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NUCLEAR
Weapons chief censors Baghdad arms declaration
Bush in clash with UN over Iraq weapons dossier
Iraq Says Report to the U.N. Shows No Banned Arms
Iraq Challenges Critics Over Documents
American Policies and Presence Under Fire in South Korea
Californians debating the dangers of N-waste
Los Alamos Probed For Misuse of Funds
Report Finds Security Flaws at Indian Point
Report: Nuclear Plant Owner Finds Flaws
Return of the Iran-Contra brigade
Will Bush's March to War Be Slowed?
Senators Urge Bush to Release Evidence of Banned Arms in Iraq
MILITARY
How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
Serbian Elections Fail Again, Observers Say
Desert Rat speaks out against war
At least 23 die in Colombian violence
Iraq says chem-bio programs ended in '91
A Crude View of the Crisis in Iraq
Lack of Hard Evidence Complicates U.S. Aims
Arafat: Israel Seeking Cover for Military Campaign
U.S. special forces to be based in Jordan
Walker's World: NATO rides again
Does Democracy Help Pakistan?
Russia shocked by elite forces' killing spree
Lawmakers Want Cabinet Post for an Intelligence Director
Mossad enters global terror war
'Sci-Fi' Weapons Going to War
U.S. Headquarters Is Ready for War
Buildup Leaves U.S. Military Nearly Set to Start Attack
American Military Presence Near Iraq
AC - 130 Gunships Packs Awesome Firepower
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Sen. Graham: Intelligence Czar Needed
ENERGY AND OTHER
Wind Turbines Are Sprouting Off Europe's Shores
Use of Renewable Energy Took a Big Fall in 2001
Report slams Israel on sex slavery
ACTIVISTS
Where the Cold War Continues
Anti-US protests grow in Seoul
Philip Berrigan, Peace
Pacifist Philip Berrigan dies of cancer
Democracy Now! Archived Philip Berrigan Coverage
Iran Student Movement Finds New Vitality
400 March in Boston to Urge Cardinal Law to Resign
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- inspections
Weapons chief censors Baghdad arms declaration
By Julian Coman in Washington and David Wastell, Diplomatic Correspondent
08/12/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/08/wirq108.xml/
A furious row has broken out within the United Nations Security Council over a ruling by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, denying America and Britain full access to Iraq's 11,807-page weapons declaration, handed over in Baghdad yesterday.
White House officials complained that they had been "blind-sided" by Mr Blix's decision, which he revealed behind closed doors late on Friday, to provide only what one UN official called a "sanitised version" of the declaration to the 15 members of the Security Council.
Mr Blix, the head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic), said inspectors would vet the declaration before it is passed on, because of the risk that details of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes could be used as a "cookbook" by other states or terrorists trying to build their own weapons.
He proposed that the most sensitive information should be purged from the text by inspectors, to ensure that it did not leak. To do otherwise would breach international treaties on weapons proliferation, he said.
Although Britain and America supported the plan to hold back sensitive information from the 10 rotating members of the council - notably Syria, which Washington has accused of supporting terrorism - they are determined that they, France, Russia and China, as the five permanent members, should see the whole text. Their assessment of the Iraqi declaration will be crucial to the fate of Saddam Hussein's regime.
"There was no agreement about who should see what," said a western UN diplomat. "The Americans simply expect to get the whole report. Other countries are determined to see anything that America sees. They'll be arguing about it well into next week. It wasn't just Syria. Mexico and several other countries were adamant as well."
UN officials said that in the interests of "equity" all 15 Security Council members should receive the same information. Mr Blix said: "All the governments are aware that they should not have access to anything that everyone else does not have access to."
Another UN official said: "It would be quite wrong for some members to get a sanitised version but not others. That is not what was agreed on Friday." American officials were furious at the decision, having been led to believe on Thursday that they would receive the declaration at around 10pm tonight.
American intelligence officials are waiting to compare the document with their own information on Iraq's weapons programmes. A White House official privately accused Mr Blix of throwing a last-minute "curveball".
The Bush administration said it would wait until Mr Blix reports to America and other Security Council members early this week before making its feelings known. American officials said privately that Mr Blix could not be allowed to have sole control of the Iraqi document.
The UN resolution ordering the declaration states that Iraq must provide its weapons declaration to the UN weapons inspectors "and the Security Council".
Britain, like the US, wants to see the document in its entirety, and "went along with the agreement" in the belief that it would eventually see the full text, officials close to the Security Council said. The Foreign Office refused to comment last night.
The delay means that although the Iraqi declaration will be delivered tonight to UN headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Security Council members will not see it until the end of the week at the earliest.
----
Bush in clash with UN over Iraq weapons dossier
By David Blair in Baghdad and Julian Coman in Washington
08/12/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/08/wirq08.xml/
Iraq yesterday handed the United Nations a 43-volume 11,807-page declaration on its weapons of mass destruction as America reacted with fury to a ruling that it will not be allowed to see the full report. The contents of the document will decide whether Iraq faces war. An Iraqi official shows documents on Iraq's arms programmes to journalists in Baghdad
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has told the 15 Security Council members that they will be given the report only after sensitive information about weapons manufacture had been removed.
The purged details are expected to be the most sensitive - precisely the information that America most needs to compare with its own intelligence.
Washington believes that the document will provide the trigger for military action as it is certain that Iraq has left out key information. That would put Saddam Hussein's regime in "material breach" of UN resolutions, paving the way for an American-led attack.
A senior US official said that Washington would provide the inspectors with evidence, including some not made public before, that Iraq has retained and accelerated prohibited weapons programmes.
UN inspectors in Baghdad were given what Iraqi officials called an "accurate, full and complete" report covering 11 years of intensive work on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Baghdad hopes to head off the threat of war by providing details of secret weapon programmes whose existence it once denied.
In a cynical attempt to forge an anti-American alliance in the Arab world, Saddam last night apologised for the first time to the people of Kuwait for invading the emirate in 1990.
He also urged Muslims to join any Iraqi struggle against "occupation forces". But Kuwait rejected the apology last night.
Saddam's aides persisted in denying that the country possessed banned weapons. "Some ministries perhaps contain some activities which are dual-use and they are declared fully, completely and accurately," said Maj-Gen Hussam Mohammed Amin, the head of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate.
The weapons declaration was presented to the world in chaotic fashion after journalists were told to follow a government vehicle driven across Baghdad at breakneck speed to a secret location.
They were told that they would see the declaration in groups of six, but the information ministry failed to announce which would be allowed in first.
This provoked pandemonium as cameramen besieged the office and smashed a window. Officials then scribbled out a hasty list and journalists were allowed two minutes each in the room with the 43 spiral-bound volumes and 12 CD-roms.
The report was flown to Cyprus last night en route to the UN in New York. Officials will pore over the text and the inspectors in Iraq will have the task of verifying every claim.
President George W Bush said that Washington would take some time to judge the declaration, but repeated that the US would disarm Iraq by force if necessary.
----
Iraq Says Report to the U.N. Shows No Banned Arms
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/middleeast/08IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 7 - Iraq today delivered a 12,000-page declaration on banned weapons to the United Nations, meeting a Security Council deadline with more than 24 hours to spare. Officials said flatly that the documents confirmed that Saddam Hussein's government had no current programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, in contradiction of American and British claims.
Mr. Hussein also chose today to deliver a statement on Kuwait, apologizing to the Kuwaiti people for the 1990 invasion, but criticizing the government there and asking Kuwaitis to join him in fighting "the foreign occupier."
At a news conference, the Iraqi official in charge of preparing the declaration, Maj. Gen. Hussam Muhammad Amin, said the documents "verified" the position Iraq had taken ever since the United States and Britain accused Baghdad earlier this year of continuing with secret nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, and threatened to go to war. Iraq contends that it has abandoned all such projects and met longstanding demands that it disarm.
In the new report, General Amin said, "We declare that Iraq is empty of any weapons of mass destruction." To hammer the point home, he told reporters summoned to have an early sighting of the documents at Baghdad University that Mr. Hussein, the Iraqi leader, had ordered that officials to be "fair and frank" in its declaration, "and that means that when we say we have no weapons of mass destruction we are speaking the truth."
The Iraqi report appears to set the stage for a still sharper confrontation between the United States and Iraq, with the ball effectively now back in the American court.
At 8:05 p.m., Iraqi officials delivered the documents and additional information on computer disks to United Nations officials at the Canal Hotel on the capital's eastern outskirts, converted for use as the United Nations headquarters in Iraq.
Several men in a beige-colored four-by-four carried two bags and four cardboards boxes into the building, where they met briefly with officials of the United Nations weapons-inspection team and took a receipt. They left again in minutes.
The handover put Iraq a full day ahead of a deadline of midnight Sunday that the United Nations Security Council set last month in demanding a "currently accurate, full and complete" declaration by Iraq of any banned weapons programs or related work in nonmilitary fields.
Leaders of the current weapons inspection team in Baghdad, which began work 11 days ago, have said that Iraq has delivered at least eight previous "full and complete" declarations of its secret weapons programs over the past 10 years, only for each to be shown later to have omitted entire programs banned under Security Council resolutions.
Officials of the United Nations weapons inspection team in the Iraqi capital said the Iraqi report would be flown out of Baghdad tonight to a United Nations staging post in Larnaca, Cyprus, and transferred there to a long-haul jet for the flight to New York. They said the cargo of spiral-bound documents, CD-ROM's and large, snap-shut filing folders would arrive in New York on Sunday and be delivered straight to the offices of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Observation Commission, the agency set up to ensure the disarmament of Iraq.
A second copy of the documents will go to the International Atomic Agency in Vienna, which has responsibility for monitoring Iraqi nuclear programs. The New York-based inspection agency has the task of searching out and destroying any prohibited biological or chemical warfare projects, as well as plans to develop ballistic missiles with a range longer than 94 miles. All the restrictions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, triggering the Persian Gulf war and Iraq's ouster from Kuwait the following spring.
Mr. Hussein's statement on Kuwait today contrasted oddly with his speech on Thursday in which he struck a mollifying note on the crisis with the United States, saying that Iraq should allow the new weapons inspectors to do their work so as to prove to the world that Iraq has no banned weapons, and to "keep our people out of harm's way."
The statement coupled his apology with a new stream of invective, including a passage in which he appeared to congratulating Islamic militants in Kuwait who recently attacked American soldiers.
The purpose of the the Iraqi leader's latest statement, which was read on Iraqi television, appeared to be to foment opposition to the government of Kuwait, and upset if possible Americans plans to use bases in Kuwait for any war with Iraq.
"Isn't anyone of the Iraqis or of the people of Kuwait right to ask: Since the agents have joined forces by the will of the foreigner to harm Iraq and the Arab nation, why don't the believers and mujahedeens in Kuwait join forces with their fellow believers and mujahedeens in Iraq under the umbrella of God the Almighty instead of the umbrella of London or Washington or the Zionist entity" - meaning Israel - "to discuss their affairs?" Mr. Hussein said.
In the days before the declaration, senior Bush administration officials had repeated their contention that Iraq does have the weapons programs it has now formally denied, and warned, again, that Mr. Hussein would be running the gantlet of war if he returned to the patterns of the past, trying to deceive the world about his secret projects.
In his radio address today, President Bush warned that the declaration must hold up to American scrutiny if Baghdad is to avoid military attack.
"We will judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time," he said in his weekly radio address.
The next crucial stage will come when the documents are handed over to the United States and other member states of the Security Council, a step that Hans Blix, one of the chiefs of the United Nations agencies monitoring Iraqi disarmament, said on Friday could take several days.
Mr. Blix said the delay would be necessary to give United Nations experts time to purge the Iraqi documents of any technical information that, in the wrong hands, would lead to "proliferation"- meaning the spread of deadly weapons to rogue states or terrorists.
Theoretically, the United States could short-circuit the cumbersome United Nations procedures by taking the declaration General Amin made today, that Iraq has no banned weapons or weapons programs, and immediately producing some of the intelligence that President Bush has repeatedly said Washington has of the existence of such schemes.
However, in an interview on Friday, a senior administration official said President Bush had elected another course: to take the time to analyze the Iraqi declaration both at the C.I.A. and the national laboratories, where much of the government's expertise on weapons of mass destruction is located. Then it will be compared, the official said, "to past lists of what was there, to previous inspection reports, and to our own intelligence."
"Eventually we will make our assessment available," said the official, whose tone indicated that Mr. Bush was not in any particular hurry to use the report as a reason to go to war.
United Nations weapons inspectors in Baghdad have said that the Iraqi declaration will set a "baseline" of truth, and that any deceit by Iraq in the declaration could open the path to an immediate swoop by the inspectors on sites where banned programs are under way.
At the events today in Baghdad, Iraqi officials appeared acutely aware of the risks Iraq now faces.
Even without the new intelligence that the United States says it has on secret Iraqi weapons sites, the Security Council, once it has the documents, will have an immediate benchmark for establishing whether Iraq, this time, has made a clean breast of it secret weapons work. This benchmark, these officials say, will lie in whether Iraq, in the new declaration, has accounted for the weapons and weapons materials that U.N. inspectors came to know about in the 1990's, but were never able to find.
The list includes 4,000 tons of chemical warfare "precursors," meaning materials needed to make anthrax, mustard-gas and other weapons, as well as hundreds of tons of chemical warfare agents; 31,000 chemical warfare munitions, including 550 jmustard gas shells; as many as 20 Soviet-made Scud missiles adapted by the Iraqis to deliver chemical and biological warheads; and 600 tons of "precursors" for the deadly VX gas, enough to make 200 tons of the gas itself. Western experts have said that this would be enough to wipe out the entire world population.
Asked at the news conference whether the declaration included these allegedly missing items, General Amin answered obliquely. "Generally speaking, the declaration will answer all the questions that have been raised in the past months and years", he said.
"If the intention of the United States and Britain is to disarm Iraq, I think this declaration satisfied Chapter Three of Resolution 1441, and this should prevent any threat of war" General Amin said in reference to the measure the Security Council approved unanimously on Oct. 8, under intense American pressure.
Few documents in recent history have been so tensely awaited as the Iraqi declaration, and the countdown to the handover suggested that Iraqi officials, who had said that they were facing serious difficulties in gathering the information needed to meet the Security Council's demands, may have had last-minute dramas in putting the huge dossier together.
At his news conference, General Amin referred glancingly to the strains, saying that "tens" of Iraqi scientists and officials had worked to pull the information together. "We feel proud that we fulfilled everything in the specified time," he said.
After announcing on Thursday that the declaration would be completed and turned over to the United Nations in Baghdad today, Iraqi officials repeatedly delayed General Amin's news conference and a quick first sighting of the Iraqi documents that had been promised to the scores of Western reporters now in Baghdad.
The reporters were told to be ready at 8 a.m., then noon, then 2.15 p.m.. Finally, it was past 3 p.m. when an Iraqi government car led a motorcade of reporters in a high-speed chase across Baghdad to the university campus, where the Iraqi weapons-monitoring monitoring agency that General Amin heads, the National Monitoring Directorate, maintains its offices.
There, on a campus lined with palm trees, scenes of chaos developed as Western television news crews and news agency reporters, facing deadlines and desperate to be among the first to see the documents, joined in a melee of pushing, shoving and shouting to try to get ahead in the crush.
After a senior Information Ministry official had appealed for the newsmen to behave "in a civilized manner," tensions calmed. Allowed to enter an upper room in the monitoring directorate in small groups, the reporters found a long wooden table laid out with sheaves of spiral-bound documents looking like university theses, with clear and blue plastic covers, and titles in English and Arabic that spelled out more than a decade of secret arms work.
Here, in one room, even if the Iraqis have not been fully candid about their current programs, was a astonishing archive of the clandestine project to make Iraq a military superpower that has been at the heart of Mr. Hussein's 23 years in power.
Overseeing everything was a solemn, black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein, and a gold-lettered panel, in Arabic, that quoted the Iraqi leader on the importance of distinguishing between truth and lies. An Iraqi official, asked what it said, stepped forward with evident satisfaction, and translated. "May God open our hearts and our eyes and give us the light to distinguish whether what others tell us is the truth, or lies, and what it is that they have in the hearts, love or hatred," it said.
--------
Iraq Challenges Critics Over Documents
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Arms-Declaration.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq challenged the United States on Sunday to produce evidence it still has weapons of mass destruction. ``Why play a game?'' a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein asked.
As the huge collection of documents on Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs was being flown to the U.N. headquarters, Lt. Gen. Amer Al-Saadi said the declaration demanded by the United Nations is accurate and complete.
Al-Saadi told reporters that the report contains no new Iraqi evidence to answer lingering questions inspectors have about crucial part of Baghdad's chemical and biological weapons programs. Baghdad has previously presented ``first-class evidence'' that was ignored for political reasons, he said.
A U.N. inspector brought a copy of the part of the report dealing with Iraq's nuclear program to Vienna on Sunday and handed it over to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. agency overseeing nuclear inspections in Iraq. IAEA experts were to begin examining the documents Sunday night, a spokeswoman said.
Two more copies of the report -- which in its complete form totals more than 12,000 pages -- were on their way to New York, one for the Security Council and the other for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
The U.N. resolution requiring the declaration be filed by Sunday also called on Iraq to declare any stocks or programs in chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The Baghdad government says it has none.
Bush administration officials reject such Iraqi denials and threaten war if, in their view, Baghdad does not meet U.N. arms control demands. They say they have ``solid evidence'' Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction, but U.N. inspectors indicate they have seen no conclusive evidence thus far from U.S. or other sources.
Al-Saadi, a British-educated, former chief of military production for Iraq, told reporters the Iraqi declaration was ``accurate'' and ``truthful.'' Then he added:
``If they have anything to the contrary, let them forthwith come up with it, give it to (the U.N. inspectors). They are here. Why play a game?''
Al-Saadi said the report ``will embarrass some nations and companies'' cited as having assisted in Iraq's pre-1991 efforts to build weapons of mass destruction, which Baghdad insists it no longer holds.
Al-Saadi said the document was so complete that if the council makes it all public, ``this means that the Security Council is participating in the proliferation of materials'' relating to prohibited weapons. He said the council already was discussing how to handle the report during a meeting in New York on Tuesday.
He complained that the U.S. administration, even before reading the dossiers filed Saturday, had ridiculed the mass of Iraqi documents as a ``telephone directory.''
``We don't understand this rush to judgment,'' he said. ``A superpower should study and take its time in judging, especially since everyone is looking on as it prepares for a huge military campaign, for an aggression against Iraq. It should behave wisely.''
Asked whether Iraq itself has included new evidence in its declaration to address major unanswered questions posed by the U.N. inspectors, al-Saadi focused on two issues: reported discrepancies in the disposition of large amounts of lethal VX nerve agent produced by Iraq in the 1980s, and large gaps in documentation linked to Iraq's biological weapons program.
On VX, he said, ``some first-class evidence'' was given in the 1990s, but did not satisfy the inspectors then ``because they were mainly led by personnel from the United States and Britain.'' As for biological weapons, he said further evidence doesn't exist because ``the program didn't exist after 1991.''
The U.N. plane carried the Iraqi declaration out of Baghdad to Cyprus for onward flights. On its return, the plane brought reinforcements for the U.N. weapons inspectors in the Iraqi capital, 25 new investigators who will double the staff and allow quick expansion of the inspection schedule.
The inspectors' first helicopter was being assembled Sunday at Baghdad's Saddam International Airport. They expect eight in all, enabling them to range farther afield with their daily surprise inspections.
The U.N. teams continued those missions Sunday, visiting a government mining and survey company in Baghdad with past association with uranium processing, which could help make fuel for nuclear bombs, and a pesticide plant west of Baghdad. Pesticide production can be converted to chemical weapons making.
The long-awaited Iraqi declaration comprised at least a dozen bound volumes accompanied by computer disks, covering such subjects as the 1990s U.N. weapons inspection regime in Iraq, when many arms and much production equipment were destroyed, and ``dual-use'' industries that can alternate between civilian and military production.
The arms declaration will draw weeks of scrutiny from nuclear engineers, chemists, microbiologists, missile technicians and other specialists as the United Nations searches for clues, among the dry accounts, of hidden arms programs or remaining caches of weapons of mass destruction.
``I hope the international community will bear with us and give us time to do a proper job,'' said Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA director-general.
The U.N. experts are expected to ``sanitize'' the documents for distribution to representatives of 15 Security Council member nations, by removing sensitive information on producing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Translating from Arabic may also cause delays.
The U.N. agencies will compare the new Iraqi information with past Iraqi reports and with their own databases of past inspections and other information. What they learn ``will be integrated in our overall strategy'' as they plan targets for surprise visits in the coming weeks, said Jacques Baute, leader of the nuclear inspection team here.
``The information provided in this declaration will have to be verified, and the onus of that will fall on us,'' said Demetrius Perricos, operational chief for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, responsible for chemical and biological weapons and missiles.
