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NUCLEAR
U.S. Concerned About Nuke Smuggling in Central Asia
New Website - Lessons from the NATO Bombings of Yugoslavia
Belgian lower house passes nuclear phase-out bill
U.N. Teams Head Toward Uranium Mine
Iraq Indicates Names of Arms Suppliers in Document
Opposition claims to have proof of hidden Iraqi arms
U.S., Others to Get Complete Iraq Papers
U.N. Team Returns to Nuclear Site in Iraq
Security Council Receives Copies of Iraq Report on Banned Arms
A Top Iraqi Aide Defies U.S. to Find Proof of Weapons
Iraq Indicates Names of Arms Suppliers in Document
N. Korea seeks aid from China on nukes
Britain Lays Out Arguments for Missile Defense
U.S. to Eye Ukraine Missiles Destruction
DOE seeks input from recyclers on radioactive nickel
A Tough Case: How to Convict Hussein
MILITARY
Fear of casualties hampers hunt for Taliban
Rumsfeld Considers US Military in Africa
Ethiopia to Host Summit on Libya's One - Africa Plan
China's arms sales, stance on Taiwan chill talks with U.S.
Serbs Call Arms Sales to Iraq 'Peanuts'
Pact lets U.S. patrol Canada
Chinese Report Addresses Terror Concerns
Kuwait scorns Iraqi leader's 'apology'
Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US
Two Albanian shepherds killed by landmine blast - UN
Turkey Links Position on Iraq With Its European Union Status
Bush Will Meet a Leading Turk on Use of Bases
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION:
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
FBI Told to Give Papers to Whistleblower
Qaeda Claims Kenya Attacks; Promises More
ENERGY AND OTHER
EU bans single-hull tankers carrying heavy fuel oil
ACTIVISTS
Protesters say new group spurs crackdown
Chased Out Of D.C., Protester Eyes Bush Ranch
British Group Mounts Court Challenge to Iraq War
Celebrities to Send Bush Anti-War Letter
NO CHILD LEFT ALONE
Funeral for Peace Activist Berrigan
Peace movement growing below U.S. radar
Catholic Group Visits Iraq for Anti-War Protests
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
U.S. Concerned About Nuke Smuggling in Central Asia
December 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-nuclear-smuggling.html
GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany (Reuters) - Radioactive material that could potentially be used to make so-called ``dirty bombs'' has been seized at border posts in Central Asia in the past 12 months, a senior Defense Department official said Monday.
The smuggled material, contaminated metals, was confiscated at checkpoints along the Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan borders, Harlan Strauss, director of International Counterproliferation Programs at the Defense Department, told Reuters.
``It is possible to be reprocessed and to be utilized in a way that radioactive material can be used for a dispersal device or a small weapon to contaminate an area,'' he said.
Dirty bombs scatter radioactive material using conventional explosive devices.
``There continues to be movement of material across borders which is of concern,'' Strauss said on the sidelines of a conference on terrorism.
``We have recently, particularly in Central Asia, stopped some shipments of radioactive material exiting the region.
``In this case it was contaminated metals. How radioactive is a question of debate and discussion. Where it was going was unclear because the papers were not legit.''
The United States has been concerned since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that instability and economic hardship could prompt low-paid scientific workers to smuggle material that could be used to make nuclear or biological weapons.
Worries that a fundamentalist Islamic group such as al Qaeda could acquire such destructive items have increased hugely since last September's attacks on the United States.
Over the past decade at least 88 pounds (40 kg) of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium has been stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union, according to a report published by Stanford University's Institute for International Studies earlier this year.
While most of this material was subsequently retrieved, at least 4.4 pounds of highly enriched uranium stolen from a reactor in Georgia remains missing.
In Russia, U.S.-funded radiation detectors installed at eight border crossings have detected more than 275 cases involving contaminated scrap metal, irradiated cargo and other radioactive materials that could pose a proliferation concern, a General Accounting Office official told a U.S. congressional committee in October.
The United States has spent about $86 million to help about 30 countries, mostly in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, combat the threat of smuggling of nuclear and other metals that could be used in weapons of mass destruction.
-------- depleted uranium
New Website - Lessons from the NATO Bombings of Yugoslavia
From: "Janet M Eaton" <jeaton@ca.inter.net>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 01:20:48 -0400
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/jmeaton/war/index.htm
Ecological and Health Consequences of War:
Lessons from the NATO Bombings of Yugoslavia
DIGESTS & PAPERS
by Dr. Janet M Eaton
Introduction
With the growing threat of a US led war against Iraq, increasing numbers of news articles, commentaries, and analyses are warning of the environmental and health consequences of a possible war. These references draw attention to the impacts of other military strikes, executed with similar strategies and weaponry over the past decade and longer.
This website has been constructed to create awareness of the ecological and health consequences of the NATO Bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999, with the hope that lessons of the past might offer some insights and guidance towards mitigating and avoiding future wars.
During the NATO Bombings of Yugoslavia, Dr. Janet M Eaton collected, compiled, indexed and summarized a diverse number of news articles, analyses and reports available online and via listservs, into a regular series of Digests entitled "The Ecological and Health Hazards of the NATO Bombings". These Digests were widely distributed on numerous international listservs and posted on websites around world. Subsequently Janet was commissioned or asked to write a number of papers on the Ecological and Health consequences of this war.
-------- europe
Belgian lower house passes nuclear phase-out bill
Story by Gilles Castonguay
REUTERS BELGIUM:
December 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18934/story.htm
BRUSSELS - Belgium's lower house early last week passed a controversial bill to shut down the country's seven nuclear reactors by 2025, emulating similar moves by Germany and other European countries.
The Chamber of Deputies, which has been passing a slew of bills ahead of the Christmas holidays, approved the bill with 86 in favour, 49 against and five abstaining, according to a chamber spokesman.
The move is controversial because Belgium gets nearly 60 percent of its electricity from the reactors, making it the country most dependent on nuclear power after France.
The bill, presented by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt's cabinet, orders the shutting of the reactors after 40 years of use and bans the construction of new ones.
"The first reactors will be dismantled by February 2015, the last in 2025," read a statement from Secretary of State for Energy Olivier Deleuze, a Green party member who championed the bill.
Electrabel, Belgium's dominant power utility that operates the reactors, denounced the vote.
"We deplore this decision because there is today not any single reason, be it technical, economic or ecological, to close the plants ahead of time," spokeswoman Francoise Vanthemsche told local VRT radio.
Its shares were off 0.3 percent at 236.30 euros. VIABLE ALTERNATIVES?
Vanthemsche said the government should have conducted a study on viable alternatives to nuclear power before introducing such a bill.
The government will invest in solar, wind and other renewable energy resources as well as build more gas and co-generation plants to compensate for the loss of nuclear power.
The bill, which follows a pledge made by Verhofstadt when it took office three years ago, aims at eliminating the risk of a disastrous accident at one of the reactors and reducing the dangers of radioactive waste.
It goes next week to the Senate, which usually has one to two months to call a vote on a bill.
Politicians who opposed the bill doubted that the country would be able to meet its future energy needs without paying higher costs for it.
But Deleuze has argued that the gradual opening of the country's energy market to competition would keep the cost of electricity down.
He has also said the government is obliged to ensure the country gets the power it needs to function properly.
One study has foreseen the country relying on natural gas for 85 percent of its energy needs. Such a heavy reliance on a single source has been seen as making the country vulnerable to fluctuating gas prices.
Belgium's dilemma is the same as that faced elsewhere in Europe, where nuclear energy meets about a third of consumers' needs.
Puilaetco analyst Sophie Rouard said in a research note that the motives behind the bill were political rather economic.
"We believe that the bill could still be reviewed (by) other governments if there are not enough replacement energy sources," she said.
(Additional reporting by Bart Crols).
-------- inspections
U.N. Teams Head Toward Uranium Mine
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent
Dec 10, 2002 10:50 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_WEAPONS_INSPECTORS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Hanley reports the inspectors have been revisiting sites that were inspected in the 1990's. (Audio)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- International nuclear monitors drove six hours across the Iraqi desert to a remote uranium mining site in one of five inspections mounted Tuesday, a marked expansion of the U.N. field operation. Still more inspectors arrived in Baghdad.
Iraq's chief liaison to the U.N. teams said the Iraqis have found the inspectors to be working in a "calm and professional" manner. But he again complained about last week's surprise inspection of one of President Saddam Hussein's palaces, calling it an American-inspired provocation.
Also Tuesday, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan rejected U.S. skepticism of Baghdad's report to the U.N. Security Council on its weapons program, and said an attack on his country would be a challenge to the whole region.
"Any aggression against Iraq is the start of more aggression on the neighborhood," he told Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network, which showed only a brief segment of the interview.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said allied aircraft bombed an Iraqi surface-to-air missile system Tuesday after Saddam's forces moved it into a restricted zone earlier in the day.
The attack took place in Al Amarah, about 165 miles southeast of Baghdad. It was unclear if Iraqi forces fired at U.S. and British warplanes patrolling the southern no-fly zone. But U.S. officials say the mere presence of air defense systems inside such zones represents a threat to coalition pilots.
Tuesday marked the end of the second week of field missions for the U.N. inspectors, who returned to Iraq after a four-year absence under the Security Council resolution requiring the Baghdad government to give up any remaining chemical or biological weapons, and shut down programs to make them. Iraq denies it has such weapons or programs. The Iraq field missions were expanding as U.N. analysts began combing through 12,000 pages of documents submitted by Iraq to the United Nations over the weekend, detailing past programs of weapons of mass destruction and what it says are purely civilian programs today in the chemical, biological and nuclear areas.
Inspections in the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War, led to the destruction of tons of chemical and biological weapons, and to the dismantling of Iraq's program to try to build atomic bombs.
On Tuesday, reporters followed several cars of U.N. nuclear experts to mining operations at Akashat, in the desert near the Syrian border 250 miles west of Baghdad. The enormous complex surrounded by antenna posts, some broken, sat in an otherwise empty quarter of the desert. Reporters were unable to follow the inspectors inside.
The U.N. team presumably wanted to assess current Akashat operations considering what was found there by U.N. nuclear inspectors in the 1990s.
In the 1980s, the phosphate deposits at Akashat had been exploited for their uranium content as well as for fertilizer, producing some 100 tons of uranium over six years.
Also Tuesday, other nuclear inspectors headed again for al-Tuwaitha, Iraq's major nuclear research center, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, Iraqi Information Ministry officials reported. It was their third recent visit to the sprawling complex, where Iraqi scientists in the 1980s worked on developing technology for enriching uranium to levels usable in bombs.
A third U.N. team was reported to have visited a veterinary medicine establishment at Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad - presumably the Amariyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, site of biological weapons-related research in the 1980s.
That institute is reported to have expanded its storage capacity to an extent the U.S. government says exceeds Iraq's needs. Iraq contends the facility only makes and stores human vaccines.
Other inspectors were reported to have gone Tuesday to a military training center in Baghdad and to an industrial facility at al-Furat, just south of Baghdad. The purposes of those visits were not immediately known.
In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair said it would be "naive" to believe Saddam plans to comply with U.N. demands for disarmament. He also restated the readiness of the United States and Britain to take military action against Saddam.
"If there is a breach and Saddam doesn't comply, then we are prepared to take action," Blair was quoted as saying in the Financial Times.
