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NUCLEAR
INDIA - Missile found in Kashmir hide-out
Iraq Says Has No Banned Arms, Is Helping Inspectors
UN Arms Experts Search Nine Sites in Iraq
Russia Says No Violations in Iranian Nuclear Plans
Clinton Says His Govt Threatened to Attack N.Korea
Clinton: N. Korea Warned About Reactor
North Korea Can't Wait
The Bunker Buster
The man who gave the world the bomb
Officials See Bush Insulated From Hill Probes
Three Enemy Targets Require Three Different Strategies
Pre-emption
MILITARY
German and Spanish Navies Take on Major Role Near Horn of Africa
Rebels promise war as French mobilise
West Africa Scrambles to Save Ivory Coast from War
High - Tech Japanese Warship Sails for Indian Ocean
Reaction Is Mixed to Inoculations but People Seem Doubtful
Small elite force likely for Iraq
The long arm of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
Hopes and Fears in India Stirred by Hindu Nationalist
Scientists Hold Key To Iraqi Arms Search
Saddam given two weeks to name scientists
Meeting of Iraqi Opposition Seeks to Bar U.S. Dominance
Chechen warlord dies in jail
Shadow Warriors
Candid Cameras Cover the Bases
Bush Has Widened Authority of C.I.A. to Kill Terrorists
Senators Support CIA Anti - Terror Effort
Russian Official: Peace Corps Suspicious
Hi-tech arms 'would finish war in a week'
Harrier Deadlier To Friend Than Foe
Pentagon: No Comment on Report of Troops in N.Iraq
Bush Plans to Seek $14 Billion Hike in Defense Budget
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
A Plea to Virginia: Free the Innocent
Death Penalty Foes Gather in Chicago
U.S. Death Row Population Falling
ACTIVISTS
Protesters call for oversight of U.S. military
The Crusader [Ramsey Clark]
The Ghosts of Economic Demonstrations Haunt Italy
Thousands Protest Against HK Plans for New Law
Hong Kong Subversion Law Draws Protests
'Ordinary people' join peace protests
Sanctions don't deter students
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- india / pakistan
INDIA - Missile found in Kashmir hide-out
World Scene
December 15, 2002
Washington Times • Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021215-77897737.htm
SRINAGAR - Indian soldiers discovered a Pakistani surface-to-air missile in a suspected militant hide-out in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the first such find in 13 years, the military said yesterday.
The heat-seeking missile was found Friday in the border district of Kupwara, the Indian army said. The area is near the cease-fire line that divides the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
-------- inspections
Iraq Says Has No Banned Arms, Is Helping Inspectors
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three top Iraqi ministers insisted that Baghdad would cooperate fully with U.N. arms experts to disprove U.S. and British accusations that it still held weapons of mass destruction.
Scores of arms inspectors visited nine suspect plants on Sunday as U.S. and British planes attacked what Washington said were anti-aircraft artillery sites in a no-fly zone in southern Iraq.
Iraq said the jets had hit civilian installations and that Iraqi anti-aircraft and missile batteries had fired back.
In London, opponents of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein agreed on a political blueprint for the country's future, calling for a federal and tolerant Iraq if Saddam is ousted.
But it is not clear what support the U.S.-backed delegates have in their homeland. Saddam has dominated Iraq for 30 years and most of the delegates have been in exile for decades.
Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, meanwhile, branded President Bush a warmonger and hypocrite.
He said on the U.S. ``Fox News Sunday'' program that Bush was ``driving America to a hostile imperialist policy'' that was dangerous for both the United States and the world.
Aziz said of the arms search ``They will not find any weapons of mass destruction because, simply, we don't have them.''
In an interview with Reuters, Oil Minister Rasheed said ``The whole public opinion will see how Iraq is wise, Iraq is truthful. It has absolutely no weapons of mass destruction.''
Asked if Iraq would comply with a U.N. demand -- pushed for by the United States -- for a list of scientists associated with its weapons programs, he said ``They will try many questions. We will deal with them.''
``Iraq won't give the American administration the chance and the possibility to create such a confrontation and a crisis,'' Rasheed said.
BRITAIN ``VERY DISAPPOINTED''
British officials analyzing Iraq's lengthy dossier on its weapons programs are ``very disappointed'' at its contents, saying they think much information is missing and this could cost Iraq the chance to avoid war, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Monday.
Their view echoed remarks by U.S. officials and U.N. diplomats, who said last week the dossier appeared to fall short of the full disclosure required by the U.N. Security Council to avoid severe consequences.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix wrote to an Iraqi official on Thursday demanding the list of scientists -- as authorized by the Security Council -- by the end of the month.
Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan also said in an interview with the Qatar-based Arabic TV channel al-Jazeera that Baghdad would continue to cooperate with the inspectors. But he said Iraq doubted whether it could ward off a U.S.-led attack.
Ramadan said Iraqis were prepared to inflict great harm on American troops in the event of war and urged neighboring Arab and Muslim countries not to support an attack.
The Pentagon said on Sunday it had no information about an alleged movement of U.S. troops and equipment into northern Iraq from Turkey, reported by Turkey's NTV and Jazeera television.
Plants inspected by arms experts on Sunday included missile sites, a former nuclear research center, a chemical complex and a glass and ceramics company. They searched a dozen locations the previous day in their busiest round of inspections so far.
The inspectors returned last month after a four-year absence to check Iraq's claim that it no longer has any long-range missiles or chemical, biological or nuclear arms.
At the London conference, the final draft of a resolution hammered out by around 330 delegates representing six opposition groups recognized by the United States vowed to refuse foreign guardianship and occupation of Iraq if Saddam is toppled.
CALL FOR FEDERAL DEMOCRACY
The draft, seen by Reuters but still to be formally announced, said Iraq's new government should be a federal democracy and Islam should remain the state religion.
On the sidelines of the conference, Bush's special envoy for ``free Iraqis,'' Zalmay Khalilzad, told Reuters Television News: ``We don't want war with Iraq. We want Saddam to comply with U.N. resolutions, and freedom and liberty for the Iraqi people.''
Khalilzad was appointed Bush's ``special envoy and ambassador at large for free Iraqis'' earlier this month in a move seen as reinforcing Washington's policy of ``regime change'' in Iraq.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri complained to the United Nations about U.S. and British policing of a self-declared ``no-fly'' zone in south Iraq and demanded an end to the flights.
Washington said U.S. and British jets had attacked Iraqi air defense facilities in southern Iraq on Sunday.
Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zones, which were set up after the 1991 Gulf War to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north and Shi'ite Muslims in the south from Saddam's forces.
Meanwhile, Russia's biggest oil firm, LUKOIL, said Moscow's support for the November 8 U.N. resolution sending arms experts back to Iraq had prompted Baghdad to scrap a $3.7 billion deal to develop a huge Iraqi oilfield. The cancellation was seen as an expression of irritation with an old ally's disloyalty.
Oil Minister Rasheed told Reuters the contract had been scrapped because LUKOIL had not honored commitments, but that Iraq would consider awarding it to another Russian firm.
--------
UN Arms Experts Search Nine Sites in Iraq
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-inspectors.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Scores of U.N. arms inspectors made forays to nine suspect sites on Sunday in their quest to track down any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which Baghdad denies having.
Hiro Ueki, spokesman for the inspectors, said another 15 weapons experts arrived in Baghdad, bringing the total to 105.
Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agencyspent around two hours at the Um al-Maarekmilitary complex, once a nuclear research center, at Yusoufiyya, nine miles south of Baghdad.
Um al-Maarek, named after Iraq's term for the 1991 Gulf war, is an arm of the state Military Industrialization Commission. Iraqi officials say it produces light machinery.
``They checked cameras and tagged equipment and took samples of our production and swaps from all the departments they visited,'' the plant's director, Hussein Attiya Hammoudi, told reporters after the U.N. inspectors had left.
IAEA experts visited the company on November 30. U.N. inspectors had placed it under monitoring in the 1990s.
A chemical team from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) spent more than six hours at al- Qaqa complex, about 25 miles south of Baghdad.
Its director, Sinan Rasim Saeed, said the experts had focused on the facility's sulphuric acid concentration plant.
He said the company, which produces explosives for ammunition, was under U.N. monitoring until 1998 when the inspectors left ahead of a U.S.-British bombing blitz.
Saeed said the UNMOVIC team had asked about the company's procurement, production rate and capacity.
``They said they will come again to visit the remaining sites of the company,'' he added.
Ueki said in a statement that the UNMOVIC inspection at al- Qaqa had focused on a new production unit built since 1998.
Another UNMOVIC team went back to al-Nasr (Victory) complex in the Taji area, some 25 km (16 miles) north of Baghdad.
Components for long-range Scud missiles were once produced at the sprawling site, bombed during the Gulf War and in 1998.
Inspectors also went to the Mu'tassim missile plant in Jurf Sakhr, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad. The plant occupies the grounds of the former al-Atheer nuclear facility.
Other sites visited included a rocket propellant plant, a vaccine institute, two engineering facilities and a glass and ceramics company, the U.N. statement said.
Iraq gave the United Nations a huge dossier on its arms programs a week ago in line with a Security Council resolution threatening serious consequences if it fails to cooperate with the inspectors.
U.N. teams visited around a dozen sites on Saturday, the heaviest day of inspections since they resumed their search last month after a four-year gap.
-------- iran
Russia Says No Violations in Iranian Nuclear Plans
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-russia.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia, which is helping Iran build a nuclear power plant, said Sunday Tehran was violating no international rules by developing two other nuclear sites despite U.S. fears they could be used for military aims.
Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev was also quoted as telling Itar-Tass news agency in an interview that efforts should be made to persuade North Korea to ease its tough stand on resuming its nuclear program.
Russia has faced heavy U.S. criticism for helping Iran build a reactor at a nuclear plant at Bushehr but Rumyantsev said Moscow was proceeding with the project. He dismissed as unfounded U.S. suggestions last week that two other facilities under construction could enable Iran to produce nuclear weapons.
He told the agency Iran had never concealed its intention to build a complete nuclear cycle and the facilities ``do not violate any commitments'' the country had undertaken.
Tehran has denied U.S. assertions that the two sites near the towns of Natanz and Arak were of a type that could be used for making a nuclear weapon. It says it is determined to meet its growing demand for electricity with nuclear power.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the facilities, seen in commercial satellite photographs, had generated ``grave concerns.'' Washington has labeled Iran as part of an ``axis of evil'' bent on developing weapons of mass destruction.
But Rumyantsev was quoted as saying: ``You cannot assume anything from the published photographs.''
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had been discussing the sites with Tehran since August, with Iranian authorities agreeing to submit to IAEA monitoring.
Rumyantsev said Russia had no connection with either facility, but predicted that Washington could increase pressure on Moscow to halt its participation in the Bushehr project.
``We have no intention of doing so, as there is no proof that we are committing any violations of any sort,'' he told Tass.
Rumyantsev's press service told Tass Moscow's continued participation in the Bushehr project was contingent on Iranian assurances that all spent fuel would be returned to Russia -- a demand advanced by U.S. experts.
The press service said it was uncertain whether Russia would pursue plans to build up to five more reactors at the site.
On North Korea, which said this week it intended to restart a nuclear reactor shut down under a 1994 deal with the United States, Rumyantsev said attempts should be made to discuss the matter with Pyongyang's secretive leadership.
``North Korea has taken a specific stand, which has to be understood with efforts made to tone it down,'' he told Tass.
Russia, he said, had ceased all nuclear cooperation with Pyongyang in 1993 and had no intention of reviving it.
``If North Korea decides to seek our help, this is possible only through the IAEA,'' he told Tass.
-------- korea
Clinton Says His Govt Threatened to Attack N.Korea
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-clinton.html
ROTTERDAM (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Sunday his administration threatened North Korea with the destruction of its nuclear facilities when the Asian state was developing weapons-grade plutonium in the early 1990s.
``We were in a very intense situation with North Korea. They were planning to produce six to eight nuclear weapons per year with plutonium extracted from power plants,'' Clinton said in a speech to a security forum in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam.
``We actually drew up plans to attack North Korea and to destroy their reactors and we told them we would attack unless they ended their nuclear program.''
North Korea this month said it planned to restart a nuclear reactor that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
The plant was idled under a 1994 agreement with the United States aimed at preventing the reclusive Stalinist state from developing nuclear weapons.
Seoul described the decision as ``unacceptable'' and both the United States and South Korea have put fresh pressure on Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program.
Impoverished North Korea, which relies heavily on foreign aid to feed its people, says it needs the complex for power.
``They probably don't intend to sell these weapons but instead bargain for more aid by threats. I approve of the approach by President (George W.) Bush to work with the South Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and Russians to end this program -- but make no mistake about it, it has to be ended,'' said Clinton.
``You do not want North Korea making bombs and selling them to the highest bidder because they cannot feed themselves through the winter.''
Under the 1994 pact, North Korea agreed to freeze operations at the Soviet-era nuclear complex in exchange for heavy fuel oil and construction of two light-water reactors, less likely to yield weapons-grade fuel.
When Pyongyang told an American envoy in October that it had been pursuing a separate, clandestine uranium-enrichment program, the United States and its South Korean, Japanese and European Union allies decided to halt fuel oil shipments.
Bush has branded North Korea part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and Iran.
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Clinton: N. Korea Warned About Reactor
December 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Clinton-NKorea-Nuclear.html
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Former President Bill Clinton said Sunday he had warned North Korea in 1994 the United States would destroy its nuclear reactor unless it agreed to freeze its operations.
Now that Pyongyang has said it was reactivating its facilities, Clinton said the North Koreans must be persuaded or forced to stop the weapons program. Advertisement Click Here
``Make no mistake about it, it has to be ended,'' Clinton said. ``You do not want North Korea making bombs and selling them to the highest bidder.''
Speaking at a dinner for Dutch businessmen and public figures, Clinton said it was more likely North Korea would use the nuclear issue to bargain for more aid rather than put weapons on the market.
``We had a tense situation with North Korea in my first term,'' Clinton said. Pyongyang ``was planning six to eight'' bombs a year.
``We drew up plans to destroy the reactor,'' Clinton said, and he told Pyongyang the facility would be attacked unless it officials froze it.
Clinton urged President Bush to work with China, Japan and other nations to pressure the North Koreans on the nuclear issue.
The White House said Friday that Bush intended to stick with a diplomatic approach to the crisis and ruled out military action to shut the reactor.
Under the 1994 deal with the Clinton administration, North Korea froze its nuclear program in return for a promise of two safer light-water reactors. It also received a guarantee of 500,000 tons of heavy oil annually until the reactors are built.