If Iraq is eventually found to have cooperated fully with the inspectors, U.N. resolutions call for the Security Council to consider lifting economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Although Washington was dismissive of the Iraqi document submitted this weekend, the Russian Foreign Ministry, by contrast, issued a statement saying the declaration shows Iraq is committed ``to act in compliance'' with U.N. requirements.
In the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, meanwhile, the U.S. Central Command prepared to inaugurate a seven-day, computer-assisted war game Monday that some observers speculate could be a rehearsal for a war against Iraq. The exercise will not involve troops in the field, but rather ``tabletop'' scenarios played out by staff officers.
-------- korea
American Policies and Presence Under Fire in South Korea
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH with DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/asia/08KORE.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 5 - Buddhist monks and Christian groups have held hunger strikes near the hulking United States Embassy here all week, and while the riot police keep the demonstrators from the gates, they cannot stop the taxi drivers from honking their horns in protest.
In even angrier demonstrations, students have launched firebombs at American military bases here. During a recent music award show, meanwhile, a pop star smashed a model of an American tank on live television, drawing a rousing cheer. Foreign diplomats say universities have withdrawn speaking invitations to the American ambassador, for fear of trouble if he appeared on campus.
South Korea and the United States have long been the closest of trans-Pacific friends, but the recent turbulence goes well beyond youthful fashion or passing unrest in a country with a long tradition of protest. The growing estrangement has been evident in the race for president, to be decided in an election on Dec. 19, and many here are warning that the relationship is undergoing fundamental changes, with even more difficult times ahead.
Roh Moo Hyun, the candidate who holds a narrow lead according to opinion polls, has repeatedly criticized Washington's Korean policies as "hard-line," and he boldly said that if elected he would "guarantee the security of North Korea." The 37,000 American troops here are committed to protecting South Korea from any attack by North Korea, and President Bush has said the North is a member of an "axis of evil."
The immediate source of anti-American sentiment was an incident in June in which two 14-year-old girls were accidentally crushed by an American armored vehicle as they walked to a birthday party on a narrow road north of Seoul. Simmering anger has flared into outrage with the acquittal last month of two United States Army sergeants by an American panel in a military trial.
But many authorities say the divide has deeper roots, involving this country's rapid passage to affluence and its perception that its distant ally is heavy handed and insensitive, particularly with regard to North Korea.
Relations are worse than they have been in about 25 years, said Shim Jae Hoon, an analyst of Korean affairs. Others say even longer.
"The main issue then was human rights," said Mr. Shim. "Today the main issue is North-South relations. The two countries don't see eye to eye on foreign policy, and neither of them is handling the worsening relationship very well."
The widening gulf between the two allies, and in their perceptions of North Korea, is reflected in numerous public opinion polls. In September, a Gallup Korea poll found that a majority of 1,056 South Koreans surveyed felt there was little or no chance of an attack by North Korea. After a disputed call during the 2002 Winter Olympics, when a jostled South Korean skater lost the gold medal to an American rival, another Gallup poll here reported that nearly 60 percent of respondents "disliked" the United States.
Another poll taken before the deaths of the schoolgirls, which was published in November 2000 by The Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, found that only 42 percent of respondents supported maintaining the current number of American troops in South Korea, while 15 percent supported withdrawing them altogether.
Mr. Roh, a labor lawyer and a former legislator and cabinet member with a background in social activism who has never visited the United States, also once said that American troops were not needed in South Korea. Nowadays he calls the military alliance vital.
But he routinely emphasizes that this is an alliance badly in need of a revision, and the popular anger toward the United States has even forced his main rival, Lee Hoi Chang, a conservative whose international views are generally more in line with those of the Bush administration, to campaign for major changes.
For a half century, the alliance has been the bedrock of South Korea's prosperity and of Washington's security planning in Asia.
Few countries have made the economic strides that South Korea has made in recent decades. It leads the world in broadband Internet access, and it is second in shipbuilding; it is also the third-leading producer of semiconductors and fifth in automobile manufacturing.
An important psychological lift came in June when South Korea served as a co-host, with Japan, for the World Cup soccer tournament, and its team made it to the semifinals. For the first time in the modern era, Koreans feel a swaggering sense of self-assurance.
Yet daily life still serves up rude collisions between this newfound confidence and the country's dependence on what many Koreans now consider an ally that sometimes seems overbearing.
For travelers, a bracing dose of this comes upon arrival at South Korea's dazzling new airport, just outside Seoul, where often the first thing passengers may see are American sergeants in combat fatigues barking orders to arriving American servicemembers.
Also jarring is the gigantic Yongsan Army Garrison, covering 630 acres in the heart of this crowded city. The location of the post, in the center of the capital, is often justified by the nearness of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea - 40 miles away - but it is still something that other countries with American bases, like Japan and Germany, do not have to endure.
"We have a joint working group with our Korean partners to study ways to move this out of the central city," said the American ambassador, Thomas C. Hubbard. "We recognize the imposition that having a command headquarters in the middle of Seoul causes for many Koreans."
Diplomatically, on both sides of the Pacific, many people say things began to go wrong at the first meeting between the freshly inaugurated President Bush and President Kim Dae Jung at the White House in March 2001. Mr. Kim came to Washington hoping to maintain the momentum of the last months of the Clinton administration, when it appeared that a historic security agreement with North Korea was in reach.
Instead of an endorsement, many South Koreans, including some who are not partisans of Mr. Kim, felt that Mr. Bush showed insufficient deference to their president and was dismissive of Mr. Kim's policy of reconciliation with North Korea.
For his part, Mr. Kim failed to understand how much Washington's outlook had shifted with the change in administrations, his critics say. "The perception is that the U.S. has been vacillating, but over the years, the Koreans have vacillated at least as much as the U.S. has," said one Western diplomat.
Things have only grown worse since then, with Washington leading a campaign to force North Korea to abandon a nuclear weapons program whose existence, secret until recently, violates many arms control agreements. South Korean officials say that their country's intelligence agencies, and not the United States as is commonly believed, first detected the existence of the North Korean nuclear program, and yet Mr. Kim, in the waning months of his presidency, has continued to press for engagement with the North. Mr. Kim is barred by the Constitution from seeking a second five-year term.
With their overwhelming economic superiority and vastly better weaponry compared with their neighbor, South Koreans increasingly regard an unprovoked attack by North Korea as unimaginable, and public opinion has largely followed Mr. Kim. More than 62 percent of 1,013 respondents in a Sisa Journal-Media Research survey earlier this year called Mr. Bush's approach toward North Korea unhelpful.
"The Bush administration looked at the political calendar and made a calculation that they would be in office after Kim Dae Jung, and have given the appearance of just trying to wait him out," said Scott Snyder, the Korea representative of the Asia Foundation. "The unintended consequence is that Koreans have been getting the impression that their country isn't taken seriously.
"Depending on what happens with North Korea," Mr. Snyder said, "I think the entire relationship could be on the table."
Western diplomats deny there has ever been a strategy to simply await the end of Mr. Kim's term to reactivate diplomacy concerning North Korea. In any event, today the payoff of such an approach looks uncertain at best.
Until less than a month ago, Mr. Lee, the conservative opposition leader, looked like a shoo-in for the presidency, but the merger of Mr. Roh's campaign with that of a third-party candidate and the uproar over the American acquittals in the deaths of the two girls have transformed the tenor of the race. The changes helped make a favorite out of Mr. Roh, whose diffidence toward Washington would almost certainly make for a pricklier relationship.
Some analysts say that the biggest challenge to the South Korean-American alliance may be generational. Since the division of the Korean Peninsula was solidified after the Korean War, South Koreans have felt an ache from the separation of tens of thousands of families. Despite this country's prosperity, there is a deep anger over having been victimized by outside powers.
"For Koreans, it is very ironic that we were divided by World War II, and Japan, your defeated enemy, was not," said Chung Mong Joon, the scion of the Hyundai industrial empire, and the unsuccessful candidate who merged his campaign with Mr. Roh's. "In Europe, Germany was defeated and divided, but Japan was aided by the Korean War, which left us divided. This is very unfair."
As the generations age, fewer people have memories of the horrors of the Korean War, and of the poverty that South Korea overcame, and that benefits North Korea.
"There are perfectly sound arguments that can be made for the U.S. presence, but they are less clear now that they have been in some time," said Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "In the meantime, U.S. forces are making sonic booms over people's houses, causing environmental damage and doing the unpleasant things that unattached men all over the world sometimes do.
"If the alliance has a purpose that is spelled out, then people can tolerate these sorts of things," Mr. Eberstadt added. "If not, we will have problems."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Californians debating the dangers of N-waste
Sunday, December 8, 2002
By Miguel Bustillo
Los Angeles Times
http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,450019278,00.html
For at least a decade, California has allowed mildly radioactive waste from old nuclear sites to go to recycling plants and city dumps not licensed to handle radioactive material of any type.
Yet neither landfill owners nor their employees, nearby residents nor elected officials, were ever notified of the state's policy, details of which are only now becoming public after a lawsuit and questions from concerned state lawmakers.
Anti-nuclear activists, environmental groups and others are demanding to know more about where the state has allowed the waste - mostly soil, concrete and metal with residual traces of radiation - to be disposed of.
But the California Department of Health Services contends that it did not keep detailed records on slightly radioactive trash because officials never considered it contaminated enough to pose a health hazard.
"There is a lot of public fear and concern about anything radioactive; it's a polarizing issue," said the deputy director of the Health Services Department, Kevin Reilly. But the slightly radioactive trash, he said, "does not pose a significant health risk. And it is not just California's opinion; it is a near-universal opinion within the scientific community.
"When you get down to low levels, you don't have any scientific evidence to suggest they are a threat, especially when you take into account the ability of the human body to repair itself," he added.
Experts disagree on whether exposure to the material - most commonly debris from old buildings where radioactive experiments took place - is a serious health risk.
The danger is greatest for those who live or work near the waste and are more likely than others to be exposed to it repeatedly.
And even though they insist that the waste is harmless, state attorneys refuse to release records on its likely sources - the more than 1,400 former nuclear sites that the state has released from oversight in the last 15 years - because of post-Sept. 11 concerns that terrorists might be trying to collect radioactive materials for a "dirty bomb."
State legislators and environmental groups alarmed by the dumping had hoped to examine the inventory of sites to determine the danger for themselves.
They criticized the state's decision to keep the information private, saying it raises troubling questions about the nature of the radioactive junk that might have been shipped from the sites. The state claimed to have decommissioned the sites only after they were cleaned up to safe levels.
"It's so safe we can sprinkle it on your children's cereal, but we can't tell you about it because Osama bin Laden might want to use it to make a bomb to blow up Los Angeles? There's a bit of a disconnect there," said Daniel Hirsch of the anti-nuclear Committee to Bridge the Gap. He noted that the old sites were supposedly cleaned up to safe levels before the state unconditionally released them from oversight.
Meanwhile, Gov. Gray Davis' administration is moving forward with new guidelines to allow at least some dumping and recycling to continue.
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos Probed For Misuse of Funds
Nuclear Lab Fires 2 Whistleblowers
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24305-2002Dec7?language=printer
House investigators, following up on a criminal probe launched by the FBI, have asked for dozens of records relating to allegations of illegal procurement practices, theft and misuse of government funds at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Three employees of the nation's oldest nuclear weapons facility are on administrative leave, and several others are under investigation, officials said last week. Two lab employees who filed a whistleblower complaint about the lab's handling of their reports of irregularities were fired Nov. 25.
Saying that the events have raised "serious questions" about procurement policies and oversight practices, Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) requested the records in a letter to Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of California, which manages the facility under a contract with the federal government that expires in 2005.
Greenwood, who is chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, gave the university until Monday to provide the material. He said staff investigators would be sent to Los Alamos as early as this week to interview officials.
"We're determined to get to the bottom of this mess," committee spokesman Kenneth Johnson said Friday.
The discovery in 1999 that Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee had downloaded classified nuclear information onto portable computer disks that could not all be accounted for prompted demands for improved controls at one of the world's premier government laboratories.
Officials said there is no evidence of new security breaches or loss of classified material in the new allegations, and no one has been charged with a crime. But several investigators said the disclosures and the lab's response suggest that management problems still may exist.
"In terms of specific issues at Los Alamos right now, the university is determined to get to the bottom of any problem and respond appropriately," said Jeff Garberson, a spokesman for the University of California.
On Oct. 31, FBI agents armed with search warrants entered the homes of two employees attached to the lab's nonproliferation and international security division. Sources said investigators are attempting to determine whether thousands of dollars worth of goods recovered, ranging from hunting knives and clothing to lock-picking devices, may have been acquired through the improper use of government purchasing orders.
Both men are on administrative leave, lab officials confirmed. Investigators are also looking into whether a third employee, also on leave, may have tried to use a government credit card to buy an automobile. The employee denied the charge, sources said.
Greenwood said Friday that his staff was also concerned about the lab's recent firing of Glenn Walp and Steven Doran, who had joined the lab's Office of Security Inquiries earlier this year. The office is charged, among other things, with looking into property loss and vandalism.
Walp, a retired commissioner of the Pennsylvania state police, said last week that he learned of a major theft problem at the lab soon after arriving. Separately, he said, informants inside the lab also contacted the FBI, which began an investigation in July.
But Walp said he and Doran were taken off the investigation into illegal use of purchasing orders several days before the FBI search. Subsequently, Walp said, lab officials were reluctant to press criminal charges against an employee suspected of falsifying a voucher.
Walp and Doran received top evaluations in October, Walp said. But he said lab officials may have been angered when a memo he had written in March outlining his concerns about theft and misuse of taxpayer money had been leaked to the media. He denied responsibility.
Lab spokesman Jim Danneskiold said Walp and Doran were fired because they had "lost the confidence of the organization they were required to work with."
-------- new york
Report Finds Security Flaws at Indian Point
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/nyregion/08INDI.html
Security guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant did not believe they could protect the plant from an attack, and said their bosses discouraged them from raising security concerns, according to a report written early this year for the plant's owner.
"Only 19 percent of the security officers stated that they could adequately defend the plant after the terrorist event of Sept. 11," the report, which was completed by a security consultant to the plant's owner last January, said. It also questioned the training and fitness of the guards.
"Some officers believe that as many as 50 percent of the force may not be physically able to meet the demands of defending the plant," said the report, a copy of which was given to The New York Times by Riverkeeper, an environmental group that wants the plant closed. "The current physical agility test is extremely lax and is not adequate to evaluate the actual physical conditioning of the security force."
Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the company that recently bought Indian Point's two active reactors, said that many concerns raised by the report had been addressed. The company, a subsidiary of Entergy Corporation, one of the nation's largest power companies, also said that the plant met security requirements set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an assessment confirmed by the commission and by the report.
But in interviews, several current and former guards said that if anything, the report understated the problems, many of which persist, and they still consider the plant very vulnerable.
Guards told of minimal training, of other guards reporting for duty drunk, of security drills that were carefully staged to ensure that mock attackers would be repelled, and of out-of-shape guards forced to work 70 to 80 hours a week or more. Both the guards and the report referred repeatedly to often-broken electronic security equipment.
An Entergy spokesman, James F. Steets, said, "We accepted the conclusions in the report," though he added that "some parts of that report might be overly alarming."
"We took it seriously," he said, "and we took appropriate actions to address the findings in it."
Among the improvements made in the last year were a new perimeter fence, concrete barriers near the main gate, more-sophisticated security cameras and bullet-resistant enclosures for guards in a few spots.
But guards said that many of the problems listed in the report had not been addressed, including frequent breakdowns in alarm systems that are supposed to warn of an unauthorized entry into the plant. They told of alarm tripwires held together with electrical tape. Fitness requirements for guards have not changed, and the guards' training, they said, has changed little.
"This assessment of security at Indian Point confirms what we've suspected all along, which is that the plant is not adequately defended from a terrorist attack," said the executive director of Riverkeeper, Alex Matthiessen. "If this isn't a wake-up call for elected officials, I don't know what is."
Mr. Steets said the plant's problems were inherited. Entergy Nuclear Northeast bought the Unit 3 reactor from the New York Power Authority in 2000, and Unit 2 from Consolidated Edison last year, days before Sept. 11.
Some concerns, like long hours, have been fairly common in the nuclear power industry, but others, like the manipulation of security drills and the suppression of security complaints, have not.
Indian Point's critics, who have been vigorously campaigning to shut it down, call it a special case. The plant, in Buchanan, in northern Westchester County, is in the most densely populated area of any nuclear plant in the country, and it lies in the flight path taken by one of the hijacked jets that struck the World Trade Center.
The security report deals only with Unit 2. Guards said security conditions were marginally better at Unit 3, but that work hours were longer there.
Entergy directly employs the Unit 3 guards, who are paid somewhat higher wages than those at Unit 2, who work for the Wackenhut Corporation, a large company under contract to provide security to Indian Point and to other power plants. Calls to Wackenhut were not returned.
Unit 2 has experienced some highly publicized security lapses this year. In September, a Glock semiautomatic handgun carried by one of the guards was reported missing from Unit 2; it still has not been found.
Entergy commissioned the security report in November 2001, to respond to complaints raised by guards before and after Sept. 11, and it addresses a few specific areas. The author, Keith G. Logan, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigator, interviewed more than 50 guards at Unit 2.
The 33-page report says that 59 percent of the guards "stated that they believe that a chilled environment exists" about raising security concerns, and that 12 percent reported that they had suffered retaliation for doing so.
Guards told Mr. Logan that their supervisors admonished them for trying to raise security concerns during their group meetings. They said supervisors told guards not to fill out incident reports about security lapses - reports that must be filed and become a part of the plant's official record. Instead, they insisted that the complaints be written on blank sheets of paper.
"The chilled environment, that's an issue that we immediately addressed, with training and emphasizing the value of our employee-concerns program," Mr. Steets said. He said that discouraging people from filing formal written reports was "clearly unacceptable," but he could not say if the practice had ended.
The plant increased the number of guards on each shift after Sept. 11, by having them work more. A standard workweek now is five or six 12-hour shifts, and guards say that often, shifts are extended to 16 hours, or that they are ordered to work extra days.
Mr. Logan's report did not directly address the issue, but guards said that fatigue was a serious problem. Even before Sept. 11, they said, mandatory overtime was common and many of them felt they were too tired to perform well.
"They are working six 12's, we recognize that," Mr. Steets said. "In January, we plan to hire about 30 new officers to accommodate that."
Several guards spoke of a handful of instances of guards reporting for duty drunk and being sent home, but not disciplined. A security sergeant, Foster Zeh, said that twice he reported one officer for showing up "drunk as a skunk," but that the officer was not punished. The officer has since left the plant.
Mr. Steets said no record of such incidents existed, and that management was unaware of them, "so I really wonder whether that's true or not."
Mr. Zeh is on a paid suspension, Mr. Steets said, but he would not say why. Mr. Zeh said that he was not given a reason, but that he believed the suspension was in retaliation for his complaints about security.
Guards say their training and testing is very limited, and anyone who can walk at a steady pace, climb a few flights of stairs and shoot a gun with moderate accuracy can pass the employment test. In interviews with The Times and with Mr. Logan, many guards complained that their colleagues were in very poor physical shape, and had to be given multiple chances to pass agility and shooting tests. Mr. Logan found that some test results - though not of tests required by federal rules - had been falsified.
"Our whole security program is based on what is required of us by the N.R.C., and we meet those requirements," Mr. Steets said.
Mr. Zeh, who helped train other guards, and who recently moved to Unit 3 after five years at Unit 2, said they received no meaningful training in tactics. "There's no ability to act together as a team," he said. "The testing is a joke. An armed assault on the plant cannot be stopped. It's that simple."
Several guards complained that "force-on-force" drills, in which an incursion into the plant is simulated, were too controlled - an area Mr. Logan's report did not touch on. An attack team includes no more than three people; the regulatory commission is considering requiring larger numbers.
"The people playing the attackers were given specific routes of travel, and if they deviated from the routes of travel, the management had a cow," said John R. Kite, who was a sergeant at the plant until early this year, when he quit and moved to Arizona. "The defenders had done this enough times, they knew exactly what the routes could be. The attackers were told to take it easy. And even so, the defenders a lot of times couldn't stop them."
Mr. Steets said: "Yes, those drills are proscribed for the attackers, but they do run a variety of scenarios, so the defenders don't know. We're not aware of anyone being told not to push it. That's something we might look into."
Mr. Kite's account of the drills was confirmed by several other guards who still work at the plant and who asked that their names not be used because they feared retaliation. Mr. Zeh said the simulated attacks were "designed to fail."
Mr. Logan's report also referred to complaints of sexual harassment of guards; again, guards said that the problem was more prevalent than the report indicates, and went beyond sexual harassment. A Jewish guard has sued the plant, charging that he was subjected to anti-Semitism. Some guards tell of colleagues' being abused because they were female, black or gay.
--------
Report: Nuclear Plant Owner Finds Flaws
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Indian-Point.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Security guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant do not believe they could protect the plant from an attack, and said there was no encouragement to raise security concerns, a published report said Sunday.
