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NUCLEAR
Bombs, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing
Our troops are pulling out, and bin Laden will be mightily pleased
Neighborhood Bully
Transplant Drug Could Aid Radiation
U.N. Arms Inspectors to Number 70 by Early December
North Korea can build nukes right now
CIA Says N.Korea Could Produce More Nuclear Arms
Al-Qaeda's quixotic quest to go nuclear
House rubber-stamps Homeland Security Bill
'An Irresponsible Exercise in Political Chicanery'
Bush, Putin Say Iraq Must Obey UN Arms Calls
MILITARY
Taiwan boosts patrols to counter China
NATO Finds Eight Tons of Weapons in Bosnia Raid
An attack on Iraq makes no business sense
Defense Dept. Allows Northrop-TRW Merger
Over a barrel
Israel Takes Control of Bethlehem in Response to Bombing
The Bold Road To NATO Expansion
NATO looks beyond its 7 new ex-communist invitees
NATO Backs Bush on Iraq but Germans Oppose War
Analysis: NATO's new tool -- for what?
NATO chief pelted with tomatoes
Ukraine chief unwanted guest at NATO party
Philippines Signs Agreement To Host Anti-Terrorism Forces
Chechnya is Russia's Internal Affair: Bush
Russian Official Outlines Improvements to Military
Bush and Putin Meet in Russia, With Chechnya a Key Topic
Ukraine's complaints
U.N. Accuses Israel Over Aid Worker's Death
Military Spending Proposals Envision Changing Battlefield
Military Studies Nonlethal Weapons
U.S. Battle Planners Head to Gulf
Reporters Wrap Up Media 'Boot Camp'
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Hill seeks competition for prison industry
Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet
House OKs High - Tech Task Force Bill
The super snoops are out to get you
A Major Suspect in Qaeda Attacks Is in U.S. Custody
ENERGY AND OTHER
E.P.A. Eases Clean Air Rules on Power Plants and Refineries
Energy Dept. Finances Effort to Create Artificial Life
Scientists Hope to Make New Bacterium
ACTIVISTS
Battling cancer, Philip Berrigan puts his fate in God's hands
Resistance Rising!
Ellsberg charts change from insider to activist
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
Bombs, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing
Sydney Morning Herald,
November 22 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/21/1037697804898.html
Destroying all weapons of mass destruction would be a decisive move in the fight against terrorism, writes Paul Keating, a former prime minister of Australia.
John Howard said in the House of Representatives last week that "the ultimate terrorist nightmare would be if weapons of mass destruction were to fall into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his cohorts". I couldn't agree more. The threat that terrorists might launch attacks on our cities is real.
Howard went on, however, to draw from that threat the conclusion that "efforts must be sustained by the nations of the world to remove from the hands of people who might capriciously use them, weapons of mass destruction".
He was obviously preparing ground for an argument that a unilateral attack on Iraq is the same thing as war on terrorism because Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists.
In fact, terrorists are likely to find their weapons in more familiar circumstances - from fissile material leaking out of the insecure stockpiles in the former Soviet Union, or, as we almost certainly saw with the anthrax attacks in the United States last year, from within the American defence establishment itself.
But Howard's use of that word "capriciously" was revealing. It suggests that sober, thoughtful, non-capricious use of such weapons could be contemplated.
And the idea that underpins such thinking comes to the heart of the problem for me. It is based on the notion that somehow we can keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of irresponsible and dangerous people, while maintaining them for the right sort of people - people, in other words, like us and our allies.
We are probably now stuck with the phrase "the war on terror", but it is a dangerously misleading metaphor for the dangers we face. It conjures up images of a clear enemy, fixed battles, military or intelligence solutions and, at the end of it all, an unconditional victory over our opponents.
Instead, we are engaged in a long struggle on many fronts against shifting groups and individuals. To prevail, we need better intelligence gathering, more effective protective security, military action in some cases, civilian aid in others.
But as important as any of that, we need to engage in the struggle for ideas. Unless we address the circumstances that spawn the recruitment of terrorists, we will never succeed in stemming their rise.
We could begin by acknowledging the way in which the world has changed but how the structures of power haven't.
The world is still set up on the model which existed in 1947 and it is not run co-operatively. From the UN to the IMF to the G8, it needs a root and branch change, one that acknowledges more fairly the weight and interests of particular countries and regions. India, China and the Middle East come immediately to mind.
And if we are to have any hope of confronting the universally acknowledged danger of more states acquiring nuclear weapons and terrorists getting hold of them, we have to accept that that means getting rid of them for everyone.
If we take the view that some may have them but others not, where is the line to be drawn? Who will be judged a "capricious" user, and who not? Saddam Hussein? Kim Jong-Il in North Korea? America's friend General Musharraf in Pakistan? Israel? And what future tin-pot dictator?
So long as some nations reserve the right to have nuclear weapons, others will ask, "Why not us?" And there is no defensible answer to the question. The only way is to get weapons of mass destruction out of everyone's hands.
Nuclear weapons were devised as weapons of indiscriminate destruction. They do not discriminate between military targets and civilian populations. It is why American battlefield commanders refer to them as "junk". Because they are weapons that such commanders will never get to deploy. And why would they when the US has such hegemony in weapons of accuracy which can surgically take out military targets within built-up civilian populations?
We no longer keep nuclear weapons to contain the Soviet Union and they cannot and do not deter terrorists - they can only entice them. It is why many Americans now ask "well, why have them?".
The penny seems never to have dropped for the American Right. US dominance with weapons of accuracy and its overwhelming capacity to project power is allowed to be levelled down by any punk state or terrorist group that decides to develop, or is able to obtain, a crude nuclear weapon.
Nuclear disarmament itself is already a solemn commitment of the five declared nuclear powers. One made under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a bargain struck with the non-nuclear states to halt the spread of weapons in return for the weapon states working towards their elimination.
This goal will not be easy. It was never going to be easy. But it must happen. It requires intrusive inspection regimes and, as we see with Iraq, a willingness by the international community to back up commitments with force. But nuclear weapons are not needed. They are the biggest of all accidents waiting to happen.
It was exactly these issues that caused the government I led to commission the Canberra Commission report on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The first practical de-nuking document in the world. A report since pigeon-holed by the Coalition.
When the commission reported in 1996, it based its practical and realistic recommendations on the fundamental assumption that "the proposition that large numbers of nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used - accidentally or by decision - defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and the assurance that they will never be produced again."
Since the Canberra Commission report, India, Pakistan and now North Korea have signed themselves into the nuclear club. More will join.
Australia has no nuclear weapons of our own but we have two particular strengths that give us standing in this debate. The first is our solid alliance with the United States. The second is our effective national experience in arms control, and particularly nuclear and chemical weapons control. There are few contributions we could more usefully make to the struggle against terrorism.
----
Our troops are pulling out, and bin Laden will be mightily pleased
Sydney Morning Herald,
November 22 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/21/1037697805183.html
Special forces are being freed up to battle Iraq rather than protecting their homeland, writes Christopher Kremmer.
There are few politicians who could at one stroke please both Osama bin Laden and George Bush. In fact, there is probably only one: John Winston Howard.
With his decision to withdraw Australia's small squadron of Special Air Services troops from Afghanistan, the Prime Minister has once again demonstrated his political cunning.
The United States President will be pleased because Howard has made it crystal clear that Australian special forces are being released for a possible role in any future war in Iraq.
Their number may be small, but a deployment of Australian SAS would free up US special forces for the nasty work of fighting and bribing their way to Baghdad when the curtain falls on the latest episode of the Weapons Inspections Follies.
While Bush will be pleased, bin Laden will be positively delirious.
The decision serves his interests in three ways.
First, it weakens the hold of the Afghan government on areas outside Kabul.
Al-Qaeda, since the collapse of its Taliban allies' government in the capital, has been lying low in the lawless tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It is waiting for US and allied forces to vacate the battlefield.
Australia now leads the retreat, but Washington too has signalled that its focus is shifting from military to reconstruction and humanitarian assistance to the Government of President Hamid Karzai.
Unless the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) - the small force of 5000 peacekeepers now confined to Kabul - is expanded to cover areas outside the capital, significant parts of Afghanistan may soon once more become a happy hunting ground for al-Qaeda.
Second, the timing of the Australian withdrawal, little more than a month after the Bali bombings, will enthuse bin Laden's legion of fanatics.
They will spread the message across the Muslim world that Australia has been sent packing from Afghanistan thanks to the al-Qaeda/Jemaah Islamiah-sponsored Bali bombings.
Third, a full-scale US-led invasion of Iraq is precisely what bin Laden needs to fuel the flames of hatred and suspicion among Muslims, on which his movement feeds.
For the families of the 150 Australian soldiers based at Bagram airbase north of Kabul, there will be understandable relief.
One SAS trooper, Andrew Knox, was killed and another was seriously injured, both in landmine explosions while on duty in Afghanistan.
Those who know the SAS, such as the former head of the Defence Department's strategic and international policy division, Dr Allan Behm, have argued persuasively that the regiment is not being used to full advantage in Afghanistan.
SAS troops are trained to provide long-range surveillance to help with the delivery of precise and lethal force against unsuspecting enemies. This often involves being inserted behind enemy lines to direct laser-guided ordnance fired from fighter aircraft on to their targets.
But in Afghanistan they have found themselves engaged in a frustrating hunt for elusive Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants, the sort of job, as Behm points out, that could be done by infantry forces.
The onset of the harsh Afghan winter would also have limited their effectiveness.
But arguments about their appropriate role fail to explain the move. Had the Government wanted to address the misallocation of a scarce and highly trained military resource it could simply have sent a different unit.
In their polite way, the Afghans have pointed out the dangers in opening a new front in the fight against terrorism in Iraq, while Afghanistan remains without a national army or police force, and facing resurgent fundamentalist forces across the border in Pakistan.
At the very least, they hope, Australia will not walk away from them altogether, perhaps contributing to the ISAF peacekeeping force, or helping train their fledgling army.
To the rest of us, the redeployment looks suspiciously like political sleight of hand.
In the aftermath of Bali, and with Australia itself facing an unprecedented level-three terrorism alert, the question remains: "If not in Afghanistan, why not here?"
The answer, of course, is Iraq.
Whatever it may say, Canberra is gearing up for Baghdad.
The argument our Prime Minister has yet to make convincingly is that removing a recalcitrant, but boxed-in, Saddam Hussein is a more pressing priority than eliminating the direct threat to Australia posed by al-Qaeda.
Unless and until he can do that, Howard's political wiles may yet prove to be the death of us.
Christopher Kremmer is a former Herald correspondent in Afghanistan and author of The Carpet Wars.
-------- depleted uranium
Neighborhood Bully
by Brian •
Friday November 22, 2002
Ramsey Clark on American militarism
San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/1544833.php
When I picture a high-ranking government official, I think of someone who is corrupt. I think of a corporate shill. I think of someone who is not a friend to the people of this country. I think of Lord Acton's famous line about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely. I think of the disdain with which so many Americans have viewed so many of their leaders for so many years.
Former attorney general Ramsey Clark is different. Despite having once been the chief law-enforcement officer of this country, he consistently takes the side of the oppressed.
Born to power - Clark's father was attorney general in the 1940s and later a Supreme Court justice - the University of Chicago Law School graduate was appointed assistant attorney general by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and went on to head that department as attorney general under Lyndon Johnson from 1967 to 1969. During his years in the Justice Department, Clark was a staunch supporter of the civil-rights movement. While in charge of government efforts to protect the protesters in Alabama, he witnessed firsthand "the enormous violence that was latent in our society toward unpopular people." He had a similar experience when he was sent to Los Angeles after the rioting in Watts and discovered abuses by the police and the National Guard.
Although back then, Clark didn't take the strong antiwar stance he advocates today, his Justice Department record boasts some major accomplishments: He supervised the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He denounced police shootings and authorized prosecution of police on charges of brutality and wrongful death. He opposed electronic surveillance and refused to authorize an FBI wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr. He fought hard against the death penalty and won, putting a stay on federal executions that lasted until this year [2001], when Timothy McVeigh's death sentence was carried out.
After a failed bid for the Senate in 1976, Clark abandoned government service and set out to provide legal defense to victims of oppression. As an attorney in private practice, he has represented many controversial clients over the years, among them antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan; Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier; the Branch Davidians, whose compound in Waco, Texas, was destroyed by government agents; Sheik Omar Abd El-Rahman, who was accused of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing; and Lori Berenson, an American held in a Peruvian prison for allegedly supporting the revolutionary Tupac Amaru movement there. Clark's dedication to defending unpopular, and even hated, figures has also led him to represent such clients as Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and far-right extremist Lyndon LaRouche.
Clark is founder and chairperson of the International Action Center, the largest antiwar movement in the United States. A vocal critic of U.S. military actions around the globe, he calls government officials "international outlaws," accusing them of "killing innocent people because we don't like their leader." He has traveled to Iraq, North Vietnam, Serbia, and other embattled regions of the world to investigate the effects of American bombing and economic sanctions there. The sanctions, he says, are particularly inhumane:
"They're like the neutron bomb, which is the most 'inspired' of all weapons, because it kills the people and preserves the property, the wealth. So you get the wealth and you don't have the baggage of the hungry, clamoring poor."
After the Gulf War, in 1991, Clark initiated a war-crimes tribunal, which tried and found guilty President George Bush and Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, among others. Clark went on to write a book, The Fire This Time (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992; International Action Center, 2002), describing the crimes he says were committed by U.S. and NATO forces during the Gulf War. When asked why he focuses on the crimes of his own country, instead of those committed by Iraq, Clark says that we, as citizens, need to announce our principles and "force our government to adhere to them. When you see your government violating those principles, you have the highest obligation to correct what your government does, not point the finger at someone else."
The interview took place on a dreary day last November [2000], when the presidential election was still undecided. We have a new [illegitimate] president now, but Clark's criticisms of U.S. foreign policy are, if anything, more relevant with George W. Bush in the Oval Office. I met with Clark in the offices of the International Action Center (39 West 14th St., #206, New York, NY 10011, http://www.iacenter.org). Books lined every wall, except for a fairly large area devoted to photographs of Clark's two children, his numerous grandchildren, and his wife of more than fifty years.
Jensen: According to the federal government's Defense Planning Guide of 1992, the first objective of U.S. foreign policy is to convince potential rivals that they "need not aspire" to "a more aggressive posture to defend their legitimate interests." The implication seems to be that the U.S. intends not to let other countries actively defend their own interests. To what extent does U.S. foreign policy in action reflect that goal?
Clark: Our foreign policy has been a disaster since long before that planning guide - for a lot longer than we'd like to believe. We can look all the way back to the arrogance of the Monroe Doctrine, when the United States said, "This hemisphere is ours," ignoring all the other people who lived here, too. For a part of this past century, there were some constraints on our capacity for arbitrary military action - what you might call the inhibitions of the Cold War - but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've acquired a headier sense of what we can get away with.
Our overriding purpose, from the beginning right through to the present day, has been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible; and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of our foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources. And insofar as any people or states get in the way of our domination, they must be eliminated - or, at the very least, shown the error of their ways.
I'm not talking about just military domination. U.S. trade policies are driven by the exploitation of poor people the world over. Vietnam is a good example of both the military and the economic inhumanity. We have punished its government and people mercilessly, just because they want freedom. The Vietnamese people had to fight for thirty years to achieve freedom - first against the French, and then against the United States. I used to be criticized for saying that the Vietnamese suffered 2 million casualties, but I've noticed that people now say 3 million without much criticism. Yet that war was nothing compared to the effects of twenty years of sanctions, from 1975 to 1995, which brought the Vietnamese people - a people who had proven to be invincible when threatened by physical force on their own land - down to such dire poverty that they were taking to open boats in stormy seas, and drowning, to get to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, a place no one in his or her right mind would want to be. They went simply because they saw no future in their own country.
I went to North Vietnam in the summer of 1971, when the U.S. was trying to destroy civilian dikes through bombing. Our government figured that if it could destroy Vietnam's capacity for irrigation, it could starve the people into submission.
Jensen: Which, in itself, is a war crime.
Clark: Sure, but since when does international law stop the U.S. government - except when it comes to laws made by the World Trade Organization, where it's to the advantage of the owners of capital for the government to obey them?
The U.S. figured that if the Vietnamese couldn't control their water supply, then they couldn't grow rice, and they wouldn't be able to feed themselves. At that time, they were producing about five tons of rice to the hectare, which is extremely productive. The economy was based on the women. The men were living in tunnels to the south with a bag of rice, a bag of ammunition, and a rifle; some had been there for years. And we were still bombing them mercilessly, inflicting heavy casualties. Yet they survived.
The sanctions, on the other hand, brought their economy down below that of Mozambique - then the poorest country in the world, with a per capita income of about eighty dollars per year.
All of this reflects a U.S. foreign policy that is completely materialistic and enforced by violence, or the threat of violence, and economic coercion.
Jensen: Do you think most Americans would agree that U.S. foreign policy has been "a disaster"?
Clark: Sadly, I think most Americans don't have an opinion about our foreign policy. Worse than that, when they do think about it, it's in terms of the demonization of enemies and the exaltation of our capacity for violence.
When the Gulf War started in 1991, you could almost feel a reverence come over the country. We had a forty-two-day running commercial for militarism. Nearly everybody was glued to CNN, and whenever they saw a Tomahawk cruise missile taking off from a navy vessel somewhere in the Persian Gulf, they practically stood up and shouted, "Hooray for America!" But that missile was going to hit a market in Basra or someplace, destroy three hundred food stalls, and kill forty-two very poor people. And we considered that a good thing.
It's very difficult to debate military spending in this country today - which is unbelievable, because our military spending is absolutely, certifiably insane. Just to provide one example: We still have twenty-two commissioned Trident nuclear submarines, which are first-strike weapons. Any one of those submarines can launch twenty-four missiles simultaneously. Each of those missiles can contain as many as seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads. And each of those warheads can travel seven thousand nautical miles and supposedly hit within three hundred feet of its predetermined target. If we fire them in opposite directions, we can span fourteen thousand nautical miles: halfway around the world at the equator. This means we can take out 408 centers of human population, hitting each with a nuclear warhead ten times as powerful as the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki.
Jensen: This is all from one submarine?
Clark: One submarine. And we have twenty-two of them. It's an unthinkable machine. Why would you have it? What kind of mind would conceive of such a machine? What justification could there be for its existence? What would be the meaning of daring to use it?
Yet the debate about military spending in this country never raises these questions. Think back to 1980, when President Carter and Governor Reagan were arguing about the military budget. At that time, you could see the end of the Cold War approaching; the risk of superpower conflict was waning rapidly. Carter came in with a 7 percent increase in the budget, when it should have been reduced. And Reagan, of course, topped him with a proposal for an 11 percent increase. Carter's response was that he could spend 7 percent more effectively than Reagan could spend 11 percent, so we'd be stronger on Carter's program. Nowhere in this debate did we - or do we now - hear anything about the morality or the sanity (even the fiscal sanity) of such huge military budgets.
Our foreign policy is based on the use of our military might as an enforcer, exactly as Teddy Roosevelt implied when he said that we should "speak softly and carry a big stick." What does that mean? It means: "Do what I say, or I'll smash your head in. I won't make a lot of noise about it; I'll just do it."
Jensen: How many times has the United States invaded Latin America in the last two hundred years?
Clark: It depends on who's doing the counting, but in the twentieth century alone, it was undoubtedly almost once per year. Off the top of my head, I could count probably seventy instances.
Jensen: And, of course, it was the same in the nineteenth century.
Clark: We sent the word out pretty early. We had to worry about the British and the Spanish for a long time, but we were determined to make this "our" hemisphere - while, at the same time, certainly not confining ourselves to just this side of the world.
We hear a lot of rhetoric about how the United States exports democracy all over the world, but if you really want to understand U.S. influence on other peoples, probably the best places to start are Liberia and the Philippines, which are our two preeminent colonies - I think it's fair to call them that - in Africa and Asia.
We started in Liberia well before 1843, planning to send freed slaves there as one of the "solutions," so to speak, to our slavery problem. Liberia became a U.S. colony in every sense of the word: "Liberia" is the name we gave the country; the capital, Monrovia, and the great port city, Buchanan, are both named after U.S. presidents; the government was organized and put in place directly by the United States; the national currency is the U.S. dollar. Given these close connections, you'd expect Liberia to be relatively well-off. But it would be difficult, even in Africa, to find a people more tormented and endangered and impoverished than Liberia's.
It's the same story in the Philippines, which we conquered during the Philippine-American War - commonly (and inaccurately) called the Spanish-American War. More than a million Filipinos died during that war from violence and dengue fever, a byproduct of the fighting. We had government testimony of widespread use of torture by U.S. troops and of a general giving orders to kill all of the males on Negros Island. Once, that island could feed more than the population of the entire Philippine archipelago. And what's the condition of that island now, after a hundred years of American benevolence? It's owned by twelve families and produces 60 percent of the sugar exported from the Philippines. The children of those who chop the cane starve because their families don't even have enough land to grow their own vegetables. Per capita income in the Philippines ten years ago was less than six hundred dollars. Per capita income in Japan, by contrast, was more than twenty-four thousand dollars. Even the poorest countries in the region have per capita incomes double or triple that of the Philippines.
So what have Liberia and the Philippines gotten out of being de facto colonies of the United States? Poverty, division, confusion, and tyrannical governments: Ferdinand Marcos was our man in Manila. We installed one dictator after another in Liberia.
These two countries represent a small part of our foreign policy, but it's a part where you would expect us to be the most attentive to the well-being of the people. Yet few have suffered more in other parts of the world.
Jensen: So how do we maintain our national self-image as God's gift to the world, the great bastion of democracy?
Clark: But we're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy. Wealth has its way. The concentration of wealth and the division between rich and poor in the U.S. are unequaled anywhere. And think of whom we admire most: the Rockefellers and Morgans, the Bill Gateses and Donald Trumps. Would any moral person accumulate a billion dollars when there are 10 million infants dying of starvation every year? Is that the best thing you can find to do with your time?
Jensen: I remember seeing a statistic a few years ago that summed up our priorities for me: for the price of a single b-1 bomber - about $285 million - we could provide basic immunization treatments to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them, thus saving 2.5 million lives annually.
Clark: Such comparisons have a powerful illustrative impact, but they imply that if the money weren't spent on bombers, it might be put to good use. The fact is, however, that if the b-1 were canceled, we still wouldn't spend the money on vaccinations, because it wouldn't serve the trade interests of the United States. It's not a part of our vision.
Jensen: What, then, is our vision?
Clark: Central to our foreign policy has been the active attempt to deprive governments and peoples of the independence that comes from self-sufficiency in the production of food. I've believed for many years that a country that can't produce food for its own people can never really be free. Iran is a good example of this. We overthrew the democratically elected government in Iran and installed the Shah. For twenty-five years, Iran was our surrogate in the Middle East, a hugely important region. After the Shah was overthrown by his own people, CIA chief William Colby called installing the Shah the CIA's proudest achievement and said, "You may think he failed, but for twenty-five years, he served us well."
Jensen: Serving us well, in this case, included killing tens of thousands of Iranians just in the year before he left office.
Clark: He certainly killed as many as he dared, especially in that last year, 1978. I've always said it was about thirty-seven thousand that year, but we'll never know exactly how many. I think there were two thousand gunned down on Black Friday alone, that August. There were a million people out on the streets that day, and they came through Jaleh Square, many wearing shrouds so that it would be convenient to bury them if they were killed. Huey helicopters fired on them from a hundred feet in the air with fifty-caliber machine guns.
Jensen: U.S.-supplied Hueys?
Clark: The Hueys were fabricated in Esfahan, Iran, from U.S.-supplied parts. In fact, the fabrication of those Hueys provides an interesting insight into the effects of U.S. influence. In 1500, Esfahan was one of the ten biggest cities in the world, with about half a million people. Culturally, it remained almost pristine until 1955, the year after the Shah took power. As part of the Shah's efforts to fulfill his dream of making Iran the fifth great industrial power in the world, he made Esfahan a center of industrialization. By 1970, the population had increased to 1.5 million, including about eight hundred thousand peasants who had come to live in the slums around this once fabulous city.
Once again, the result of U.S. foreign policy was poverty, anger, hurt, and suffering for the majority. While the canal systems that had supported enough agriculture to feed the population for a couple of millennia were going into decay, causing Iran to import most of its food, the country was buying arms. We sold them more than $22 billion in arms between 1972 and 1977 - everything they wanted, except nuclear weapons.