Washington halted the oil shipments after U.S. officials said in October that the communist country had acknowledged having a uranium enrichment program to build atomic weapons.
North Korea said last week it will resume operation and construction of its reactors. It said it considered the agreement dead because of delays in the delivery of the reactors, initially planned to be completed by 2003. U.S. officials anticipate at least five years of delay.
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North Korea Can't Wait
December 15, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/opinion/15SUN2.html
A combination of factors makes North Korea uniquely dangerous. It has an unpredictable and untrustworthy dictator, an economy in free fall and a two-track nuclear weapons effort that appears more advanced than Iraq's. One of those tracks, a secret uranium-enrichment program, was uncovered in October. The other, built around plutonium reprocessed from spent reactor fuel, has been closed since 1994, by agreement with the United States. Now it seems about to be reopened. On Thursday, Pyongyang announced that it was immediately reactivating a sealed power reactor that could produce one to two bombs' worth of weapons-grade plutonium per year.
This development requires an energetic diplomatic response from the Bush administration. The joint declaration on Friday by Mr. Bush and South Korea's president that the North's actions are unacceptable is accurate, but not enough. Washington seems to think that it can afford the luxury of deferring the North Korean problem until it has finished disarming Iraq. It cannot.
The starting point must be diplomacy. Military action would risk a violent North Korean response that could be ruinous to South Korea. It could also endanger Japan and the 100,000 American troops currently based in northeast Asia. Diplomacy coercive enough to work is hampered by the stubborn unwillingness of most of North Korea's neighbors to consider tough sanctions. These obstacles must somehow be overcome, and there is little time to lose.
Restarting the reactor is bad enough. What would be even more alarming would be ending the current international monitoring of North Korea's spent fuel and of a nearby plutonium-reprocessing plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency is working hard to keep those monitors in place. To succeed, it must have the United States' wholehearted support.
North Korea claims that it needs the power reactor to replace electricity lost when the United States and other countries recently suspended fuel oil shipments because of the enriched-uranium deception. Sending the international monitors home and allowing plutonium reprocessing to resume would leave no doubt that nuclear weapons production was North Korea's real and only agenda.
The White House must now mobilize an all-out diplomatic effort to prevent that next step from being taken, enlisting as much help as it can get from Russia and China, the two countries with the greatest influence in Pyongyang. If North Korea is not compelled to change course and abandon both of its nuclear weapons tracks, it could soon be producing several nuclear bombs a year. It currently has long-range missiles that threaten Japan and might one day be upgraded to reach parts of the United States.
The world is a complicated place, with multiple dangers, and the United States cannot always choose to deal with them in sequential order. At best, the Iraq crisis will not be resolved for many more months. Dealing with the North Korean weapons threat cannot wait that long. The danger is too grave and immediate.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
The Bunker Buster
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By IVAR EKMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15BUNK.html
According to security experts, a lot of the prime military targets in Iraq are hidden underground -- which would make them extremely difficult to destroy. That may be why the military is so excited about the new BLU-118/B. This opaquely named weapon is a ''bunker buster'' that can plow deep into the ground before detonating. Already given a test run this year in an attack on a suspected Qaeda cave in Afghanistan, the bunker buster may become one of the key weapons in an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime.
The comparatively slim shape and the hardness of the bunker buster's skin allow it to penetrate deep into the earth -- as well as through more than six feet of reinforced concrete -- before exploding. A special fuse delays the detonation for 120 milliseconds after penetration. And the bomb has a special ''thermobaric'' payload design, allowing it to release a high-temperature ''energy burst'' (a fireball combined with a powerful shock wave) that lasts long enough to incinerate whatever is in its path. Instead of a boom, the bunker buster produces a big, underground booooooooom.
In terms of Iraq, security experts say that the bomb's special features will allow the U.S. to destroy any sites that may contain underground stocks of chemical and biological weapons. John Pike, a military analyst for the Web site Globalsecurity.org, suggests that there are potentially dozens of fortified structures below ground that shelter nerve gas, mustard gas, anthrax and maybe even smallpox.
Of course, the last thing the U.S. military wants to do is simply explode vats of anthrax and then spread it to the winds. That may be why the BLU-118/B is designed to discharge in a way that completely incinerates the material it targets. Nothing harmful is dispersed into the air -- at least in theory. One downside of the incineration approach, however, is that burning people to death is a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention. (Military spokesmen deny that the bomb would violate the convention, although they do admit that it ''provides increased lethality in confined spaces.'')
The Pentagon now has a whole family of bunker-busting bombs in different stages of development, some of which can dig deeper and produce much hotter explosions than the BLU-118/B. And some military planners are considering a truly unnerving idea: the deployment of a nuclear bunker buster.
----
The man who gave the world the bomb
Jon Else
December 15, 2002
http://c1.zedo.com/ads2/i/3861/255/167000003/0/i.html?e=i;s=11;b=;z=0.028547902076380416
At just the moment when the United States contemplates home-grown A- bombs in Iraq and communist North Korea, newly released documents have rekindled the debate over whether J. Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atomic bomb," was himself a secret Communist in the 1930s. As we dance toward war in the Middle East, we should remember how half a century ago Oppenheimer, perhaps against his better judgment, helped set in motion an arms race from which we may never escape.
Whether or not the enigmatic physicist, chosen by President Franklin Roosevelt's generals in 1942 to oversee the pioneering nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos, lied about being a member of a secret Communist cell, as reported in Gregg Herken's recent book, "The Brotherhood of the Bomb," is an intriguing question.
If true, it casts dark light on Oppenheimer's endlessly puzzling character and suggests he committed perjury by repeatedly testifying that he was not a member. But against the snarled and exhausted debates over Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, the receding Cold War, and the wreckage of lives brought low by McCarthyism and loyalty oaths, his party membership matters less in retrospect.
What mattered then, and what matters now, is the atomic bomb Oppenheimer built.
Early in World War II, high on a remote mesa at Los Alamos, he assembled what was certainly the greatest concentration of very smart people ever brought together for a single task. Many of them were brilliant young left- wing intellectuals, many had escaped Nazi occupied Europe, or like Oppenheimer, had Jewish relatives fleeing the Germans.
Their task was to build a weapon to stop Hitler's unstoppable wave of systematic murder, and they built it well. If they hadn't forged that first atomic bomb and urged that it be dropped on Japanese civilians (even after Hitler's defeat), someone else probably would have. But they are the ones who did it, and we are the ones who have lived ever since with that bomb and its ever-multiplying descendants.
Oppenheimer's Hiroshima bomb was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Pound for pound, it was the most expensive man-made object ever constructed, but it was fluff compared to the multimegaton savagery soon to be concocted by others with stronger stomachs. By 1952, Los Alamos scientists had exploded a bomb 500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb; in 1961 the Soviets exploded a 58-megaton bomb, with 3,000 times the force of the Hiroshima explosion. Edward Teller, who had argued against dropping the first bomb on a city, was by 1954 proposing a 10,000-megaton bomb . . . and by 1960 they had figured out how to mass produce little A-bombs the size of cantaloupes and were laying plans to explode a hydrogen bomb on the surface of the moon.
Since 1945, something like 100,000 nuclear bombs have been manufactured. Long ago we passed that milestone in history when it became possible to exterminate all life on Earth. That probably won't happen in our lifetimes. But if you can get together a coffee can of enriched uranium, the Hiroshima- sized bombs designed at Los Alamos are relatively cheap and easy to build -- in Iraq, in Israel, probably in Idaho or Paraguay if you're passionate and determined enough. Getting the fuel is the only really hard part.