``Only 19 percent of the security officers stated that they could adequately defend the plant after the terrorist event of Sept. 11,'' said a report conducted for the plant's owner and obtained by The New York Times.
The 33-page report also said 59 percent of the guards described a ``chilled environment'' for raising security concerns, and that 12 percent said they had suffered retaliation for doing so.
Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the company that owns Indian Point's two active reactors, commissioned the report in November 2001 in response to complaints by guards made both before and after the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.
An Entergy spokesman told The Times many of the security concerns had been resolved since the report was completed last January.
The New York Times obtained a copy of the report from Riverkeeper, an environmental group that wants the plant closed.
-------- us politics
Return of the Iran-Contra brigade
Sunday December 8, 2002
The Observer (UK)
http://observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,856095,00.html
The selection of Elliot Abrams last week as President George Bush's director of Middle Eastern affairs triggered a cloud of controversy over both the administration's Middle East policy.
Abrams pleaded guilty in 1987 to withholding information from about the Nicaraguan Contra case from Congress, before being pardoned by the first President Bush in 1992. Four officials now in the Bush administration worked for President Reagan in the mid-1980s, when money from arms sales to Iran was diverted to aid the Contra rebels in Nicaragua:
Elliott Abrams
NOW Senior director for Near East and North African Affairs at the National Security Council
THEN Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
Pleaded guilty to withholding information about the case from Congress. Was later pardoned by President George Bush Sr
John D. Negroponte
NOW US Ambassador to the United Nations
THEN Ambassador to Honduras
Was the Reagan administration's 'point man' for efforts to back the Contras from Nicaragua's neighbour, Honduras
John M. Poindexter
NOW Director of the Information Awareness Office at the Pentagon's research agency
THEN National Security Adviser
Was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts, including making false statements to Congress. The convictions were later overturned
Otto J. Reich
NOW Special envoy for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and was Assistant Secretary of State
THEN Director of the office of public diplomacy at the State Department
Led an office found to have engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda to generate support for the Contras
----
NEWS ANALYSIS
Will Bush's March to War Be Slowed?
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/middleeast/08ASSE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - The arrival of Iraq's encyclopedic declaration of weapons data this weekend impels the Bush administration toward the last "off ramp" along the road to war.
Even as America mobilizes for a campaign to disarm and decapitate the Baghdad government, President Bush is facing final determination of whether the Iraqi arms declaration is an honest rendering - a step toward disarmament - or a capricious lie that establishes the basis for disarmament by force, a step Mr. Bush says he will take as a last resort.
Therefore the last off ramp - the expression is a favorite of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell - is the one that leads to a relentless United Nations inspection program, backed by a credible threat of force, that persuades Mr. Hussein to surrender everything that could be construed as illicit weapons or the banned tools for making them.
It may be wishful thinking that Mr. Hussein can ever change or abandon his ambition to lead the Arab world. But the question that clings to the capital like the first snow of winter is whether anything will be enough for Mr. Bush.
"Everyone in this town who claims to know the president's mind says he is determined to finish off the Saddam weapons of mass destruction problem and the regime," said Fritz W. Ermarth, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council under the first President Bush and is now a resident at the Nixon Center.
Still, he added: "We are at a colossally important milestone. How this plays out is extremely important for the international order, for the credibility of the United States as a power, and as a consensus leading power, or not."
Diplomats and statesmen were seized by the momentousness of the deliberations over Iraq. Many echoed Mr. Ermarth, saying that decisions made in coming weeks will heavily influence the rules for security, war and intervention at a time of unrivaled American power.
Yet most Americans seem to focus more immediately on whether there will be another military dash across the desert like the one the president's father ordered in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Polling data shows that an impressive majority of Americans are game. They would like Mr. Bush to work within the United Nations system in confronting Iraq, but also realize that he may not be able to abide constraints on the goals he has set for himself for changing the Iraqi government.
Mr. Ermarth, who used to make his living handicapping the likelihood of nuclear war, regional conflicts and other great events for the Central Intelligence Agency, sees the possibility of delay and obfuscation by Mr. Hussein.
"Saddam is playing for delay, and a lot of other international actors are playing for that, too," he said. Other nations, some close allies, want time to see what the inspections yield. Others want to see more intelligence on whether Iraq actually has the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon over the next five years.
"We all know that Saddam is a terrible fellow," said Brian Urquhart, a former under secretary general of the United Nations. "But there is no real serious or credible information about his nuclear program." With inspectors now inside the country, he asks why not give them time to find the truth about the risks.
At the United Nations, there was a substantial measure of skepticism that Mr. Bush was looking for an off ramp at all. Some officials questioned whether the administration, with its bellicose statements on regime change, was trying to undermine the diplomatic and inspection track.
"There is a very fine line between showing a seriousness of intent and conveying the impression that you are going to war no matter what happens, and that fine line should not be crossed," said a United Nations official who spent the week trying to evaluate the statements emanating from Washington. "It is one thing to show determination to go to war if inspections fail, but it is quite another to convey that whether inspections succeed or not, the intent is to go to war."
What seemed new this season was that the president, in a prominent interview with Bob Woodward, extended earlier public remarks on how fighting terrorism would be the focus of his presidency into a broader vision that seems almost quixotic.
Mr. Bush described his presidency as one devoted to confronting the remaining despotic regimes in the world. He said he loathed Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, for "starving his people."
Mr. Bush told Mr. Woodward, "They tell me we don't need to move too fast" to take action to free oppressed peoples. "I just don't buy that," he said. "Either you believe in freedom, and want to - and worry about the human condition, or you don't."
These comments suggest that Mr. Bush is not engaged in an opportunistic whipping up of an Iraq crisis, as some of his critics allege, as a way to divert the country from a troubled economy during the election campaign. They also suggest that Mr. Bush might not be willing to take the last off ramp, even though a timely exit would allow him to pocket the credit for bringing Iraq back under United Nations supervision.
The hawks in the administration are now nervous, some observers say.
"They are nervous that he will not pull the trigger," said Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University who has advised both the Bush and Clinton administrations on Russian policy.
"They thought they were in the driver's seat," he said, "and now they are panicked" because they agreed to drive Mr. Bush to the United Nations, which is now in charge on the ground in Iraq. Their fear is that Mr. Bush will balk at writing unilateral rules of the new international game.
For now, administration officials seemed poised to make significant investments in an extended United Nations inspection effort.
War could still break out, but Mr. Ermarth, asked to assess the odds, said, "By a hair, I would bet that things get dragged out." But there is always the winter after next.
--------
Senators Urge Bush to Release Evidence of Banned Arms in Iraq
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/politics/08WIRE-IRAQ.html
WASHINGTON -- The White House must decide soon to release intelligence data to the United Nations and the public if the Bush administration is to make its case that Iraq is lying when it denies that it holds or is developing weapons of mass destruction, lawmakers said Sunday.
"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons program, said Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla.
The timing for the release of that information to Americans and the world, he said on CBS' "Face the Nation," "is going to be an important strategic decision for this administration." He compared the situation to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the Kennedy administration came forth with information on Soviet missile sites in Cuba.
Baghdad, in releasing a 12,000-page arms document Saturday, denied it was producing or stocking weapons of mass destruction. President Bush has rejected that and warned that continued Iraqi attempts to hide the arms could lead to military retaliation.
Last week, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said there was a "solid basis" for assertions that Saddam possessed banned weapons, and the United States would provide intelligence to U.N. inspectors. He did not say what the evidence was.
"It may very well be that the advice of our allies will be that we ought to go very public, that we ought to have worldwide opinion," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the next Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. "I think these are delicate judgments."
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota told CNN's "Late Edition" that he supported going public with information that contradicts Saddam's denials. "We have to put our best evidence forward, especially if it's a question of Saddam Hussein again denying all of these assertions," Daschle said.
He said U.S. intelligence, the Iraqi arms documents and the results of U.N. inspectors must be scrupulously analyzed before the United States decides its next course of action.
Former Vice President Al Gore, speaking on ABC's "This Week," acknowledged that the administration "is really facing a difficult situation here" in deciding whether to stick to a multilateral, inspections-based approach or take unilateral action in response to Iraqi deceptions.
But he said that if it could be proved that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, the United States would be justified in using military force regardless of whether the United Nations had voted its approval.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
By Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
Sunday Herald (UK)
08 September 2002
http://www.sundayherald.com/print27572
THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological wea pons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defence Dep-artment documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's rep orts on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programmes.'
This assistance, according to the report, included 'chemical warfare-agent precursors, chem ical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment'.
Donald Riegle, then chairman of the committee, said: 'UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licences issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programmes.'
Riegle added that, between January 1985 and August 1990, the 'executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licences for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record'.
It is thought the information contained in the Senate committee reports is likely to make up much of the 'evidence of proof' that Bush and Blair will reveal in the coming days to justify the US and Britain going to war with Iraq. It is unlikely, however, that the two leaders will admit it was the Western powers that armed Saddam with these weapons of mass destruction.
However, Bush and Blair will also have to prove that Saddam still has chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities. This looks like a difficult case to clinch in view of the fact that Scott Ritter, the UN's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, says the United Nations des troyed most of Iraq's wea pons of mass destruction and doubts that Saddam could have rebuilt his stocks by now.
According to Ritter, between 90% and 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were des troyed by the UN. He believes the remainder were probably used or destroyed during 'the ravages of the Gulf War'.
Ritter has described himself as a 'card-carrying Republican' who voted for George W Bush. Nevertheless, he has called the president a 'liar' over his claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat to America.
Ritter has also alleged that the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons emits certain gases, which would have been detected by satellite. 'We have seen none of this,' he insists. 'If Iraq was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof.'
He also dismisses claims that Iraq may have a nuclear weapons capacity or be on the verge of attaining one, saying that gamma-particle atomic radiation from the radioactive materials in the warheads would also have been detected by western surveillance.
The UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and former UN under-secretary general, Count Hans von Sponeck, has also told the Sunday Herald that he believes the West is lying about Iraq's weapons programme.
Von Sponeck visited the Al-Dora and Faluja factories near Baghdad in 1999 after they were 'comprehensively trashed' on the orders of UN inspectors, on the grounds that they were suspected of being chemical weapons plants. He returned to the site late in July this year, with a German TV crew, and said both plants were still wrecked.
'We filmed the evidence of the dishonesty of the claims that they were producing chemical and biological weapons,' von Sponeck has told the Sunday Herald. 'They are indeed in the same destroyed state which we witnessed in 1999. There was no trace of any resumed activity at all.'
-------- balkans
Serbian Elections Fail Again, Observers Say
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Serbian-Elections.html
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Serbia failed for a second time to elect a president on Sunday, as too few voters showed up to cast ballots, deepening a political crisis in the dominant Yugoslav republic, according to exit polls.
The Center for Free Elections and Democracy, an independent group of observers, said turnout was around 45 percent, about the same as when the vote failed in October for not meeting the required 50 percent turnout.
``We can definitely say'' the elections failed, said Zoran Lucic, a group spokesman.
The low turnout was a serious blow to the top contender, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who gathered 58 percent of the vote Sunday, independent observers said. Kostunica, a moderate nationalist with pro-democratic views, also dominated the October ballot.
It was unclear what would happen if officials declared Sunday's vote invalid. The Serbian constitution has no provisions regarding the repeated failure of the vote. But a failure likely would fuel the political feud between Kostunica and his top rival, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.
Djindjic's pro-Western government did not field its own candidate and has refrained from endorsing Kostunica -- mostly because of his nationalist and anti-reformist views.
Kostunica has indicated he would seek early parliamentary elections in an effort to bring down Djindjic. His rival would like to see the law changed to have the president elected by Serbia's parliament, instead of by a popular vote.
That would give Djindjic a chance to nominate a candidate of his choice who would be assured of victory because Djindjic controls the Serbian legislature.
Kostunica led the popular movement in 2000 that toppled Slobodan Milosevic, the autocratic Yugoslav ex-president now on trial for war crimes at the U.N. court in The Hague, Netherlands.
He faced two extremists: Vojislav Seselj of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party -- an ally of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and Borislav Pelevic of the Serbian Unity Party, founded by late Serb warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan.
Exit polls also showed that Seselj won 36 percent, while Pelevic had 3.4 percent, election monitors said.
Complete unofficial results were expected later Sunday. Many voters stayed home amid widespread apathy and freezing temperatures, analysts said.
Slow economic and social reforms, scandals and perpetual power struggles between Kostunica and Djindjic have disillusioned Serbs, who are more concerned with their dire living standards and rampant unemployment.
Though the national currency, the dinar, has remained stable, buying power has eroded as prices climb. The cost of feeding a family of four has risen from $150 to $400 per month in the past two years, according to government figures.
``What is there to vote for when nothing will change after Sunday?'' asked Radmila Micic, an unemployed economist and mother of two. ``I'd better stay home Sunday and see to lunch.''
The presidential vote, two years after Milosevic's ouster, aims to pick a successor to incumbent Milan Milutinovic, whose term ends in January.
Milutinovic was indicted along with Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo and likely will face extradition once his mandate expires. From his Netherlands prison cell, Milosevic has urged Serbs to vote for Seselj.
Serbia's presidency is expected to gain in importance as the post of Yugoslav president will be dismantled when the Yugoslav federation is transformed early next year.
-------- britain
Desert Rat speaks out against war
BBC
December 9, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/2551707.stm
Maj Gen Patrick Cordingley thinks a Gulf War will be a massacre The man who led the Allied armoured forces into Iraq during the last Gulf War has criticised those planning renewed military action against Saddam Hussein.
Major General Patrick Cordingley believes a second Gulf War would be pointless as it would only lead to tens of thousands of Iraqis being needlessly killed.
As commander of the Desert Rats (the 7th Armoured Brigade) during the 1991 conflict, he led the Allied armoured forces into Iraq.
But despite such heavy involvement last time around, Maj Gen Cordingley has told BBC One's Panorama programme that he has strong reservations about a fresh conflict.
In the Gulf War, the British and Americans lost less than three hundred men, while the Iraqis lost tens of thousands.
Catastrophic
Inevitably the enemy will take a large number of casualties
Maj Gen Patrick Cordingley
Maj Gen Cordingley now fears that the Iraqi land forces - which have been weakened by sanctions - could suffer even heavier losses if the armed forces are sent in again.
He said: "I think it is the fact that fire-power today is so massive, so overwhelming, so catastrophic when it's used that inevitably the enemy will take a large number of casualties."
The retired officer also feels that some British soldiers will not feel the cause is just - especially if President Bush decides to attack without the explicit backing of the United Nations.
He added: "It is a great shame if you get a situation where they're being used in a way that the British public are not easy with.
World War III
Robert Baer Ex-CIA man Robert Baer thinks it will be WWIII
"I'm not going to dispute that and they will do their job and get on with it, but if I was a Commander out there, I would feel sad that we're being used in a way that did not have the support of the nation."
Also opposed to another conflict in the Gulf is Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who was wrongly accused by the FBI of plotting to murder Saddam.
In fact, he had been involved in a plot by Kurds and Iraqi dissidents to unseat the Iraqi dictator - encouraging an uprising which was brutally crushed by the Iraqi leader.
But he is against another war in Iraq, believing it will create massive instability in the region.
"What we're inviting is World War Three. In the Middle East. It's too late to invade Iraq a second time," he said.
Revenge
A war against an Arab country is going to cause several governments in the Middle East to fall
Robert Baer
Mr Baer claims that his fears are echoed by his former paymasters in the intelligence business.
He added: "I talk to people in the CIA. They're worried about the stability of the region."
"A land war or a massive air war, against an Arab country is going to cause several governments in the Middle East to fall. Among them Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and possibly Egypt.
"I think people in Washington are so hurt, so damaged by the attacks on September 11th, that they want to take revenge. And Saddam happens to be the vehicle."
Panorama: the Case Against War, will be shown on BBC One on Sunday 8 December at 2240 GMT.
-------- colombia
At least 23 die in Colombian violence
AFP
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 08, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=30624251
BOGOTA: At least 23 people have died in a wave of violence around Colombia including seven rebels killed in a foiled bomb attack on a strategic oilfield, authorities said on Saturday.
Two indigenous leaders, a teacher and a farmer were murdered late Saturday by unidentified gunmen, and another two indigenous people were kidnapped in Florida, southwest of Bogota, in one of the worst incidents.
And seven National Liberation Army (ELN) leftist rebels were killed as they attempted to bomb the Cano Limon oil field, one of the biggest in the South American country, General Martin Carreno said.
The rebels were surprised by air transported troops as they prepared to bomb the installations.
On Friday, the military stymied an attempt to bomb the pipeline by the ELN. An explosion last month attributed to the same rebel group disrupted the production of some 95,000 barrels of oil.
The pipeline, which carries oil from the Cano Limon oilfield and is operated by US firm Occidental Petroleum, normally produces some 105,000 barrels of oil per day.
Washington has offered to train Colombia's military brigades to protect the 780 km of pipeline.
The ELN is opposed to foreign involvement in Colombia's oil industry.
The National Liberation Army is Colombia's second-largest rebel force, with some 4,000 members.
On Friday five rebels with the country's largest rebel group, the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), were killed by army troops, while two soldiers were killed when they stepped on a FARC minefield.
-------- iraq
Iraq says chem-bio programs ended in '91
December 8, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021208-115105-4471r.htm
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 -- Iraq said Sunday all its chemical and biological weapons programs came to an end in 1991 and that the country had never reached the assembly or testing stage for nuclear weapons.
Current United Nations weapons inspections, mandated in November by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, were "intrusive," disruptive and a bitter pill, but Iraq would cooperate, it said.
"Some things are like medicine," Brig. Amer al-Saadi, a scientific adviser to President Saddam Hussein told reporters at a Baghdad news conference broadcast abroad. "They are bitter pills."
Al-Saadi, speaking the day after Iraq turned over a nearly 12,000-page report to the Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency, said the report detailed all previous programs, actions taken to dismantle them, and steps taken over the years to meet U.N. mandates.
The report, he said, answered U.S. and British accusations about a continued development and possession of proscribed weapons "truthfully, honestly and comprehensively" and was not a "telephone book" -- a clear reference to an earlier White House jibe.
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., speaking of Fox News Sunday, said he doubted the veracity of the Iraqi documentation.
"There's always a chance (it is accurate)," he said. "But it would represent one of the most shocking and I suppose encouraging conversions in world history, which is that Saddam would start telling the truth instead of lying as he has been for more than a decade to the United Nations, cheating deceiving."
Lieberman said the 100 pounds of documents, based on intelligence reports he's seen, Iraq's past lies and other evidence, were probably a "12,000-page, 100-pound lie."
Richard Butler, former head of weapons inspector before they department Iraq in 1998 over Baghdad's non-compliance and interference with the inspection process, also took a cautious approach.
"Of course there will be useful information there," he said on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. "Iraq has followed a technique that it's used in the past of almost trying to kill with kindness.
"You know, giving so much information that it doesn't necessarily clarify. It actually, to some extent, makes the task more difficult. But leaving that aside, the basic political and real construct here is that Iraq is obliged under international law, not only to have no weapons of mass destruction, but now to declare to the Security Council the exact status of all its relevant programs, weapons related, and those that could be weapons related.
"The job of the inspectors is to verify that declaration. It's to see where it stands out, where it's true and where it's false. And this is what we're now going to see play out. It's a bit like Sherlock Holmes, it's real forensic work, because the inspectors will want to also discern from this document what Iraq has not said."
In destroying its chemical and biological weapons programs, al-Saadi said Iraq had made a "mistake" -- it had also destroyed the documentation of the programs and their termination.
"It never existed after 1991," al-Saadi said when asked about development of VX gas. "It was totally removed."
Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran during its war against the Islamic regime in the 1980s. It also used chemical weapons against dissident Kurds in the north of the country.
Al-Saadi said the report also contains information of dual-technology and materials (items that could have a military application).
Washington and London, which claim to have intelligence proving Iraq is continuing to try to develop such weapons, as well as a nuclear weapons capability, argue that Iraq poses a unique threat to peace. Given Iraq's previous denials of possessing such weapons -- later disproved -- current denials are unreliable, they say.
Under Resolution 1441, passed after strong pressure from the United States, Iraq is considered in material breach of previous U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Any deceit or failure to cooperate fully with new inspections and requirements to disarm, would be considered a new breach, resulting in the international body imposing unspecified "serious consequences."
President Bush has vowed to lead a "coalition of the willing" to forcibly disarm Iraq if it fails to do so voluntarily. Thousands of U.S. troops are already in the Gulf to underline and back up Washington's resolve.
U.N. weapons inspectors will review the documents and redact sensitive passages that could give away arms development techniques before distributing copies to members of the Security Council.
----
A Crude View of the Crisis in Iraq
By Daniel Yergin
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21166-2002Dec6?language=printer
If oil is the question, Iraq is not the answer.
Some people say the Iraq crisis has been manufactured to cloak an "oil grab" by the United States and the American oil industry. Others believe that a liberated Iraq will flood the world market with cheap oil and provide a quick fix for concerns about our energy security.