Iran isn't the only Middle Eastern nation dependent upon food imports. Today twenty-two Arab states import more than half of their food. This makes them extremely vulnerable to U.S. economic pressure.
Egypt is a great example of this. It's the second-largest U.S.-aid recipient in the world, after Israel. Can you imagine what sanctions would do to Cairo? You've got 12 million people living there, 10 million of them in real poverty. The city would be bedlam in ninety days. There would be rebellion in the streets.
The same is true of the other Arab countries. They might think they've got wealth because of their oil, but Iraq has oil, and it hasn't helped that country survive the sanctions. There, sanctions have forced impoverishment on a people who had a quality of life that was by far the best in the region. They had free, universal healthcare and a good educational system. Now they're dying at a rate of about eighteen thousand per month as a direct result of sanctions imposed by the United States in the name of the UN Security Council - the most extreme sanctions imposed in modern times.
The U.S. helped maneuver Iraq into a position where it was one of those twenty-two Arab nations importing more than half its food, and I have always believed that we maneuvered it, as well, into attacking Iran, in that god-awful war that cost a million young men their lives for no purpose. After the collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979, Iraq thought that Iran couldn't defend itself, but didn't take into account the passion that twenty-five years of suffering had created in the population - a passion so strong that you had fifteen-year-old kids running barefoot through swamps into a hail of bullets, and if they got near you, you were dead. They had a pair of pants and a rifle, and that was about it. Meanwhile, Iraq, which was supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States, had artillery it could mount shoulder to shoulder and armored vehicles with cannons and machine guns. But the war was still a stalemate.
In any case, by the late 1980s, Iraq was emerging as too powerful a nation in the Middle East. And, fatally for Iraq, it wasn't reliable enough to be our new surrogate. No one would be as good a surrogate for us as the Shah's Iran had been.
So we had to take out Iraq, under the pretense of defending Kuwait. First we bombed Iraq brutally: 110,000 aerial sorties in forty-two days, an average of one every thirty seconds, which dropped 88,500 tons of bombs. (These are Pentagon figures.) We destroyed the infrastructure - to use a cruel euphemism for life-support systems. Take water, for example: We hit reservoirs, dams, pumping stations, pipelines, and purification plants. Some associates and I drove into Iraq at the end of the second week of the war, and there was no running water anywhere. People were drinking water out of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
The Gulf War showed, for the first time, that you could destroy a country without setting foot on its soil. We probably killed a hundred thousand, and our total casualties, according to the Pentagon, were 157 - most of them from friendly fire and accidents. The Iraqis caused only minimal casualties. One of those notoriously inaccurate Scud missiles, fired toward Saudi Arabia, came wobbling down and somehow hit a mess-hall tent, killing thirty-seven American soldiers. That's a big chunk of the total casualties right there. We didn't lose a single tank, whereas we destroyed seventeen hundred Iraqi armored vehicles, plinking them with depleted-uranium ammunition and laser-guided missiles.
But, as with Vietnam, the sanctions that followed the war have been infinitely more damaging, causing fifteen times the number of casualties. The sanctions against Iraq are genocidal conduct under the law, according to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - which, by the way, the United States refused to endorse until 1988 and explicitly refuses to comply with to this day. The sanctions against Iraq have killed more than 1.5 million people, more than half of them children under the age of five, an especially vulnerable segment of the population. Particularly in their first year, children are more susceptible to disease and malnutrition, and to the malnutrition of their mother. Many Iraqi mothers are now so malnourished that they cannot produce milk. They try to give their children sugar water as a substitute, but because the United States destroyed the infrastructure, the water is contaminated: within forty-eight hours, the child is dead. And that child could have been saved by a rehydration tablet that costs less than a penny, but is not available because of the sanctions. This is in a country that once produced 15 percent of its own pharmaceuticals: now it can't even get the raw materials. We have, in an act of will, impoverished a whole population.
Jensen: Where do you see such policies taking us?
Clark: The great issue of the twenty-first century will be that of the relationship between the rich and poor nations, and of the elimination of some percentage of those whom we consider not only expendable, but even undesirable. In many parts of the world, we've got 30 percent of the labor force unemployed and unemployable, and new technology renders them unnecessary. Why, then, from the perspective of capital - and, therefore, from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy - should we support them? Why worry about AIDS in Africa? Why worry about hunger and malnutrition in Bangladesh or Somalia?
Jensen: Let me see if I've got this right: From the perspective of those in power, it's desirable to keep the poor alive only insofar as they're useful, and the poor are useful only as labor, or as an excess pool of labor to drive wages down. Beyond that, who needs them?
Clark: Yes. It's hard for me to see how we will find meaningful and desirable employment for the poorest segment of the world's population in the face of both ecological degradation and technology's capacity to produce more than we need. How did Dostoevski put it? "The cruelest punishment that can be inflicted on a person is to force him to work hard at a meaningless task." That may or may not be true, but we do know that such make-work is a form of psychological torture. If your labor isn't needed, if you don't have skills, then what are you worth to a society that won't even bother to vaccinate your children or provide food for your starving infants?
In 1900, half of the labor force in the United States was involved in agriculture. Now it's probably less than 5 percent. In 1900, 80 percent of the labor force in China was involved in food production. When that figure comes down to 10 percent, what are those other 90 percent going to do?
Jensen: While we've been talking, I've been thinking about a conversation that took place years ago between Senator George McGovern and Robert Anderson, the president of the military contractor Rockwell International. McGovern asked Anderson if he wouldn't rather build mass-transit systems than b-1 bombers. Anderson said he would, but they both knew that there was no chance Congress would appropriate money for public transportation.
Clark: They were absolutely right. Capital in the United States would never accept that sort of shift in priorities, for many reasons. The first is that the military is a means of international domination, and any change that might threaten that domination will not be allowed to take place. The second reason is that capital requires continuing, ever expanding demand, and mass transit shrinks demand for automobiles and gas.
When my family moved to Los Angeles when I was a kid, before World War II, it was a paradise. The word smog hadn't been invented. There were no such things as freeways. There were mountains, beaches, deserts, and wildlife, and 49 percent of the land in the area was owned by the people of the United States. But the machinery that would destroy that paradise had already been put in motion.
In the 1920s, there had been struggles over whether there would continue to be mass transit in Los Angeles, which at the start of the century had an elaborate streetcar system. But powerful industries - the oil refiners and the automobile manufacturers - fiercely opposed what the people obviously needed. The citizens of Los Angeles were a fast-growing population with long distances to travel, and they needed to get there fast and cheaply. If they'd developed more mass transit, it would have led to an entirely different way of life. Instead, LA is now a big, sprawling metropolis with a tangle of freeways and millions of cars, unbelievable in its endless banality and congestion and noise and pollution. But think of what LA's maintaining its excellent mass-transit system would have done to the petrochemical industry and the automobile industry, with all of their accessories - tires, parts, and so on.
Capital promotes activities from which its owners can reap enormous profits. It does not matter if those activities are detrimental to living beings or communities. For example, those in power seem to have an unlimited imagination for conjuring up new excuses to throw money at the military. I was saddened by the almost pathetic naiveté of the people of this country some ten years ago, when we were talking about reaping a "peace dividend."
Jensen: Which, of course, we never hear about anymore.
Clark: But people believed there would be a peace dividend! Instead, we've devised incredible schemes like SDI - the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative, which is back again.
Jensen: The argument now is that we need SDI to protect us from North Korea.
Clark: That's crazy. In the current election, even more than in 1980, when Carter and Reagan were debating the military budget, we saw two candidates vying to prove that they each would provide a stronger defense. But defense from what? In order to keep increasing the demand for military products, we're teaching moral and fiscal insanity. I was in South Africa a couple of weeks ago. After all the people there have suffered, you have to be so hopeful for them, yet they just spent over a billion dollars on a bunch of naval vessels.
And we've been consistently sold a bill of goods that has made people believe they've been heroic when they've done terrible things in the name of their country through military actions. I mean, how many of those pilots who bombed Vietnam - even the ones who became prisoners - ever said to themselves, "I wonder what it was like being a Vietnamese villager when I was coming over and dropping those bombs"?
Jensen: I kept thinking about that when Senator John McCain used his former-prisoner-of-war status to gain political capital, and I never heard anyone publicly confront him about killing civilians.
I remember once, when I lived in Spokane, Washington, there was a gala event called "A Celebration of Heroes." The headliner was the Gulf War commander Norman Schwarzkopf. Neither the mainstream nor the alternative papers published articles, or even letters to the editor, about Schwarzkopf's war crimes. I think that holding up mass murderers as heroes is as much a problem as holding up the rich.
Clark: Violence may not be as harmful as greed in the long run, because it's harder to kill people directly than it is to kill them with sanctions. If you killed that many with bullets, your finger would get tired.
Colin Powell seems to be a compelling figure, but when he was asked during the Gulf War how many Iraqis he thought the United States had killed, his response was - and this is a direct quote - "Frankly, that's a number that doesn't interest me very much." Now, aside from international law, which requires that all participants in war count their enemy dead, that is an extraordinarily inhumane statement. And then you see a fellow like General Barry McCaffrey, whom Clinton later named as his drug czar, coming in and attacking defenseless Iraqi troops as they withdrew, killing several thousand people just like that. [Snaps his finger.] That's a war crime of the first magnitude. And yet these men are rewarded; they're seen as heroes.
Jensen: On another subject, you've also spoken out against our nation's prison system.
Clark: One of the most devastating things that have happened in this society - and one of the most ignored - is the stunning growth of the prison system and the use of capital punishment. In the 1960s, a time of maximum domestic turbulence, we were able to bring the government out against the death penalty, leading to a halt in federal executions in 1963. In fact, the first year in U.S. history that there were no executions anywhere was 1968. We also had a moratorium on federal prison construction. The federal-prison population was then around twenty thousand. Now, of course, we're building prisons like mad, and the federal-prison population is currently about 145,000.
In 1971, prisoners at Attica in New York State rebelled against horrible prison conditions. (Conditions overall are worse today.) The suppression of that rebellion is still the bloodiest day of battle between Americans on American soil since the Civil War: thirty-seven people were killed. At that time, there were fewer than thirteen thousand prisoners in the whole New York prison system; today there are about seventy-five thousand. And the population of the state hasn't risen 5 percent.
Across the country, more than 2 million people are in prison. And in California - which we tend to think of as a trendsetter for the rest of the country - 40 percent of African American males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven, the most vital years of their lives, are either in prison or under some form of community supervision or probation. What's the reason behind this? It's a means of controlling a major segment of the population. But what does it do to the people?
And what does it mean that we've got politicians like New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who insists on sending people to jail for what he calls "quality of life" crimes? What does it mean when 70 percent of young-adult African American males have arrest records? What does it mean when so many of these African Americans have had frightening and damaging experiences with the police? We say we're "the land of the free and the home of the brave," yet we have a prison system unrivaled in the so-called democratic societies, and probably in any society on the planet today. And we're Lord High Executioner.
In the 1960s, South Africa was the world's leading executioner for postjudicial convictions, executing about three hundred people every year - nearly one each day. Most years, all of those executed were black, with the occasional exception of a white who had been convicted of being part of the African National Congress's resistance to apartheid. Back then, the principal argument we made in this country against the death penalty was "We don't want to be like South Africa." Part of the reason that argument worked is that the civil-rights movement was ascendant. Another is that people recognized that our executions were racist: For instance, 89 percent of the executions for rape, from the time statistics began to be collected until the Supreme Court abolished executions for rape, were of African American men. And although we don't know the race of all the victims, because those statistics weren't kept, those whose race we have been able to determine were all white. The imposition of the death penalty was - and remains - blatantly racist.
Now South Africa has abolished the death penalty; its constitution prohibits it. Prior to that, its supreme court found the death penalty to be a violation of international and domestic laws. Yet we come on like gangbusters for capital punishment. George W. Bush executed more people than any other governor in the history of the United States.
Jensen: You seem to be a good person, yet you filled a major government post. That seems to me an immense contradiction.
Clark: If your premises are correct, then that's a terrible indictment of the system. There is something desperately wrong if we don't have the best among us in government service. But it's true; we drive them out.
I joined the Marines during World War II, but a bunch of my buddies were conscientious objectors. Even then, I realized that they were better men than I, that what they did took more courage. I mean, to join the Marines is a piece of cake: all you've got to do is go down to the recruitment center and sign up. But I've watched my conscientious-objector friends over the years, and I have to say that they've been very lonely; in some ways, their lives were pretty much wasted. We're social creatures, and these men - boys, really, when they first made that decision - were ostracized for what they did, for following their conscience. And I think that lack of social esteem affected how they perceived themselves.
It seems the best among us often get purged. I have seen many new congresspeople come into Washington, and some of them are just such good people that you can hardly stand it - bright, articulate, and caring about issues. But it seems that, if they get reelected a few times, they start to sit around and scowl and drink too much, and their families break up. If you see this happen enough times, you begin to realize the enormous corrupting power of our political system. To be successful in it, you might have to make compromises that will cause you not to like yourself very much. And then you'll have to compensate for that in some way. You can become excessively ambitious, or greedy, or corrupt, or something else, but something's got to happen, because if you don't like yourself, what do you do?
Young people often ask me if they should go to law school, and I always say, "If you're not tough, you'll get your values beaten out of you, and you'll move into a kind of fee-grabbing existence where your self-esteem will depend on how much you bill per hour and what kind of clients you bring in to the law firm. You might find yourself turning into nothing but a money mill."
If we are to significantly change our culture, we need to recognize that we are held in thrall by two desperately harmful value patterns. One is the glorification of violence. We absolutely, irrationally, insanely glorify violence. We often think that we enjoy watching the good guys kill the bad guys, but the truth is that we enjoy watching the kill itself.
The other value is materialism. We are the most materialistic people who have ever lived. We value things over children. Indeed, the way we show how much we value children is by giving them things, to the point where a mother's self-esteem depends on whether she's the first in her neighborhood to get her child some new toy.
I think the hardest part for us is to break through the illusory world that the media create. Television is a big part of our reality. Children spend more time watching TV than they do in school or participating in any other activity. And television is a preacher of materialism above all else. It tells us constantly to want things. More money is spent on commercials than on the entertainment itself. And that entertainment is essentially hypnotic.
I think often of the Roman poet Juvenal's line about "bread and circuses." All these distractions that now fill our lives are an unprecedented mechanism of social control, because they occupy so much of our time that we don't reason, we don't imagine, and we don't use our senses. We walk though our day mesmerized, never questioning, never thinking, never appreciating. From this process we emerge a synthetic vessel without moral purpose, with no notion in our head or our heart of what is good for people, of what builds a healthier, happier, more loving society.
You began this interview by asking me about U.S. foreign policy, and I said that it's been a failure. Here is the standard by which I would judge any foreign or domestic policy: has it built a healthier, happier, more loving society, both at home and abroad? The answer, in our case, is no on both counts.
Jensen: So what do we do?
Clark: I think the solution relies on the power of the idea, and the power of the word, and on a belief that, in the end, the ultimate power resides in the people.
In discussing the effects of U.S. foreign policy, we've been talking about only one part of the story. Another part is resistance - the power of the people. We saw that in the Philippines, when Marcos was deposed in a nonviolent revolution, and we saw that in Iran, when the Shah's staggering power was overcome, as well, by a nonviolent revolution.
Of course, just getting rid of Marcos or the Shah is not the end of the story. People sometimes think that, after the glorious revolution, everybody is going to live happily ever after. But it doesn't work that way. What they've gone through in the struggle has divided them, confused them, driven them to extremes of desperation.
I think what all of this means is that we each have to do our own part, and become responsible, civic-minded citizens: we have to realize that we won't be happy unless we try to do our part. And if a small portion of us simply do our part, that will be enough. If even 1 percent of the people of this country could break out of the invisible chains, they could bring down this military-industrial complex - this tyranny of corporations, this plutocracy - overnight. That's all it would take: 1 percent of the people.
We also have to realize that we're going to be here only one time, and we've got to enjoy life, however hard it is. To miss the opportunity for joy is to miss life. Any fool can be unhappy; in fact, we make whole industries out of being unhappy, because happy people generally make lousy consumers. It's interesting to see how the poor understand all of this better than the rich. This morning, I was in court over in Brooklyn, representing a group of Romany - they're often called Gypsies, but they don't like to be called that - who were claiming recognition for losses in the Holocaust. The Romany lost 1.5 million people, yet nobody pays any attention to their claims. In fact, last year [1999], the city of Munich, Germany, enacted legislation that is almost a verbatim reproduction of 1934 legislation prohibiting Romany from coming into the city: they'll be arrested if they do. The Romany might be the most endangered people on the planet - even more so than the 200 million indigenous people around the globe. They are fugitives everywhere they go, persecuted everywhere. Yet, like the traditional indigenous peoples, they are people of exceptional joy. They sing and dance and have fun. They can't see life as so much drudgery.
I saw that same joy among the civil-rights protesters in the 1960s. Watching them sing as they marched, I couldn't help but realize that you feel better when you're doing something you feel is right - no matter how hard it is. http://www.americanstateterrorism.com/usgenocide/NeighborhoodBully.html
San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center.
-------- health
Transplant Drug Could Aid Radiation
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Better-Radiotherapy.html
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Researchers have discovered that a drug normally used to prevent the rejection of kidney transplants might improve radiation therapy by keeping cancer tumors from growing between doses.
Radiotherapy kills tumor cells, but one of the hurdles to the treatment, which is given as a course of intermittent doses, is that the cancer cells that survive the onslaught continue to multiply between sessions.
Preliminary research presented Thursday at a meeting of U.S. and European cancer experts found that when mice grafted with human brain tumors got the transplant drug rapamycin during radiotherapy, their cancer did not grow as much in the breaks between radiation doses.
The mice were given glioblastoma multiforme, the most deadly form of brain cancer.
Over the last few years scientists have learned that, for several types of cancer, giving radiotherapy and chemotherapy drugs at the same time improves by about 30 percent the ability to stop tumors spreading and enables cancer patients to live 10 percent longer compared with giving the two treatments sequentially.
``This has not been seen in brain tumors so far,'' said Dr. Harry Bartelink, head of radiotherapy at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, who was not involved in the study. ``In these types of brain tumors, radiotherapy and chemotherapy have been extremely ineffective. Nearly all patients will die.''
``If you can translate these laboratory findings to the clinic and improve the efficacy of radiotherapy, that would be a major step forward,'' Bartelink said.
Rapamycin, also known as Rapamune, is traditionally used to suppress the immune system and prevent rejection in kidney transplant patients. Scientists now know that it works by blocking the switching on of the immune cells responsible for attacking the transplant.
They recently discovered that rapamycin also appears to attack cancer, at least in cells in the lab and in animals.
It turns out that the drug blocks a protein, called mTOR, which regulates many activities involved in the life cycle of cells. Many common types of cancer involve genetic abnormalities that affect how mTOR operates.
``The exciting finding from our study is that this is the first evidence that mTOR is involved in the cellular response to radiation,'' said Dr. Jann Sarkaria, a Mayo Clinic oncology professor who conducted the study. ``It's not clear yet how it works, but we think rapamycin slows tumor proliferation during radiation treatment.''
In the study, the mice got three doses of radiation over 18 days -- one dose every six days. They were also given rapamycin injections regularly throughout the 18 days.
The size of their tumors, which had been implanted just under the skin, were measured over the course of the study.
``Where they got sham radiation and (fake) injections, the tumors grew quite quickly. Likewise, with radiation only and with rapamycin alone,'' Sarkaria said. ``With the combination of rapamycin plus radiation, it took quite a bit longer for these tumors to regrow to three times their original volume.''
Sarkaria said he plans next to test rapamycin combined with radiotherapy in patients with brain and lung cancers.
The symposium, which focuses on so-called targeted cancer therapies, is held annually by the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer, the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the American Association for Cancer Research.
On the Net:
Conference Web site: http://www.fecs.be/conferences/ena2002
-------- inspections
U.N. Arms Inspectors to Number 70 by Early December
November 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-inspectors-plans.html
NICOSIA (Reuters) - The United Nations plans to build up a team of about 70 weapons inspectors in Baghdad by the first week of December to seek out weapons of mass destruction, an authoritative source said on Friday.
Four or five inspectors and a larger number of logistics staff, who are using Cyprus as their forward base, are expected to fly out from the east Mediterranean island to Iraq on November 25, kicking off U.N. inspections after a four-year gap.
``The first lump sum of inspectors won't be moving in until a bit later. It is likely that about 70 inspectors will be deployed by the first week of December,'' the source told Reuters.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, led an advance team of inspectors and logistics experts into Iraq last Monday.
Blix and ElBaradei emerged two days later with verbal commitments from Iraqi officials that they would cooperate with the probe. Blix is expected to brief the 15-nation Security Council about his visit next week.
But Iraq's first real test comes on December 8, when it is obliged by a tough U.N. resolution to submit a full account of its weapons programs.
Inspectors will fly into Iraq on a chartered C-130 carrier which will shuttle back and forth between Baghdad and the Cypriot airport at Larnaca.
The U.N. inspection agency UNMOVIC and the IAEA hope to have some 100 weapons inspectors in Iraq by the end of December. By January 27 the inspectors must have given their first report to the Security Council.
The resolution compels Iraq to allow inspectors unfettered access to suspected weapons sites.
The U.S. has warned Iraq the inspections are Baghdad's last chance to abandon peacefully its alleged chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs. It has threatened to launch a war against Iraq if it does not disarm.
-------- korea
North Korea can build nukes right now
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021122-85983350.htm
North Korea could build several plutonium bombs right away and add one every year until about 2005 if the 1994 Agreed Framework collapses, a CIA analysis says.
By the middle of the decade, however, North Korea could begin producing enough plutonium to make up to 50 bombs a year, the CIA revealed in an unclassified estimate released to Congress.
The estimate for plutonium bombs does not include additional bombs that could be made under Pyongyang's covert uranium-enrichment program, which could begin producing enough fuel for one to two uranium bombs per year beginning in 2005.
In Pyongyang, North Korea's Foreign Ministry announced yesterday that the 1994 agreement had collapsed because of the decision last week by the United States to halt fuel-oil shipments to North Korea.
"Now that the U.S. unilaterally gave up its last commitment under the framework, the [North] acknowledges that it is high time to decide upon who is to blame for the collapse of the framework," a ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the official news agency, KCNA.
Japan's government said on Wednesday that it remains committed to building two nuclear reactors in North Korea despite Pyongyang's covert nuclear-arms program. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said in Tokyo that the government continues to back the Agreed Framework.
The CIA statement shows that it would take North Korea five to six years after jettisoning the 1994 arms-control pact before it could begin large-scale production of nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration suspended fuel-oil shipments to North Korea last week after a senior North Korean official disclosed in an October meeting with U.S. officials that Pyongyang secretly was building uranium-based weapons.
The administration was debating whether to abandon the treaty, which required that the United States, Japan and South Korea build two nuclear-power reactors in North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang's ending its nuclear-arms program.
Some officials favor keeping the agreement while others say the North Korean violations show that the communist government, which President Bush has said is part of an "axis of evil," cannot be trusted.
Incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar, Indiana Republican, said last week that the agreement should be kept. Mr. Lugar told The Washington Times that "we need a construct that stops the production of more weapons by North Korea."
The CIA estimate, obtained by The Times, states that the North Koreans could begin producing highly enriched uranium in the next three years.
"We recently learned that the North is constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational - which could be as soon as mid-decade," the CIA said.
The plutonium-based nuclear-arms program used fuel from three reactors to produce enough for up to two bombs before 1992, the CIA said.
That program was supposed to have stopped under the Agreed Framework, which was hailed by the Clinton administration as a major arms-control breakthrough.
Signs that North Korea was continuing to develop nuclear arms were identified by U.S. intelligence as early as 1999, U.S. officials have said.
Under a section headed "If the Framework collapses," the CIA said North Korea could begin reprocessing plutonium again if it abandons the Agreed Framework.
"Reprocessing the spent 5 megawatt-electric reactor fuel now in storage at Yongbyon site under [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards would recover enough plutonium for several more weapons," the CIA stated in a brief unclassified statement.
"Restarting the 5 megawatt reactor would generate about 6 kilograms [of plutonium] per year," it said. "The 50 megawatt-electric reactor at Yongbyon and the 200 megawatt-electric reactor at Taechon would generate about 275 kilograms per year, although it would take several years to complete construction of these reactors."
Arms specialists said about 5 kilograms of plutonium is required for one bomb, making the bomb-production rate about 55 weapons per year after the reactors are completed.
The CIA stated that despite the agreement to halt plutonium production at the Yongbyon facility, "we have assessed, however, that the North has continued its nuclear weapons program."