Today, Saddam Hussein apparently dreams of building a uranium hydride bomb (designed by Teller at Los Alamos in 1941), and is apparently separating weapons-grade uranium on simple, old-fashioned machines called "Calutrons," so named for UC Berkeley, where they were designed by Ernest Lawrence in 1942 for the Manhattan Project.
In the 1950s, Oppenheimer was the most influential scientist in the U.S., but his fibs, fabrications and duplicity got him in a world of trouble. Late one night in 1979, on a gravel road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I met his friend, the French novelist Haakon Chevalier, about whom Oppenheimer had concocted a bizarre tale for Los Alamos security investigators, falsely claiming that Chevalier was part of an imagined plot to steal the secret of the atomic bomb. The fabrication ruined the unwitting Chevalier's career.
Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, may or may not have been a clandestine Communist, but Chevalier's claim that the scientist briefly belonged to a special unit of the Communist Party in Berkeley in the late '30s offers nothing we didn't already know about him. There has been absolutely no evidence that the celebrated physicist ever spied for anyone.
What also struck me in 1979 was that the CIA, the Army, the House Un- American Activities Committee, and the FBI, in 20 years of interrogating Oppenheimer and Chevalier, their families and friends, reading their mail, wiretapping their phones (and their lawyers' phones), shadowing them with agents, hauling them before tribunals, had, to the government's unending consternation, failed to confirm the information Chevalier had so casually passed on to me.
The truly astonishing intelligence failures had happened in 1943, even before the first bomb was exploded, when a real Communist spy, the English physicist Klaus Fuchs, had easily slipped detailed drawings of the bomb's plutonium core assembly out the front door of Los Alamos Labs to Stalin. Again in 1949, Fuchs, still a Soviet spy, still employed at Los Alamos, secured a classified U.S. patent on the hydrogen bomb.
Before Hiroshima, barely a handful among those thousands of people feverishly working on what they knew to be a near-genocidal weapon paused to question what unintended consequences they might set in motion with "the gadget." I fear that I myself might not have paused. But after his bombs nearly blew two entire Japanese cities off the face of the Earth (in about nine seconds each), Oppenheimer knew he could never get the genie back in the bottle.
After the war, he first supported and then opposed development of the hydrogen bomb, on moral grounds. He and many others from wartime Los Alamos spent the rest of their lives working to effect a lasting peace, to bring all nuclear weapons and all nuclear secrets under international control so that future generations -- our generations -- would not have to live under their cloud. They nearly succeeded.
Oppenheimer's political activism on the Berkeley campus in 1939 pales in significance compared with the lasting bargain that UC and other major universities first struck with big weapons research programs around that same time.
Herken's "Brotherhood" traces how the wartime urgency of secret Manhattan Project contracts signed in Berkeley's LeConte Hall in 1943 had become so routine by 1950 that President Robert Sproul and the regents unanimously authorized a classified $11 million Atomic Energy Commission contract without knowing what it was for -- construction of the first hydrogen bomb. Now, half a century later, as President Bush signs into law the largest military budget since the Cold War, UC has just renewed a five-year contract to run the weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore. Serious talk about the resumption of nuclear testing in Nevada has surfaced within the administration and the labs. Now the Bush administration is hinting at nuclear retaliation to chemical and biological terrorist attacks.
Stalinism, fascism, Maoism, liberal democracy, Islamic fundamentalism and the Bush Doctrine may ebb and flow, but we will live with atomic bombs until the end of time.
The Los Alamos scientists are almost all gone now. They were mostly humanist bomb builders, nearly all liberals, living in the miracle years of particle physics. The best and the brightest of them spoke half a dozen languages, read the classics in Greek or, like Oppenheimer, the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, and wrestled with moral demons. But they were filled with hope. They were people like you and me, only much smarter, who, in a fight against evil, designed and built the most savage weapon in history, and they did it in an effort to save civilization.
When I interviewed physicist Frank Oppenheimer, Robert's brother, who also worked on the bomb at Berkeley and Los Alamos. Frank had openly joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, then openly lied about it, and paid dearly. After refusing to name names, he was blacklisted from physics in the 1950s and forced into internal exile high in the mountains of Colorado, only to emerge as the beloved founder of San Francisco's Exploratorium, one of the finest science museums in the world.
After a long conversation about the '30s and the war years, Frank offered a final thought on the heady triumphs at Los Alamos: "So far, nothing has turned out quite the way we hoped."
Jon Else teaches at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and is the director of "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb."
-------- us politics
Officials See Bush Insulated From Hill Probes
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55615-2002Dec14?language=printer
With fellow Republicans set to run Congress and a federal court upholding his right to secrecy, President Bush over the next two years will be protected from potentially embarrassing congressional investigations into his administration, especially its relationship with big corporate donors, government officials say.
Starting next month, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) and other top Senate Democrats will lose their chairmanships and much of their power to initiate investigations of the Bush administration, subpoena key officials and hold public hearings on possible wrongdoing. As a result, Bush will likely escape close congressional scrutiny of the role his biggest corporate contributors play in shaping administration policy on environment, energy and other pro-business issues.
A Republican-appointed judge last week provided the Bush administration another layer of protection from congressional scrutiny and dealt a blow to a campaign by Democrats to reveal how energy companies helped devise the administration's comprehensive energy plan last year. The judge, John D. Bates, threw out a case brought by the head of the General Accounting Office, the investigative and auditing arm of Congress, that would have required Vice President Cheney's energy task force to release secret records of White House meetings with industry officials. Now, Bush is in a strong position to keep secret potentially embarrassing details of conversations between his staff and energy industry officials trying to influence their decisions.
More broadly, the court ruling will have a chilling effect on efforts by Democrats to use the GAO to monitor the executive branch. If the courts refuse to compel White House officials to comply with GAO requests for information, they'll have little reason to cooperate, Democrats say.
Unless the ruling is reversed, "Bush and Cheney can operate in complete secrecy with no oversight by Congress," says Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee.
In another move that could help shield Bush from scrutiny, Government Reform Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who irritated some Republicans with his willingness to challenge the Bush White House over FBI abuses and its penchant for secrecy, will be stepping down. While Democrats feel that Burton gave Bush a free pass, especially compared with his hounding of President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, GOP leaders want Burton's successor, who has yet to be named, to focus less on potential wrongdoing in the administration and more on downsizing government, GOP leadership aides say.
"Under unified party control," says Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution, "there tends to be a lessening of the police patrolling that has had some significant breakthroughs" in rooting out malfeasance. "That's the nature of the beast." Light, a former congressional aide specializing in government oversight, is an expert on the federal bureaucracy.
A weaker checks and balances system could strengthen Bush's hand heading into his expected campaign for reelection in 2004. Polls show Bush is vulnerable to attacks that his policies are influenced too heavily by corporations and big donors. The fewer investigations and public hearings on this matter, the better, as far as Republicans are concerned.
A senior GOP leadership aide said House Republicans plan to wield their oversight power by looking into ways to privatize and downsize government programs. This will keep the focus on ideas backed by the White House and congressional leaders, not on money and politics, the aide said.