Later Tuesday, more inspectors - about 25 were expected - arrived on a flight from a U.N. rear base on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, bolstering the U.N. inspection staff to about 70. Inspection team leaders have said they hope to expand operations to eight teams by year's end.
In an interview published Tuesday in the weekly al-Rafidayn, Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, chief Iraqi liaison, said of the inspectors' "behavior" that "we're satisfied with it so far because it is calm and professional."
Iraqi officials have complained sharply, however, about the U.N. inspection Dec. 3 of Baghdad's al-Sajoud palace, one of Saddam's many presidential palaces.
"The visit took place under pressure from the United States of America to create a crisis or confrontation between Iraq and inspection teams, but this did not happen," Amin reiterated.
Such palace inspections contributed to the U.N.-Iraqi tensions that ended with the collapse of the previous inspection regime in 1998. The new U.N. resolution declares the monitors have unrestricted power to inspect such sites.
Asked how long he expects the new U.N. inspections to take, Amin said that if the inspection agencies are "sincere," he thinks they should take eight months.
"Then the Security Council should suspend the sanctions imposed on Iraq and the monitoring process would continue," he said.
He was referring to international economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990, and to U.N. plans to establish a long-term system of monitoring Iraq's military-industrial complex - via surveillance gear, required reports and periodic visits.
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Iraq Indicates Names of Arms Suppliers in Document
Mon December 9, 2002
Reuters
By Evelyn Leopold
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=1876861
UNITED NATIONS - Iraq's long declaration of its past weapons programs is expected to include names of foreign suppliers, disclosures that may be embarrassing for nations on the U.N. Security Council.
A table of contents, circulated to the Security Council on Monday, says Iraq listed "procurements" of its nuclear programs as well as imported chemical precursors and foreign technical assistance for its chemical arms programs.
Under biological weapons, the index says 33 pages are devoted to "acquisition of equipment, material, supplies and empty munitions containers for all phases of the program."
The table, contained in a covering letter from Baghdad's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, lists all of Iraq's banned weapons programs, but does not indicate if any arms were procured after U.N. sanctions were imposed in August 1990.
In the past, sensitive information, has not been disclosed by U.N. weapons inspection units. Companies around the world, which cooperated with the United Nations did so on condition they not be identified publicly, although the United States and others are presumed to have access to such information.
But this time all 15 Security Council members are to get the report, which means it could leak to the press quickly.
Unknown is whether the United States and other council members will try to repress this part of Iraq's 12,000-page declaration, delivered to the United Nations on Sunday.
Washington now has the sole copy of the report, which it is expected to distribute to Russia, Britain, France and China, the other permanent council members.
The U.N. Security Council decided on Friday to purge the document of information that could lead to weapons proliferation, such as how to make a bomb. But no decision has been made on information about the suppliers.
President Saddam Hussein's government met a Dec. 8 deadline called for last month in a crucial Security Council resolution that sets the ground rules for new tough weapons inspections and give Iraq one more chance to disarm or face "serious consequences."
The Bush administration intends to show that significant information about any illegal weapons programs will put Baghdad in "material breach" of resolution 1441, adopted on Nov. 8, which would allow Washington to go to war.
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Opposition claims to have proof of hidden Iraqi arms
DEC 9, 2002
Straits Times (AP)
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/storyprintfriendly/0,1887,159634,00.html?
TEHERAN - The leader of the biggest Iraqi opposition group said he was prepared to hand over documents proving that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction but wanted the United Nations to guarantee the safety of his informers inside Iraq.
'We have strong evidence proving that Saddam does have weapons of mass destruction and is hiding them from the UN arms inspectors,' Mr Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Teheran-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told The Associated Press yesterday.
He said his group's information was new and came 'from inside Iraq'. He did not elaborate further.
He said he had not approached the UN and was instead waiting for officials to come to him now that he had publicised his claim.
'We are prepared to hand over our documents to the UN if it asks for it. We do not set any conditions for this but expect the UN to guarantee the safety of our informers inside Iraq,' he said.
The spokesman for the UN weapons inspectors, Mr Hiro Ueki, refused to comment about Mr al-Hakim's offer.
The United States, which rejects Iraq's denials of possessing weapons of mass destruction, has said that it wants UN inspectors to aggressively court Iraqi scientists with promises of safety and asylum in exchange for information about Mr Saddam's weapons programmes.
Like Mr al-Hakim, US officials say they have evidence they have not yet shared of Iraq's illegal weapons. --AP
----
U.S., Others to Get Complete Iraq Papers
Security Council Agrees to Give U.S. and Four Others Uncensored Copies of Iraq Declaration
The Associated Press,
December 9, 2002
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20021209_60.html
UNITED NATIONS Dec. 9 - In a surprise decision late Sunday, the Security Council agreed to give the United States, Russia, France, China and Britain full access to Iraq's arms declaration, U.N. officials and diplomats said.
The decision overrides one made Friday to distribute censored copies to the council and means that Washington won't have to wait to begin it's own analysis and translation of the 12,000 pages Iraq turned over to weapons inspectors on Saturday in Baghdad.
Under Sunday's agreement, the other 10 council members, including Syria, will only see the declaration once it is translated, analyzed and gleaned of sensitive material including possible instructions on bomb-making.
The decision was announced by Colombian Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso, the current Security Council president, who met with chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix late Sunday, several hours after Iraq's long-awaited dossier arrived at U.N. headquarters.
"After consultation with the members of the Security Council, the presidency decided to allow access to the Iraqi declaration to those members with the expertise to assess the risk of proliferation and other sensitive information to begin its immediate review," he said.
U.N. officials said the only countries with that level of expertise are the five permanent members.
Valdivieso said the experts would work "in close coordination and consultation," with weapons inspectors and "will assist them in producing a working version of the declaration as soon as possible."
According to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, largely drafted by the Bush administration and passed on Nov. 8, any omission or false statement that Iraq makes in the declaration would constitute a "material breach," a distinction which could open the door for another war against Saddam Hussein.
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U.N. Team Returns to Nuclear Site in Iraq
December 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.N. arms inspectors paid a return visit Monday to Iraq's huge al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex, where scientists and engineers in the 1980s worked to produce the fissionable material for nuclear bombs.
A second U.N. team set off in the direction of an area of chemical plants and other facilities with past connections to Iraq's old chemical and biological weapons programs.
At the nuclear site, U.N. experts wanted to ensure that Iraqi specialists, in the four years since U.N. monitors were last in Iraq, have not returned to research in areas that would contribute to nuclear weapons-building.
Recent satellite photos show new construction at al-Tuwaitha, buildings whose purposes the U.N. investigators would want to check.
Last Wednesday, in their first visit to al-Tuwaitha in the 2-week-old new round of U.N. inspections, specialists of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the U.N. nuclear watchdog -- spent five hours going ``room to room,'' team leader Jacques Baute reported afterward. But they needed more time to complete their inspection of the complex of more than 100 buildings, he said.
Many buildings at al-Tuwaitha, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, were destroyed in heavy U.S. bombing in the 1991 Gulf War. Through the 1990s, it was scrutinized by U.N. nuclear agency inspectors under a postwar U.N. monitoring regime to ensure Iraq did not develop weapons of mass destruction.
Those inspections stopped in 1998 amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes. The current round began Nov. 27 under a new, tougher U.N. Security Council resolution.
The daily inspections continue as the monitors' headquarters offices in New York and Vienna begin their review of the massive arms declaration, more than 12,000 pages, submitted by Iraq to the United Nations on Saturday.
Analysis of the declaration, whose submission was required by last month's U.N. resolution, is expected to suggest new sites for inspections, especially facilities that can alternate between civilian and military use.
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. If Iraq is found in noncompliance, on the other hand, the council may consider military action to forcibly the Baghdad government.
On Sunday, a science adviser to President Saddam Hussein said Iraq's report to the United Nations was accurate and comprehensive and included documents on Baghdad's drive to develop a nuclear bomb and other weapons programs up until 1991.
Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi said Iraq no longer has such ambitions, and in Vienna, Austria, U.N. nuclear experts said Iraq's report on its nuclear program appears to repeat that claim.
``At first glance, it appears the declaration is consistent with Iraq's statement that it has no nuclear weapons and that it has no nuclear weapons material or associated programs,'' Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Associated Press.
In Baghdad on Monday, peace activists from the Chicago-based Iraq advocacy group Voices in the Wilderness gathered before U.N. offices in for a demonstration urging the United States and Iraq not to interfere in the U.N. weapons inspectors' work.
The inspections process ``is the main source of help right now to avoid war,'' said Kathy Kelly, leader of the 17-member delegation from the United States and several other countries.
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Security Council Receives Copies of Iraq Report on Banned Arms
December 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Iraq.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The United States took possession Monday of the Security Council's copy of Saddam Hussein's massive arms declaration, as inspectors began combing the dossier for clues about whether Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. Reversing an earlier decision, the U.N. Security Council agreed late Sunday to give the United States and the four other permanent council members -- Britain, France, Russia and China -- full copies of the 12,000-page declaration.
Deputy Russian Ambassador Gennady Gatilov said the United States had taken the council's lone copy to Washington where it would make duplicates for distribution to the four other powerful council members.
The 10, non-permanent members, including Syria, will only see a censored version of the document once weapons inspectors have gone through the report and gleaned it of sensitive material -- including possible instructions on bomb-making.
Angered by the decision cut over the weekend by Secretary of State Colin Powell, diplomats said, Syria planned to protest the arrangement during Security Council consultations Monday.
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it would take some time to review the declaration and he called on Washington and others to be patient with the inspectors.
``The inspectors will have to review them, analyze them and report to the council, and I think that's going to take a while.''
In Washington, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer withheld judgment on the massive documentation and said the United States wants to study the material ``thoroughly, completely and fully and thoughtfully.''
The U.N. nuclear agency said Monday that at first glance, the nuclear section of the dossier repeats Saddam's claim that his country has no atomic weapons, materials or associated programs.
Of the 2,400-page nuclear portion of the document, 300 pages still must be translated from Arabic. And only an exhaustive analysis, backed up by ongoing arms inspections in Iraq, can determine if the document is truthful, said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Vienna, Austria-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
``The cross-checking is extremely important, including cross-checking on the ground,'' Fleming told The Associated Press. ``Should there be elements we feel have to be checked out, we have the advantage of having a team on the ground that can go the next day.''
On Sunday, an adviser to Saddam suggested that in the years before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq may have been close to building an atomic bomb.
Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi said Iraq no longer has such ambitions, but that it was up to the U.N. nuclear agency to determine ``how close we were.''
Using a powerful electronic database, nuclear experts began poring through the dossier within hours after it arrived at U.N. offices Sunday, measuring Iraq's claims against the hundreds of thousands of documents the agency has compiled since it began inspections in Iraq in the early 1990s.
Iraq insists in the declaration that it has no programs for developing banned biological or chemical weapons -- and challenged the United States to hand over any evidence it has to the contrary.
``The sooner they do it, the better,'' al-Saadi said Sunday.
Annan also said Monday that it sharing some intelligence with inspectors was critical to their success.
In Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors made a return visit Monday to Iraq's huge al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex, where scientists in the 1980s worked to produce the fissionable material for nuclear bombs. Chief nuclear arms monitor Mohamed ElBaradei said that war can be avoided if continued inspections prove Iraq is disarmed.