These perspectives, while very different, are based on a fundamental misperception -- of both scale and timing. Yes, Iraq is a major oil country, with the world's second-largest known reserves. But in terms of production capacity, Iraq represents just 3 percent of the world's total. Its oil exports are on the same level as Nigeria's. Even if Iraq doubled its capacity, that could take more than a decade. In the meantime, growth elsewhere would limit Iraq's eventual share to perhaps 5 percent, significant but still in the second tier of oil nations.
But even that scenario assumes that Iraq will welcome foreign investors on a reasonable timetable -- and, history tells us, that is not a foregone conclusion. After the 1991 Gulf War, a liberated and grateful Kuwait announced that it would open its oil industry to foreign investment in order to boost production. Eleven years later, that still hasn't happened, owing to nationalistic opposition in Kuwait's parliament.
While this crisis is focused on overall security -- Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- there is a clear energy dimension to the confrontation: the security and stability of the Persian Gulf region, from which flows almost a quarter of the world's oil. Saddam Hussein's drive to dominate the region is obvious and cannot be dismissed. He invaded Iran in 1980 and then, a decade later, invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. The other Persian Gulf states have no love for him, and with good reason.
But it requires several leaps of logic -- as well as inattention to developments in the rest of the world's markets, particularly in Russia, the Caspian region and West Africa -- to conclude that the current Iraq crisis is all about oil. No U.S. administration would launch so momentous a campaign just to facilitate a handful of oil development contracts and a moderate increase in supply -- half a decade from now.
How would a Persian Gulf without Saddam affect the future of Iraqi oil? The discussion now underway in Washington and elsewhere -- which takes place under the rubric of "the day after" -- is dominated more by the uncertainties and risks than the benefits. The most immediate question involves a possible war, and the resulting damage that it might do to Iraq's output at the very moment when a new regime would desperately need oil revenues to secure its own stability. There also is much apprehension that Saddam would torch Iraq's oil facilities in a Pyrrhic defeat. That is exactly what Iraqi forces did on their way out of Kuwait in 1991. It took eight months to extinguish the fires in the Kuwaiti oil fields. This time, however, some Iraqi commanders might be loath to obey any such orders, as they would have to answer after the war for their actions.
The next critical issue, when "the day after" arrives, will be the question of authority. Who would be in charge? If there is a temporary military government, either U.N.- or U.S.-led, it would be preoccupied with establishing firm control over Iraq's weaponry and laying the basis as quickly as possible for a new Iraqi government with broad representation. It would certainly be focused on security, including the oil facilities. After all, the country earns the bulk of its living by exporting oil. For that reason, a temporary military authority would be keen to see the "new" Iraq maximize its oil earnings. But a military authority is unlikely to want to get much involved in the decision-making about the future of the industry. Rather, it will try to push the responsibility into the hands of a new Iraqi government -- or an interim group of technocrats.
A new Iraqi government, for its part, will just as surely want to get its hands on its number one economic resource so that it can generate revenue for reconstruction and development. Iraq is not Afghanistan. It has the means, through oil, to pay for rebuilding the country. At the same time, a new government would also be determined to bolster its sovereignty, legitimacy and nationalist credentials -- all of which will be essential requirements for holding the country together. This ensures that Iraq will be a very tough negotiator when it sits down with the oil companies.
It is often assumed in the "it's all about oil" discussions that Iraq would turn over its current 2.8 million barrels per day of production capacity to international companies -- that this is the new "prize" up for grabs. But that's another shaky assumption. If the new Iraqi government brings in foreign companies, it will have to split revenue -- keeping perhaps 88 cents of every dollar of earnings for itself, but with 12 cents or so going to the companies. Why not keep the whole dollar for itself and simply buy what it needs in terms of technology and equipment for the existing fields?
What a post-Saddam government will need is capital -- lots of it -- for exploration and new production from its currently undeveloped fields. And that is where a new regime is likely to turn to international oil companies. But which ones?
It will have no shortage of suitors. Once things are clear, companies will be eager to get in line to sign contracts with a country that has 11 percent of the world's proven reserves. (Saudi Arabia, the highest, has 25 percent; the United States, just two.) But they will be very cautious when it comes to spending billions of dollars until they are pretty confident about security and stability -- and "stability" applies not only to the new regime but also to the contracts they sign.
Companies from several countries -- Russia, France, Italy and China, among others -- already hold contracts, but they are not operational because of U.N. sanctions still in place. Companies without contracts, including the American ones, will have to assess how much time and trouble they are willing to bear. For the oil companies, the big issue, wherever they operate in the world, is how to manage the range of risks -- from the geological to the political. In response, they often work together in consortia and partnerships. This approach hedges their bets, spreads their investments and diversifies their portfolios.
And that's likely to be the outcome for Iraq. The companies with existing contracts will likely team up with other companies -- American, European, Canadian, Australian, Japanese -- to form new partnerships. Such partnerships would meet the crucial need of a new Iraqi government, which would want to strengthen its position by dealing with a diversified political portfolio of companies representing many different nationalities.
None of this will take place swiftly. It might take a new regime a year or so just to get things organized and begin to negotiate contracts. When it does, it will have to face the deteriorating condition of the Iraqi oil industry. Production capacity has dropped from its peak of 3.5 million barrels a day in 1980, before the Iran-Iraq War, to about 2.8 million barrels per day and falling. Reservoirs have been damaged by years of mismanagement. The infrastructure -- whether wells, pipelines, pumping stations or ports -- is in poor shape. Equipment is rusting and malfunctioning. Environmental considerations are widely ignored.
To get back to 3.5 million barrels could take three years or more, at an estimated cost of at least $7 billion. This would put Iraq back into the leagues of Norway, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and Venezuela. Another 2 million barrels per day would require a major push, and it would still leave Iraq several rungs below the capacity of the Big Three producers -- Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia. Making that leap to 5.5 million barrels a day would come sometime after 2010 -- at a cost of upwards of $20 billion.
As its output increased, Iraq would begin jostling its neighbors for market share. Thatwould not, however, give Iraq enough clout to be an OPEC-buster. It would not have the ability to "flood" the market. Nor the desire. Its intense need for revenues would make it much more interested in oil at $20 or $25 a barrel, rather than at a cut-rate $10.
By the year 2010, world oil demand, driven by countries such as China and India, could be almost 90 million barrels a day -- 17 percent greater than today. And where will that oil come from? Here's where the picture grows more complex.
One can already see the beginning of a larger contest. On one side are Russia and the Caspian countries, primarily Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan; on the other side, the Middle East, including Iraq. Over the last three years, spurred by what has been called "the miracle in the Russian oil fields," Russian output has increased by about 25 percent, to 8 million barrels a day. The race heated up with the recent announcement by four Russian oil companies of their intention to build a new Arctic port to export directly to the United States.
Right now, Russia and the Caspian nations seem to have the edge in this race. All that, however, is subject to change. The outcome will be determined not only by geology and the balancing of opportunity and risk by companies, but also by political and economic stability and by the decisions governments make.
But the prize of this larger race to meet growing world demand is very tangible -- by 2010, an additional $100 billion or more a year in oil revenues flowing into national treasuries. After "the day after," Iraq will be in a better position to compete for its share. But it will be only one of several strong contestants.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power," which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He is co-author of "Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy" (Touchstone).
----
Lack of Hard Evidence Complicates U.S. Aims
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page A38
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24123-2002Dec7?language=printer
During his recent trip to Europe to drum up support from the allies, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was asked by NATO ambassadors what it would take to prove that Iraq has failed to give up its weapons of mass destruction. His reply illustrated the subjective nature of the evidence against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, which depends on the eye of the beholder.
"It's like the judge said about pornography," Wolfowitz told the closed-door audience, according to a participant. "I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it."
As Baghdad complies with the deadline set by the U.N. Security Council and hands over a detailed report on Iraqi weapons programs, few experts in or out of government are expecting to find a smoking gun buried in the mound of documentation.
A far more likely result, they say, is further ambiguity about Hussein's arsenal and widely differing opinions about the need for war with Iraq.
While the Bush administration may need little convincing that Iraq is in material breach of U.N. resolutions demanding its disarmament, a much higher standard of evidence will be required to convince key U.S. allies, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, of the case for war. Even Britain, America's most dependable ally, has signaled differences with Washington over how long the inspection process should be permitted to continue before declaring that Hussein is cheating.
Now that Iraq has completed its report, pressure will mount on the United States to produce solid evidence to bolster its contention that Hussein still has an extensive program to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in violation of the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War. U.S. officials have refrained from providing such evidence until now on the grounds that it would enable Baghdad to fill in gaps in its "full and final" accounting of its arsenal.
In briefings last week, senior administration officials went out of their way to play down expectations of dramatic new evidence showing that Iraq has been caught red-handed. As one White House official put it, this will not be like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, shocked the Security Council with spy-plane photos of Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba.
"The intelligence process is an art, not a science, requiring synthesis of a lot of information from a wide variety of sources," said a top administration expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He added that over the last four decades, Iraq and other countries have invested huge resources in covering up their tracks, including moving key facilities underground, making them difficult to detect by overhead surveillance.
Rather than a smoking gun, U.S. officials say, the rest of the world should expect a pattern of telltale signs that lead to "only one logical conclusion": that Hussein still has weapons of mass destruction and "values these weapons very dearly."
In the absence of dramatic, unambiguous evidence proving that Hussein is lying, European officials say much will depend on the conclusions of the U.N. inspection teams allowed back into Iraq last month after four years.
"We must give the inspections a serious chance," a West European diplomat said. "If the Americans want to bring the sensible majority of Security Council members with them, it will have to be on the basis of the inspectors' analysis."
Giving the inspectors a chance raises problems of timing, however. Many experts believe it will take the inspectors many months, if not years, to come up with convincing evidence of large-scale cheating by Baghdad. This will push the timetable for an invasion of Iraq past February, the optimum period for fighting a war, before desert temperatures begin to rise and chemical protection suits become too hot to tolerate.
This explains why some Washington hawks would like to orchestrate a showdown with Iraq over the next few weeks, rather than get involved in a protracted cat-and-mouse game with Baghdad.
"If you think the result of the inspections process will be ambiguous, then the best time to strike is now," said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA expert on Iraq now with the Brookings Institution. "You should make a crisis now because you are not going to have any better cause for a crisis in six months. It is a fantasy to think the inspectors will come up with a smoking gun."
The drawback to engineering a crisis with Iraq based on something less than a smoking gun is that it becomes much more difficult -- although not necessarily impossible -- to assemble an international coalition to overthrow Hussein. Officials from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which are home to large U.S. military bases bordering Iraq, have said they will require a second Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force before allowing their countries to be used as the springboard for an invasion.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, alternative bases are available in Kuwait and Qatar, where the U.S. military has just inaugurated a new command and control center duplicating many of the facilities available at the Prince Sultan air base outside Riyadh.
Turkey's cooperation, however, is crucial for access to northern Iraq, given that neither Iran nor Syria is friendly with the United States.
Bush administration officials have put a good deal of effort into wooing the new Turkish government after the election victory of a moderate Islamic party, many of whose supporters are strongly oppose to a U.S. attack on a neighboring Muslim state. When Wolfowitz visited Ankara last week, he brought a big bag of incentives for Turkey, including economic assistance, a role in deciding the future of northern Iraq and full integration with Europe.
"The United States has become the champion of Turkey joining the European Union," said a European diplomat, noting that Wolfowitz spent one-third of a major foreign policy address in London supporting Turkish political aspirations. "These things are all linked."
U.S. experts on Turkey believe that Ankara will eventually go along with the Bush administration's wishes on Iraq, and provide Washington the facilities it needs, if only because Turkey cannot afford to stand aside, given the geopolitical stakes involved.
Successive Turkish governments have been determined to prevent the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq, fearing that this would encourage secessionist pressures from Turkey's own Kurdish minority.
A former Turkish prime minister, Turgut Ozal, summed up the Turkish dilemma on Iraq when he noted that during the run-up to the Gulf War, Turkey wanted to be "at the table as a guest, not as a menu item."
In order to secure a minimum level of international endorsement of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration will need the support of Britain and France, who have veto rights on the Security Council. While London has loyally supported Washington throughout the current crisis with Iraq, the two governments' positions are not identical. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw last week made clear that London wants the inspectors to be given time to "nail" Hussein's "lies."
France, meanwhile, has the taken the lead in insisting on a second U.N. resolution to clear the way for a U.S. attack on Iraq. In the end, however, most observers expect the French to fall into line. "The French will be persnickety in demanding respect for international law," said a European diplomat, "but when the chips are down, they will be there."
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat: Israel Seeking Cover for Military Campaign
December 8, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-arafat.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Yasser Arafat said on Sunday Israel was using trumped-up accusations of Palestinian links to al Qaeda and U.S. threats of war on Iraq as cover for stepping up its military campaign in Palestinian areas.
Arafat said in an interview with Reuters at his battered West Bank compound that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made clear he had no desire for peace and instead was intent on escalating military operations against the Palestinians.
The Palestinian president, under pressure at home and abroad for democratic reforms, also said a general election set for January 20 would have to be delayed unless Israeli forces withdrew from all Palestinian-ruled cities and towns.
Sharon said on Thursday Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed by Washington for the September 11 attacks, had established a presence in Palestinian-ruled areas of Gaza and in Lebanon, aiming to attack Israel.
``A big, big lie. He wants to cover his military attacks against the Palestinians now with a new face,'' Arafat said in a cramped room in one of the few buildings left standing at his Ramallah complex following an Israeli army siege in September.
HUNKERED DOWN
The 73-year old has been hunkered down inside his compound for months as Israeli tanks have held positions within sight of the sandbagged building.
Surrounded by aides and bodyguards, he works, sleeps and eats in a second-floor conference room dominated by a long, wooden table.
Arafat denied any connection between al Qaeda and the Palestinians despite bin Laden's espousal of the Palestinian cause following the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, last week that killed 13 Kenyans and three Israelis, and a failed attempt to down an Israeli plane taking off nearby.
Arafat voiced concern that if a possible U.S. military strike against Iraq occupied the world's attention, Sharon would have a freer hand to step up his crackdown on the Palestinians.
``He will use it when all the world will be involved (with Iraq) to make his crimes during that period against us,'' Arafat said, wearing his trademark black-and-white keffiyeh head-dress arranged in the shape of historic Palestine.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment. Sharon has vowed, following a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, that Israel will not let up on its military pressure until Arafat reins in militants behind the violence.
Arafat reiterated his condemnation of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians but made clear he considered attacks against armed Jewish settlers living on occupied territory to be acts of self-defense.
He said a new round of talks was under way in Gaza between his Fatah faction and the militant group Hamas, aimed at convincing the Islamic movement to halt attacks in Israel. Previous talks in Egypt failed to yield an agreement.
TROOPS PREVENTING ELECTIONS
Arafat made clear on Sunday the presence of Israeli troops and tanks, which have reoccupied most of the West Bank following a wave of Palestinian suicide attacks, would make it impossible to go ahead with elections as scheduled.
He said Palestinians would need at least one month and possibly up to three months free of Israeli military occupation to allow for campaigning for the ballot.
Arafat issued a presidential decree in September calling for the first Palestinian general election since 1996 after coming under pressure from the United States, the European Union and his own people for an overhaul of his Palestinian Authority.
President Bush had shunned Arafat by calling on Palestinians to choose new leaders ``not compromised by terror.'' But opinion polls suggest Arafat would win an election.
``At least one month (before elections), they have to withdraw from all our cities and towns so that our people will start their (political) campaigns,'' he said.
Arafat said he wanted to travel to Bethlehem to attend mass on Christmas eve after Israel refused to let him go last year. But he said Israel might again bar him from the town revered as the birthplace of Jesus.
-------- mideast
U.S. special forces to be based in Jordan to hunt Scuds in case of war in Iraq
By Nathan Guttman,
December 8, 2002
Ha'aretz
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=238337&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
The U.S. plans to station special forces in Jordan in case of a war with Iraq, in order to hunt down missile launchers aimed at Israel in the western Iraqi desert, American sources said this week.
These sources, who are familiar with the operational plans being developed for the war, added that Jordan wants to help the U.S. war effort, but prefers to maintain a low profile. Thus, instead of posting regular troops in the kingdom, which would require massive logistical support, the U.S. has decided on special forces. Their job will be to move into the Iraqi desert to locate Scud missile launchers such as those used against Israel in the 1991 Gulf War.
To counter concerns in Jordan that the kingdom will lose its essentially free oil supply from Baghdad, the Americans have arranged for it to get oil from Gulf states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, if the Iraqi flow does dry up.
The U.S. is now working on shoring up its Arab support for the move against Iraq. After winning Turkish approval for the use of bases for command and control of the air war, the Americans are now trying to persuade Saudi Arabia to allow it to use similar bases in its territory for coordinating the attack on Iraq. After Saudia Arabia made clear it would not allow the U.S. to use peninsula bases for an assault, the Americans shifted their air bases to Qatar and Kuwait, but the conventional wisdom is that there is no replacement for the Saudi bases, so the U.S. will promise not to beef up its troop presence there and to keep the Saudis uninvolved in the war effort.
Meanwhile, a new trial for the Egyptian-American dissident Sa'ad Adin Ibrahim, jailed for articles critical of the President Hosni Mubarak's regime, appears to be a sign of improved Cairo-Washington relations, which have been strained over the trial and Cairo's opposition to a war on Iraq. The U.S. has also been critical of the Egyptian TV series based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." An Egyptian delegation, possibly headed by Mubarak, is expected in Washington soon.
-------- nato
Walker's World: NATO rides again
December 8, 2002
By Martin Walker
UPI Chief International Correspondent
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021207-063053-9225r.htmhttp://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021207-063053-9225r.htm
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- The NATO alliance has survived its worst threat -- American indifference. The Bush administration, without ever admitting its initial blunder in churlishly spurning the European allies' instinctive offer of help after the Sept. 11 attacks, is now urgently seeking their support for the prospect of war with Iraq.
The warm glow of last month's successful summit in Prague still surrounds NATO, with the completion of the American commitment to foster "a Europe whole and free" as seven new members from eastern Europe joined the alliance. The Americans got everything they wanted at Prague, from a promise of support on Iraq to a new global focus for a new Response Force of 20,000 troops available for swift deployment to trouble spots around the globe. The once Europe-rooted NATO is now, in the words of U.S. Ambassador Nick Burns "an alliance with global reach."
As a result, NATO is back in high favor in Washington. National Security Council officials positively purred goodwill to a Franco-German security conference this week. "I feel like I have been licked all over," grinned one still-skeptical French defense aide after the White House charm offensive.
There are good reasons for his skepticism, beyond the still inflamed row with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder over his refusal to join "an American military adventure" in Iraq. The Europeans may deep down be loyal allies when they wear their NATO hats. But when they put on their alternative headgear -- their European Union hats -- they are still aggrieved by Bush administration attitudes to global warming, trade rows, the International Criminal Court and all the other irritants to the Transatlantic relationship. Stiffing NATO during the Taliban war just served to undermine American friends in Europe's armies and defense ministries.
"We could have handled it better," is as far as White House officials have gone in acknowledging the ill-considered decision 14 months ago to launch the Afghan campaign against the Taliban as an overwhelmingly American operation. There was token British participation, but the bulk of the allies felt demeaned by the U.S. rejection of their decision to invoke Article V of the NATO treaty -- an attack against one is an attack against all.
But since then, the aftermath of the Afghan war has become a NATO operation in all but name. The mission has been led by NATO allies: Britain first, succeeded by Turkey until the end of this year, with the Dutch and Germans then following in January -- with NATO staff back at the headquarters in Mons, Belgium, running logistical support.
After the trip to NATO headquarters in Brussels by U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the allies are now being actively courted for the Iraq mission. NATO pledged "effective action" to enforce the United Nations resolutions at its summit in Prague last month and even though the Germans have emphasized that they will take no active military part, Wolfowitz arrived in Brussels with a shopping list.
The Americans, Wolfowitz said, wanted help in guarding Turkey against Iraqi incursions, with Patriot anti-missile systems and troops. They wanted AWACS aircraft and in-flight refueling tankers, minesweepers and patrol boats, and troops to guard bases, thus freeing American soldiers for combat. They also wanted troops and combat engineers, field hospitals and military police, for the post-war challenges.
With the exception of the indispensable Czech chemical warfare troops, and the British who are seen as the serious allies, most of the NATO forces requested will be doing the secondary work of soldiering, essential, but less dangerous and -- in this televisual age -- less glamorous.
The problem is that there was a sound military reason for the spurning of NATO in the Afghan war; with the exception of the British and French, none of the other allies can provide the all-weather mobile forces and precision-guided weaponry that are the key to modern war. However, there are duties, like infantry and armored car patrols, military policing, engineering work and field hospitals, that even the low-tech NATO allies can perform.
Few armies relish being treated as the hewers of wood and drawers of water for a warrior elite, and that looks to be the fate of most NATO armies as the technological and investment gap widens. That is why so many of them are now busily training their own Special Forces, most of whom saw some action in Afghanistan, which have the advantage of being a good military return on investment as well as elite.