This isn't how the framers of the Constitution envisioned the systems of checks and balances, critics say. The framers wanted Congress to keep a close eye on the inner workings of the executive branch to guard against abuse and wrongdoing. Congress does this through general oversight, hearings at which White House and administration officials are called to testify publicly, and full-blown investigations. Yet, when the president's party controls the House and Senate, he usually gets friendly treatment.
To be sure, the Senate has its share of maverick Republicans. Incoming Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman John McCain (Ariz.) and Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) have histories of holding the president's feet to the fire.
But Democrats worry potential transgressions will go unnoticed. The oversight process -- while sometimes abused by partisans to embarrass presidents -- has uncovered abuses of power ranging from campaign finance scandals in the Clinton administration to defense procurement scams in the 1980s. The Bush administration, led by Cheney, has waged a war to reverse what it sees as an erosion of the power of the presidency over the past 30 years. Starting in the 1970s, Cheney contends, Congress responded to Watergate and Vietnam by passing laws to provide the legislative branch greater authority over the president. Since then, Congress has been increasingly aggressive about demanding everything from e-mail messages to secret documents from the White House, with some success.
Bush has pushed back. He refused to disclose details to the GAO and lawmakers about Cheney's task force on new energy laws, taking its fight to the courts. He refused to allow homeland security director Tom Ridge to testify before Congress about anti-terrorism planning inside the White House.
Most recently, Bush blocked a commission to investigate the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, favored by lawmakers. In the end, Bush forced a compromise allowing him to appoint the head of a new bipartisan commission, Henry A. Kissinger, a Republican. Kissinger resigned the post Friday.
After helping Republicans win back the Senate and expand their House majority, Bush is in a strong position to beat back any inquiries in the 108th Congress.
It's unlikely incoming Governmental Affairs Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) will pursue investigations of Bush's ties to energy companies and other corporations, as Lieberman was planning to do, Republican aides say. In a statement, Collins did not disclose her plans but suggested she won't back down from pressing the White House for information. "I believe that any administration should provide documents and information that Congress legitimately needs to carry out its investigative responsibilities," Collins said.
--------
Three Enemy Targets Require Three Different Strategies
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/weekinreview/15SANG.html
WASHINGTON - President Bush's diplomatic strategy for December was hardly a mystery: Focus attention on a unique threat posed by Iraq, one that could be neutralized only by disarming the country and deposing Saddam Hussein.
But last week the two other members of the "axis of evil," North Korea and Iran, suddenly created nuclear-sized distractions, raising a question the White House wants to glide past: Is the threat from Iraq the most imminent threat to America and the world?
In quick succession, the United States failed to block a shipment of North Korean missiles to Yemen, North Korea said it was resuming production of weapons-grade plutonium, and satellite photographs showed huge progress in Iran's bomb program.
"What the president may have just discovered," said Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, "is that Iraq is actually the least complicated of the three cases. And his team is going to earn its pay in the next few months figuring out the other two."
North Korea may not have Iraq's malicious intent, but it owns at least two nuclear weapons, the means to deliver them, and a huge conventional force facing South Korea, Japan and American troops in Asia.
But as a senior American official put it last month: "We are taking on Iraq because we can, without doing much damage elsewhere. We are tripping over ourselves on North Korea because there is no military option we can live with, and no diplomatic option that the White House likes."
In fact, there's been a different strategy for each point on the axis. For Iraq, it's confrontation. For Iran, it's hands off.
"If we get involved, overtly or covertly" in Iran's internal struggles between democratic reformists and hard-liners, a senior aide to Mr. Bush said, "we'll only be hurting our own interests."
In North Korea, the administration has followed a boa-constrictor strategy ever since North Korea admitted in October that it has secretly been working to develop a weapon from highly enriched uranium. Last month, the administration organized its allies to put a slow squeeze on the North Korean economy by cutting off the oil that was supposed to compensate for an agreement to stay away from nuclear power.
Unlike Iraq, argues Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, North Korea has no oil revenue, making it vulnerable to economic pressure. And unlike Iran, she notes, it has no indigenous democracy movement to encourage.
"This time around, the economic carrot and stick will be much more effective," said Han Sung Joo, a former South Korean foreign minister. "The North is more dependent on us than it was during the last nuclear crisis," in 1994.
That contention may one day prove true, but so far North Korea has been defiant. On Thursday, it said it was switching on the nuclear reactor that was shut down under the 1994 agreement, which can produce enough plutonium to make a few nuclear weapons a year. The White House described the North Korean decision as "regrettable."
The White House has been even more restrained in how it describes allies that help feed North Korea's nuclear habit.
When American spy satellites detected a Pakistani plane picking up North Korean missiles in July, there was no public criticism, even though the C.I.A. has said North Korea's missile sales pay for its nuclear program. "It's another piece of evidence," one American diplomat said, "that Pakistan may be our biggest problem."
When the same satellites warned that a North Korean freighter loaded with hidden Scud missiles was headed for the Middle East, the United States arranged for Spain to stop the ship last week. The ship was turned over to American forces - until it turned out that the buyer was Yemen, a new American ally. The Yemenis called Vice President Dick Cheney and the cargo was delivered.
The next day, commercial satellite photographs of Iran's newest nuclear sites were broadcast around the world. Again the White House was silent.
So what happened to Mr. Bush's declaration that when it comes to fighting terror, and keeping the world's worst weapons out of the hands of the world's worst dictators, nations are "with us or against us"?
It is one of those phrases, administration officials say, that remain a fine statement of national goals. "The execution, however," one senior official concedes, "is a little bit trickier."
--------
Pre-emption
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By BILL KELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15PREE.html
In a world where shadowy enemies can create havoc without warning, the lone remaining superpower is obliged to strike first wherever danger breeds. That is this year's bold new idea in grand strategy, the offspring of America's seemingly insurmountable military superiority and the heightened sense of danger after Sept. 11. The United States, the argument goes, cannot afford to let an adversary land the first punch, or even start his windup, when that punch could let loose a nuclear, chemical or biological horror.
Depending on which analyst you ask, this represents either a radical departure from, or an overdue updating of, the two mainstream schools of American strategy that have jostled for primacy since World War II. One is liberal internationalism, which has the United States promoting democracy and open markets through global organizations. The other is balance-of-power realism, the great Kissingerian chess game that succeeded in containing Soviet Communism. But how do you contain an enemy with no known address, or deter a foe that celebrates suicide?
The pre-emptive strike is not, of course, a novelty in warfare. Sir Francis Drake struck the Spanish Armada at anchor, and Israel stole a jump on its Arab neighbors in the Six Day War. Nor, as the writer Max Boot has pointed out, is it an altogether new thing for America. Woodrow Wilson's occupation of Haiti in 1915, Lyndon Johnson's dispatch of Marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983 are just a few of the pre-emptive interventions launched to protect American dominance in this hemisphere. Boot even counts Vietnam as essentially an instance of America playing pre-emptive globocop. None of these examples are universally regarded as a proud moment in American history, though. And in any case, while pre-emption has been an occasional fact of life, no president has so explicitly elevated the practice to a doctrine. Previous American leaders preferred to fabricate pretexts -- the sinking of the Maine, the ostensible attacks on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin -- rather than admit they were going in unprovoked.
President Bush changed that in June in a speech at West Point, when he declared, ''We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.'' In September, this thinking was formalized in a document called ''The National Security Strategy of the United States'': ''The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction -- and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack.''