``If we succeed in providing a thorough analysis on the report and if we succeed in making sure Iraq is disarmed through an inspection, that I think could lead to the avoidance of a use of force,'' ElBaradei said at a Tokyo conference on nuclear safeguards.
The bulk of the Iraqi document, covering chemical, biological and missile components, is being reviewed in New York by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC.
The declaration arrived at U.N. offices in New York and Vienna late Sunday, the deadline for Iraq to provide a full and complete accounting of its weapons programs.
But the real test will be the document's transparency, which could determine whether Iraq will face another war with the United States and its allies over U.S. insistence that Iraq has banned weapons.
Under the terms of Security Council Resolution 1441, passed on Nov. 8, false statements or omissions in the declaration, coupled with a failure by Iraq to comply with inspections, ``shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations.''
Such a breach could be enough for Washington to argue that military action is the only way to force Iraq to comply.
In Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said Iraq's declaration created ``not a bad basis'' for resolving the Iraq crisis politically.
Under successive resolutions, passed since the Gulf War ousted Saddam's troops from neighboring Kuwait, the Security Council has demanded that Iraq disarm and comply with a weapons inspections regime. Only after inspectors declare Iraq in compliance can 12 years of crippling sanctions, imposed after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, be suspended.
Last week, the White House said there was a ``solid basis'' for assertions that Saddam possessed banned weapons and that the United States would provide that intelligence to U.N. inspectors. That evidence has not been forthcoming, and Blix has continued to ask Washington to share its data.
Asked Sunday whether he was bothered by Washington's criticism of Iraqi compliance with his inspectors thus far, Blix said: ``I'm not concerned about that. They will have their reaction, and we will have our study.''
Iraq's declaration, in Arabic and English with an 80-page summary, was contained in at least a dozen bound volumes accompanied by computer disks. They were brought into U.N. headquarters in two, small suitcases.
The declaration covers the 1990s U.N. weapons inspection regime in Iraq, when many arms and much production equipment were destroyed, and details ``dual-use'' industries that can serve both civilian and military purposes.
Inspectors said they expect much of the declaration to include repetitious material that was submitted years ago.
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A Top Iraqi Aide Defies U.S. to Find Proof of Weapons
December 9, 2002
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/international/middleeast/09IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 8 - An Iraqi general who is a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein challenged the United States and Britain today to produce any evidence they have that Iraq still has any weapons of mass destruction or programs to develop them.
But he strongly implied that American intelligence has been right in contending that Iraq came close to building at least one Nagasaki-sized atom bomb by 1991, at the time of the Persian Gulf war.
Adopting a posture of punchy self-confidence and defiance, the Iraqi officer, Gen. Amir al-Saadi, said at a news conference that Iraq's 12,000-page declaration to the United Nations Security Council denying any banned weapons or programs was "entirely accurate."
The long declaration landed at United Nations offices in Vienna and New York, and arms experts immediately began the daunting job of determining whether the material reveals any illegal activity.
With the comments of General Saadi, Mr. Hussein seems to be gambling that the American threat of war will prove to be a bluff.
The Bush administration has alerted the C.I.A. and national laboratories to be ready to go into overdrive, homing in on a few crucial Iraqi claims that the United States believes it can show to be false. But in private, administration officials concede that there is no single piece of dramatic intelligence that Iraq has continued to try to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
General Saadi implied that Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who have led the pressures for Iraq to meet its disarmament obligations or face attack, will be shown to have no hard evidence.
"We hope they will be investigating, that it will satisfy them, because it's entirely accurate, it's truthful," General Saadi said, referring to the Iraqi declaration. It was produced under a 30-day Security Council deadline and handed over at the United Nations headquarters here on Saturday night, a day ahead of the United Nations' deadline of today.
With the declaration's mass of top-secret technical detail and its history of Iraq's weapons programs going back to the 1980's, it is expected to establish a new base line in the confrontation between the United States and Iraq, helping to settle one way or another whether there will be war.
"If they have anything to the contrary, let them come up with it to the Security Council," General Saadi said. United Nations inspectors are in Iraq hunting down any secret weapons programs that may survive; they are swooping down every day on plants, research institutes and laboratories suspected of harboring banned programs.
"Why play this game?" General Saadi asked.
The United Nations weapons inspectors continued their daily missions today, visiting a government mining and survey company in Baghdad that has past association with uranium processing, and a pesticide plant west of Baghdad. Pesticide production can be converted to production of chemical weapons.
The Iraqi officer spoke mostly in English, aiming mainly at television audiences in the United States, but he took care to offer his rebuke to the Bush administration in Arabic, too.
"We don't understand the rush to judgment," he said. "A superpower should study and take its time in judging, especially as everyone is looking on it as it prepares for a huge military campaign, for an aggression against Iraq. It should behave wisely."
The Bush administration has said it intends to take time to analyze the documents, and no doubt will seize on the most startling of the admissions that came out of General Saadi's news conference: his suggestion of how far Iraq had progressed by 1991 toward acquiring a nuclear bomb.
All the work came to an end, he said, on Jan. 17, 1991, when the first President Bush ordered the bombing of Iraq to begin, five months after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
On that topic, the 64-year-old general, a chemical engineer who rose to become Mr. Hussein's most trusted lieutenant in the secret weapons hierarchy, seemed proud, even regretful, that the gulf war with the United States, and the bombing of Iraq's most coveted nuclear sites, had disrupted its most ambitious weapons venture of all.
The general was asked how close Iraq had come to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Speaking in English acquired during doctoral studies at the University of London in the 1960's, he replied, "We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb, nor tested it," and added, "If you follow the documents we have given, there is no guarantee that you would succeed."
Yet he danced close to the idea that considerable progress had been made. "We don't know, it's for others to judge, it's for the International Atomic Energy Agency to judge, how close we were," he said. "If I tell you we were close, it's subjective, maybe promotional."
That Iraq made headway toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, and its cloak-and-dagger stratagems, has been chronicled in detail by the international atomic agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
A C.I.A. report made public in October said Iraq began a crash program to build a bomb immediately after its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, planning to divert highly enriched uranium from internationally safeguarded research reactors that France and the Soviet Union supplied.
A British government dossier published in September gave other details. It said that after the Kuwait occupation, Iraq planned to build a "gas-centrifuge cascade" to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium from a Soviet-made research reactor, also using fuel from the Osirak reactor that Israeli jets bombed in 1981. The British said the aim was to produce a bomb with a 20-kiloton yield, similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
But what made General Saadi's remarks the more stunning was that it was the first time any Iraqi official other than a defector had spoken so candidly, in public, about a project that would have made Iraq the Arab world's instant military superpower.
The general devoted much of the one-hour news conference to spelling out details of Iraq's nuclear program as described to the Security Council. He said that 2,081 pages of the declaration were devoted to nuclear weapons and that the declaration included sections on the two methods Iraq used to try to obtain a domestic supply of weapons-grade fuel, electromagnetic isotope separation and gas-centrifuge enrichment. He cited a passage on work to develop a "trigger" for the bomb and to achieve "the final shaping of the device."
He explained, "In scientific jargon, `device' means the bomb." General Saadi seemed well chosen for the role he played today. He is also one of the Iraqis most trusted by Mr. Hussein, whom he now serves with the title of presidential adviser.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the secret weapons programs and how far advanced they were - in nuclear weapons, in deadly chemical and biological agents that were in the process of being "weaponized" and packed into bombs and missile warheads, and in missiles that were rapidly advancing to the stage where they could have achieved ranges of as much as 1,850 miles.
In the mid-1990's, when the crisis over Iraq's attempts to hide its weapons programs from United Nations inspections peaked, he was the official heading the Military Industrialization Commission, in overall charge of all the clandestine programs. In that position, he clashed frequently with the international weapons inspectors, as Iraqi denials that it had any banned programs, and the repertoire of harassment and obstruction faced by the inspectors, were swept away by United Nations discoveries of projects Baghdad had disclaimed.
The breakthrough came in 1995, when the military industrialization minister, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was Mr. Hussein's son-in-law and General Saadi's immediate boss, defected to Jordan and, in debriefing sessions with C.I.A. experts, laid out a blueprint of the secret programs. General Kamel was later lured back to Baghdad and killed in a shootout at his sister's home.
General Saadi's remarks at the news conference were peppered with frustration at the work imposed on Iraq in compiling its dossier, and the threats made by the United States if it made a single mistake in accounting for its banned programs.
The general said the requirement that Iraq account for all so-called dual use programs and materials, meaning civilian enterprises that use processes and resources similar to the weapons projects, meant that Iraq had to list in the declaration thousands of undertakings that had nothing to do with weapons, like canneries, refineries, dairies and fertilizer factories.
"We are not even allowed one inaccuracy in this resolution," he said. "It's a draconian resolution."
Reporters focused many of their questions on attempts to get General Saadi to say whether the declaration contained any new disclosures. They inquired about any banned weapons or weapons programs that Iraq has not previously admitted to the United Nations inspectors, whether from 1991 to 1998, when the inspections regime collapsed in the face of Iraqi obstruction, or after 1998.
Iraq might have tried to avoid war by admitting it had some secret programs until recently, but had scrapped them all. That might have allowed Iraq to square its insistence in recent weeks that it has no secret programs with whatever fresh intelligence evidence the United States and Britain can bring forward.
General Saadi rejected that route, at least until an American television reporter posed the question about new programs for the third or fourth time. "I recommend that you read the declaration," the general said, apparently sarcastically, because the declaration will not be made public for some days, if then. "Is there new evidence?" he asked. "I'm not going to answer that."
Despite American claims, the general insisted that biological weapons programs "never existed after 1991." Yet later in the 1990's, United Nations inspectors uncovered an animal vaccine plant that had been diverted to producing botulinum.
He was similarly insistent about Iraq's production of VX gas, another deadly program uncovered by the inspectors in the 1990's. Of that program, he said, "nothing still exists."
Weapons inspectors hoped the declaration would settle what happened to 600 tons of "precurs," materials Iraq had and could use in the production of VX gas. Weapons experts have said that much material would be enough to produce enough VX gas to kill the entire world population.
--------
Iraq Indicates Names of Arms Suppliers in Document
December 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-un-contents.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iraq's long declaration of its past weapons programs is expected to include names of foreign suppliers, disclosures that may be embarrassing for nations on the U.N. Security Council.
A table of contents, circulated to the Security Council on Monday, says Iraq listed ``procurements'' of its nuclear programs as well as imported chemical precursors and foreign technical assistance for its chemical arms programs.
Under biological weapons, the index says 33 pages are devoted to ``acquisition of equipment, material, supplies and empty munitions containers for all phases of the program.''
The table, contained in a covering letter from Baghdad's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, lists all of Iraq's banned weapons programs, but does not indicate if any arms were procured after U.N. sanctions were imposed in August 1990.
In the past, sensitive information, has not been disclosed by U.N. weapons inspection units. Companies around the world, which cooperated with the United Nations did so on condition they not be identified publicly, although the United States and others are presumed to have access to such information.
But this time all 15 Security Council members are to get the report, which means it could leak to the press quickly.
Unknown is whether the United States and other council members will try to repress this part of Iraq's 12,000-page declaration, delivered to the United Nations on Sunday.
Washington now has the sole copy of the report, which it is expected to distribute to Russia, Britain, France and China, the other permanent council members.
