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NUCLEAR
Chinese general told threat against U.S. unacceptable
The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal
U.N. Sharpens Search for Iraqi Weapons
Iraq's arms in '91 confirmed
U.N. Official Won't Reveal Iraq Suppliers to the Public
One Proliferator at a Time
North Korean ship seized
Rumsfeld: N.Korea Is Biggest Missile Proliferator
Interceptor Rocket Fails in Missile Test
Rocket Fails in Missile Defense Test
U.S. Issues Warning to Foes in Arms Plan
Al-Qaeda planning uranium bomb: UN
Preemptive Strikes Part Of U.S. Strategic Doctrine
U.S. Sees Nuclear Deterrence Against WMD Attack
Bush Warns Iraq of Harsh Response
New bombshells at Los Alamos lab
White House steps over the line
MILITARY
U.S. military expands civil affairs
Afghan Army Demands Warlords Surrender Arms - Report
Rumsfeld Seeking New Allies to Oppose Al Qaeda and Iraq
Weapons Trade Open to All Who Can Pay
U.S. Allows Scud Missile Shipment to Continue to Yemen
Charges Issued in Smuggling of Parts to Iran
Man Charged in Military Part Export
Court Aids Defense Firms
TRW Approves Sale to Northrop Grumman
Northrop Says U.S. Agrees to Deal for Acquisition of TRW
China Suggests Missile Buildup Linked to Arms Sales to Taiwan
Iraq claims U.S. tampered with report
U.S. FIRMS EYE POST-SADDAM IRAQ
New Iraq Web site
Iraqi regime hiding scientists
Iran wants say in a post-Saddam Iraq
THE KURDS
Israel's Labor party cuts its doves
U.S. considers changes to treaty
Spain and U.S. Seize N. Korean Missiles
Scud missiles are ours, says Yemen
U.S. releases Yemeni missiles
EGYPT TURNS DOWN U.S. REQUEST FOR BASES
Spy Satellite Effort Viewed as Lagging
CIA prepares early analysis on Iraq report
Lawmakers approve report on intelligence overhaul
Senators Urge an Overhaul of U.S. Intelligence Operations
Turkey Names Its Price for Aid Against Iraq
What is the US military's Exercise Internal Look?
The War After Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
High court rules on felons' gun rights
Constitutionality of death penalty upheld
ENERGY AND OTHER
Canadian Lawmakers Advance Climate Pact as Discord Grows
'Politically Correct' Stem Cell Is Licensed to Biotech Concern
ACTIVISTS
With Warning, Carter Accepts Nobel
Carter Accepts Nobel and Gives Message on Iraq
From Coast to Coast, a Cry for Peace
SYRIA - Kurdish demonstrators charge discrimination
Day of Protests for Peace
Priests, peace activists attend Berrigan's funeral
The Radical Faith of Philip Berrigan
Remembering Phil Berrigan
15 Berber Protesters Arrested in Algeria
Cuban Dissidents Gather as Police Look On
Protests Held Across the Country to Oppose War in Iraq
Hollywood Performers Oppose War with Iraq
Iraq War Opponents Hold Small Rallies Across U.S.
Thousands Protest Oil Tanker in Spain
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
Chinese general told threat against U.S. unacceptable
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021211-27417625.htm
The White House told a visiting Chinese general yesterday that comments he made in 1995 suggesting China would use nuclear weapons against Los Angeles were unacceptable.
The discussion came during a meeting between Chinese Lt. Gen. Xiong Guankai, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, and White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
The meeting was part of the appeal by the Bush administration to warn China against making further nuclear threats and to make clear to Gen. Xiong that China should not miscalculate in thinking it could win an arms race with Taiwan, or that it could coerce the island into reunification.
An additional message for the general was that Chinese help in getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program is important to U.S.-Chinese relations.
Gen. Xiong is in Washington with a delegation of Chinese officials who met Monday at the Pentagon with defense officials as part of a strategic dialogue that had been put on hold after last year's aerial collision between a Chinese jet and U.S. EP-3E spy plane.
Miss Rice "chose to meet with Gen. Xiong to underscore our view of international security and particularly the issue of Taiwan," a senior administration official said of the meeting.
Other administration officials said plans for the meeting sparked a dispute among officials on the National Security Council staff who opposed the meeting because it would be viewed as rewarding a foreign general who threatened to attack the United States.
Gen. Xiong told former defense official Charles Freeman in 1995 that the United States would not come to Taiwan's defense in any conflict with China because it "cared more about Los Angeles than Taipei," the Taiwanese capital.
The remark was reported to the White House at the time as a veiled threat to use nuclear weapons against the United States.
Miss Rice and two aides met with Gen. Xiong and three other Chinese military officials in her office at the White House West Wing.
"She stressed that the United States does not support Taiwan independence but that we have the means and will to meet our commitments to Taipei," the senior official said.
Miss Rice also told Gen. Xiong that the administration is committed to its obligations under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which calls for the United States to meet Taiwan's defensive needs.
The Bush administration announced last year it was selling guided missile destroyers and submarines to Taiwan to bolster its forces against China's military buildup, especially of short-range missiles.
Miss Rice also said that "any differences must be resolved peacefully and without resort to force or coercion," the official said.
She said "there is no justification for the continued buildup of Chinese missiles along the Taiwan Strait," the official said, noting that "it is the Chinese buildup of missiles and other forces that increases tensions in the region."
"And we believe that enhancing peace and stability in the region should be begun with the end, and then the reversal of this buildup," the official said.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin suggested to President Bush in Crawford, Texas, in October that China would be willing to reduce the missile deployments opposite Taiwan if the United States curbed arms sales to Taiwan.
U.S. officials said the offer was an informal suggestion rather than a serious proposal.
-------- depleted uranium
The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal
By Harold Pinter
11/12/2002
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2002/12/11/do1101.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/12/11/ixnewstop.html
Earlier this year, I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive.
However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world.
"If you are not with us, you are against us," President George W. Bush has said. He has also said: "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders." Quite right. Look in the mirror, chum. That's you.
America is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and is prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.
America believes that the 3,000 deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.
The 3,000 deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through American and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to.
The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf war, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.
The 200,000 deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by America are never referred to. The 500,000 deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by America, are never referred to.
The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to. The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to.
But what a misjudgment of the present and what a misreading of history this is. People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back.
The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of America over many years, in all parts of the world.
In Britain, the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous. How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas?
However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience to America. Apparently a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented.
But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of schoolchildren travel on the Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the Underground himself.
The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.
America and Britain are pursuing a course that can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe. It is obvious, however, that America is bursting at the seams to attack Iraq.
I believe that it will do this not only to take control of Iraqi oil, but also because the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.
Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's declaration - "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".
# The article is taken from an address given by Harold Pinter on receiving an honorary degree at the University of Turin
-------- inspections
U.N. Sharpens Search for Iraqi Weapons
Expanded Team Broadens Inspections to Remote Sites
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37254-2002Dec10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 10 -- U.N. arms specialists today ramped up their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, augmenting their ranks to 70 inspectors and splitting into teams to conduct five simultaneous searches, including one of a remote uranium mine near the Syrian border.
The inspectors have become more assertive in their field visits over the past few days, breaking into small groups, moving in several directions and questioning Iraqi officials with a seemingly greater intensity, according to witnesses and Iraqis in charge of facilities that have been searched. A helicopter that will give the inspectors more mobility and greater ability to conduct surprise searches has arrived in Baghdad and should be operating this week, U.N. officials said.
As the high-stakes inspections entered their third week, 28 specialists from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, arrived here this afternoon aboard a U.N. cargo plane, joining seven of their colleagues and 20 experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency who landed on Sunday. The IAEA and UNMOVIC, which are sharing inspection duties, provided 15 inspectors and two team leaders, who have since left, for the first two weeks of field visits.
"We are deploying inspectors as fast as we can," said Hiro Ueki, a spokesman for the inspection operation.
U.S. officials last week criticized the pace of inspections and urged UNMOVIC and the IAEA to quickly increase the staff here. The Bush administration also questioned the strategy of starting inspections at well-known sites that had been visited by previous inspectors. Behind the U.S. complaints lay a vow by President Bush to disarm Iraq by force if President Saddam Hussein's government fails to do so voluntarily and, more broadly, an administration goal of "regime change," or destruction of Hussein's rule.
U.N. officials said the increase over the past two days is not the result of the U.S. pressure, but of the fact that weapons experts from around the world -- summoned by UNMOVIC after a Security Council resolution on Nov. 8 -- have now reported for work. The presence of 70 inspectors and reports that more are on the way appear to put the United Nations on track to meet its goal of having 80 to 100 inspectors in Iraq by Christmas.
The experts visited 11 sites today, bringing the total number visited since inspections resumed Nov. 27 to more than 30. Several sites visited over the past few days, including today's visit to the Saddam Center for Biotechnology in Baghdad, were not visited by previous inspectors.
Some of the sites, particularly the sprawling Tuwaitha nuclear installation, have required multiple visits. A team from the IAEA searched the heavily bombed facility, which stretches for several square miles and has scores of buildings, for the fourth time. They pursued a physical inventory of materials from Iraq's past nuclear program. Ueki said it likely would take two more days to complete the inventory.
Although the inspectors are working their way down a prearranged list of sites prepared by U.N. officials, Ueki said the contents of a voluminous arms declaration Iraq submitted over the weekend could shift the strategy. "After going through the declaration, they may make some adjustments to their inspection plans," he said.
Aside from an unannounced search of one of Hussein's palaces last week, the initial rounds of inspections have not prompted significant complaints here. In an interview published today in the weekly newspaper Rafidain, the chief Iraqi liaison to the inspections, Lt. Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, said Iraq is "satisfied with [the inspection process] so far because it is calm and professional."
Ueki said the inspectors still have not received a list of Iraqi scientists who have been involved in the country's nuclear, biological and chemical programs since the last inspectors left Iraq in 1998. The Security Council resolution requires Iraq to hand over such a list but does not specify a deadline.
The list is regarded by U.S. and U.N. officials as crucial in determining which scientists and weapons experts to interview. Bush administration officials have been pushing UNMOVIC to start conducting interviews soon, preferably by taking scientists and their families out of the country so they can speak freely.
The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said he has not formally asked Iraq to hand over such a list. Diplomats at the United Nations said Blix is waiting to receive more intelligence from the United States and Britain before making a formal request.
Iraq's Foreign Ministry condemned a decision by the Security Council's rotating president to give one of the two copies of Iraq's nearly 12,000-page declaration to the United States. In a statement, the ministry accused the U.S. government of "practicing an unprecedented blackmail operation" and suggested that it would try to alter Iraq's submission.
"This American behavior aims at manipulating the documents of the United Nations in order to find a cover for aggression against Iraq," the statement said.
Hussein was shown on TV meeting with his war cabinet, which included top military commanders and his sons, Qusay and Uday. Qusay, wearing a light gray suit and sitting at his father's right, and Uday, in a blue Nehru jacket, were the only participants not wearing olive-green uniforms. "Your heads will remain high with honor, God willing," Hussein told the officers, "and your enemy will be defeated." Among the 11 sites visited by the inspectors today was the Qaim phosphate complex, 240 miles northwest of Baghdad. The facility produced a type of refined uranium ore called "yellow cake" from 1984 to 1990 that played an important role in Iraq's nuclear program, which Iraqi officials say ended after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The facility was bombed during the war. Iraqi officials insist it no longer produces uranium. Ueki said a team of IAEA inspectors, which plans to continue the inspection at the plant on Wednesday, was verifying the status of destroyed equipment and trying to determine whether uranium extraction has resumed.
Other nuclear experts visited the Qaqaa explosives plant and the Furat chemical plant south of Baghdad. The Furat site was previously associated with Iraq's efforts to design and test gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
----
Iraq's arms in '91 confirmed
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021211-68416665.htm
President Bush's recent declaration that Iraq was close to making a nuclear bomb in 1991 has been bolstered by an unlikely source - Baghdad.
A key architect of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs has told reporters his quest for a nuclear bomb was nearly achieved when allied planes struck in January 1991, destroying much of the country's weapons-making facilities.
The statement of Iraqi Gen. Amar al Saadi also conflicts somewhat with the last assessment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which downplayed reports that Baghdad nearly built the bomb.
Gen. Saadi, a London-educated chemical engineer and top weapons adviser to Saddam Hussein, strongly suggested Iraq's well-funded nuclear weapons programs was close to a bomb in 1991. It marked the first public confession from a member of Saddam's inner-circle that the hard-line regime was bent on becoming a nuclear power.
"We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it," Gen. Saadi said, suggesting key components were ready for assembly. "So if you want to follow that, there's no guarantee that you would succeed. We don't know. It's for others to judge. It's for the IAEA to judge how close we were."
Then, in a bit of bravado that leads some Pentagon officials to believe Iraq deceived IAEA inspectors before 1991, Gen. Saadi said, "If I tell you we were close, it is maybe promotional."
In a press conference Sunday in Baghdad to explain Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration, Gen. Saadi said bomb makers had reached the point where triggers for a bomb were being made. He referred to one facility where the "final shaping of the device" was under way.
"Now, in the nuclear jargon, device is the - it's the bomb," he said.
Iraq's lengthy declaration, which reached the United Nations on Sunday night and is now being analyzed by U.S. weapons experts, contains 2,081 pages on Iraq's nuclear quest.
In a sense, Gen. Saadi's statement that Iraq came so close, but failed to build the bomb, shows how effective the Desert Storm air campaign was in destroying bomb-making sites. The allies further disrupted the program with the defections of key Iraqi scientists, who led the Vienna, Austria-based IAEA to secret caches thought safe by Gen. Saadi's department.
"The intelligence community is often well behind estimating when a country will have nuclear weapons and this appears to be another one," said a Pentagon official.
The CIA's latest assessment of Iraq's weapons program said that after Saddam's troops invaded Kuwait in 1991 he commenced a rush program to divert highly enriched uranium from nuclear reactors to hasten construction of a bomb. But Iraq only had a few months before the allies began the air campaign and the task was not completed.
"In the absence of inspections, however, most analysts assess that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program - unraveling the IAEA's hard-earned accomplishments," the CIA said in October.
Mr. Bush often cites Iraq's desire to own nuclear weapons as a key reason to disarm the country.
He misstated one fact in September when he asserted that the IAEA's 1998 report said Iraq was six months away from the bomb. "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied - finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic - the IAEA - that they were six months away from developing a weapon."
Mark Gwozdecky, the agency's chief spokesman, later rebutted those remarks. "There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," he said.
But Iraqi Gen. Saadi's assessment on Sunday seems to support Mr. Bush's contention that Iraq was dangerously close in 1991 and could reach that point again, absent intense international scrutiny.
--------
THE WEAPONS DECLARATION
U.N. Official Won't Reveal Iraq Suppliers to the Public
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/middleeast/11NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 10 - Hans Blix, a chief of the weapons team here, told the Security Council today that he was not going to release the names of foreign arms suppliers that Iraq has listed in its weapons declaration because they could be valuable to United Nations inspectors as sources of information about Baghdad's programs.
Mr. Blix confirmed to the Council that there appeared to be bomb recipes in the hundreds of pages detailing Iraq's secret nuclear program, which was discovered by inspectors in 1991 and deactivated. He said he would identify by Friday any passages in the vast document that must be screened out before it can be distributed to the full Council. Iraq delivered the report, required under Resolution 1441, to inspectors in Baghdad on Saturday night.
A 300-page section of the declaration, describing industrial facilities in Iraq where there could have been nuclear activity after 1991, includes much new information that analysts have to scrutinize carefully, he said.
Mr. Blix briefed the 15 Council nations over lunch today with Secretary General Kofi Annan. On Sunday, all of them except Syria agreed to allow the five permanent members, which are all nuclear powers, to examine the declaration immediately, before the 10 rotating members, none of which are nuclear powers.
In Washington, London and Paris today, experts plunged into the trove of documents and CD-ROM's, after agreeing to assist Mr. Blix in detecting information that could be used to make an illegal weapon. Russian and Chinese diplomats said that their copies of the declaration were only just arriving today in Moscow and Beijing.
Mr. Blix turned the tables today on the United States and other permanent members, saying he wanted to receive by Friday their assessments of the information that had to be filtered out of the documents. Up to now, the Bush administration, echoed by Britain, has been vocal in its complaints that Mr. Blix is moving too slowly with his inspections.
Both Russia and China said they doubted that they would have their assessments ready by Friday.
Mr. Blix said he wanted to give the filtered declaration to all 15 Council members on Monday. As soon as the declaration is so widely distributed, it is certain to leak out and become public.
Mr. Blix, the chairman of the United Nations chemical and biological weapons team, explained that he would, at least initially, remove the suppliers' names from the document that will be made public because inspectors found in the past that suppliers could provide vital information about what Baghdad was buying and where.
If the inspectors "were to give the names publicly, then they would never get another foreign supplier to give them any information," he said after the Council session.
Diplomats have indicated that disclosing the suppliers could be embarrassing to several nations, even perhaps the United States, which provided arms to Iraq during its long war with Iran in the 1980's.
Mr. Blix said he would abide by whatever the Council ultimately decided about the suppliers. The plan is for Mr. Blix's team and the International Atomic Energy Agency to keep the risky information confidential.
Mr. Blix said the most important part of the declaration is contained in 3,000 of its 12,000 pages, about 500 of which are in Arabic and must be translated.
Weapons analysts here will not even begin to assess the far more interesting issue of the accuracy of the declaration until next week. Mr. Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the atomic energy agency, will give their first evaluation to the Council Nov. 19.
A senior Mexican official sought today to clarify remarks by Mexican diplomats here that indicated they were reluctant to back the United States plan to have Washington and the other permanent members see the declaration first.
The official said that Jorge G. Castañeda, the foreign minister, had in fact proposed to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that Colombia, which holds the Council presidency this month, should decide whether to turn over the declaration to Washington on behalf of the nonpermanent members.
Mr. Castañeda also talked to Mr. Blix on Saturday to make sure he agreed, the official said.
"We have nobody in the whole country that can go through this declaration in three days and see if there are weapons cookbooks in there," the official said.
-------- korea
One Proliferator at a Time
By Jim Hoagland
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37708-2002Dec10?language=printer
North Korean agents are ransacking the global black market for nuclear technology and equipment to enable Kim Jong Il's regime to complete a uranium-enriched bomb on a crash basis, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
The in-your-face defiance by North Korea of U.S. demands to halt its covert nuclear program is both unsurprising and revealing: Pyongyang's characteristic belligerence points up the incomplete nature of the Bush administration's forceful campaign to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to the world's most dangerous dictatorships.
The administration has shifted its emphasis from confronting North Korea diplomatically to pressing China, Russia, Pakistan and other countries with potential nuclear suppliers to help cut off the North Koreans.
This emergency response usefully spotlights the long-term role that the merchants of atomic, biological and chemical death have played in constructing a destabilizing axis of proliferation. Effective, punishing action must be targeted on the suppliers as well as the users. The pushers cannot be let off the hook through neglect or expediency.
The dangers of greed driving proliferation are being underlined as well by the delivery this week of Iraq's 12,000-page declaration on its weapons of mass destruction to the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. One section is reported to contain a detailed listing of foreign companies or governments that helped Baghdad acquire components of history's most deadly armaments.
"The Iraqis seem to be doing what an aggressive litigator would do in an American trial," said one U.S. official briefed on initial assessments of the Iraqi report. The official continued:
"They dumped a mountain of old and unresponsive documents on us -- a lot of them can be identified as photocopies of photocopies previously submitted -- and challenged us to find anything useful or new. And they reached out to implicate everybody else they could, to make it seem that everybody knew what was going on and if they are in the dock, their German or French suppliers should be too."
In the Reagan and first Bush administrations, Washington paid little attention to Iraq's voracious pursuit of weapons systems, including nuclear-weapons components, poison gas that Saddam Hussein used on Iranian soldiers and his Kurdish citizens, and biological weapons that were systematically tested on Iraqi dissidents and other civilians. Until 1990 it was Iran that was seen as the great threat in the Persian Gulf, while Iraq was supposedly an Arab bulwark that had to be forgiven for its deadly foibles.
A dozen years of intermittent hostilities with Iraq have been one consequence of that mistaken judgment, which President George W. Bush seems determined to put right -- through the United Nations if he can, unilaterally if he must.
But the pattern of postponing difficult anti-proliferation actions is being repeated in the context of axis-of-evil member North Korea: The United States will not invoke sanctions now against Pakistan, despite that country's established role as the principal supplier of centrifuges and technology to the North Korean secret uranium-enrichment program over an estimated five-year period.
"We have to deal with one urgent problem at a time right now," said a U.S. official. The implication was that Pakistan's past proliferation has to be overlooked while Washington pursues the war on global terrorism, disarming Iraq and shutting down any new nuclear leaks to North Korea. "What Pakistan does right now on those fronts is getting our intense attention."
China is another country of concern for the administration on North Korea. I am told that Bush delivered a private but crystal clear warning to President Jiang Zemin in October that China's willingness -- or lack thereof -- to help contain North Korea's nuclear ambitions would now affect U.S.-China relations. But the Chinese have not applied pressure on Kim Jong Il since then. Their private inaction during a time of leadership transition matches their public statements that they can do nothing about North Korea, says one knowledgeable and therefore worried American.
Administration briefings to journalists and foreign officials have been opaque on how close the North Koreans may be to developing a workable uranium-based bomb. That is still something of a mystery. U.S. intelligence is in fact still not sure that the North Koreans have actually weaponized the plutonium they extracted to build one or two bombs in the early 1990s.
But conversations with senior officials suggest that one to two years is a reasonable estimate. The suppliers have done their dastardly job, leaving the North Koreans only a short gap to fill and the world with only a short time to come to terms with the need to tackle both the users and pushers of the means of mass murder.
----
North Korean ship seized
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021211-17872888.htm
U.S. and allied warships have seized a North Korean ship in the Arabian Sea with a shipment of a dozen Scud missiles bound for Yemen.
The boarding and seizure took place Monday about 600 miles east of the Horn of Africa, said defense and administration officials familiar with the incident.
The missile shipment was first disclosed by The Washington Times on Dec. 2 after the vessel departed several weeks ago from the North Korean port of Nampo with the Scud missiles and their components and a missile fuel chemical.
"U.S. intelligence had been tracking the ship closely, and what were found were about a dozen Scud missiles," one official said, confirming that it was the shipment first disclosed by The Times.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage yesterday called the seizure "expected" and the latest proof of North Korean involvement in missile proliferation.
"It appears that [North Korea] was busy proliferating again," he told reporters in Beijing after arriving for talks with Chinese leaders. "It appears that this vessel was carrying Scud missiles. It's been apprehended at sea in what I understand was a perfectly legal manner."
"Obviously, this was expected by American authorities for some time," he said. "I don't think there's any change. This is not exactly a development that is new."
According to the officials, two Spanish warships first approached the ship, which sought to evade capture. Warning shots were fired, and the ship halted and was boarded.
The Spanish ships were engaged in maritime-intercept operations aimed at finding al Qaeda terrorists in the region.
A team of U.S. military weapons specialists from aboard an American warship found the Scuds. Other details about what was on the vessel, which had listed its cargo as cement, could not be learned last night.
Officials said the ship was not a North Korean-flagged vessel, but evidence uncovered on the ship indicated that it was North Korean.
"It is a Cambodian vessel improperly registered. It had a name of So San, and it was painted over the original name. There was also paint over its ID number," a second administration official said.
The crew on the ship was North Korean, and the official said that when the ship refused the Spaniards' boarding request, it communicated a signal to Pyongyang.
Then yesterday, "the Spanish asked the Americans to help them inspect the cargo," the official said.
It was not clear last night what would happen to the shipment, which U.S. and allied forces in the Persian Gulf are likely to confiscate.
The interdiction could raise protests from North Korea, which recently announced that it was covertly working on nuclear weapons in violation of a 1994 agreement to halt its nuclear-arms program.
The North Korean ship was identified by U.S. intelligence agencies in November as it picked up the missile cargo, which included a chemical known as inhibited red fuming nitric acid, an agent used as an oxidizer in Scud missile fuel.
The missiles had been under surveillance for several weeks before they left the port.
The shipment is believed to be part of a deal between North Korea and Yemen that was made public earlier this year and which led to economic sanctions against North Korea, but not Yemen, in August.
The Bush administration decided not to sanction the Arab state because it supports U.S. military and intelligence operations against al Qaeda terrorists, some of whom blew a hole in the side of the destroyer USS Cole while it was docked in the Yemeni capital, Aden. That attack in October 2000 killed 17 American sailors.