Regarding the uranium-bomb program, the CIA said it had been suspicious about Pyongyang's work on enrichment for several years.
"However, we did not obtain clear evidence indicating the North had begun constructing a centrifuge facility until recently," the CIA said. "We assess that North Korea embarked on the effort to develop a centrifuge-based uranium enrichment program about two years ago."
Last year, procurement agents for North Korea "began seeking centrifuge-related materials in large quantities," the CIA said, noting that the North Koreans "also obtained equipment suitable for use in uranium feed and withdrawal systems."
The CIA stated that assessing North Korea's nuclear program is difficult to gauge accurately because of the closed communist system and "the obvious covert nature of the program."
Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, which first obtained the CIA analysis, said the report indicates that North Korea will not be able to build more nuclear weapons rapidly outside of the Agreed Framework until five or six years.
"The North Koreans cannot break out with a large amount of plutonium bombs very quickly beyond what they already have," Mr. Sokolski said.
Critics, including members of Congress, said the Agreed Framework was killed by the North Koreans. A senior North Korean official told Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly in early October that the agreement was nullified, U.S. officials said.
"The era of negotiation with North Korea is over because negotiations have failed categorically," said one congressional aide.
"North Korea is going to try to build bombs no matter what we do," the aide said. "Their goal is to have nuclear weapons. Our goal should be to stop as many dual-use exports to this regime as we can."
Mr. Sokolski notes: "All this suggests that trying to fine-tune an agreement for plutonium or uranium is a mistake. We've got to change the regime."
--------
CIA Says N.Korea Could Produce More Nuclear Arms
November 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-usa-nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea is building a plant that by the middle of the decade could produce enough uranium for two or more nuclear weapons a year, a CIA analysis said on Friday.
``We recently learned that the North is constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational -- which could be as soon as mid-decade,'' the unclassified analysis said.
The CIA previously estimated that North Korea had one or two nuclear weapons using plutonium produced before 1992. The recent analysis was sent to Congress and obtained by Reuters.
North Korea stopped plutonium production in 1994 under the terms of an agreement with the United States.
``We have assessed, however, that despite the freeze at Yongbyon, the North has continued its nuclear weapons program,'' the CIA analysis said, referring to the site of a plutonium reprocessing plant.
Under the 1994 pact, North Korea agreed to freeze nuclear weapon activities in return for a $5 billion package that included two light-water nuclear power reactors and 500,000 tons annually of heavy fuel oil.
But a revelation in recent months that North Korea was pursuing a program to produce highly enriched uranium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, prompted a U.S. decision to suspend fuel oil shipments in an effort to force the North Koreans to abandon their nuclear arms program.
If North Korea abandoned the 1994 agreement it could resume production of plutonium. Reprocessing spent reactor fuel in storage at Yongbyon ``would recover enough plutonium for several more weapons,'' the analysis said.
``The United States has been suspicious that North Korea has been working on uranium enrichment for several years. However, we did not obtain clear evidence indicating the North had begun constructing a centrifuge facility until recently,'' it said.
``We assess that North Korea embarked on the effort to develop a centrifuge-based uranium enrichment program about two years ago,'' the CIA analysis said.
North Korea began seeking centrifuge-related materials ``in large quantities'' last year, and obtained equipment that could be used in uranium feed and withdrawal systems, the analysis said.
-------- terrorism
Al-Qaeda's quixotic quest to go nuclear
By David Albright,
Nov 22, 2002
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DK22Ak01.html
(With permission from the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development.)
Following the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001, intelligence agencies and the media scrambled to find documents and other information about al-Qaeda and its next potential targets. A priority was uncovering information about al-Qaeda's progress on acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including nuclear weapons.
Al-Qaeda views the acquisition of WMD as a religious obligation. However, it could develop only limited technological capabilities in Afghanistan to produce WMD, and few believe al-Qaeda obtained nuclear weapons while it was entrenched there. On the other hand, al-Qaeda's determination to get nuclear weapons, along with its increased ability to obtain outside technical assistance, lead to the conclusion that if al-Qaeda had remained in Afghanistan, it would have likely acquired nuclear weapons eventually.
Also, although al-Qaeda's WMD efforts are in disarray, it remains determined to get WMD. As a result, preventing al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons or other WMD must be an overarching goal of the United States and the international community.
Searching Afghanistan
General Tommy Franks, commander of American forces in Afghanistan, said last winter that detailed searches had been conducted at more than 100 sites in Afghanistan, including about 50 suspected of being involved in the production of weapons of mass destruction. Western and Northern Alliance intelligence officers scoured houses, caves and training camps for documents, booklets, personnel records, videos, equipment, materials and other evidence of WMD programs.
Many members of the media who arrived in Kabul soon after the fall of the Taliban in mid-November 2001 uncovered many al-Qaeda and Taliban records. In Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, they climbed over walls to get into al-Qaeda safe houses, gained access to offices, visited training camps and acquired hard drives from al-Qaeda computers. CNN, The Evening Standard, The Times of London, Associated Press, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times and others reported on the information they found in videos, on computer hard drives, and in hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and other written records. This information provides a detailed snapshot of the terrorist group's activities in Afghanistan and abroad. The information includes:
- Instruction manuals to train recruits to make and use a wide variety of conventional explosives;
- Details about the daily lives of al-Qaeda personnel;
- Pictures or schematics of intended targets, including nuclear power plants;
- Training manuals for teaching recruits who speak many different languages to wage guerilla and conventional warfare;
- Instructions on operating uncover overseas; and
- Instructor and student notebooks describing techniques of kidnapping and assassination.
Only a relatively small portion of the records found by the media, however, were about nuclear weapons or other WMD. Nor did the intelligence agencies find a significantly larger amount or vastly different types of nuclear documents in the records they collected.
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban likely either destroyed or took many important WMD documents. The media uncovered partially burned documents and other evidence that documents had been burned or removed in advance of the forces of the Northern Alliance and its allies. As a result, any assessment based on the recovered records remains partial.
Nuclear documents
The captured documents reinforce assessments that al-Qaeda is highly determined to obtain nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on January 16, 2001, at a Defense Department briefing: "We have found a number of things that show an appetite for WMD." To support his claim, he cited diagrams, materials, attempts to acquire items, and specific cases wherein such weapons were discussed at al-Qaeda meetings.
David Ensor of CNN reported on December 4, 2002, that according to US officials, one hand-drawn diagram found either in a Taliban or al-Qaeda facility showed a design for a "dirty bomb". With regard to nuclear weapons, US officials also saw evidence that al-Qaeda was also seeking to acquire or develop a nuclear explosive device.
CIA director George Tenet told Congress in late January 2001 that the United States had uncovered rudimentary diagrams of nuclear weapons in a suspected al-Qaeda house in Kabul. According to a CIA report released publicly on January 30, 2001, these "diagrams, while crude, describe the essential components - uranium and high explosives - common to nuclear weapons."
Superbomb document
In November 2001, CNN found an Arabic document titled "Superbomb" in the home of Abu Khabab, the code name of a senior al-Qaeda official. This document, which was assessed by this author in cooperation with CNN, has some sections that are relatively sophisticated and others that are remarkably inaccurate or naive. Over 25 neatly hand-written pages, the author discusses various types of nuclear weapons, the physics of nuclear explosions, properties of nuclear materials needed to make them, and the effects of nuclear weapons. It is not systematic in its coverage and the author sometimes covers some subjects in depth and others superficially or incorrectly. Nor is it a cookbook for making nuclear weapons, as many critical steps to make a nuclear weapon are missing from the document.
Nonetheless, this documents shows that al-Qaeda was interested in developing a deeper understanding of nuclear weapons. Some of the information in the document suggests that the author understood shortcuts to making crude nuclear explosives.
The document is missing its cover and first pages, so the author's name or background is unknown. The date of the document is also unknown. The first page begins "... since the latter is less stable and therefore more capable of nuclear fission. For this reason, anyone desiring to obtain a nuclear weapon must set up a plant for enriching uranium."
The author advocates the use of laser enrichment, which he claims is "simple". In reality, however, laser enrichment is incredibly complex to master. This indicates that the author only possessed a rudimentary understanding of the knowledge to enrich uranium or was trying to convince the reader to pursue this enrichment technology for an unstated reason.
The sections on plutonium and uranium are relatively detailed. Compared to the sections discussing nuclear weapons, these sections imply that the author was more comfortable writing about the nuclear fuel cycle than nuclear weapons.
According to Ronald Wolfe, the Arab language specialist who translated this and other documents found by CNN, the author is most likely Egyptian. Moreover, the Superbomb document looks like the type used by professors and lecturers at Arab universities. To further support this, CNN found student notes in houses in Kabul, one containing a date of early 2000, that have crude drawings that appear to be based on the one in the Superbomb document. Thus, an instructor may have used the Superbomb document to give a course to al-Qaeda members about nuclear weapons. Some of the notes in the margins suggest that the instructor may have not been the author of the document.
In that document and in student notebooks there are similar figures of atomic bomb designs using plutonium or uranium. However, these designs are not credible nuclear weapons designs. If someone obtained separated plutonium and built this design, it would not function as an atomic bomb. Rather, it would be a radiological dispersal device (RDD). These students, who thought they were learning about nuclear weapons, were in actuality learning about making radiological dispersal devices.
The Superbomb document was found in conjunction with a wide variety of other documents regarding the manufacture and use of conventional explosives. An interpretation of this finding is that the students, who were taking an advanced course in building conventional explosives, also received instruction in the ultimate explosive, nuclear weapons.
A student notebook found by The Washington Post in Kabul supports this view. A November 22, 2001, Washington Post article reports that while most of the notebook contains information written during a general course on using conventional explosives, the last page contains notes specifically about atomic explosions. Moreover, some of the information that appears in the notebook is similar to what is in the Superbomb document.
Other records
Other records imply that al-Qaeda had a more sophisticated understanding of atomic bombs than what is suggested by the Superbomb document. NBC reported that hard drives found by US intelligence agencies had more interesting information about nuclear weapons than those obtained by the media.
A document found by a reporter of the London Times, who was one of the first to search al-Qaeda houses in Kabul, shows that the Arab readers were partially discerning about what they obtained. The reporter found a part of a page of a document that simplistically discussed hydrogen bombs and other nuclear weapon topics. The document was typed in English with Arabic notes handwritten on the page. The document contains several mistakes, some of which are outlandish. At one place, the writer of the document compares the chemical structure of plutonium to the fictitious elements Saturium, Jupiternium and Marrissum. The writer of the Arabic notes drew arrows from these three words, to an Arabic phrase, which translates to: "This is bullshit."
A document found by The New York Times in Afghanistan discusses precautions for using chemical, biological and nuclear weapons written by Abul Khabad. In the preface, he identified himself as coming from Greece and as a "protector of mujahideen". It is unknown who this person is, or if it is another spelling or code name of Abu Khabbab.
The New York Times, in an extensive report on al-Qaeda documents on March 18, 2002, cited officials who said that papers were found in Kabul explaining the use of radioactive isotopes in agriculture and medicine in the same rooms as notebooks on conventional explosives, further indicating research into RDDs.
Several documents reportedly described the manufacture of nuclear weapons and their effects. In addition, other documents described defenses against a nuclear attack.
Many documents contained detailed information about making and using conventional explosives, including one called RDX, a high explosive popular with militaries. It has also been used as an ingredient in "shaped charges" used to compress the nuclear core of an implosion-type nuclear design. However, none of the documents reviewed by this author contained any information about shaped charges. This finding supports the conclusion that al-Qaeda's capabilities were limited. However, it also fuels speculation that al-Qaeda may have favored a gun-type nuclear design, which is simpler to make and depends on the use of a propellant to fire a slug of highly enriched Uranium (HEU) down a barrel into another piece of HEU.
Foreign assistance
The documents support the view that al-Qaeda's leadership understood its limitations and was taking steps to improve its ability to create an industrial infrastructure to make WMD. Al-Qaeda realized that foreign assistance would allow it to overcome its weaknesses and be more efficient and economical in making WMD.
A record obtained by The Wall Street Journal from a computer hard drive appears to be a 1999 al-Qaeda progress report on its efforts to make nerve gas.(1) The author of the memo complained that the use of non-specialists had "resulted in a waste of effort and money", urging the recruitment of experts as the "fastest, safest and cheapest" route. A June 1999 memo said the program should seek cover and talent in educational institutions, which it said were "more beneficial to us and would allow easy access to specialists, which will greatly benefit us in the first stage, God willing".
Al-Qaeda's nuclear effort benefited from the help of two Pakistani nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudari Abdul Majeed, who have admitted that they had had long discussions with al-Qaeda officials in August 2001 about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.(2) Pakistani intelligence officials told The Washington Post that they believe that the scientists used a charity they had created as a cover to conduct secret talks with bin Laden.
Pakistani officials told The Washington Post that the scientists reportedly admitted meeting with bin Laden, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, and two other al-Qaeda officials over two or three days in August at a compound in Kabul. The scientists described bin Laden as intensely interested in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.(3)
Bin Laden indicated to them that he had obtained, or had access to, some type of radiological material that he said had been acquired by the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.(4) Mahmood and Majeed reportedly told bin Laden that it would not be possible to manufacture a nuclear weapon from that material.(5) They claim they provided no material or specific plans to bin Laden, but rather engaged in wide ranging "academic" discussions, Pakistanis officials told The Washington Post.
According to another Pakistani official, however, the scientists spoke extensively about weapons of mass destruction. He described the scientists as "very motivated" and "extremist in their views," but added that they were "discussing things that didn't materialize, but fall under the breaking secrets act".(6) Pakistani officials familiar with the interrogations told The Washington Post that the scientists provided detailed responses to bin Laden's technical questions about the manufacture of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.(7)
Documents describing the projects of these scientists' charity, which were found by CNN in Kabul, include plans to develop uranium mining in Afghanistan. It has been known for a long time that Afghanistan had uranium resources. But the fact that these nuclear scientists were planning to extract uranium is surprising. A nuclear weapons program may need uranium for components, or as a material for testing nuclear designs, or for learning to make highly enriched uranium metal. Such a capability would also make any weapons program more indigenous.
In summation, these scientists are believed to have provided al-Qaeda a blueprint for making nuclear weapons. They are suspected of providing classified information about producing nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda or the Taliban or of facilitating access to others in the Pakistani nuclear program who had that knowledge. These two scientists, who had years of experience in Pakistan's nuclear program, could have provided important tips or direct assistance on managing and running a complex nuclear project. This type of assistance would have been critical to al-Qaeda, which had limited experience in technical projects or their management.
What was not found
The documents and other information did not provide any evidence that al-Qaeda had acquired nuclear weapons. Prior to the September 11 attacks, many media reports stated that al-Qaeda had acquired operational nuclear weapons from countries of the former Soviet Union. No evidence, however, has emerged that al-Qaeda obtained any nuclear weapons, despite bin Laden's statement to a Pakistani journalist published in Dawn on November 9, 2001, in which he claimed to have both nuclear and chemical weapons. He said that the weapons would be used as a deterrent against an US attack.
In addition, no evidence showed that al-Qaeda had acquired nuclear explosive materials, although this result is less certain. US experts took "environmental samples" at about 100 sites in Afghanistan that were analyzed for traces of nuclear material, chemical weapons and biological agents. Environmental sampling did not reveal the presence of plutonium or highly enriched uranium at any of these sites. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated on January 15, 2001, at a roundtable with radio media, that in one case US experts detected a high radiation reading, but the radioactive material was depleted uranium contained in armor-piercing munitions.(8)
Bin Laden is known to have sought highly enriched uranium and plutonium. At least two attempts are known to have been scams. Al-Qaeda may, however, have obtained natural or low-enriched uranium or other radiological material in these deals. The information revealed by these investigations leads to the question of whether al-Qaeda was completely thwarted in its quest for nuclear material or whether it just got smarter and more secretive in its efforts to get the material.
Nuclear material used in nuclear weapons (or in many radiological dispersal devices) is relatively easy to hide or transport. Given that most of the al-Qaeda leadership escaped US capture, it would be foolhardy to assume that al-Qaeda would have left behind any valuable, transportable radioactive material.
Reflecting that uncertainty, The Washington Post reported on March 3, 2002, that some US intelligence officials believe that al-Qaeda could already control a stolen Soviet-era tactical nuclear weapon or enough weapon-grade material to fashion a crude atomic bomb.
The search of Afghanistan did not reveal a cadre of al-Qaeda's nuclear scientists and technicians, even though bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders are known to have taken a personal interest in acquiring nuclear weapons and other WMD. But information about the personnel that staffed such a program is scarce. A few names, such as Abu Khabab, surfaced in media reports, but these appear to be code names of individuals. The fate or current location of any technical or scientific al-Qaeda personnel remains unknown.
Taking Stock
Whatever al-Qaeda had accomplished towards a nuclear weapon capability, its effort in Afghanistan was ended with the fall of the Taliban government. The international community is fortunate that the war in Afghanistan set back al-Qaeda's effort to obtain nuclear weapons.
Al-Qaeda was putting together a serious program to make nuclear weapons. But it is hard to judge how far the nuclear research went.
Although al-Qaeda was unlikely to develop the capability to make separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium, it may have tried to do so or accelerated its efforts to acquire separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium overseas. In either case, al-Qaeda would have had to build the necessary infrastructure to make a nuclear explosive from plutonium or highly enriched uranium.
The available information implies that al-Qaeda had only achieved a limited technical capability to make nuclear weapons, assuming it acquired plutonium or highly enriched uranium illicitly. Its effort would likely have needed to concentrate on the simpler gun-type design of a crude nuclear explosive, which also means it would have had to obtain at least about 50 kilograms of HEU. Plutonium does not work in a gun-type design.
The documents strongly suggest that al-Qaeda was intensifying its long-term goal to acquire nuclear weapons and would have likely succeeded, if it had remained powerful in Afghanistan for several more years. The documents show that al-Qaeda was creating a quasi-state nuclear weapons program with the tacit or direct approval of the Taliban government. Moreover, this effort was largely invisible to the rest of the world prior to September 11. Although intelligence agencies were intensely scrutinizing al-Qaeda's activities, they had little success in penetrating al-Qaeda's secret WMD programs.
The Taliban needed al-Qaeda's financial and military support and allowed its operatives to function relatively independent of Taliban control. A senior Pakistani official said in an interview that the annual budget of the Taliban was US$70 million per year while the budget of al-Qaeda was $200 million per year. Moreover, al-Qaeda personnel were far more skilled at running organizations than the relatively ineffectual Taliban government personnel.
Al-Qaeda's relationship with the Taliban regime, which some have labeled "parasitic," was immensely beneficial to al-Qaeda. It needed Taliban support to hide any WMD programs from outsiders. Senior al-Qaeda officials appear to have realized that foreign assistance was critical to the success of its endeavors to obtain WMD. As a result, they would have also realized the importance of the cover provided by the Taliban regime in its efforts to obtain sensitive foreign supplies and the help of foreign experts. Such outside assistance would have been far harder to obtain without the Taliban regime legitimizing or fronting al-Qaeda's activities.
A critical lesson of the documents found in Afghanistan is that groups like al-Qaeda see great value in the use of nuclear weapons. Al-Qaeda, its spin-offs and like-minded terrorist groups can be expected to struggle to enhance their chances of acquiring and using nuclear explosives, regardless of the costs to themselves.
The risk remains
Al-Qaeda's nuclear weapons program was seriously disrupted by the loss of its base of operations in Afghanistan. We are left to ponder many troubling questions. Will al-Qaeda reconstitute a nuclear weapons effort somewhere else? Will this program be more focused? What did al-Qaeda learn from the Pakistani nuclear scientists?
Any effort by al-Qaeda or splinter groups to reconstitute a nuclear weapons effort will take time. That time permits actions to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack. Al-Qaeda will likely need another base and more assistance to master making a nuclear explosive.
Although a nuclear weapon in the hands of al-Qaeda remains the greatest danger, many analysts believe that al-Qaeda will try to strike at a nuclear facility or attack with an RDD using stolen radioactive materials. Documents found in Afghanistan and other information suggest that al-Qaeda was considering attacks on nuclear power plants in Europe or the United States. Concern about RDDs intensified in May and June 2002 following revelations that senior al-Qaeda official Abu Zubaydah told his captors that al-Qaeda was interested in producing a RDD and knew how to do it. Adding to worries was the arrest of the al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla in Chicago in May 2002. He was reportedly on a scouting mission for an al-Qaeda operation to attack the United States with a RDD.
Profound consequences Although the overall chance of al-Qaeda detonating a nuclear explosive appears on reflection to be low, the consequences would be profound. A single nuclear explosion in a major metropolitan area would be catastrophic. Even a relatively low-yield nuclear explosion could cause tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties. A severe earthquake can provide some indication of the level of damage to be expected from the blast of nuclear explosion, but it cannot capture the immense number of burns and radiation injuries that would follow a nuclear detonation.
Recovery from a nuclear explosion would be long and difficult. Financial impacts would be severe. Emotional consequences for both those most immediately and indirectly affected would be profound. No one would feel safe.
The desire for revenge may lead the United States, or perhaps its allies, to respond with nuclear weapons, eliminating the perpetrators if they could be immediately identified, but likely causing untold suffering to civilian populations. US use of nuclear weapons could fundamentally alter world order and institutions.
Preventing al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear weapons must remain a fundamental goal of the international community. Many of the necessary steps have been identified and are being implemented. Several actions, however, remain undone.
Steps of prevention
The existing strategy of the international community to aggressively pursue global terrorists remains the most effective way to prevent nuclear terrorism. Although often stated, the best defense is a good offense. Governments must be prepared to target such groups through covert and overt military means in order to deny them the ability to conduct nuclear weapons research and development.
The United States and allied governments are sharing intelligence about terrorist activities. They understand the importance of developing a strategy and method to detect attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or the wherewithal to make them. A well-accepted priority is placing agents in terrorist groups and providing financial and other incentives for members to defect.
Many have pointed out the critical need to better protect nuclear material worldwide, particularly in states or regions in conflict or experiencing instability. Significantly more resources are needed to develop adequate accounting and protection of nuclear explosive material and other radiological materials.
Similarly, it is accepted that technical and procedural capabilities to search for nuclear weapons or nuclear materials require improvement. Such improvements are occurring, although far more needs to be done worldwide.
Often overlooked is the need to continue to tighten export controls worldwide, particularly in places like the former Soviet Union and Pakistan. The production of nuclear weapons requires material, know-how and manufacturing equipment. Countries need to improve export controls and be more vigilant to make it harder for terrorist groups to acquire needed items. In addition, more attention to the monitoring of certain exports may uncover terrorist group efforts to make nuclear weapons. Toward that end, countries should share more information about their nuclear dual-use exports.
Information about making nuclear weapons was actively sought by al-Qaeda. This sobering fact means that governments need to continue trying to strengthen their own controls on sensitive know-how. In addition to national systems, there is a need for an international set of guidelines about what types of nuclear weapons information should remain classified. Nations have a responsibility to have more open and transparent nuclear programs and policies. Nonetheless, not all nuclear information should be released. The oldest information about nuclear weapons design may be the most useful to terrorist groups. In addition, declassification guidelines are not always consistent from state to state, allowing classified information to be assembled piecemeal from several countries.
Many governments need to pay significantly more attention to the activities of scientists who work in classified nuclear programs and can "leak" important know-how, equipment, materials or components. No country can prevent all defections or leakage of sensitive items, but terrorist groups will likely depend on outside help to make nuclear weapons. Acquiring the services of a highly trained expert may be necessary, or at least could significantly decrease the time it would take, for a terrorist group to produce a crude nuclear weapon. Governments, therefore, need to develop responsible programs to ensure the reliability of the people in their nuclear programs.
The safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a role to play in preventing terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. One step is to continue improving the IAEA's ability to detect undeclared nuclear activities in states. The IAEA needs to pay more attention in states that have little declared nuclear activity, such as Afghanistan, but where terrorist groups may establish a nuclear weapons program in secret. There were many indicators that al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime were interested in nuclear activities prior to September 11. The IAEA should use its expertise to flag undeclared activities in these types of states.
More resources are needed to improve the understanding of the capabilities of terrorist groups to make nuclear weapons. Some believe that a terrorist group could never build a nuclear weapon, even if it possesses large quantities of HEU. Others believe that a small group could easily build a nuclear explosive from HEU. Experience says that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Knowing what terrorists can do is instrumental in developing an accurate and comprehensive plan of action to combat and prevent nuclear terrorism. One step is re-evaluating the type of nuclear explosives a terrorist may seek. The design may differ significantly from that sought by a nation. More needs to be learned about al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, particularly about who they recruit, and their potential approaches to building nuclear weapons. This information is critical to determining how terrorists may assemble the necessary materials, equipment, infrastructure, and expertise to obtain or build a nuclear explosive.