The U.N. Security Council decided on Friday to purge the document of information that could lead to weapons proliferation, such as how to make a bomb. But no decision has been made on information about the suppliers.
President Saddam Hussein's government met a Dec. 8 deadline called for last month in a crucial Security Council resolution that sets the ground rules for new tough weapons inspections and give Iraq one more chance to disarm or face ``serious consequences.''
The Bush administration intends to show that significant information about any illegal weapons programs will put Baghdad in ``material breach'' of resolution 1441, adopted on Nov. 8, which would allow Washington to go to war.
-------- korea
N. Korea seeks aid from China on nukes
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021209-32546824.htm
North Korea is trying to buy a chemical from China used in the production of nuclear-weapons fuel that U.S. intelligence officials say is a sign the communist government in Pyongyang is continuing to secretly develop nuclear arms, The Washington Times has learned.
North Korean government agents were tracked by U.S. intelligence to several Chinese companies that make the chemical, known as tributyl phosphate, or TBP, said officials familiar with classified intelligence reports.
"This shows they are moving ahead with their uranium [nuclear-weapons] program," an intelligence official said.
The chemical has commercial uses, but U.S. intelligence agencies believe the North Koreans want the TBP as part of the uranium-based nuclear-arms development program, which the CIA estimates is about two years away from being able to produce fuel for nuclear bombs.
The TBP "will be used to turn spent [nuclear] fuel into weapons-grade uranium," the official said.
A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
The Chinese companies involved in the North Korean chemical deal were not identified. However, Chinese companies have been sanctioned by the Bush administration at least three times in the past year for similar weapons-related sales to Iran and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence agencies also have detected recent activity at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility that may signal the communist government in Pyongyang is preparing to restart the reactor, which was shut as part of a 1994 agreement, an intelligence official said.
A State Department intelligence bureau report made public last month stated that North Korea has not reloaded the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon and had stopped construction of larger 50-megawatt and 200-megawatt reactors at the site. "It is not producing fuel at the fuel fabrication facility at Yongbyon, and it has forgone reprocessing spent fuel," the bureau said in written answers to questions from the Senate intelligence committee.
North Korean government officials in October confirmed U.S. intelligence reports that the government is developing uranium-based nuclear arms, despite promises to freeze nuclear-weapons development under the 1994 agreement.
The disclosure led the United States to cut off fuel oil shipments last month. The oil was meant to help North Korean energy shortfalls until the electrical-power-generating reactors are built during the next several years.
North Korea responded to the cutoff by announcing that the 1994 accord was nullified.
Asked about the North Korean nuclear-arms program on Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he discussed the issue with South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jun during meetings at the Pentagon.
North Korea's continuing efforts to build nuclear weapons in violation of arms agreements will be a topic of discussion in talks in the region by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who is visiting the South Pacific this week. Mr. Armitage will make stops in South Korea, Japan, Australia and China.
On Friday, the State Department announced that a year-end meeting of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization would be postponed until next month. The meeting of the organization, which deals with energy issues in North Korea, had been scheduled to discuss how the United States, Japan and South Korea would respond to North Korea's nuclear program.
The Bush administration is waiting until after South Korea holds presidential elections, set for Dec. 19, before deciding how to deal with the growing nuclear showdown with the North.
The administration is especially concerned that the candidate of the ruling Millennium Democratic Party, which has taken a conciliatory line toward the North Korean nuclear-arms program, will be elected.
Diplomatically, the administration is working within the 41-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group to curb sales of weapons goods, including TBP, to North Korea.
"There's no question but that the situation in North Korea is very serious," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters last week. "They have violated several agreements and proceeded on a very dangerous course."
Nuclear-arms specialists say TBP is used in purifying uranium and also can be used for making new plutonium fuel at the Yongbyon nuclear facility.
TBP also is used for reprocessing spent plutonium fuel.
Leonard S. Spector, deputy director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., said the reported North Korean chemical dealing could mean several things.
"Depending on their timing, these activities could signal that, in response to the new confrontation with the United States, North Korea is getting ready to exploit the demise of the Agreed Framework," Mr. Spector said.
The 1994 Agreed Framework was supposed to have halted all work on North Korea's nuclear weapons in exchange for the United States, Japan and South Korea providing the North with two nuclear-electrical-power reactors.
Mr. Spector said the North Koreans may be sending signals through the attempted purchase of TBP as "a way for Pyongyang to turn up the heat a little, without going to the brink."
Mr. Spector said he believes that as long as North Korea allows nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the Yongbyon nuclear facility, "the North Koreans want a deal, not a blowup."
North Korea announced last week that it had rejected a request from the IAEA to inspect its nuclear facilities, including those at Yongbyon.
The international nuclear agency announced Nov. 29 that North Korea should immediately permit nuclear inspections and "give up any nuclear-weapons program, expeditiously and in a verifiable manner."
"The [North Korean] government cannot accept the Nov. 29 resolution of the IAEA board of governors in any case and there is no change in its principled stand on the nuclear issue," North Korea's central news agency said, citing a Dec. 2 letter from Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun.
President Bush had said North Korea is one of three "axis of evil" states. The others are Iraq and Iran.
The CIA released an unclassified assessment of the North Korean nuclear-arms program last month.
The agency concluded that North Korea could build several plutonium bombs right away and add one bomb every year until 2005 if the Agreed Framework collapses. Beginning in 2005, North Korea could begin large-scale production of nuclear weapons - up to 50 bombs a year.
-------- missile defense
Britain Lays Out Arguments for Missile Defense
December 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-britain-usa.html
LONDON (Reuters) - The British government spelled out the arguments Monday for signing up to a planned U.S. missile defense shield in a paper that critics said was the latest part of a softening-up exercise.
Officially, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government says Washington has yet to decide whether it would need bases in Britain to support such a system so no UK decision is required.
But last month, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon declared missile defense could strengthen global stability and deter attack by ``rogue states.''
Monday's discussion paper from the Ministry of Defense -- which spells out how a missile shield might work, its possible deterrence effect, the costs involved and what Britain's input might be -- rammed that message home.
``There are an increasing number of potential threats to the security of the UK and her allies,'' the document said.
``There are complex issues to be considered before the UK and others can determine the best overall strategy for addressing this threat and the role missile defense could play...But now is the time to consider these issues.''
Blair may have to approve the upgrading of early warning systems at Fylingdales in northern England to allow the U.S. program to go ahead.
In parliament, Hoon said his government would agree only if it believed missile defense would enhance British security and that of the NATO alliance. ``If there is a United States request ... we will consider it very seriously,'' he said.
In a first step toward setting up a missile defense umbrella, the U.S. in June unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty which banned such systems.
The move worried U.S. allies and led to protests in Blair's Labor Party, many of whom are vehemently opposed to closer military links with Washington and argue a missile defense shield could spark a new global arms race.
Labor MP Malcolm Savidge asked Hoon for an assurance that the document did not show government policy was being dictated by the ``ideological obsessions of the Bush administration.''
The system, dubbed ``Son of Star Wars'' after an initiative pioneered by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, depends on intercepting an incoming missile with another missile.
The document said the government was considering setting up a technology center, funded by the state and industry, to provide expert work in support of missile defense. It is also discussing with Washington how to improve partnerships between British and U.S. industries and experts.
-------- ukraine
U.S. to Eye Ukraine Missiles Destruction
December 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Missiles.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- U.S. weapons experts arrived in Ukraine on Monday for a four-day visit to monitor the former Soviet republic's progress in eliminating its disarmed SS-24 missiles.
The 10-member team from the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program is charged with verifying that Ukraine's disassembly and destruction of deactivated SS-24 missile components comply with its obligations under the 1991 START Treaty, a Defense Ministry official said. The missiles are stored in the southeastern city of Pavlohrad, some 300 miles from the capital, Kiev.
Ukraine began destroying some 54 intercontinental ballistic missiles at Pavlohrad in June 2000. About 30 of the silo-based missiles have been dismantled so far.
In October, U.S. and Ukrainian officials celebrated the closing of Ukraine's last nuclear missile silo and the 43rd Rocket Army that controlled some 175 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Ukraine inherited the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, including hundreds of missiles and dozens of strategic bombers.
Independent Ukraine renounced nuclear weapons and has transferred its 1,300 nuclear warheads to Russia for destruction. Some of those warheads had armed the SS-24 missiles now being eliminated as part of an ongoing U.S.-Ukraine program.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
DOE seeks input from recyclers on radioactive nickel
REUTERS USA:
December 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18932/story.htm
NEW YORK - The U.S. Department of Energy said last week it is discussing with metals processors ways to recycle 15,700 tons of nickel in Kentucky and Tennessee, contaminated by uranium and other radioactive elements over decades at U.S. enrichment plants.
Another 21,000 tons of shredded nickel scrap used as or stored near enrichment process equipment also could become available for recycling in the future, the DOE said.
Use of the nickel, now stored near a gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Ky. and at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., would be limited to radiological or nuclear applications, said DOE technician Richard Meehan.
The 15,700 tons of nickel has a potential value of about $10 million, and contains traces of uranium, technetium, neptunium and plutonium.
The 21,000 tonnes of nickel could become available as scrap from demolitions at Paducah, Oak Ridge, and a plant in Portsmouth, Ohio sometime down the road, according to the DOE.
Meehan said several prospective contractors met Dec. 5 with the DOE to discuss ways of possibly reusing the nickel scrap "in compliance with a 2001 federal policy prohibiting release of contaminated material into general commerce."
Formal responses from any companies expressing interest in the nickel are expected late this month, he said.
"There are a bunch of companies out there that have metal processing capabilities that have radiological materials licenses, and several showed up at the meeting, but whether they are interested or not is another story," he said.
Local news reports have said federal lawsuits allege that the nickel, mainly stored in a 25-acre scrap yard in Paducah, is highly radioactive and a poses a health threat to workers and the public.
U.S. enrichment plants processed uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, but in recent years mainly made it for nuclear power-plant fuel.
The nickel's use now would be limited to radiological or nuclear applications where it would be subject to radioactive contamination anyway, Meehan added.
"Why take clean material and dirty it up when you can take material that is already contaminated and reuse that in a competent way? It conserves resources and keeps that material in a controlled setting.
"If somebody has a better idea than just throwing it away, that's what it amounts to," he added.
Meehan said that possible uses for the contaminated base metal include steam generator replacements and nuclear piping.
-------- us politics
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Tough Case: How to Convict Hussein
December 9, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/international/middleeast/09POLI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - At the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Adlai E. Stevenson, the American chief delegate to the United Nations, crystallized one of the most dramatic moments of the cold war when he displayed spy-plane photos of Soviet nuclear missiles being delivered in Cuba - images that swept away Soviet denials that anything nefarious was afoot.
Some officials in Washington recalled that moment this weekend. The administration was asked why President Bush has not orchestrated a similar display of evidence that would cut through 12,000 pages of Iraqi declarations, and back up Washington's assertion that Saddam Hussein never gave up his weapons of mass destruction.
"It's a very different challenge," a senior administration official said.
Nations trying to hide their weapons programs are familiar with the power of American spy satellites, and are far more skilled at hiding weaponry from view.
There are suspicions that Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons are aboard ever-moving vans, and that its program to develop highly enriched uranium is buried deep underground. In short, this is a far harder task than watching workers unload nuclear missiles four decades ago, this official explained.