An administration official said the Yemeni government had promised the U.S. government that it would not purchase any more Scuds from North Korea, a promise the latest shipment would violate, the official said.
Another official said the cargo may have been intercepted before it reached Yemen to avoid embarrassing the government there.
The dispute with North Korea, which was prompted by disclosures about the nuclear program in October, led to a suspension of U.S. fuel-oil shipments that were a stopgap measure to help impoverished North Korea until two nuclear-power-generating reactor facilities are built. The nuclear-reactor program is in doubt.
According to administration officials, the latest Scud transfer is expected to lead to tougher sanctions against North Korea and possibly on Yemen.
A company that was sanctioned in August for the Yemeni missile transfer was identified by U.S. officials as the state-run Changgwang Sinyong Corp., the communist government's missile exporter.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said in a speech in August that the missiles were purchased and that it was "a legitimate right for Yemen" to buy the systems.
A Yemeni Embassy spokesman, Yahyah Alshawakani, told The Times last week that Yemen's only missile shipment from North Korea took place earlier this year and denied that any other missile shipments were made.
Yemen has been a key supporter of the U.S.-led war against international terrorists. In October, the CIA conducted a missile attack in the country using an unmanned drone aircraft that killed six al Qaeda terrorists.
Yemen's missile arsenal included more than 20 Scuds purchased from Russia, many of which were fired during a 1994 civil war.
--------
Rumsfeld: N.Korea Is Biggest Missile Proliferator
December 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-rumsfeld.html
DJIBOUTI (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called North Korea on Wednesday the ``single largest proliferator'' of missile technology on earth after Spanish ships intercepted a North Korean ship carrying hidden Scud missiles.
Rumsfeld said he did not know the final destination of the Scud missiles, intercepted in the Arabian sea on Monday, but said North Korea was spreading missile technology to many countries.
``They continue to be the single largest proliferator of ballistic missile technology on the face of the earth, and they are putting into the hands of many countries the technologies and capabilities which have the potential for killing hundreds of thousands of people,'' Rumsfeld told reporters.
He confirmed that they were Scud missiles that were found onboard the So San ship, and said that there were also warheads with them.
North Korea has been branded by President Bush as a member of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and Iran.
Rumsfeld was speaking in the tiny northeast African state of Djibouti after meeting Djibouti's President Ismail Omar Guelleh as part of a regional tour he says is aimed at commending several countries on their efforts to fight extremist violence.
Rumsfeld declined to name any of the potential recipients of the missiles, which U.S. officials said were hidden under thousands of bags of cement.
``I have no information about the destination, as to whether there was one destination, or whether there were possible transfer points to other locations,'' Rumsfeld said.
``There's clearly an interest in determining where they were headed, but they're not going to get there,'' Rumsfeld said.
``There are places that the missiles could have been headed that are clearly illegal,'' he said.
Rumsfeld visited Ethiopia and Eritrea on Tuesday, and was due to cross the Arabian peninsula for talks in the Gulf state of Qatar.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, arriving in China on an Asian tour to drum up support for Washington's push to disarm Iraq, said the discovery of the missiles was unlikely to affect its policy on North Korea.
-------- missile defense
Interceptor Rocket Fails in Missile Test
December 11, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Missile-Test.html
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) -- An interceptor rocket failed to strike and destroy a ballistic missile early Wednesday during the latest test of the nation's missile defense system.
The Minuteman II intercontinental missile was successfully launched from the central California coast toward the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A booster rocket with the interceptor was launched about 20 minutes later from Kwajalein, in the Pacific Ocean 4,800 miles west of California.
The 55-inch, 120-pound interceptor was supposed to destroy a dummy warhead in the Minuteman at an altitude of about 140 miles. It failed to separate from its booster rocket, however, missed its target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the atmosphere, Missile Defense Agency spokesman Lt. Col. Rick Lehner said.
The dummy warhead splashed down in the Pacific, he said.
The $80 million test was the third such test to fail since 1999, according to the Pentagon.
--------
Rocket Fails in Missile Defense Test
December 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-missile-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. interceptor rocket designed to destroy incoming warheads failed its latest test over the Pacific on Wednesday, setting back the push to build a shield against ballistic missiles from countries such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
It was the third miss in eight attempts to shoot down a mock warhead since the tests began in October 1999, and was caused by a relatively low-tech problem -- a separation failure between the ``kill vehicle'' and its booster rocket.
President Bush wants to put an Alaska-based ``test bed'' initially with five missile silos -- and rudimentary operational capabilities against real attack -- in place by October 2004.
The test bed would constitute the first leg of a planned layered shield against missile attack. Other Pentagon projects involve overlappng systems that could be based at sea, in space and aboard laser-firing modified Boeing 747 aircraft.
Erecting such a shield is the Pentagon's single most expensive development program, likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over coming decades.
For each of the past two fiscal years alone, Bush requested and Congress approved $7.8 billion in research, development and testing funds.
Lt. Col. Rick Lehner of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency called it ``frustrating and disappointing'' that a possibly low-tech glitch had doomed the latest test and said it was not immediately clear where the fault lay.
An investigation into the failure of the ``Exo-Atmospheric Kill Vehicle,'' built by Raytheon Co., to separate from the booster rocket, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., likely would take ``weeks and weeks,'' he said.
A similar separation failure in a July 8, 2000 test was traced to scrambled commands from the booster's upper-stage assembly.
COMPANIES DEFEND THEIR SYSTEMS
Lockheed, the No. 1 U.S. defense contractor, defended its technology. ``Based on initial analysis, all aspects of the Lockheed Martin portion of the mission performed exactly as required,'' said a company official who asked not to be identified by name.
A spokesman for Lexington, Mass.-based Raytheon, Dave Shea, said the company had confidence in its design. Raytheon technology seemed an unlikely culprit, he said.
Five of the previous flight tests, including the last four in a row, have obliterated a dummy warhead aboard a modified Minuteman 2 intercontinental target launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force base.
The kill vehicle weighs about 120 pounds (54 kg). Equipped with two infrared sensors and a visible sensor, it has a small propulsion system meant to zero in on a warhead.
The botched test -- involving the widest cross-section of sensors yet -- was supposed to demonstrate that a nuclear, chemical or biological warhead would be destroyed and neutralized in a collision using ``hit to kill'' technology.
Lehner said the interceptor rocket was launched without a hitch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands -- at night for the first time -- 4,800 miles away from Vandenberg on the central California coast.
``Initial post-test analysis indicate that all other program elements successfully completed their test objectives, including radars and other sensors, as well as the battle management, command, control and communication elements,'' a Pentagon statement said.
Boeing, the lead system integrator for the ground-based mid-course program, referred callers to the Pentagon.
TRW Inc. builds the battle command, control and communications system.
-------- terrorism
WHITE HOUSE
U.S. Issues Warning to Foes in Arms Plan
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/politics/11NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - The Bush administration published a new strategy today on combatting weapons of mass destruction that included a statement, clearly directed at potential opponents like Iraq. Washington is prepared to "respond with all our options" if such weapons are used against American troops or allies.
The explicit warning was contained in a six-page, unclassified version of a new presidential document that outlines the administration's approach to countering and deterring the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It underscores a longstanding American policy, but officials acknowledged that it bears considerable resemblance to a private warning that Secretary of State James A. Baker III sent to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, before the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
In a briefing today, a senior administration official said Mr. Bush has assigned many government agencies the task of enacting the new strategy. The official said the president was spending "considerable sums" on research into new counterproliferation strategies, beyond missile defense. But he offered no examples.
The strategy document said, using the initials for weapons of mass destruction: "The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force - including through resort to all our options - to the use of W.M.D. against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies."
That warning was not included in a similar strategy document issued by the Clinton administration in 1993. Mr. Clinton's approach relied chiefly on nonproliferation efforts, though at various times his administration repeated warnings that attacks using weapons of mass destruction would be met with overwhelming force.
The strategy revision published today and a longer classified version reflect Mr. Bush's reliance on counterproliferation, including missile defenses and, when necessary, pre-emptive strikes against states or groups whose weaponry could pose a threat to the United States. While nonproliferation relies on laws and treaties to restrain countries from producing weapons of mass destruction, counterproliferation relies on force or physical interdiction to stop them.
American officials pointed to the interdiction today of a North Korean ship carrying Scud missiles in the Arabian Sea as an example of a more aggressive counter-proliferation strategy.
Many of the details in the strategy, including state and local preparations for emergency response in case of a chemical or biological attack, are part of the post-Sept. 11 precautions that now seem familiar. The policy also calls for tighter controls on nuclear materials, better export controls, and the strengthening of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one of the few international treaties that the administration has endorsed.
"What's new here is that we have a comprehensive strategy," the official said. "Every administration comes under criticism for not have an integrated strategy on issues like this. We do."
But that strategy makes no mention of the painful tradeoffs that the administration has already been forced to make to keep its coalition against terrorism together.
Pakistan, for example, has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and is widely believed by American intelligence agencies to have provided nuclear aid to North Korea. Yet the Bush administration lifted all nuclear-related economic sanctions against Pakistan when it needed the country's help pursuing leaders of Al Qaeda.
The strategy document says that "because each of these regimes is different, we will pursue country-specific strategies that best enable us and our friends and allies to prevent, deter and defend against W.M.D. and missile threats."
Administration officials say the document has been in draft form for months, and they contend the timing of its release had no relationship to the growing confrontation with Iraq. One official noted that Mr. Baker's warning to Saddam Hussein had come "when hostilities were imminent," a point the United States has not yet reached.
Nonetheless, the comparisons with the Baker letter are striking. Mr. Baker recalled in his memoirs, "The Politics of Diplomacy," that in dealing with Iraq in the period leading up to the war in January 1991, "I purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq could invite tactical nuclear retaliation." (In fact, he said, President George H.W. Bush had decided not to retaliate with chemical or nuclear weapons if Mr. Hussein launched a chemical attack.)
"This is not a threat, it is a promise," Mr. Baker recalled saying. "If there is any use of weapons like that, our objective won't just be the liberation of Kuwait, but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime."
The senior official who briefed reporters today said Mr. Hussein appeared to have understood the message, "and he didn't cross that line."
The current Bush administration has worried that deterring Mr. Hussein from using chemical or biological weapons may prove more difficult this time.
Mr. Bush has repeatedly stated that "regime change" is his goal. His aides have conceded in background conversations that, should Mr. Hussein fear for his own survival, he might be more tempted to reach for his most destructive weaponry.
Mr. Bush has specifically warned against that, and openly encouraged Iraqi generals not to act on any instructions from Mr. Hussein to use such weapons against American troops, Israel or other neighbors. The statement today, however, marks a more explicit version of that warning.
"The language speaks for itself," the senior official said, "and I think it does apply to any state that would use weapons of mass destruction against us."
----
Al-Qaeda planning uranium bomb: UN
Five canisters of 'highly radioactive material' seized
Steven Edwards
National Post
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id=%7B47E4D779-BAEA-4B5F-A7E2-678F7BA10EE2%7D
UNITED NATIONS - United Nations experts charged with probing al-Qaeda warn that the terrorist group appears determined to produce a "dirty bomb" capable of spreading radioactive material over a wide area after Tanzanian police seized what is believed to be raw uranium.
Police seized 110 kilograms of suspected raw uranium last month, after confiscating five canisters of suspected uranium early this year, says the report by the UN Monitoring Group on al- Qaeda.
"The Group remains highly preoccupied by the potential for al-Qaeda to manufacture some kind of 'dirty bomb,' " the report warns, adding that uranium is a "highly radioactive material."
The report, to be discussed privately by United Nations Security Council diplomats on Friday, says the experts could not tie the seized material directly to the terrorist network. However, it adds, "the possibility cannot be excluded of these illegal movements of raw uranium reaching al-Qaeda or their associates in East Africa.
"The Group is following [up] with the Tanzanian authorities and maintaining contact on this matter with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Department of Safeguards," says the UN report.
A "dirty bomb" is a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material that would kill few people in the initial blast but would create fear, panic and a long-term cancer risk with the spread of the radioactive material. Huge financial losses would also result as people fled contaminated areas.
U.S. authorities believe they stymied al-Qaeda planning for a "dirty bomb" attack on a U.S. city with the May arrest of Jose Padilla. The former Chicago street-gang member who became a radical Islamist was on a scouting mission for the terrorist network, they say.
In September, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, also released a government dossier that accused Saddam Hussein of trying to acquire substantial quantities of uranium from Africa as part of his effort to develop nuclear weapons.
Western experts have worried for years about security at a nuclear facility at the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo . The UN report says uranium is "usually" smuggled from neighbouring countries through the Tanzanian border towns of Mbeya (southern Tanzania), Kigoma (western Tanzania) and Rukwa (southwestern Tanzania).
Kigoma and Rukwa are across Lake Tanganyika from Congo, while Mbeya overlooks Zambia.
The group's findings come after twin terrorist attacks last month on Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya, for which al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. The terrorist group also vowed to launch even-more lethal strikes. The activity in East Africa has raised U.S. concern that the region and the Horn of Africa to the north have become havens for al-Qaeda cells since their expulsion from much of Afghanistan.
The UN Security Council created the Monitoring Group in January to watch over UN sanctions aimed at choking off funds and arms to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.
For this and two earlier reports, the group's members toured the globe to interview government, banking and other officials.
While the experts say the war on terrorism has caused "significant disruption" to al-Qaeda's infrastructure, the terrorist network remains "a substantial threat" because of its ability to disperse.
It has outfoxed efforts to freeze its financial assets by raising increasing amounts of money through charities and other non-governmental organizations, which "go unregulated in many countries."
Meanwhile, seizures of arms destined for the group represent "only the tip of the iceberg," leaving the terrorist network with access to "substantial quantities" of weapons. Only international co-operation can beat this "insidious mass movement," but states are not coming together sufficiently, the report charges. Many states have failed to update the UN's Consolidated List of al-Qaeda suspects, making it a less-than-effective tool for informing UN members of the people and organizations they should be targeting with sanctions.
One of about 100 people who have been named as suspects but not included on the list is Mr. Padilla, the accused "dirty-bomb" scout.
Also absent from the UN list are four of the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists," Iamd Fayez Mugniyah, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mughassil, Ali Saed bin al-Hoorie and Ibrahim Salih Mohammed al-Yacoub.
Sharpening U.S. focus on the Horn of Africa, Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, arrived in the Eritrean capital Asmara yesterday to discuss expanding military cooperation and to visit U.S. troops training in neighbouring deserts. He will also visit Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Gulf state of Qatar, where U.S. forces have established a military command post for a possible attack on Iraq.
sedwards@nationalpost.com
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Preemptive Strikes Part Of U.S. Strategic Doctrine
'All Options' Open for Countering Unconventional Arms
By Mike Allen and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36819-2002Dec10?language=printer
A Bush administration strategy announced yesterday calls for the preemptive use of military and covert force before an enemy unleashes weapons of mass destruction, and underscores the United States's willingness to retaliate with nuclear weapons for chemical or biological attacks on U.S. soil or against American troops overseas.
The strategy introduces a more aggressive approach to combating weapons of mass destruction, and it comes as the nation prepares for a possible war with Iraq.
A version of the strategy that was released by the White House said the United States will "respond with overwhelming force," including "all options," to the use of biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons on the nation, its troops or its allies.
However, a classified version of the strategy goes even further: It breaks with 50 years of U.S. counterproliferation efforts by authorizing preemptive strikes on states and terrorist groups that are close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction or the long-range missiles capable of delivering them. The policy aims to prevent the transfer of weapons components or to destroy them before they can be assembled.
In a top-secret appendix, the directive names Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya among the countries that are the central focus of the new U.S. approach. Administration officials said that does not imply that President Bush intends to use military force, covert or overt, in any of those countries. He is determined, they said, to stop transfers of weapons components in or out of their borders. The policy sets out the practical ramifications of Bush's doctrine of preemption, contained in a national security strategy released in September, which turns away from the Cold War doctrine based on deterrence and containment. The preemption doctrine favors taking on hostile states before they can strike.
It broadens a warning that was made to Iraq on the eve of the Persian Gulf War of 1991. A letter from President George H.W. Bush promised "the strongest possible response" if Iraq were to use chemical and biological weapons against U.S. and allied troops.
But the new policy is more specific, detailing the consequences of an enemy's use of weapons of mass destruction. "The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force -- including through resort to all of our options -- to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies," the document says.
The timing of the document's release yesterday sends an unmistakable message to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein about the potential consequences of using nonconventional weapons in a future war.
A senior administration official, briefing reporters on the new strategy, said those options include nuclear force. The official said the 1991 letter had its intended effect. "He [Hussein] didn't cross the line of using chemical or biological weapons," the official said. "The Iraqis have told us that they interpreted that letter as meaning that the United States would use nuclear weapons, and it was a powerful deterrent."
In the past, U.S. officials saw some advantage in keeping the world guessing about how the United States would respond to evidence that a country or a terrorist group was hiding weapons of mass destruction deep underground. And Bush administration officials were at pains yesterday to insist that there is nothing new in their formulation.
Under Bush, however, Pentagon officials appear to have taken a step closer to the possible, limited use of nuclear weapons by pursuing new and more usable ones. A review of nuclear policy completed by defense officials a year ago put added emphasis on developing low-yield nuclear weapons that could be used to burrow deep into the earth and destroy underground complexes, including stores of chemical and biological arms. This has raised questions about whether the administration is lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons.
Officials deny that they are doing so. But they also argue that the strategic calculations necessary for combating terrorism and hostile nations must inherently be different from those used during the Cold War, when deterrence meant simply convincing the Soviets that the United States, if attacked, could and would wipe them out. Against today's new enemies, the administration has argued, it may be necessary to strike preemptively and with nuclear weapons that would keep fallout to a minimum.
The administration published a broader national security strategy in September, and the preparation of a separate policy on weapons of mass destruction reflects the seriousness with which the administration takes the threat of attacks from rogue states and terrorist organizations. "Every administration seems to come under criticism for not having a strategy," the official said.
The six-page strategy released by the White House yesterday was a declassified extract of a top secret directive signed by Bush in May after resolving interagency disputes dating to January. It is among the first major policy collaborations of the National Security Council and the new Homeland Security Council, whose chairman is Tom Ridge. The classified version is identified jointly as National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 17 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 4. The new strategy does not repudiate "traditional measures" of diplomacy, multinational arms control agreements and export controls. But in its classified form, and in the interagency process that drafted it, the directive is premised on a view that "traditional nonproliferation has failed, and now we're going into active interdiction," according to one participant who spoke without authority from the White House.
Active interdiction, the official said, "is physical -- it's disruption, it's destruction in any form, whether kinetic or cyber."
Explaining the new approach, one official gave the hypothetical scenario of a ship using the Philippines as a transshipment point for special weapons to Libya. "We're going to interdict or destroy or disrupt that shipment or, during the transloading process, it is going to mysteriously disappear," the official said.
The official spoke as Spanish special forces, with U.S. intelligence support, stopped a North Korean ship bound for Yemen with Scud missiles. In rare cases, previous presidents have mounted preemptive strikes against nonconventional weapons. Those episodes, including the August 1998 missile strike on an alleged Sudanese chemical weapons plant and the bombing of some targets in Iraq four months later, have generally come in retaliation for specific enemy attacks.
Bush hinted at the new approach in a Dec. 11, 2001, speech at the Citadel, speaking of active counterproliferation. By January, a draft of NSPD 17 was circulating in the State Department, the White House, the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies. State Department officials objected to some elements of the new approach but failed to carry the decision. The Homeland Security Office, represented by policy director Richard A. Falkenrath, interjected itself as jointly responsible for managing the consequences of a successful attack on the United States. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to one participant, objected in April to language that he believed commingled military and domestic lines of authority. Bush signed the draft unchanged in May.
The intention, in theory, is not fundamentally new. The Clinton administration's Presidential Decision Directive 62, "Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas," had classified language that one former official summarized as: "If you think terrorists will get access to WMD, there is an extremely low threshold that the United States should act" militarily.
Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Sees Nuclear Deterrence Against WMD Attack
December 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-bush-security.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States reminded Iraq and other countries on Tuesday that it was prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary to respond to an attack from weapons of mass destruction.
The warning, which underscored longstanding U.S. policy leaving open the use of nuclear weapons if needed, was contained in a statement of U.S. strategy against nuclear, chemical and biological weapons -- the first update since 1993.
The six-page strategy document says deterring attacks with the threat of ``overwhelming force'' is an essential element in protecting America and its allies from weapons of mass destruction, also known as WMD.
``The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force -- including through resort to all our options -- to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies,'' the strategy report said.
``In addition to our conventional and nuclear response and defense capabilities, our overall deterrent posture against WMD threats is reinforced by effective intelligence, surveillance, interdiction and domestic law enforcement capabilities,'' it said.
Senior U.S. officials said the passage was not included the previous U.S. strategy document on weapons of mass destruction, which emphasized efforts to prevent proliferation, and said the new document did not represent a shift in U.S. policy on when it would use nuclear weapons.
But the passage was put in the new report as part of an increased emphasis on the role of deterrence against a weapons of mass destruction attack, they said.
Other major elements of the new strategy include strengthening nonproliferation measures, beefing up defenses and combating the effects of an attack on the population.
The strategy report was released amid the looming possibility of war with Iraq, which the United States accuses of possessing weapons of mass destruction, officials said.
``The language speaks for itself, and I think it does apply to any state that would use weapons of mass destruction against us,'' a senior official said.
But the warning emphasizes and makes explicit for other countries a private warning Bush's father, former President George Bush, made in a letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on the eve of the first Gulf War.
In that letter, the United States threatened the ``severest consequences'' if Iraq were to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States, destroy Kuwaiti oil fields or participate in terrorism.
``It was clear in terms of the message that we would respond with all of our options. ... The Iraqis have told us that they interpreted that letter as meaning the United States would use nuclear weapons, and it was a powerful deterrent,'' the official said.
Although Iraq later set fire to Kuwaiti oil fields and supported terrorism, the official said, it did not ``cross the line'' of using chemical or biological weapons.
--------
Bush Warns Iraq of Harsh Response
December 11, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Weapons-Strategy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's explicit threat to use nuclear weapons against enemies wielding weapons of mass destruction drew little objection Wednesday from Democratic rivals. A Republican senator, however, warned that Bush risks undoing 50 years' work to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
The White House submitted to Congress a six-page statement of defense strategy emphasizing the long-standing policy that the United States may respond ``with overwhelming force'' -- including nuclear weapons -- to any attack with weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its friends.
In a statement accompanying the strategy, Bush said his administration would confront the threat posed by such weapons ``with confidence and determination.'' He did not specifically mention the possibility of retaliatory or pre-emptive nuclear strikes in the statement, which comes as Bush considers war to disarm Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the administration strategy, publicly released only in broad outlines, also includes the authorization of pre-emptive U.S. nuclear strikes -- with ``all our might'' -- against enemies close to acquiring such weapons.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who lost to Bush in 2000, said through a spokesman that the White House ``is in keeping with America's long held strategy of using our own weapons of mass destruction principally to dissuade any aggressor from using their own arsenal against us.''
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., agreed that the United States ``has always reserved every military option to defend our citizens and our troops.'' But, Kerry added, Bush should put as much effort into national security initiatives, such as intelligence gathering and coalition building, ``that go beyond pure muscle flexing.''
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the policy declaration was a statement of ``how seriously the United States would take it in the event that weapons of mass destruction were used ... to make clear that the United States will indeed respond.''
Hagel told his constituents at a Rotary Club in Omaha, Neb., that a nation's right to self-defense is nothing new. ``But it is very dangerous to be talking too much about these kinds of responses that the United States would take or actions in anticipation of another nation's actions,'' Hagel said.
Hagel warned that over-asserting America's right to use nuclear weapons in self-defense reduces to ``a mucky schizophrenia'' the long-standing U.S. efforts to keep a lid on other nuclear nations.
``It essentially nullifies the last 50 years,'' Hagel said. ``It sets in motion a series of uncontrollable actions that could be taken by China, by Russia, by Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, nations that do possess nuclear weapons.''
It does not take a great leap of imagination, for example, to see India exploring a first-strike with nuclear force in order to eliminate a number of Pakistani nuclear facilities, Hagel added.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said it was ironic that the strategy, which also emphasizes a priority on interdiction of weapons, was submitted on the same day that the administration allowed Yemen to keep an interdicted shipment of North Korean-made missiles.
``With thousands of U.S. troops in the region and the possibility of more to come, this decision is ill-considered at best,'' Lieberman said.
Bush has already undercut the strategy's deterrent effect on Saddam, said James Steinberg, deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration.