And yet NATO will still be needed for the well-honed planning and logistics skills of its multinational staff, and also for the essential political support -- and diplomatic legitimacy -- that the alliance brings. Even though the Germans will not deploy troops, and the French, Italians and Canadians say the use of force will require a new U.N. resolution, the United States can count on most of the allies.
Britain, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Poland, the Czech Republic and Turkey last week all expressed "strong and unequivocal support for the U.S. policy that if diplomacy fails, force is going to be necessary," according to one NATO official. "And a number of these countries would want to participate in military operations."
That's a good start. But if NATO's revival is to prove lasting, the Americans are going to have to find more meaningful jobs for their allies than guarding bases, repairing bridges and sweeping minefields. Without the comradeship of shared dangers and shared victories, an alliance dedicated to shared security can fade into hollowness fast.
(Walker's World -- an in-depth look at the people and events shaping global geopolitics -- is published every Sunday and Wednesday.)
-------- pakistan
Does Democracy Help Pakistan?
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/weekinreview/08ROHD.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- SIX weeks ago, in Pakistan's legislative elections, nobody - not the semi-authoritarian president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf; not the religious parties who think General Musharraf isn't radical enough; and not the other parties in between - emerged in full control. Now a government has finally been cobbled together through arm-twisting, party defections and backroom deals redolent of pressure from the president's office, and many here are disgusted with the whole thing.
So the question arises: Is the "guided democracy" that President Musharraf has promoted as the way to keep Pakistan's radicals under control proving to be as unstable as the "flawed democracy" he has vowed to replace?
It is a question not just for Pakistan. The election results brought Islamist radicals to power in two areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border, where Qaeda and Taliban fighters are believed to be hiding.
Under the religious parties, whose agenda includes expelling American soldiers from Pakistan and implementing Islamic law, these areas could become even more of a safe haven for terrorists.
So Washington is left with two grim alternatives: It can keep sending F.B.I. agents to aggressively pursue Qaeda members in the border area, risking a dispute with an elected government. Or the raids could be reduced, leaving the hunting of terrorists to the Pakistani intelligence agencies who worked with the Taliban in the past.
No wonder there has been little celebration in Washington over the results of this election, even though it had been promoted as a careful step toward full democracy.
In fact, the elections, which created the country's new National Assembly, have raised new questions about General Musharraf's political astuteness. Repeatedly, the president, whose power stems from his military role, vowed to be neutral. But many here say the mainstream parties would have done far better had he not tried to manipulate the election rules in favor of his allies among the divided moderates.
In the end, expectations of a rigged election dissuaded many moderates from voting at all, while the religious parties turned out voters in droves. So none of the mainstream parties won an outright mandate. And the hard-line Islamic religious parties received 10 percent of the popular vote, enough to bid seriously, if unsuccessfully, for a role in forming a national coalition.
So the battle for the soul of Pakistan, a country whose identity has vacillated h between being a more secular and a more Islamic state, remains in play, even as the American interest in events here has grown. Pakistan is the only Muslim country known to have a nuclear bomb. And American intelligence officials have concluded that Osama bin Laden remains alive - perhaps somewhere in Pakistan.
What is unclear is how to contain the effects of the elections.
Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general who says he is pro-Western, said the United States could undermine the religious parties by changing foreign policies that are widely resented - toward Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan. Failing that, he said, the worst thing the United States can do is openly threaten the religious parties where they govern. Instead, he suggests that if the hard-liners are allowed to govern, Pakistanis might reject them, having seen what life under strict Islamic law is like. The raids by American F.B.I. agents in the border areas are an immediate flash point. President Musharraf can continue them - but only at the risk of being called an American lackey.
Backing down to the Islamists also involves political risks, though. Since the election, the religious parties have proved bold and politically astute, and they have leveraged their vote gains into a surprising amount of political power.
PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF, on the other hand, has been left with a reputation for clumsiness. The beneficiary of a 1999 coup himself, he banned former Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, both now in exile, from the race. When supporters of their parties failed to turn out, allies of President Musharraf won the most legislative seats, but not enough to form a government. They managed to do so only by persuading 10 members of Ms. Bhutto's party to defect. Six of these became government ministers.
American officials called the new government an incremental step forward in the return to democracy. Critics of military rule dismiss it as a sham. "It's not incremental," said Samina Ahmed, project director for the International Crisis Group, a policy organization. "It didn't even start."
Even with those maneuvers, the ruling coalition is perilously thin. Zafarullah Jamal was elected prime minister by a single vote, and his government must survive a confidence vote within a few months.
Meanwhile, Western diplomats say they will wait and hope. In the best outcome, they say, religious parties would fail to produce the jobs, better schools and clean government Pakistanis desperately want while economic reforms by Mr. Musharraf's government show results.
Until then, the general is in a precarious position - leading a fragile government trapped between American demands that F.B.I. raids continue and rising anti-Americanism among Pakistanis, with religious parties claiming a democratic mandate.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia shocked by elite forces' killing spree
Nick Paton Walsh, Kaliningrad
Sunday December 8, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/europe/story/0,11363,856103,00.html
They were among the elite of the Kremlin's special forces. The cream of the Russian equivalent of the US Navy Seals, they were trained to parachute into water from 13,000 feet, to reach land in safety and to kill with stealth.
Now they face a life behind bars, after a motiveless killing spree that terrified Russia and exposed the crisis at the heart of the former Soviet Union's penniless but highly skilled army.
Artiom Sobkovich, 22, and Alexei Spilnik, 23, have admitted committing 13 brutal murders across Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic surrounded by Poland and Lithuania. Last week a third alleged accomplice, paratrooper Pavel Borisenko was arrested amid growing concerns in Russia that the bloodbath was the result of the armed forces training young males to believe they were 'supermen', then cutting them loose without support or control.
The Kaliningrad murders seem motiveless - the targets were security guards, young mothers, or soldiers on patrol. Sometimes Sobkovich and Spilnik stole money from their victims, but more often they seemed to have killed for fun, each murder being executed with military precision.
On the outskirts of town, Alexandra Spilnik potters about the crumbling three-room flat she formerly shared with her son Alexei. His room is as he left it before his arrest three weeks ago. On his desk is his certificate from the military academy, pictures of him parachuting, using a field radio and a sniper rifle. On the wall are posters of Chuck Norris - the invincible Hollywood warrior he so wanted to become.
'He loved Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger,' said Alexandra. 'At school he was a grade-A student, who loved sports. When he came out of the army he worked for a year, but the money was pennies and often he did not get paid at all. I did not see any of the money he is accused of stealing and spending. He never spent it here. I can only blame the army for what happened. They have to find work for people when they are discharged.'
Artiom lived in the same block of flats with his father, Piotr, a retired army major. Both families lived for the army. Alexei and Artiom were born in the military town of Oztrov, in western Russia, and their families were posted to the Kaliningrad region. There the boys followed local tradition and went to military academy before graduating into the formidable Baltic Fleet in the Kaliningrad town of Baltisk.
The pair - both teetotal non-smokers - wanted to be the best. In 1999 they passed a rigorous recruitment programme and psychological screening for the Military Underwater Unit, the pride of the Russian Navy, which protected Mikhail Gorbachev during his Cold War summits with the US in 1985 and 1989.
Less than a year later they had left the navy - the authorities refuse to say why. The killings began in August 2000. The first victim was Vasili Romanovski, an armed guard at a military airfield. Three weeks later they used Romanovski's gun on two security guards, slitting their throats and torching their cabin. Two days after that, they killed again, and then again within a month.
On 30 October, police swooped on the pair, who have admitted to 13 murders. Yet the investigation continues, with the third arrest raising the possibility that the list of victims will be longer.
Their detention has brought little comfort for Dmitri Gvozdaryov, whose wife, Angela, died in August last year. He has little time for the hard-luck stories spun by Alexei's mother and others. 'If someone is out of work, then they can turn to crime and rob for money,' he said. 'But they do not need to kill innocent people. These men were like little children who do not understand the seriousness of death.'
-------- spy agencies
Lawmakers Want Cabinet Post for an Intelligence Director
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/politics/08INTE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks plan to issue a final report next week calling for the appointment of a new cabinet-level director of national intelligence who would outrank the director of central intelligence, government officials say.
But the Congressional leaders have agreed not to assign blame to any individual government officials for the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, and instead will emphasize proposals for changes to make sure that such devastating attacks never happen again.
The final report, summing up the joint panel's nearly yearlong inquiry into the government's performance before Sept. 11, is based on evidence of missed signals at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, and will include many of the findings that the panel's staff made public in interim reports released at hearings this summer and fall.
The report is coming just days after President Bush signed legislation creating an independent commission to investigate the attacks. Mr. Bush named Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, as chairman of the commission, which will pick up the case just as Congress is dropping it off. The independent commission is certain to plow through much of the same material already reviewed by the Congressional panel, which collected hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies.
After extended private negotiations this week, the four top lawmakers on the joint inquiry agreed among themselves on the most important recommendations to include in the final report. They now tentatively plan to present a draft to the full panel for a vote as early as Tuesday. The four lawmakers - Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida; Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama; Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida; and Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California - are expected to confer again on Monday to review a written draft of the report that includes the recommendations they settled on this week.
Officials cautioned that it was unclear how their draft would be received by the committee's other members, or whether it would be revised as they sought a consensus. If the committee votes on the report on Tuesday, it may announce its final recommendations by Wednesday.
The leaders stopped short of endorsing one of the most contentious ideas for intelligence change being widely debated in Washington - the creation of an additional domestic intelligence agency like the British MI-5 - even as they recognized the F.B.I.'s weaknesses in conducting domestic counterterrorism operations. But they said they were open to further study of such proposals.
The idea of creating an American version of MI-5 has gained support as the Bush administration, Congress and outside experts have all tried to grapple with the difficulties of tracking terrorists once they are inside the United States. Widespread criticism of the F.B.I.'s performance before Sept. 11 raised questions about whether counterterrorism operations should be stripped from the bureau and turned over to an independent agency. Still, deep concerns over civil liberties and other constitutional issues have made both the administration and Congress reluctant to endorse the idea.
The proposal to create a director of national intelligence closely mirrors legislation introduced last summer by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. Ms. Feinstein said in June that a director of national intelligence was necessary to "coordinate our intelligence and antiterrorism efforts" and to make certain that "the sort of communication problems that prevented the various elements of our intelligence community from working together effectively before Sept. 11 never happen again."
One person, the director of central intelligence, is supposed to have authority over the entire American intelligence community, including the C.I.A. In reality, however, the director is most directly responsible for managing the C.I.A., while other agencies within the vast intelligence community have day-to-day managers of their own. Many of those agencies are part of the Defense Department, and so the secretary of defense controls their purse strings, drastically limiting the intelligence director's influence over them.
There have been many proposals from Congress and independent commissions in recent years for major changes in the role of the director of central intelligence. Some of those have called for addressing one of the major complaints of central intelligence directors in the past: that they had responsibility for the entire intelligence community but lacked budget power over most of it.
A commission headed by the former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft recently recommended that the director of central intelligence be given real budget authority over the entire intelligence community. But that move has long been resisted by the Pentagon.
The proposal to create a director of national intelligence attempts to address many of the same problems by splitting the job in two.
The national intelligence director would have authority over the broad intelligence community, including the allocation of resources. The central intelligence director, meanwhile, would be responsible only for the C.I.A. itself. That would free the central intelligence director to concentrate only on whether the agency was doing the hard day-to-day work of counterterrorism.
But questions remain over just how powerful a new director of national intelligence would really be. The leaders of the joint inquiry plan to propose that the new national intelligence director would review and approve budgets for the intelligence community, but it is unclear whether that would reduce the secretary of defense's budget authority over military intelligence agencies.
Officials at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. said they had not yet seen the recommendations proposed by the Congressional leaders, and so could not comment.
While the Congressional inquiry is now about to be overshadowed by the new Kissinger commission, its staff clearly laid the framework for all future investigations of Sept. 11. The joint inquiry's public hearings held in the summer and fall produced riveting moments and surprising revelations. At one hearing on Oct. 17, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, testified that the threat of a terror attack was as serious a year later as it had been in the months before September 2001.
The Congressional investigation yielded new evidence about lapses at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. before the attacks. In a series of public hearings that ended in October, the committee's staff produced reports that accused both agencies of having made mistakes.
In several interim reports, the committee's staff said the agencies had failed to pursue leads that might have led them to unravel the plans for the hijackings. The inquiry staff accused the agencies of failing in the 1990's to comprehend the ominous rise of Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda network.
In a report on Oct. 17, the panel's staff concluded that there were a number of indicators of an impending terrorist attack in the spring and summer of 2001. The information was never specific, but agencies accumulated information suggesting that there might be an attack with a large number of casualties.
The committee's staff concluded in the October report that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. had not adequately shared the information they collected, had not assessed the warning signs as a whole and were slow to react to the significance of the intelligence they had obtained about the possibility of an attack. The committee concluded that the F.B.I. had failed to grasp the significance of a July 2001 communication sent from an agent in the bureau's Phoenix office that identified a pattern of Middle Eastern men, some with extreme anti-American beliefs, who were receiving pilot training at flight schools in the United States.
It also said the F.B.I. did not connect the Phoenix communication with the arrest in August 2001 of Zacarias Moussaoui , who was later indicted for complicity in the hijackings, and that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. did not assess the potential threat posed by Mr. Moussaoui in light of the heightened fears of a terrorist attack in the summer of 2001.
Specifically, the panel's staff criticized the C.I.A. for failing to alert other agencies about the terrorist connections of two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who had been in Malaysia and who lived in San Diego a year before they took part in the hijackings.
In private, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials complained bitterly about the committee's staff, led by Eleanor Hill, a former inspector general at the Pentagon. Antagonism between the intelligence agency and the joint inquiry flared in September when Mr. Tenet sent an angry letter to the panel's leaders, protesting the treatment of a senior agency officer who had testified before the committee.
Mr. Tenet's letter was in response to a disclosure that the joint committee staff had predicted in a briefing book to committee members that the officer, Cofer Black, formerly the chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, would "dissemble" in his testimony. Mr. Tenet said the disclosure revealed that some members of the committee staff were motivated by "bias, preconceived notions and apparent animus."
The panel's staff also jarred the F.B.I. with some of its findings. A draft report by the committee accused Saudi Arabia of failing to cooperate with the Sept. 11 inquiry and concluded that the F.B.I. had failed to investigate aggressively a series of payments the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States made to a man who had met with Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi when they living in the United States.
Government officials said that the F.B.I. had fully investigated the matter, but the accusations sent shock waves reverberating through the capital. The disclosures also led the Saudi government to tighten controls over Saudi charities in the United States and prompted lawmakers in both parties to criticize what they called the Saudi government's tolerance of extremism within its own borders while failing to cooperate with American investigators.
"No one will ever know whether more extensive analytic efforts, fuller and more timely information sharing or a greater focus on the connection between these events would have led to the unraveling of the Sept. 11 plot," one staff report said. "But it is at least a possibility that increased analysis, sharing and focus would have drawn greater attention to the growing potential for a major terrorist attack in the United States involving the aviation industry."
----
Mossad enters global terror war
By Abraham Rabinovich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021209-36034268.htm
JERUSALEM - With the dispatch of Mossad agents to Kenya - the site of two attacks claimed yesterday by a senior al Qaeda leader - Israel's famed intelligence service has for the first time entered the international war against Islamic terror.
The move follows clear signs that militants who for years have attacked U.S. targets including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have turned their "global jihad" against Israel. Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network claimed responsibility yesterday for the Nov. 28 attacks on a hotel and an airliner in Kenya that killed 16 persons and promised more attacks on both Israel and the United States.
The United States has until now differentiated the Israeli struggle against Palestinian terrorism from its own war on terror for fear of alienating Muslim governments whose help it needs against al Qaeda.
But the Israeli intelligence agency believes it has a significant role to play on the basis of its lengthy experience with the Arab world and the lethal struggle it has waged in the shadows for decades against Palestinian terror organizations.
The new threat from al Qaeda was recorded on Saturday and broadcast yesterday on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera channel.
"I hereby confirm what has been issued by al Qaeda political office regarding our responsibility for the Mombasa attacks in Kenya," said Sulaiman Bu Ghaith, a leading al Qaeda member who has been in hiding since the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.
"The Christian-Jewish alliance will not, God willing, be safe from attacks by the [Muslim warriors]. The alliance's installations and facilities everywhere will be subject to attacks," he said.
"The next phase will witness bigger and more lethal operations," he added.
Earlier yesterday, an Israeli security source told Reuters news agency that the Jewish state had received intelligence reports warning of plans by al Qaeda to attack Jews and Israelis in Prague.
The source said Israel has also received information from several foreign intelligence agencies warning of al Qaeda plans to target Israelis overseas.
While new to the war against al Qaeda, Mossad has long experience in fighting terrorists.
Following the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the service to track down and kill all those involved in the attack, including the planners. The decision was motivated not just by a desire for vengeance but to create deterrence.
Within 10 months of the massacre, at least nine Palestinians associated by Israel with terrorism died violent deaths, mostly in Europe - some by bombs, others by shooting. Most were believed to have been connected specifically with the Munich massacre.
The manhunt continued for years and claimed at least one innocent victim - a Moroccan waiter gunned down in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1973 after being mistakenly identified as one of the key figures behind the massacre, Ali Hassan Salameh. Six years later, the real Salameh was blown up by a car bomb in Beirut.
It was the Mossad that tracked down Gestapo officer Adolph Eichmann, who symbolized more than any other Nazi survivor the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Eichmann, who had taken on a new identity, was seized on a Buenos Aires street in 1960 and abducted to Israel where he was tried and hanged, the only person ever to be sentenced to death by a court in Israel.
The Mossad played a critical role in the Yom Kippur War when, on the eve of the holiday in 1973 its leader, Zvi Zamir, flew to a European capital to meet his most important agent in the Arab world, a non-Israeli. The agent reported that Egypt and Syria planned to launch a surprise attack against Israel the next day.
Although the warning reached Jerusalem only half a day before the war started, it permitted Israel to begin mobilization of reserves and to adjust its mind-set before the Arab armies struck. The war was one of the most traumatic episodes in Israel's history, but without the Mossad warning it could have been far worse.
The Mossad's mandate does not include the Palestinian territories, where undercover work is carried out by the Shin Bet, or Security Agency. In recent years, the Shin Bet has dealt with the intifada while the Mossad has kept a relatively low profile, often playing a quasi-diplomatic role, particularly in countries with which Israel has no official relations.
But under Gen. Meir Dagan, who took charge of the service last month, it had been expected even before the Kenya attacks to undertake a more activist role. Gen. Dagan has been involved in anti-terror activities for decades, much of the time in the field.
The organization appeared to have missed a beat when it failed to issue a warning against travel to Kenya before last week's attack.
Intelligence officers said the information in hand was "too general," but one official suggested a wish not to offend Kenya, with which Israel has important economic and security links. The Mossad is not expected to cling to such diplomatic niceties in the battle shaping up.
-------- us
'Sci-Fi' Weapons Going to War
By William M. Arkin,
December 8, 2002
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin8dec08,0,664010.story
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion. E-mail: warkin@igc.org.
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. -- On April 30, 2001, more than 30 square miles of the rolling Maryland countryside that make up the Aberdeen Proving Grounds were cleared of all nonessential personnel for the first full-scale test of a new weapon. Planners also took care to remove all unnecessary electronic equipment, because electronic equipment was exactly what the new weapon was designed to destroy.
At 6:13 p.m., the antenna on the exotic new device was switched on and a high-powered beam of microwaves was fired at a nearby truck -- the first field deployment of a "directed energy" weapon. It fried the truck's ignition and air-fuel mixing system, bringing the hapless vehicle to a halt.
About the same time, at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, field demonstrations were being wrapped up on another microwave weapon, this one mounted on a truck and designed to inflict intense pain on human skin. The weapon sprang from a program devoted to what military researchers call "active-denial technology."
Now, a year and a half later, an enormous effort is underway to move these speed-of-light weapons from the realm of research to combat readiness. The same is true for an array of exotic new weapons, including new generations of so-called "agent defeat" bombs. Among the latter is a guided cluster bomb that scatters 4,000 titanium rods capable of penetrating chemical and biological bunkers and storage tanks with lethal effect. Most promising is a new incendiary device that generates a firestorm so intense it cannot be quenched with water.
What lies behind this rush to bring these exotic new weapons into the American arsenal is the Bush administration's almost obsessive determination to eradicate nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Iraq -- and potentially in other rogue states -- as part of its war on terrorism.
The new devices, along with the development of highly secret special operations units and new tactics, are intended to help the armed forces seize or neutralize the so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with greater speed and security -- as well as with less damage to surrounding areas or people, and less danger of inadvertently spreading toxic materials.
There are risks, however, because some of these new weapons could arguably be construed as violating established codes of wartime conduct. And the risks of a backlash, whether at home or abroad, are magnified by the administration's almost total refusal to talk about what it is doing and thereby build public understanding and support.