In private, administration officials concede that there is no single piece of intelligence that can undermine the Iraqi declarations.
Instead, they say, there are only patterns of Iraqi purchases, the scattered reports of defectors and Mr. Hussein's own history of making "final" declarations that eventually proved to be neither final nor true.
The absence of a smoking missile so far creates a far more difficult diplomatic task for Mr. Bush. As he insists that Iraq prove a negative - that it no longer possesses the weapons that inspectors found before 1998 - Mr. Bush is under pressure to come up with evidence as debate-ending as those photos of the missiles shown to the Security Council in 1962.
Today the Iraqis may have made the process a little easier when Gen. Amir al-Saadi, who has run many of Iraq's weapons programs, said in Baghdad that the immense document proved Iraq had given up its arms programs and then, curiously, described how close it had come to developing a nuclear weapon.
"We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things," he said, speaking in the present tense in fluent English. "We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it."
If General Saadi was discussing a current program - and that was not entirely clear - Mr. Bush may have all that he needs to prove that Iraq is in "material breach" of its 11-year-old commitments to disarm.
The administration is betting that General Saadi and his colleagues together will ultimately prove to be the Adlai Stevenson of this drama, that they will unintentionally provide the road map to continuing weapons projects, or false claims that those projects have been dismantled.
So for now the administration appears to have settled on a three-part strategy that began to come into view late last week.
The first step, which preceded the Iraqi delivery of documents this weekend, was to demand that Iraq do far more than simply provide its list to the United Nations. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have both said that the only way for Iraq to clear up doubt is to lead the inspectors to the weapons stores, and to the scientists who worked on the programs. There must be irrefutable evidence, they argue, that tons of precursors to VX, a chemical agent, and biological experiments have been destroyed.
"This is why it is so important to bring the scientists out of Iraq," said one senior official. "Unless we are talking to them outside Saddam's atmosphere of intimidation, we will never know what really happened, whether anything was destroyed."
Step two, expected in the next few weeks, is to counter the voluminous Iraqi report with selected bits and pieces of intelligence, each of which could call into question the accuracy of the weekend declarations.
American officials briefing reporters at the White House on Friday noted, for example, the thousands of tons of VX that arms inspectors found after Iraq had said the substance had never been successfully produced or turned into weapons. But after the inspectors left in 1998, they said they could not verify Iraq's claims about how much had been produced or destroyed.
Over the weekend, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said the first thing Mr. Hussein had to do was account for those "thousands of tons of material."
Part three of the strategy, then, is to launch a global campaign to argue that the 12,000 pages, and supporting documents, fail to answer those questions. "We can't make that declaration now, because we haven't gotten the documents yet," one senior official said over the weekend. "But we're headed that way."
As a diplomatic matter, however, that will be difficult. "It is a tough case to make," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former national security aide and Central Intelligence Agency expert on Iraqi weapons who has written a book, "The Threatening Storm," arguing for an invasion of Iraq. "But the fact is that the case isn't likely to get easier to make in the next few months."
The chain of events the White House desperately wants to avoid is a lengthy analysis of the weekend declarations, followed by a point-by-point debate with the Iraqis over whether that is sufficient. It has warned the C.I.A. and the national laboratories that they should home in on a few Iraqi claims that the United States believes it can demonstrate as false. It is unclear whether Mr. Bush is willing to declassify intelligence to emphasize the point.
That is where statements like General Saadi's today may help. Iraq has never provided crucial technical documents from its nuclear program. If those are not included in the submission made over the weekend, his statements will be evidence that the report is incomplete. If such documents are included in the submissions, inspectors will demand to see where the equipment is today, or demand evidence of its destruction.
But it is unclear whether murky evidence of the destruction of the weaponry will satisfy the Security Council that a reason for war exists. Perhaps for this reason, Ms. Rice and others repeat frequently now that "the burden of proof is on the Iraqis," and that this declaration was, in the words of the Security Council resolution, a "final chance" to come clean.
White House officials know they have to win that argument because they have little hope that the inspections themselves will find anything Mr. Hussein is intent on hiding.
"How do 300 searchers, with 80 to 100 men on the ground, search a major nation with hundreds or thousands of facilities and mobile assets?" asked Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a report last week.
He answered this way: "Very slowly, and not comprehensively."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Fear of casualties hampers hunt for Taliban
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021209-15741127.htm
U.S. commanders have turned down as too risky plans for special operations missions to attack Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, according to soldiers and Bush administration officials.
Military sources said that on several occasions, Army Green Beret A-Teams received good intelligence on the whereabouts of former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, one of the United States' most sought after fugitives. In each case, soldiers said, commanders turned down the missions as too dangerous or because they believed the intelligence was shaky.
The military sources said that in recent months, Green Berets, also called Special Forces, have written detailed plans, or what are called "concept for operations" (conops), to find and attack Taliban leaders. In virtually all the cases, the officials said, the conops were turned down by Task Force 180, the overall Afghanistan command at Bagram air base north of Kabul.
Col. Roger King, chief spokesman for Task Force 180, issued a statement yesterday rebutting these accounts from Special Forces soldiers. The statement said 580 conops had been conducted by Green Berets during the past three months.
Special Forces sources, however, said the vast majority of missions involved reconnaissance or searches for weapons caches - not a specific plan to attack a Taliban leader.
"We had a good plan," said one Special Forces soldier, who, like others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from superiors.
"We came in hard in November, December, January, February and we won," the soldier said. "Since then, we've been floundering."
Said another solider with knowledge of operations in Afghanistan: "If you put in a conop, if it said 'raid,' 'ambush,' 'kill,' 'sniper,' anything like that, the conop would be disapproved based on the vocabulary used. If you said my team has intelligence that a Taliban corps commander was going to be at such a place, set up an ambush and engage and try to kill or capture him, that would be out of hand rejected."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ordered all senior U.S. commanders to "lean forward" or be aggressive in the war against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters and other terrorists.
A senior defense official said the lack of what are called "direct action" special operations missions comes at a critical time. The military sources said that based on intelligence collected by A-Teams and U.S. agencies, there are likely only 50 to 100 devoted Taliban leaders left in Afghanistan. Some are trying to form new guerrilla groups by merging with Pakistani and Arab militants.
Special Forces soldiers on the ground say that if the United States misses its chance now to kill or capture them, the hard-core Taliban leaders may be successful in reorganizing their units and other militants' and destabilizing the regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
An administration official said the issue of approving conops has been discussed at high levels in the Pentagon.
Soldiers traced the operational slowdown in Afghanistan to an incident last June at Deh Rawod called Operation Full Throttle, a major direct action by coalition commandos in Afghanistan. As ground warriors moved toward Taliban targets in areas north of Kandahar, an AC-130 gunship fired rounds into a village where anti-aircraft fire was spotted.
When the smoke cleared, 34 civilians had been killed, according to an investigation by U.S. Central Command, which runs the war in Afghanistan. Some Special Forces soldiers contend that the casualty total was much lower.
Still, special operations troops considered Full Throttle a success because it flushed out some Taliban leaders and sent them scurrying to Pakistan, where they remain today, soldiers said.
Soldiers said that since Deh Rawod, the process of winning approval for a conops became more bureaucratic when they called for missions involving ambushes. Military lawyers started playing a larger role in reviewing and recommending against direct action missions.
Some commandos viewed the disapproval as a sign of timidity by commanders at the Bagram air base, who did not want to see their careers damaged by missions that might go bad.
Task Force 180 is led by Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, an Army corps commander whose units include the 82nd Airborne Division. Commandos say there is an attitude at the Task Force that special operations forces have been in Afghanistan too long.
Historically, conventional warfare commanders have harbored a distrust of special operations units, believing some of their missions' risks outweigh the benefits.
"The fear of getting prosecuted for anything there is real. There's a paranoia," said one soldier. "There are so many lawyers."
Said a Special Forces soldier: "There is nothing worth dying for in Afghanistan. None of us want to take an unnecessary risk, but we did want to catch terrorists."
Gen. McNeill was in Washington last week briefing Mr. Rumsfeld and President Bush on the pace of operations in Afghanistan.
The Task Force 180 statement from Col. King to The Washington Times said:
"Without knowing who you talked to, I can't comment on either their motives or familiarity with operations in Afghanistan. However, Special Forces here executed 580 conops during September, October and November. These operations were not all offensive in nature, as some were reconnaissance, but it is a good indicator of the pace of operations in Afghanistan.
"Additionally, conventional forces here conducted approximately 20 larger operations during the same time frame. All those operations were offensive in nature. The primary mission of [Task Force] 180 remains to 'kill or capture' terrorists in Afghanistan. To that end, coalition forces have apprehended more than 550 persons since May."
In early November, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed some unhappiness with the pace of intelligence collection and anti-terror operations in Afghanistan.
"They've adapted their tactics, and we've got to adapt ours," he told a gathering at the Brookings Institution.
He spoke of an "intelligence flow that has to be more exquisite, if you will, than it's been in the past" and of "the ability of our forces to strike very quickly on intelligence that may not be 100 percent perfect or sure, but to take that kind of risk because the payoff is so important."
He added: "In general, I think that's where we need to improve. And I think in a sense we've lost a little momentum there, to be frank."
A Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Friday that Gen. Myers was referring to the lack of success in capturing key al Qaeda fighters. He said that since the general made his remarks to the Brookings Institution there have been improvements.
A soldier told of an incident within one A-Team this summer. An Afghan soldier repeatedly followed and watched the team as it moved around eastern Afghanistan, one of the last strongholds of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in that country.
One day, the Afghan approached and pointed his rifle. An A-Team member responded by shooting and killing him. The incident would have ended there, except that a support personnel attached to the team filed a complaint at headquarters.
"The word got out. Anyone can be prosecuted," said one soldier.
Asked about this shooting, Task Force 180's Col. King said, "There is an incident similar to what you described that is currently under investigation. This investigation is being handled by U.S. Army Special Forces Command, Fort Bragg, N.C. As a rule, we don't comment on ongoing investigations."
There are 30 A-Teams in Afghanistan, who are conducting operations along with a contingent of local Afghans who act as guides and bodyguards.
-------- africa
Rumsfeld Considers US Military in Africa
The Associated Press
December 9, 2002
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20021209_2166.html
SOUDA BAY, Crete Dec. 9 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday left open the possibility of expanding the new U.S. military presence in the Horn of Africa, where hundreds of American troops are based as part of a land, sea and air campaign to root out al-Qaida terrorists.
In an interview en route to his first visit to the Horn of Africa since taking office, Rumsfeld said some countries in that unstable region had offered the use of military facilities, but that so far the United States had only agreed to use Camp Le Monier in the desert hinterland of Djibouti.
Eritrea, which lies to the northwest of Djibouti on the Red Sea, was Rumsfeld's first stop, following a change of planes on this Greek island. In an indication of the level of concern about terrorist threats, Rumsfeld switched from an Air Force C-32 jetliner to a C-17 cargo plane for his Africa tour.
Rumsfeld also was scheduled to visit Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, where more than 1,000 U.S. battle planners are conducting a computer-simulated war game at a new command post. A war against Iraq likely would be run from that command post.
The port at Assab, on the southern tip of Eritrea, is one of the largest on the Red Sea. When Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, visited Assab in March the government offered to play host to his troops.
Rumsfeld told reporters flying with him from Washington that he was not ready to strike any deals.