``It's all well and good to say, 'We'll use whatever we've got.' But if you've already told Saddam Hussein you're getting rid of him, if he thinks he's not going to survive in any event, what's the deterrent?''
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy at American Enterprise Institute, countered that the deterrent effect is targeted more at Saddam's lieutenants.
Associated Press writer Joe Ruff contributed to this report from Omaha, Neb.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
New bombshells at Los Alamos lab
By J.R. Moehringer
Los Angeles Times
December 11, 2002
The Seattle Times
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=losalamos11&date=20021211&query=nuclear
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - A "culture of theft" at Los Alamos National Laboratory costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year and endangers national security, said two investigators recently fired by the laboratory.
Glenn Walp and Steven Doran, former police officers, said they were recruited by Los Alamos officials earlier this year to investigate corruption at the lab, which houses the nation's nuclear secrets and monitors the quality of the nuclear arsenal.
But after finding far more corruption than Los Alamos officials suspected - including hundreds of missing items that could prove valuable to terrorists or rogue nations - the investigators were dismissed Nov. 25 and escorted from the lab by armed guards.
The firings have become another embarrassment for the troubled laboratory and sparked an outcry in Congress.
Laboratory officials said the investigators were fired because their aggressive tactics and combative attitude alienated workers. But the investigators said they were fired because their bosses cared less about safeguarding one of the nation's most important scientific and military sites than about protecting the image of the University of California, which runs Los Alamos for the Energy Department.
Los Alamos officials acknowledged the FBI and the Energy Department are looking into several leads turned up by the fired investigators. Walp and Doran said those leads include lapses in security, such as one worker who tried to buy a $30,000 customized Ford Mustang with lab money and one who used her lab credit card to get $2,500 in cash at a casino.
University of California officials said they will urge the Energy Department to widen its inquiry into Los Alamos to include the firings.
"Through the years there has been ingrained within the laboratory this culture of theft," said Walp, 61, former head of the Pennsylvania State Police who was hired to lead the internal security force at Los Alamos in January.
"The problem isn't with scientists. They're just there doing their jobs. It's the middle people."
Soon after arriving at the laboratory, Walp wrote a report that estimated $3 million in equipment had been stolen since 1999. Among the missing items were more than 260 computers, some from the most sensitive areas of the laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed.
The report, Walp said, only annoyed his bosses, who often told him his first loyalty was to the University of California, not the U.S. taxpayer.
Los Alamos spokesman Jim Danneskiold dismissed that the facility is rife with corruption. "There is no culture of theft here," he said. "People do not walk out of here with property."
He said roughly 0.1 percent of the lab's $1 billion inventory disappears each year, far below the percentage large retail stores deem acceptable. Many items that appear stolen, he said, are stored in some forgotten Quonset hut or World War II-era shed. Los Alamos has more than 2,000 buildings on its 40-square-mile site, he said, and things get mislaid. However, he said, "There is no evidence that there is any classified information on computers reported as missing."
He added that Doran and Walp were fired because "they had lost the confidence of different officials they had to work with," Danneskiold said.
Doran, 39, scoffed at the suggestion missing items were "mislaid."
"One of the missing items was a 2-ton magnet," he said. "How do you lose a 2-ton magnet?"
The most shocking case of theft, Walp and Doran said, involved two workers with access to all top-secret areas. The workers reportedly went on a spree, using lab purchase orders to acquire hundreds of items, including spy gear.
"It's unbelievable," said Doran, a former Marine and former police chief in Idaho City, Idaho. "They bought camping equipment, backpacks, lock picks, beacons, radio equipment, high-speed digital cameras, $9,000 worth of the best knives money can buy, tractors, lawn mowers, wood chippers ... high-pressure washers, air-conditioning units."
Also, the two workers reportedly stole cryogenic freezers, which Doran said could be useful to anyone developing biological weapons.
The two suspected workers have been placed on paid leave, Los Alamos officials said, while the FBI investigates.
Doran called it unfair that workers suspected of felonies remain on paid leave, while he and Walp were fired.
Also, Doran said, he and Walp received outstanding performance reviews just before being fired. Walp even got a $5,000 bonus.
A spokesman for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said the firings have prompted concern among lawmakers, who likely will hold hearings soon and send a team of investigators to Los Alamos.
-------- us politics
White House steps over the line
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/99280_thomas11.shtml
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's aides must stay awake at night thinking of new ways to intrude on the privacy of once-free Americans. These officials simply won't stop overreaching, will they?
Whenever they come up with one of their big-brother schemes to invade every facet of our life, they package it as just another pain-free way to fight terrorism.
First there was the infamous proposal that the Justice Department create a Terrorism Information and Prevention System in which delivery people, truck drivers and letter carriers as well as local gossips would spy on folks in the neighborhood and report to the FBI.
This foolish plot had the ring of Nazi Germany in the '30s and '40s. Fortunately, the plan generated so much outrage that the administration withdrew it.
Now comes the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness Office, which until recently had operated secretly as a part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon.
TIA's grandiose mission is just what its name implies: to find out everything about us -- what magazines we read, what credit card purchases we make, what doctors and hospitals we visit, what medicines we take, what trips we book, what bank checks we write. Then TIA plans to file the data onto what the Pentagon calls a "virtual, centralized grand database."
Scary, isn't it?
Even scarier is the fact that the director of this Orwellian vision is, of all people, John Poindexter.
Remember him? He was President Reagan's national security adviser who was convicted in 1990 of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.
That mid-1980s scandal, which Poindexter helped mastermind, involved secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of the profits to help the so-called Contra rebels in Nicaragua. His conviction was overturned in 1991 by an appeals court because the government relied on the testimony he gave Congress after it had granted him immunity from prosecution.
In January Poindexter quietly returned to government, moving into the Pentagon without any fanfare. That's understandable. With his record of deceit, why should he be back in government? Is he the best that this administration has to offer?
Poindexter told The Washington Post that information awareness systems being developed would create a global computer that could gather data on travel to risky areas, suspicious e-mails, bizarre fund transfers and unusual medical activities, such as treatments for anthrax-induced sores.
In other words, no closet would be too remote and no skeleton in it too small to escape the eagle eye of the all-knowing global computer system.
Yet isn't it fascinating that in all this personal-information gathering, the records of gun buyers will be off-limits. That's the way the National Rifle Association wants it. And one of the gun lobby's proudest picks for government service, Attorney General John Ashcroft, agrees. The NRA commands, and the Ashcroft Justice Department genuflects.
Phil Kent, president of the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation, an Atlanta-based public interest law firm, said the TIA program, which the government hopes to have up and running in 2007, would be an "unprecedented electronic dragnet." It would give "carte blanche to eavesdrop on Americans on the flimsiest of evidence, if any evidence at all."
Kent also told the Washington Times that it is "the most sweeping threat to civil liberties since Japanese American internment."
In the wake of Sept. 11 we Americans have had to struggle to hang onto our basic civil rights and liberties. Fear has made too many of us capitulate to those who would take away the freedoms we have cherished for so long.
We must speak out to uphold the U.S. Constitution before it's too late.
I don't believe government bureaucrats should know -- or need to know -- that much personal information about us. We should tell them: It's none of your business.
And by the way, while you're snooping, why don't you find out something we would all like to know: Where is Osama bin Laden anyway?
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. military expands civil affairs
By Mike Eckel
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-32572542.htm
BAGRAM, Afghanistan - The U.S. military is expanding its humanitarian-aid and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, work that military officials say is designed to give legitimacy to the Afghan government.
The military says such help is not nation-building, but aid agencies have accused the United States of politicizing humanitarian projects in war-shattered Afghanistan. They say the military should stick to military objectives such as searching for al Qaeda suspects.
The U.S. military plans to set up a team comprising up to 70 U.S. Army civil affairs specialists, Special Forces and security troops in the eastern Afghan town of Gardez within 30 days.
The team, including engineers and medical specialists, will work primarily as a clearinghouse for aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations doing their own projects, said U.S. Army Col. Roger King, a spokesman at Bagram air base, headquarters for the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.
The team will not provide security for agencies, Col. King said, nor will it tell aid agencies which projects they should do. Such teams eventually will work in cities and towns across Afghanistan, he said.
"It is a framework to coordinate the efforts of a bunch of different people, all of whom want to do good things," Col. King said.
Rafael Robillard of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an umbrella group of about 77 nongovernmental organizations, said the effort is misguided.
He said military-coordinated aid could taint the projects of the United Nations or other agencies, and armed soldiers working in conjunction with aid workers could put agencies in danger, he said.
"With the military, they have a military objective, to pacify this country and win the war against terrorists," Mr. Robillard said.
"Coordinating aid is our business. We don't think a foreign army should be coordinating aid. It's really two different visions, different missions."
The Gardez project is a shift in the U.S. mission in Afghanistan away from combat operations, even as infantry troops, Special Forces and other U.S. agencies continue search-and-seizure missions.
U.S. officials, including Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who is overseeing the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, repeatedly have denied the United States is getting involved in nation-building. U.S. political leaders, including President Bush, have shunned the term, saying it implies the United States wants to control a country's politics or policies.
For months, U.S. forces have been involved in humanitarian projects in Afghanistan. Civil-affairs specialists regularly consult village leaders about pressing problems. Army medics, veterinarians and engineers visit rural villages, giving medical treatment to sick or malnourished Afghans, treating animals and testing drinking-water supplies.
But the arrival last month of more than 150 additional civil affairs specialists and the new regional teams indicates a more organized approach to humanitarian and reconstruction projects.
Col. King said the arrangement will buttress local governments in the eyes of war-weary and government-wary Afghans by making relief projects more efficient. It also will help to legitimize the government of President Hamid Karzai, which has little control outside the capital, where a multinational force keeps the peace.
"What it is [doing] is giving legitimacy to the local government, or the government in Kabul, so that the Afghan people will turn to their local officials for help instead of warlords or local militias," Col. King said.
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Afghan Army Demands Warlords Surrender Arms - Report
December 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-weapons.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The Afghan army and international peacekeepers plan to crack down on warlords in five southeastern Afghan provinces if they fail to lay down their arms in 10 days, an army spokesman was quoted as saying on Wednesday.
The government has asked all factional commanders in the region to surrender their weapons or face a joint operation by the Afghan army and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Pressagency quoted Afghan army spokesman Mohammad Ismail as saying.
The warning was issued to warlords in Logar, Paktia, Paktika, Khost and Ghazni provinces, the AIP reported.
Several powerful warlords, including in the Pashtun-dominated southern and southeastern provinces, have been challenging the authority of President Hamid Karzai's government since it was installed last year. In several provinces local commanders refused to accept government-appointed governors and fought official forces.
One renegade warlord, Padshah Khan Zadran, has waged fierce battles against official forces in Khost province and vowed to continue to oppose Karzai's rule.
Warlords are seen as one of the greatest threats to security in Afghanistan, where central government control is virtually non-existent in many areas and where factional fighting has broken out in the north, west, east and southeast.
Military spokesman Ismail, whose 3rd Afghan Corps is based in Gardez city south of Kabul, said that 200 ISAF soldiers had already arrived to take part in the operation.
However, ISAF spokesman Tony Grubb denied this. ``No ISAF personnel are deployed in Gardez or anywhere outside of Kabul,'' he said.
ISAF's mandate currently limits it to the capital, although British government sources said in late November that the United States and Britain planned to expand the security umbrella to the provinces from the end of this month.
They said the plan, which had to be approved by the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would cover up to six cities, including Gardez.
Ismail said all commanders not officially belonging to the defense and interior ministries or other government institutions should surrender their weapons.
The U.S.-backed Karzai has already sacked up to 20 medium-level local officials as part of a bid to consolidate his power outside Kabul, and the government is involved in disarmament initiatives in the north and northeast.
Thousands of U.S. troops have also uncovered many large arms caches in the south and southeast during their hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban remnants, but locals are bitterly opposed to being searched or disarmed.
-------- africa
AFRICA
Rumsfeld Seeking New Allies to Oppose Al Qaeda and Iraq
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/africa/11RUMS.html
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec. 10 - In another sign of Africa's increased importance to United States military planners, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived in Eritrea today on a three-country tour aimed at courting allies considered essential to the fight against Al Qaeda and to possible military action against Iraq.
"We know there are Al Qaeda in this area, in several countries, in varying numbers," Mr. Rumsfeld said on the flight from Washington to Eritrea, a country on the Horn of Africa that has sought mightily to bring United States troops to its soil. "We also know to the extent we put pressure on them in one place, they tend to be disrupted and have to find other locations."
The recent terrorist bombing in Kenya, which is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Al Qaeda, highlights the importance of a region that had previously seen its strategic role in the world fade after the end of the cold war. Now, with Qaeda operatives scattering and the United States looking for the broadest possible array of military allies, African governments are finding Washington increasingly receptive.
After meeting with President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea today, Mr. Rumsfeld left for Eritrea's bitter rival to the south, Ethiopia, which fought a two-year border war with Eritrea that ended in 2000.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia has just returned from a meeting with President Bush at the White House, which was also attended by President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya. Analysts suspect that one reason Eritrea is so eager to court the American military is to outflank Ethiopia, which is considered one of Washington's key allies in the region.
After his meeting with Mr. Rumsfeld today, the Eritrean president vowed to stand by the United States in its fight against terrorism. "We are not offering anything to get anything from the United States," Mr. Afewerki said. "We have very limited resources, but we are willing and prepared to use these resources in any way that is useful to combat terrorism."
In recent weeks, Eritrea's lobbyists in Washington have sought to play up their country's importance in the region. They point out that Eritrea - half Christian and half Muslim - has resisted joining the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic States and would have no qualms about assisting the United States in an attack against Iraq.
Eritrea is directly across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, with deep-water ports on the sea, and "a military partnership between the United States and Eritrea is sensible and well timed," said a recent position paper distributed by Greenberg Traurig, a Washington law firm working for Eritrea.
The country has been shunned in the past because of its repressive government, which jailed numerous opposition leaders, student activists and independent journalists last year. Two Eritreans who work at the American Embassy in Asmara, the capital, have been jailed for the past year for what the Eritrean government says is subversive activity. Repeated calls for their release have been ignored by Eritrean leaders.
Mr. Rumsfeld said human rights issues were among those he discussed with Mr. Afewerki. "We are frankly hoping that the relationship will evolve and strengthen and grow in the weeks and months and years ahead," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Another stop on Mr. Rumsfeld's tour will be Djibouti, a former French colony that sits at the mouth of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, between Eritrea and the lawless state of Somalia. There are already more than 1,000 American troops, mostly Special Operations forces and marines, stationed in Djibouti. They are there to assist the Qaeda operation and, if necessary, the offensive against Iraq.
Mr. Rumsfeld will wind up his trip in Qatar, where the American military's Central Command has put in place a new forward headquarters for the Persian Gulf region.
-------- arms sales
Weapons Trade Open to All Who Can Pay
December 11, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-World-Arms-Trade.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- No one's an outcast at the global weapons bazaar.
Countries with little in common, or even on opposing sides of alliances, come together in the arms trade, whether they do so openly, under the table or -- as in the case of an intercepted missile shipment from North Korea to Yemen -- hidden amid a cargo of cement.
With all but the most advanced weapons, arms experts say, if you've got the cash, you can get what you want.
And their only surprise when the transaction between North Korea and Yemen was uncovered was that the United States did something to stop it.
``They say politics makes strange bedfellows,'' said Jon Wolfsthal, an authority on nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ``The international arms trade is no different.''
U.S. officials decided Wednesday to let the unflagged cargo ship carrying the Scud missiles sail on its way to Yemen after concluding they had no legal basis to seize the shipment. Intelligence officials shadowed the ship for weeks and the Spanish navy stopped it Monday off the Arabian peninsula.
North Korea is an ambitious exporter of ballistic missiles, but not alone in offering its military wares to practically all comers.
The U.S. government has warned for several years about leapfrogging advances in missile technology throughout the developing world. More small countries, using equipment and expertise from Russia, China and North Korea, are no longer just customers, but weapons exporters in their own right.
The breakup of the Soviet Union also has spawned smaller but sizable arms-exporting enterprises that are hard to control. Among them, Belarus has become one of the world's largest arms exporters -- a country with a hardline leadership and close ties to Iraq and other states accused of trying to amass highly destructive weapons.
In a small example of conventional-arms proliferation repeated many times over, a particularly effective German assault rifle is being manufactured in perhaps 17 countries -- most with far less stringent export controls than the major suppliers face, experts say.
And the two shoulder-fired missiles that narrowly missed an Israeli airliner recently were the old -- but still highly effective -- Soviet SA-7 missiles, versions of which are being made in half a dozen countries or more, said Edward Laurance, author of ``The International Arms Trade.''
``God only knows where all those things are,'' he said.
Some reasons there are more players in the arms trade: licensing agreements that let one country's weapon be produced in another; readily available technical information and the spread of reverse engineering -- taking something apart, figuring out how it works and coming up with a way to make it.
Wolfsthal said almost any country able to make cars can also make tanks and other sophisticated military hardware.
North Koreans ``have the incredible ability to reverse-engineer anything they get their hands on,'' he said. ``The Chinese are taking Russian airplanes and making their own production lines. The Iranians have bought not only ballistic missiles from North Korea but a production capability.''
The United States is the largest arms merchant by far, delivering almost half the weapons bought on the world market. America netted $14 billion from arms exports in 2000, more than double the earnings of its closest competitor, Britain, with Russia in third.
Like other top arms suppliers, the United States does not sell directly to hostile nations -- except in shady deals like the arms-for-hostages arrangement with Iran in the 1980s.
But this is an amorphous world of shifting relations and military hand-me-downs.
One result: U.S. forces faced U.S. Stinger missiles in Afghanistan, leftovers from the arms supplied to the Afghan resistance in its war against the Soviet Union.
Another: Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 with weapons bought from all major arms powers, including the United States.
And another: In perhaps the last chance to avoid another Iraq war, inspectors are searching there for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein once used against Iran -- when U.S. officials sided with him.
``In the past 20 years, Pakistan was our friend, then our enemy, friend, enemy, friend,'' Wolfsthal said. ``Alliances change quickly.''
North Korea has been selling industriously to anyone who wants to buy.
U.S. allies such as Egypt and Pakistan have bought from North Korea, experts say, and so has Iran. President Bush branded North Korea, Iran and Iraq an ``axis of evil'' because of their existing or potential arsenals of the world's worst weapons.
Yemen is part ally, part trouble spot for the United States -- its backcountry seething with anti-American militancy but its leadership cooperating with the United States in the war against terrorism.
--------
U.S. Allows Scud Missile Shipment to Continue to Yemen
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By THOM SHANKER with TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/11CND-SCUD.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - The White House said today that a North Korean ship carrying Scud missiles that was intercepted by Spanish warships in the Arabian Sea was headed to Yemen and was allowed to continue its journey after the United States determined that the shipment was not in violation of any international law.
While there is authority to stop and search such a vessel, which was not carrying a national flag, "in this instance there is no clear authority to seize the shipment of Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen, and therefore the merchant vessel is being released," the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said at a news conference.
He said the United States was engaged in continuing efforts to stop the spread of missile technologies and was conducting talks on such an agreement with Yemen.
Mr. Fleischer, who said Yemeni officials had been contacted today by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney, spoke after a series of twists and turns about the fate and destination of the missiles.
Spain reported earlier today that after its warships halted the North Korean ship on Tuesday it had been handed over to the United States and was on its way to Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island leased to Washington by Britain.
The Spanish defense minister, Federico Trillo, said the North Korean cargo vessel was carrying 15 Scud missiles and about 85 drums of chemicals, but that its destination could not be ascertained.
Later the Yemeni government said the missiles were intended for its army and issued formal protests over the vessel's seizure to the United States and Spain, the official Yemeni news agency Saba said.
At the White House Mr. Fleischer said this afternoon, "Yemen is a partner of the United States in the war on terrorism," and added, "As conversations took place with Yemen, Yemen has given the United States assurances that it will not transfer these missiles to anyone."
Asked if the lesson to be drawn by North Korea was that the United States was willing to cut off oil supplies but that Pyongyang was free to ship its missiles, Mr. Fleischer said Washington did have concerns about the shipments but that "international law still is international law."
Mr. Fleischer said one concern in the shipment was "whether or not these missiles were going to head to any rogue regimes."
He added: "And that would have been a different matter. But the fact of the matter is the import of export of this, which is legal, must be observed under international law."
In Sana, the Yemeni capital, Foreign Minister Abubakr al-Qirbi was quoted by the official Saba news agency as saying: "The shipment is part of contracts signed some time ago. It belongs to the Yemeni government and its army and meant for defensive purposes."
Saba said Mr. Qirbi summoned the United States ambassador to Sana to lodge a formal protest.
"The foreign minister stressed the importance of the return of the shipment to the Yemeni government," the Yemeni agency said, adding that the Yemeni government had also protested to Spain, whose warships intercepted the North Korean vessel.
Before Mr. Fleischer spoke, the deputy White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said, Yemen was not a state that sponsored terrorism, and added, "We now know that in fact Yemen has been a friend and partner in the global war on terrorism."
American and Spanish officials have said the missiles were hidden under thousands of bags of cement. Late Tuesday night, American intelligence officials said there was no clear link between Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups and the North Korean ship.
The ship, which a senior administration official said on Tuesday had been tracked by American intelligence "all the way out" from North Korea, appeared to be heading for Yemen when it was stopped by the two Spanish warships an estimated 600 miles off the Yemeni coast.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in Djibouti today as part of an overseas trip that alo included a visit to Qatar, "North Korea doesn't like to hear me say it, but they continue to be the largest proliferator of missiles and ballistic missile technology on the face of the earth." Mr. Rumsfeld spoke after meeting President Ismael Omar Guelleh.
North Korea recently disclosed that it has a program to make nuclear weapons from highly enriched uranium, in violation of its international agreements, but the United States has taken pains to defuse any sense that it is planning an immediate confrontation over the issue. That policy is in contrast to the administration's approach with Iraq, where the Bush administration has threatened military action to disarm President Saddam Hussein if he does not voluntarily dispose of any weapons of mass destruction.
The administration's complicated diplomatic and military relations throughout the region could be made even more difficult if and when it were determined who the customer was for the cargo, an arsenal that one official said was about a dozen Scud missiles. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration has been rewarding nations that have supported the American counterterrorism effort, coaxing some to join the campaign, and threatening others - in particular Iraq - that are believed to possess weapons of mass destruction or to be supporting terrorist networks.
The Spanish warships, the Navarra and the Patino, were part of a seaborne operation initially set up to halt Al Qaeda supporters who might be fleeing the war in Afghanistan. The Navarra signaled for the cargo ship to halt but it "did not cooperate," one Pentagon official said. "It took evasive maneuvers. It tried by all means to avoid inspection."
Warning shots were fired, officials said, and the cargo ship, whose seizure was first reported by CNN, was cut off by the two warships and was boarded by Spanish crews.
The ship's manifest said it was carrying 40,000 sacks of cement, an official said. But a search found 20 containers, each about 20 feet by 40 feet, that were covered with sacks of cement. After clearing the sacks and discovering signs of a high-tech arsenal, the Spanish captain signaled for American explosives experts, who are expected to file a more thorough report after they complete their work.
Administration officials have said that North Korea is one of the largest proliferators of missile technology. Its customers have included Pakistan - which supplied nuclear technology in return, administration officials say - and Iran and Yemen. North Korea has sold Pakistan not only Scuds, which are shorter-range tactical missiles, but also longer-range Nodongs.
An international agreement, called the Missile Technology Control Regime, was intended to prevent the spread of delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction, but North Korea has not signed the pact.
According to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., Yemen has 18 Scud-B missiles and used a small number of them in its civil war in 1994.
Iraq also fired Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and should President Bush order the United States to war in order to disarm President Saddam Hussein, eliminating any Scud threat would be a critical early priority.
After the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the subsequent war in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa became an important hub for military planners. The United States and its allies, worried that Al Qaeda fighters would flee Afghanistan for Yemen's interior, Somalia or other lawless regions, organized the patrols in the Arabian Sea and adjoining waters. About 10 countries have provided vessels to the effort, and more than 30 ships are on patrol at all times, Pentagon officials said.
The Scud is based on a Soviet-era design for a tactical surface-to-surface missile with a range of about 390 miles. It is not highly accurate, and of less military utility when armed with conventional explosives. Even so, a Scud killed dozens of American soldiers at a barracks near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1991.
But Scuds can be armed with more lethal warheads of chemical or biological weapons, which do not require the same accuracy to perform their mission.
--------
Charges Issued in Smuggling of Parts to Iran
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/politics/11SMUG.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - A crackdown on smuggling military parts to Iran led to federal indictments today against three executives and three companies charged with violating export laws.