Iraq looms as the first full-scale demonstration of the doctrine, but we already operate with less regard for the conventions of war than in the past. When the C.I.A. summarily executed a carload of Al Qaeda suspects in the desert of Yemen in November, there was scarcely a squeak of domestic protest about the absence of evidence or the transgression of sovereignty.
Sticklers point out that what the administration advocates is not technically ''pre-emption,'' which implies a demonstrably imminent attack, but ''prevention,'' which is held in even lower regard by just-war theologians, since it is divorced from a clearly impending danger. In the new thinking, that distinction is blurred by the fact that when nuclear weapons, nerve gas and smallpox are introduced into the equation, ''imminent'' may be too late. Thus the threat need not be at hand to justify action; the threat need not even be established. In Donald Rumsfeld's Zen-like formulation, ''absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,'' meaning a reasonable probability that an adversary is amassing the most hideous weapons may justify an armed pre-emption.
Some critics see this scorn for evidence as part of a broader disdain for the niceties of law, exemplified by preventive detentions of possible terror suspects. What, besides a few technological
refinements, separates us from the world of Spielberg's ''Minority Report,'' in which future criminals are pre-emptively arrested for crimes foreseen by psychic ''precogs''?
The administration describes pre-emption as something to employ in extremis, not as a first resort. Many critics, however, see it as a doctrinal accessory to a more unilateral, even imperial, foreign policy, with real dangers. One obvious risk is that we would lose the world's good will when we really need it -- for law enforcement, trade, nonproliferation, peacekeeping or rebuilding places we have, um, pre-empted. Another fear is that others would follow our example and take up pre-emption as a way of dealing with their problems. The Bush doctrine -- or at least the rhetoric -- has
already been appropriated by Russia against Georgia, by India against Pakistan. If everyone embraces our new doctrine, a messy world may become a lot messier. Caveat pre-emptor.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
German and Spanish Navies Take on Major Role Near Horn of Africa
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/europe/15SHIP.html
The mission began when two Spanish warships were ordered to intercept a cargo vessel in the Indian Ocean. After concluding that the ship was trying to get away, a Spanish helicopter zoomed to the scene so Spanish commandos could slide down a rope to the deck.
The discovery of a hold full of North Korean missiles was not the only noteworthy development of the operation early last week. It was also striking because of who carried it out: an antiterrorist naval task force under European command.
American commentators have often criticized European nations for not pulling their weight on defense. But there is no question whose navies have the main role in the waters near the Horn of Africa.
Rear Adm. Juan A. Moreno is the Spanish officer who commands Task Force 150, an eight-ship flotilla that is charged with searching for operatives of Al Qaeda and terrorist contraband. The Spanish recently took command from the Germans, who are still an important part of the task force. Only one ship in the flotilla is American.
A recent visit to the Spanish and German ships in the task force during their patrols off the coast of Africa offers an unusual look at an often-overlooked mission, one that few Americans are aware of but represents a major commitment of Europe's military resources.
The Spanish and German ships operate far from home, performing missions that were all but unthinkable just a few years ago.
"For 90 percent of my crew, this was the first time they have gone through the Suez Canal," said Gonzalo Rodriguez, the commanding officer of the Navarra, who allowed that he was one of the newly initiated.
The counterterrorism mission is logistically demanding for European navies unaccustomed to the kind of power projection that is the core mission for the United States Navy. But it is a prestigious task and a career enhancing assignment for Spanish and German naval officers.
Task Force 150 was established about a year ago. The concern was that Qaeda fighters would flee Afghanistan and try to hide in Somalia and other lawless regions of Africa. The flotilla's mission was to monitor the maritime traffic in the region, safeguard the sea lanes and, if necessary, board and capture terrorists - a mission the United States Central Command calls "leadership interdiction."
Germany was initially given command. The smallest of Germany's military services, the navy's cold war mission was to bottle up the Soviet Baltic fleet and protect the sea lanes in the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea. Germany dedicated several frigates to the new mission near the Horn of Africa, a major commitment for a navy that only has 15 frigates.
Currently, about 1,200 Germans serve in the task force and supporting operations, like the long-range patrol aircraft the Germans fly from Mombasa, Kenya. They are part of the approximately 8,600 German troops deployed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan and other locations.
The vast majority of the troops are deployed on peacekeeping missions, and Germany is scheduled to take over joint command of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. Germany, in fact, currently has more troops deployed on foreign missions than Britain, the United States' closest military ally.
Chancellor Gerard Schröder rankled the Bush administration during his successful campaign for re-election by deriding American plans for a possible war to topple Saddam Hussein. By deterring terrorist attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, however, Task Force 150 is safeguarding the waterways the United States is using to build up its force in the Persian Gulf.
"That is not our mission, really, but it does certainly have this effect," Rear Adm. Rolf Schmitz said in an interview on the Brandenburg, a spick-and-span warship that seems the very model of efficiency. "We are stabilizing the area, and that probably is an advantage for your forces as well," he added, referring to American forces.
When it came time for Germany to give up command, the Spanish lobbied Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the United States Central Command, for the role. "This is the way for the Spanish to try to demonstrate their support for the war on terrorism," said Admiral Morena, the commander of Task Force 150.
It is not the only case in which the United States allies play a crucial role. Australia has command of the Persian Gulf naval force that is enforcing the United Nations embargo on Iraq.
Before its current mission as the command ship for Task Force 150, the Navarra may have been best known for its role in the summer standoff between Spain and Morocco over Perejil, a tiny island that was briefly occupied by Moroccan troops. Its sister ship, the Patino, is a supply ship that holds more than 6,000 gallons of fuel to resupply allied vessels, including American ships. The Patino also has a small hospital as well as a detachment of Spanish commandos.
The task force reports to Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the commander of the United States Fifth Fleet and the senior naval officer in the Middle East, headquartered in Bahrain. But the Spanish cannot board a suspicious ship without also obtaining permission from the Spanish government.
The atmosphere on the Spanish ships is more relaxed than on a United States Navy ship. Spanish officers are allowed to smoke on the bridge. The crew is allowed to wear shorts, a practice strictly forbidden by the more rule-bound Americans.
At night, the Spanish keep the crew occupied by giving classes in mathematics and even Flamenco dancing. The Spanish insist they need to maintain a balance to maintain morale on the high seas and, unlike the Americans, do not rely on a steady stream of action films to entertain their crew.
"We need to take care of people," Commander Rodriguez said. "They are not used to a long deployment. The most important thing is the mission, but we need to keep a balance."
The Spanish crew is allowed to drink wine or beer with meals. When the Patino refueled the Brandenburg, the two captains used a line between the vessels to exchange bottles of Spanish and German wine. The Americans, in contrast, strictly forbid the consumption of alcohol at sea, except for the two beers American crew members are allowed after a 45-day continuous stretch of sea duty.
No one doubts the Spanish professionalism. So far, the task force has not found any Qaeda operatives or impounded any terrorist weapons. But last week, the Spanish swung into action. After being ordered to intercept a cargo ship suspected of carrying Scud missiles, the Navarra and the Patino steamed toward the scene. The intercept was set for Monday at dawn about 600 miles east of the Horn of Africa.
The Spanish ship's initial plan was to lower small, inflatable boats to approach the cargo vessels, a standard practice for conducting intercepts at sea. But the captain of the cargo ship radioed that he was carrying cement and tried to get away, the Spanish say.
