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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 u