Federal prosecutors said the companies had tried to sell engines, gear assemblies, spare parts and munitions for fighter planes and military helicopters without required State Department approvals. The sales, the prosecutors said, went through a sham Austrian corporation set up by undercover Customs Service agents.
"It's the seller's obligation to make sure export laws are followed, and these companies acted as if they just didn't care," Steven M. Biskupic, the United States attorney for Milwaukee, said in an interview. "In the past, these types of violations may have been viewed as more regulatory than anything. In the post-Sept. 11 period, the dangers and the reasons for these restrictions are much more readily apparent."
Charged with violating export laws were Jami S. Choudhury, 38, of Wauwatosa, Wis.; William W. Manning, 55, of Clinton, Utah, and the company where he is a vice president, Camnetics Manufacturing of Oregon, Wis.; Andrew A. Adams, 63, of Monroe, N.C., and the company that he heads, Equipment and Supply International; and Rick's Manufacturing and Supply of Harrah, Okla.
None of the defendants was taken into custody because prosecutors said they were not considered to pose a threat or a flight risk.
Mr. Adams said he did not know of the indictment until a reporter called him this evening. "I don't know anything about this," he said, declining to answer further questions.
At issue, prosecutors contend, are broad violations of export laws punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $1 million in fines. They did not say the executives or companies knew that the military parts they were selling were headed for Iran or anywhere else.
Mr. Choudhury has been linked to the Iranian black market. He was sentenced to six months of home confinement in 2000 for lying to a federal agent about sales of airplane parts to Iran. Mr. Choudhury said at his sentencing that he was "humiliated enough to last a lifetime."
Federal officials said today that they believed that he resumed the illegal export business not long after his release from confinement.
The indictment against Mr. Choudhury charges that he and executives at Rick's Manufacturing arranged to have five shipments of rebuilt starter engines, designed for use in C-130 transports, shipped to Taiwan. Officials charged that Mr. Choudhury falsified invoices to understate the $20,000 value of the engines and to make it appear that the sales did not require an export license.
Prosecutors said the defendants also arranged to sell parts and supplies for F-4 and F-15 fighters and Sikorsky military helicopters.
The case grew out of recent cases in Milwaukee and elsewhere in which businesses sold military and aircraft parts, computer supplies and gas testers to Iran in violation of bans.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton imposed trade sanctions against Iran for what he called its sponsorship of terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. President Bush has declared Iran one of the three countries of an "axis of evil."
Concerned about growing black-market sales, authorities in Milwaukee set up an undercover operation, posing as buyers in Vienna for black-market supplies.
"We've had an ongoing problem with people trying to purchase weapons for Iran, missile components, military jet components and more," a spokesman for the Customs Service, Dean Boyd, said.
--------
Man Charged in Military Part Export
December 11, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Illegal-Exports.html
MILWAUKEE (AP) -- A man convicted in 1999 for exporting military parts to Iran has been indicted along with two businessmen and three companies for allegedly selling equipment on the black market.
Federal prosecutors accused Jami Choudhury of doing nothing to find out whether the parts were illegally destined for a country that is considered a threat to the United States.
Choudhury, 38, a naturalized citizen living in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa, faces five counts of selling airplane engine starters that are among items banned for export without a State Department license, prosecutors and customs officials said.
Tuesday's indictments allege Choudhury purchased 10 of the $10,000 starters from Rick's Manufacturing and Supply of Harrah, Okla., and forwarded them to California to be sent to Taiwan.
Such exports are legal only with a license, which requires proof that the parts will end up in an approved country, U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic said.
Also indicted were the Oklahoma company; William W. Manning Jr., of Camnetics Manufacturing Corporation in Clinton, Utah, and the company; and Andrew Adams, of Equipment and Supply International Inc. in Monroe, N.C., and his company. ``Today's indictments allege not that these defendants knew the parts were destined for Iran or some other prohibited country or source,'' Biskupic said. ``Rather, the charges allege that the defendants took no action to ascertain the end user of these items. Simply put, the indictments allege these companies acted as if they did not care.''
Earlier this year, President Bush said Iran was part of an ``axis of evil'' with Iraq and North Korea. Iran and the United States have not had diplomatic ties since 1979.
Choudhury also was indicted Tuesday on charges of having false documents related to the sales. He faces up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $1 million if convicted.
He earlier was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $15,000 on the 1999 conviction.
Brian Falvey, resident agent in charge of the Milwaukee U.S. Customs Service, said Choudhury was indicted after the agency set up a fake Austrian business actually run from Milwaukee. The business placed orders for military parts whose sale in the United States is prohibited without a license and waited to see if anyone would offer to send the parts, Falvey said. That investigation yielded clues that Choudhury might have been back in business, Biskupic said.
-------- business
Court Aids Defense Firms
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Washington Post; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37703-2002Dec10?language=printer
The Pentagon's $2.3 billion dispute with General Dynamics and Boeing over the demise of the A-12 Navy fighter-jet program is ongoing and the agency can't begin collection efforts, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled. After settlement talks collapsed, the Pentagon threatened to begin withholding the money from the companies' current contracts. But the court ruled that collecting the money "would not be in the national interest, particularly at this time," according to a statement from Falls Church-based General Dynamics.
----
TRW Approves Sale to Northrop Grumman
By M.R. KROPKO
AP Business Writer
Dec 11, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TRW_NORTHROP_GRUMMAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
CLEVELAND (AP) -- Shareholders approved the $7.8 billion sale of TRW Inc. to defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp. on Wednesday, clearing the way for completion of a deal that will make Northrop the world's second largest defense contractor.
TRW shareholders approved the deal at a morning meeting in Cleveland. A few hours later, Northrop shareholders meeting in Santa Monica, Calif., approved the transaction.
The sale is expected to close within a day or two.
The votes came a day after Northrop announced an agreement with the Justice Department that the merger will not impede fair and open competition related to electronics in spacecraft.
"This is a real win for TRW's shareholders, our thousands of employees worldwide and for our valued customers," said TRW Chairman Philip A. Odeen.
"Together with TRW, Northrop Grumman will be a highly competitive organization and well-positioned in each of the fastest growing sectors of the defense industry," he said.
To win Department of Justice approval for the deal, Northrop signed a consent agreement requiring the company to sell satellite sensors to competitors at a fair price.
Competitors, chiefly the No. 1 defense contractor Lockheed Martin, were concerned that the combination of Northrop, which ranked fourth in defense revenue in 2001, and TRW would result in Northrop having an unfair advantage. Northrop now makes sensors and other equipment that will go on satellites produced by TRW.
The consent decree includes the possibility of a $10 million fine if Northrop is found to be in contempt, the company said.
"We feel comfortable with this decree because it is the way we operate anyway," said Northrop chairman and chief executive Kent Kresa.
On July 1, Northrop announced its sweetened offer to buy TRW for about $7.8 billion in stock. It would also assume about $4 billion in TRW debt.
The European Union antitrust authority approved the transaction Oct. 16.
Northrop said it would pay $60 a share in stock for each TRW share, or 27 percent more than it had initially offered in February.
Northrop said Tuesday that the exact exchange ratio will be determined based on closing prices of its common stock for five consecutive trading days ending on the second trading day before the closing of the merger.
TRW said in a statement that the exchange rate would be 0.5357 Northrop shares for each TRW share.
TRW shares were up 50 cents at $52.31 a share in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange, while Northrop Grumman rose $1.01 to $97.63 a share.
On the Net:
TRW Inc.: http://www.trw.com
Northrop Grumman: www.northgrum.com
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Northrop Says U.S. Agrees to Deal for Acquisition of TRW
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/business/11ARMS.html
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 10 - The military contractor Northrop Grumman said today that it had reached an agreement with the Justice Department that would allow it to buy the rival TRW for $11.8 billion.
Northrop said the terms of a consent decree with the government assured that the merger would not hurt competition for satellite components. The company, which makes sensors and electronics for satellites, pledged to continue selling parts to rivals like Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Buying TRW would make Northrop the primary supplier of parts for military satellites and would give it $2 billion more in military contracts. It also caps an expansion plan that the chief executive, Kent Kresa, undertook after the government stopped Northrop's sale to Lockheed in 1998. The $9 billion of acquisitions since then, including Newport News Shipbuilding in January and Litton Industries in May 2001, more than doubled Northrop's size.
Northrop expects to close the transaction after the companies' shareholders vote on Wednesday. The vote concludes an effort begun in February when Northrop made an unsolicited bid three days after the chief executive of TRW, David M. Cote, quit. TRW makes satellite equipment and electronics for missiles.
Shares of Northrop rose $1.27, to $96.62. TRW rose 91 cents, to $51.81.
The consent decree does not require Northrop to divest itself of businesses, the company said. Northrop did not give examples of what the agreement obligates it to do.
"The agreement will be a matter of public record when it is filed" by the Justice Department, a Northrop spokesman, Randy Belote, said. The Justice Department had no comment on Northrop's statement, a spokesman said.
Northrop will close TRW's headquarters in Cleveland. The company has also said it plans to keep almost all of TRW's operating personnel, enlarging its payroll to 123,000.
-------- china
China Suggests Missile Buildup Linked to Arms Sales to Taiwan
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 10, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32700-2002Dec9?language=printer
BEIJING, Dec. 9 -- President Jiang Zemin suggested during his meeting with President Bush in October that China could link its deployment of short-range missiles facing Taiwan to U.S. arms sales to the Taiwanese military, a senior Chinese official said.
The official recently described the offer as "sincere and well thought through." The proposal marked the first time China has offered to link the missiles with arms sales and, the official said, "created new space for cooperation" between Washington and Beijing.
The offer seemed to call the U.S. government's bluff on the arms sales issue; for years U.S. officials have used China's substantial and growing missile deployment in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces as the main reason for U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. As recently as March, a senior U.S. administration official said a decrease in China's missile deployments would be a precondition for any limit on U.S. arms sales to the island, which lies 100 miles from China's southeastern coast.
But Bush administration officials, responding to a reporter's inquiries in Washington, seemed to have little interest in the Chinese proposal, using words that suggested it was a non-starter as far as they were concerned.
"We will fulfill our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act," an administration official said. "We have made our position clear, that any issue between Taiwan and China should be resolved without resorting to force or coercion and instead through political dialogue."
The official added that the Chinese idea was "never formally proposed," either during Bush's meeting with Jiang at the president's ranch in Crawford, Tex., or in other meetings. "I don't think anyone would consider it an offer," he said.
Officials suspect that China deploys about 400 missiles within range of Taiwan's cities, airports and other installations, a buildup that is increasing by about 50 missiles a year. The missiles represent the one area in which China has achieved military dominance in the Taiwan Strait. While growing stronger, the Chinese air force and navy are still no match for Taiwan's forces.
China claims Taiwan is part of its territory and has vowed to attack the island of 23 million people if it declares formal independence. Taiwan is a democracy, and successive governments have said that unification with China could be considered only if China undertakes significant political reforms.
U.S. officials have acknowledged that Jiang raised the missile issue with Bush in October, but they have not given details of what was discussed. The Chinese official said the subject was raised again in informal talks between Chinese leaders and a delegation led by former defense secretary William J. Perry last month in Beijing.
"I believe the Chinese leadership would not make an offer like this without having thought it through," the Chinese official said. "It was a very constructive idea. It creates a new space for discussion."
Previously China had said that any issue involving its missile deployments was an internal matter and could not be discussed. China demanded that the United States cut its arms sales to Taiwan unilaterally and offered no sweeteners.
Missile deployments and arms sales to Taiwan "are linked," said the official. "They are interactive."
U.S. relations with Taiwan were codified by the Taiwan Relations Act, which vaguely commits the United States to protect Taiwan's interests. Since it was passed in 1979, successive administrations have interpreted it to mean that the United States would sell Taiwan billions of dollars worth of military hardware.
However, the United States also agreed to limit arms sales to Taiwan in a joint communique signed in 1982, during the first Reagan administration, as long as China pursued unification with Taiwan peacefully. Successive administrations have pointed to China's missile deployments, and its general military buildup, as indications that China is not committed to peaceful unification.
The missile offer is part of a series of Chinese moves designed to "further stabilize" U.S.-China relations, the official said. China has toned down its criticism of Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, and has significantly modified its policy toward the island. It also has toned down criticism of the United States. Its biennial white paper on national security issued today lacked most of the anti-American vitriol that filled the paper in 2000.
China has also dropped its precondition that Taiwan must first accept the "one China" principle before direct shipping and airline links can be inaugurated.
The Chinese official expressed some frustration at U.S. policymakers who, he said, believe China's recent "good behavior" is a result of the Bush administration's tougher policy toward China and clearer support of Taiwan. Under Bush, the long-standing policy of "strategic ambiguity" about whether the United States would respond to an unprovoked attack on Taiwan has been replaced with a much clearer commitment to defend the island.
"China has been making serious efforts to improve its ties with the United States," he said. "Anti-terrorism is important to the United States, and China's support is important to the United States on this front. But you can't expect to request us to support you on counterterrorism and then overlook or even hurt our national security on this other issue."
Staff writer Glenn Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- iraq
Iraq claims U.S. tampered with report
December 11, 2002
Chicago Sun-Times
BY CHARLES J. HANLEY
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-iraq11.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq--The Iraqi government accused Washington on Tuesday of taking control of a UN master copy of Baghdad's arms declaration in order to tamper with it and create a pretext for war.
The White House dismissed Iraq's accusation that it altered the documents. Specialists at the CIA and other U.S. agencies began poring over the 12,000-page declaration, in which Baghdad is supposed to ''tell all'' about its chemical, biological and nuclear programs. American officials said much of the material appeared to be recycled versions of earlier documents.
Bush administration officials said they hoped to share its preliminary findings with the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, by Friday, but cautioned that a full evaluation of the material--some of it in Arabic--could take weeks.
Refusal to comply won't be tolerated, U.S. warns
BY SCOTT LINDLAW
WASHINGTON--War plans in hand, Bush administration officials on Sunday promised ''zero tolerance'' if Saddam Hussein refuses to comply with international calls to disarm.
A new United Nations Security Council resolution demands that Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and open up to inspectors or face ''serious consequences,'' and top White House aides said they are watching closely to ensure Saddam cooperates.
''We do not need to waste the world's time with another game of cat and mouse,'' national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said.
Under the resolution, the Security Council would assess any violations and decide how to respond.
But several administration officials made plain that the United States reserved the right to invade Iraq with or without UN approval.
''We have the authority by the president's desire to protect and defend the United States of America,'' White House chief of staff Andrews Card said. ''The UN can meet and discuss, but we don't need their permission.''
Said Secretary of State Colin Powell: If we find that debate is going nowhere, if the UN chooses not to act, we have not given up our authority to act with like-minded nations who might wish to join us in such an action.''
The administration received some support Sunday when Arab foreign ministers urged Saddam to accept the terms of the resolution.
Rice, meantime, dismissed as ''ludicrous'' the call by the Iraqi president for his parliament to hold an emergency session on the resolution.
''Saddam Hussein is an absolute dictator and tyrant, and the idea that somehow he expects the Iraqi parliament to debate this--they've never debated anything else,'' Rice said. ''I'm surprised he's even bothering to go through this ploy.''
Administration officials faced questions on reports published Sunday on President Bush's approval of a battle plan should Iraq fail to comply with the resolution. The leaks appeared to be an effort to send Saddam a message about how serious the United States is.
AP
Meanwhile, the Bush administration delivered full copies of the material to UN Security Council's other four permanent members--Britain, France, Russia and China--and said an edited version would be provided to the council's 10 other members as soon as possible.
UN inspectors have said Iraq's earlier declarations were incomplete.
Inspectors stepped up their search Tuesday, fanning across Iraq on surprise missions to 13 sites--the largest number of inspections since the UN operation resumed two weeks ago. One team moved in on a uranium mining site 250 miles west of Baghdad.
President Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, spoke of war and sacrifice in a meeting with top lieutenants, men U.S. strategists hope will abandon the Iraqi strongman in the event of war. ''Your heads will remain high with honor, God willing, and your enemy will be defeated,'' he was shown on state television telling defense officials, including Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmed.
U.S.-Iraqi tensions flared again in the southern no-fly zone Tuesday, when the U.S. command said its warplanes bombed an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile site 165 miles southeast of Baghdad. Just across Iraq's southeastern border in Kuwait, U.S. Army units were conducting desert exercises.
Iraq insists it no longer has weapons of mass destruction or programs to make them. The Bush administration says it's sure Baghdad does and has threatened war if, in the U.S. view, Saddam's government doesn't comply with UN disarmament demands.
Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced Saddam's claims, saying, ''He's a liar.''
''We'll see now whether he decides that the cost of lying is too great. The cost of lying now might result in his regime being destroyed by the armed forces of the international community,'' he said during an interview Thursday with the French television station France 2. The State Department released the transcript Tuesday.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the U.S. analysis of Iraq's declaration would be ''deliberative'' and ''careful'' in order to ''understand what it is that Iraq is purporting to declare, as well as what they have failed to declare.''
The UN monitoring operation received reinforcements Tuesday when 28 new inspectors flew in, expanding the staff to 70. Blix says he expects to have 100 in place by the end of the year.
The inspectors visited a variety of sites Tuesday, including chemical and explosives facilities, and veterinary medicine institutes, whose vaccine-making processes were applied in the past to biological weapons-making.
The uranium mining operations at al-Qaim, also known as Akashat, in the desert near the Syrian border, were scrutinized by UN nuclear inspectors in the 1990s. Its phosphate deposits were exploited in the 1980s for their uranium content as well as for fertilizer, producing some 100 tons of uranium over six years. AP
----
U.S. FIRMS EYE POST-SADDAM IRAQ
Ha'aretz:
Wed, 11 Dec 2002
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=239766&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
WASHINGTON [MENL] - U.S. energy firms are exploring the prospect of operations in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Industry oil sources said the Bush administration has been examining the role of U.S. energy companies in Iraq after the toppling of President Saddam Hussein. They said British and U.S. firms could play a major role in refurbishing and expanding Iraq's oil and natural gas production.
A report by the German-based Deutsche Bank said contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq's energy infrastructure could amount to $1.5 billion. Iraq is believed to have the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.
So far, the sources said, no formal talks have begun. Earlier this week, ConocoPhillips denied holding discussions on Iraq with the administration. But the firm said it is amenable to such talks.
NOTE: The above is not the full item.
This service contains only a small portion of the information produced daily by Middle East Newsline. For a subscription to the full service, please contact Middle East Newsline at: editor@menewsline.com for further details.
----
New Iraq Web site
Embassy Row,
by James Morrison
Washington Times
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-84230332.htm
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has opened a Web site dedicated to news and analysis on Iraq.
"The coming days and weeks will be pivotal in this critical international situation," the endowment said yesterday. "What weapons does Iraq possess? Will the new round of inspections succeed? Will the U.S. invade? If the Bush administration does topple Saddam Hussein, what next? What are the chances for a wave of democratic reform in the Middle East?"
The think tank's site, titled "Crisis in Iraq," at www.ceip.org/iraq, will include daily news updates, analyses from Carnegie specialists, and maps, charts and photos of Iraq's arsenals.
----
Iraqi regime hiding scientists
By David Wastell
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-78667887.htm
LONDON - Many of the Iraqi scientists U.N. arms inspectors want to interview have been spirited abroad or switched to innocuous posts and their places taken by unknown technicians, according to Iraqi exiles and Western officials.
As the weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix prepare to summon the first of several hundred potential interview subjects, the Baghdad authorities have put some beyond reach and moved others to jobs with no direct involvement in Iraq's nuclear-, chemical- or biological-weapons programs.
"Most of those working on the nuclear program in the 1980s and early 1990s have been sent away to university or industrial positions. Some have been sent outside Iraq, including those working on chemical- and biological-warfare agents," said Hussein Shahristani, a former chief researcher with Iraq's atomic energy organization who spent 11 years in jail before fleeing abroad.
Among scientists the inspectors want to question are Rihab Taha, a biological-weapons expert known as "Dr. Germ," who is now described as a Baghdad housewife, and Hazem Ali, a virologist who was said to be no more than a university tutor in 1998.
The moves have made the task of the inspectors more difficult. They need information on the steps taken by Saddam Hussein to conceal stockpiles of chemical and biological agents - many of which are thought to have been hidden in private houses - and on the extent of Iraq's developments over the past four years.
Iraqi personnel are seen as the best source of such information, and the United Nations has ruled that its inspectors must have the right to "unrestricted," "unimpeded" access to anyone they want to interview.
They are relying, however, on lists of several hundred scientists and technicians, drawn up during the 1990s, as the starting point for their inquiries. Many of these people are now thought to have very limited knowledge of developments since the previous team of weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998.
"Once you have worked out how to make the ingredients of chemical and biological weapons, you don't need many scientists to make them," said one arms expert.
Mr. Shahristani predicted that the government would feign ignorance of some of the people the inspectors ask to see. "They've been sent to hide on farms somewhere, and Iraq will say it simply has no idea where they are."
Even if the inspectors find some of the right people to interview, Baghdad has taken steps to restrict information: scientists, technicians and administrators have been told that their families' safety will be jeopardized if they reveal sensitive information, some sources said.
Some key workers have been sent abroad to sympathetic countries, including Libya, Sudan and Syria, and told to remain there while inspections continue. Their families are being kept in Iraq to ensure that they do not defect.
"These are the people with the know-how, so the best way to hide the know-how is to hide the people," one Western official said.
The United States is pressing the U.N. inspectors to take key figures in the arms program out of Iraq for interviews - an option included in the U.N. resolution - and is offering them a "witness-protection program."
•Inigo Gilmore contributed to this article from Jerusalem.
----
Iran wants say in a post-Saddam Iraq
By Anwar Iqbal
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-3473626.htm
As talks for forming a post-Saddam Hussein government in Iraq shape up, Iran fears being left out of a major political development in the region that will have an impact on Tehran as well.
Iran fought a 10-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. Iraq also has a large Shi'ite population, which looks to Iran for protection whenever it faces persecution at home. Iran is the world's only Shi'ite state and has been actively supporting Shi'ite minorities in nearby countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 brought U.S. forces to the region, causing a direct threat to the radical Islamic government in Iran, which overthrew its U.S.-installed shah and opposed U.S. influence in the Middle East.
In 1997, however, Iranian reformist Mohammed Khatami was elected president with an overwhelming majority. He was re-elected with a larger majority four years later.
Mr. Khatami's government wants to roll back the extremist policies of the clerical governments that have ruled the country since the revolution of 1979. He favors improving relations with the West, particularly the United States, and fears that if Iran continues to opt out of the U.S.-led talks on Iraq, it will be further isolated in the region.
In order to break Iran's isolation, the Iranian government has allowed several Iraqi opposition leaders to visit the country for consultations with Iran-based Iraqi Shi'ite groups.
On Monday, two such leaders - Ahmad Chalabi and Masoud Barzani - met Ayatollah Mohammed Baqar al-Hakim, who heads the main Shi'ite opposition group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
SCIRI is an umbrella organization for a number of Shi'ite Islamic groups, including some that have in the past coordinated activities with Iran's intelligence services. The group maintains an office in Tehran that is paid for by the Iranian government.
Mr. Chalabi leads the Iraqi National Congress, while Mr. Barzani heads the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
The KDP is one of two Kurdish parties that control Kurdish northern Iraq, under the protection of the U.S.- and British-enforced no-fly zone.
"In the meeting, the two sides reviewed the possible scenario in Iraq after the fall of Saddam and discussed ways and means to establish and promote ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran," KDP representative Ebrahim Pirut told Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency.
Mr. Barzani arrived in Tehran on Saturday "to discuss Iraq's future with Iranian officials, as well as with Iraqi opposition leaders," IRNA said.
On Sunday, the Kurdish leader met the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who urged the Iraqi opposition to maintain unity. Mr. Karroubi said that "Iraq's independence and territorial integrity" must be protected - code for Iran's long-standing opposition to the creation of a separate Kurdish state in Iraq.
To forestall creation of a Kurdish state, the Iranians have also been discouraging Iraqi Shi'ites from demanding a separate state for themselves.
Jalal Talabani - the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the other main Iraqi Kurdish party - may also visit Iran in the near future, IRNA said.
The negotiations among various Iraqi groups precede a major opposition gathering in London to hammer out a power-sharing setup to replace Saddam. More than 300 delegates from six Iraqi opposition parties are to attend this meeting, which begins Friday.
IRNA also mentioned media reports that after Saddam's fall, Washington may appoint one of its own generals to oversee the formation of a new government in Iraq.