Unfortunately, one side effect of framing the war on terrorism in terms of weapons of mass destruction is that it instills in government officials a sense of moral certainty so great that they feel no need to explain or justify themselves.
And, for all the talk of withering airstrikes on thousands of Iraqi targets and of armored divisions racing toward Baghdad, what really distinguishes Washington's preparation for war with Iraq is its focus on finding and destroying Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz made this crystal clear last week when he said, "Our goal is to achieve the disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, peacefully if possible, voluntarily if possible, by force if necessary."
And the administration clearly sees high-powered microwave, or HPM, weapons and other such devices as potentially useful in achieving that goal. When Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was asked at an August press briefing how promising he considered HPM technology, he replied in his characteristically elliptical way by recalling the unexpected emergence of unmanned aerial drones in the Afghanistan war.
"You never know," he said. Drones "that were used in Afghanistan had not reached their full development. In the normal order of things, when you invest in research and development, you don't have any intention or expectations that one would use it. On the other hand, the real world intervenes from time to time."
The real world that drives current war planning is the absolute imperative of thwarting Iraqi use of chemical or biological weapons.
For many years, the military and the defense industry have dreamed of directed-energy weapons -- lasers, microwaves and electromagnetic pulses that would operate in milliseconds and leapfrog over the current generations of conventional and nuclear weapons.
Microwave weapons work by producing an intense surge of energy, like a lightning bolt, that short-circuits electrical connections, interferes with computer motherboards, destroys memory chips and damages other electronic components. As antipersonnel weapons, active-denial HPMs send a narrow beam of energy that penetrates about 1/64th of an inch into the skin, where nerves that cause pain are located. By instantaneously heating the skin to above 50 degrees Centigrade (122 degrees Fahrenheit), the microwaves inflict intense pain; often, the reaction they produce is panic. "All the glossy slide presentations in the world cannot prepare you for what to expect when you step in the beam," a high-ranking officer commented last year after experiencing it. His account was contained in military documents.
As a result of the attacks of Sept. 11, these and other highly classified HPM prototypes are being evaluated for use against facilities involving weapons of mass destruction. "We are looking for a boutique of capabilities," Sue Payton, deputy undersecretary of Defense for advanced systems and concepts, told the Pentagon press corps in March, describing the agent-defeat mission. HPMs are being tested against mock targets with the hope of being able to disable them with a minimum of blast effects, civilian death or external physical damage, military sources say.
In fact, HPM weapons technology has now returned to its nuclear roots. In the mid-1980s, the Air Force's Strategic Air Command called for a new weapon able to protect storage bunkers from mobs of anti-nuclear protesters. A "repel demonstrator" device using high-powered microwaves was built and tested in 1996. The focus of the program shifted to crowd control missions for places such as Somalia and Bosnia; two vehicle-mounted prototypes were tested in New Mexico and built before Sept. 11.
While these devices can perform at close quarters, developers of long-range HPM weapons still have had to overcome huge problems in making them combat-ready. They require large power sources. They are small and lack ruggedness. And they have a tendency to inadvertently harm friendly forces.
In April 1999, the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center oversaw the first military HPM weapon successfully demonstrated against electronics on a small scale. The prototype was described at the time as "elegant, safe, well built, and user friendly." Last October, a Defense Department briefing extolled its ability to stop vehicles at hundreds of meters, and military sources hint that at least three different prototypes are available for what might be one-time use in Iraq.
Meantime, the Pentagon has not put all its eggs in the technology basket. It is training special combat units too.
Since Sept. 11, the mission of the U.S. Special Operations Command has focused on combating terrorism and countering weapons as dual priorities. The command's mission, according to Defense Department documents, is to "prevent/limit/minimize the development, possession and employment of weapons of mass destruction [and] to seize, destroy, render safe, capture or recover WMD [weapons of mass destruction]."
The use of Special Forces in this role actually has its roots in the Cold War, when the still-top-secret Delta Force was created. In fact, its first "certifying" exercise, code-named Joshua Junction, took place at a mock nuclear weapons facility on Jackass Flats at the Nevada Test Site. In that exercise, Delta Force teams were to recover a stolen U.S. nuclear weapon from a Middle East terrorist group. Over more than 20 years, what is now called the Joint Special Operations Command has honed its ability to conduct surgical missions against WMD production, storage and other facilities, using techniques and weapons designed to minimize environmental damage and the danger of dispersal.
Putting new weapons together with these highly trained teams of special operators, Pentagon planners have developed detailed scenarios for dealing with any WMD facilities encountered in Iraq.
Unmanned vehicles with special sensors keyed to detect radioactive or chemical emissions would scout the site. HPMs would then be employed. Spreading soundlessly along water pipes, air vents and antennas, they would attack electronic equipment, causing the facility to freeze up. HPMs might also be used to drive the enemy out of bunkers and other secure sites without the destruction and possible collateral damage that come with high explosives.
Cluster and smart bombs could also bring about pinpoint destruction of above-ground facilities. New incendiaries, combined with penetrating munitions and chemicals, could burn up chemical or biological agents. Under a program originally dubbed Vulcan Fire, the Navy and Lockheed Martin are furiously working to field 20 inter-metallic incendiaries. Called HTI-J-1000, these penetrator weapons combine high-temperature explosives to ignite and burn chemical agents, with disinfectant chlorine and acids to neutralize biological agents.
Many of the boutique weapons and special operations remain highly classified not only to preserve the element of surprise, but also because -- politically -- they are highly controversial.
This year's classified Nuclear Posture Review talked of a classified weapon under development that uses "radiological neutralization" of chemical/biological materials in production or storage facilities. "Radiological neutralization" suggests something awfully close to a nuclear weapon. And HPMs intended to destroy military electronics and disrupt civilian electrical power systems might also knock out electrical service to hospitals, for instance, and attack backup generators. Even people with pacemakers might be affected.
Similarly, high-tech antipersonnel devices must inflict pain while avoiding burning, eye damage or other prolonged effects that could be considered "unnecessary suffering," which is banned under existing treaties and international law.
The Bush administration justifies use of the new weapons on grounds that hitting WMD sites with conventional weapons might create large-scale disasters, because hazardous chemicals, toxins and biological agents could be dispersed over a wide area.
This line of thinking may stem in part from the fact that, during the 1991 Gulf War, when Hussein had an enormous chemical and biological arsenal, the United States took huge risks in attacking WMD sites. American intelligence had no idea which targets actually contained chemical and biological agents; only after the war did we discover how little correlation there'd been between actual and suspected WMD sites.
Today, U.S. intelligence about the location of Hussein's illicit materials is no better. The hope is that Iraq will do something to "expose" its weapons, providing the opportunity for a clear American shot. The goal -- reducing the risk of nuclear, chemical or biological disaster -- is important.
But good intentions may not be a good enough answer if units such as Delta Force are sent into action with weapons and tactics that appear to cross the threshold of what is considered lawful and acceptable. Especially if the U.S. government does not begin to make its case to the American public and the rest of the world until after the fact.
Secrecy seems to be the Bush administration's favorite operating style. In the end, however, events may prove that its momentary convenience comes at a heavy price.
----
U.S. Headquarters Is Ready for War
Qatar Command to Begin Combat Exercise
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page A41
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24391-2002Dec7?language=printer
DOHA, Qatar, Dec. 7 -- A major American military headquarters is fully operational at a base near here, U.S. officials said today, for possible use in a war with Iraq.
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who would take charge of the war, presided over the opening of a two-day walk-through in advance of computerized war games, designated Internal Look, scheduled to begin Monday. About 200 U.S. staff members participated today, along with military observers from Britain and Australia, identified by U.S. officials as part of "the coalition." In a statement to the group, Franks stressed the virtue of being ready for anything.
"Even the best plans change once action starts," he said. "And we need to be flexible and agile enough to meet any contingencies."
The headquarters provides command and control for U.S. land, sea and air forces in the Middle East, Central Asia and East Africa. The debut of the Central Command Deployable Headquarters coincides with a tense diplomatic drama being played out in Baghdad, where today Iraqi officials delivered a 12,000-page declaration to the United Nations reiterating Baghdad's denials regarding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
President Bush has expressed intense skepticism that Iraq would offer full disclosure of its programs and has reserved the option of invading the country to overthrow President Saddam Hussein. Bush's military tools are almost in place: In recent days, independent observers in the United States have estimated that forces could be ready to invade Iraq by the end of the month.
Activation of the headquarters is only the latest element in a military force that has gradually grown in size and spread throughout the region. On Thursday, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman left Virginia for the Middle East at the head of a multi-ship battle group. It will join three other battle groups, led by the carriers Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Constellation, that are already in place.
For several weeks, thousands of soldiers have been practicing warfare in Kuwait, and military equipment has poured into the oil-rich country that Iraq invaded a dozen years ago. The United States is pressing Turkey, site of a major air base, to serve as a staging ground for U.S. troops. Jet bombers are based in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and in Qatar, a flat, dusty peninsula 300 miles south of Iraq.
About 55,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors and Air Force personnel are within striking distance of Iraq, among them 15,000 "trigger-ready" ground troops, U.S. officials said. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has tried to keep secret the numbers and whereabouts of the forces. "We've been moving forces around the world," he said at a news conference last week. "We've got a somewhat higher presence in the Central Command area today than we did last week or the week before or the week before that." The Central Command area encompasses 25 countries from Central Asia through the Middle East into East Africa.
Today, Franks, dressed in shades of sand desert camouflage, was surrounded by the equipment necessary to launch warfare. According to U.S. officials here, Franks can perform the same command tasks in Qatar as from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, the Central Command's home. After the Internal Look exercise ends, the modular buildings and equipment will remain in place in case there is a real war.
Internal Look will center on a "fictitious but realistic" combat scenario in the region, U.S. officials said. The exercise will "test our ability to communicate with the modern battlefield," said a senior Central Command official. The week-long evaluation will present commanders with a variety of plots: invasion, resistance, attacks and counterattacks involving land, sea and air forces. No soldiers, tanks, planes or ships will move around; everything will be done by computer simulation. Maps, graphs and tables will let commanders know the location of friendly and enemy forces, as well as their activities, casualties and need for ammunition, supplies and air or artillery strikes, according to published reports.
Central Command officials declined to confirm the published reports. "Secrecy saves lives and increases the commander's options," said Jim Wilkinson, director of strategic communications. The two-day exercise launched today, designated Rock Drill, centers on cataloguing the forces and arms available for the war games. Officials here likened Rock Drill to the kind of war-gaming that used to take place on tables, with pieces moved by hand.
Franks labored in a gymnasium at the 262-acre al-Sayliyah military base, just a few miles from Doha, the capital of Qatar, a sheikdom rich with oil and natural gas.
----
Buildup Leaves U.S. Military Nearly Set to Start Attack
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/middleeast/08MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - The United States will soon have enough heavy tanks, warships, aircraft, bombs and troops in the Persian Gulf region to enable it to begin an attack against Iraq sometime in January, senior military officials say.
About 60,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, as well as about 200 warplanes, are in or near the region. The Army alone has 9,000 soldiers, 24 Apache helicopter gunships and heavy equipment for two armored brigades in Kuwait. Equipment for a third brigade is steadily arriving on ships usually based in the Indian Ocean, and some matériel will be stored at a new $200 million logistics base, Camp Arifjan, south of Kuwait City.
By late next week, four aircraft carriers will be poised to strike Iraq on short notice, with a fifth in Southeast Asia ready to steam to the gulf in a crisis. Two of the carriers, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are heading home, but the Navy will keep their crews together about two weeks longer than the usual 30 days after arrival in case they are ordered back to the gulf.
Special Operations forces in the region are refining plans to hunt for Scud missiles and clandestine weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. About 1,000 military planners, led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, have assembled in Qatar and other gulf states for a computer-simulated exercise that begins Monday and is intended as a model for an offensive against Iraq, officials said.
Taken together, these are unmistakable signs that before long, President Bush will be in a position to order an attack to disarm Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and have it carried out within days, senior military officials said.
"The pieces are going into place that are the basic building blocks for a combination of military options," said Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who will take over the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee next month.
Or as one senior defense official put it this week, "We are rapidly getting to the point where if called upon, we'd be able to execute operations in Iraq."
The steady buildup - brought together with little fanfare by air and by ship - is intended to put increasing pressure on the Iraqi government to disarm, and perhaps to persuade Mr. Hussein's generals to defect or rebel against him.
"This is really their last chance to decide to either have a peaceful resolution, which requires giving up those weapons, or have us do it by force," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said this week in Turkey.
For now any talk of war is muted as the administration prepares to review Iraq's declaration of any weapons of mass destruction that it may possess. Officials say that the process of dealing with Iraq's disclosure - including any subsequent diplomatic discussions, further weapons inspections and possibly another United Nations resolution - could delay any attack for weeks or months.
Pentagon officials say the armed forces could attack now, if required, but several diplomatic and military steps would need to be completed before the United States could go to war on its own terms, officials said.
The administration wants to use Turkey as a major staging base for American ground troops, who would swoop into northern Iraq to protect the vast oil fields of Kurdistan and combine with allied forces pushing up from Kuwait to put the government in Baghdad in a vise.
But Turkey has balked at permitting ground forces, prompting the White House to invite Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the largest party in Turkey's new governing coalition, to meet with President Bush on Tuesday.
"We're quite comfortable with what we can do from the south," Mr. Wolfowitz said this week. "Obviously, if we are going to have significant ground forces in the north, this is the country they have to come through. There is no other option."
Britain, another vital ally, is expected to contribute several thousand armored forces, but has not yet begun to send them.
American active-duty troops could be flown in quickly aboard chartered airliners to join their equipment. But any major campaign would require activating tens of thousands of reservists, largely to help defend American military bases, power plants and transportation hubs at home against possible terrorist reprisals. Mobilizing reserve units typically takes about 30 days, but a senior defense official said the Pentagon was looking at ways to speed up the process.
The Pentagon has plans to mobilize as many as 265,000 members of the National Guard and Reserves, roughly as many as for the Persian Gulf war in 1991, if President Bush orders an attack. Senior military officials said large-scale mobilizations would not begin before January, and even then would probably be made in stages to soften the political impact.
The force in place by next month would be large enough to begin the "rolling start" of an offensive, but additional armored and air forces would have to be sent from Europe and the United States to sustain a larger attack that could mass 200,000 to 250,000 American troops.
"We'd be ready to begin strikes in a meaningful way if told to do so, but then you'd then have to have a rapid, rapid deployment of additional forces," said one senior Navy official.
Throughout the gulf region these days, there is a constant hum of military preparations. Army forces are conducting exercises in desert ranges in Kuwait that simulate territory they would roll across in Iraq.
Carrier-based jets patrolling the no-flight zone in southern Iraq carry out mock bombing runs against Iraqi airfields and military bases. Air Force engineers at Diego Garcia, a British base in the Indian Ocean, are erecting portable hangars to protect the sensitive radar-evading skin of the B-2 bombers that will soon be stationed there.
Planners are readying the heavy equipment and supplies now aboard ships at Diego Garcia that would sustain more than 17,000 marines for up to 30 days. Navy Seabees based in Spain have been dispatched to Kuwait for construction duties at two bases.
Military logistics and supply experts have been in the region for months preparing for incoming matériel. Tugboats, forklifts and other cargo-handling equipment needed to prepare ports for the arrival of tanks and other armored equipment are coming in.
In Kuwait, the Army has two brigades' worth of heavy equipment in place. A typical armored brigade set includes 88 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 88 M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 16 120 millimeter mortars, an Army spokeswoman said.
Equipment from a third brigade stored on ships at Diego Garcia is flowing in. One of the Navy's giant roll-on/roll-off cargo ships, the Watkins, disgorged a load of heavy Army equipment in July, and a sister vessel, the Watson, is on the way with equipment for an armored battalion task force, Army officials said.
Special Operations forces are planning covert missions that would be pivotal in the opening hours and days of any campaign. These operations would include destroying Scud missiles that Iraq could launch at Israel.
"We're doing everything prudent and proactive that we can without starting a war in the process," said one military official.
--------
GRAPHIC
American Military Presence Near Iraq
December 8, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/08PRESENCE.html
Map http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2002/12/08/international/021208_for_PRESENCEmap.gif
Here are the American military forces near Iraq, as the United States continues preparations for a possible attack. Special Operations forces are also operating in the region.
AT SEA
Personnel About 20,000, mostly Navy, aboard two aircraft carriers. About 3,500, including 2,100 marines, are conducting exercises off the Kenyan coast. Equipment The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its battle group of eight other ships. The carrier George Washington and its battle group are in the western Mediterranean. Each carrier has about 80 aircraft.
The carrier Constellation will arrive soon to replace the Lincoln, and the carrier Harry S. Truman left on Thursday to replace the George Washington. The carrier Kitty Hawk is in the South China Sea, and could be brought into the region in an emergency.
BAHRAIN
Personnel About 4,200. The Navy's Fifth Fleet is based in Manama.
DIEGO GARCIA
Personnel About 1,900, mostly Air Force.
Equipment Prepositioned Equipment aboard ships for a Marine brigade and an Army brigade. The Army Equipment is gradually being shipped to Kuwait. About eight B-52 bombers. The United States is building special temporary shelters for B-2 stealth bombers.
DJIBOUTI
Personnel 800, about half of which are Special Operations forces.
KUWAIT
Personnel About 12,000, mostly Army and Air Force.
Equipment Prepositioned equipment for two brigades, with a third arriving gradually from Diego Garcia. Each brigade set contains 88 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 88 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 16 120 mm mortars and 18 155 mm howitzers. Two Patriot antimissile batteries. About 80 aircraft.
OMAN
Personnel About 3,000, mostly Air Force.
Equipment About 25 aircraft.
QATAR
Personnel About 3,300, mostly Army. About 1,000 military planners from Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and other military commands are now at As Sayliyah and elsewhere.
Equipment Refueling aircraft are based at Al Udeid Air Base, which has the longest runway in the region.
SAUDI ARABIA
Personnel About 5,000, mostly Air Force.
Equipment Two Patriot antimissile batteries. About 75 aircraft. An air operations center is at Prince Sultan Air Base, where the air campaign over Afghanistan was managed.
TURKEY
Personnel About 1,700, mostly Air Force.
Equipment About 60 aircraft. The fighters that patrol the northern no-flight zone over Iraq are based at Incirlik Air Base.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Personnel About 500, mostly Air Force.
--------
AC - 130 Gunships Packs Awesome Firepower
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-The-Big-Gun.html
HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. (AP) -- It's official name is the AC-130. Some call it simply the Big Gun. Packed with a unique combination of airborne firepower, it is one of the most fearsome warplanes.
Just one look shows why.
This plane does not drop bombs or break speed records. Flying night or the day, loitering at low altitude, it fires shells the likes of which would be expected to be found on a tank, an artillery piece or a battleship.
The steel gun barrel that protrudes from the left side of the AC-130's fuselage is big enough to stick an arm down. It fires 105 mm shells -- each about 33 pounds and 3 feet long. Even resting idle and unarmed, the cannon is a chilling sight.
Closer to the cockpit door, on the same side of the plane, is even more weaponry: a 40 mm Bofors cannon capable of 100 shots per minute and a 25 mm Gatling gun that fires as many as 1,800 rounds per minute.
Together, these guns can inflict death and destruction on a scale unmatched by any other aircraft that performs low-flying support for ground troops. Over their 35 years in service, individual AC-130s have carried such nicknames as Grim Reaper, Jaws of Death, Ultimate End, Exterminator and Grave Digger.
If war comes to Iraq, AC-130s surely will be there, flown by crews from two special operations squadrons based at Hurlburt Field -- the 4th, flying the newer U model called Spooky, and the 16th, flying the H model, called Spectre.
The Spooky has advanced features not found on the Spectre. These include a more effective radar for long-range target detection, a Global Positioning System for satellite navigation, and a capability to simultaneously attack two targets as much as a half-mile apart.
The newer model, which costs about $190 million, also carries twice as much ammunition. The older model runs about $132 million.
All 21 AC-130s -- 13 Spookys and eight Spectres -- are based at Hurlburt. Most of them have returned for maintenance and repairs after months flying missions against al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Afghanistan.
Gen. Tommy Franks, the Central Command commander who ordered the AC-130 into that battle, is quick to praise its performance.
``I would sum it up by saying simply, I'm a fan,'' Franks said in a Nov. 28 interview with The Associated Press.
At Hurlburt, Air Force officials declined to make AC-130 crew members available for interviews. A public affairs officer, Lt. Rosemary Heiss, said they were too busy training. She gave a visiting reporter a tour, however, of a 1990-model Spooky parked on the tarmac, and described what it is like inside while its guns are blazing.
``It's dark, it's loud, it smells and it's intimidating,'' she said.
The origins of the AC-130 gunship date to the Vietnam War, where the first ones saw action in 1968. They are converted C-130 Hercules transport planes, modified to add not only guns but also advanced navigation systems and a variety of sensors for detecting threats and targets, including FLIR, or forward-looking infrared radar. This radar is mounted under the plane's nose. It senses heat emissions and creates a video image.