The Spanish fired warning shots. There were three bursts of machine-gun fire: one burst 200 yards off the bow, another 100 yards off the bow and then a final burst over the bow itself. Then a helicopter full of Spanish Special Forces from the Patino prepared to fly to the scene.
Spanish sharpshooters on the Navarra shot out the wire cables on the cargo so that they would not interfere with the helicopter, and seven Spanish commandos slid to the deck of the cargo ship on ropes.
After the Spanish discovered 15 Scuds from North Korea and missile warheads hidden under a cache of cement a team of American explosive experts arrived from the Tortuga, an American amphibious ship in the region. After the Bush administration discovered that the North Korean Scuds were intended for Yemen, it decided to let the cargo proceed. The ship went on and landed in Yemen yesterday. The United States depends on Yemen's cooperation to search for Qaeda cells in that country.
The American action mystified the Spanish, who seem to feel the Americans had a failure of nerve.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo wrote that the Spanish Navy had been charged with doing Washington's "dirty work" and that it had to endure a "sense of ridicule of the police officer who arrests a criminal only to see the judge release him through the back door."
The Spanish say Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz called Madrid to apologize for the mixed signals. A Pentagon official denied this, saying that Mr. Wolfowitz merely apologized for the fact that reports of the seizure came out of Washington before the Spanish authorities could announce them.
Politics aside, United States Navy officers say they are very pleased with their European counterparts. "The Spanish did an astounding job of execution," a Navy officer said.
----
Rebels promise war as French mobilise an 'occupying force' into former colony
From Alistair Thomson in Abijan,
December 15, 2002
Sunday UK Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/29988
France began flying hundreds more troops into war-torn Ivory Coast this weekend, building up its biggest intervention force in a former colony in Africa since the 1980s.
The main rebel group in the west African country has accused Paris of sending an occupying force and said it would respond with war.
France has some 1500 soldiers monitoring a shaky ceasefire between the government and rebels who seized the north of the country in an uprising in September. But after fighting by two new rebel groups in the west thrust the once-stable Ivory Coast closer to the anarchy that has engulfed nearby nations in West Africa, France said it would step up its efforts to restore stability to its former colony.
French military spokesman Ange-Antoine Leccia said the first of several hundred extra troops would fly in this weekend. 'Today it is just the first company -- the others will arrive over the next 10 days,' he said, adding that soldiers and arms would arrive by sea and air.
France, which initially deployed troops to protect thousands of its citizens in Ivory Coast, invited the rebel Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI) to peace talks in Paris, provided it proved its political credentials.
The French deployment is the biggest in Africa since 1983 when Paris sent 3000 troops to its former colony Chad to push out Libyan-backed forces.
But at talks in the Togolese capital Lome, the rebels' chief negotiator told France to get out or face war.
'The French force in Ivory Coast is deviating from its mission and becoming a true force of occupation. In light of this, the MPCI will fight and its forces are ready to take up the challenge of war,' said its spokesman Guillaume Soro.
Leccia declined to respond to Soro's threat. 'These are political comments -- we have no response to make to them.'
West African leaders plan a summit in Togo to chart a way out of the deepening war in which hundreds have died and hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes. The country was once haven to the troubled region's refugees.
UN agencies said they were preparing for a possible refugee crisis in the world's top cocoa grower, where attacks by the two new rebel factions in the west, backed by Liberian fighters, have thrown peace efforts into confusion.
Assistant UN High Commissioner for Refugees Kamel Morjane said he was looking at ways to move thousands of refugees from a camp in the volatile western region near the Liberian border.
'We have to be ready for any eventuality -- especially, unfortunately, the tragic ones,' he said .
----
West Africa Scrambles to Save Ivory Coast from War
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-ivorycoast.html
ABIDJAN (Reuters) - West Africa's political heavyweights meet in Togo on Monday to salvage faltering efforts to end war in Ivory Coast as former colonial ruler France rushes more troops to enforce a fragile cease-fire.
Togo's President Gnassingbe Eyadema has been hosting peace talks between Ivory Coast's main rebel faction (MPCI) and the government since the end of October but scant progress has been made and the leaders will now take stock of the negotiations.
A key economic force in Africa and a regional transport hub, Ivory Coast has been split in two since rebels captured the north after a failed coup in September.
MPCI rebels signed a cease-fire a month later but the emergence of two new rebel factions in the west has rocked the truce and forced French troops to fight them to secure an airport a fortnight ago near the town of Man.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Senegal's leader Abdoulaye Wade will join Eyadema in the northern Togolese town of Kara along with the leaders of Ghana and Gabon, an Ivory Coast government delegation and MPCI rebels, officials said.
Liberian President Charles Taylor, whose own revolt with backing from Ivory Coast's then leaders triggered Liberia's 1990s civil war, has been invited to help throw light on the hundreds of Liberian mercenaries who have reportedly flooded across the border to fight with the new rebel factions.
``Liberia is one of the countries affected by the crisis in Ivory Coast,'' said Toussaint Alain, a spokesman for Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo. ``It's perfectly logical that Mr. Taylor should come to this meeting to explain what he knows.''
The regional summit comes as France steps up the diplomatic pressure to find a peaceful solution to the three-month crisis which has left hundreds dead and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.
France, the former colonial ruler of the world's biggest cocoa grower, is keen to host a peace summit in Paris to end the crisis as soon as possible and has said it would invite many of the same people due to meet in Togo on Monday.
``With diplomatic initiatives multiplying it would be good to carry out a proper evaluation of the Lome process,'' Alain said. ``The meeting will be an assessment, to see if it can work.''
France rushed fresh Foreign Legion paratroopers into Ivory Coast on Sunday with orders to shoot anyone violating the truce as the French mission shifts from monitoring to enforcement.
The arrival of the crack troops, part of France's biggest intervention force in Africa since the 1980s, angered rebels who accuse Paris of sending an occupying army to its former colony.
More French troops and equipment were due to arrive over the coming days by sea and air, in a deployment that has enraged rebels and their sympathizers.
-------- asia
High - Tech Japanese Warship Sails for Indian Ocean
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-japan-usa-aegis.html
YOKOSUKA, Japan (Reuters) - A Japanese warship equipped with a high-tech Aegis missile detection system left for the Indian Ocean on Monday, a controversial move some analysts say signals support for a possible U.S.-led attack on Iraq.
Riot police lined the shore and a crowd of about 100 cheered and waved Japanese flags as the 7,250-tondestroyer Kirishima left its home base at Yokosuka, southwest of Tokyo.
An equal number of demonstrators rallied to oppose the dispatch, which domestic critics say could violate Japan's pacifist constitution and its self-imposed ban on ``collective self-defense,'' or aiding allies when they are attacked.
Some demonstrators also launched small boats in a futile attempt to block the destroyer's departure.
``We will display the results of our daily training, carry through the mission we are given and will all return in good health,'' the ship's captain, Shiro Yoshimura, said in a pre-departure ceremony.
The destroyer, with a crew of about 250, is scheduled to arrive in the Indian Ocean in about three weeks to replace one of three Japanese naval vessels currently deployed in the area.
``It's frightening, but it's their job,'' said a young mother of three as she watched the ship leave with her husband aboard.
Japan, keen to avoid a rerun of its diplomatic humiliation when it failed to send even token troops for the 1991 Gulf War, last year passed a law enabling the country to deploy naval ships to support the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan -- its first military dispatch into a war situation since World War II.