"Iraqi rebel groups, however, have expressed their opposition to any U.S. interference in the country's future," the report said.
Iran's decision to allow Kurdish rebel leaders to confer with Iraqi Shi'ite leaders indicates a major change in Tehran's policy toward the Kurds.
Like Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria have significant Kurdish minorities and fear that the creation of a Kurdish state in Iraq could be destabilizing. That is why Iran has always opposed the idea of a separate Kurdish homeland, and in the past has tried to prevent Kurdish leaders from getting together.
But apparently, fear of being left out of a new setup in Baghdad proved stronger than the fear of troubles in the country's Kurdish enclave.
Consulting Kurdish rebels is also seen as another moderating influence of the Khatami government on Iran's policies.
Despite the electoral defeat of the parties that support their rule, Iran's clerical establishment has retained its control over the armed forces and other powerful state apparatus, impeding Mr. Khatami's efforts to reform Iran.
On Nov. 6, the country's religious courts sentenced a reformist college professor, Hashem Aghajari, to death for demanding religious reforms.
The clerics also oppose Mr. Khatami's moves to improve relations with the West, but observers say that by allowing Kurdish rebels to visit Tehran, Mr. Khatami has created a difficult situation for the hard-liners: If Iranian hard-liners oppose the consultations with the Iraqi Kurds, they might later be blamed for opting out of talks on a development with far-reaching consequences for Iran.
However, the hard-liners are also aware that several Iraqi opposition groups, particularly the Kurds, enjoy strong U.S. support. Most of them attended an all-party meeting held in Washington in August and agreed to work with the United States to topple Saddam.
Some of Iran's hard-line clerics fear that engaging Iraqi opposition groups would open a channel for talks with the United States, and the reformists may avail themselves of such an opportunity.
At the same time, Iranian leaders are convinced that the United States has decided to bring in a new government in Iraq, even if Saddam complies with the U.N. resolutions. And they want to make sure that the Iraqi government is at least not hostile to Iran.
----
THE KURDS
Still Suffering From '88 Gas Attack, a Village Distrusts Iraq's Arms Report
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/middleeast/11KURD.html
HALABJA, Iraq, Dec. 10 - Hamida Hassan shivered on a hospital mattress, knees drawn up near her ribs. She suppressed another cough, stretched herself to full length and gestured to doctors to undo her clothes.
"I am just a woman," she said. "No one will believe my words. But if you see my body you will know whether Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons or not."
Slowly doctors pulled away her robe. Ruined skin appeared: a white crosshatch of grafts over her collarbone and shoulders, giving way to disfigured breasts and scars across her navel and waist. Doctors say her lungs are also scarred.
Ms. Hassan, now a chronic hospital patient at age 32, was struck with what was believed to be mustard gas when the Iraqi Air Force attacked this village in 1988.
She has not seen the Iraqi government's declaration to the United Nations about its weapons of mass destruction, but she is certain of what it contains. "Saddam Hussein is lying," she said in her cold hospital room. "He is telling the world lies."
As the United Nations reviews the 12,000-page Iraqi disclosure of its prohibited weapons and missile programs, the declaration in which Baghdad claims to have no such weapons anymore, the people of Halabja have already reached a conclusion. They talk about it as if it were a book of nonsense.
Their verdict comes from experience. Halabja has the ignoble fame of being synonymous with chemical attack. Its name also recalls a bald official lie.
On March 16, 1988, waves of Iraqi warplanes dropped gas canisters in this Kurdish village of roughly 50,000 people, bathing neighborhoods in what is believed to have been a misty cocktail of nerve and blister agents - sarin, tabun, mustard, VX - and perhaps the biological agent aflatoxin as well. Before nightfall the dead littered basements and the streets, and a grotesque human exodus was stumbling away.
The survivors remember the response of President Hussein's spokesmen when news of the attack reached the outside world. They blamed Iran.
Mr. Hussein's government finally admitted the truth last week, but 14 years later, in a land isolated by sanctions and geography, there has still been no precise survey of the aftermath. Estimates of the dead range from 3,200 to 7,000. An additional 15,000 to 20,000 people were injured, Kurdish doctors say.
Survivors suffer from a range of afflictions that a study by Kurdish doctors says occur in higher rates in Halabja than in neighboring cities: tremors, atrophy, respiratory ailments, reproductive failure, skin diseases, mental illness and blindness. They are alike in a simple way.
"One thing all of us know, and that is never believe Saddam Hussein," said Hussein Star, 45, whose face and crown were spotted with pink burns after mustard agent settled on his head. When Mr. Star removes his turban to expose where his hair was seared away, he looks as if he has been scalped.
Halabja is in Iraq's northern autonomous zone and is controlled by Kurds, not by Mr. Hussein. In 1988 it had the misfortune of being along the front line separating Iran and Iraq, who were in the eighth and final year of a war. Kurds believe that they were attacked because they were suspected of assisting Iran.
But no one outside Iraq's central government is certain of the rationale even now. Dr. Fouad Baban, an Iraqi Kurd who has studied the victims, identified 250 villages and 31 suspected bases of Kurdish guerrillas that Iraq gassed in 1987 and 1988. Some were far from Iran.
Still, none had a toll as high as Halabja's, where signs of the suffering remain in every direction: here a darkened eye, there a scorched limb, in the other room hacking coughs from a man with involuntary shakes. Bitterness is common currency.
"We live in a bad psychological state," said Abdulrahman Ali Muhammad, 62, whose hands and forearms are burned and whose limbs tremble. "We are angry. We are filled with hate. We have too many wants."
Aras Abid Akram, who lost 22 family members, offered a widespread feeling. "We, the people of Halabja, wish death upon Saddam Hussein," he said.
Each household has a tale of loss. Aqlima Muhammad embraced her 5-month-old son, Sarkher, as the attack began. She woke up 15 days later in Tehran, her left eye blinded, her skin aflame.
Sarkher was gone. He has never been found. The only trace of her husband is a photograph taken by the Red Crescent Society in an Iranian morgue. "Of course Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons," she said. "If he didn't want to have chemical weapons, what happened to me?"
These are connoisseurs of Iraqi lies. They remember not only how Mr. Hussein's government blamed Iran for gassing Halabja, but also how Iraqi generals offered amnesty to villagers who came home after other attacks and then arrested the first waves of returnees, who have never been seen again.
They listened with knowing disgust when the Kurdish news media reported on Monday that Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, one of Mr. Hussein's longest serving confidants, admitted for the first time that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iran, and in Halabja.
The judgment here was that it was an insincere gesture to try to convince the United Nations that Iraq had changed its ways. The villagers did not need Mr. Aziz to tell them what happened. "We saw by our own eyes," said Muhammad Amin Khadir, 51. "We were in our basement, underground, and when we looked outside we saw the colored clouds, yellow and bluish-gray."
As Mr. Khadir spoke, one of his adult sons, Abdullah, sat cross-legged beside him, wearing a Tweety Bird sweatshirt, picking his toes.
Mr. Khadir gently kneaded his son's shoulder. "He cannot speak even a word," he said. "Now he is a mute, and mentally ill. He was very good as a boy, very smart. But after the chemical bombs he became this way. Today he is 25, and he is less than a child."
Abdullah didn't seem to hear a thing. "Look at my son," Mr. Khadir said. "Nobody should believe Saddam Hussein. Nobody, not in all the world."
-------- israel / palestine
Israel's Labor party cuts its doves
Associated Press
12/11/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-12-11-israel-labor_x.htm
JERUSALEM (AP) - Leading Labor dove Yael Dayan quit the party on Wednesday after a primary vote assigned her and other peace activists virtually unelectable places on the list of candidates for next month's general elections.
Labor's new list was seen as designed to win favor with voters from the middle ground, who in surveys repeatedly gave high approval ratings to the previous coalition of Labor with the hawkish Likud party of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The Haaretz newspaper quoted supporters of former Labor leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer as saying that the marginalization of Dayan and Yossi Beilin, an architect of the interim peace accords with the Palestinians of the mid-1990s, would improve chances of renewing the alliance after next month's general election.
Haaretz analyst Yossi Verter referred to the purged Labor ranks as "a list even Sharon could lead."
Dayan, daughter of the late Israeli icon Moshe Dayan, agreed: "It (Labor) looks more and more like some poor version of what the Likud had been," she told The Associated Press. She ascribed her poor showing in the primary to her support of concessions to the Palestinians, and said she quit Labor.
Beilin declined comment.
Another dove who failed to make the list is Labor legislator Tzali Reshef, co-founder of Peace Now, a group that monitors settlement expansion and advocated a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
One of the party's more hawkish newcomers, Danny Yatom, made the top 10 in polling, guaranteeing him a seat in parliament. Yatom resigned as head of the Mossad spy agency in 1997 under a cloud after the botched assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Jordan.
Labor leader Amram Mitzna says it is Likud, not his own party which is hardening its positions. "Here in the Labor party it's not like the Likud....the Likud has turned right," he told supporters on Tuesday.
Labor won 26 seats in the 1999 election, but polls indicate it may win fewer than 20 this time. Likud, on the other hand, had 19 seats in the outgoing parliament, but polls predict it could take about 40 places in the Jan. 28 balloting.
For the last three elections, Israelis cast two ballots - one for prime minister and the other for parliament. With the January election, the system reverts to the former one-ballot voting, in which citizens pick a party, and the 120 seats in the parliament are divided proportionally according to the vote counts.
The party leader who can form a majority coalition in the parliament becomes prime minister.
Sharon and Mitzna have staked out vastly different positions about how to deal with the Palestinians, but critics on both sides say the parliamentary lists run counter to the leaders' views.
Sharon, whose 21 months in power have been marked by ever-escalating military operations against the Palestinians in an attempt to stop attacks, says he would eventually accept a Palestinian state in about 40% of the West Bank and two-thirds of the Gaza Strip if all violence stops and calm is maintained through a long interim period.
But critics point to many at the top of the Likud Knesset list who oppose a Palestinian state in any form. Top vote-getter Tzachi Hanegbi told Israel TV on Tuesday that the Likud leadership has already rejected a Palestinian state once, and if Sharon brought such a proposal again, it would be defeated again.
Mitzna pledges a unilateral Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip and negotiations with the Palestinians over a border with the West Bank. However, if the negotiations fail, Mitzna proposes drawing Israel's border unilaterally and separating Israel from the Palestinians.
However, Labor's Knesset list includes a number who back Ben-Eliezer, who as defense minister directed the military offensives against the Palestinians and is less enthusiastic about unilateral pullbacks. Mitzna unseated Ben-Eliezer in an election for party leader last month.
-------- korea
U.S. considers changes to treaty
By Jong-heon Lee
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-46795939.htm
SEOUL - A top U.S. official said yesterday that Washington is willing to discuss modifying a legal agreement on U.S. forces that has sparked anti-American protests over the deaths of two local girls in a military accident.
"Meetings this week between officials of both our governments will afford an important opportunity to review concrete ideas to improve the operation of the U.S.-Korea Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA)," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in a statement after a meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.
Mr. Armitage's visit comes as anti-U.S. protests are sweeping South Korea.
The daily demonstrations threaten to undermine a broad consensus in South Korea to host American troops, which have been based here since the 1950-53 Korean War.
The United States now has 37,000 troops in South Korea. But the military presence has been a source of friction with communities near U.S. bases.
Mr. Kim, whose single five-year term ends in February, said during his meeting with Mr. Armitage that South Koreans "feel great shock and sadness at the tragic deaths of the middle school girls."
The girls were crushed by an American armored vehicle in June as they walked on a narrow road north of Seoul.
Mr. Kim also expressed regrets about the way the United States has handled the accident, referring to last month's court-martial acquittal of the two American soldiers in the vehicle that killed the girls.
He called for Washington's "visible" steps to revise the treaty governing the legal status of U.S. troops in South Korea as part of efforts to soothe public anger.
Under the SOFA accord, South Korea cedes judicial jurisdiction of U.S. troops who commit crimes while on duty.
Mr. Armitage conveyed Washington's "profound apology" over the accident and pledged his country's support for revision of the pact, according to a spokeswoman for the South Korean president.
"We have to do our absolute best to be seen as the best possible partners for our friends in Korea," Mr. Armitage was quoted as saying.
Anti-U.S. protests reached a critical stage in recent days. Tens of thousands of South Koreans have taken to the streets daily demanding changes in the SOFA accord.
The protests have become an issue in presidential elections a week from tomorrow and forced candidates from all parties to distance themselves from the United States.
Protesters continued a candlelit vigil yesterday for an 11th consecutive day near the U.S. Embassy in downtown Seoul.
Mr. Armitage and Mr. Kim also discussed the renewed tension over North Korea's nuclear weapons development program and a potential U.S. attack against Iraq.
Mr. Kim stressed more diplomatic efforts to press North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.
Mr. Armitage was greeted when he arrived by fierce protests by anti-U.S. activists. A group of students and civic activists gathered outside the U.S. Embassy and demanded a direct apology for the girls' deaths from President Bush.
-------- mideast
Spain and U.S. Seize N. Korean Missiles
Scuds Were on Ship Bound for Yemen
By Thomas E. Ricks and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36489-2002Dec10?language=printer
A ship operated by a North Korean crew carrying 12 disassembled Scud missiles bound for Yemen has been boarded and seized by Spanish and U.S. military forces in the Arabian Sea, Pentagon and administration officials said yesterday.
U.S. intelligence satellites and Navy ships had been tracking the ship, the So San, since it left North Korea in the middle of last month, the officials said. It was boarded early Monday about 600 miles southeast of Yemen -- far out to sea and so unquestionably in international waters, a U.S. official said.
The decision to take over the ship was approved "at the highest levels of the administration," the official said.
Evidence of a North Korean effort to ship ballistic missiles to the Middle East during a tense standoff between Iraq and the United States over weapons and missiles can only deepen the strain on the already tense relationship between Washington and Pyonyang. It has been barely two months since the North Korean government admitted -- under sharp U.S. questioning -- that it maintains a secret nuclear weapons program in defiance of international agreements.
The incident may also chill U.S. relations with Yemen, which backed Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and then was the site of an October 2000 attack on a Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, that killed 17 American sailors.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Yemen has been an eager partner in the U.S.-led global war on terrorism. U.S. Special Forces trainers began operating there this year to improve Yemeni anti-terrorist capabilities. And just last month, when the United States conducted an airstrike against suspected terrorists in Yemen using an unmanned Predator drone aircraft firing Hellfire missiles, the Yemeni government quickly made it known that it had agreed to the action.
"The Yemeni government will be hugely embarrassed by this," an intelligence official said.
Yemen apparently bought the missiles to upgrade the handful of aging Scuds that it already possesses, the U.S. intelligence official said. The Yemeni government repeatedly has promised not to purchase missiles or parts in recent months, another official said, but "we keep catching them with their hand in the cookie jar."
The fact that news of the action leaked in Washington may also create friction between the United States and Spain, whose forces led the seizure. "This is an extremely hot potato," a Defense Department official said. "I think the Spanish would have preferred that it come out of Spain."
The incident began around dawn, local time, on Monday, when two Spanish navy ships, the Navarra and the Patino, signaled the freighter to stop. When the ship, sailing under a Cambodian flag but believed to be owned by North Korea, tried to evade capture, the Spanish ships fired warning shots across its bow. When it continued to try to escape, Spanish special forces troops conducted a hostile boarding by helicopter.
The crew of about 20 was then put under guard and the ship was searched. It quickly became apparent that there were problems with the legal status of the ship, officials said, noting that its original name had been painted over to conceal its North Korean origin, and its registry papers were not in order. Also, a quick search uncovered major discrepancies between the ship's manifest, which listed a cargo of cement, and the actual load aboard the ship. The Spanish soldiers opened large containers partially hidden by the cement and found missile parts. They then called in U.S. military experts in handling explosives.
The USS Nassau, a ship that is based in Norfolk and usually carries Marines, helicopters and Harrier jump-jets, is standing by the freighter, which remains about 600 miles off the Yemeni coast, an official said. Additional searches still are underway, he added.
The discovery of the Scud shipment comes at an extreme low point in U.S. relations with North Korea.
Challenged by the International Atomic Energy Agency in late November to halt its nuclear weapons program in a verifiable way, North Korea's foreign minister responded with a blast at the IAEA's motivations and U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula. The Bush administration halted fuel oil shipments to the impoverished country this month but has left the door open to further discussions. The latest news appears likely only to harden attitudes within the administration.
The Bush administration also imposed sanctions on North Korea in August after concluding that a state-controlled firm sold Scud missile components to Yemen during the Clinton administration.
A U.S. official termed Monday's operation "a stunning success," which would make it a sharp contrast to a similar situation in 1992, when the Navy lost track of a North Korean freighter, the Dae Hung Ho, which slipped into an Iranian port, supposedly with a load of Scuds destined for Syria.
Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
----
Scud missiles are ours, says Yemen
U.S. officials say they are "99 percent sure" the ship was bound for Yemen when it was stopped.
CNN's Barbara Starr reports
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/12/11/scud.ship/
MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Yemen says Scud missiles found on a North Korean ship were destined for its army, and has made a formal protest over the vessel's seizure to the United States.
A Spanish warship intercepted the ship, carrying 15 hidden Scud missiles, several hundred miles off the coast of Yemen.
Yemen's foreign ministry sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador protesting the interception of the ship So San by the Spanish Navy.
The letter said Yemen bought the missiles some time ago for its defense force.
A senior Bush administration official told CNN the United States had been "99 percent sure" the vessel was "headed for Yemen."
U.S. officials defended the seizure of the missiles as consistent with administration policy of interdicting arms sales if there is a potential the material could be used to make or deliver weapons of mass destruction.
One senior official said the U.S. government would talk to Yemen about its desire to have the missiles delivered, but said the Bush administration saw no strategic reason the Yemeni military would need the missiles.
CNN's John King says the seizure raises a number of prickly foreign policy issues -- including the prospect of a major dispute with a country that in the past has had troubled relations with the United States, but over the past several months has been credited with providing major assistance in the war on terrorism.
Another debate is likely to arise over the grounds for the seizure -- U.S. officials concede there is nothing in international law that allows for such a seizure of conventional weapons that are not banned by any treaties, but they also argue there is nothing that explicitly forbids such a seizure.
Special forces swoop
Special forces boarded the So San cargo ship on ropes attached to a helicopter hovering overhead after the freighter was fired on while trying to escape the Spanish frigate.
The ship, currently several hundred miles southeast of Yemen, was on Wednesday handed over to U.S. command and is being taken to the Diego Garcia naval base in the Indian Ocean.
Fifteen Scud missiles and 85 containers of unidentified chemical products were found under the vessel's stated cargo of cement, Spain said on Wednesday.
The So San was intercepted at dawn by the frigate Navarra on December 9 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom after Washington asked Spain to inspect the vessel.
Spanish Defence Minister Federico Trillo said: "When questioned (by radio) the captain said he was carrying cement but he did not allow the navy to board and tried to speed away, forcing the navy to fire warning shots.
"There was no choice but to board the So San using fast ropes from a helicopter. The boarding party had to be very careful to miss cables and masts on the boat as they boarded.
"The specials units team boarded the ship and there were no injuries."
The ship, which had sailed from North Korea, was registered in Cambodia but was travelling without a flag.
A U.S. technical inspection team also boarded the ship to carry out a more detailed search.
The ship, with 21 crew, left North Korea several days ago and was tracked by U.S. intelligence as it sailed towards the Arabian Sea, U.S. officials said. (View map)
The Spanish support ship Patino carrying 150 sailors also took part in the operation.
They were in the area as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, leading a fleet that includes French and German military vessels. U.S. and British warships also have taken part in monitoring the area.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said on Wednesday the discovery was unlikely to affect U.S. policy on North Korea.
"North Korea is one of the major proliferators and it appears that they are busy proliferating again," Armitage said.
Another senior Bush administration official said the situation was of "great concern" and officials were "monitoring the situation closely."
U.S. officials stressed the ship did not appear to be heading to Iraq, which used Scuds during the 1991 Gulf War. The ballistic missile has a range of about 550 miles.
The news comes amid increased tension between the United States and North Korea. In October, North Korea acknowledged it was developing nuclear weapons despite its 1994 agreement to freeze its nuclear weapons development programme.
North Korea, which has been supported by China in the past, has been branded by Washington as a member of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran.
Yemen was not, in the opinion of the United States, "looking for missiles for terrorism," a senior official said.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week called North Korea the "single biggest proliferator of ballistic missiles" and said the Communist nation is "a danger to the world."
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, earlier this year called North Korea a "merchant for ballistic missile technology" and said Pyongyang was willing to sell the weapons "to just about anybody who will buy."
-- CNN Madrid Bureau Chief Al Goodman and correspondents Barbara Starr, Andrea Koppel and Frank Buckley contributed to this report.
----
U.S. releases Yemeni missiles
By Pauline Jelinek
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2002121113298.htm
The United States and Yemen faced off today as American naval forces held a missile shipment seized in the Arabian Sea, then released it at the demand of the Yemeni government.
The United States released the vessel and its cargo of North Korean-made Scud missiles after high-level consultations between the two countries, officials said.
"There is no clear authority to seize the shipment ... the merchant vessel is being released," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told a press conference.
U.S. officials had said the shipment of missiles and missile parts violated an agreement Yemen made with the United States not to buy such equipment from North Korea, which Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has called the worst missile proliferator in the world.
A Yemeni official told The Associated Press in San'a that Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kerbi summoned U.S. Ambassador Edmund J. Hull to protest the seizure and ask for the return of the equipment, which was planned for "defensive purposes."
The decision to release the missiles came after discussions with Yemeni officials by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Mr. Fleischer said.
"We have looked at this matter thoroughly. There is no provision under international law prohibiting Yemen from accepting delivery of missiles from North Korea. While there is authority to stop and search, in this instance there is no clear authority to sieze the shipment of Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen and therefore the merchant vessel is being released," Mr. Fleischer said.
Mr. Fleischer went out of his way to say the United States has no diplomatic complaints against Yemen, underscoring that Yemen is not only a sovereign government but also a reliable partner in the U.S.-led war against terrorism.
The Yemenis have given the United States assurances that they will not transfer the missiles to anyone.
"I think that Yemen understands the United States' commitment to making certain that terrorist regimes in the area do not receive weapons," Mr. Fleischer said.
----
EGYPT TURNS DOWN U.S. REQUEST FOR BASES
Wed, 11 Dec 2002
Middle East Newsline
http://menewsline.com/stories/2002/december/12_12_1.html
CAIRO [MENL] -- Egypt is said to have turned down a U.S. request for the use of military bases.
Western diplomatic sources said President Hosni Mubarak rejected a U.S. appeal for the basing of U.S. security forces in Egyptian facilities. They said this would have included military personnel as well as combat forces.
"Mubarak does not compromise on independent decision-making nor does he allow meddling in our internal affairs or the establishment of military bases in Egypt," Egyptian Information Minister Safwat Sherif said.
The sources said the main U.S. request concerned the stationing of forces near the Suez Canal. The proposed deployment was meant to ensure the safety of U.S. naval vessels transporting personnel and equipment to the Persian Gulf.
-------- spy agencies
Spy Satellite Effort Viewed as Lagging
Defense, Intelligence Officials Seek More Money
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37291-2002Dec10?language=printer
A secret program for developing the next generation of spy satellites is underfunded and behind schedule and could leave the CIA and Pentagon with gaps in satellite coverage critical to the war on terrorism if the program cannot be restructured, defense and intelligence officials said.
The delays and funding problems in the program, called Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), come as the nation's combat and intelligence personnel are more dependent than ever on satellites to track terrorists, detect troop movements and identify nuclear, chemical and biological weapons sites in potentially hostile states such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Unless the problem is fixed, according to one senior intelligence official, current spy satellites could stop working before the first next-generation satellite is launched in the next few years, leaving the country with a gap in coverage.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is so concerned about getting the satellite development program back on track that he met Thursday with CIA Director George J. Tenet to review the situation and to discuss how to address it, defense and intelligence officials said.
The senior intelligence official said a "reprogramming" of about $625 million and possibly as much as $900 million, from other intelligence programs this year should be enough to get the program back on schedule so that spy satellite coverage is maintained without interruption. "The tradeoffs are not nearly as bad as a gap in imagery coverage," the official said.
Tenet is responsible for overseeing the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates spy satellites, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which analyzes satellite pictures beamed back to Earth. The additional $550 million, the official said, is needed to cover expenses at both agencies that were not adequately budgeted when the contract for developing the new satellite system was awarded to Boeing Co. several years ago.
The official denied that the satellites under development are much heavier -- and thus more expensive to keep in orbit -- than Boeing originally proposed. "The FIA satellite is a lot smaller than anything else we've done," the official said, "and the capability is better than anything we've ever done."