Conclusion
The documents found in Afghanistan show that al-Qaeda members are neither supermen nor morons. Their efforts in making nuclear weapons were far less sophisticated than known state programs, but their determination to get nuclear weapons is astounding and their apparent willingness to use them terrifying. Because many of these terrorist groups will never give up in their quest for nuclear weapons and other WMD, the world cannot let down its guard either.
Notes (1) Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, "Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Years of al-Qaeda Doings," The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2001.
(2) Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, "2 Nuclear Experts Briefed Bin Laden, Pakistanis Say," The Washington Post, December 12, 2001.
(3) "2 Nuclear Scientists Briefed," op. cit.
(4) The Washington Post reported on June 11, 2002, that the US government had concluded that al-Qaeda controls enough radioactive cesium, strontium, or cobalt to mount a radiological attack on the United States.
(5) "2 Nuclear Scientists Briefed," op. cit.
(6) "2 Nuclear Scientists Briefed," op. cit.
(7) Kaman Khan, "Pakistan Releases Nuclear Scientists for Ramadan's End," The Washington Post, December 16, 2001.
(8) Roundtable with radio media Associated Press, BBC, NPR and VOA "Secretary Rumsfield Roundtable with Radio Media, Defense Department News Transcript, January 15, 2002. See also Rumsfeld's comments at the Defense Department Press Briefing on January 16, 2002.
(Originally published by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development.
-------- us politics
House rubber-stamps Homeland Security Bill
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
11/22/2002
United Press International
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021122-031601-3841r
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- The mostly empty U.S. House of Representatives by voice vote Friday approved the final bill establishing the Department of Homeland Security, which combines about 20 federal agencies into a new Cabinet-level body. Most members departed last week for the recess, leaving only a procedural approval of the bill.
The House had originally approved the final compromise on the bill's language last week before sending it to the Senate early this week for debate and amendments.
After the Senate made minor changes to the bill -- which will bring the operations of about 20 agencies and 170,000 workers under a new single cabinet secretary -- the House had to re-pass the new version before it could be sent to the Senate.
As most House members had left for winter recess after last week's vote, virtually no one was present for Friday's procedural vote.
Some Democrats had argued that Congress should take up an extension of unemployment benefits before departing and had threatened to delay final passage on the homeland bill unless that measure also received a vote.
But without sufficient members on the floor to muster votes to throw up any procedural hurdles, Democrats will be forced to wait until the 108th Congress convenes in January.
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'An Irresponsible Exercise in Political Chicanery'
Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV)
November 22, 2002
AntiWar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/byrd2.html
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 90-9 to approve the landmark Homeland Security bill. What follows is the full transcript of Sen. Byrd's remarks during the conclusion of the Homeland Security debate.
We have come to the end of a long, long road. For nearly five months this chamber has engaged in discussions about homeland security. But, for nearly as long a time this Congress has not engaged in seeing to it that there is actually funding to make our people any safer from the threat of another horrific terrorist attack.
It has been over four months since the House of Representatives has seen fit to pass a regular appropriations bill.
We have talked a lot about homeland security, but we have done very, very little.
We have not given the cities and municipalities-the police, the firemen, the hospital workers, the first responders, who are on the front lines-we have not given these people one red cent to help them keep us safer from the madmen within our midst in four months.
It has been a little over a year and two months since America was jolted from its tranquility by the noise, smoke and flames of two exploding commercial airlines as they smashed into the twin towers.
Yet, in these intervening months, except for the initial help we provided to New York and to Washington to aid in closing the hemorrhaging wounds of economic disruption and human devastation, caused by the terrorist attacks, not enough has changed here at home.
True, we have chased bin Laden across the landscape of Afghanistan and probably cleansed that nation of the training camps for terrorists for now. We have made progress, I am sure, in some disruption of the al-Qaida network worldwide.
But no one in this chamber, and no one in this city can look the American people in the eye and say to them: "Today you are much safer here at home than you were 14 months ago."
Because of reckless disregard for the reality of the threat to our domestic security, this administration and many in this Congress have taken part in an irresponsible exercise in political chicanery.
The White House has pressured its Republican colleagues in the Congress to reject billions of dollars in money which could have added to the tangible safety of the American people.
This White House has stopped this year's normal funding process in its tracks, and even turned back funds for homeland security in emergency spending bills that could have shored up existing mechanisms to prevent, or respond to, another devastating blow by fanatics who hate us.
They have done this plain disservice to the people in order to gain some perceived political advantage in a congressional election year, and in order to be able to say that they were holding down spending. Further, in order to avoid criticism of the too meager dollars for homeland security, this White House suddenly did an about-face and embraced the concept of a Department of Homeland Security.
The people are being offered a bureaucratic behemoth, complete with fancy, top-heavy directorates, officious new titles and noble sounding missions instead of real tools to help protect them from death and destruction.
How utterly irresponsible. How callous. How cavalier. With this debate about homeland security, politics in Washington has reached the apogee of utter cynicism and the perigee of candor.
No one is telling our people the plain unvarnished truth. It is simply this.
This Department is a bureaucratic behemoth cooked up by political advisors to satisfy several inside Washington agendas.
1) It is intended to protect the president from criticism and fault-should another attack occur.
2) It is intended to eliminate large numbers of dedicated, trained federal workers, so that lucrative contracts for their services may be awarded to favored private entities.
3) It will be used to channel federal research moneys and grants to big corporate contributors without the usual federal procurement standards that ensure fair competition and best value for the tax dollar.
4) It will foster easier spying and information-gathering on ordinary citizens which may be used in ways which could have nothing whatsoever to do with homeland security.
And now with this new bill, which showed up only last week on the doorstep of the Senate, insult has been added to injury by provisions that further exploit the already shamefully exploited issue of homeland security with pork for certain states and certain businesses.
My, my, my, how low we have sunk.
Well, the nation will have this unfortunate creature, this behemoth bureaucratic bag of tricks, this huge Department of Homeland Security, and it will hulk across the landscape of this city, touting its noble mission, shining up its new seal, and eagerly gobbling up tax dollars for all manner of things, some of which will have very little to do with protecting or saving lives.
And maybe in five years or so, it will sort out its mission and shift around its desks enough to actually make some real contribution to the safety of our people. I sincerely hope so.
But, if the latest tape from bin Laden is to be believed, we won't have time for all of that. If the latest threat assessments from the FBI can be believed, we will experience something catastrophic before that new department even finishes firing all of the federal workers it wants to get rid of.
What does it take to wake us up? What does it take to make the gamesmanship cease? When will we stop the political mud wrestling and begin to wrestle with the most potentially destructive force ever to challenge this nation?
Let us hope that when the gavel bangs to close down this session of Congress, it will awaken us to all of the dreadful consequences of continued posturing and inaction.
I know that this administration, with its newfound majorities in both houses of Congress, will quickly pass the remaining 2003 bills which will provide at least some modicum of real security for our people as soon as Congress reconvenes in January. They will want to claim that they can get things done.
Although I deplore the motivation and the gamesmanship behind such tactics, I wish them well and I pledge my help.
It is long past time for us to finally do our best to prevent another deadly strike by those who hate us and wish us ill. Terrorism is no plaything.
Political service is no game. Political office is no place for warring children.
And the oath of office which we take is no empty pledge to be subjugated to the tactics of election-year chicanery perpetrated on a good and trusting people.
Robert C. Byrd represents West Virginia in the United States Senate.
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Bush, Putin Say Iraq Must Obey UN Arms Calls
November 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-russia-usa.html
PUSHKIN, Russia (Reuters) - President Bush and Russia's Vladimir Putin warned Iraq Friday to disarm or face tough consequences, but the Kremlin chief also told his guest any action against Baghdad should be within U.N. rules.
Putin, in talks at a palace outside St. Petersburg, also grudgingly accepted Bush's explanation a day after a NATO summit that the Alliance's second eastward expansion posed no threat to Moscow's security.
Bush later flew to Lithuania, an ex-Soviet Baltic state and one of seven countries invited at NATO's Prague summit to join. He is due to complete his European tour in Romania, another future NATO member.
Bush and Putin looked relaxed at the end of nearly two hours of talks, with both pledging to pursue the close ties they have forged since Moscow backed the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
A joint statement put more pressure on Iraq by urging President Saddam Hussein to abide by the terms of a U.N. Security Council resolution clinched this month after Russia secured a number of concessions.
``We call on Iraq to comply fully and immediately with this and all relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, which were adopted as a necessary step to secure international peace and security,'' the statement said.
But Putin stuck to Russia's stand that the United Nations was the proper avenue for dealing with Iraq, in the face of Bush's repeated threats to lead a ``coalition of the willing'' to disarm Iraq of suspected weapons of mass destruction if necessary.
``STAY WITHIN U.N. FRAMEWORK''
``We do believe that we have to stay within the framework of the work being carried out by the Security Council of the United Nations,'' Putin told a concluding joint news conference.
``And we do believe that together with the United States we can achieve a positive result.''
Iraq's information minister, speaking to Reuters in New Delhi Friday, said his country was ``completely clean'' of all weapons prohibited by the U.N. Security Council. Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf said Iraq would cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Russia, an ally of Iraq in the Soviet era with key oil interests in the country, wants to ensure arms inspections are not used by the United States to provide grounds for a military invasion to oust Saddam. Inspectors, last in Iraq in 1998, returned this week to proceed with checks to determine whether Baghdad holds chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Asked whether Russia would consider the use of military force to help disarm Iraq, Putin said other countries in the region had provided a home to those who had undermined international security.
Most of the hijackers implicated in the Sept. 11 2001 attacks on U.S. landmarks, he said, were from Saudi Arabia. And Osama bin Laden, presumed mastermind of those attacks, was in hiding ``somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan.''
Since Russian security forces stormed a theater to end a siege by armed Chechen separatists, Putin has said that Russia, like other countries, was under attack from an international Islamist conspiracy. A total of 128 hostages and 41 Chechen rebels died in the operation to end the siege.
Bush welcomed the arrest of al Qaeda leader Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is under CIA control after his capture near Yemen. ``America, Russia and people who love freedom are one person safer as a result of finding this guy,'' Bush said.
NO TOTAL AGREEMENT
Bush admitted he and Putin did not agree on everything.
``Like other good friends I've had throughout my life, we don't agree 100 percent of the time,'' he said. ``But we always agree to discuss things ... in a frank way.''
Bush's stated goal on coming to Russia after leaving the Prague summit was to reassure Putin that NATO's invitation to seven ex-communist states represented no threat to Moscow.
``Russia is a friend, Russia is not an enemy,'' Bush said.
Putin restated his skepticism about expansion, although he has long since resigned himself to it. And he did not rule out closer Russia-NATO ties.
``We do not believe that this has been necessitated by the existing facts. But we take note of the position taken by the president of the United States, and we hope to have positive development in our relations with all NATO countries,'' he said.
``We do not rule out the possibility of deepening our relations with the alliance as a whole.''
In Lithuania, Bush is unlikely to dwell on NATO's key significance for the Baltic states in NATO membership, the security guarantee that wins them the freedom from Russian dominance which they have long sought.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia won back the freedom they lost during World War II when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They have been pressing for NATO membership as a security guarantee.
Bush is expected to get a rousing reception in bitter winter weather when he appears in a square in the 16th century center of Vilnius Saturday morning.
``He is coming to celebrate our victory with us,'' Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus said before Bush arrived.
-------- MILITARY
-------- asia
Taiwan boosts patrols to counter China
Briefly
November 22, 2002
Washington Times
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021122-1073374.htm
TAIPEI, Taiwan - The defense minister of the Republic of China (Taiwan) says his forces have stepped up air and naval patrols off the east of the island amid reports that China is increasing its military operations there.
"The Defense Ministry has ordered the air force and navy to increase their patrols as part of our efforts to keep a close eye on the area," Defense Minister Tang Yao-ming told parliament.
Mr. Tang said Taiwan would not be able to check Chinese operations if it does not buy Kidd-class destroyers from the United States. "The navy's combat capability would be boosted fivefold once it is joined by the fleet of Kidd-class destroyers," Mr. Tang said. The parliament's Defense Committee last month backed purchase of four second-hand Kidd-class destroyers if the parliament approves.
The 9,600-ton destroyers would be armed with Standard II-3A surface-to-air missiles.
U.S. destroyer to call at Qingdao
BEIJING - A U.S. Navy ship is to call at a Chinese port next week, the first such visit since military ties were ruptured after the collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet.
The USS Paul F. Foster, a destroyer with the U.S. 7th Fleet operating in the western Pacific, will stop at the eastern port of Qingdao, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing announced. It didn't say what day the ship would arrive.
China-U.S. military relations soured after the April 1, 2001, collision over the South China Sea. Both sides accused the other of causing the crash, and China detained the American plane's 24 crew members for 11 days after the EP-3 made an emergency landing on China's Hainan island.
U.S. ships have since visited Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, but the visit to Qingdao would be the first to a mainland port by a U.S. Navy ship since March 2001.
Muslim-area violence rings alarms in Bangkok
BANGKOK - With dozens of bombings and 20 policemen slain by unidentified attackers, Muslim-majority southern Thailand has experienced a spate of violence in the past year that has rung alarm bells after the Bali bombings.
The government insists the incidents are not the work of terrorists, but are linked with "local factors" like feuds between gangster groups - a view generally backed by political analysts.
Still, the five southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia, 600-plus miles from Bangkok, Thailand's capital, have clearly slipped from the government's control. The region is a hub for crimes, including trafficking in weapons, drugs, oil and women.
Weekly notes
The United States and the Philippines signed an agreement yesterday allowing U.S. forces to use its former Asian colony as a supply point for military operations. Vice President Teofisto Guingona, a nationalist, resigned his other post as foreign minister in July to show opposition to Manila's deepening military ties with Washington as the Philippines battles its own Muslim militants accused of ties to al Qaeda. Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs says it wants Britain's Queen Elizabeth II to formally open its proposed new complex because she is their paramount chief and officially "King of the Fiji Islands." The former British colony has been independent since 1970, but this only let Her Majesty off as head of state at the government level, the chiefs say. She (and her successors) will remain Fiji's monarch until this status is removed at a traditional ceremony.
-------- balkans
NATO Finds Eight Tons of Weapons in Bosnia Raid
November 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-bosnia-cache.html
SARAJEVO (Reuters) - NATO-led peacekeepers said on Friday they had found nearly eight tons of weapons and ammunition in a private warehouse in northwestern Bosnia.
The Stabilization Force (SFOR) said the find was so big it would take several days for peacekeepers to be sure of the exact quantity and types of weapons involved.
``It will be a very, very large cache,'' SFOR spokesman Yves Vanier said.
Bosnia has been under close international scrutiny since a Bosnian Serb company was found last month to have been helping Iraq refurbish air force jets in a violation of a U.N. embargo.
Vanier said an investigation would reveal whether the weapons found in the town of Prijedor were left over from Bosnia's 1992-95 war and if they were intended for export.
``We are talking about more than 20 types of extremely dangerous material,'' Vanier said. He said mortars, mortar rounds, anti-tank grenade launchers, 300,000 small arms rounds, mines, and machine-gun ammunition were among the items found.
SFOR said it began the search operation in Prijedor early on Thursday morning as part of a regular program to find and confiscate weapons hidden after the war. Removal of material from the site continued on Friday.
Vanier declined to disclose how SFOR had learned about the cache, hidden in Bosnia's Serb Republic.
He said Bosnia's U.N. policing mission and local police would have to conduct their own investigation to clarify the ownership of the warehouse, while SFOR's task was to protect the security of people living in the area.
Prijedor was a pure Serb-held territory during the war and site of several major Serb-run concentration camps for Muslims and Croats.
-------- business
An attack on Iraq makes no business sense
11/22/2002
Portland Tribune
http://www.portlandtribune.com/viewcurr.cgi?email&id=14826
In a corporation, when we consider embarking on a large venture that promises to have a significant price tag, we typically prepare an in-depth business case. The business case needs to show that the expected benefit from the undertaking will be greater than the cost. Otherwise, the idea usually isn't approved.
To justify such large capital expenditures, leaders and visionaries behind the idea always look to the end state - i.e., when we've spent the money, what will we have to show for it?
Our country is about to spend somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion on an outright attack of Iraq intended to take down Saddam Hussein's powerful dictatorship. That's a monumental investment.
As with any significant expenditure, I find myself asking: When we've spent billions of dollars on the attack, what will we have to show for it? What will the "end state" look like?
When evaluating a business case, the best executives examine facts, assess reasonableness and evaluate their organization's overall ability to pull it off. They determine, too, whether the end state helps to realize the company's strategy.
If I look at the Iraq attack initiative in these terms, it seems to me we haven't articulated our end state very well, beyond "ousting Saddam." We have done an incomplete job of aligning this mission with our strategy, and we are determining our readiness to undertake this effort by tallying and re-tallying the numbers of Democrats and Republicans in favor or opposed.
So, without the boundaries and rigor of a business case, I instead try to imagine the end state. Will the return on our investment of $50 billion to $100 billion be a stable, peaceful and prosperous Iraq, a model for nearby nations to follow? Will we find the nations of the world, whose counsel we ignored, smiling at us and admitting, "You were right all the time?"
Or are we likely to lose our Arab allies and to foster even more anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East?
When the attack is over, the circumstances we'll leave behind are the wreckage of lands and cities, the deaths of thousands of innocent people and conspicuously heightened hostilities - not only among the nations of the region aimed at each other but particularly aimed at the United States. That's not a value proposition that I think has much merit.
Frankly, if we're willing to spend $100 billion to strengthen our country and our position in the world, I would like us to consider other areas of urgent and enduring vulnerability, the kind of weakness that incapacitates nations. I'm referring to poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, and mental and physical illness of a large - and growing - number of people in our country.
Instead, after we've spent billions, demolished lands and lives, and lined up decades of repair work for those who are left behind, we'll leave intact our current levels of poverty and hunger, our struggling public education system, and our growing numbers of citizens who have little or no access to health care.
In the end, this undertaking, with its enormously high price tag and perhaps inestimable risk, creates no lasting value.
Susan de la Vergne is a freelance writer with 20 years of corporate management experience. She lives in Lake Oswego.
----
Defense Dept. Allows Northrop-TRW Merger
By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 22, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23569-2002Nov21?language=printer
The Pentagon has approved Northrop Grumman Corp.'s proposed purchase of TRW Inc. and passed the matter on to the Justice Department for final action, sources familiar with the situation said yesterday.
The $7.8 billion deal, which would create a defense, aerospace and information technology powerhouse big enough to rival industry leader Lockheed Martin Corp., has been hung up at the Defense Department for weeks, reportedly because top Pentagon officials were focusing on the possible war with Iraq.
Getting a green light from the Defense Department, the companies' primary customer, usually ensures that a defense industry merger will be approved by antitrust regulators at Justice.
But sources said yesterday that the approval hinges on obtaining a consent decree from Northrop Grumman to protect competition in the satellite industry. Without that, a source said, Defense will oppose the merger.
Other companies, most notably Lockheed Martin, have expressed concern that a Northrop-TRW merger would give the resulting company control over the manufacture of important space and satellite components.
The government will require Northrop to ensure that competitors have equal access to those products, but the specifics -- to be contained in the consent decree -- have yet to be worked out, sources said.
"We continue to hold discussions with DoD and DoJ and are working toward a prompt decision," a spokesman for the Los Angeles-based company said.
"We expect to close this transaction by the end of the year."
Northrop announced earlier this week that once the deal goes through, it plans to sell a majority stake in the auto-parts segment of TRW to the Blackstone Group, a private merchant bank, for $4.4 billion in cash and assumed debt.
----
Over a barrel
The mother of all legal rows over who has the right to Iraq's lucrative oilfields is likely if the United States wins its war for the country itself
Tom Cholmondeley
Friday November 22, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,845167,00.html
All the players in the current quarrel can agree on one thing - Iraq has the potential to become a great oil nation again. There is a huge gap between the trickle of oil coming out of Iraq today and its capabilities.
According to Opec, the entire world's known oil reserves run to 1,000bn barrels. Iraq claims a 10th of this, just over 100bn barrels. However, in an interview before the current conflict, Taha Hmud Moussa, then Iraq's deputy oil minister, said the oil "will exceed 300bn barrels when all Iraq's regions are explored". If true, this means Iraq has a quarter of the world's oil. The UK's North Sea reserves are 5bn barrels and we are the EU's largest oil producer. Iraqi's oil is not miles offshore under a treacherous sea. This makes it cheaper than the $3 to $4 barrel oil Britain produces - much cheaper.
John Teeling, head of one of the few western companies to admit to working in Iraq, is exultant. His Dublin-based company Petrel is keen to develop unexplored oilfields. This oil could cost as little as 97 cents a barrel. "Ninety cents a barrel for oil that sells for $30 - that's the kind of business anyone would want to be in," he says. "A 97% profit margin - you can live with that."
Last month, behind the closed doors of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, leading oilmen, exiled Iraqis and lawyers held a meeting entitled "Invading Iraq: dangers and opportunities for the energy sector". One delegate said the entire day could be summarised with: "Who gets the oil?" If America changes the regime you might expect US companies to get it. But it may be more complicated than that.
History can reveal much of how this may end. Iraq's oil was originally developed through a consortium called the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) - split roughly a quarter share to BP, Shell, and the forerunner to Total, with the remainder owned mainly by Standard Oil and Mobil. But, in 1972, it was nationalised by the revolutionary Iraqi regime. Negotiations over nationalisation were fierce, and Geoffrey Stockwell, who headed the IPC team, had some extraordinary clashes with both Saddam Hussein and Iraq's vice-president, Salih Mahdi Ammash. Ammash said Iraq would "go through any battle with the companies that was necessary", and resort to "all means necessary". The companies would also "lose Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti oil because if their Arab brethren did not stand by Iraq, they would use force to stop this oil flow".
After a painful battle, the IPC finally signed the nationalisation agreement on February 28 1973. Today, if "regime change" happens, we could see three of the world's largest public companies - BP, Shell and ExxonMobil - fighting for their old IPC possessions.
Back in the 1970s, the IPC was compensated for its lost oilfields, and that would normally end any future rights they might have. However, they may well try to show that the compensation deal was signed under duress. An incoming Iraqi government could face a giant legal compensation case.
"If you argue there is something amounting to duress, then you could argue the compensation agreement is invalid," says Professor Thomas Wälde, formerly principal UN interregional adviser on oil and gas law. "If I were their [the companies'] adviser, I would develop this into a bargaining chip with the new government. It would play a role in the race for getting new titles."
The stakes are high. Iraq could be producing 8m barrels a day within the decade. The maths is impressive - 8m times 365 at $30 per barrel or $87.6bn a year. Any share would be worth fighting for.
The stakes are equally high for the French, Russians and Chinese. It is striking that the three countries which delayed America's new UN Iraq resolution all have potentially massive oil pacts there. Saddam is believed to have offered the French company Total Elf Fina exclusive rights to the largest of Iraq's oil fields, the Majnoon, which would more than double the company's entire output at a stroke. Meanwhile, Russia and China have sought various deals on the supergiant West Kurna and Rumaila fields respectively. Russian company Lukoil has been assured it will not lose its stake in the 20bn barrel West Kurna field.
Former CIA director James Woolsey, who is close to the Iraqi opposition groups, recently told the Washington Post: "It's pretty straightforward. France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq towards decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure the new government and American companies work closely with them. If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult, to the point of impossible, to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them."
Experts on international law seem not to be on Woolsey's side, however, and a new Iraqi government may have little choice but to work with Saddam's current friends. "The majority opinion is that if a government creates a [legal] title, it survives a change of government," says Prof Wälde. "The idea that all the Iraqi oil industry is now going to be sold to Exxon, say, or BP... is not going to work."
"Regime change does not change the acquired rights companies have in the area," says Doak Bishop, vice-chair of the Institute of Transnational Arbitration. "If the Russians and the French have legal rights in those fields, then a regime change would not oust them of those rights, but it could well get pretty messy."
Should "regime change" happen, one thing is guaranteed - shortly afterwards there will be the mother of all legal battles.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Takes Control of Bethlehem in Response to Bombing
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/international/22CND-ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 22 - Israeli forces took control of Bethlehem early today and hunted down those responsible for a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus that killed 11 people, including at least four children, and wounded dozens.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon resisted pressure from his political right for more drastic military action, although Israelis reeled from images of grieving parents and scattered school books, and a shredded teddy bear carried from the wreckage by an emergency worker on Thursday.