The plane normally has a crew of 13 -- five officers and eight enlisted.
Although the AC-130s played a central role in defeating the Taliban and chasing al-Qaida from Afghanistan, they also were involved in two highly publicized controversies.
On March 2, the opening day of the last major U.S. offensive in Afghanistan, an AC-130 mistakenly fired on friendly forces, killing an American soldier. An investigation concluded that the plane's crew had been plagued by equipment problems including flawed navigation systems that contributed to the erroneous targeting. The Pentagon had originally reported that the U.S. soldier had been killed by mortar fire from enemy forces.
On July 1, an AC-130 pounded several villages in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province, and Afghan authorities said afterward that 48 civilians were killed, including women and children celebrating a wedding. U.S. officials defended the AC-130 crew, saying they opened fire only after coming under hostile fire from the ground.
The last time an AC-130 was lost on an overseas mission was March 15, 1994, when a Spectre gunship went down off the coast of Kenya shortly after taking off for a surveillance mission over Mogadishu, Somalia. Eight members of the crew were killed. The crash was caused by a detonation of the 105 mm gun while airborne.
One AC-130 Spectre also was lost in the 1991 Gulf War. That one was shot down by a surface-to-air missile on Jan. 31, 1991 while supporting allied ground forces in the Battle of Khafji, Saudi Arabia. All 14 members of the crew were killed.
On the Net:
AC-130 fact sheet at http://www.af.mil/news/factsheets/AC--130H--U--Gunship.html
Hurlburt Field at http://www.hurlburt.af.mil/index2.shtml
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Sen. Graham: Intelligence Czar Needed
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Congress.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Cabinet-level official overseeing U.S. intelligence operations is essential to help prevent future terrorist attacks because the FBI, CIA and other agencies are reluctant to share information, a senator who favors the new post said Sunday.
Sen. Bob Graham, co-chairman of a joint congressional committee examining why the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus failed to detect the Sept. 11 attacks beforehand, said an intelligence director is among the most important of about 20 recommendations the panel will make.
``We found, in looking at the specific questions of what happened before Sept. 11, that one of the major causes, in terms of the intelligence community failures, were the fact that people weren't talking with each other,'' Graham, D-Fla., said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''
Another committee member, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said a new director of national intelligence would run up against agencies that zealously guard their turf.
``We do need ... people who talk to each other. The firewalls have to come down,'' Lugar said. ``And that will be very tough, given the culture within our own government.''
Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he believed the problem ``would be substantially alleviated if there was somebody in charge who could assure that all of the agencies were on the same page and all participating as a team.''
A second proposal expected to emerge from the committee is creation of a separate agency to handle domestic intelligence-gathering that would be similar to Scotland Yard's MI-5.
The FBI has handled domestic spying as well as its main function, criminal investigations. After Sept. 11, President Bush changed the agency's main mission to preventing future terror attacks.
Asked about the idea, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said the United States needs an enhanced ability to analyze intelligence data involving terror threats. That now is the job mainly of the FBI.
Daschle said on CNN's ``Late Edition'' that current practice is deficient in both assessing threat levels and arresting people who endanger Americans.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Wind Turbines Are Sprouting Off Europe's Shores
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By MARLISE SIMONS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/europe/08WIND.html
LELYSTAD, the Netherlands - When the telephone rings in this Dutchman's car, chances are that it is a windmill calling. A windmill?
"It's telling me there's a problem, maybe it has stopped," said Herre van der Meulen, a technician at Nuon, a Dutch utility.
He searches through his laptop, checks the disturbance and sends a telephone signal back to the computer aboard the windmill. Moments later, the blades are spinning again, yielding electricity. "Usually I can fix most problems from a distance," he said.
That he can do his job from afar is a good thing - soon technicians may have little choice. Across wind-swept Northern Europe, hundreds of high-powered turbines are being planned or are under construction offshore, beyond the easy reach of engineers.
"Going offshore is the new trend, and it's huge," said Bruce Douglas of the European Wind Energy Association, an industry group based in Brussels. "The demonstration projects out at sea have been a success. Now people are going for full-scale marine wind parks. Some are close to land, some are so far you can't see them."
In the business, the talk is of a veritable rush offshore. Power companies are staking out suitable tracts of sandbanks, reefs and shallow open waters from the shores of Ireland to the Baltic Sea. They are joining with traditional offshore oil and gas companies, including giants like Shell, that have the capability to drill and rig up the 100-ton towers at sea.
Engineers say that wind parks at sea have two main advantages: the wind blows harder and more steadily than on land and there are no residents protesting against great wind parks marring the landscape.
On the Dutch coast near Lelystad, 28 windmills stand in a perfect lineup near the shore, anchored in about 20 feet of water. The swoosh of the wind going over the blades is barely audible, even drowned out by the squawking of the sea gulls.
"It's new, it's clean, it's high tech," said Henk Kouwenhoven, a manager of Nuon, who watched the towers go up in 1996. "The offshore potential is enormous. Here we never run out of wind. It blows 90 percent of the time. The main issue is making it cost-efficient."
Europe's wind-driven energy has been growing at 40 percent a year. With a capacity of more than 20,000 megawatts installed on land, it now represents three-fourths of the world's total wind-power output. Europe hopes to raise this to 60,000 megawatts in the next six years. Much of that growth is expected to come from sea-based turbines.
"It's going so fast now because there is a race to go offshore, with manufacturers and utilities competing for the jobs," said Corin Millais of the European Wind Energy Association. "Companies are now talking of wind fields, like oil reserves or coal reserves, waiting to be tapped. The beauty of it is that it is inexhaustible."
Advocates see the move offshore as an impressive rite of passage in the history of an ancient technology. For centuries, tapping the wind was the domain of the miller, his family and his hand-set sails. Even modern wind energy had humble beginnings in Europe. In the 1970's, it was started by grass-roots groups of often politically motivated investors putting up one or two private windmills. There are still thousands of private owners in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
But wind power is no longer a cottage industry, and the windmills of today are not the charming, stubby kind that once pumped much of this country dry and became a national emblem. These are the modern variety, called turbines, that are becoming sleeker, taller and more powerful by the year.
"The largest turbines now produce 250 times more electricity than the ones built 20 years ago," Mr. Millais said. Today wind provides some 28 million Europeans with electricity, he said, about half of them in Germany, Europe's largest producer.
The European Union has been pushing to develop alternatives to fossil fuels, which are widely believed to contribute to global warming. It wants 22 percent of its electricity - and 12 percent of all energy - to come from renewable sources by 2010, to meet its commitment under the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. In the United States, wind energy has stalled at about one-fifth of Europe's capacity.
Here, wind projects have been encouraged with incentives like tax credits and guaranteed rates, and the emphasis is now shifting offshore. About 100 sea-based turbines are already operating. This year, Britain, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands have all earmarked large offshore sites and issued licenses. Some of the projects are scheduled to be ready next year.
The new endeavors are not without problems or critics. Environmental groups are divided. Some defend the wind turbines as a renewable source of pollution-free energy, while others fear the offshore turbines will disturb fishing and spawning grounds and endanger flocks of birds that migrate at night.
In Britain and Norway, the military has objected to some designated coastal sites, saying that wind parks can produce false radar echoes and disturb telecommunications.
There are other hurdles as well. Offshore turbines may be more productive, but building costs are 50 percent higher than on land and maintenance is difficult in a region where winters bring Atlantic gales. "When waves are up and your boat sways back and forth, it's unsafe to try and get onto the landing platform," said Mr. van der Meulen, the technician who monitors about 200 windmills scattered over a large area, including some at sea. "You can do maintenance work really only in the summer."
Then there is the issue of price. Industry spokesmen contend that, strictly speaking, the price of wind-driven energy is close to being competitive with other sources. They argue that traditional fossil fuels and nuclear energy get enormous hidden or indirect subsidies, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. For example, in some European countries, governments pay for the insurance of nuclear power plants.
While no one expects wind to become more important than traditional power sources, enthusiasts are undeterred, and the growth of wind-powered turbines is likely to continue. Denmark already uses wind to produce 18 percent of its electricity, the world's highest per capita consumption. Britain intends to catch up.
The British have designated 12 offshore turbine sites. Brian Wilson, the energy minister, said studies had shown there is enough wind to provide electricity for the whole country. He said he expected the global market for offshore energy to be worth $12 billion by 2007. Most of that, he said, will be in Europe.
"I don't see anything stopping offshore electricity now," said Mr. Kouwenhoven, of Nuon, which has teamed up with Royal Dutch Shell in a joint venture. "Shell knows the offshore business, we know the wind business. It's just a matter of moving ahead."
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Use of Renewable Energy Took a Big Fall in 2001
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/science/08SOLA.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - Consumption of energy from renewable sources, like the sun, the wind and biological fuels, fell sharply in 2001, the Department of Energy has reported.
The department attributed much of the decline to a drought that cut generation of hydroelectric power by 23 percent. Such variations are natural. But in a report last month, the department's Energy Information Administration also said solar equipment was being retired faster than new equipment was being built.
"Back in the late 70's and early 80's, we had very, very large support programs," said Fred Mayes, who handles data on renewable energy at the energy information agency.
Those programs, begun after the loss of oil from Iran pushed the price to almost $40 a barrel, expired in the 1980's, and "things went into the tank," Mr. Mayes said. Equipment from the boom years is wearing out, and the base of installed equipment is shrinking, he said.
This is true even though shipments of new equipment have risen in the last few years, analysts say. The number of solar collectors, which gather the sun's heat for uses like warming swimming pools, has increased sharply in the last few years, including 34 percent in 2001 alone, the department said.
A spokesman for the solar industry, Scott Sklar, agreed with that assessment. But by the Energy Department's estimate, the total amount of solar energy gathered has fallen three years in a row.
The use of photovoltaic cells, which generate electricity with sunlight, is also growing. Domestic installations were up 80 percent last year, the department reported.
Biomass, including burning of wood or similar renewable products to produce energy and the use of alcohol fuels, declined nearly 2 percent. The use of wind power grew more than 3 percent.
Over all, consumption of renewable energy fell 12 percent to what the department said was the lowest level in more than 12 years, accounting for only 6 percent of the energy consumed in the country.
Of the renewables, biomass accounted for 50.4 percent of the total and hydroelectric for 41.9 percent. The remainder was from the sun, the wind and geothermal sources.
Many environmentalists say solar and wind power have the greatest potential for growth and for displacing fuels that cause pollution and are suspected of causing changes in the world's climate.
The solar total is still very small; 36.3 megawatts of capacity were added in 2001. At that rate it would take 30 years to add the capacity of one large nuclear plant.
For the first time since records have been kept, exports of solar cells declined in 2001. That occurred, Mr. Mayes said, because the companies that build the cells expanded production capacity in other countries.
Solar cells are still too costly to compete with conventional power, but experts say they are increasingly used to supply small amounts of power in places where connecting to the grid would be costly.
Mr. Mayes said he was surprised to find solar cells and batteries being used on the Strip in Las Vegas to provide power to light bus shelters. Although the area has electricity, installing solar cells was cheaper than digging up the sidewalks to put in power lines, he said.
-------- human rights
Report slams Israel on sex slavery
Associated Press
Sunday, December 8
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/front/RTGAM/20021208/wisra1208/Front/homeBN/breakingnews
Jerusalem - About 3,000 women, mainly from the former Soviet Union, are sold each year into Israel's sex industry, which takes in about $1-billion (U.S.) annually, a parliamentary report said Sunday, slamming the country's justice system for being lax on punishments.
The women, seeking to escape poverty at home, are usually smuggled in by traffickers who promise them legitimate jobs. Once in Israel, they are sold to pimps for between $3,000 and $6,000 each, the preliminary report said.
The women receive between $25-$30 per customer, of which the pimp takes between 80 and 90 per cent, the report said. The women work about 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week and receive an average of 10 to 15 clients daily, it added. Often, the women live in dismal conditions and sometimes they are physically abused or live in fear of their pimps.
Israeli courts generally reach a plea bargain with the pimps and sentence them to either a few months of community service or up to an average of two years in prison, punishments which the committee said are too weak to serve as deterrents.
It suggested that these crimes should have minimum prison sentences to deter the sex traders, who often jail, blackmail and enslave the women.
In July of 2001, a U.S. State Department report placed Israel on a black list of countries whose laws don't meet U.S. criteria for dealing with this crime and threatened economic sanctions.
Israel has reformed the law somewhat since then, but the committee said it is not enough to confront the problem effectively. In addition to changes in the law, the committee suggested an authority be formed to fight the "war against trafficking in people."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Where the Cold War Continues
On Pennsylvania Avenue, Peace Activists Battle Elements -- and Boredom
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24872-2002Dec7.html
Concepcion Picciotto, back to camera, wishes members of the Nipponzan Myooji Buddhist Order well as they leave their vigil at day's end.
(Photos Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I24852-2002Dec07
He's locked into a Zen-like stillness, allowing snowflakes to frost his untamed beard as he contemplates the chain-like nature of existence: Fall begets winter, which begets the chill that sinks into his bones, which begets an impulse to sip hot coffee, which begets a swelling of the bladder, which begets an uncomfortable dilemma that regularly vexes Donn Congdon during these bitter days and nights.
"The killer is that you have to stay within three feet of the signs at all times or the police can legally take them away," he says.
Congdon helps maintain one of two anti-nuclear weapons vigils across from the White House on the sidewalk fronting Lafayette Square. With a partner who handles the night shift, they establish a constant presence, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So does Concepcion Picciotto, who has stayed day and night for two decades. Other demonstrations come and go, but the residents of 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. don't. They are the die-hards.
Normally Congdon can go four or five hours without a bathroom break, which corresponds to the routine of a friend who stops by each afternoon to spell him during a short break. But the wicked chain of cause-and-effect that accompanies the annual shift into winter threatens the balance.
"I try to think warm thoughts," he says, waiting, chilling. "Peace in the world would be cool. Or warm."
The vigil keepers admit to frequent discomfort, but they won't fish for sympathy. They know that no one is forcing them to be there. And they feel certain that a lot of people, especially the U.S. Park Police, would prefer they leave.
The keepers list some of the regulations that work against them as evidence. They can't fully recline because that would violate laws prohibiting camping. They can't take shelter under anything that could be construed as a structure, be it temporary or permanent. They can't abandon their signs. And, according to a policy that has been exhaustively tested, they can't deploy squirrels on tactical missions.
The squirrels that freely scamper across Congdon as he sits under a tarp illustrate a few truths about life at 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. First: It can get very lonely. When the weather turns nasty, squirrels are often the only company. The buckets of nuts that Congdon and the others keep on hand have broken down the barriers that traditionally divide man and rodent: All fear is gone. A few years ago, the keepers tried to use this to their advantage, demonstrating a second truth: An abundance of time to sit and think breeds creativity. Squirrels for Peace
It was an ambitious plan that the vigil keepers, in retrospect, admit was a long shot. It began with a shelled peanut, a piece of shoestring, and a balloon. The balloon was tied to the string, the string was tied to the peanut. A slogan was written on the balloon: "Nuts Not Nukes." They repeated this until their bag of balloons was empty.
As if knowing what was expected of them, the squirrels took peanuts in mouth and went to work. They ran with valiant abandon, balloons floating proudly behind as they zigzagged out of Lafayette Square. Some scrabbled up trees, some haltingly scurried down the street. Many of the balloons popped. But the keepers watched a few brave squirrels bound through the gated fence and onto the White House lawn, balloons intact.
Like proud elders cheering on their proteges, they watched the squirrels dash and weave as the White House guards -- "lawn ninjas" in vigil lexicon -- began the chase.
"We're now under the threat that if they see another squirrel with a balloon, we go to jail," says Rudy, Congdon's night-shift partner. "They're considered threats to national security."
The keepers have not used the squirrels since.
A Park Police spokesman wouldn't comment on the specific incident, but Congdon and Rudy, who wouldn't give his last name, have pictures of the police shutting the ballooning operation down.
So these days, despite their proven potential to make a more effective and flashy statement, the squirrels lead lives sapped of the adrenal excitement they once tasted.
The keepers say they can relate. The Night Shift
In the early hours of morning, the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue is one of the busiest streets in Washington. Though it is officially closed to traffic, a steady rumble of vehicular activity confronts the two vigil keepers who try to get some sleep. Snowplows make repeated passes, as do marked and unmarked security vehicles. The street lights are unrelenting.
It's 1 a.m. on Friday, and Picciotto is cocooned in translucent plastic. Peel back the plastic, the blankets, the parka, the scarves, and there she is: sitting on a wooden plank, upright, ever mindful of the camping statute.
Picciotto is the dean of the keepers, a Helen Thomas-like figure who has been keeping an eye on the White House since the Carter administration. Within her plasticized shelter -- don't call it a tent, because that would constitute a "structure" -- she keeps a copy of a photograph of herself as a young woman in Madrid. She is standing gowned in what looks to be some sort of a drawing room. The photo is offered as a counterpoint to the 57-year-old woman she has become.
Her complexion is weathered, its ruddier elements surfacing in the capillaries that spider across her cheeks.
"Without sacrifice," she says, "you can't achieve anything."
She didn't start out as a nuclear protester. She originally came to 1601 to take her battle for custody of her daughter straight to the top. Soon she met William Thomas, the man who started the first permanent anti-nuclear vigil here. Thomas, who eventually founded the peace group called the Proposition One Committee, befriended her.
A few yards from her plasticized lair, a pair of eyes stare out from beneath Rudy's plastic encampment. He's not accustomed to much foot traffic passing by, and he's eager to talk.
"Since 9/11, man, it's hard not to feel like the Maytag repairman out here," says Rudy.
Occasionally he'll spot the president or the first lady across the street, and they'll wave. The Clintons never did, he says. He figures that might have been a result of the sign that read "WAR CRIMINAL" and showed Bill Clinton's face.
"He's a human being, you know," Rudy says of Bush. "I wouldn't want his job. He's got some hard shots to call. But he's the guy there, so he gets the heat."
Sitting and sleeping during the hours when the only people who see them are the security guards might not seem particularly effective protest, but Rudy says it's vital. He concedes he might not have lived up to his potential, but says the vigil satisfies his desire to contribute to a free society.
"That we're willing to do this 24/7 constitutes a sense of urgency," says Rudy, 53. Then he acknowledges, "It also illustrates the futility of individual effort."
Awaiting a decisive triumph of peace over violence, he has taken solace in minor victories. During a sleet storm, police told him the umbrella under his tarp rendered it a structure. When he removed the umbrella, he says, the ice that had formed on the plastic retained the umbrella's shape overhead.
"It didn't even move," he says, relishing the memory. Battling Winter
Congdon has stood and sat at 1601 off and on since 1981. He hasn't missed a day since 1999. He calls it his "Cal Ripken streak."
The most unbearable winter weather he can remember was the beard-icer that accompanied President Ronald Reagan's second inauguration, in January 1985. Like his compatriots, he has a few secrets to beat the cold. "We're not allowed space heaters," he says. "But sometimes I light a candle."
Picciotto says she sometimes has to get someone to spell her while she changes into dry, warm clothes. Rudy confesses to sometimes, but not always, smuggling in a sleeping bag.
For several weeks, the keepers have had company from the Women's Peace Vigil -- a group of women wearing pink and opposing war. Some tried to stay overnight, but they say the police told them they couldn't: That right was reserved for the vigils manned by Picciotto and Congdon and Rudy.
The longtime keepers like having the company, even if it's not round-the-clock. But it's clear from listening that true street credibility comes only when time is measured in years.
"It's probably good they aren't out here at night," Rudy says of the group. "They were fasting, so that probably wouldn't have been a good idea. I'd never give up food and do this."
This week, many pathways in Lafayette Square were snow-covered. But not the stretch of pavement near the keepers. As Congdon relieved Rudy after the snowfall on Thursday morning, he found him shoveling around his post.
Throughout that day several people would ask Congdon if he was doing all right.
"Not too cold, are you?" a passerby asked.
"I've seen worse," Congdon replied.
"Do you need anything?"
"I'm fine," he said. "It's pretty easy for me. I've got this nice, thick beard. I'll drink a lot of coffee."
----
Anti-US protests grow in Seoul
BBC
Sunday, 8 December, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2552875.stm
Hundreds of South Koreans have gathered in the capital, Seoul, to protest against the presence of American troops in the country.
The protesters, many of them students, demanded an apology from President Bush over the deaths of two South Korean teenage girls last June in an accident involving a tank driven by American soldiers.
Korean protester arrested in front of the White House There were arrests in Washington
A group of protesters, including seven activists who had travelled from South Korea, also gathered in Washington to demonstrate in front of the White House.
The rising tension prompted a United States congressional delegation to call off a trip to Seoul to meet President Kim Dae-Jung and a group of North Korean defectors.
The chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Henry Hyde, said he did not want his delegation to become a focal point for large anti-US protests.