One senior Pentagon official offered a much more negative assessment, saying the program most likely faces a "radical restructuring" if it is to avoid being canceled.
The National Reconnaissance Office operates a fleet of satellites thought to consist of three KH-11 Keyhole satellites that take digital pictures, and three Lacrosse satellites that produce radar images. While the Keyhole pictures are of slightly higher quality than radar images, the advantage of radar is that it works at night and through clouds.
The Keyhole and the Lacrosse satellites -- school bus-size spacecraft that orbit the Earth at altitudes of 400 to 600 miles -- are thought to have the ability to depict objects as small as 10 centimeters in length. While they cannot read license plates, they can tell whether a car has a license plate. The satellites' exact capabilities are classified.
The last time the United States bombed Iraq, in December 1998, amateurs who track the orbits of the spacecraft determined that the Keyholes and Lacrosses flew over Baghdad 19 times in the first 18 hours after the attack began. But each of the passes lasted for only minutes, leaving large gaps in coverage. Pentagon and intelligence officials are seeking continuous coverage of a target such as Baghdad in time of war.
In Afghanistan and in the sky over Iraq, drone aircraft such as the Predator have provided coverage for as long as 24 hours at a time, from 25,000 feet. But satellites have advantages over drones. They cannot be shot down, and they have a much broader range that lets them photograph dozens of cities on each orbit.
The next-generation satellites under the FIA program represent an incremental improvement. But FIA is not one of two radical new approaches that some analysts believe the country should be investing in.
One is for building satellites that would orbit at much higher altitudes, giving them more time over a target. This would require the satellites to be even larger than they are now -- with larger lenses and radar antennae -- for image quality to be maintained. The other is for building constellations of smaller, cheaper satellites that could provide virtually constant coverage of targets. Under this system, as one satellite flew over a city, it would be immediately followed by another.
After meeting with Tenet on Thursday, Rumsfeld told Stephen Cambone, the director of defense program analysis and evaluation at the Pentagon, to recommend a strategy by the end of next week for getting the FIA program back on track. One obstacle they must surmount is growing skepticism on Capitol Hill.
Members of the intelligence committees, meeting in House-Senate conference committee, noted in the fiscal 2003 intelligence authorization bill that the program presents a "major challenge" that could jeopardize current spy satellites if the program is not kept on schedule.
In the bill, the intelligence committees said they have provided more money for the program and for alternative systems "if developmental problems exist or persist." They also note a "continuing pattern" in which managers seek more money for their own programs with "little or no regard" for the overall mix of imagery needed to counter terrorists and other national security threats.
----
CIA prepares early analysis on Iraq report
By Betsy Pisik and Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-16072764.htm
The CIA, coordinating a rush effort by as many as eight U.S. agencies to translate and evaluate Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration, expects to deliver a preliminary assessment to the White House today, administration officials said.
U.N. inspectors and the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council were working independently to evaluate the massive report, with chief weapons inspector Hans Blix predicting an initial assessment by late next week.
Iraq yesterday charged that Washington would distort the document to provide the grounds for a military assault.
"This is unprecedented extortion in the history of the United Nations, when [the United States] forced the president of the Security Council to give it the original copy of Iraq's declaration," the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement faxed to news organizations.
After an intensive lobbying effort, the United States was given the original copy of the Iraqi report late Sunday, which is to be copied and distributed to other permanent members of the Security Council: Russia, France, China and Britain.
The United States, with large numbers of trained experts capable of translating some 500 pages of Arabic in the report, has rushed ahead in the race to determine whether it contains any new information.
"The CIA is working on it, and the analysis will obviously take time, but the agency will prepare a preliminary assessment tomorrow and will send it to the White House," an administration official said last night.
Another official said it may be a "few weeks" before the administration can complete a more detailed evaluation, comparing material in the declaration to U.S. intelligence findings.
Accusing Washington of "possibly forging what it wants to forge," the Iraqi statement said, "This American behavior aims to play with the United Nations' documents with the aim of finding a cover for aggression against Iraq."
A beefed-up U.N. inspection team meanwhile conducted its most widespread searches to date, visiting chemical and explosives facilities, veterinary-medicine institutes and uranium-mining operations near the Syrian border.
A total of 42 inspectors are now at work in Iraq and another 28 arrived yesterday, Mr. Blix said in New York. He said he expects to have 100 inspectors in place by the end of the month.
With high-speed photocopiers working overtime, the United States delivered copies of the Iraqi arms declaration to the French and British governments in Washington on Monday night. Russian and Chinese officials received their copies in New York yesterday morning.
The other 10 council members will have to wait at least until next week to receive sanitized copies, which will be edited by the U.N. inspection team to remove material that could help with the production of outlawed weapons.
The handling of the document has created bitterness among the 10 temporary members, who are elected to the Security Council for two-year terms, complicating the prospects for any future vote on military action.
Several ambassadors demanded at a closed-door luncheon with Mr. Blix yesterday that all 15 nations be involved in council decision-making from now on, according to a participant.
Syria had denounced the two-tier system earlier, and Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen yesterday protested the treatment of some members as "B-nations."
U.S. officials said the American copy of the report was distributed yesterday morning to counterproliferation, linguistic and weapons experts at the CIA, with some parts sent to weapons experts at other agencies.
"We've got lots of translators, analysts, experts. Every agency in the U.S. government has a role," said one U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition that he not be identified. "The CIA is in charge. There must be six or eight agencies involved."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the U.S. analysis would be deliberate and careful in order to "understand what it is that Iraq is purporting to declare, as well as what they have failed to declare."
One source said he had been told to expect little new information in the declaration and that Iraq appeared to have simply pieced together a number of previous declarations.
In New York, Mr. Blix said after his luncheon with the Security Council members that he expects to have a working version of the arms declaration translated by Monday, and will complete a preliminary assessment of its substance by Dec. 19.
He declined to characterize the accuracy or usefulness of the report until then. So far, he said, his experts are mostly focusing on editing out information that might aid the spread of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Blix and several council members said yesterday that they expect the sanitized version of the declaration to be distributed to the full council by early next week.
"The bottleneck, frankly, is translation. We have about 500 pages in Arabic which need to be translated," he said.
Mr. Blix, who oversees the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, said his office had already begun to coordinate efforts with experts from some of the five permanent council nations.
"We have asked the P-5, who have the experts on proliferation-sensitive matters, to advise us by Friday," he said. "We are willing to share with them our conclusions."
•Rowan Scarborough and Bill Gertz contributed to this report.
----
Lawmakers approve report on intelligence overhaul
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021211-20291642.htm
Lawmakers yesterday approved a report designed to correct intelligence shortcomings that might have prevented authorities from stopping the September 11 attacks.
Details of the report, approved in a private meeting of the House and Senate select intelligence committees, were not revealed. Preliminary drafts called for creating the position of national intelligence director, a Cabinet-level post that would oversee all U.S. intelligence operations.
Paul Anderson, a spokesman for Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said lawmakers made changes in the recommendations, but he gave no specifics.
The recommendations will be announced at a news conference today. Some of the 20 or so recommendations would:
•Commission a study on whether a new domestic intelligence agency is needed.
•Thoroughly investigate whether U.S.-based terrorists receive help from foreign governments.
•Review whether to expand a law allowing surveillance of foreign terror suspects in the United States.
•Establish procedures to reward staff members who acted in ways that could have prevented the attacks and discipline those whose actions might have prevented the attacks from being stopped.
The recommendations followed months of public and private hearings in which congressional staff faulted the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies for failing to share information that, if pieced together, might have uncovered the September 11 plot.
Asked Monday if he believed the attacks could have been prevented, Mr. Graham gave "a conditional yes."
"It would have required several things to have happened, which in fact did not occur," he said in an interview.
Those included having a single person with the job of reviewing all the information collected by different organizations, "a creative mind that would have seen the pieces of this puzzle start to form a plot that would have triggered a law-enforcement response."
Creating a position for an intelligence director would help overcome any barriers that block communication among agencies, Mr. Graham said.
The Senate panel's top Republican, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, said the position should be like the chief executive of intelligence.
"Short of that, we're going to continue to have a lot of principalities, a lot of dukedoms and no one really in charge of the intelligence community," Mr. Shelby said.
-------
Senators Urge an Overhaul of U.S. Intelligence Operations
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN and DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/politics/11CND-INTEL.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - The joint Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks called today for an overhaul of American intelligence-gathering, and a leading member of the panel said several present and former high officials needed to be held accountable for their failures.
Members of the committee discussed their findings today, a day after voting in closed session to approve a final report calling for the creation of a director of national intelligence, a cabinet-level position that would narrow the authority of the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The proposal for a national intelligence director was one of 18 to 20 recommendations for overhauling the intelligence community adopted by the joint panel. The committee said the new post was necessary to coordinate the sprawling United States intelligence community, giving it broad authority over all the military and civilian intelligence agencies and leaving the director of central intelligence subordinate.
"It is our belief that if these recommendations are fully and expeditiously implemented, our government's ability to detect, deter and disrupt the next assault will be significantly improved," Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who headed the joint committee, said. "They will close some of the most significant gaps in our intelligence - gaps which allowed the hijackers' plot for September the 11th to go undetected and become the tragedy of September the 11th."
Mr. Graham added, "It is almost a certainty that in the coming months Americans will face another attempted terrorist assault, an assault that quite possibly could be of the same scale as that of September the 11th, 2001."
But much of the focus on today's release was on a dissenting report by Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, ranking Republican on the committee, who said - with what seemed to be considerable personal anguish - that some high officials needed to answer for the failure to detect and head off the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that killed some 3,000 people.
Mr. Shelby said he endorsed the report in general, but that he differed, with some sadness, on issues of accountability.
"I believe we're all accountable, and I believe people who make decisions on a high level or middle level dealing with the security of this nation should be accountable for what they don't do," Mr. Shelby said.
Mr. Shelby singled out George Tenet, the head of the C.I.A., and John Deutch, former head of that agency; Louis Freeh, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Michael V. Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency.
The senator said Mr. Tenet had "done some good things." But he added, "There have been more massive failures of intelligence on his watch as director of C.I.A. than any director in the history of the agency."
Mr. Shelby said Mr. Deutch "took insufficient steps, a lot of insufficient steps, to bring the intelligence community, and especially the C.I.A., into the new era to fight terrorism. And he's got some responsibility."
"And let's not forget Louis Freeh, who is someone we all respect and we love," Mr. Shelby continued. "But Louis Freeh presided over the F.B.I. during a catastrophic era when the F.B.I., I think, for a lot of reasons lost its way and needed leadership at a crucial time. And even today, a lot of people are not sure they have it."
Finally, Mr. Shelby criticized Mr. Hayden. "He failed to move decisively into the collection, I believe and others believe, into the war against terrorism," Mr. Shelby said.
Mr. Shelby said on Tuesday that he would issue a minority report, so his comments today were not surprising. But they illustrated how much debate lies ahead on how the United States can protect itself from people who are willing to die to kill Americans.
In a television appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Shelby said he could not understand how Mr. Tenet and others had escaped accountability for their actions or inaction. "A lot of the people who have made those decisions are still there," he said. "The same thing at the F.B.I. It's inexplicable to me, and that's why I've been outspoken about it."
Mr. Graham disagreed with Mr. Shelby's assertions that the final report was not critical enough of officials in the intelligence community, although Mr. Graham said today that it was clear that "the intelligence community was not properly postured to meet the threat of global terrorism against the people of the United States."
The final report includes some three dozen findings of fact, based on the joint inquiry's nearly yearlong investigation of the government's performance before Sept. 11. The joint inquiry reviewed some 400,000 pages of documents in its investigation, officials said.
But one Congressional official close to Senator Shelby said that while the report called for the joint inquiry to present to inspectors general factual findings about a series of events, in at least one notable instance it did not name individuals involved.
In the F.B.I.'s handling of the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen of Moroccan descent who faces conspiracy charges related to the Sept. 11 attacks, the joint-inquiry report states that F.B.I. agents in Minneapolis, where Mr. Moussaoui was arrested before the attacks, acted appropriately. But middle managers at F.B.I. headquarters who turned down requests from Minneapolis for warrants to search Mr. Moussaoui's belongings before Sept. 11 did not, the report says. But those middle managers are not named in the report, the Congressional official said.
Still, other members of the joint inquiry praised the final report and made it clear that they did not believe that assigning individual blame was part of their job. "I am very impressed with the report," said Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California and a member of the joint-inquiry panel. "I think, with 37 members on a committee that is bipartisan and bicameral and had 400,000 pieces of paper to review, I think it is miraculous that the report is as clear and as strong as it is. I think we accomplished our mission, which was to understand the plot."
Another panel member, Representative Tim Roemer, Democrat of Indiana, added that he did not believe it was the job of the joint inquiry to assign blame to individual government officials.
"I think accountability is an extremely important part of the report, and it is one of the more robust aspects of the recommendations we have made," Mr. Roemer said in an interview. "But I don't think it was our job to present criticism of individuals, but to offer ideas for reform instead."
---- turkey
Turkey Names Its Price for Aid Against Iraq
Support on EU and Economy Sought From U.S. for Assistance in War Effort
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37245-2002Dec10?language=printer
ISTANBUL, Dec. 10 -- The last time the United States went to war against Iraq, Sadan Argun lost his house and his car. The tourists who used to buy his miniature boxes and hand-painted candles stopped coming to Turkey -- next door to the Persian Gulf War -- and the resulting economic crash was as abrupt as it was steep.
"What we went through was real," said Argun, at the end of another day standing behind a lonely tabletop of the trinkets he once paid 40 people to make by the gross. "Everybody would consider the Gulf War a significant starting point for the downturn."
Now, a decade later, the United States is asking Turkey to play a pivotal role in a fresh military enterprise, and quiet bargaining over the price of cooperation is under way. In exchange for use of its territory by U.S. troops and aircraft against Iraq, the Turkish government is asking for significant economic help to make sure there is no repeat of the recession that followed the 1991 war. Just as eagerly, it wants the Bush administration to persuade the European Union to respond more favorably to a long-delayed Turkish bid for membership.
The United States strongly backs the bid, as President Bush emphasized repeatedly in Washington today while receiving Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of Turkey's new governing party. Membership in the prosperous club of European nations, U.S. officials say, would not only boost Turkey's economy; it would enhance Turkey's status as a model of secular democracy in a Muslim country.
More immediately, analysts and diplomats add, signs of progress on EU membership would improve American chances of winning permission to mass ground troops in Turkey in addition to basing warplanes here, a necessity for opening a northern front in any new war against President Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad.
But despite the endorsement in Washington, Europe's willingness to embrace the Turkish application anytime soon remains in doubt. European foreign ministers today endorsed a French-German proposal that Turkey begin negotiations with the EU in 2005 -- if it meets human rights conditions by 2004 that so far it has failed to meet.
Erdogan dismissed that timetable as a double standard on Monday and demanded a firm date. If, as expected, European leaders follow their foreign ministers' suggestion, Turkish disappointment could affect the level of cooperation with U.S. war plans, analysts here say.
"If Europe says no, you're going to see a backlash the likes of which you've never seen in Turkey before, and it's going to make the job of persuading Turkey on Iraq incredibly harder," said Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, where Erdogan delivered a speech Monday night.
"I can't emphasize this enough," Aliriza said. "Because to the Turks, it's not the United States as opposed to Europe. It's 'the West.' "
Turks have been weaned on the vision of the nation's founder, Kemal Ataturk, to look toward the West for progress and prosperity. But they complain of feeling poorly used by the forces they have longed to embrace. Almost 40 years after applying for membership in what was then the European Community, Turkey is at the end of its patience, Erdogan warned.
The United States, which championed Turkey's bid to join NATO decades ago, fares poorly in opinion polls here. In a recent survey of 44 countries by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the percentage of Turks expressing a "favorable" view of the United States dropped more than in any other country with a benchmark for comparison -- skidding from 52 to 30 percent in just two years.
In a country where schoolchildren are taught they are Turks before anything else, more and more people say events are reminding them they are also Muslims.
"Although Turkey is a secular country, it's also a fact that the world is getting divided into two camps, and Turkey is 98 percent Muslim," said Ahmet Ugur, 53, a resort hotelier with a degree in political science. "And no matter how much Turkey wants to remain a secular country, the U.S. and the EU are pushing Turkey back into the other camp."
Such skepticism reduces the maneuvering room of the new government, which U.S. officials say has privately offered to cooperate against Iraq. Born from the ruins of earlier, openly Islamic parties, the ruling Justice and Development Party appears eager to reassure the United States that it has left behind religious politics and will be a reliable strategic partner.
Major strategic decisions will fall to Turkey's National Security Council, a mix of elected officials and top generals who have worked with the Pentagon in assembling war plans. But Turkey's constitution requires parliamentary approval of such moves as hosting foreign troops or dispatching Turkish forces abroad, both of which the Bush administration has privately requested, and politicians say they must answer to voters.
"We should get the okay of the people if there is war," said Omer Celik, an adviser to Erdogan.
Turkish officials said that, given the recession and memories of the Gulf War, money will be a key lubricant. The recession, triggered by last year's banking and currency crisis, is the worst since World War II. The Turkish lira lost two-thirds of its value and is now trading at 1.5 million to the dollar. The unofficial unemployment rate is 30 percent, and last year the economy shrank nearly 10 percent.
The two countries are deep into negotiating an aid package that would include steady reduction of $5 billion in military debt to the United States, assurances on an existing $16 billion recovery loan from the International Monetary Fund and limited trade preferences to boost Turkish exports.
But help with the EU would go the farthest, say diplomats and analysts. With Turkey yet to adopt the required human rights and political reforms, observers say the best hope for getting a firm date for beginning EU accession talks lies in a breakthrough to unite Cyprus, an island divided into Greek and Turkish areas since 1974.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan released a revised proposal today that would allow Cyprus to join the EU as a united republic with two "component states." News services reported that the most reluctant party to the talks, Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, dismissed the revisions. But he headed to Ankara for meetings as Erdogan flew to see Annan in New York.
-------- us
What is the US military's Exercise Internal Look?
December 11, 2002
By Matthew Clark
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1211/p25s01-wonq.html
Perhaps more than anything else, Internal Look is a warning to Iraq.
Though US officials deny suggestions that it is a rehearsal for war or saber rattling, Exercise Internal Look is certainly a chance for the US to address any command and control wrinkles ahead of a possible conflict with Iraq.
Internal Look is a biennial exercise that tests the command, control, and communications ability of US Central Command (CentCom) and its component commands. CentCom is headquarters for US forces from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. Internal Look tests how well CentCom can guide air, land, and sea forces in times of war and how well CentCom and its other command centers communicate with each other.
The military has set up a high-tech, $58 million portable command center at the as-Sayliyah army base in Qatar from which it will run computer-assisted war games. Details of the exercise are classified. It is clear, however, that only senior officers and their staff are involved. Combat troops are not participating.
The main goal is for Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of CentCom, to do everything in Qatar that he can do from CentCom headquarters in Tampa, Fla. This is the first time this exercise is being held outside of the continental US.
The all-day simulations began Monday and will last seven to 10 days. The mobile command and communications equipment will remain after the exercise has been completed.
Send your questions to newsquestion@csmonitor.com. Please include your full name, city, and state.
------
The War After Iraq
Dec 11, 2002
Stratfor.com
http://www.stratfor.com/todaysnews/premium/Story.neo?storyId=208204
Summary
For the United States, fighting and winning a war against Iraq has become a strategic imperative. Although it is true that this war could engender greater support for al Qaeda among the Islamic masses, the consequences of not attacking Baghdad -- from Washington's perspective -- could be worse. But even more important, a victory and U.S. occupation of a conquered Iraq would reshape the political dynamic in the Middle East. The United States would be in a position to manipulate the region on an unprecedented scale.
Analysis
The current struggle over the soul of the weapons inspection process in Iraq must not divert attention from the primary strategic reality: The world's only superpower has decided that the defeat and displacement of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime is in its fundamental national interest. That superpower prefers that its allies and the United Nations concur with its position, but this preference should not be mistaken for a requirement.
Washington is prepared to wait a reasonable length of time to procure that support -- particularly since its own military strategy dictates that operations should not begin until January. Nevertheless, regardless of the stance the U.N. and U.S. allies have adopted, there is little doubt that the United States will press forward and, in all likelihood, will defeat and occupy Iraq.
There are some negative reasons for this. It is no longer politically possible for the Bush administration to abandon its quest. By this, we do not mean "politically" in a domestic sense, although that is a consideration. Of far greater importance are the political consequences the United States would incur in the Islamic world if it did not carry out its threats against Iraq. Many have pointed to the potential consequences of waging a war -- namely exciting greater support for al Qaeda among the Islamic masses -- but public debate has neglected to consider the consequences of inaction.
Al Qaeda persistently has argued that the United States is fundamentally weak. From Beirut in the 1980s to Desert Storm, Somalia and now the Afghan war, the United States, the argument goes, has failed to act decisively and conclusively. Unwilling to take casualties, Washington either has withdrawn under pressure or has refused to take decisive but costly steps to impose its will. Al Qaeda has argued repeatedly that the United States should not be feared because, at root, it lacks the will to victory.
Should the United States -- having made Iraq the centerpiece of its war-making policy since last spring -- decline engagement this time, it would be another confirmation that, ultimately, the United States lacks the stomach for war and that increasing the pressure on Washington is a low-risk enterprise with high potential returns. In other words, at this point, the political consequences of failing to act against Iraq might reduce hatred of the United States somewhat but will increase contempt for it dramatically.
Machiavelli raised the core question: Is it better for a prince to be loved or feared? He answered the question simply -- love is a voluntary emotion; it comes and it goes, but it is very difficult to impose. Moreover, it is an emotion with unpredictable consequences. Fear, on the other hand, is involuntary. It can be imposed from the outside, and the behavior of frightened people is far more predictable. This is the classic political problem the United States faces today. Washington cannot possibly guarantee the love of the Islamic world. Therefore, it cannot guarantee that if it does not attack Iraq, Islamic hatred for the country will subside. But it is certain that if it does not attack, fear of the United States will decline. According to this logic, the United States cannot decline war at this point.
War is the issue; voluntary regime change is not. It is not only important that Hussein's government fall, it is equally important that the United States be seen as the instrument of its destruction and the U.S. military the means of his defeat. Given the logic of its strategy, the United States must defeat the Iraqi army overwhelmingly and be seen as imposing its will. It must establish its military credibility decisively and overwhelmingly.
The reasons go beyond transforming the psychology of the Islamic world. The United States has direct military reasons for needing to defeat Iraq in war. From Washington's viewpoint, any outcome must allow the United States to occupy Iraq with its own military forces. This is not because it needs to govern Iraq directly, although demonstrating control over a defiant Islamic country would support its interests. Nor is oil the primary issue, although this would give the United States some serious bargaining power with allies. The primary reason is geography.
If we look at a map, Iraq is the most strategic country between the Levant and the Persian Gulf. It shares borders with Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and, most of all, Saudi Arabia. If the United States were to occupy Iraq, it would be there by right of conquest. Unlike any other country in the region, the United States would not have to negotiate with an occupied Iraq. It would have ample room for deploying air power in the heart of the region. More important, it would be able to deploy a substantial ground force capable of bringing pressure to bear within a 360-degree radius. Within a matter of months, the United States would become the most powerful military force native to the region.
Consider some of the consequences. For example, the Saudi royal family currently is caught between two fears: the fear of al Qaeda sympathizers inside and outside the family and fear of the United States. On the whole, officials in Riyadh fear al Qaeda sympathizers somewhat more than they fear the United States. They will attempt to placate the United States, but they are not prepared to make the kind of fundamental, internal changes needed to act meaningfully against al Qaeda sympathizers.
With several U.S. armored divisions on the nation's borders, however, the Saudi calculus must change. When Iraq deployed forces against Saudi Arabia, Riyadh relied upon the United States to protect its interests. If U.S. forces deploy on its borders, who will come to Saudi Arabia's aid then? Riyadh's assumption always has been (1) that the United States, concerned about Iraq and Iran, could not turn on Saudi Arabia and (2) that the United States lacked the military means to turn on it. All of that is true -- unless the United States has occupied Iraq, has control of the Iranian frontier and perceives Saudi Arabia as a direct threat because it has failed to control al Qaeda. The Saudi fear factor then would change dramatically and so, one suspects, would its actions.
Similarly, the threat to Iran from U.S. ground and air forces also has been extremely limited. Iran's western frontier has been secure since Desert Storm, and the country has been relatively insulated from U.S. power. Domestic affairs have developed in relative security from the United States or any external threat. If the United States occupies Iraq, the Iranian reality will be fundamentally changed. This does not mean that Iran will become pro-American -- quite the contrary, it might retreat into rigidity. But it will not stay the same.