"I'm not here to engage in transactions," he said. "I'm not here to put pressure on anybody. I'm here to demonstrate that the United States values what these countries are doing."
He said there is no doubt that some members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network are operating in several countries in the Horn of Africa, although he did not say how many or name the countries.
Rumsfeld said discussions about ways Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia can contribute to the global war on terrorism are ongoing. "It is something that evolves over time," he said. They already are doing things such as sharing intelligence and permitting the use of their airspace for U.S. planes.
Rumsfeld's trip is the latest in a series of consultations by senior Bush administration officials with crucial allies in the country's two main current foreign policy crises. His top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, visited Turkey last week and secured a preliminary agreement to let U.S. forces use Turkish bases in the event of war in Iraq.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was due to visit Moscow this week to consult on Iraq and the terror war.
U.S. troops under Franks' command are stationed in many countries near the Gulf and in Central Asia. About 12,000 troops are in Kuwait, mostly Army, and more than 5,000 in Saudi Arabia, mostly Air Force. The Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters is in Bahrain, and more than 4,300 troops are in Qatar.
More than 1,000 U.S. troops are in Djibouti, a small nation across the Gulf of Aden on the Horn of Africa.
Coinciding with Rumsfeld's trip was the arrival off the Red Sea coast of Djibouti of the USS Mount Whitney. The ship is a floating command post for Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, a specially tailored U.S. naval, air and ground force supposed to monitor, track and, if possible, attack al-Qaida terrorists in the area.
----
Ethiopia to Host Summit on Libya's One - Africa Plan
December 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-africa-summit.html
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) - Ethiopia will host a special summit of the African Union early next year to debate Libyan proposals to make the continent a single country with one army, officials said Monday.
African foreign ministers, meeting Monday in Tripoli, Libya, ended speculation Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi would host the summit.
``The summit will be held in Addis Ababa'' in late January or early February, South African Foreign Ministry spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa told Reuters.
Diplomats said there was minimal support within the 53-nation AU for Gaddafi's proposals, but other leaders decided to discuss them so oil-rich Libya would not be offended.
South African President Thabo Mbeki, the current AU chairman, has spoken out strongly against the notion of a unified Africa with a joint army, saying it would be unworkable.
It was in Libya in 1999 that African leaders decided to establish the AU, replacing the Organization of African Unity. That change finally took place this year.
After two days of talks in Tripoli, the AU's ministerial council will decide what to recommend to the summit about the Libyan proposals. The AU's regular annual summit is scheduled for July in Mozambique.
-------- arms sales
China's arms sales, stance on Taiwan chill talks with U.S.
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 10, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021210-81002548.htm
Chinese military officials yesterday rebuffed questions about Beijing's arms sales to rogue states and refused to renounce the use of force to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, defense officials said yesterday.
China's arms sales and its missile buildup opposite Taiwan were areas of disagreement in talks at the Pentagon led by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Chinese Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai.
This was the Bush administration's first high-level "strategic dialogue" with the Chinese military since the April 1, 2001, aerial collision involving a Chinese jet and U.S. EP-3 surveillance aircraft.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sharply curtailed military exchanges after China's military imprisoned the 23-member crew of the damaged EP-3 that landed on a military base on Hainan island.
Mr. Rumsfeld said after the incident that he wants any exchanges with China's military to be more open and mutually beneficial.
In the past, critics have said China's military has learned important war-fighting information from visiting U.S. defense and military facilities. U.S. visits to China, however, have been severely restricted.
Asked whether the Chinese agreed to the new terms of exchanges, Mr. Feith told reporters after the discussions: "I don't want to claim progress . We spent some time on that subject and talked about reciprocity and transparency and what we mean by those terms and what we want to come out of our military-to-military exchanges."
Mr. Feith said he hopes the military exchanges will lead to learning about Chinese military "thinking and policies and capabilities."
The Pentagon does not want "exchanges that are showcase pieces, that suggest that there's real cooperation when there's not real cooperation," he said.
Mr. Feith said China's military agreed with U.S. views of the United Nations' work in Iraq and on working to end North Korea's nuclear-arms program.
"And the areas of disagreement were, of course, headed by the issue of Taiwan, but also touched on China's military modernization, its proliferation policies, and how these affect the stability of Asia," Mr. Feith said.
A defense source said the U.S. officials raised China's continuing sales of missile technology and goods related to chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to states such as Iran and North Korea.
"They denied everything," said a defense official familiar with closed-door discussions held with a delegation of seven Chinese military officers.
Mr. Feith said China was urged to "live up to its proliferation commitments."
"The continued proliferation by China of nuclear, chemical and missile-related materials and technologies remains a problem, and we raised questions about China's historical support for North Korea's missile program," Mr. Feith said.
"The Chinese assured us they are not providing missile technology to North Korea."
Chinese companies in the past have played a key role in sending missile technology and goods to North Korea, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Mr. Feith declined to comment when asked about a report in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times about North Korea seeking to buy a specialty chemical from China that is used in making nuclear weapons fuel.
"The general topic of Chinese proliferation was one of the topics we discussed," he said. "I can't get into the details of the discussion."
U.S. intelligence officials said North Korea was trying to purchase a chemical known as tributyl phosphate from Chinese companies.
Regarding Taiwan, Mr. Feith said the American side raised concerns about China's missile buildup, which was mentioned "in the context of discussing actions that do not contribute to the stability of the area."
"And we said we thought that is threatening and appears to be designed to, you know, coerce and intimidate, and that is not the right approach to reducing risks and tensions regarding Taiwan," he said.
--------
Serbs Call Arms Sales to Iraq 'Peanuts'
December 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Helping-Iraq.html
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Serbs who helped Saddam Hussein's effort to rebuild the Iraqi military say that ultimately their role hardly mattered.
Nobody here denies a Yugoslav state arms dealer ignored a U.N. ban on weapons trade with Iraq, but culprits and investigators alike say the bottom line is that war-battered Yugoslavia had little to offer.
``We were repairing old engines,'' said one, downing a second glass of whiskey as he acknowledged involvement in refurbishing Iraq's Soviet-era MiG jet fighters. ``So what? What's the MiG-21 in comparison to the (U.S) F-16?''
``Peanuts,'' a beefy, black-clad arms dealer said of the shipments to Baghdad in recent years. Asked about reports that Yugoslav experts furnished Baghdad with cruise missile technology and possibly chemical weapons, he snorted: ``That's utter B.S.!''
Since revelations in October that the arms dealer Yugoimport had overhauled MiG engines and provided other unspecified military services for Iraq, top executives have been arrested and investigations launched, including one by a U.S. team now in Belgrade.
Still, officials argue there was little Yugoslavia had to offer, following a decade of wars that culminated in a NATO air assault in 1999 that destroyed the country's arms industry.
Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic put the value of all arms and related material shipped to Iraq over the past three years at less than $25 million. ``This is not an amount for which you can purchase anything serious,'' he told The Associated Press.
At the most, he said, Iraq might have had maintenance work done on the Orkan short-range, multibarrel rocket launchers it acquired in the 1980s or received a few 125-mm howitzers.
Yugoslavia has ``no missile program, no chemical, no biological and no nuclear program,'' he said.
While U.S. officials won't discuss what their investigation has uncovered, Yugoslavia's claim that little of military value was shipped to Iraq appears to be getting a sympathetic hearing from the Americans.
A report last week by the International Crisis Group linking Yugoslavia to Iraqi attempts to acquire chemical weapons and cruise missile technology was dismissed as ``full of speculation and errors'' by U.S. Embassy spokesman Abelardo Docal. He also said Yugoslav authorities were ``cooperating fully'' with the U.S. investigation team.
Zivkovic said the bulk of the shipments from Yugoslavia were infantry weapons, such as assault rifles and grenades, some from third countries like Ukraine and Russia.
``There was also expert assistance, but only in the areas where we are experts,'' Zivkovic said. Typically, he said, that would include the occasional MiG aviation engineer, or mechanics and optics experts for the Yugoslav-made M-84 tanks and howitzers that Iraq acquired in the 1980s.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial before the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, developed close ties with Saddam and allegedly encouraged illegal arms deals. That trade built on links developed earlier under Yugoslavia's former communist leader, Josip Broz Tito.
While Milosevic was still in power, Iraqi experts visited Belgrade to learn about the Yugoslavs' spirited defense against the NATO bombing campaign. Although outgunned, the Yugoslav air defense performed well, protecting military targets in Kosovo and shooting down two U.S. jets, including an F-117 stealth attack plane.
Yugoslavia's old guard remains welcome in Iraq. Yugoslav reporters recently in Baghdad reported spotting former Milosevic aides who refused to discuss their missions.
Zivkovic blames officials in the military appointed by Milosevic for the violation of U.N. sanctions on Iraq. ``The whole Defense Ministry and the military was a Milosevic structure,'' he said.
The Defense Ministry has accused individuals of signing the export permits for shipments for Iraq, arguing the ministry as an institution was not involved.
The scandal broke in early October, when a raid by NATO peacekeepers on the Orao aviation plant in the Serb part of Bosnia-Herzegovina turned up evidence of illicit maintenance work on Iraq's MiG engines.
After making phone calls to Bosnian Serb generals, Orao managers said they were not authorized to talk a reporter. But a senior employee said plasma technology, which sprays worn-out metal components with a new metal coating, was used to refurbish some MiG engine turbine parts.
Joining others interviewed dismissing the scope of Yugoslav aid, the employee -- who like others talked to asked for anonymity -- said in some cases there was little that even that technique could do.
``The metal was so corroded that it was too far gone for repair,'' he said.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press correspondent Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade contributed to this report.
-------- canada
Pact lets U.S. patrol Canada
Troops would be under command of Canadian military
ALLAN THOMPSON STAFF REPORTER
Toronto Star
Dec. 9, 2002. 12:40 PM
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_=d6599c01ae3c40d9&pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035775347438&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154
WASHINGTON-U.S. forces, under the control of the Canadian military, would be allowed to cross the border into Canada in an emergency, according to a new Canada-U.S. accord to be unveiled today.
Canadian forces could be deployed in the U.S. in a crisis, but under American operational command. The accord would:
#Create a new bi-national planning group to draft plans that would detail how both countries jointly deploy military forces and emergency services in the event of a terrorist attack or other disaster.
#Step up joint operations and military exercises in the army and navy to prevent terrorism.
The planning group, which will co-ordinate joint maritime surveillance, intelligence sharing and cross-border military exercises, is to be headed by Canadian Lt.-Gen. Ken Pennie.
Pennie is the deputy commander of NORAD.
In turn, Pennie will report to Canada's chief of defence staff and the American general who commands NORAD and the U.S. military's Northern Command.
"This is an important way of co-operating with the Americans on a common issue of security in a way that is constructive and at the same time preserves Canadian sovereignty, because we're not engaged in doing anything without the authority of the Canadian government," a senior government source said.
`This is an important way of co-operating with the Americans on a common issue of security.'
A senior government source
In fact, Canada sees this new accord as an alternative to formally joining the U.S. military's Northern Command, or the creation of a `super-NORAD' military structure that would have put Canadian army and navy resources under American command, as is the case for air force units attached to NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command).
Canada's air force is already closely integrated with U.S. plans for defending North America's air space, through NORAD, a pact that has been in place for more than 50 years. That alliance is always commanded by an American general, with a Canadian deputy commander.