Today soldiers arrested about 20 suspected militants and sealed off the Church of the Nativity to prevent any militants from taking refuge in the church compound, as they did during a similar Israeli incursion in April.
"I have ordered the security forces to take all necessary steps in order to hurt those who try to harm us," Mr. Sharon told reporters during a visit to a lookout near Bethlehem.
The army blew up the home near Bethlehem of the 23-year-old bomber behind Thursday's attack and destroyed the houses of two Hamas members in the Gaza Strip, saying the demolitions sent a message that "their deeds have a price." Hamas was one of two Islamic groups that claimed responsibility for the bus bombing.
In a clash today between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Jenin on the West Bank, a United Nations international staff worker was shot dead. A spokesman for the United Nationss Relief and Works Agency in Geneva, Rene Aquarone, identified him as Iain John Hook of Britain.
Mr. Aquarone said Mr. Hook was the project manager for the reconstruction of the Jenin refugee camp, which was badly damaged in an Israeli incursion in April.
The bombing and the Israeli and Palestinian responses to it provided a painful glimpse into the turmoil in the politics on both sides more than two years into the current conflict.
In the foreground was the crippled bus, not far from the boundary with Bethlehem, the bomber's hometown; in the background were the sweeping ambitions of the Bush administration to reshape the Middle East with a possible war on Iraq.
Israeli officials said Mr. Sharon, who met into the night with his security advisers, had been governed in his response by the American military intentions. "We are not going to allow any kind of escalation," said Raanan Gissin, Mr. Sharon's spokesman. He accused Palestinian terrorists of stepping up their own attacks in hopes of provoking such a response and opening a second front ahead of an Iraq war.
Through a spokesman, the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat condemned the bombing as terrorism. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two militant Islamic groups, issued dueling claims of responsibility for the attack.
Mr. Sharon calculates that it is in Israel's interest to do what it can to avoid hindering the American effort to gain international support for a possible assault on Iraq. Israeli officials hope that an American victory will ultimately force Israel's adversaries in the region to sever links to terrorism and Palestinian militants.
Mr. Sharon also has more immediate concerns. In a week he faces a primary contest to retain the leadership of the Likud Party against Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr. Netanyahu, the former prime minister who recently became foreign minister, has shifted his emphasis from criticizing Mr. Sharon for failing to stop Israel's economic slide to criticizing him for failing to safeguard its security.
Recalling his own tenure as prime minister in the 1990's, Mr. Netanyahu has been declaring in advertisements: "Four suicide bombings in three years." In a deft twist of the knife, the advertisements are appearing on the sides of buses.
Dozens of suicide bombers have struck since Mr. Sharon was elected in February 2001 on a platform of peace and security.
But so far, Mr. Netanyahu's attacks from the right have not done much damage to Mr. Sharon within Likud. They appear to have placed him closer to the center of Israeli politics, the position that has helped sustain his popularity.
Mr. Sharon's response to Thursday's bombing, if it remains restrained, may have the same effect, while also underscoring the cooperative relationship he has built with President Bush.
At the same time, the bombing could not have been more precisely timed or targeted to undermine Israel's left-of-center alternative to Mr. Sharon. Just two days ago the Labor Party elected as its new leader Amram Mitzna, who will compete in general elections on Jan. 28 as Labor's candidate for prime minister against the winner of the Likud primary.
Mr. Mitzna is a former general who advocates immediate negotiations with the Palestinians, without conditions, and a unilateral Israeli withdrawal of soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. Among other conditions before negotiations resume, Mr. Sharon insists that Mr. Arafat be replaced as Palestinian leader and that Palestinians halt all violence.
At issue is a fundamental difference of belief over the source of the conflict. Where Mr. Sharon sees a relentless, generations-old campaign of Arab terror to destroy the Jewish state, Mr. Mitzna sees some Israeli culpability, stemming from Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
The wreckage of the No. 20 bus is a problem for the latter theory of the conflict and a possible blow to the idea that an Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders might end the violence. The bombing took place on land that was Israel's before the 1967 war, and its victims included schoolchildren rather than only settlers and soldiers.
In fact, a debate is under way among Palestinians over whether it is legitimate to attack Israelis outside what is known in shorthand as '67 land.
Mr. Arafat harshly criticized violence against Israeli civilians within the 1967 borders.
"Resisting Israeli occupation and settlements doesn't mean targeting the lives of the Israeli civilians who have no relation at all with occupation and settlement activity," he said through his spokesman on Thursday. "They are normal people who are living their daily lives, and targeting them is a condemned act ethically and politically."
The effect of such bombings, he said, is to make even "legitimate resistance" look like "blind terrorism."
But while Mr. Arafat has recognized Israel's right to exist, at least within its pre-1967 borders, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have not. In practice, these groups make no distinction among Israelis and have repeatedly shown a determination to kill them without regard to age, occupation or geography.
At the urging of the European Union and Egypt, Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction has been negotiating with Hamas to suspend suicide bombings in pre-1967 Israel, at least during the Israeli election campaign, when such attacks are likely to aid the right wing.
But in a commentary on a Hamas Web site on Thursday, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a political leader of Hamas, rejected that distinction as well. "I'm shocked at what I hear people keep saying, that the Likud is violent and the Labor is peaceful," he wrote. They are both violent, he said.
In hopes of halting the violence on both sides, the so-called Quartet - the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia - is pressing the antagonists to adopt a "road map" toward peace and a Palestinian state in 2005.
Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special envoy here, said Palestinians had diverse views about the violence. He argued that only the prospect of political progress could strengthen those in favor of peace, saying that so far "scores of cease-fire declarations" had yielded only more violence.
"Unless there is a political underpinning, they cannot take hold," he said, "and this is precisely what the work on the Quartet road map takes into account."
The road map is evolving. The Quartet recently added some requirements on both sides, including some that would be hard for Mr. Sharon: Israel would have to express a commitment to an "independent, viable, sovereign" Palestinian state and halt settlement expansion that would interfere with making Palestinian territory contiguous.
But that schedule means that if Mr. Sharon wins the Likud primary, he will be faced with the road map at least a month before elections.
"Israel would not want to be put in a position where it would have to make specific decisions with regard to that before the situation with Iraq is cleared up," said Zalman Shoval, a Likud politician and Sharon adviser.
Depending on its final shape and timetable, the road map could force Mr. Sharon to make the decision he has so far evaded: choosing among his rightist political base, his averred willingness to make "painful concessions" for peace and his relationship with Mr. Bush.
It could also force Mr. Arafat to make an often-avoided choice between merely condemning killing like today's and trying to stop it.
-------- nato
The Bold Road To NATO Expansion
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 22, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23865-2002Nov21?language=printer
NATO crosses the frontier into the territory of the Soviet Union and no one notices. At its Prague summit, NATO is extending an invitation to seven countries, including three -- Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- that for a half-century were part of the Soviet Union. The fact that this has elicited nothing but yawns is a measure not just of how radically the world has changed, but how successful a resolute and, when necessary, unilateralist American foreign policy can be.
Take two dramatic changes in U.S. policy toward Russia. First, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Despite the protests of congressional Democrats, the alarm of former Clinton administration officials and dire warnings from the foreign policy establishment that the "cornerstone of strategic stability" was at stake, the Bush administration earlier this year unilaterally abrogated the 1972 ABM Treaty. For eight years, the Clinton administration had negotiated ways to keep it alive. Abandoning it, we were told, would terminally alienate the Russians, anger the Europeans and even spark a new arms race.
Utter nonsense. Nothing of the sort happened. Russian President Vladimir Putin acquiesced and the Europeans followed suit. The single most anachronistic piece of parchment on the planet -- the ABM Treaty that prevented us from developing adequate defenses against the coming and inevitable threat of rogue-state missiles tipped with weapons of mass destruction -- is now dead. So dead that it is not even an agenda item at the NATO summit.
The other policy, begun during the Clinton administration, was NATO expansion. It was not unilateralist but it was just as bold, and it was met with the usual chorus from those who panic at the thought of any deviation from the ossified strategic posture of the Cold War. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times warned that Putin could "very cheaply counter any NATO expansion by . . . [moving] a few troops to the border." For what possible purpose?
He also warned that "expanding NATO's wall to Russia's border" would have the effect of "making cooperation with Moscow impossible." In fact, the level of U.S.-Russian cooperation is the highest today since 1945. Putin is not just collaborating in the war on terror, not just allowing a U.S. presence in the former Soviet Central Asian states, not just acquiescing to NATO expansion right up to Russia's border and into Soviet space; he is knocking on NATO's door, trying to get in.
Why? Because he has recognized two blindingly obvious changes in the world. First, with the Cold War over, Russia has no intrinsic ideological imperative to engage in strategic competition with the United States. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and on the Moscow theater dramatized for those still living deep in the past that we share common enemies and common purposes.
Second, NATO as a military alliance is dead. It took ill with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then died in Afghanistan. When the United States destroyed the Taliban using a handful of men and precision-guided munitions in a wholly new kind of war, it demonstrated a military capability so qualitatively superior to that of the allies that NATO instantly became obsolete.
As Paul Kennedy, the Yale history professor who once was the leading proponent of the theory of U.S. decline, wrote after the Afghan war: "The larger lesson -- and one stupefying to the Russian and Chinese military, worrying to the Indians, and disturbing to proponents of a common European defense policy -- is that in military terms there is only one player on the field that counts." Afghanistan made clear that NATO has no serious military role to play in any serious conflict.
This is not to denigrate the European past. The Western Europeans had a deadly serious role countering the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They put the men on the plains of Central Europe to face down massive Warsaw Pact armies, and did so bravely and steadfastly for 50 years.
Now, however, the Warsaw Pact is gone. With the United States having developed a unique 21st-century military, NATO is an alliance that, having lost an (evil) empire, is in search of a role.
The Russians understand NATO's new role better than many Americans. NATO has become a political club of like-minded countries. Europe today has two such clubs. The European Union is the local outfit. NATO is the transatlantic one, having now become the premier Euro-American talking and consultation society.
The United States has wisely combined the expansion of NATO with an expansion of Russia's role in NATO. Far from being a threat to Russia, the new NATO is now Russia's entree to the West. Putin has moved no troops to the Lithuanian border.
----
NATO looks beyond its 7 new ex-communist invitees
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021122-1686576.htm
PRAGUE - NATO invited seven former communist countries to become members yesterday, marking its largest expansion to date, and turned its gaze even farther eastward to potential allies in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
At a two-day summit in Prague, the alliance also adopted a U.S. proposal to create an "advanced and flexible" response force of 20,000 troops, capable of deployment within one month, which will be "ready to move quickly to wherever needed."
The NATO leaders also endorsed new initiatives to enhance the alliance's capabilities against nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and - handing the Bush administration broad success on its complete agenda - agreed to "examine options" for building a missile-defense shield.
The changes are meant to transform NATO from a Cold War organization arrayed against the Soviet Union into one that can successfully face new threats posed by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, alliance officials said.
Although widely expected, the membership invitations to Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia produced an obvious sense of excitement and celebration. Leaders of both current and future members scrambled for words to describe the event's significance.
"This is a crucially important decision where consensus among allies has emerged gradually over the last few months," said NATO Secretary-General George Robertson. "We can, therefore, say with complete confidence that this round of enlargement will maintain and increase NATO's strength, cohesion and vitality."
President Bush, in a brief remark, said yesterday's decision "reaffirms our commitment to freedom" and to a Europe whole, free and at peace. "By welcoming seven members, we will not only add to our military capabilities, we will refresh the spirit of this great democratic alliance," he said.
French President Jacques Chirac took the opportunity to remind his colleagues that France had supported membership for Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia during the previous round of expansion in 1997, when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were invited to join. "The vision of our continent's future, which was unable to take root at the time," he said, alluding to U.S. objections at that time, "is now shared by all."
The summit's host, Czech President Vaclav Havel, said the admission of nearly all former Soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe is a "clear signal" that "the era when countries were divided by force into spheres of influence, or when the strong were used to subjugate the weaker, has come to an end once and for all."
In a joint declaration, alliance leaders said they were aiming at signing accession protocols with the newly invited nations by the end of March and admitting them as full members in May 2004.
While buoyed by their diplomatic victory, the invitees still must convince the parliaments of the 19 current NATO members that they are ready to fulfill all responsibilities under the common-defense Article 5.
"The invitation is a challenge for us to continue the reform of our armed forces," said Slovak President Rudolf Schuster. "We are capable and ready to assist."
While for the first time absorbing countries that were once parts of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the alliance declared that NATO's door is open to still more members.
It specifically encouraged nations in the "strategically important region of the Caucasus and Central Asia to take advantage" of such "practical mechanisms" as the newly introduced Individual Partnership Action Plans.
These documents, which yesterday's declaration called a "comprehensive, tailored and differential approach to the partnership," are modeled after the Membership Action Plans that mapped the path to NATO invitations for yesterday's successful candidates.
"These countries were vital to our successful campaign in Afghanistan," Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to the alliance, said in a speech in Berlin three weeks ago.
"As NATO seeks in the future to respond to the threat of terrorism and to instability in the arc of countries ranging from North Africa to the Middle East to South Asia, we need the active support of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgystan to protect us and them from the many dangers we all now confront."
Mr. Burns said that as NATO "devoted itself to stabilizing Central Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s, we must now look east in the next decade to extend our hand in partnership to each of these countries as we seek peace and stability for them and for ourselves."
As NATO leaders yesterday moved to ensure that the alliance begins adapting to face the new threats of the post-Cold War world, their first order of business was to endorse the response-force proposal, first presented by the United States to the NATO defense ministers in late September.
The new force will be a "catalyst for focusing and promoting improvements in the alliance's military capabilities," the leaders said. It will have a limited capability by October 2004 and will be fully operational no later than October 2006.
In order to "streamline" NATO's command arrangements, the alliance decided to have a "strategic command for transformation" based in the United States in addition to its existing command for operations at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Under pressure from Washington, its European allies made concrete commitments to improve their military capabilities, which are now years behind those of the United States. Even though officials did not specify what exactly each country had promised, they said the pledges were in such areas as strategic air and sea lift, precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling, and special forces.
"We will be judged on results, not the commitments we make today," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "When we next meet, we must be able to point to concrete achievements."
----
NATO Backs Bush on Iraq but Germans Oppose War
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/international/europe/22NATO.html
PRAGUE, Nov. 21 - At a summit meeting scripted to embrace seven new members from the old Soviet bloc, the 19 leaders of the North Atlantic alliance united today behind President Bush and strongly condemned Iraq, saying it had failed to meet United Nations demands to surrender weapons of mass destruction.
Yet Germany's continued opposition to taking part in any war with Iraq seemed all but certain to prevent the alliance from formally entering a campaign, though many of its members appeared willing to do so on an ad hoc basis.
Gathered in this graceful capital of Baroque and Gothic lines, the NATO leaders also agreed to an American proposal to establish a rapid reaction force over the next four years intended to move swiftly around the globe and keep NATO relevant in the fight against terrorism.
Late today, when Western leaders arrayed themselves around a huge circular table for their final session of the day, the Latvian president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, thanked them for admitting a raft of militarily weak nations that crave the security and economic stability already being enjoyed in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They joined the alliance in 1999.
"Latvia lost its independence for a very long time," she said, "and knows the meaning of independence and the loss of it; knows the meaning of security, and the loss of it."
For Ms. Freiberga today was "a momentous moment writ large." As a child in 1944, she fled Soviet forces and her homeland by small boat. She grew up in refugee camps in Germany and French Morocco before settling in Canada, where she was a noted psychologist.
"Hope," she said, is what today's enlargement gives to the remaining small states in the Balkans and elsewhere that aspire to "the rock of political certainty" that membership conveys, along with encouragement for countries "trying to recover from a half century of totalitarian rule."
But stirring rhetoric about expanding NATO to the borders of its cold war enemy did little to disguise the very real cracks in alliance unity on Iraq. Germany remains implacably opposed to taking part in a war, and the NATO leaders notably did not commit NATO forces to a military campaign against Iraq in the event Saddam Hussein does not comply with the United Nations' demands to disarm.
European diplomats and Bush administration officials did report a growing consensus that an ad hoc alliance comprising some NATO countries - along with some Arab states - would be willing to take part in an eventual military campaign against Iraq.
A senior administration official traveling with Mr. Bush said tonight that diplomatic contacts with dozens of nations that might be called upon to provide support or assistance in a military attack on Iraq were part of a strategy of prudent war planning to keep the pressure on Baghdad. It has until Dec. 8 to detail programs concerning weapons of mass destruction that senior Iraqi officials say they do not have.
Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush s national security adviser, said she remained "skeptical" that Mr. Hussein would comply. "We haven't seen anything yet which suggests that this is a leopard that is changing its spots," she said, adding a warning, "If Iraq tries to shift the burden of proof on to the inspectors, that would be a great mistake, because the burden of proof is on Saddam Hussein."
The many political fissures within a slowly uniting Europe were evident in a new diplomatic divide today when the seven nations that were formally invited into NATO joined with three aspiring NATO countries in issuing their own muscular declaration on Iraq.
As a bloc of NATO newcomers, the East European and Baltic states that lived under Soviet rule have exuded a more militant and openly pro-American spirit. Mr. Bush has taken to citing this new spirit on NATO's eastern flank to exhort NATO's older members to action.
"The Baltic countries know what it means to live under fear and the lack of freedom and to have these countries be allied to the United States and other nations is important to our soul," Mr. Bush said in an interview with Lithuanian television today.
The newly accepted member states are Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have a combined population of 46 million. Their membership in the alliance will be complete in 2004. Albania, Croatia and Macedonia joined them in the Iraq statement.
They said in their communiqué that if Iraq failed to comply with the recent United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq, "we are prepared to contribute to an international coalition to enforce its provisions and the disarmament of Iraq."
But the German-American rift was the deeper and preoccupying concern of this meeting, and not just because the German position on Iraq virtually ensures that the NATO alliance as an institution will sit out any Iraq campaign as it sat out the American-led attack on Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Germany is the powerful center of NATO on the Continent, and its pacifist stirrings could undermine alliance cohesion and America's push for a more aggressive, even pre-emptive, NATO posture against new terrorist threats.
President Bush and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder shook hands and exchanged pleasantries at a banquet Wednesday evening, but the chill between Berlin and Washington was still evident when Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer emerged from the summit meeting hall today to tell reporters that despite the strong NATO stand, "We are against military action," adding: "We don't support military action. We want the possibility not to become the reality."
Still, Germany supported today's NATO statement on Iraq, and one senior American official pronounced himself "gratified" that it had done so "without dragging its claws or being pushed."
A German official said Mr. Schröder would not apologize for taking a position that had broad political support at home.
"America has always said that they want self-confident leaders in Germany and now they have them," said the official, Karsten D. Voigt, coordinator for German-American affairs in the Foreign Ministry. For Mr. Schröder, he added, it was a matter of "self-esteem" to await the right moment for reconciliation.
Late today, during a photo session, Mr. Bush and Mr. Schröder again shook hands and exchanged a few words, and some Germans saw a signal that a thaw might have begun.
France today, too, differed openly with the United States even as it endorsed unrelenting pressure on Iraq. French diplomats issued their own version of the NATO declaration, in French, with a critical change on what might touch off a war.
"It is true that both texts are operative," said a chagrined American official, because in NATO, English and French are the official languages.
France asserted that Iraq faced "serious consequences if it continues" violating its obligations, while the English-language version drafted by the American delegation said Iraq would face serious consequences "as a result of its continued violations of its obligations."
The French interpretation was a pointed signal that President Jacques Chirac's government still is seeking to remove any "automatic" catalyst for war. France favors giving Iraq a clear and final opportunity to bring itself into compliance.
"There is no alternative for Iraq to full and entire cooperation with the United Nations," Mr. Chirac told Western leaders, according to his spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna. "Iraq must understand that it must seize the chance that is offered, and understand that this is the last chance," he reportedly added.
Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state during the Clinton administration, was one of many dignitaries who traveled here to celebrate the first NATO summit meeting to be held in a former Warsaw Pact capital. Ms. Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and speaks Czech.
She admitted to a grudging admiration for what she termed Mr. Bush's transformation since his speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12. "I think it is the right direction," she said. "We have been seeing a different George Bush after the U.N. speech and I sense that he has gotten some reality check that has taught him that even if you want to go it alone, you can't."
Mr. Bush said today that he looked forward to flying from this summit meeting to Russia, where he will meet President Vladimir V. Putin in the old northern capital of St. Petersburg. Diplomats described his visit as a necessary gesture to Mr. Putin for his forbearance in the face of NATO expansion and for his strategic alignment with Washington since the Sept. 11 attacks, but also in recognition of the influence Russia wields when allied with France and China, as it was during the United Nations debate on Iraq.
"I'm going to say to the Russian people, you shouldn't fear expansion of NATO to your border because these are peace-loving people and you ought to welcome them," Mr. Bush said.
He also reassured Moscow that its economic interests in Iraq would be honored if the United States led an invasion force against Mr. Hussein. "We have no desire to run the show, to run the country," Mr. Bush said of Iraq in remarks to Russia's NTV network. "We will work to encourage the development of new leadership and protect the country s territorial integrity.
"And we understand Russia has got interests there, as do other countries, and of course, those interests will be honored."
----
Analysis: NATO's new tool -- for what?
By Martin Walker
UPI Chief International Correspondent
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021122-100605-4619r.htm
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- The invitation for seven ex-Communist states to join the alliance made it easy for President George W Bush and other Western leaders to dub this week's NATO summit in Prague as "historic." And NATO's enlargement indeed puts a fitting seal on the Cold war past.
But far-sighted European and American officials and experts gathered in Prague agree that NATO's truly historic transformation has yet to be achieved -- and in a wholly new battleground far from NATO's traditionally European field of operations.
"Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war," said former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, in Prague for a conference on NATO's transformation organized by the Aspen Institute of Berlin and the NATO Summit Host Committee,
"After two hot world wars and one cold one, that all began and were centered in Europe, the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East. The real question is whether NATO can bring stability and democracy to the Middle East in the same way that it did Europe over the last 50 years," Woolsey argued.
Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of State in the Clinton administration, wondered whether NATO is the right tool, but agreed with Woolsey's core analysis that "the biggest piece of unfinished business is the Middle East."
Bronislaw Geremek, the Polish foreign minister who took his country into NATO three years ago, agrees that without a readiness to deploy its force and influence beyond Europe, NATO will be less and useful to its key member, the United States.
"NATO's future depends precisely on whether it is prepared to become a global alliance," Geremek said.
"NATO is no longer going to be about Europe," agreed Czech Sen. Michael Zantovsky. "We in NATO have to get Europe out of our heads. Europe is not being threatened -- but our way of life, our European and American way of life, is being threatened."
Ron Asmus, former assistant secretary of State who was the Clinton administration's point man for the first enlargement of NATO three years ago, stresses that "the existential threats we face today no longer come from Europe. They come from the Middle East. That's the central strategic issue of the next decade and more."
Asmus, a former strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, has drafted a broad proposal to use the planned regime change in Iraq to establish a beachhead of democracy in the Middle East. The Asmus plan stems from Washington's deep frustration with the collapse of the peace process in the Middle East, partly because undemocratic Arab governments need the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli crisis, and some discreetly cooperate with extremist Islamism, as a way to divert reformist pressures within their own societies.
The plan, which has attracted keen interest inside the Bush administration, proposes to widen this democratic beachhead and transform the assorted near-feudal autocracies, sheikhdoms, theocracies and dictatorships that comprise the 23 Arab countries.
"If NATO adapts and makes the leap, it will remain central to U.S. strategic thinking. If not, NATO will no longer be central. It is as simple as that," Asmus concludes.
The test of the new NATO will not be long in coming. The alliance agreed at the summit to establish a NATO Response Force of 21,000 troops, trained and equipped to the high American war-fighting standards and available for deployment to trouble spots around the world.
This is dramatic. Only three years ago, before its last summit, NATO was arguing furiously whether it could go "out of area." Now it is prepared to go global, and has the tool to do it. But it is far from clear that NATO will be able to find the political will to use the NRF.
The current 19 (and soon 26) nations that comprise the alliance will all have to agree before the NRF is deployed. And the first signs from this NATO summit are ambiguous.
NATO agreed to take "effective action" against Iraq to ensure compliance with U.N. resolutions. But this was not quite an endorsement of a U.S.-led war on Iraq, as French President Jacques Chirac was keen to point out to the French media, claiming to have forced "a toning down" of the initially much tougher U.S. draft of the NATO statement.