Trial demand
A US court martial last month acquitted the two US servicemen in the tank of negligent homicide.
Amid rising anti-American sentiment, several pubs and restaurants in Seoul are now barring US servicemen.
Demonstrators are demanding that the US soldiers involved in the accident stand trial under South Korean law.
Sign at the e-ZENO restaurant in Seoul Restaurants and pubs are also taking a stand
They rallied in a public park in the city, chanting slogans and demanding a direct apology from Mr Bush.
They also called for changes to an accord giving extra-territorial legal status to 37,000 US troops.
Later the crowd marched to the US embassy for a candlelight vigil in memory of the two girls.
But US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who met South Korea Defence Minister Lee Jun in Washington on Thursday, said he saw no reason for the agreement governing the 37,000 US forces in South Korea to be changed.
Under the accord, known as the Status of Forces Agreement (Sofa) the US has jurisdiction in criminal cases involving its servicemen in South Korea, although it can hand over jurisdiction to Seoul on a case by case basis.
Growing resentment
Priests, monks and entertainers joined the growing protests on Friday.
The leader of the South Korean Catholic Priests' Association for Justice (CPAJ), Reverend Mun Kyu-hyun, told a rally that the road accident had led many to question the very presence of US forces.
South Korean singer Lee Hyun-woo agreed.
"For a long time, we thought of American soldiers as friends, neighbours and allies," he told reporters.
"But after the accident, I think our views have changed 180 degrees," he said.
----
Philip Berrigan, Peace
Advocate in the Vietnam War Era, Dies at 79
By DANIEL LEWIS
December 8, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/obituaries/08BERR.html?position=top&ei=5062&en=7a6ee44ad69a0514&ex=1039928400&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=top
Philip F. Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft board raids that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960's, died on Friday in Baltimore after a lifetime of battling "the American Empire," as he called it, over the morality of its military and social policies. He was 79.
His family said the cause was cancer.
An Army combat veteran sickened by the killing in World War II, Mr. Berrigan came to be one of the most radical pacifists of the 20th century - and, for a time in the Vietnam period, a larger-than-life figure in the convulsive struggle over the country's direction.
In the late 60's he was a Catholic priest serving a poor black parish in Baltimore and seeing nothing that would change his conviction that war, racism and poverty were inseparable strands of a corrupt economic system. His Josephite superiors had previously hustled him out of Newburgh, N.Y., for aggressive civil rights and antiwar activity there; the "fatal blow," he said, had been a talk to a community affairs council in which he asked, "Is it possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and violent at home and be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?"
He hardly missed a beat after his transfer to Baltimore, founding an antiwar group, Peace Mission, whose operations included picketing the homes of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in December 1966. By the fall of 1967 Father Berrigan and three friends were ready to try a new tactic. On Oct. 17, they walked into the Baltimore Customs House, distracted the draft board clerks and methodically spattered Selective Service records with a red liquid made partly from their own blood.
Three decades later, Mr. Berrigan remembered feeling "exalted" as the judge sentenced him to six years in prison. From then on, he would be in and out of jail for repeated efforts to interfere with government operations and deface military hardware.
Even before his sentencing for the Customs House raid, Father Berrigan instigated a second invasion, against the local draft board office in Catonsville, Md. Among those persuaded to join was his older brother, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and poet, who had been one of the first prominent clergymen to preach and organize against the war.
The "Catonsville Nine" struck on May 17, 1968, taking hundreds of files relating to potential draftees from the Knights of Columbus building, where the draft board rented space. They piled the documents in the parking lot and set them burning with a mixture of gasoline and soap chips - homemade napalm.
Reporters were given a statement that read, "We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men but also because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America." It continued, "We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes."
When the police arrived, the trespassers were praying in the parking lot. The cameras loved the Berrigans. In the definitive photograph of the event, seven of the Catonsville Nine are nowhere to be seen. The photo includes only the striking image of two priests in clerical dress, one big and craggy, the other slight and puckish, serenely accepting their imminent incarceration.
The Catonsville raid inspired others in New York City, Milwaukee, Boston, Chicago and other cities, the tactic becoming a sort of calling card of the "ultra-resistance." It also elevated the Berrigan brothers to the status of superstars. "Father Phil" and "Father Dan" were on the cover of Time magazine and illuminated in profiles by the smartest writers.
But many Americans saw them as communists and traitors, or at best naïve dupes of the Vietcong. And among their own allies, grumbling grew about a cult of personality and a certain disdain for anyone unwilling to make the same sacrifices the Berrigans demanded of themselves.
Philip Francis Berrigan was born Oct. 5, 1923, in Two Harbors, Minn., the youngest of six sons of Thomas W. Berrigan and Frida Fromhart Berrigan, a German immigrant. Thomas Berrigan was a frustrated poet and a bullying husband and father. He was also a political radical whose labor organizing activities led to his dismissal as a railroad engineer, after which he moved to Syracuse and bought a poor 10-acre farm.
After high school, Philip was a first baseman in semiprofessional baseball before enrolling in St. Michael's College in Toronto. In January 1943, after one semester, he was drafted into the Army.
The life of black sharecroppers in Georgia, where he had basic training, and the treatment of black soldiers on his troop ship to Europe made an indelible impression on his conscience. So did his own role in infantry and artillery battles that earned him a battlefield commission as second lieutenant. In so many words, he came to consider himself as guilty of murder as the Germans and Japanese. Along with this came the conviction that he had grown up on a diet of nationalistic propaganda in which the good - "white Europeans" - always triumphed over evil - "anyone else."
After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., in 1950, he committed himself to the priesthood and was ordained in St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart in 1955. Later, he earned degrees from Loyola University and Xavier University, both in New Orleans.
The young priest became passionately involved in civil rights and antiwar activities, especially after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He was frequently in trouble with his superiors, whom he openly criticized for supporting the status quo, and occasionally with the law. He boasted that he was the first American priest jailed for a political crime.
In the trial that resulted in his second prison term - the trial of the Catonsville Nine in 1968 - the defendants were allowed to talk about their lives and political views but not to argue that some higher morality justified their breaking the law. All were found guilty.
In April 1970, after his appeals were denied, he was scheduled to begin serving a three-and-a-half-year term for the Catonsville incident, to run concurrently with the six-year sentence from the earlier Baltimore raid.
But the Berrigan brothers and two other Catonsville defendants reasoned that if they had been right to break the law in the first place, then it would be wrong to accept the government's punishment for it. So they went underground, and for a time two priests were among the criminals most wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Daniel eluded capture until Aug. 11, but Philip was arrested on April 21 in St. Gregory's Church in Manhattan and began serving his sentence in Lewisburg, Pa.
He spent many prison hours praying and filling journals with his trademark polemical writing, which over the years condemned everything from deceptive breakfast cereal advertising (a form of "violence") to the modern church. "The Gospel the church preaches," he wrote, "is a precise statement of the life it leads - a degenerate stew of behavioral psychology, affluent ethics and cultural mythology, seasoned by nationalist politics."
While at Lewisburg, Father Berrigan unwittingly helped set in motion a new controversy.
He had fallen in love with a nun, Elizabeth McAlister of the Religious Order of the Sacred Heart. In a ceremony without witnesses the two had secretly declared themselves husband and wife in 1969. They smuggled love letters past the prison censors through a trusted young inmate, Boyd Douglas, who was allowed outside to attend college classes.
According to the biographers Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady in "Disarmed and Dangerous," Father Berrigan's fellow inmate James R. Hoffa, the Teamsters president, warned that Mr. Douglas was an F.B.I. informant. But this expert opinion was ignored, and the exchanges ultimately became a source of great embarrassment and the basis for fresh prosecution. The letters talked of kidnapping a government official - Henry A. Kissinger was mentioned - and of shutting down government buildings in Washington by turning off the heat or air-conditioning.
The result was a conspiracy trial in 1972 that ended in acquittal on all major charges.
Philip Berrigan was paroled in December 1972. He and Elizabeth McAlister legalized their marriage in 1973. They issued justifications of their union on personal, scriptural and political grounds - and were excommunicated.
From then on the couple lived and worked in Jonah House, a small religiously oriented commune they founded in Baltimore.
Through his antinuclear Plowshares operation, Mr. Berrigan led a series of raids, among them an attack in 1980 at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pa. Two decades later he was still at it, though the world had largely stopped paying attention.
Thus citizen Berrigan, then 77, missed the 2001 premiere of a documentary film about Catonsville. He in an Ohio prison on charges of interference with a weapons system.
In addition to his wife and brother Daniel, Mr. Berrigan is survived by three children, Frida, Jerome and Katherine; and three other brothers, John, James and Jerome.
---
Pacifist Philip Berrigan dies of cancer
By Kasey Jones
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 8, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20021208-78749778.htm
BALTIMORE - Philip Berrigan, the former priest whose fight against war and nuclear weapons lasted decades beyond the anti-war movement of the 1960s, died Friday night at Jonah House, a communal residence for pacifists that he founded. He was 79.
Mr. Berrigan led the Catonsville Nine, who staged one of the most dramatic anti-war protests of the 1960s. The group, including Mr. Berrigan's brother, Daniel, doused homemade napalm on a small fire of draft records in a Catonsville parking lot in 1968.
Mr. Berrigan's family said he was diagnosed with cancer two months ago and decided to stop chemotherapy one month ago. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, officiated over last-rites ceremonies Nov. 30, which were attended by friends and peace activists at Jonah House, family members said.
In a statement given to his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, during the Thanksgiving weekend, Mr. Berrigan said, "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself."
Mr. Berrigan was born Oct. 5, 1923, in Minnesota and served as an artillery officer in World War II. He was ordained a Catholic priest in the Josephite Order in 1955.
He took part in the civil rights movement in the South.
On Oct. 27, 1967, Mr. Berrigan and three others dumped blood on Selective Service records in the Baltimore Customs House, "anointing" them, he said. They waited to be arrested, as they would in most protests.
"We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes," Mr. Berrigan said in a statement that day. "We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war and is hostile to the poor."
Mr. Berrigan expanded those views to include opposition to almost any form of established government that would wage war, deploy nuclear weapons or even use nuclear power.
---------
Democracy Now! Archived Philip Berrigan Coverage
by Democracy Now!
Sunday December 08, 2002
mail@democracynow.org
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1548481.php
Philip Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft board raids to oppose the Vietnam War and helped start the anti-nuclear Plowshares movement, died on Friday in Baltimore.
Philip Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft board raids to oppose the Vietnam War and helped start the anti-nuclear Plowshares movement, died on Friday in Baltimore.
He was the first U.S. Catholic priest to be jailed for political reasons and he was among the nation's first priests to participate in the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s. He helped found the Plowshares movement which took literally a line in the Book of Isaiah that calls for swords to be beaten into plowshares. He has spent over 10 years of his life in prison stemming from convictions for more than 100 acts of civil resistance to war.
On Wednesday Democracy Now! reported that Berrigan, 79, was quietly dying of cancer at Jonah House in Baltimore, the non-violent resistance community he helped found in the early 1970s. Over the past few days, his family and community have been gathering by his bedside. On Dec. 4 we spoke with Phil Berrigan's son and daughter, Gerry and Frida, and re-ran a 1998 interview conducted inside a federal prison between Democracy Now! and Phil Berrigan.
Listen to the Dec. 4 show http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20021104.html
Democracy Now! has been following the activism of Phil Berrigan as well as the militant religious peace movement for years. Below are some related highlights:
April 22, 2002: PHILIP BERRIGAN SPEAKS AT MAJOR ANTI-WAR RALLY IN WASHINGTON, D.C. [Read] http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20020422.html || [Listen] || [watch]
Jan. 3, 2002: PHILIP BERRIGAN RELEASED FROM PRISON, CONFRONTS BUSH AT CHURCH [Read] http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20020103.html || [Listen]
March 28, 2000: PHILIP BERRIGAN & PLOWSHARES ACTIVISTS IMPRISONED [Read] http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20000328.html || [Listen]
March 17, 2000: PHILIP BERRIGAN & OTHER ACTIVISTS FROM PLOWSHARES VS. DEPLETED URANIUM GO TO COURT [Read] http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20000317.html#3 || [Listen]
December 20, 1999: ACTIVISTS HAMMER ON FIGHTER PLANES FIRING DEPLETED URANIUM [Read] http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn991220.html || [Listen]
March 17, 1998: DEMOCRACY NOW! GOES TO THE PETERSBURG FEDERAL PENITENTIARY TO TALK WITH BERRIGAN IN JAIL [Read] http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn980317.html || [Listen]
External Links: Plowshares Actions: http://www.plowsharesactions.org
Articles on the Prince of Plowshares: http://www.musenet.org/~bkort/plowshares/
The Trial of Depleted Uranium by Philip Berrigan: http://www.ncf.ca/coat/our_magazine/links/issue41/articles/the_trail_of_deplated_uranium.htm
Time for a National Strike by Philip Berrigan: http://www.agapecommunity.org/NationalStrike.html
Compressing the Gap Between Nuclear and Conventional Weapons by Philip Berrigan http://www.swans.com/library/art7/zig057.html
Prince of Peace Plowshares: The Saga by Philip Berrigan http://users.rcn.com/danmk/phil.html
www.democracynow.org http://www.democracynow.org
add your comments http://sf.indymedia.org/comment.php?top_id=1548481
--
ACTIVIST PHILIP BERRIGAN RELEASED FROM PRISON, CONFRONTS BUSH AT CHURCH
January 3, 2002 on Democracy NOW! in Exile
http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20020103.html
Since September 11th, President George W Bush and his administration have threatened the world with warnings that nations that do not fall in line with Washington's so-called war on terror will pay a price-you're with us or you're with the terrorists he says. His attorney General John Ashcroft has pushed through a series of repressive decrees and laws, aimed at slashing civil liberties and basic constitutional rights. Ashcroft has said on a number of occasions that to criticize his detention of more than a thousand people here in the US--or any of his edicts for that matter-is supporting what he calls the terrorists. In fact only one member of the Senate, Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, voted against the repressive anti-terrorism bill.
At a time when dissent has been virtually outlawed, there are still some who dare to speak out.
This past weekend longtime peace-activist Philip Berrigan was released from federal prison after serving 2 years for an anti-nuclear protest in which he and several other activists hammered on US warplanes at the Bath Iron Works in Maine. Their Plowshares action was aimed at the A-10 warthog plane, one of the main warplanes that uses depleted uranium weapons. This was not the first time Phil Berrigan was behind bars. In fact he has spent more than a decade of his life in prisons and jails throughout the country:
--In 1964 he was imprisoned for pouring blood on draft cards in Baltimore during the Vietnam War.
--In 1968, along with his brother Fr. Daniel Berrigan and 7 others burned draft files in Catonsville, Maryland in what came to be known as the Catonsville 9.
--In the early 1970s he was put on trial on false charges of attempting to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Berrigan's wife Liz McAlister was also indicted in that case.
--In 1980, he and 7 others including Dan Berrigan entered the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania where they hammered on nuclear warheads. Known as the "Plowshares 8". This sparked a movement called the Plowshares movement where dozens of actions have been carried out at US military facilities across the country, usually involving hammering on weapons or pouring blood on them.
Barely a week out of prison, Phil Berrigan paid George W Bush a visit this past Sunday at the National Cathedral.
Guest:
- Phil Berrigan, is a longtime peace time activist and a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore. He was just released from prison where he served some 2 years for an anti-nuclear plowshares action in which he and several other people hammered on A-10 warthog attack planes. These warplanes generally drop depleted uranium.
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Iran Student Movement Finds New Vitality
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/middleeast/08IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Dec. 7 - University students protested again today, and the government cracked down with scores of arrests, witnesses said.
Thousands of people marched outside the Tehran University campus, and security forces used tear gas to disperse them, the witnesses said.
It was the biggest day of demonstrations in two weeks of almost daily protests set off by the death sentence issued for a reformist lecturer, Hashem Aghajari.
"Around 60 to 70 people have been arrested, most of whom are being questioned," Ali Taala, general director of security and political affairs at the governor's office in Tehran, told the students' news agency ISNA, according to Reuters. Others put the number of arrested in the hundreds.
Most of those arrested were not students, he said.
The student-led protests have been the broadest pro-reform demonstrations in three years. The students are motivated by the popularity of Mr. Aghajari, but many of them say their demands are not limited to his case.
Students "would not burst into such protests if they had basic freedoms such as wearing what they wish, listening to music or if men and women could freely mingle, and have normal lives," said one student, Sajad Ghorghi, 22. But because there are bans on such simple freedoms, he said, the students have to express their demands in political terms.
Reza Delbari, 24, said he would graduate this year, but even if he was lucky enough to find a job, he would earn only $150 a month, not enough to even rent a room.
"Then I have to be intimidated and humiliated every day by people who want to say what is religiously right," he said. "We cannot even decide for our own future."
The students represent many among Iran's overwhelmingly young population - 70 percent of the 65 million Iranians are younger than 30.
"This is a force that the government counted on for support, but now the establishment is faced with its high expectations and demands," said Qassem Sholeh-Saadi, a professor of law and political science at Tehran University.
Many students are well read and familiar with Western democracy. They are taught by professors who studied in Europe and the United States. The Internet and satellite television have put them in touch with the outside world.
The only independent associations allowed to function at universities are Islamic Associations, which predate the 1979 revolution. For a time, members hewed to radical Islamic ideology, but by the mid-1990's, pro-democracy students largely replaced them, and alternative groups formed with the hard-liners.
Islamic Associations around the country coordinate their policies through a central office. Students choose members of the office in free elections, and the body decides general policies.
But the student movement is handicapped because that central office has been weakened by arrests and infiltrations. Only three years ago, a week of student protests over the closure of a pro-reform newspaper was suppressed. Many demonstrators were arrested, and nearly a dozen are still in jail.
The 1999 crackdown plunged students into a period of political slumber, which lasted until the sentencing of Mr. Aghajari.
They have decided to hold a referendum at several universities, including here at Amir Kabir. The nature of the referendum is being kept secret, in order to avoid a reaction by hard-liners. But it will be a veiled question about the government's popularity.
Their request to hold a protest today, on the annual national student day, was rejected by the government. Nonetheless, thousands gathered at the Technical Faculty of Tehran University under heavy security.
"We will confine our activities to university campuses," said Mr. Farrokhi, noting that they are a preserve where the security forces are not allowed. "But we will not withdraw from out strategic demands: referendum is one of those, and we are willing to pay the price for it."
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400 March in Boston to Urge Cardinal Law to Resign
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Church-Abuse-Boston.html
BOSTON (AP) -- Cardinal Bernard Law, facing rekindled calls for his resignation and a rebellion of Boston-area clergy, was in Rome on Sunday for a previously unannounced visit to the Vatican, an archdiocese spokeswoman said.
Donna Morrissey refused to discuss the purpose of Law's trip. An archdiocese financial panel has authorized Law to file for bankruptcy on behalf of the archdiocese, but he would need permission from the Vatican before doing so.
Meanwhile, following new revelations of priest misconduct in the Boston Archdiocese, an estimated 400 people protested outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the cathedral where Law typically celebrates Mass.
Sunday's larger-than-usual protest was fueled by last week's release of new internal church documents containing some of the most spectacular allegations yet, suggesting church officials tolerated a wide range of clergy misconduct, and not just sexual abuse of boys.
``His presence here is hindering the ability of the victims to come out. He is the real voice of dissent here. He is the one flouting Catholic teachings time and again,'' said Jean Garrity, 43, of Wellesley, a member of the dissident group Voice of the Faithful.
Law has brushed off calls for his resignation for months, but for the first time he now faces the same request from priests.
Boston-area priests have been circulating a draft statement calling for Law's resignation. The petition praises Law for his leadership, but says the release of damaging internal church files makes his resignation ``a necessary step.''
``(The) events of recent months and, in particular, of these last few days, make it clear to us that your position as our bishop is so compromised that it is no longer possible for you to exercise the spiritual leadership required for the church of Boston,'' the petition reads.
The draft document initially called for 50 signatures, but the Rev. Robert Bullock, the head of a 250-member Boston Priests Forum, said Sunday it would require many more signatories to indicate a ``consensus'' that Law had to go. Once the document was finished, he would sign it himself, he said.
``We need new leadership, and we cannot build trust and confidence without new leadership,'' he said.
The Boston Priests Forum plans to discuss calling on Law to resign at a meeting Friday, he said.
Morrissey said she could not comment on the petition because she had not seen it.
The latest personnel papers, part of a huge collection of church files that victims' lawyers pried from the archdiocese, document a priest beating his housekeeper and threatening alleged sex abuse victims, another trading cocaine for sex, and a third claiming to be the second coming of Christ in order to entice teenagers training to be nuns into having sex.
Later in the week, other papers disclosed that a priest fathered at least two children, and apparently failed to immediately get medical help for the mother of their children when she overdosed.
Amid the latest reports, a financial advisory panel gave Law authority on Wednesday to seek a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing for the archdiocese -- a move that may prove financially necessary but would infuriate abuse victims seeking damages.
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