The accord, to be announced today by Defence Minister John McCallum and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham will increase co-ordination between the army and navy on both sides of the border.
Canadian officials insist the accord does not pose a threat to Canadian sovereignty because Canada would have to approve the deployment of U.S. troops on Canadian soil. And the deal puts Canada in a position to work with the U.S. on contingency plans for defending North America.
"Ultimately, governments on both sides of the border are going to have to approve the execution of it," the senior source said.
The planning group is not a military command, it does not itself have the authority to deploy forces. Instead, it will draw up contingency plans for deploying forces by looking at possible threat scenarios.
The group will also work to improve the military's links and standard operating procedures with police and other emergency services in the civilian world.
At the outset, the planning group will include 30 military officers - 15 from each country and it should be fully operational by the spring.
The Winnipeg-born Pennie is an air force pilot who has held a number of senior posts in Canada's military.
In the late 1990s, he was the director-general of strategic planning at defence headquarters and helped produce the military's key strategy document.
He was promoted to three-leaf general in the summer of 2001 and appointed deputy commander-in-chief of NORAD in August, 2001.
-------- china
Chinese Report Addresses Terror Concerns
December 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Military.html
BEIJING (AP) -- China outlined a military strategy Monday that mixed bravado with conciliation, repeating its tough talk about dominating Taiwan but endorsing greater cooperation with the United States and other governments to fight global terrorism.
Its biennial military report, released Monday night, offered a vague outline of the world's largest armed forces but little else. It also took a veiled swipe at U.S. policy toward Taiwan, chiding countries that would help the island defend itself.
The document, ``China's National Defense in 2002,'' also promised a more technologically advanced military but at the same time defended rises in military spending as aimed at improving conditions for soldiers rather than acquiring new high-tech weapons.
``China has consistently pursued a national defense policy that is defensive in nature,'' said the report, issued by the information office under the State Council, China's Cabinet.
China has issued defense reports in recent years in an effort to portray its military as modern and professional. While offering a window on the secretive armed forces, the reports typically contain little firm information about the army's fighting abilities or leadership.
The 68-page report -- issued in Chinese and English -- pledged to cooperate with the United States and the international community to fight terrorism. But it reiterated standard threats to use force to bring self-governing Taiwan under Chinese control.
While the Taiwanese public wanted ``peace, tranquility, and development,'' the island's leaders were ``stubbornly clinging to the position of 'Taiwan independence,''' it said.
``China's armed forces will unswervingly defend the country's sovereignty and unity, and have the resolve as well as the capability to check any separatist act,'' the report said.
China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949. While China says it wants Taiwan to return to Chinese control peacefully, ``it will not foreswear the use of force,'' the report said.
In a dig at the United States, Taiwan's biggest political backer and arms provider, the report said China resolutely opposed arms sales to the island ``by a handful of countries.'' Though the United States has diplomatic relations with China and not Taiwan, U.S. law requires Washington to supply Taiwan with weapons to defend itself.
The report said the troop strength of China's People's Liberation Army -- including land forces, the air force, navy and missile corps -- stood at below 2.5 million. Others serve in the paramilitary People's Armed Police and part-time units, although no figures were given for their size.
This year's report, the first since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, also placed greater emphasis on international cooperation. Beijing has linked its struggle against Islamic separatists in western China to the global anti-terror campaign and sought to enlist neighbors for help.
The Beijing-sponsored Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which groups China with Russia and four Central Asian republics, has ``beefed up substantive cooperation in the fight against terrorism, separatism, and extremism,'' the report said.
It also lauded increased security dialogue with Southeast Asian nations, Japan, Russia and South Korea, and the dispatch of PLA officers to observe U.S. and Japanese military exercises.
``China intends to selectively and gradually participate in more multilateral joint military exercises in the nontraditional fields of security in the future,'' the report said.
-------- iraq
Kuwait scorns Iraqi leader's 'apology'
BBC
Sunday, 8 December, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2555515.stm
Kuwait has denounced a statement by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in which he made a qualified apology for Iraq's 1990 invasion of the oil-rich Gulf emirate.
The Kuwaiti Information Minister, Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahd al-Sabah, said the message was "an unveiled attempt to create a rift in the united ranks of the Kuwaiti people and leadership".
Saddam Hussein should confirm his peaceful intentions in words and deeds by implementing all UN Security Council resolutions
Sheikh Ahmad "The speech contained incitement and encouragement of terrorist acts which the whole world has rejected and condemned," Sheikh Ahmad told the Kuwaiti News Agency (Kuna).
In the televised statement, read out by Iraqi Information Minister Mohamed Said Sahaf on Saturday, Saddam Hussein said both Iraq and Kuwait had been victims of the Gulf War in 1991.
He urged the Kuwaiti people to support Baghdad against "infidel forces" and said they should rise up against "treason".
Praise for militants
Sheikh Ahmad said Saddam Hussein sought to "encourage acts of terrorism which the whole world deplores" - an apparent reference to the Iraqi leader's praise for Kuwaiti militants who recently attacked US troops in the emirate.
We apologise to God for any deed that angered him in the past, which we might not have known of and is blamed on us, and on this basis we also apologise to you
Saddam Hussein
"Instead of deliberately ignoring the strong bonds tying the Kuwaiti leadership and people, Saddam Hussein should confirm his peaceful intentions in words and deeds by implementing all UN Security Council resolutions pertaining to the invasion of Kuwait," Sheikh Ahmad said.
BBC regional analyst David Bamford says Saddam Hussein may now believe that, despite the resumption of UN weapons inspections, there will be another war with the United States sooner or later, and this is his effort to persuade the Arab world to resist.
US troops on exercise in Kuwaiti desert The US has sent more forces to Kuwait Referring to the presence of the US troops, Saddam Hussein said Kuwait was under "direct foreign military occupation" and called on Kuwaitis to join efforts to expel them.
Sheikh Ahmad said Saddam Hussein's message was like the "political and media campaigns" waged by Iraq in the run-up to its August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Watan denounced the speech as "farcical," saying "Saddam changes colour, but not his nature".
Another Kuwaiti paper, al-Qabas, said the Iraqi leader "is a time bomb that threatens international peace".
"He did not apologise for the (Iraqi) occupation. The only apology actually revealed his hostile intentions against Kuwait," it said.
-------- israel / palestine
Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US
By David R. Francis
The Christian Science Monitor
December 09, 2002
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html
Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person.
This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby.
For the first time in many years, Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. So far, he figures, the bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War.
And now Israel wants more. In a meeting at the White House late last month, Israeli officials made a pitch for $4 billion in additional military aid to defray the rising costs of dealing with the intifada and suicide bombings. They also asked for more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to help the country's recession-bound economy.
Considering Israel's deep economic troubles, Stauffer doubts the Israel bonds covered by the loan guarantees will ever be repaid. The bonds are likely to be structured so they don't pay interest until they reach maturity. If Stauffer is right, the US would end up paying both principal and interest, perhaps 10 years out.
Israel's request could be part of a supplemental spending bill that's likely to be passed early next year, perhaps wrapped in with the cost of a war with Iraq.
Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It is already due to get $2.04 billion in military assistance and $720 million in economic aid in fiscal 2003. It has been getting $3 billion a year for years.
Adjusting the official aid to 2001 dollars in purchasing power, Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, Stauffer reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel.
"Consequently, politically, if not administratively, those outlays are part of the total package of support for Israel," argues Stauffer in a lecture on the total costs of US Middle East policy, commissioned by the US Army War College, for a recent conference at the University of Maine.
These foreign-aid costs are well known. Many Americans would probably say it is money well spent to support a beleagured democracy of some strategic interest. But Stauffer wonders if Americans are aware of the full bill for supporting Israel since some costs, if not hidden, are little known.
One huge cost is not secret. It is the higher cost of oil and other economic damage to the US after Israel-Arab wars.
In 1973, for instance, Arab nations attacked Israel in an attempt to win back territories Israel had conquered in the 1967 war. President Nixon resupplied Israel with US arms, triggering the Arab oil embargo against the US.
That shortfall in oil deliveries kicked off a deep recession. The US lost $420 billion (in 2001 dollars) of output as a result, Stauffer calculates. And a boost in oil prices cost another $450 billion.
Afraid that Arab nations might use their oil clout again, the US set up a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That has since cost, conservatively, $134 billion, Stauffer reckons.
Other US help includes:
• US Jewish charities and organizations have remitted grants or bought Israel bonds worth $50 billion to $60 billion. Though private in origin, the money is "a net drain" on the United States economy, says Stauffer.
• The US has already guaranteed $10 billion in commercial loans to Israel, and $600 billion in "housing loans." Stauffer expects the US Treasury to cover these.
• The US has given $2.5 billion to support Israel's Lavi fighter and Arrow missile projects.
• Israel buys discounted, serviceable "excess" US military equipment. Stauffer says these discounts amount to "several billion dollars" over recent years.
• Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its $1.8 billion per year in military aid, ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to Israel.
US help, financial and technical, has enabled Israel to become a major weapons supplier. Weapons make up almost half of Israel's manufactured exports. US defense contractors often resent the buy-Israel requirements and the extra competition subsidized by US taxpayers.
• US policy and trade sanctions reduce US exports to the Middle East about $5 billion a year, costing 70,000 or so American jobs, Stauffer estimates. Not requiring Israel to use its US aid to buy American goods, as is usual in foreign aid, costs another 125,000 jobs.
• Israel has blocked some major US arms sales, such as F-15 fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s. That cost $40 billion over 10 years, says Stauffer.
Stauffer's list will be controversial. He's been assisted in this research by a number of mostly retired military or diplomatic officials who do not go public for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic if they criticize America's policies toward Israel.
-------- landmines
Two Albanian shepherds killed by landmine blast - UN
REUTERS YUGOSLAVIA:
December 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18933/story.htm
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - Two Albanian shepherds were killed when they stepped on a landmine in no man's land between Kosovo and Albania, the United Nations said.
The incident highlighed the continuing risks across the Balkans of landmines left over from the wars of the 1990s.
It took place on Thursday morning about 100 metres from the border crossing of Qafa e Prushit in western Kosovo, a spokesman for the Yugoslav province's U.N. administration said. The two victims were cousins from a village in eastern Albania.
At least 120 people have been killed and 370 wounded by landmines and cluster bombs left over from the Kosovo war since the conflict ended in June 1999, Dritan Rexha from the Kosovo Protection Corps mine-clearing unit told Reuters.
"A lot of explosive devices were cleared by international mine agencies which left at the end of last year, but there's still plenty of clearing up to be done," said Rexha, whose agency was formed to give former guerrillas a postwar role.
-------- turkey
Turkey Links Position on Iraq With Its European Union Status
December 9, 2002
New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/international/middleeast/10TURKEY.html
ISTANBUL, Turkey, Dec. 9 - On the eve of a summit with President Bush, senior leaders of Turkey's ruling party suggested today that the country would have a difficult time persuading the public to play an active role in an American-led war against Iraq if Turkey is rejected later this week for membership in the European Union.