Given the French hesitation, and the German opposition to the prospect of war against Iraq, the chances of all the NATO allies agreeing to deploy the new NRF to Iraq, or elsewhere in the Middle East seem slim, despite the growing American focus on the region as the urgent strategic challenge. NATO may have willed the means of global intervention at this Prague summit, but has yet to agree on the ends for which the new tool will be used.
----
NATO chief pelted with tomatoes
By Gareth Harding
UPI Chief European Correspondent
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021122-094137-8531r.htm
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- A summit of NATO leaders in Prague ended in farce Friday when the military alliance's chief, George Robertson, was pelted with tomatoes by hard-line Russian Communists.
The incident happened at the closing news conference of the two-day meeting as Robertson was waiting to have his picture taken with summit staff.
Two youths posing as journalists hurled tomatoes at the former British defense ministers, shouting: "NATO is worse than the Gestapo."
A visibly shaken Robertson was not hit by the projectiles but several splattered against the summit backdrop where hours previously NATO leaders had posed for a "family photo."
The protesters, who were later identified as members of the National Bolshevik Party of Russia, were bundled out of the Prague Congress Center's main theater by security guards.
One of the protesters wore a hammer and sickle armband doctored to resemble a Nazi swastika. Another had a summit media pass around his neck.
One NATO official dismissed the attack as a "pretty childish stunt," but others were clearly furious at the breach of security in an otherwise peaceful summit.
"These are just a bunch of people looking to you to provide them with publicity," said one spokesperson.
The incident was not the only farcical moment on the last day of NATO's 'transformation summit' in the Czech capital.
Earlier, the alliance's protocol people came up with a cunning plan to prevent U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair from being seated beside Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
Kuchma was not invited to NATO's first meeting behind the former Iron Curtain, but turned up anyway.
As leaders are seated alphabetically, NATO diplomats simply changed the language of the alphabet to French, keeping Royaume Uni (the United Kingdom) and Les Etats Uni (United States) apart from Ukraine.
----
Ukraine chief unwanted guest at NATO party
By Gareth Harding
UPI Chief European Correspondent
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021122-072447-1208r.htm
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- Ukraine on Friday strenuously denied allegations that President Leonid Kuchma had personally authorized the sale of advanced radar equipment to Iraq, in breach of U.N. sanctions.
A British and U.S. team of experts is looking into the claims, which was sparked when one of Kuchma's bodyguards handed a tape of the Ukrainian chief allegedly agreeing to the $100 million sale.
Speaking after a meeting with NATO members in Prague, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoliy Zlenko said: "We are really frustrated by the unreasonable conclusions of the expert team. We would like to continue cooperation in order to prove that these groundless accusations are just an assumption."
Zlenko, who refused to answer journalists questions at the end of a brief press briefing, added: "We are open to our American counterparts, except about information concerning the transfer of technology to some countries."
U.S. authorities have repeatedly accused Kiev of hampering their probe into the transfer of radar equipment and in September suspended a $54-million aid package to the country.
NATO's deputy head, Alessandro Minuto Rizzo, said foreign ministers voiced "well-known concerns" about the alleged supply of Kolchuga radar technology to Iraq and pleaded for relations between the Alliance and Ukraine to be based on "transparency and trust."
The two sides promised to step up military cooperation at the end of the Prague meet, but NATO ministers shied from offering Kiev a map toward membership of the alliance. One NATO official said: "The door is not shut on anyone, but no one is thinking about Ukrainian membership in the short-term."
The main obstacle is Kuchma, who -- along with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko -- was not invited to the Prague summit.
"The Ukrainian president knows there's a shadow hanging over him," said NATO Secretary-General George Robertson Thursday.
Despite pleas to stay at home, the Ukrainian president turned up at a gala dinner for the meeting's host, Czech President Vaclav Havel, Thursday.
Kuchma, who sacked his Cabinet last week, also attended a meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council Friday, leaving diplomats with the thorny problem of where to seat the uninvited guest.
NATO leaders are traditionally seated next to heads of state in alphabetical order, but this would have placed the Ukrainian next to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush. In the end, NATO's protocol people came up with the ingenious plan of using the French alphabet to seat leaders, thereby keeping Kuchma well away from Bush or Blair.
-------- philippines
Philippines Signs Agreement To Host Anti-Terrorism Forces
World In Brief
Friday, November 22, 2002
Reuters
Washington Post; Page A36
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23868-2002Nov21?language=printer
MANILA -- The United States and the Philippines, boosting anti-terrorism cooperation, signed a controversial agreement that will allow U.S. forces to use the Asian country as a supply point for military operations.
The Philippines, a former U.S. territory whose own troops are fighting Muslim militants accused of being linked to the al Qaeda network, has been a vociferous supporter of the Washington-led war on terror.
But the presence of U.S. troops in the Philippines this year and concerns about Manila's wider involvement in Washington's anti-terror campaign has provoked strong protests in the country, which asked the United States to vacate its permanent bases here in 1992.
The Philippines hosted more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers for about six months to train Filipino forces in counterterrorism, but has stopped short of allowing a permanent U.S. presence in line with its constitution.
"The objective of this agreement is to enhance the effectiveness . . . of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the U.S. armed forces in the fight against terrorism," Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes told reporters.
Shortly after the signing of the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA), about 100 protesters gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Manila to denounce the accord and Washington's threat to launch military strikes against Iraq if it fails to disarm.
"The MLSA will make the Philippines a staging area, transit point and recreation spot for U.S. troops in this dirty war," the protesters said in a leaflet.
The pact allows the U.S. military to set up storage centers for ammunition, spare parts, fuel, food and other supplies. But it expressly excludes nuclear or chemical weapons, as well as guided missiles and torpedoes. The U.S. Navy has a logistics base in Singapore.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechnya is Russia's Internal Affair: Bush
People's Daily Online
Friday, November 22, 2002
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200211/22/eng20021122_107286.shtml
US President George W. Bush, in an interview broadcast by Russia's NTV television on Thursday on the eve of talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, said the Chechen issue is Russia's internal affair andwill hopefully be resolved peacefully.
Bush said that he would try to persuade the Russian leader to work toward a peaceful settlement in Chechnya.
Bush also gave a full backing to the Russian leadership in dealing with last month's deadly hostage-taking crisis in a Moscowtheater.
A total of 128 hostages died as Russian special forces stormed the theater seized by some 50 armed Chechen terrorists, using gas to incapacitate the explosive-attached attackers.
A national leader must act firmly when terrorists kill civilians. Vladimir Putin was in a dire situation, and the terrorists threatened to kill 800 people, Bush said. He stressed that Putin did whatever he possibly could to save lives.
Some people place the blame for what happened on Russia, while it is the terrorists who must pay for what they have done, Bush said.
Bush said that he intends to discuss possible ties between elected president of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov and international terrorists during his upcoming meeting with the Russian president in St. Petersburg.
The US president called the anti-terrorism fight a new type of war, which has no historical precedents.
Bush said that previously combats were against armies equipped with tanks, airplanes and ships, while today enemies are holed up in caves and act through suicide-bombers. This requires other methods of warfare.
Bush welcomed the start of a dialogue between Putin and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze.
He called for a common strategy that would help track down murderers and al-Qaeda accomplices who may be hiding in the Pankisi Gorge and whose sole goal is to destabilize the situation in Russia.
----
Russian Official Outlines Improvements to Military
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/international/europe/22RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Nov. 21 - Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, outlined a package of military reforms today, pledging to improve the training and professionalism of the armed forces, although he backed away from the sweeping changes that President Vladimir V. Putin had called for in the past.
After meeting with ministers at the government headquarters, the White House, Mr. Ivanov announced that the military would accelerate its effort to fill its ranks with professional soldiers on contracts, rather than with draftees.
By 2007, he said, soldiers, paratroopers and marines in the most combat-ready units - 10 divisions, 7 brigades and 13 regiments - would all be professionals. Under current plans, strongly supported by the uniformed leadership, the transition to a contracted, rather than conscripted force would not begin in earnest until 2011.
"These units will form the core of a new professional army," Mr. Ivanov said in a news conference after today's meeting.
Under the plan, 126,000 troops of a total of 1.1 million would become professionals in the next four years. Although that represents a fraction of the total force, Mr. Ivanov called it "a very ambitious" goal.
The proposals left unanswered many of the most pressing issues facing the Russian armed forces, including whether the overall size of the military should be reduced and whether the widely unpopular draft would be abolished.
More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military is suffering from a breakdown of equipment, training and morale, with widespread draft dodging, crime and corruption.
At today's meeting, Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov underscored one the most embarrassing aspects of the state of the military, saying many troops were involved in activities that had nothing to do with soldiering.
"There are units doing agricultural work and units doing construction," he said. "I think we must be more persistent in rooting out these activities."
Since taking office nearly three years ago, Mr. Putin has advocated sweeping changes in the military, calling for better-equipped and more professional fighters to deal with the post-cold-war threats facing Russia. In 2000, he called for deep reductions in the ranks, including nearly a third of the regular armed forces by next year.
"To maintain such a cumbersome and at times ineffective military organization is extravagant," he said at the time.
Those reductions - which advocates of reform say could pay for better equipment and training - have yet to take place.
In the wake of the 57-hour siege of a theater here by Chechen guerrillas last month, Mr. Putin ordered the drafting of a new national security strategy that would reorganize the military, among other agencies, to deal with the threat posed by terrorism.
Mr. Ivanov said any decision over the size of the military - including a dozen other military organizations, like the interior, border and railway troops - would have to wait until the new strategy is devised.
He seemed to rule out an end to the draft, saying, "There will always be conscription." But he said it might be possible to reduce the length of service to as few as six months, from two years now.
In the meantime, next year's budget would include added money to increase pay and benefits of contract soldiers, who now earn about $130 a month, compared with less than $3 given to draftees.
--------
Bush and Putin Meet in Russia, With Chechnya a Key Topic
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/international/22CND-NATO.html
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Nov. 22 - President Bush arrived here today for talks with President Vladimir V. Putin at which he will bring up the need to find a peaceful solution to the war in Chechnya that recognizes the aspirations of Chechens for self-rule.
Mr. Bush will also touch on Washington's longstanding concerns about abuses of human rights by Russian troops stationed in the breakaway Russian republic, he said Thursday in an interview on the Russian NTV television network.
At the NATO summit meeting in Prague on Thursday, the secretary general, Lord Robertson, said the allies did not raise Moscow's military crackdown in Chechnya and expressed their sympathy over last month's hostage-taking by Chechen gunmen in a Moscow theater.
Diplomats described Mr. Bush's visit today as a necessary gesture to Mr. Putin for his forbearance in the face of NATO expansion to include seven new members from the old Soviet bloc and for his strategic alignment with Washington since the Sept. 11 attacks. But they said it was also in recognition of the influence Russia wields when allied with France and China, as it was during the United Nations debate on Iraq.
"I'm going to say to the Russian people, you shouldn't fear expansion of NATO to your border because these are peace-loving people and you ought to welcome them," Mr. Bush said.
He also reassured Moscow that its economic interests in Iraq would be honored if the United States led an invasion force against Mr. Hussein. "We have no desire to run the show, to run the country," Mr. Bush said in the NTV interview. "We will work to encourage the development of new leadership and protect the country s territorial integrity.
"And we understand Russia has got interests there, as do other countries, and of course, those interests will be honored."
At the NATO meeting in Prague the 19 leaders of the North Atlantic alliance united behind President Bush and strongly condemned Iraq, saying it had failed to meet United Nations demands to surrender weapons of mass destruction.
Yet Germany's continued opposition to taking part in any war with Iraq seemed all but certain to prevent the alliance from formally entering a campaign, though many of its members appeared willing to do so on an ad hoc basis.
The NATO leaders also agreed to an American proposal to establish a rapid reaction force over the next four years intended to move swiftly around the globe and keep NATO relevant in the fight against terrorism.
Late Thursday, when Western leaders arrayed themselves around a huge circular table for their final session of the day, the Latvian president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, thanked them for admitting a raft of militarily weak nations that crave the security and economic stability already being enjoyed in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They joined the alliance in 1999.
"Latvia lost its independence for a very long time," she said, "and knows the meaning of independence and the loss of it; knows the meaning of security, and the loss of it."
For Ms. Freiberga Thursday was "a momentous moment writ large." As a child in 1944, she fled Soviet forces and her homeland by small boat. She grew up in refugee camps in Germany and French Morocco before settling in Canada, where she was a noted psychologist.
"Hope," she said, is what today's enlargement gives to the remaining small states in the Balkans and elsewhere that aspire to "the rock of political certainty" that membership conveys, along with encouragement for countries "trying to recover from a half century of totalitarian rule."
But stirring rhetoric about expanding NATO to the borders of its cold war enemy did little to disguise the very real cracks in alliance unity on Iraq. Germany remains implacably opposed to taking part in a war, and the NATO leaders notably did not commit NATO forces to a military campaign against Iraq in the event Saddam Hussein does not comply with the United Nations' demands to disarm.
European diplomats and Bush administration officials did report a growing consensus that an ad hoc alliance comprising some NATO countries - along with some Arab states - would be willing to take part in an eventual military campaign against Iraq.
A senior administration official traveling with Mr. Bush said Thursday night that diplomatic contacts with dozens of nations that might be called upon to provide support or assistance in a military attack on Iraq were part of a strategy of prudent war planning to keep the pressure on Baghdad. It has until Dec. 8 to detail programs concerning weapons of mass destruction that senior Iraqi officials say they do not have.
Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush s national security adviser, said she remained "skeptical" that Mr. Hussein would comply.
"We haven't seen anything yet which suggests that this is a leopard that is changing its spots," she said, adding a warning, "If Iraq tries to shift the burden of proof on to the inspectors, that would be a great mistake, because the burden of proof is on Saddam Hussein."
The many political fissures within a slowly uniting Europe were evident in a new diplomatic divide when the seven nations that were formally invited into NATO joined with three aspiring NATO countries in issuing their own muscular declaration on Iraq.
As a bloc of NATO newcomers, the East European and Baltic states that lived under Soviet rule have exuded a more militant and openly pro-American spirit. Mr. Bush has taken to citing this new spirit on NATO's eastern flank to exhort NATO's older members to action.
"The Baltic countries know what it means to live under fear and the lack of freedom and to have these countries be allied to the United States and other nations is important to our soul," Mr. Bush said in an interview with Lithuanian television today.
The newly accepted member states are Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have a combined population of 46 million. Their membership in the alliance will be complete in 2004. Albania, Croatia and Macedonia joined them in the Iraq statement.
They said in their communiqué that if Iraq failed to comply with the recent United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq, "we are prepared to contribute to an international coalition to enforce its provisions and the disarmament of Iraq."
But the German-American rift was the deeper and preoccupying concern of the meeting, and not just because the German position on Iraq virtually ensures that the NATO alliance as an institution will sit out any Iraq campaign as it sat out the American-led attack on Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Germany is the powerful center of NATO on the Continent, and its pacifist stirrings could undermine alliance cohesion and America's push for a more aggressive, even pre-emptive, NATO posture against new terrorist threats.
President Bush and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany shook hands and exchanged pleasantries at a banquet Wednesday evening, but the chill between Berlin and Washington was still evident when Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer emerged from the summit meeting hall on Thursday to tell reporters that despite the strong NATO stand, "We are against military action," adding: "We don't support military action. We want the possibility not to become the reality."
Still, Germany supported today's NATO statement on Iraq, and one senior American official pronounced himself "gratified" that it had done so "without dragging its claws or being pushed."
A German official said Mr. Schröder would not apologize for taking a position that had broad political support at home.
"America has always said that they want self-confident leaders in Germany and now they have them," said the official, Karsten D. Voigt, coordinator for German-American affairs in the Foreign Ministry. For Mr. Schröder, he added, it was a matter of "self-esteem" to await the right moment for reconciliation.
Late on Thursday, during a photo session, Mr. Bush and Mr. Schröder again shook hands and exchanged a few words, and some Germans saw a signal that a thaw might have begun.
France today, too, differed openly with the United States even as it endorsed unrelenting pressure on Iraq. French diplomats issued their own version of the NATO declaration, in French, with a critical change on what might touch off a war.
"It is true that both texts are operative," said a chagrined American official, because in NATO, English and French are the official languages.
France asserted that Iraq faced "serious consequences if it continues" violating its obligations, while the English-language version drafted by the American delegation said Iraq would face serious consequences "as a result of its continued violations of its obligations."
The French interpretation was a pointed signal that President Jacques Chirac's government is still seeking to remove any "automatic" catalyst for war. France favors giving Iraq a clear and final opportunity to bring itself into compliance.
"There is no alternative for Iraq to full and entire cooperation with the United Nations," Mr. Chirac told Western leaders, according to his spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna. "Iraq must understand that it must seize the chance that is offered, and understand that this is the last chance," he reportedly added.
-------- ukraine
Ukraine's complaints
Embassy Row
James Morrison
Washington Times
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021122-87384084.htm
The Ukrainian ambassador yesterday conceded he is perplexed by U.S. suspicions that his government sold a sophisticated radar system to Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions.
Ambassador Kostyantyn Gryshchenko told editors and reporters at The Washington Times that Washington's position has plunged U.S.-Ukrainian relations to the lowest point since the former Soviet republic gained independence in 1991.
The Ukrainian government has repeatedly denied charges that President Leonid Kuchma authorized the sale of a Kolchuga radar system to Iraq. The government has also dismissed a secret tape recording, in which Mr. Kuchma reportedly approved the sale, as a fake. The State Department, however, believes the tape is authentic.
"At the very least, it is doctored," Mr. Gryshchenko said of the tape, recorded by Mr. Kuchma's former bodyguard, who is now living in the United States.
The ambassador complained that the United States is trying to make Ukraine do the impossible by proving it did not sell the system to Iraq.
"We can't prove a negative. They cannot prove a negative," he said.
Mr. Gryshchenko said all of Ukraine's sales of the radar system are accounted for. He noted that if Ukraine had, indeed, sold the Iraqis such a system, they would have used it by now against U.S. planes patrolling the no-fly zones in Iraq.
The ambassador also said he has heard of no U.S. surveillance photographs that would have detected the system.
"The who story is like a John Le Carre spy novel, but this is not fiction," Mr. Gryshchenko said.
The ambassador said Ukraine feels it is being isolated by the United States, which should consider Ukraine an ally.
The United States announced Sept. 24 it had suspended programs worth $54 million in annual aid to Ukraine as part of a wider policy-review plan concerning the country.
The U.S. aid suspension, according to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, "doesn't affect the bulk of our assistance to Ukraine" but applies only to funding going directly to the central government under the U.S. Freedom Support Act. U.S. assistance to Ukraine's private sector, local and regional governments, nonproliferation projects and military has not be halted.
The radar accusation was just the latest development in the increasingly strained relations between Ukraine and the West. NATO and the European Union have snubbed Ukraine's desire for membership, and human rights activists suspect that Mr. Kuchma had a role in the slaying of a journalist who was critical of his government. Western election observers have also questioned the fairness of the 1999 voting in which Mr. Kuchma won a second four-year term.
-------- un
U.N. Accuses Israel Over Aid Worker's Death
November 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The death of a senior United Nations relief official in an Israeli-Palestinian gun battle drew U.N. accusations that Israeli forces delayed an ambulance summoned to evacuate the Briton after he was shot.
While the U.N. focused its attention on the incident in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, Israel kept a tight grip on Bethlehem, reoccupied Friday after a Palestinian suicide bombing killed 11 people on a bus.
The latest surges in Israeli-Palestinian violence come at a time when the United States is keen to see calm in the region so it can woo Arab support for a possible war on Iraq. Palestinians launched an uprising two years ago for an independent state.
Washington used to oppose Israeli incursions into West Bank towns but signaled again Friday that its attitude has gradually shifted over the months toward qualified acceptance.
``We are...urging the Israelis, in the course of their operations, to keep in mind the consequences of their actions, to complete these operations as quickly as possible and to take steps to avoid further civilian casualties,'' State Department spokesman Philip Reeker told a daily briefing.
Reeker said progress on ``realizing Palestinian aspirations,'' diplomatic code for setting up a Palestinian state, was impossible as long as Palestinians carried out attacks like Thursday's suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus.
Iain Hook, manager of the Jenin camp rehabilitation project run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), was hit by bullets that tore into his trailer in a U.N. compound while Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen exchanged fire nearby.
Israel and the United Nations said it was unclear who fired the shots that killed Hook, 54. A Palestinian doctor in Jenin hospital said bullets taken from his body were of a type used by the Israeli army.
Israeli troops raided the camp to detain a wanted militant accused of being behind a suicide bombing in October that killed 14 people. They said he was a member of the Islamic Jihad group.
ANNAN ``VERY DISTURBED'' OVER JENIN SHOOTING
At U.N. headquarters in New York, a spokesman said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was ``very disturbed by the fact that the Israeli Defense Forces refused immediate access for an ambulance which had been summoned by UNRWA'' to evacuate Hook.
The Israeli army said it had opened an investigation into Hook's death, but added: ``From the initial investigation, we don't know of any delay regarding the ambulance.''
An Israeli military source said: ``The moment we received a report about an UNRWA representative being hit, the army sent an ambulance to treat the wounded man. When the medical team arrived he was already dead.''
Hook had been leading UNRWA's work on rebuilding the refugee camp, which was heavily damaged during an Israeli army sweep for militants in April following suicide bombings in Israel.
A U.N. report issued four months ago strongly criticized Israeli forces for preventing emergency medical and aid workers from gaining access to Palestinians during the April assault. Israel promised at the time to do better in the future.
Israeli armor rumbled into Bethlehem in the West Bank early Friday and took up positions across the city in response to Thursday's suicide bombing.
Soldiers detained alleged militants and sealed off the Church of the Nativity, revered as the birthplace of Jesus, to prevent militants taking refuge in the shrine as they did during the army invasion of Bethlehem in April.
``There are several dozen (wanted militants) and if we manage to catch them, we will have saved many lives in Israel,'' a field commander, identified only as Lieutenant-Colonel Guy, told Israel's Channel Two television.
SHARON UNDER PRESSURE TO ACT
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent troops to reoccupy Bethlehem after pressure to strike hard for Thursday's bombing.
His new defense minister, former army chief Shaul Mofaz, said in a speech: ``The security forces face no restrictions on the depth of the operation, its duration or its strength.''
Near Bethlehem, the army blew up the home of the 23-year-old bomber behind Thursday's bus attack. It also destroyed the house of a wanted Islamic Jihad militant in the city and the Gaza homes of two members of the fundamentalist Muslim group Hamas.
Troops rounded up about 20 suspects in Bethlehem and 16 people elsewhere in the West Bank, most of them members of Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the bus attack.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat convened the Palestine Liberation Organization's Executive Committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah Friday and reissued a call for an ``immediate and complete cessation'' of attacks on Israeli civilians.
Such calls in the past have failed to impress Israeli leaders, who have noted they did not include pledges to stop strikes on Jewish settlers living on occupied land Palestinians want for a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The international community regards settlements as illegal under international law. Israel disputes this.
At least 1,677 Palestinians and 662 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
-------- us
Military Spending Proposals Envision Changing Battlefield
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/politics/22DEFE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - One of the Pentagon's top budget officials today outlined proposals for military spending that call for investing in new communications and surveillance satellites and in other programs to force traditional warplanes to prove their cost-effectiveness compared with the next generation of pilotless vehicles and missiles.
The spending proposals outlined by the official, Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon's director of program analysis and evaluation, would, he said, transform how the country fights wars. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is reviewing the proposals before they go to the White House.
The proposals emphasize joint operations by the armed services and favor forces that can rapidly make the transition from peacetime to war and bring such decisive force to bear on the battlefield - especially against mobile targets - that a conflict can quickly be won.
In a Pentagon news briefing, Mr. Cambone said all the theorizing about transforming the military would eventually be reduced to nuts-and-bolts decisions about which "platforms and programs" to buy. He also indicated that major weapons programs would not be killed solely to save money for other military investments, but only if they did not measure up to Mr. Rumsfeld's definition of transformation.
"I think it would be fair to say that there isn't a desire to cut a major weapon system for the purposes of saving money," Mr. Cambone said. "The question will be whether the weapon system at issue is going to support the kind of joint operational capability that we are attempting to construct."
The Pentagon's spending plan for fiscal 2004 is being cast by senior officials as the first true "transformation defense budget." Mr. Rumsfeld arrived in 2001 to inherit a budget already in development by the Clinton administration, and the war in Afghanistan shaped planning for fiscal 2003 and supplemental budgets.