Following a war in Iraq, the United States would become the defining power in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. It is difficult to imagine any coalition of regional nation-states that could emerge either to oust or control the United States. Even in the event that a tide of anti-Americanism ripped the region apart, the objective strategic equation would not permit a coalition of regional forces to mount a substantial challenge to the United States. To the contrary, Washington would be in a position to manipulate the region on an unprecedented scale. It also would be able to mount operations against al Qaeda throughout the region much more effectively than it can today and, we should add, without requesting permission.
The downside of this strategy is obvious and much-discussed. Hatred and resentment of the United States will run deep, and this undoubtedly will generate more recruits for al Qaeda, at least in the short run. Certainly, al Qaeda will continue its strategy of striking at U.S. targets where and when it can. If the United States attacks Iraq against European wishes, the Europeans potentially might withdraw intelligence collaboration, thus increasing U.S. vulnerability. These are not trivial concerns, and Washington takes them seriously.
But ultimately, Washington appears to believe that the upside of an occupied Iraq trumps the downside.
1. It is true that al Qaeda recruitment might rise, but al Qaeda does not have a problem with recruitment now. Not only do its core operations not require large numbers of operatives, but in fact, they cannot use large numbers because they depend upon stealth and security, both of which make large-scale recruitment impossible. It will be difficult to turn intensified hatred into intensified, effective operations. Random attacks in region doubtless will increase, but this will be a tolerable price to pay. Ultimately, al Qaeda already operates at its structural capacity and cannot capitalize on increased sympathy for its cause.
2. Any government in the region will have to reassess the fundamental threat it faces. With a U.S. presence in Iraq, Saudi leaders, for example, will recalculate their interests. A pro-al Qaeda government would become the target of a very real U.S. regional power. A neutral government would come under tremendous U.S. pressure, including the threat of attack. Governments -- and not only that in Saudi Arabia -- would find it in their interest to suppress the growth of al Qaeda sympathies, in collaboration with the United States.
3. European states will not abrogate relations with the United States no matter what it does in Iraq. Ultimately, al Qaeda and militant Islam are as much a threat to Europe as to the United States. Ending intelligence cooperation with the United States would hurt Europe at least as much as Washington. Moreover, Europe is vulnerable to the United States in a range of economic areas. A successful operation in Iraq, once concluded, would create a new reality not only in the region but globally. The Europeans might accelerate development of an integrated defense policy -- but then again, even this might not happen.
The U.S. view, therefore, apparently is that a post-war world in which U.S. forces operating out of Iraq establish a regional sphere of influence -- based on direct military power -- is the foundation for waging a regional war that will defeat al Qaeda. The United States does not expect to obliterate either al Qaeda or related groups, but it does expect to be able to further contain the network's operations by undermining the foundations of its support and basing in the region. Washington also would be able to control the regional balance of power directly, rather than through proxies as it currently must. In effect, the era in which Washington must negotiate with a state like Qatar in order to carry out essential operations will end.
What is most interesting here is that, ultimately, it doesn't matter whether the Bush administration has clearly thought through these consequences. The fact is that no matter Washington's intent, the conquest of Iraq will have this outcome. History frequently is made by people with a clear vision, but sometimes it is the result of unintended consequences. In the end, history takes you to the same place. However, in our view, the Bush administration is quite clear in its own mind about how the region will look after a U.S.-Iraq war. We suspect that the risks are calculated as well.
1. The United States might get bogged down in a war in Iraq if enemy forces prove more capable than expected and -- facing high casualties in Baghdad -- Washington might be forced to accept an armistice that would leave it in a far worse position psychologically and geopolitically than before.
2. The consequences of U.S. occupation might be the opposite of what is expected. A broad anti-U.S. coalition could form in the region, and al Qaeda might use the changed atmosphere to increase its regional influence and to intensify anti-U.S. operations.
3. European leaders actually might shift from making speeches to supplying direct military support for Saudi Arabia and other states in the region against the United States.
4. Prior to an attack, U.S. public opinion might shift massively against a war, making it impossible for the United States to act. Once again, the superpower would appear to be all talk, no action.
Officials in Washington believe none of these things will happen. This view ultimately will prove either correct or incorrect. But in understanding what is transpiring with Iraq, this must be understood as the core U.S. perception. It is what drives the United States forward. From Washington's point of view, this is the clearest path to taking the initiative away from al Qaeda and reshaping regional power in such a way as to deny it effective sanctuary -- even though this strategy undoubtedly will spawn further hatred of the United States.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- courts
High court rules on felons' gun rights
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021211-12022415.htm
The Supreme Court blocked felons from going straight to court to get their gun rights restored, rejecting arguments yesterday that those people have nowhere else to go.
Justices didn't get into the constitutional arguments about limitations on the right to keep and bear arms. In a brief decision, they ruled unanimously that courts can intervene only after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) has rejected a request.
However, Congress already has barred the ATF from considering such requests. The high court's message for a Texas man who wanted to get around the ban: too bad.
The case had the backing of gun-rights supporters, who contend that Thomas Bean and others convicted of nonviolent crimes should not permanently lose their gun rights.
The Bush administration argued against Mr. Bean, despite the Justice Department's position that the Constitution guarantees an individual right to gun ownership.
Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the court's conservative members, wrote the decision. He said the ATF, not a judge, was best prepared to look into whether an applicant could be a danger to public safety. The ruling mentions the ATF ban, but offers no opinion of it.
The Supreme Court could be drawn into a larger gun-rights case soon. An appeals court ruled last week that the Second Amendment does not give Americans a personal right to own firearms. The ruling, by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is expected to be appealed.
Mr. Bean, a gun dealer, was convicted of violating Mexican law after officers found 200 rounds of ammunition in his car during a dinner trip across the border four years ago. Mr. Bean can return to lower courts to argue that the Mexican conviction does not classify him as a felon in the United States.
Felons are prohibited by federal law from carrying guns, but they can ask the government for exceptions.
When Mr. Bean tried to get back his gun rights, and his livelihood, he was supported by two police chiefs, a sheriff, a judge, a prosecutor and a Baptist preacher. Because the ATF wouldn't review his case, he sued.
A lower court restored Mr. Bean's firearms license, but yesterday's decision reversed that.
Each year since 1992, Congress has included in the ATF's budget a ban on using money to do background checks for felons, which cost an estimated $3,700 each.
Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University, said the court's decision moves the debate to the Capitol.
"Congress created this situation, and they can fix it, which they may do when the Republicans have control of both houses and the presidency," Mr. Lund said.
Mathew Nosanchuk, litigation director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group, predicted the court's decision will end the effort to give felons gun rights.
"I don't think any member of Congress wants to be standing up in favor of restoring gun privileges to convicted felons," he said.
The National Rifle Association did not file arguments in the case, but other gun-rights supporters backed Mr. Bean.
"If courts can make decisions about whether someone can be executed, it seems to me that they ought to be competent to make a decision about whether somebody can have their rights restored," said William Gustavson, a lawyer for the Second Amendment Foundation.
Separately yesterday, the Supreme Court threw out a death-penalty case that was argued last month, apparently because of concerns about whether the case was properly appealed to the high court.
The decision means Tennessee can move ahead with plans to execute Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman, although his lawyers can try other ways to get his case back before the Supreme Court.
Abdur'Rahman was convicted of fatally stabbing a man in an attack in which he also wounded the man's girlfriend in Nashville, Tenn., in 1986.
-------- death penalty
Constitutionality of death penalty upheld
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 11, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021211-153626.htm
A federal appeals court yesterday overturned a ruling that the federal death penalty is unconstitutional, dismissing a lower court's fear that innocent people could be executed.
"Capital punishment cannot constitute a per se violation of the due process clause," a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in reversing District Judge Jed S. Rakoff's decision that the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA) violated the Fifth Amendment due process provision.
The July 1 decision by Judge Rakoff - who was for seven years a federal prosecutor - said the federal death penalty violates the Fifth Amendment's due process clause because DNA testing has shown "innocent people are convicted of capital crimes with some frequency."
"[It] is tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings," said Judge Rakoff, who was appointed by President Clinton. He noted 12 cases in which condemned state prisoners were exonerated by DNA tests, citing a Columbia University survey of state cases.
The unanimous appeals court ruling said, "It is apparent from the text of the Constitution itself that the existence of capital punishment was accepted by the Framers" who acknowledged use of the death penalty in three different places within the Fifth Amendment.
"Most importantly, the Supreme Court has upheld state and federal statutes providing for capital punishment for over 200 years, and it has done so despite a clear recognition of the possibility that, because our judicial system - indeed, any judicial system - is fallible, innocent people might be executed and, therefore, lose any opportunity for exoneration," the appeals panel said.
"This is a well-deserved rebuke of a crackpot decision," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, who praised rejection of claims made by Alan Quinones and Diego Rodriguez, accused in a drug-related killing.
The two face the death penalty if convicted of killing a police informant to protect their narcotics conspiracy.
Their attorneys indicated earlier they would appeal to the Supreme Court.
Chris Dunn, of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the issue Judge Rakoff raised is "going to go to the Supreme Court whether it's in this case or another case This is an issue that the Supreme Court will need to confront."
Government attorneys had no immediate comment on their victory.
An important provision of the ruling rejected the prosecutors' contention that the constitutionality of the sentence cannot be challenged before the trial is held.
The panel said capital trials are conducted differently so that a defendant has a right to attack the constitutionality of that process ahead of time.
Aside from the defendant's fear for his life, differences in a capital trial include the number of peremptory challenges and exclusion of jurors who are conscientiously opposed to the death penalty, resulting in a jury considered more likely to convict.
State death penalty laws are not affected by the federal decisions.
Although five of the 31 convictions under the FDPA were reversed on legal grounds, none of those sentenced to death has later been found to be innocent. The only two executed under the 1994 law were Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and drug killer Juan Garza.
The opinion written by Circuit Judge Jose A. Cabranes, also a Clinton appointee, noted that death-penalty opponents began claiming early in the 1800s that innocent people often were executed by mistake.
"[Their] argument that execution deprives individuals of the opportunity for exoneration is not new at all - it repeatedly has been made to the Supreme Court and rejected by the Supreme Court," the circuit court said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Canadian Lawmakers Advance Climate Pact as Discord Grows
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/americas/11CANA.html
TORONTO, Dec. 10 - The House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to ratify the Kyoto climate change protocol today, but widespread disapproval by powerful provincial governments and business groups has called into question whether the agreement will ever be fully put in place in Canada.
Proponents said Canada's ratification was a major step forward for the 1997 treaty. Canada, one of the world's largest producers of carbon dioxide emissions per capita, is one of only a few large polluting countries among about 100 nations to have ratified or moved toward ratification.
But as the debate here heated up in recent weeks, the Liberal government compromised on previous commitments to control emissions in an effort to assuage the auto and oil industries and counter a national campaign against the accord financed by the Alberta provincial government.
Under Canadian law, the 195-to-77 vote today was not necessary. It takes only a vote by the cabinet to ratify international treaties. That vote, which is expected next week, is considered a formality, because all the cabinet ministers voted in favor of the resolution in the House of Commons.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who has made the Kyoto accord a centerpiece of his agenda, hoped that approval by the House of Commons, including the votes of the opposition Bloc Québécois and the social democratic New Democratic Party, would signify broad national support. The impact of the vote, however, was reduced by a procedural vote in the House on Monday to shut off debate. Several influential Liberal lawmakers, including former Finance Minister Paul Martin, abstained from the procedural vote.
Mr. Martin, who is the leading contender to succeed Mr. Chrétien as the Liberal leader and prime minister when he steps down in early 2004, said he believed that the debate over the Kyoto accord should have continued, to build consensus before ratification went forward. Mr. Martin's abstention was viewed by Ralph Klein, the premier of Alberta, and other opponents as a signal that he would not wholeheartedly press for industrial curbs should he take over the government.
Mr. Klein has warned that he could sue the federal government over the Kyoto accord, noting that under Canadian law the provinces have control over natural resources.
Under the accord, by 2012 Canada would be required to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 6 percent from 1990 levels. Of the country's total 240-megaton target for emissions reductions, business would be required to contribute 23 percent of the decreases.
To meet the targets, the government has proposed measures including improving public transit, increasing parking fees in big cities and encouraging more freight transport by train.
Auto companies based in Canada would be required to make new vehicles that are 25 percent more efficient by 2010, and coal-fired industries would be obliged to either reduce emissions or spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year purchasing "emissions credits" from countries outside Canada.
Under the Kyoto protocol, countries can sell and purchase parts of their carbon monoxide emissions allotments, allowing countries that are falling behind in their obligations to purchase excess emission credits from countries that are ahead of schedule in order to meet their targets.
-------- genetics
'Politically Correct' Stem Cell Is Licensed to Biotech Concern
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By ANDREW POLLACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/business/11STEM.html
A small biotechnology company has obtained the exclusive rights to commercial applications of a new type of stem cell that has the potential to defuse the public debate over the use of those cells in research.
The company, Athersys Inc. of Cleveland, licensed the rights from the University of Minnesota, where the stem cell was discovered by Dr. Catherine M. Verfaillie and colleagues, university and company officials said.
The cells come from the bone marrow of adults but seem to be as versatile as stem cells from embryos in their ability to turn into different types of cells in the body. That means that various types of tissue might one day be made from them, defying the conventional wisdom that adult stem cells are less versatile than embryonic ones.
And since the cells come from adults, they do not raise the ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem cells, which are obtained by the destruction of human embryos. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research have championed Dr. Verfaillie's cells, which she calls multipotent adult progenitor cells, as alternatives to embryonic cells.
No other scientist has published data confirming Dr. Verfaillie's findings, however, so some still question their validity. And the University of Minnesota has not yet been granted patents.
The granting of the license to Athersys, which has been expected, could raise concerns similar to those that arose when the Geron Corporation was given the exclusive license for certain commercial uses of embryonic stem cells by the University of Wisconsin.
Some scientists worried that Geron by itself would not make sufficient progress in developing therapies using the stem cells, yet its control of the patents would discourage others from pursuing such treatments. Under pressure, Wisconsin forced Geron to relinquish some of its rights.
Gil Van Bokkelen, chief executive of Athersys, which is privately held, said the company had no desire to block others' research and hoped to collaborate and share the returns. "We're not looking to do the whole thing under our umbrella," he said.
Michael F. Moore, who is in charge of licensing the University of Minnesota's health technology patents, also played down concerns, saying, "It's in no one's best interest to not have things commercialized." He said the university decided to offer an exclusive license because nonexclusive ones tend not to attract as much corporate interest.
Mr. Moore said the university was providing some cells to academic researchers, nearly 20 of whom have already obtained them. They are free to use the cells for their research, but Athersys would have the option to license any commercial applications, he said. Companies that want to work with the cells have to arrange that with Athersys, he said.
The university will get an upfront payment and research financing from Athersys, a stake in the company and possibly future payments and royalties, Dr. Van Bokkelen said. But the exact terms are not being released.
Athersys, which has raised about $100 million, has not been in the stem cell business until now. Its business has been built on a technology that turns on random genes in cells as a way of discovering novel proteins. Athersys found out about the research at the University of Minnesota before many others because the scientists there were using Athersys technology to help determine what proteins would induce their stem cells to turn into various types of body cells. It was reported in June that Athersys was close to a licensing deal.
Dr. Verfaillie said that both large and small companies had been interested in licensing the technology. She and her colleagues also thought of starting their own company. But they decided Athersys would be a good match. "The tools that they have developed should be very useful to apply to our cells," she said. She said that university scientists and Athersys hope to start the first clinical trial using the cells, probably to treat a rare genetic disorder, in two years.
-------- ACTIVISTS
With Warning, Carter Accepts Nobel
Former President Inveighs Against 'Preventive War'
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37574-2002Dec10?language=printer
OSLO, Dec. 10 -- Former president Jimmy Carter, warning that "the world is now, in many ways, a more dangerous place," today accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with a ringing endorsement for the United Nations and a plea for the United States to seek multi- lateral solutions to international problems rather than rely solely on its military might.
A frequent critic of many Bush administration policies, Carter avoided direct references to the White House in his acceptance speech. But he endorsed international restrictions on global warming, outlawing of the death penalty and the establishment of an international court to try alleged war criminals -- all positions opposed by the administration.
And he took an indirect swipe at the White House's declared policy of preemptive action against threats to U.S. security. "For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventive war may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences," he told an audience in this capital's ornate city hall.
Citing the United States' status as the world's sole superpower, he said Americans traditionally have "not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom." He added that, "imperfect as it may be," the United Nations is "the best avenue for the maintenance of peace."
It was a day of high emotion and deep satisfaction for the 39th president, 78, who was denied the peace prize in 1978 on a technicality and was defeated for a second term by Ronald Reagan in 1980. In a brief interview this evening, Carter said that although he had been disappointed to have lost out on the prize 24 years ago, it was more gratifying to receive it now. "I'll make good use of it," he said.
The peace prize committee said it chose Carter for his "vital contribution" in brokering the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, for his emphasis on human rights in international politics and for the work of the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based research and advocacy organization that he founded after leaving office in 1981.
"Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president," said Gunnar Berge, chairman of the five-member Norwegian awards committee, in introducing the winner at this afternoon's ceremony. "But he is certainly the best ex-president the country ever had."
Berge noted that Carter had been denied the prize in 1978 because he was nominated after the deadline and declared ineligible to share the award with Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat. "It became increasingly obvious that the bypassing of Carter had been one of the real sins of omission in peace prize history," said Berge. "This year we can finally put all that behind us."
The ceremony began after Carter's entourage of 81 friends and relatives -- including his wife Rosalynn, four children, 10 grandchildren and many veterans of his administration -- took their seats in the front of the flower-festooned auditorium. The former president then made his way to the stage to a standing ovation, after which the king and queen of Norway entered. Berge spoke first, then opera singer Jessye Norman performed "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."
Carter's address touched on many of the themes of his post-White House career. He bemoaned the growing gap between rich and poor nations, made a renewed plea for Middle East peace and denounced those who invoke religion to justify waging war or terrorism.
"In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions," he said. "Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God's mercy and grace, their lives lose all value."
Carter said this false justification applied not only to terrorists, but also to armed forces that use high-tech weapons. "From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity, and never want to know the number or identity of the victims," he told the audience.
He and his friends and family returned to the city hall later in the day to participate in a one-hour live interview program hosted by CNN. The crowd broke into spontaneous applause when interviewer Jonathan Mann told Carter that he was "arguably the most respected American on the planet today."
Carter follows Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as the third president to receive the prize, which includes a check for $1 million. He said he would donate the money to the Carter Center. The prize, he said, "will obviously enhance our reputation around the world and make it easier to raise funds."
-----
Carter Accepts Nobel and Gives Message on Iraq
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/europe/11CART.html
OSLO, Dec. 10 - With a broad smile and an air of satisfaction, former President Jimmy Carter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today, then used the vaunted platform to try to steer events away from an armed conflict in Iraq.
Mr. Carter's speech, during a gilded ceremony here that represented a high point in his extraordinary life journey, included a warning to Baghdad that it meet the United Nations Security Council's demand for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.
"The world insists that this be done," he said.
But his speech also seemed to have a message, more implicit than explicit, for the Bush administration, which had talked in the past about waging war against Iraq without United Nations backing and had framed such an engagement as a safeguard against future threats to the United States.
"It is clear that global challenges must be met by an emphasis on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international consensus," Mr. Carter said. "Imperfect as it may be, there is no doubt that this can best be done through the United Nations.
"For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventive war," he later added, "may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences."
Although the former president spoke broadly and did not link those comments to the possibility of a military strike against Iraq, the relevance was unmistakable. His remarks came at a time of keen international tensions over the situation, and were delivered from a world podium as tall, in symbolic terms, as any leader could hope to command.
Two months ago, when the prize committee announced Mr. Carter as the winner of this year's award, the citation praised him as an advocate for peace during a period "marked by threats of the use of power."
The committee chairman, Gunnar Berge, went further, telling reporters that the selection of Mr. Carter, who had been publicly critical of the Bush administration's aggressive posture toward Iraq, "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken."
But that was not the main reason the committee cited. It referred to Mr. Carter's role, as president, in helping to forge the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
It also noted his ambitious humanitarian work since he left the White House in 1981 and founded the Carter Center, a private foundation in Atlanta dedicated to promoting peace. In poor and troubled nations around the globe, Mr. Carter, 78, has fought disease, built houses, monitored elections and prodded dictators to respect human rights.
To Mr. Carter and his closest aides, the award also seemed to represent cause for hope that his years in the White House, dragged down by the Iranian hostage crisis and runaway inflation, would be viewed more favorably over time. In the days leading up to the award ceremony, they occasionally revisited and sought to recast his administration's record.
"I think any objective analyst would recognize that we had one of the toughest and most potentially unpopular agendas in history," Mr. Carter said in a telephone interview late last week, shortly before he left Atlanta for Oslo.
He mentioned his battles for a Palestinian homeland, normalized relations with China and energy conservation, all of which became more widely accepted ideas during subsequent administrations.
The former president also said that while he may now be held in higher regard by many people than he was two decades ago, "I haven't changed, as far as I can tell."
In presenting the Nobel medal to Mr. Carter today, Mr. Berge said, "Carter's principal concern was to do what he felt was right, even when it was not the smartest political step to take."
Mr. Carter is only the third American president, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which was first awarded in 1901.
The honor clearly elated him. He traveled to Norway with about 80 friends and relatives, and he beamed early this afternoon as trumpet blasts heralded his arrival in the grand auditorium of Oslo City Hall, which was bedecked with yellow and orange flowers.
After the American soprano Jessye Norman sang several songs in his honor, he silently blew her a kiss.
In his roughly 20-minute speech, he denounced what he called "the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth" and beseeched rich nations "to share with others an appreciable part of our excessive wealth."
He implored Israel to heed United Nations Resolution 242, which he said called for Israel to withdraw from occupied territories.
"There is no other mandate whose implementation could more profoundly improve international relations," Mr. Carter said.
Aides said his speech was not intended as a direct commentary on the possibility of war with Iraq. They also said his repeated statements about international consensus and the importance of the United Nations could be seen as an endorsement of the Bush administration's current cooperation with the United Nations Security Council.
But those statements also seemed to reflect his previously stated misgivings about the Bush administration's sometimes unilateralist tendencies.
"Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented, and have been used with restraint and widespread benefit in the past," Mr. Carter said.
"War may sometimes be a necessary evil," he later added. "But no matter how necessary, it is always evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."
In a subsequent interview with CNN from the stage of the auditorium, Mr. Carter said that if international inspectors deemed Iraq to be in violation of the Security Council mandate against weapons of mass destruction, a military strike would not, at that point, be unprovoked.
But, seemingly questioning the need for it, he also said he did not believe that Iraq currently represented a direct threat to the United States.
"We should concentrate first on the obvious threat around the world from Al Qaeda," he said.
Mr. Carter almost received the peace prize in 1978, along with Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel, in recognition for brokering the peace treaty between them. But he had not been nominated in time.
Asked during the CNN interview if that had bothered him, he said, "It was hard for me to understand."
Then, grinning about it now, he added, "I have to admit: I really wanted to earn the Nobel Peace Prize."
----
From Coast to Coast, a Cry for Peace
Human Rights Day is marked with vigils, prayers, teach-ins and a rally at the U.N. At least 150 antiwar protesters are arrested nationwide.
December 11, 2002
By John J. Goldman,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-peace11dec11,0,3356706.story
NEW YORK -- As part of antiwar protests across the country, hundreds of activists rallied outside the United Nations on Tuesday, urging President Bush not to invade Iraq.
Police arrested at least 150 people nationwide for highly choreographed acts of civil disobedience, including 99 demonstrators who blocked the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
In cities from coast to coast, groups sponsored candlelight vigils, marches, teach-ins, food drives and interfaith prayer services to mark International Human Rights Day.
The goal, organizers explained, was to show the breadth of what they said is a burgeoning movement against the Bush administration's threats of war.
Sponsors said the events were intended as a smaller follow-up to massive demonstrations held in October in Washington and San Francisco.
At the White House, a spokesman said the demonstrations were a "time-honored tradition" of democracy.
"We held over 120 events across the country ... to express our dismay at the prospect of a war," said David Levy, an organizer with United for Peace, a loose-knit coalition that coordinated the antiwar activity.
In Anchorage, a memorial celebrated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights while in Vero Beach, Fla., marchers gathered by candlelight to press for peace for Iraq.