Turkish officials said today that they were counting on President Bush to help persuade European leaders to open negotiations for Turkey's eventual membership in the union, which it has been seeking without success for 15 years. European leaders are scheduled to take up the issue later this week in a summit in Copenhagen. President Bush has said he supports Turkey's candidacy. Without the European Union agreement, which is viewed across Turkey as a historic opportunity, the officials said they would face an uphill battle persuading the Turkish public to actively support a war against Iraq. Turkey, which borders Iraq and has a Muslim majority, is viewed as a potentially crucial ally in the event of an American-led military operation against Iraq. Meeting with Turkish officials last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz laid out plans for a northern front against Iraq that involved potential Turkish participation.
Turkish public opinion is running strongly against providing any help for an American invasion of Iraq. Turkish leaders have so far been coy about the the degree of support they would be willing to offer the United States in the event of a war with Iraq, and President Bush is expected to lobby the leader of Turkey's governing party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his country's support when Mr. Erdogan visits the White House on Tuesday.
The Turkish officials said the government's ability to help the United States would not be enhanced by a rejection in Copenhagen.
"In terms of the Turkish people, they will find a link between European attitudes and Turkish involvement in Iraq," said Murat Mercan, deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party. "If Europe does bad to us, why cooperate on Iraq? This administration will try to separate those issues, but that is what the Turkish people will try to think."
Mr. Mercan and other Turkish officials said they were counting on President Bush to persuade European leaders to give Turkey a date to begin negotiations to enter the European Union.
"We have very high hopes that Mr. Bush is going to intervene, make several calls, and that it will change the tune in the European capitals," said Mr. Mercan, who is a senior advisor to Mr. Erdogan and to Prime Minister Abdullah Gul. "I have very high hopes on that."
--------
Bush Will Meet a Leading Turk on Use of Bases
December 9, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/international/middleeast/09TURK.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - After he read an Islamic poem at a 1997 rally in southeastern Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was charged with sedition, jailed for four months and barred from taking any government office. Now Mr. Erdogan is the leader of Turkey's governing party and is coming to the White House for a meeting on Tuesday with President Bush.
The reason for Mr. Bush's invitation seems clear.
Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, a Muslim-based political organization with a decidedly pragmatic agenda, leads the coalition that came to power in the election last month. So Washington is eager to shore up ties with Mr. Erdogan and, in the event of war with Iraq, secure his support for the Pentagon's plan for ousting Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Erdogan, for his part, is eager to burnish his credentials as a forward-thinking moderate and advance his country's bid to enter the European Union, a move Washington strongly supports.
But a big question is whether the two sides will agree on the scope of American military deployment in Turkey. If Mr. Bush decides to authorize an attack on Iraq, the Pentagon hopes to carry out airstrikes from Turkish air bases as it did during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But this time the Pentagon wants to do more. It also wants to use Turkish soil as a staging area for American ground attacks in northern Iraq.
The idea is to open a northern front that could complement the main attack from Kuwait and therefore enable the United States and its allies to quickly overwhelm Iraq's overstretched forces.
United States officials also calculate that the deployment of American ground troops in northern Iraq would enable Washington to fend off an Iraqi attack on the ethnic Kurds who dominate that region, a mission that might be difficult to accomplish by air power alone. They believe that American forces would stabilize the Kurdish area if Mr. Hussein was toppled. That is no small consideration given the tensions between Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish minority, and the Iraqi Kurds.
"We're quite comfortable with what we can do from the south," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said during a visit to Turkey last 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."
Besides pushing for an early date to start negotiations to join the European Union, Turkey is also involved in negotiations over a United Nations plan to settle the longstanding Greek-Turkish impasse on Cyprus. The Bush administration has been pressing for progress on both fronts by the European Union summit meeting in Copenhagen, which starts on Thursday.
American officials say headway in those areas would be a major achievement that would help integrate Muslim Turkey into the West and resolve a long-simmering international dispute. Washington, however, is also hoping that its support for Turkey's bid to enter the European Union - and the $5 billion in assistance that Turkish officials say the Bush administration is offering as compensation for the economic dislocation that would result from a war with Iraq - will help win Mr. Erdogan's support for a possible military operation in Iraq.
As a NATO member, Turkey has long been a close ally of the United States. But the extent of its cooperation with Washington in the event of a war with Iraq is far from settled. American officials said they were confident that the United States would eventually secure access to air bases in Turkey.
But Turkey's foreign minister, Yasar Yakis, cautioned publicly during Mr. Wolfowitz's visit that the deployment of larger numbers of American ground troops on Turkish soil was not politically feasible, a view that was also conveyed privately to the Bush administration by other senior Turkish officials.
Some former United States officials say Turkish public opinion is not the main reason Turkey is resisting the deployment of American ground forces. They say the Turkish military wants to retain the option of sending its own forces into northern Iraq to ensure that the Kurds there do not declare a Kurdish state or seize the oil fields near Kirkuk, which could give the Kurds an economic basis for independence and perhaps encourage secessionist moves among Turkish Kurds.
"The Turks want to be in a position to intervene in northern Iraq without U.S. interference," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A. military analyst on Iraq. "That is why we need to be there. If U.S. forces were in the north, they can serve effectively as a peacekeeping force."
Mr. Wolfowitz also argued that the presence of American forces in northern Iraq could have an important stabilizing role and urged Turkish restraint.
"What we have been saying to our Turkish counterparts is this: Maximum U.S. participation is a good thing for Turkey," Mr. Wolfowitz told the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. "I believe that rather than acting alone to protect its interests in northern Iraq, it would be much better for Turkey to act within a coalition."
Still, Turkish public opinion is clearly not on Washington's side. According to a recent public opinion survey by the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of Turks polled oppose allowing the United States to use Turkish bases to wage war on Iraq. The percentage of Turks with a favorable view of the United States also dropped from 52 percent to 30 percent over the last year, the survey found. The poll's margin of error was 3.1 percentage points.
"Most people in Turkey would not favor a military attack on Iraq," said a Turkish official. "Iraq is a neighbor and a Muslim country. Turkey has a new government, and there is hope for this government and for the economy. Most people don't want a war to take place."
Mr. Wolfowitz conveyed Mr. Bush's invitation to Mr. Erdogan at a Tuesday night dinner in Ankara. At first glance, Mr. Erdogan might seem an unlikely ally. The 48-year-old politician grew up in Kasimpasa, a poor neighborhood in Istanbul. He went to a religious school and got his start in politics by organizing an Islamic youth group. He later was elected mayor of Istanbul. As mayor, he was praised for running an efficient government, but he also banned alcohol from city restaurants, stirring fears that he was challenging Turkey's secular state.
In 1997, he recited a poem that began, "The mosques are our barracks; the minarets are our bayonets." He was charged with inciting religious hatred and went to jail for four years, a period that his supporters say led to his transformation into a more pragmatic leader.
But the effect of Mr. Erdogan's sentence lingers, and he is still barred from serving in government, a prohibition his supporters are striving to overcome so that he can secure a place in Parliament and eventually become the head of state. Mr. Bush is giving a boost to Mr. Erdogan's ambitions by inviting him to the White House, which would raise his stature at home.
That is not the only way the Bush administration is trying to help Mr. Erdogan. Since his party's triumph at the polls, he has sought to dispel fears that he has a secret Islamic agenda, casting himself as a modernizer and a pragmatist. His primary foreign policy goal is to speed Turkey's entry into the European Union.
He made a whirlwind tour of European capitals to make his case that a date of next year should be set for talks on Turkey's union candidacy. He has rejected a European proposal that talks on eventual membership not begin until 2005, insisting that talks start next year.
The Bush administration has strenuously backed his appeals, prompting François Heisbourg, the chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, to quip that American officials known for their penchant for unilateral action have taken a curiously strong interest in the development of European multilateral institutions.
Bush administration officials, however, have cast Turkey's bid for European Union membership as a historic opportunity to bring Turkey into the West and, as a result, demonstrate that Western nations are not at odds with the Muslim world. They say they are convinced that Mr. Erdogan has undergone a genuine evolution from his early days and is a true moderate.
"Is Erdogan going to Libya, Iraq or Syria?" a senior administration official said. "No. His first trips were to European capitals. He appears to have made his strategic choice. Rather than dig into the past he is looking to the future."
During his brief trip to Washington, Mr. Erdogan is expected to meet with Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.
Administration officials insist that much of the discussion will dwell on the search for a Cyprus settlement as well as Turkey's quest to join the European Union. But they acknowledge that Iraq is also a main item on the agenda. The Pentagon, for its part, is clearly hoping that Mr. Erdogan's visit will facilitate the deployment of American forces in Turkey.
The Pentagon, in particular, is eager to begin preparing for a northern front. It has already made plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade airfields as well as ports along Turkey's southern coast so that they could be used to ship American war matériel to Turkey for a ground offensive.
-------- propaganda wars
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION:
WHY AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING
Tim O'Shea,
December 9, 2002
thedoctorwithin.com
http://www.thedoctorwithin.com/articles/doors_of_perception.html
Aldous Huxley's inspired 1954 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched, infinite rawness.
Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?
It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given story in today's news.
If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that Conventional Wisdom.
In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it. Examples:
- Pharmaceuticals restore health
- Vaccination brings immunity
- The cure for cancer is just around the corner
- Menopause is a disease condition
- When a child is sick, he needs immediate antibiotics
- When a child has a fever he needs Tylenol
- Hospitals are safe and clean.
- America has the best health care in the world.
- Americans have the best health in the world.
- Milk is a good source of calcium.
- You never outgrow your need for milk.
- Vitamin C is ascorbic acid.
- Aspirin prevents heart attacks.
- Heart drugs improve the heart.
- Back and neck pain are the only reasons for spinal adjustment.
- No child can get into school without being vaccinated.
- The FDA thoroughly tests all drugs before they go on the market.
- Pregnancy is a serious medical condition
- Chemotherapy and radiation are effective cures for cancer
- When your child is diagnosed with an ear infection, antibiotics should be given immediately 'just in case'
- Ear tubes are for the good of the child.
- Estrogen drugs prevent osteoporosis after menopause.
- Pediatricians are the most highly trained of al medical specialists.
- The purpose of the health care industry is health.
- HIV is the cause of AIDS.
- AZT is the cure.
- Without vaccines, infectious diseases will return
- Fluoride in the city water protects your teeth
- Flu shots prevent the flu.
- Vaccines are thoroughly tested before being placed on the Mandated Schedule.
- Doctors are certain that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any possible risks.
- There is a power shortage in California.
- There is a terrorist threat of smallpox.
- The NASDAQ is a natural market controlled only by supply and demand.
- Chronic pain is a natural consequence of aging.
- Soy is your healthiest source of protein.
- Insulin shots cure diabetes.
- After we take out your gall bladder you can eat anything you want
- Allergy medicine will cure allergies.
- Jet fuel, which burns at 160?, can melt steel girders, which melt at 1500?
This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions to conjure up. Did you ever wonder why most people in this country think generally the same about most of the above issues? Or why you never see the President speaking publicly unless he is reading?
HOW THIS SET-UP GOT STARTED
In their 2001 book Trust Us We're Experts, Stauber and Rampton pull together some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in America. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Spin.
From his own amazing 1928 chronicle Propaganda, we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud himself, and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion. The only difference was thatinstead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays used these same ideas to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.
THE FATHER OF SPIN
Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 40 years after that. (Tye) During all that time, Bernays took on hundreds of diverse assignments to create a public perception about some idea or product. A few examples:
As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays' first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to "Make the World Safe for Democracy." (Ewen) We've seen this phrase in every war and US military involvement since that time.
A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to p