The fiscal 2004 spending plan is also the last before presidential campaign politics imposes its weight on the budget process.
Mr. Cambone described two new and expensive constellations of satellites favored by Mr. Rumsfeld's team, one for carrying communications over laser beams and another for radar ground surveillance.
The ability to transmit huge quantities of data by laser would allow combat units in the field to "reach back" to headquarters for intelligence, information and maps, meaning the size of a forward headquarters could be significantly reduced.
A new space-based radar system would support the Pentagon's emphasis on long-range precision weapons and increase the military's ability to find and attack targets faster. Satellites can watch targets longer than aircraft. "The aim is to find a mechanism for getting to that persistent coverage that we think we're going to need," Mr. Cambone said.
He said budget proposals also advocated money for "a competition" among piloted warplanes, unmanned combat aerial vehicles and the next generation of long-range missiles. By the end of the decade, he said, the Pentagon should have new choices for missions assigned to air power.
One veteran analyst of military budgets gave the fiscal outline a positive review - but only because Mr. Rumsfeld and the military services had compromised in matching spending and weapons and ideas for change.
"This budget is a lot more transformational than it would have been without Rumsfeld," said the analyst, Loren B. Thompson of the Lexington Institute. "But Rumsfeld has lowered his sights, and the military has greatly accelerated its efforts to change. They have finally managed to reconcile, with a budget that is about as transformational as technology will allow."
Mr. Thompson said he had seen few signs of major weapons cancellations in the 2004 budget, although some might be trimmed or reorganized.
He said the Air Force F/A-22 warplane would probably stay on track, despite a potential $690 million overrun uncovered in recent days.
The Navy will be allowed to produce its next-generation aircraft carrier, Mr. Thompson said, but only because the service agreed to speed the application of new technologies for the vessel.
The V-22 Osprey troop transport, with an experimental tilt-rotor, will be allowed to continue in a test program already in place, he said. And the Army will get four Stryker brigades built around a new, light armored wheeled vehicle, putting off for another year the fight over a fifth and sixth brigade, Mr. Thompson said.
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Military Studies Nonlethal Weapons
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nonlethal-Weapons.html
QUANTICO, Va. (AP) -- The military is studying microwave and laser weapons as technologies to take the fight out of combatants without killing them, officials said Friday.
In a demonstration at Marine Corps Base Quantico, military officials with the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate described several of their projects designed to incapacitate an adversary or disable a vehicle.
This weaponry includes traditional beanbag shotgun rounds that can knock over an adversary without causing permanent harm, pyrotechnic stun grenades called ``flash-bangs'' and net guns to foul the propellors of a boat.
The military eventually hopes to adapt a heat ray that causes an intense burning sensation but during short exposures does no long-term damage. The weapon is called ``Active Denial Technology'' and based on microwaves. The military envisions mounting it on Humvees to be used to control rioting crowds.
``Nonlethal weapons are a growing need for the DOD (Department of Defense),'' said Col. David Karcher, director of the military's research efforts at Quantico.
In the longer term, researchers hope to use lasers to disable machines, such as heavy weapons systems or vehicles, without hurting the people inside, officials said.
In the 1990s, the Pentagon stepped up efforts to develop weapons to incapacitate or repel people with little risk of killing them, particularly after mobs attacked U.S. troops during peacekeeping and humanitarian missions in Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti.
Other research efforts are aimed at preventing terror attacks like that on the destroyer USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, by disabling cars or boats that approach a potential target, like an embassy or ship.
Each potential weapon is reviewed for compliance with international treaties and undergoes health studies to ensure it will not kill people with weakened constitutions, officials said.
Some projects, such as sticky foams and electromagnetic pulse weapons that would disable car engines, have been abandoned over the years due to concerns the weapons were too dangerous or too expensive.
Military officials also have discussed whether it would be possible to develop drugs for use as ``calmatives,'' or chemical peacemakers. No money is being spent on the effort as officials try to decide whether such weapons would violate treaties prohibiting the use of chemical weapons.
Such weapons received increased attention last month after Russian authorities used a knockout gas to try to incapacitate some 50 rebels from the Chechnya region, holding 800 people hostage at a theater in Moscow. The gas was too potent, however, and 128 hostages died, mostly from overexposure to the chemical.
On the Net: Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate: http://www.jnlwd.usmc.mil/contacts.asp
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U.S. Battle Planners Head to Gulf
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-War-Games.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The American general who would run a war against Iraq is quietly assembling hundreds of battle planners in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar for a war game that will test their ability to command and coordinate land, sea and air forces throughout the region.
Although planning for the exercise, code-named Internal Look, began long before the U.N. Security Council gave Iraq a Dec. 8 deadline to account for any weapons of mass destruction, timing of the operation fits in neatly. It will begin a few days before or after the U.N. deadline, officials said Friday.
It is the first time U.S. Central Command has conducted the exercise in the Middle East. In the past it was done at American military bases because Central Command, headquartered in Tampa, Fla., had no deployable command post.
``This exercise will test Central Command's ability to communicate on the modern battlefield,'' said Jim Wilkinson, director of strategic communication for the command. He would not discuss the exact dates of the exercise or the war scenario it will test. Others said the computer-based scenario involves Iraq.
Gen. Tommy Franks will travel to Qatar to oversee the war game. He recently described the deployable command post as ``containers of communications gear, very large communications pipes that we're able to put in the back of an airplane, fly it a long ways, land it on the ground and then set up a command and control complex.'' It has been developed since the start of the war in Afghanistan, which Franks commanded from his headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.
The transportable command post is already in Qatar and its buildings have been assembled and equipped.
About 600 members of Central Command's battle planning staff will participate in the exercise, and many of them already have arrived in Qatar, officials said Friday. The war game does not involve troops in the field; rather it is a means of testing the communications links that are vital to commanding forces in combat.
Franks has said it would last one week to 10 days.
Movement of the command post to Qatar, where the U.S. Air Force has a major presence at al-Udeid air base, has raised speculation that Franks will remain there to prepare for war against Iraq.
Franks has not ruled out leaving the new command post and his battle staff in Qatar, although the original intent was to bring them back to Florida at the conclusion of the exercise.
In a recent AP interview, Franks cautioned against reading too much into the timing.
``This just happens to be a very good time, a very good place and a very good way'' to do the exercise, he said.
Planning for Internal Look has been in the works for months -- long before the Bush administration began in August to make its public case for forcing Iraq's Saddam Hussein to give up any weapons of mass destruction.
Each military service that contributes combat forces to Central Command has its own headquarters, and they need sophisticated communications links to ensure that they coordinate air, land and sea-based operations.
The Army component, for example, is based at Fort McPherson, Ga., but has three forward headquarters sites in the Gulf -- in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. The command headquarters operated from Kuwait during the early months of the war in Afghanistan.
The Navy component is headquartered in Bahrain, off the coast of Saudi Arabia, because the Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters is there.
Central Command also has a Marine Corps component that normally is based at Camp Smith, Hawaii, but is now in Bahrain. Among those who will participate in Internal Look, in addition to the 600 Central Command planners, are members of the headquarters staff of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which began shipping out for Kuwait on Friday from Camp Pendleton, Calif.
The Special Operations Command component, based at Central Command headquarters in Florida, is operating from Camp Snoopy in Qatar.
Internal Look has been held periodically, most recently in November 2000. The 1990 version took on particular importance, since it was held just a few days before Iraq's Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait. In its own history of the Gulf War, the Army wrote that Internal Look provided a conceptual blueprint for the military campaign that ousted Iraq's army from Kuwait.
The 1990 war game was the first to postulate an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. Previously the scenario was a Soviet invasion of Iran. When actual deployments of combat troops to Saudi Arabia began shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, planners would routinely remark, ``We did this on Internal Look,'' the Army said it its account of the war.
On the Net:
Central Command at http://www.centcom.mil
-------- propaganda wars
Reporters Wrap Up Media 'Boot Camp'
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Media-Boot-Camp.html
QUANTICO, Va. (AP) -- Lugging 25 pounds of gear, several dozen journalists wrapped up a week of military training Friday with a five-mile hike that included a few mock ambushes along the way.
Except for a reporter who suffered minor burns from a smoke canister, the journalists completed their hike with nary a shin splint.
``They're doing good,'' said Lt. Col. Rick Long, the public affairs director at Quantico Marine Corps Base who had worked closely with the reporters since they arrived Tuesday. ``You don't have time to go into great detail with them, but you can give them some basic skills that can save their life.''
The training -- hosted first by the Navy, then the Marines -- began last Saturday with 58 journalists bouncing 40 miles across 6-foot waves to the USS Iwo Jima, the Navy's newest amphibious assault ship. From the Norfolk Naval Station, the journalists moved to Quantico.
The training is designed to give journalists rudimentary military competence and perhaps give commanders more confidence in allowing them on the front lines during a war with Iraq. Media organizations complained during the Persian Gulf War and the Afghanistan conflict about lack of access.
``I wish I had had this training before,'' said Barry Shlachter, a reporter with Knight Ridder newspapers. ``I've made 11 trips to Afghanistan and I've never had any training like this.''
The seminar included physical activity like the march and training in such things as proper use of a gas mask, mine awareness, using a map in unfamiliar terrain and basic military first aid. The journalists also learned how to identify and avoid enemy fire in hostile territory.
In one exercise, they took off in a helicopter and got a dose of battlefield conditions.
``He gave us all the Afghanistan moves in the chopper, ducking and weaving,'' said Ross Simpson, a radio reporter for The Associated Press. ``Your stomach is churning. Your adrenaline is kicking.''
When they got off the chopper, the reporters were instructed to hit the ground quickly to avoid sniper fire. Simpson learned afterward that his unit of reporters had done reasonably well: The mock snipers said they would have been able to pick off only about two of the nine who came off the chopper.
``For a guy like me, who just turned 60, it's a real physical test,'' Simpson said. ``But if we go to war with Iraq ... those reporters who have been through this will be better for it. Us old dogs learned some new tricks.''
During the march, New York Daily News reporter Richard Sisk, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran, rolled into a lit phosphorus canister and suffered minor burns on a hand and leg. Medics bandaged his hand, he finished the walk and was then taken to the hospital for treatment.
The media march was itself a media event. Some reporters bristled at the notion of televised shots of reporters in camouflage training alongside Marines, fearing it would blur perceptions outside the United States about the media's independence.
Many reporters went out of their way to identify themselves as media, with ID tags or civilian clothing on top of their camouflage.
``We just don't want to be perceived as soldiers,'' said Scripps Howard correspondent Michael Sprengelmeyer, who wore a purple striped shirt over his flak jacket. ``We don't want to endanger ourselves or anybody else.''
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Hill seeks competition for prison industry
By Marguerite Higgins
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20021122-8683576.htm
Lawmakers yesterday called for dismantling Federal Prison Industries Inc., a government-owned corporation and provider of goods and services to federal prisons and other government agencies, to allow small businesses a chance to bid for contracts.
"Small businesses are continually being shut out of the process to bid for any jobs relating to the federal prisons systems," said Rep. Donald Manzullo, Illinois Republican and chairman of the House Small Business Committee.
At the hearing, Mr. Manzullo said certain laws, such as "mandatory sourcing," have allowed Federal Prison Industries (FPI), also known as UNICOR, to force government agencies to use its services and products without a bid process. Loopholes have made it easier for agencies to get products and workers through FPI rather than requesting competitive bids.
The corporation was created in 1934 under the Justice Department to teach federal prison inmates a skill for jobs once they re-entered society. Inmates worked government jobs, and the program expanded to a corporation that provided agencies with workers and products, such as office supplies and clothing.
Mr. Manzullo said he would push to introduce legislation when Congress convenes in January to halt some or all of the corporation's operations and "weaken their influence over bids in the Federal Bureau of Prisons."
Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, Maryland Republican, charged that FPI threatens the jobs of American workers by forcing government agencies to use prison inmates as workers without allowing worker-placement companies to compete.
"I applaud the correctional program in trying to get convicted felons on the right path with a job, but I can't condone it when those jobs come at the expense of the American workers who are being downsized already," he said.
Angela Styles, who supervises procurement for the Office of Management and Budget, the agency in charge of the federal budget, said the Bush administration is working to limit FPI's contracts to bring more small businesses into the bidding process.
In 2001, the federal corporation accrued $582.5 million in sales, making it the 39th-largest government contractor.
Federal Prison Industries Chairman Kenneth Rocks acknowledged that the program has curtailed competition for the past 30 years.
"The FPI program contributes significantly to the safety and security of the federal prisons by keeping inmates productively occupied and reducing inmate idleness," Mr. Rocks said. "We need to meet these responsibilities, however, in a way that takes into account the concerns of the small-business community."
Michael Mansh, president of Pennsylvania Apparel Corp., a Fort Washington, Pa., company that specializes in military apparel, said the mandatory-sourcing rule captured 45 percent of his business through contracts with the Defense Department in the past decade.
"For example, we used to provide jackets for the Navy from 1987 to 1997, and then FPI came in and imposed its mandatory-sourcing rule, saying the Navy had to use their jackets instead," Mr. Mansh said. "The Navy agreed, and we lost a large chunk of our business from the abuse of that privilege."
----
SURVEILLANCE
Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/politics/22TRAC.html
The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.
The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology.
The plan, known as eDNA, called for developing a new version of the Internet that would include enclaves where it would be impossible to be anonymous while using the network. The technology would have divided the Internet into secure "public network highways," where a computer user would have needed to be identified, and "private network alleyways," which would not have required identification.
Several people familiar with the eDNA discussions said such secure areas might have first involved government employees or law enforcement agencies, then been extended to security-conscious organizations like financial institutions, and after that been broadened even further.
A description of the eDNA proposal that was sent to the 18 workshop participants read in part: "We envisage that all network and client resources will maintain traces of user eDNA so that the user can be uniquely identified as having visited a Web site, having started a process or having sent a packet. This way, the resources and those who use them form a virtual `crime scene' that contains evidence about the identity of the users, much the same way as a real crime scene contains DNA traces of people."
The proposal would have been one of a series of technology initiatives that have been pursued by the Bush administration for what it describes as part of the effort to counter the potential for further terrorist attacks in the Unites States. Those initiatives include a variety of plans to trace and monitor the electronic activities of United States citizens.
In recent weeks another undertaking of the the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon research organization, has drawn sharp criticism for its potential to undermine civil liberties. That project is being headed by John M. Poindexter, the retired vice admiral who served as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Poindexter returned to the Pentagon in January to direct the research agency's Information Awareness Office, created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. That office has been pursuing a surveillance system called Total Information Awareness that would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists.
In contrast, with eDNA the user would have needed to enter a digital version of unique personal identifiers, like a fingerprint or voice, in order to use the secure enclaves of the network. That would have been turned into an electronic signature that could have been appended to every Internet message or activity and thus tracked back to its source.
The eDNA idea was originally envisioned in a private brainstorming session that included the director of Darpa, Dr. Tony Tether, and a number of computer researchers, according to a person with intimate knowledge of the proposal. At the meeting, this person said, Dr. Tether asked why Internet attacks could not be traced back to their point of origin, and was told that given the current structure of the Internet, doing so was frequently not possible.
The review of the proposal was financed by a second Darpa unit, the Information Processing Technology Office. This week a Darpa spokeswoman, Jan Walker, said the agency planned no further financing for the idea. In explaining the reason for the decision to finance the review in the first place, Ms. Walker said the agency had been "intrigued by the difficult computing science research involved in creating network capabilities that would provide the same levels of responsibility and accountability in cyberspace as now exist in the physical world."
Darpa awarded a $60,000 contract to SRI International, a research concern based in Menlo Park, Calif., to investigate the concept. SRI then convened the workshop in August to evaluate its feasibility.
The workshop brought together a group of respected computer security researchers, including Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems and Matt Blaze of AT&T Labs; well-known computer scientists like Roger Needham of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England; Michael Vatis, who headed the National Infrastructure Protection Center during the Clinton administration; and Marc Rotenberg, a privacy expert from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The workshop was led by Mr. Blaze and Dr. Victoria Stavridou, an SRI computer scientist, one of those who had originally discussed the eDNA concept with Darpa officials.
At the workshop, the idea was criticized by almost all the participants, a number of them said, on both technical and privacy grounds. Several computer experts said they believed that it would not solve the problems it would be addressing.
"Before people demand more surveillance information, they should be able to process the information they already have," Mark Seiden, an independent computer security expert who attended the workshop, said in an interview. "Almost all of our failures to date have come from our inability to use existing intelligence information."
Several of the researchers told of a heated e-mail exchange in September over how to represent the consensus of the workshop in a report that was to be submitted to Darpa. At one point, Mr. Blaze reported to the group that he had been "fired" by Dr. Stavridou, of SRI, from his appointed role of writing the report presenting that consensus.
In e-mail messages, several participants said they believed that Dr. Stavridou was hijacking the report and that the group's consensus would not be reported to Darpa.
"I've never seen such personal attacks," one participant said in a subsequent telephone interview.
In defending herself by e-mail, Dr. Stavridou told the other panelists, "Darpa asked SRI to organize the meeting because they have a deep interest in technology for identifying network miscreants and revoking their network privileges."
In October, Dr. Stavridou traveled to Darpa headquarters in Virginia and - after a teleconference from there that was to have included Mr. Blaze, Mr. Rotenberg and Mr. Vatis was canceled - later told the panelists by e-mail that she had briefed several Darpa officials on her own about the group's discussions.
In that e-mail message, sent to the group on Oct. 15, she reported that the Darpa officials had been impressed with the panel's work and had told her that three Darpa offices, including the Information Awareness Office, were interested in pursuing the technology.
This week, however, in response to a reporter's question, Darpa said it had no plans to pursue the technology. And an SRI spokeswoman, Alice Resnick, said yesterday, "SRI informed Darpa that the costs and risks would outweigh any benefit."
Dr. Stavridou did not return phone calls asking for comment.
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House OKs High - Tech Task Force Bill
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NET-Guard.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A bill to create a high-tech task force to help safeguard telecommunications networks during emergencies is on its way to the president's desk to be signed into law.
Congress approved the proposed National Emergency Technology Guard, known as NET Guard, this week in the massive bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.
With its chamber almost deserted, the House used a voice vote to approve a final version of the bill containing technical changes this week made by the Senate, combining the Customs Service, Coast Guard and 20 other agencies into a single Cabinet-level department to challenge terrorism.
The new NET Guard was proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Wyden said the nation needed a high-tech counterpart to the National Guard to keep its telecommunications infrastructure up and running during disasters.
NET Guard establishes a network of private experts and companies ready to organize after emergencies to rebuild a communications infrastructure. Teams would be required to have both expertise and access to equipment before being deployed in a disaster, Wyden said.
On the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, telephone and cell phone lines in New York City were so jammed that engineers who tried to warn about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers could not get in touch with emergency crews just a few blocks away, Wyden said.
``I firmly believe that technology is this country's best hope to detect, deter and respond to terror attacks -- conventional, biological or even nuclear assaults,'' Wyden said.
Bill number is S.2037
On the Net: Bill text: http://thomas.loc.gov/
--------
The super snoops are out to get you
Wesley Pruden
Washington Times
November 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021122-30507249.htm
The bad guys never give up. They understand that persistence trumps resistance every time.
The bad guys here, the government's snoops who are determined to turn the America we love into an Orwellian snooper state, are not really bad, just naive, foolish and blissfully ignorant of both history and human nature.
When this newspaper reported that the government was about to put the most intimate records of every American - every credit-card purchase, every magazine subscription, every drug prescription, every airline ticket purchased, every car rental, every book purchased, every movie (pornographic or not) bought, every event attended - on something called "a virtual, centralized grand database," the denials were long and loud.
Pshaw! they said. Never happen, they said. How could anyone think Congress would be a party to such a thing? All suspicious stuff had been stripped from the homeland-security legislation.
But perhaps Americans have been sufficiently intimidated, frightened, bullied and cowed so as not to object to anything done to them in the name of making them "safe" from Islamist terror. So now the Defense Department acknowledges that well, yes, the super snooper program is actually alive and well.
"The bottom line is 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," Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of acquisitions and technology for the Department of Defense, announced this week.
He cited several examples of the kind of intimate details of the average American's life that the government lusts to catalog: sudden and large cash withdrawals, one-way air or rail travel, and purchases of guns, ammunitions, chemicals or agents that could be used to produce biological and chemical weapons, as well as "reports of suspicious activity given to law enforcement or intelligence services." There's no apparent reason why these "reports of suspicious activity" could not include tips given to cops or government agents by utility-meter readers, postmen or other workmen with access to American homes - just about what Attorney General John Ashcroft briefly floated several weeks ago.
Now the congressional advocates of the homeland-security legislation are eager to point out that the snooping apparatus is not in the homeland-security legislation. What is not clear is why Congress - so eager, Pilate-like, to wash its hands of any implication - doesn't tell the Pentagon to knock it off.
The Pentagon, with the bureaucracy's instinct for false assurance, identifies the man behind the program as Rear Adm. John Poindexter, the former national-security adviser to President Reagan who was convicted of lying to Congress about his cockamamie scheme to barter U.S. missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini on behalf of the Nicaraguan contras. An appeals court overturned the convictions on a technicality.
"John has a real passion for this project," Mr. Aldridge said of the database caper. But a shortage of passion is not the problem, and indeed the problem-makers in the government always come with an excess of passion. "What this is talking about is making us a nation of suspects," Chuck Pena, a senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, tells Fox News. "I am sorry to say that citizens should not have to live in fear of their own government, but that is exactly what this is going to turn out to be."
How could it not? The government that is big enough to give you everything you want, as Ronald Reagan used to say, is a government big enough to take away everything you have. A database "big enough and nimble enough," in Mr. Pena's characterization, renders abuse irresistible.
In fact, the Pentagon concedes that it doesn't really know what breed of beast it is setting loose. The Pentagon spokesman insists that individual privacy rights will be protected, but of course it's the government that will decide when those rights are sufficiently protected. "I don't know what the scope of this is going to be," he says.
If this sort of thing had been imposed by Bill Clinton, and turned over to Hillary and Janet Reno to administer and enforce, the foolish conservatives now leading the applause would be screaming outrage. An earlier generation of Americans would have had admirals strung from yardarms from here to San Diego for even suggesting such un-American scheming. Members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats and liberals and conservatives would have supplied the rope, or at least the rail, with tar and feathers.
Alas, the government, in the name of mindless security, has convinced us that unless we give in to Orwellian solutions the oil tap will run dry, our wives and daughters will be fitted for burkas and we'll all sup on sheep's eyes and stuffed grape leaves in celebration of September 11. It seems not to have occurred to some of us that "our kind" might not be in charge of the database forever. But it has occurred to some others of us. Scienta est potentia - "knowledge is power" - is the chilling Latin motto over Adm. Poindexter's office. The better advice is non illigitimi carborundum est - "Don't let the [illegitimate ones] grind you down." They will if we let them.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
-------- terrorism
A Major Suspect in Qaeda Attacks Is in U.S. Custody
November 22, 2002
New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/international/middleeast/22TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - A senior leader of Al Qaeda described as its chief of operations in the Persian Gulf has been captured, American officials said today.
The suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was also described by officials as a pivotal planner of the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and the October 2000 attack on the American destroyer Cole.
A Saudi in his mid-30's who reportedly worked at Osama bin Laden's side for more than a decade, Mr. Nashiri would be the highest-ranking Qaeda operative taken into custody since the arrest last March of Abu Zubaydah, who is described as the terror network's No. 3 official.
The American officials said that Mr. Nashiri was captured earlier this month at an airport in a foreign country, and that he had been surprisingly cooperative in his initial questioning at an American-run interrogation center elsewhere overseas.
They expressed optimism about Mr. Nashiri's information, saying it might help the United States thwart imminent terrorist attacks - especially because he seemed to have been in the process of planning several of them when caught. They also said he might provide leads to the whereabouts of even more senior Qaeda leaders.
The officials said Mr. Nashiri was believed to have been responsible for terrorist attacks carried out in the Persian Gulf region as recently as Oct. 6, when a boat loaded with explosives disabled a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, killing a crewman.
His capture, they said, is a relief to American intelligence agencies at a time when the Bush administration has been criticized for having failed to apprehend the terror network's most notorious leaders, including Mr. bin Laden. Through a newly released audiotape, he appears to have proved that he is still alive.
The administration has acknowledged for several days that a senior Qaeda leader was recently taken into custody, but administration officials refused to reveal Mr. Nashiri's name until today.