Protesters also were arrested in Chicago on charges of criminal trespass in the lobby of a federal office building, in Sacramento on charges of blocking the entrance to a U.S. courthouse and in Washington on charges of refusing to leave a military recruiting station.
"It shows you opposition to the war is not just a marginal opinion of a few activists," said Jen Carr, a spokeswoman for Peace Action, a principal member of the coalition that organized the events.
In Washington, activists held a lunch-hour march near the White House; in the early evening, about 100 people gathered outside the offices of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
"No war for oil," the picketers chanted, charging that the committee serves as a front for the pro-war lobby.
Many of the roughly 500 people who gathered in New York sang protest songs from the Vietnam War era and recalled massive and sometimes violent rallies during the 1960s and '70s.
"I went to my first demonstration in Washington, D.C., Nov. 15, 1969, and that kind of convinced me to be a peace activist and work for social justice," said Bill Steyert, who is a retired worker for a public interest organization.
At the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, protesters and police engaged in a polite, well-practiced political ballet.
Each person who refused to get up from in front of the building was photographed and courteously helped by officers into vans for the trip to court to face disorderly conduct charges of blocking the doors of the government property.
In Oakland, more than 500 people gathered at the federal building carrying about 200 small mock coffins bearing images of Iraqi children.
"Iraqi children are not collateral damage," proclaimed a large banner held above the coffins. Another banner showed a large oil tanker with the slogan, "USS War for Oil."
The death theme was repeated in Providence, R.I., where about 100 Brown University students and faculty held a "die-in" at the federal building.
In Los Angeles, more than 100 entertainers, including Matt Damon, David Duchovny, Laurence Fishburne, Martin Sheen, Diahann Carroll, Janeane Garofalo and Samuel L. Jackson, signed a letter to Bush voicing their opposition to a war.
"War is a reflection of despair, and I refuse to accept despair....We are called to be peacemakers," said Sheen, who plays a U.S. president on NBC's "The West Wing."
Sheen appeared at a news conference with a group of other actors.
"We support rigorous U.N. weapons inspections to assure Iraq's effective disarmament. However, a preemptive military invasion of Iraq will harm American national interests," the letter said.
"It will make us less, not more, secure."
Later in Los Angeles, a group of perhaps a dozen protesters exhorted motorists to honk their horns for peace in Hollywood. Many obliged in the rush-hour darkness.
Times staff writers Randy Trick in Washington and Hector Becerra in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
----
SYRIA - Kurdish demonstrators charge discrimination
Briefly
December 11, 2002
Washington Times
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021211-73416723.htm
DAMASCUS - Minority Kurds demonstrated yesterday outside the Syrian parliament to protest what they called a government policy of discrimination against their community.
About 150 Kurds took part in the protest, carrying signs saying "Lift off the embargo on Kurdish culture and language." An Agence France-Presse correspondent at the scene said that the Kurdish Yakiti party, which led the protest, called on the government to "remove barriers imposed on the Kurdish language and culture and recognize the existence of the Kurdish nationality within the unity of the country."
----
Day of Protests for Peace
A Lifetime of Demonstrations
By Riley Yates,
Newsday WASHINGTON BUREAU
December 11, 2002
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-uspeac113041114dec11,0,307029.story?coll=ny-nynews-headlines
Washington - Shivering in a snow-laden downtown park yesterday, 97-year-old Louise Franklin-Ramirez held a sign she first made for a protest in 1961 that reads "No, No Bombs."
Having attended her first anti-war protest in 1917, Franklin-Ramirez was one of many seniors in a group of about 150 demonstrators at an anti-war rally organized by several church groups. "She doesn't remember things very well, but she can still get arrested," said her husband, John Steinbach, who pushed her wheelchair.
As '60s folk music played and speakers quoted Catholic activist Philip Berrigan, who died last week, many protesters, who were mostly middle-age and older, said to be successful, the anti-war movement needs support from students at colleges and universities.
"A lot of the peace movement cut their teeth during the Vietnam War," Steinbach said. "They are the peace veterans, but I would not discount the campuses."
But rallying students against a prospective war with Iraq may be difficult, some protesters said.
"I think building a solid coalition is going to be a lot of work," said Corky Bryant, a professor at Columbia University who lives in Washington. One problem stems from the lack of a national leader for the movement, Bryant said. Another is that today's activists are unable to draw mass support from discontent over other issues, as Vietnam War protesters did with the civil-rights movement, she said.
Others at the rally were more hopeful, citing their "pre-emptive strike" against the war and saying they have more support than in the early years of Vietnam.
"We're having demonstrations before the war even starts," said Frank Collins, 91, who taught physics for 27 years at what is now Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. "[Initially] in the Vietnam War, if you protested you were labeled a communist. Walking around this spot, I seem to get more smiles than sneers."
But a war with Iraq is currently supported by most people, according to polls, and is unlikely to be nearly as costly or as drawn out as the Vietnam War.
In an effort to get the anti-war message to the masses, small-scale protests have sprung up on college campuses throughout the country, and an Oct. 26 march here drew more than 100,000 demonstrators.
Protesters yesterday said those early rallies were partly responsible for President George W. Bush seeking United Nations approval before taking action against Iraq, stepping away from his administration's earlier endorsement of a unilateral strike.
Nationwide yesterday, the group United for Peace counted more than 120 planned vigils, acts of civil disobedience and marches in 37 states. The mostly small events resulted in more than 100 total arrests.
----
Priests, peace activists attend Berrigan's funeral
December 11, 2002
Associated Press
http://www.waff.com/Global/story.asp?S=1042466
Baltimore-AP -- Hundreds of mourners carried puppets, signs and roses in today's funeral procession for Philip Berrigan. He was the patriarch of the Roman Catholic anti-war movement in the U-S.
His plain wooden coffin, hand painted with red roses, was carried by a pickup truck through the rough Baltimore neighborhood where he once served as a priest.
Bagpipers played "Amazing Grace" and Buddhist monks chanted and beat drums.
Among those in the procession was actor and activist Martin Sheen, who called Berrigan "heroic and committed" -- and said he was an inspiration and a mentor to him and others....
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The Radical Faith of Philip Berrigan
By MURRAY POLNER and JIM O'GRADY,
December 11, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/opinion/11POLN.html?ex=1040187600&en=eb4504f616f28198&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
It is one of the most striking photographs of the Vietnam War era, and it happened because of Philip Berrigan.
On the ground, wire baskets stuffed with draft notices are on fire, the flames appearing to lick the knees of a pair of Catholic priests who stand behind them. It is May 1968 and the priests are the brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan. They wear black with Roman collars and stand in a pose of benediction.
They have taken the files from an office of the Selective Service board that is sending young men to fight in Southeast Asia. They have soaked the papers in homemade napalm, which burns well. With seven others, they came to Catonsville, Md., to perform this act of civil disobedience: the first mass burning of draft files.
The group conducted its business in plain sight. The photo, taken by a news photographer who was tipped off beforehand, appeared on front pages around the world.
Some saw the act as a stroke of moral boldness, an authoritative rebuke to an unjust war and the draft that made it possible. Others criticized it as the nihilistic politics of guilt and martyrdom.
Certainly, we have had reason of late to fear those who would place their religious beliefs above the prerogatives of the state. But there is an instructive difference between what Philip Berrigan did in 1968, and continued to do until shortly before his death from cancer last week, and the fanatical acts of those who would claim to be agents of God's will.
Philip Berrigan, very simply, shunned violence. This is not as easy as it sounds. Many radicals, from the abolitionist John Brown to anti-abortion assassins, have used violence as a means to achieving their version of righteous ends. As a pacifist, Berrigan never did. He survived a Depression era boyhood, served as an artilleryman and officer in World War II, then followed his brother Daniel into the priesthood.
He spoke out early against segregation in the South from pulpits in Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, protested the Vietnam War before many could find that country on a map and raised a long and persistent alarm against nuclear weapons.
In 1980, after he had left the priesthood, he devised another new form of protest. With seven others, he entered a nuclear weapons facility and hammered and threw blood on missile parts. He called such protests "Plowshares actions," after the biblical injunction to turn swords into plowshares. He committed six of these actions himself and inspired dozens of others around the country.
He spent 11 of the last 31 years of his life in prison. But he could take the weight, as longtime inmates say.
In the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he believed that suffering for one's beliefs was the best way to disarm enemies. This is extremely idealistic but disciplined, too - a discipline formed by faith even though he could be critical of the church. A student once asked him why he was still a Catholic. He replied: "Where else can I go? My roots are in the church, in Thomas à Becket, the Christian martyrs of Rome, Thomas More."
A few years ago, he admitted that "even sympathizers thought Plowshares actions look ridiculous now, a sermon to the converted, ignored by government and the media, the public no longer listening."
All true. On the other hand, Philip Berrigan has left an unusual legacy of a radical who kept absolute faith with nonviolence. It's there in the photo. And in the life.
Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady are authors of ``Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.''
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Remembering Phil Berrigan
Alexander Cockburn
Creators Syndicate
12.11.02
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=14216
Phil Berrigan died at Jonah House, the community in Baltimore he co-founded in 1973, surrounded by family and friends. For 40 years he campaigned against war and violence, most of all against nuclear weapons.
Challenge America's weapons of mass destruction and its nuclear palaces, and the state locks you up. Phil Berrigan spent about 11 years in prison in the cause of peace and disarmament.
Berrigan wrote a final statement in the days before his death, reciting it to those surrounding his bed till he choked on the liquid in his lungs. "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family and the earth itself."
Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus told the crowd in the Sermon on the Mount, and lo, Ronald Reagan named the MX nuclear missile the "Peacemaker."
The Berrigans and their brave comrades shed their blood on a nuclear warhead being manufactured at the GE plant in King of Prussia, Pa., recalling the blood that Jesus shed for sinful humanity, and lo, they named a ballistic missile "platform" U.S.S. City of Corpus Christi, Texas, the city of the body of Christ, and they probably knew not what they did, aside from honoring the home port of some Texan pork dispenser on Capitol Hill.
The word from Jonah House is that those who mourn for Berrigan and wish to honor his memory may make donations in Berrigan's name to Citizens for Peace in Space, Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons, Nukewatch, Voices in the Wilderness, the Nuclear Resister or any Catholic Worker house.
Philip Berrigan was born in 1923 in the Minnesota Iron Range, near Bemidji, MN, maybe a hundred miles west of the birthplace of Bob Dylan, the man who wrote "The Masters of War." He was the first priest to ride in a Civil Rights movement Freedom Ride.
In 1967, he poured blood on draft files in Baltimore with three others, known as the "Baltimore Four." A year later, he burned draft files in Catonsville, MD, with eight others, including his brother, Friar Daniel Berrigan. That action was known as the "Catonsville Nine." He was convicted of destruction of U.S. property, destruction of Selective Service records and interference with the Selective Service Act of 1967.
In Sept. 9, 1980, he poured blood and hammered with seven others on Mark 12A warheads at a GE nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, PA. He was charged with conspiracy, burglary and criminal mischief; convicted and imprisoned. The action became known as the "Plowshares Eight," and it began the international Plowshares movement. He participated in five more Plowshares actions, resulting in seven years of imprisonment.
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15 Berber Protesters Arrested in Algeria
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/africa/11ALGE.html
ALGIERS, Dec. 10 - The Algerian police arrested 15 Berber militants today for demonstrating in the capital over grievances that have been simmering since riots last year.
Witnesses and security officials said the anti-riot police and plainclothes police officers detained the 15 Berbers, who were among a small group of protesters marching toward the United Nations office in defiance of a government ban on street protests.
The demonstrators chanted antigovernment slogans and demanded the release of scores of Berber militants who have been arrested during numerous street protests in the Berber-speaking region of Kabylia in recent months.
Police officials were not immediately available to say if they would charge the arrested militants or release them later, as they have done in the past in similar circumstances.
-----
Cuban Dissidents Gather as Police Look On
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/international/americas/11CUBA.html
HAVANA, Dec. 10 - Opponents of Cuba's Communist government held meetings today to mark International Human Rights Day, saying it was the first time dissidents had gathered simultaneously across the island.
"We have won this space with years of jail," Martha Beatriz Roque, an economist, told about 70 opposition members meeting in her home in Havana as security agents watched from a street corner.
Ms. Roque said the fact that the police had allowed the meeting to take place was a sign that President Fidel Castro, in power since a 1959 revolution, was feeling international pressure to improve human rights in his one-party state.
Similar meetings were being held at the same time in all 14 provinces of Cuba, said Ms. Roque, who spent three years in prison for criticizing the Castro government.
"We have achieved our main aim today, which was to meet," said Ms. Roque, who leads the Assembly to Promote Civil Society, an umbrella organization of 300 small rights and dissident groups preparing for a transition to democracy in a post-Castro Cuba. "This was a victory."
The meeting was attended by an American diplomatic official, Gonzalo Gallegos, a public affairs officer, but European and Latin American diplomats invited to the event did not show up.
Mr. Gallegos called for the release of Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet, a dissident who was arrested on Friday for trying to convene a human rights discussion group.
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DISSENT
Protests Held Across the Country to Oppose War in Iraq
December 11, 2002
New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/national/11PROT.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - From a morning blockade of a federal building in Chicago to a lunchtime march to the White House to an evening discussion at a Y.W.C.A. in Detroit, a cross-section of activists, celebrities and everyday Americans held more than 150 events across the country today to oppose a war with Iraq.
Organized by a coalition of more than 70 groups called United for Peace, the events ranged in attendance from several dozen at Youngstown, Ohio, and Mineola, N.Y., to several hundred in Santa Fe, N.M., and Oakland, Calif.
Organizers and participants said the diverse turnout represented a growing wave of popular dissent, even as the country inches closer to military action.
The scattered displays of dissent did not compare to the large turnout at a national protest held in Washington in late October, which attracted more than 100,000 people from around the nation.
But organizers said size was not their intent this time. Instead, by fanning out to small towns, neighborhood squares and workday traffic areas, they said they hoped to emphasize a growing wave of skepticism and dissent to war.
"We want you to hear us, Mr. President," Damu Smith, director of Black Voices for Peace, one of the coordinating groups, said as he stood with a midday crowd of several hundred in Washington. "We hope you hear our voices today."
The hundreds of speeches given nationwide included tributes to Philip F. Berrigan, a former Roman Catholic priest and anti-Vietnam war organizer who died last week, and salutes to President Jimmy Carter, who was being presented the Nobel Peace Prize as some of the events took place.
The day of protests, Mr. Smith said, represent a new phase in coalition building around the anti-war movement, and several more events are scheduled in the weeks and months ahead.
In Los Angeles, a group of celebrities including the actors Martin Sheen, Hector Elizondo and Tony Shalhoub turned out to add high-profile support to the movement. More than 100 entertainers have signed a letter to President Bush appealing for a diplomatic rather than a military response in Iraq.
"It's time to stand up and declare ourselves as patriots concerned for our country," Mr. Elizondo said.
The celebrity group is part of a larger coalition called Win Without War that will officially begin on Wednesday. Backed by national religious and civic organizations, including the National Council of Churches, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Organization for Women and the Sierra Club, organizers said the group's purpose was to emphasize what they called a mainstreaming of the antiwar movement.
"We are patriotic Americans who share President Bush's belief that Saddam Hussein's Iraq cannot be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction," reads the coalition's political mission statement. "We part ways with the president, however, on the issue of pre-emptive military attack against Iraq."
One of the founding organizations, MoveOn.Org., started an online signature campaign a week ago titled, "Let the Inspections Work." Within days, it gathered more than 175,000 signatures and over $300,000 in donations to buy antiwar advertisements in national media outlets.
"There is significant energy building out there," said Eli Pariser, the internet-based group's international campaign director.
The events today varied widely in tone and turnout. In New York, the police arrested 99 clergy members from a variety of faiths on charges of blocking the doors to the United Nations mission.
In Santa Fe, a children's marimba band joined junior high students, middle-aged Green Party members, Veterans for Peace and hundreds of lunchtime passers-by in singing a version of the Christmas carol "Deck the Halls."
"Peace is jolly, war is folly," sang the crowd.
On an icy playground in the Boston neighborhood Jamaica Plain, about 50 members of a group called Latinos Together Against the War came together for a puppet show, rap performance and poetry reading for peace.
Unlike some protests that are dominated by college students, these events had a significant turnout of middle-aged professionals and older people.
Louise Franklin Ramirez, 97, attended the Washington rally in her wheelchair. Margo Smith, 72, of Berkeley, Calif., joined in chants in front of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland saying, "Peace is the power of the people."
Bob Taylor, an economist for the World Bank, skipped lunch to join the march to the White House. He took his family to the Washington march in October carrying a sign that read, "Average American Family Against War With Iraq." On his way to work, Mr. Taylor said he saw a leaflet for today's rally and decided to squeeze it into his day.
"The perception out there that ordinary people are not paying attention to what's going on and are not concerned about the possibility of war is wrong," Mr. Taylor said. "Very few of my friends and colleagues support this war, even if they did not walk over to stand here today."
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Hollywood Performers Oppose War with Iraq
December 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-people-iraq-celebrities.html
HOLLYWOOD (Reuters) - Joining more than 100 celebrities on Tuesday in speaking out against a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, TV president Martin Sheen had some advice for America's real-life commander-in-chief: give peace a chance.
Sheen, who stars as President Bartlett on NBC's hit political drama ``The West Wing,'' did much of the talking at a Hollywood news conference to release an open letter from a new group called Artists United to Win Without War.
``I've always believed that war is a reflection of despair, and I refused to accept despair,'' said Sheen, one of more than 100 stars who signed the letter. ``We are the daughters and sons of God, and that means we are called to be peacemakers.''
The move came as anti-war protesters staged small demonstrations across United States criticizing American military posturing toward Iraq in coordinated marches, speeches and acts of civil disobedience.
Sheen, long active in the peace movement and various social cause, was perhaps the best known of about 30 celebrities who turned out for the news conference. Other signatories include actors Kim Basinger, Laurence Fishburne, David Duchovny, Mia Farrow, Helen Hunt and such recording artists as David Matthews, Bonnie Raitt and Michael Stipe.
Sheen said he believed President Bush and his administration ``made up their minds a long time ago that they're going to have this war.''
Asked what he thought would motivate Bush to go to war if Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Sheen said, ``I think he'd like to hand his father Saddam Hussein's head and win his approval for what happened after the 1991 Gulf War.''
The senior Bush during his tenure as president led the coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in the Gulf War -- but that war stopped short of removing Saddam from power.
Also signing the letter were retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Edward Peck, and a handful of other military and diplomatic experts.
The group was co-founded by actor Mike Farrell, who starred in the CBS TV military satire ``M+A+S+H.''
SUPPORTS WEAPONS INSPECTIONS
``We support rigorous U.N. weapons inspections to assure Iraq's effective disarmament,'' Farrell said, reading from the letter. ``However, a preemptive military invasion of Iraq will ... increase human suffering, arouse animosity toward our country, increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks, damage the economy and undermine our moral standing in the world. It will make us less, not more, secure.''
The letter, which Farrell said he hoped to get published in one or two major newspapers, came as peace activists around the country staged anti-war marches and rallies coinciding with International Human Rights Day.
Carroll, who once served as director of U.S. military operations for U.S. forces in Europe and the Middle East, accused Bush of exaggerating the menace posed by Iraq and putting the country on a war footing.
He warned that by gearing up U.S. forces for a possible Iraqi invasion, Bush ran the risk of making military conflict inevitable, even if Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein complies with U.N. demands to disarm.
``This has a life of its own, a momentum of its own,'' Carroll said. ``For God's sake, let's take 'yes' for an answer and stand down from this march to war.''
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday Iraq's weapons declaration to the United Nations should not be prejudged, and it could take weeks to reach conclusions about the 12,000 pages of documents.
Iraq handed over the voluminous declaration on its nuclear, biological and chemical programs to the U.N. at the weekend, saying it proved that Baghdad had no prohibited weapons.
But U.S. officials say there is substantial evidence, including some not made public, that Iraq has retained and accelerated banned weapons programs. President Bush has vowed to lead an international coalition to disarm Iraq by force, if necessary.
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Iraq War Opponents Hold Small Rallies Across U.S.
December 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa-protest.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Anti-war demonstrators rallied across the United States Tuesday, with protests against a possible attack on Iraq ranging from a letter from Hollywood celebrities to a pot-banging march to the White House and coordinated demonstrations that led to scores of arrests.
The protests were some of the most widespread demonstrations against the ongoing U.S. military buildup around Iraq, with organizers holding events in about 120 towns and cities to coincide with International Human Rights Day.
But with polls showing most Americans support President Bush's threat to use force to disarm the Gulf nation, anti-war rallies today are much different from the large, passionate protests during the Vietnam years. And Tuesday's small, scattered demonstrations seemed to reflect a fragmented opposition that has attracted little media attention.
The biggest events drew a few hundred protesters. Organizers -- a range of religious, academic, business, women's and rights groups -- said they had not expected mass turnouts.
In Los Angeles, former ``M+A+S+H'' star Mike Farrell and Martin Sheen, who plays the U.S. president on NBC's ``The West Wing,'' released a letter signed by more than 100 Hollywood celebrities urging the Bush administration to avoid war.
Sheen said he believed America's mobilization for a possible war was driven by Bush's desire to ``hand his father (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein's head.'' Former President George Bush was commander-in-chief during the 1991 Gulf War when victorious U.S. troops stopped short of ousting Saddam.
``I believe they made up their minds a long time ago that they're going to have this war, and that's it,'' he said.
HIGH-PROFILE ARRESTS
In New York, dozens of people were arrested near the United Nations, including Daniel Ellsberg -- a prominent anti-war activist who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 -- as well as Ben Cohen, ice cream pioneer and co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.
Over 200 people, some carrying signs that read ``Money for schools, not war'' and ``No blood for oil,'' showed up in a park across the street from the U.N. headquarters.
Police arrested demonstrators after they left the park and marched to the nearby U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
There were at least 20 arrests in Chicago and six more in Washington as protesters blocked entry to official buildings.
Bush has said the United States will go to war against Baghdad unless it complies with tough U.N. demands to dismantle any programs to make chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Saddam denies having any such weapons and has agreed to inspections by U.N. experts, now under way.
In October, in the biggest U.S. anti-war demonstration so far, coordinated protests in Washington and San Francisco drew tens of thousands of people. But peace demonstrations here have been small compared to those abroad, where hundreds of thousands have protested in Paris, London and Rome.
Tuesday, a few hundred mainly middle-aged people marched across Washington to the White House, banging pots and pans and holding placards with slogans such as ``mother for peace.''
``I really think this anti-war movement has slowed down the war machine. Now we've got to ramp it up. Public opinion is the only buffer keeping us from going to war,'' said Medea Benjamin, a member of the Women's Peace Vigil.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Bush welcomed peaceful protests, which he called ``a time-honored American tradition.''
``The president agrees that violence is not the answer in Iraq, and that's why he hopes Iraq will disarm,'' he said.
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Thousands Protest Oil Tanker in Spain
December 11, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Spain-Oil-Tanker.html
MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Tens of thousands of people gathered in the rain Wednesday in northwestern Spain to protest the government's handling of the Prestige oil tanker disaster.
Some 150,000 people took part in the biggest demonstration in the fishing port of Vigo, calling for resignations in the regional and central governments and demanding laws to ensure such a spill never happens again.
Earlier Wednesday the government acknowledged problems in its handling of the spill, which occurred when the Prestige broke apart and sank on Nov. 19, spilling about 5 million gallons of oil, which has fouled miles of coastline in a region heavily dependent on fishing.
About 15 million more gallons of oil, still in the Prestige when it sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, is continuing to leak, experts say.
As hundreds of volunteers cleaned beaches, Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said a shift in wind direction has made it inevitable that another wave of slicks will hit the northwestern Galician coastline shortly, further threatening one of the world's richest shellfish zones.
Rajoy said big slicks have broken into smaller ones, making it very difficult for an international flotilla of anti-pollution boats to remove them.
The 26-year-old, single-hulled Prestige sank six days after it ruptured in a storm and started leaking.
Rajoy appealed for help with the removal of oil from the surface of the sea. ``It's not possible for the big boats to pick up all this oil. We need all the available fishing boats as soon as possible to fight the spill,'' he said.
A Spanish scientific commission said on Tuesday that the Prestige is spewing 33,000 gallons a day and could continue to do so until March of 2006. The tanker is leaking oil from 14 cracks, nine in the bow and five in the stern.
Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said the spill is the country's worst ecological catastrophe. Spain had previously said the oil in the tanker would solidify because of the near-freezing temperatures on the sea floor, some 2 miles below the surface.
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