The officials said they had hoped that the withholding of the name would prod others in the terror network to risk contacting one another for news about the arrest, and that the resulting communications would be vulnerable to electronic monitoring by American intelligence agencies.
They said they had also wanted to delay revealing Mr. Nashiri's name while they followed up on the information he provided in his initial interrogations.
The officials said they decided to confirm his identity today after some news organizations made clear that knew the captured terrorist was Mr. Nashiri. ABC News reported tonight that it had known the identity for a number of days and had withheld the name at the request of senior government officials.
"This is a serious blow to Al Qaeda," said an American official, referring to Mr. Nashiri's capture. "He was Al Qaeda's top guy in the Persian Gulf. He is an expert in terrorist weapons and explosives. He had a major role in the Cole attack, and he was involved in the training of the principal suspects in the East Africa bombings."
The official described Mr. Nashiri as a "ruthless operator who has long-term ties to key Al Qaeda figures, including Osama bin Laden," and said Mr. Nashiri "joined the jihad" when he traveled to Afghanistan as a teenager in the 1980's.
"Given his lengthy track record in terrorist operations, as well as his experience and contacts and resources," the official said, "he is believed to have been involved in the planning of new attacks aimed at new targets in the gulf - and possibly elsewhere."
Another American official said Mr. Nashiri was so dedicated to Al Qaeda's cause that he recruited a cousin to be one of the suicide bombers in the attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in August 1998. That attack and a simultaneous one on the embassy in Tanzania left more than 220 people dead.
Officials would not say whether Mr. Nashiri's arrest was connected in any way to an Oct. 3 incident in Yemen, in which another senior Qaeda leader, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, was killed in a pinpoint missile strike from a drone aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Harethi, too, was described as an architect of the Cole bombing.
Officials said that Mr. Nashiri - already among the top dozen leaders of Al Qaeda - had grown grown appreciably in authority with the killing or capture of others in the terror network since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
They said that he appeared to have been with Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan last fall, but that he fled the country as the United States began its military campaign to oust Al Qaeda and its Taliban patrons.
They also said Mr. Nashiri made his way to Pakistan and then to Yemen - where, at a base he established, he oversaw recruitment and logistics, including the purchase of weapons, and plotted a new wave of attacks in the region.
American and Moroccan officials have said that Mr. Nashiri had planned an operation earlier this year to blow up American and British warships in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the northern coast of Morocco. The plan was thwarted by Moroccan intelligence agents who traced intercepted telephone conversations and e-mail messages back to Mr. Nashiri. He was then in tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghan border.
The plot appears to have resembled the attack on the Cole in October 2000, when a pair of suicide bombers in the Yemeni port of Aden slammed their explosives-laden boat into the flank of the docked destroyer, killing 17 American sailors. American officials said that Mr. Nashiri was believed to have paid for other terrorists to buy the boat used in the attack, and that he rented safe houses used in the plot.
Before his capture, American officials had described Mr. Zubaydah, the former terrorist operations chief, as the most important Qaeda suspect in custody. Mr. Zubaydah, they have said, provided valuable information during grueling interrogations in the weeks after his arrest in Pakistan in March.
But they acknowledged today that his information had grown stale in the eight months since his capture, and that intelligence agencies had been eager to find someone like Mr. Nashiri, who appears to have been at the heart of planning for fresh Qaeda attacks on the United States.
The Bush administration has warned that new attacks on American soil may be imminent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which last week released a dire warning of "spectacular" attacks on American targets, reiterated previous warnings today in an alert to state and local law enforcement officials. It cited possible attacks using "explosive-laden boats" and scuba divers.
The United States has confirmed that several midlevel Qaeda operatives are now being interrogated overseas, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who is suspected of being directly linked to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Mr. bin al-Shibh, a young Yemeni, was apparently in close contact with the suicide hijackers in the weeks before the attacks. He is a central figure in the Justice Department's case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen who is the only person facing trial in an American court for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Government officials have confirmed that, as first reported earlier this week in The Washington Post, Mr. bin al-Shibh has told interrogators that Mr. Moussaoui met in Afghanistan with a senior Qaeda leader who is believed to have planned the attacks in New York and Washington. That leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is among Mr. bin Laden's most trusted deputies. He is still at large.
a name="other">
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
E.P.A. Eases Clean Air Rules on Power Plants and Refineries
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Clean-Air.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration will ease clean air rules, allowing power plants and refineries to avoid new pollution controls when expanding operations, administration sources said Friday.
The long-awaited rule changes will ``increase energy efficiency and encourage emissions reductions,'' the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement obtained by The Associated Press.
An announcement of the rule change was to be made later in the day.
Environmentalists and a group of Northeastern states said they plan to file suit immediately challenging the changes. The state officials contend that the easing of the clean air requirements ``will undermine efforts'' to meet air quality standards.
The rule changes, which have been a top priority of the White House, are aimed at making it easier for utilities and refinery operators to change operations and expand production without installing new controls to capture the additional pollution.
Industry has argued that the old EPA regulations have hindered operation and prevented efficiency improvements.
The changes will ``encourage emissions reductions,'' EPA Administrator Christie Whitman argues in remarks prepared for the announcement. She said that the old rules ``have deterred companies from implementing projects that would increase energy efficiency and decrease air pollution.''
The new EPA regulation will allow industry to:
--Limit the amount of pollution it is allowed to release into the air based on figures not limited to specific facilities.
--Rely on a more lenient standard when figuring how pollution must be regulated.
In addition, the agency is proposing a new way of defining what constitutes ``routine maintenance, repair and replacement'' -- key language that helps determine when the regulations should kick in.
The EPA plans to grant power plants, factories and refineries an annual ``allowance'' for maintenance. Only when expenditures rise above that allowance would an owner or operator have to install new pollution control equipment. Replacement of existing equipment would be considered maintainence.
The administration said the new maintenance treatment ``will offer facilities greater flexibility to improve and modernize their operations in ways that will reduce energy use and air pollution.''
The changes were sought by the utility, coal and oil industries, and were the subject of months of review at the White House. The electric utility and coal industries were both major donors to Republicans for the 2002 and 2000 elections.
Electric companies and their employees contributed at least $11 million to the GOP in the 2001-02 election cycle, more than twice as much as they gave Democrats, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign finance.
Coal companies and their employees made at least $1.9 million in political contributions in that period, with more than $8 of every $10 going to Republicans, the center found.
Bush's 2000 presidential campaign was also a major beneficiary of the industries' largess. Several energy executives raised at least $100,000 each for Bush's campaign, and the energy industry, including electric and mining companies, gave more than $2.8 million.
Many of the fund-raisers and donors were members of Bush's transition team, weighing in on energy and environmental policy as the president set up his administration.
-------- genetics
Energy Dept. Finances Effort to Create Artificial Life
November 22, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/science/22CELL.html
The Department of Energy has given a $3 million grant to Dr. J. Craig Venter, leader of the private effort to decode the human genome, to develop the best possible approximation to an artificially created living cell.
Under the grant, which was first reported by The Washington Post yesterday, scientists at an institute founded by Dr. Venter will try to synthesize the chromosome of a simple bacterium.
The ability to create a living cell from scratch, by chemically synthesizing all its components, is far beyond present technology. But several years ago, Dr. Clyde Hutchinson of the University of North Carolina tried an alternative route to the same goal by taking one of the simplest known bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, and trying to define the minimum number of genes it needed to survive by stripping out all the unnecessary ones. Dr. Hutchinson reported in 1999 that the microbe could get by with as few as 265 genes, which could be thought of as the minimal set of genes needed for life.
A piece of DNA containing these genes might in principle be synthesized and inserted into a cell that had also been assembled artificially, probably with bits and pieces from other cells.
Dr. Venter, who helped lead the decoding of the M. genitalium genome in 1995, has now resumed Dr. Hutchinson's project at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives.
In a statement, Dr. Venter said the hope was that "we could potentially engineer an organism with the ideal qualities to begin to cope with our energy issues," perhaps one that could create hydrogen or absorb carbon dioxide.
Whether this organism would be a new life form or a greatly modified bacterium could be debated, but Dr. Venter told The Associated Press, "The description of this being a modification rather than making new life is probably correct."
-------- health
Scientists Hope to Make New Bacterium
November 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-New-Life-Form.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some experts say that the research to create a new species of single-cell life could open a new door to biological hazards.
A group led by J. Craig Venter, director of a private program that mapped the human genome, plans to modify a simple microbe and drive it with artificial genes to make a hydrogen fuel. Venter's group has received a $3 million grants from the Energy Department to make a new type of bacterium using DNA manufactured in the lab from basic chemicals.
Venter said the goal is to build a bacterium capable of making hydrogen fuel or, alternatively, to develop a microbe that can absorb and store carbon dioxide, thus removing a surplus of that greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
Along the way, he said, scientists will learn on a molecular level the minimum genes a cell needs to thrive and reproduce and how to artificially make those and other genes.
Some experts worry that by learning how to artificially create the basic genes essential to life, even in a fragile, obscure microbe, scientists could put a new weapon into the hands of terrorists.
``We have to be very careful about controlling the purposes of this research,'' said Kathy Kinlaw, an executive in the Center for Ethics at Emory University. She said that science ultimately will achieve what Venter is attempting, but careful oversight is needed to prevent the technology's misuse.
The federal grant was given to the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, a company founded by Venter. The organization now has 10 scientists, including Nobel laureate Dr. Hamilton O. Smith, an expert on genetic science and famed for his skill in handling DNA in the laboratory. Eventually, the institute will grow to a scientific staff of about 25.
Venter said the plan is to extend work that he and others started in 1995 at the Rockville, Md.-based Institute for Genomic Research. Researchers there sequenced the genes of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, one of the simplest microbes known with only one chromosome and 517 genes. By contrast, humans have about 30,000 genes and 23 pairs of chromosomes in each cell.
Once the normal gene complement of M. genitalium was identified, the researchers began systematically removing genes to determine how many were essential for life. In 1999, they published a paper that narrowed the minimum needs of M. genitalium to 265 to 350 genes.
Under the grant, Venter said the researchers will use basic chemicals to snythesize the DNA in M. genitalium's single chromosome. They will then use radiation to kill the chromosome in a normal M. genitalium and replace it with the lab-made DNA.
Venter said the cell will retain some of its functioning parts, such as enzymes and RNA, but that all of its genetic structure will be synthetic.
``The description of this being a modification rather than making new life is probably correct,'' said Venter. ``There is a philosophical question of how many genes can you change in an organism'' before it becomes a new life form.
Dr. Clyde Hutchison of the University of North Carolina, a microbiologist who was part of Venter's team at the Maryland institute, said M. genitalium is a good microbe to use because it is so simple and poses no safety concerns.
The microbe lacks the tough cellular wall of most bacteria and is a total parasite, depending on its host to make even the most basic amino acids, he said.
In theory, a new understanding about the basic workings of a cell could help develop new bioweapons, said Venter, but the plans call for withholding some key information his group discovers.
``We will be cautious about how and where we disclose new techniques,'' he said. ``We don't want a group of crazies to deliberately make something that is harmful.''
Venter was the head of Celeria Genomics, a private group that sequenced the human genome at the same time as an international, government-supported project. The two groups published their findings in separate journals and were jointly honored in a 2000 White House ceremony.
a name="activists">
-------- ACTIVISTS
Battling cancer, Philip Berrigan puts his fate in God's hands
By PATRICK O'NEILL
National Catholic Reporter,
November 22, 2002
http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/112202/112202j.htm
Philip Berrigan has spent more than 10 years of his life serving jail and prison sentences all over the country, stemming from convictions for more than 100 acts of civil resistance to war. Not one to complain, Berrigan, 79, is the first to say his has been a wonderful life.
Yet, when the former Josephite priest was recently asked how he was feeling, Berrigan replied "lousy." Unlike most of his previous 35 years, Berrigan has not spent one night in jail in 2002. Instead he has had to deal with a string of medical problems that has left the strapping, 6-foot-1-inch World War II veteran in constant pain and in need of a walker to get around.
Berrigan began the year with a bum hip that hobbled him even when he walked a short distance. A fall last April broke his left arm, delaying hip-replacement surgery, which was finally done in July. Last month, when he wasn't recovering well from the hip surgery, Berrigan went to the doctor. Spots found on his kidney and liver turned out to be cancerous. He is slated to begin chemotherapy this month at Johns Hopkins Hospital, but short of a miracle, doctors have told Berrigan, the father of three grown children, not to expect a cure.
"There's no talk from the doctors that there's going to be a magic bullet, and there's no talk of a cure," said Berrigan's son, Jerry Mechtenburg-Berrigan, 27, who recently joined his sisters, Frida, 28, and Kate, 21, for a family gathering at Jonah House, the intentional resistance community in Baltimore that Philip and his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, founded in 1973. It was at Jonah House where Berrigan and McAlister raised their family, often taking turns because one or the other was behind bars.
As he did while engaged in acts of resistance over the years, Philip Berrigan says he has placed his fate in God's hands.
"I'm trying to do my best to place it all in God's hands, and I'll do what I can to ward it off and maybe stabilize the cancer," he said. "But the main element is God. You know, I'm dealing with a life-threatening disease, and I'm not whining about that because I've had so much good health in my life. I'm not whining. I'm just reporting on it."
Like his body, Berrigan says his faith is also weak.
"Like most of us, my faith isn't that strong," he said, "but with what grace God can give me I'll be all right. I have a tremendously strong community supporting me, as my family does and my brothers do."
Philip Berrigan was the youngest of Thomas and Frida Berrigan's six sons. During the Vietnam War, brothers Philip and Daniel -- then both priests -- often made daily headlines for their outspoken opposition to the war and their subsequent draft board raids in which they destroyed the records of draft-eligible men. In 1980, the two also founded the Plowshares movement, in which activists would use hammers to bang on weapons, symbolically disarming them, actions that often resulted in the government handing down long prison sentences.
Although he's been sick, Berrigan has kept up a full slate of activism this past year. In January he was the keynote speaker at an antiwar rally in North Carolina. He also addressed thousands at a massive peace rally in Washington in April. The week the cancer was diagnosed, Berrigan and McAlister followed through with plans and led a retreat at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker.
Around Jonah House, folks are trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but Philip's illness is yet another trial for McAlister, who has been Philip's best friend and loving supporter for close to four decades.
McAlister's eyes often welled with tears as she received warm hugs and well wishes from friends last month when she was in Washington for the funeral of Jesuit Fr. Richard McSorley, a leader in the peace movement and longtime family friend.
McAlister and the children, all of whom live out of state, are working out a plan for the three of them to spend more time at Jonah House during Philip's illness. In October, Berrigan and McAlister had a frank discussion with the kids about Philip's health.
Son Jerry said his father currently gets around with a walker, takes one short walk a day and the rest of the time he reads and writes and rests.
He said his dad's philosophy of life is "always try to leave things a little better than you found them." That's also the political context in which Philip Berrigan has worked over the last 40 years, Mechtenberg-Berrigan said.
"I would say this country is in much worse shape than when he began, but that's not his fault," Mechtenberg-Berrigan said. "In our hearts and by his example I would say that we're all better than when he found us."
Philip's brother Jerry is asking friends to direct intercessory prayers for Philip through St. Padre Pio and Dorothy Day "to try to put the brakes on the cancer. I recommend those as intercessors to everybody."
Patrick O'Neill is a free-lance writer who lives in Raleigh, N.C.
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Resistance Rising!
True Patriots Networking
November 22nd, 2002
Village Voice,
by Nat Hentoff
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0248/hentoff.php
With advances in technology and ever-increasing government surveillance, the situation has worsened since Orwell's imaginings of the future. -John Whitehead, the Rutherford Institute, November 4, 2002
Despite the self-satisfaction of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, and the somnolence of the press, there is rising resistance around the country to the serial abuses of our liberties. More Americans are becoming aware of what Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold prophesied from the Senate floor on October 11, 2001, when he was the only Senator to vote against Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act: "There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications; if we lived in a country where people could be held in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government would probably discover more terrorists or would-be terrorists, just as it would find more lawbreakers generally. But that wouldn't be a country in which we would want to live."
Some of that warning has come to pass. What has become more specifically evident is underlined by Lincoln Caplan in the November-December issue of Legal Affairs (A Magazine of Yale Law School): "The [USA Patriot Act] . . . authorized law enforcement agencies to inspect the most personal kinds of information-medical records, bank statements, college transcripts, even church memberships. But what is more startling than the scope of these new powers is that the government can use them on people who aren't suspected of committing a crime."
As then house majority leader Dick Armey-a conservative Republican libertarian-told Georgetown University law professor Jeffrey Rosen in the October 21 New Republic: "The Justice Department . . . seems to be running amok and out of control. . . . This agency right now is the biggest threat to personal liberty in the country." (The Defense Department is an even bigger threat, with its Orwellian plan to place all of us under surveillance-more on that in a later column.)
One sign of the growing fear of losing our Bill of Rights protections against an out-of-control government came from the heartland. On September 8 of this year, the Journal Gazette, a daily newspaper in Fort Wayne, Indiana, published a full-page, five-column editorial-its first such broadside in nearly 20 years. The headline was "Attacks on Liberty": "In the name of national security, President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and even Congress have pulled strand after strand out of the constitutional fabric that distinguishes the United States from other nations. . . .
"Actions taken over the past year are eerily reminiscent of tyranny portrayed in the most nightmarish works of fiction. The power to demand reading lists from libraries could have been drawn from the pages of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. . . . The sudden suspension of due process for immigrants rounded up into jails is familiar to readers of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here."
But what is most encouraging is the continued growth in cities and towns throughout the nation of Bill of Rights Defense Committees or their equivalents, a number of which are working with ACLU affiliates. The first BORDC, as reported here, was formed in February this year in Northampton, Massachusetts, when about 300 doctors, nurses, lawyers, students, teachers, and retirees formed a group to protect the citizens of that town from the USA Patriot Act and the subsequent unilateral attacks on our liberties by John Ashcroft.
After the Northampton city council unanimously passed in May a resolution officially supporting the protests of the BORDC, other towns and cities learned how to organize similar committees through the Northampton group's Web site: www.bordc.org.
Fourteen town or city councils-from Takoma Park, Maryland, and Alachua County, Florida, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Berkeley, California-have now passed, sometimes unanimously, similar resolutions originated by local BORDC organizations. Other proposals are pending before local government bodies in 40 more cities and towns, in 24 states. One BORDC is in formation in New York City.
Next week: The details of some of these resolutions that involve city and state police and local members of Congress. The roots of the Bill of Rights Defense Committees, it is important to remember, are in the pre-revolutionary committees of correspondence, initiated by Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in Boston in 1754.
In 1805, in Boston, there was published Mercy Otis Warren's History of the Rise and Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. A historian, playwright, and political pamphleteer, she wrote in this, her major work: "Perhaps no single step contributed so much to cement the union of the colonies, and the final acquisition of independence, as the establishment of committees of correspondence. This supported a chain of communication from New Hampshire to Georgia that produced unanimity and energy throughout the continent." Sam Adams and other patriots continuously spread the news of attacks on the liberties of these new Americans by the King, his ministers, and his governors and officers in the colonies.
These committees, as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once told me, were a precipitating cause of the American Revolution. Yet John Ashcroft accuses his critics - among the most active of which are the Bill of Rights Defense Committees - of "capitulating" to the enemy. More Americans are coming to agree with Dick Armey that Ashcroft's Justice Department "is the biggest threat to personal liberty in the country." Who, then, are the American patriots now?
Read more of the Voice's coverage of the attack on civil liberties in post-September 11 America.
http://villagevoice.com/specials/civil_liberties/
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Ellsberg charts change from insider to activist
SECRETS: A MEMOIR OF VIETNAM AND THE PENTAGON PAPERS
by Daniel Ellsberg
Viking, 498 pages
Reviewed by WILLIAM O'ROURKE
National Catholic Reporter,
November 22, 2002
http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/112202/112202m.htm
The history of the Vietnam era antiwar movement has been written in layers, often through autobiography. In Secrets, Daniel Ellsberg adds an important, compelling contribution. Its focus, not unsurprisingly, is on what Ellsberg saw and did during the 1960s and early 1970s, but bits and pieces of what others were doing can be glimpsed throughout. After nearly 40 years, the whole story is finally taking shape.
Apart from that history, Ellsberg's valuable book offers a portrait rarely sketched, especially by a critic, of the defense policy, think-tank insider. Indeed, Ellsberg had been such an insider that he never questions the breed or how he became one. He went to Harvard, got a doctorate in game theory, lectured to Professor Henry Kissinger's class on "The political benefits of madness" (a tact Kissinger endorsed), and voila, the insider was born.
Ellsberg joined the economics department of the Rand Corporation, a California defense-consulting firm that came to harbor one of the few extant copies of the Robert McNamara-ordered study of the Vietnam War that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. A copy went to Rand because of Ellsberg's urging and the well-founded fear that the study might be destroyed or left inaccessible forever to the prying eyes of historians.
Ellsberg paints this culture of secrecy and exclusivity vividly. He was forsaking many things when he gave the Pentagon Papers (he authored a section on President Kennedy's decision-making of 1961) to the press. Most of all, he was giving up forever his membership in the elite world of insiders, those who run the government, especially its foreign policy.
Unfortunately, this book is almost too pertinent today, given the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy in all things. It is difficult to imagine Donald Rumsfeld ordering a comprehensive study of America's involvement in the Middle East generally and various countries specifically. One can only fear that the blunders made and lies told will be kept forever from public view, because no one in the Bush orbit will grow too sick at what is being done to defect and tell all.
Ellsberg did become sick of what he had been seeing and doing in Vietnam. Sick enough that he describes what can be only considered a breakdown at an antiwar conference he attended. He sobbed for over an hour in a bathroom and decided then to cast his "whole vote" to stop what he concluded was an "immoral" war.
His establishment credentials were hard to ignore or belittle: a former officer in the Marines, a defense department specialist on nuclear weapons first, and then the Vietnam conflict second, one of the few men in the room who had actually been in Vietnam during the early stages of American involvement, a respected analyst, someone praised by Henry Kissinger after Kissinger began working for Richard Nixon. Kissinger eventually called Ellsberg the "most dangerous man in America."
Ellsberg's conversion to the antiwar movement was assisted by a woman, Patricia Marx, the toy heiress, who eventually became his second wife. She led him from the elite inner circles of government to elite inner circles of the antiwar movement. Ellsberg does not play down, or play up, her influence. Indeed, this memoir is decidedly more an intellectual exercise than an emotional one. Go to Tom Wells' aptly titled biography of Ellsberg, Wild Man, published last year, for that side. Ellsberg, in Secrets, wants to be taken seriously again.
But he can be maddeningly self-centered in his depictions, somewhat forgivable in a memoir. The publication of the Pentagon Papers did help to bring about the end of the war, but it also brought about other beneficial changes Ellsberg doesn't mention. For one, it changed journalism for a decade or more, leading newspapers to become true papers of record by printing lengthy documents themselves, rather than summaries. The Pentagon Papers were followed by trial transcripts, congressional hearings and the Watergate tapes.
Robert McNamara provided us with historical analysis in the form of the Pentagon Papers, but Richard Nixon gave us history in the making in the form of his taping system. The release of the Pentagon Papers strengthened the public's aversion to the war, but Nixon's own taping did him in and, subsequently, the war. Though Ellsberg, too, credits overmuch our withdrawal, rather than the North Vietnamese winning, for the war's end.
Ellsberg himself, in a most touching way, believes deeply that the truth will set you free. He wanted the true history of the war to come out and felt then that Congress and the public would do the right thing. Evidently, he still believes that lessons learned from history will make our leaders think correctly and behave accordingly. In the case of the Vietnam War, they needed to see its folly. That, if nothing else, makes him a patriot. Unfortunately, this was continued because both Johnson and Nixon wanted to demonstrate Cold War determination rather than good sense. It wasn't micro reasons, it was macro reasons. And they would sacrifice young Americans to do so.
Ellsberg's trial in 1973 was stopped because of the egregious conduct of the White House, which burglarized his psychiatrist's office, wiretapped Ellsberg, offered the trial judge a job and so on. And the issue his attorney Leonard Boudin (the Boston Five and Harrisburg Seven lawyer) raised -- that what Ellsberg did was not against the law -- was never adjudicated. He was tried under the Espionage Act, but he hadn't given the papers to a foreign government; he gave them to Congress and the American people.
Given the Bush administration's adoption of a preemptive war doctrine, Ellsberg's truth-telling book about our earlier wrong-headed making of war is a must read for anyone who cares about peace and justice.
William O'Rourke, the author of The Harrisburg Seven and the New Catholic Left, is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Campaign America 2000: The View From the Couch.
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