The government has said the Aegis destroyer dispatch is part of the support extended for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan under last year's counter-terrorism law, legislation officials acknowledge would be hard to apply to direct action against Iraq.
IRAQ ON THEIR MIND?
Diplomatic analysts said a possible U.S.-led attack on Iraq was clearly on Tokyo's mind in its decision to dispatch the Aegis warship. The decision came after intense, if informal, pressure from Washington.
Some analysts say its dispatch could help make up for a decline in U.S.-intelligence gathering capabilities that would result from a shift of naval resources for an attack.
Japanese voters have been lukewarm to providing backing for a possible U.S.-led military operation against Iraq.
A survey by the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper published on Monday showed 57 percent of respondents said Japan should not provide backing for any U.S. military action against Baghdad.
Some 40 percent supported the dispatch of the Aegis-equipped destroyer while 48 percent were opposed, the Asahi said.
Japanese Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi will meet Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later on Monday in Washington to discuss security issues including Iraq.
The Aegis-equipped vessel is capable of detecting more than 2,000 aircraft or missiles several hundred kilometers away and shooting down more than 10 targets at once.
Japan now has four of the ships, another is on order and funds have been requested for one more.
-------- biological weapons
Reaction Is Mixed to Inoculations but People Seem Doubtful
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/health/15VOIC.html
Fear of smallpox, fear of its vaccine. Worried about Baghdad, worried about Washington. Even before President Bush on Friday announced plans to vaccinate civilian health care workers and military personnel and make the vaccine available to the public as early as next year, many Americans were wrestling with these issues: Is smallpox really a threat, and is a risky ounce of prevention worth it?
Anthony Burrows, 38, a United Parcel Service driver from Brooklyn, was not eager to be inoculated. "I'm not taking it," said Mr. Burrows as he dropped off boxes in Midtown Manhattan. "This whole thing is politics and big business. Somebody stands to make a bundle off the vaccine."
Mr. Burrows said he would not have his children vaccinated either. He said he did not like the idea of being injected with a disease to fight another disease. And, he said, he was not afraid of a germ attack even though his job theoretically made him vulnerable, like the postal employees who contracted anthrax.
Others had the opposite reaction.
"I would take it, and my kids would too," said Linda Massina of La Plata, Md., who was a few blocks away, headed for Radio City for a Rockettes performance. Her 20-year-old son can make his own decision, Mrs. Massina said, but the three younger children will be getting the shots. "We knew people who were lost at the Pentagon." Mrs. Massina said. "We see the effects of terrorism here in New York. There was already that subway attack in Japan with that sarin or whatever."
Mr. Burrows and Mrs. Massina represented two ends of a spectrum of decision and indecision that seemed to waver across the nation. Some people were sure they would take the vaccine, some were sure they would not - but most were just not sure.
The president's announcement that he himself would be vaccinated against smallpox because he is commander in chief, but that his family would not be, seemed to leave some people confused.
"It's a very curious message - `I'll set an example but my family is not going to get inoculated,' " said Bob Schatz, a wholesale bookseller from Portland, Ore., visiting Houston on business. "What is he telling us? If we are supposed to, then show leadership. If it's an ill-defined thing that could happen, there are a million things that could happen."
Julia Schreiber, 37, an accountant and mother of four in Houston, said she would get vaccinations only if the state required it or her company, Reliant Energy, strongly recommended it. Even then, Mrs. Schreiber said, she might do as she does now with the flu, have herself vaccinated but not her children.
There were a fair number of people who thought that the whole debate was a waste of time, that no smallpox attack was imminent.
"Saddam Hussein has been described as evil, but not suicidal," said Dr. Franklyn N. Judson, director of public health for Denver. "His main interest is staying in power. I guess if they ever had it, they've probably gotten rid of it."
Although he is a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado and one of those in charge of Denver's response to any outbreak, Dr. Judson, 60, said he personally would not recommend that anyone in Denver - including his own family - get a smallpox shot now.
"There's no benefit," he said. "The chances that somebody will show up in Denver or Rangely, Colo., with smallpox is so vanishingly small. It's a virus that's not known to exist but in two laboratories."
Tina Getsee, 41, a police crime statistician in Coral Springs, Fla., with five sons aged 4 to 18, said she was not worried about the vaccination itself since her children had had others with no problems. But she was also not worried about a smallpox attack. "I don't think they would attack here," Mrs. Getsee, said. "I think they would hit major cities. I feel fairly safe."
In a poll taken in October, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and released only last week, 65 percent of all Americans said they were ready to be vaccinated against smallpox. In a similar poll taken by the foundation in May, 59 percent said they were.
In Los Angeles, Janice Black, 56, said she, too, might get revaccinated. "If it saves my life, I'd put up with three days of sickness," Mrs. Black said. "It sounds dangerous, but where was the danger when everybody was taking it years ago?"
Shauuna Harrington of Watertown, Mass., shopping with her young daughters Zoe and Enya, said she thought that immunizing soldiers made sense, but having herself or her daughters vaccinated did not.
At Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Los Angeles, Dr. Coleen Sintek, 51, a cardiac surgeon, and Dr. Marjorie Bernstein Singer, an oncologist, both argued against precautionary vaccinations, saying they believed there was enough time to vaccinate after an attack started.
Dr. Sintek said she would not get the vaccine herself, noting that a lot of patients had compromised immune systems and that contact with the site of her vaccination could put them at risk. Dr. Singer, speaking of Mr. Bush, said she felt "the whole thing is a scare tactic to get people to support his policy."
The chief of the emergency room in North General Hospital in Harlem, Dr. Neal M. Shipley, said he did not plan to get vaccinated because he has a 14-month-old child at home. Dr. Shipley said he found the president's decision to ask emergency personnel to be vaccinated "very frustrating."
He said, "We have real patients, with real problems - diabetes, high blood pressure, domestic assault - right now."
Many of those in the military who were interviewed said they were not worried about vaccinations and would willingly be inoculated. On Friday, a few marines at Camp Pendleton, near San Clemente, Calif., sat around a barbershop and talked about the president's announcement.
One of them, Cpl. Eric Pinkston, 23, of Salida, Colo., said of getting vaccinated: "I'm all for it. Given a choice of a vaccine or dying from anthrax or smallpox, I'll take the vaccine."
-------- britain
Small elite force likely for Iraq
Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday December 15, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,860338,00.html
An elite force of 2,000 Marines with air support and medical back-up is being planned as Britain's initial contribution to possible military action against Iraq, according to Ministry of Defence sources.
The force, which will back tens of thousands of American troops, is now seen as the 'preferred option' by military planners, with February and March still seen as the most likely months for any action against Saddam Hussein. By then United Nations inspection teams will have completed their assessment of Saddam's weapons arsenal and will produce a judgment on whether the Iraqi dictator is in 'material breach' of the UN resolution on weapons of mass destruction.
The Government is now likely to give fresh details of its plans for deployment in the new year, but has made it clear that mobilising a huge armoured force would be difficult in a short timescale.
Although a large force of between 10,000 and 20,000 troops has not been ruled out, defence officials said a smaller force was more likely.
Two field hospitals with up to 200 staff each will also be provided and the MoD has put together plans to send a hospital ship to the Gulf region.
Soldiers who might serve in the Gulf are being given the opportunity to have inoculations against an anthrax attack and smallpox.
The moves come to head off criticism that the Government is not giving clear messages to military leaders about what it expects of them in the Middle East over the next three months.
A senior Whitehall figure told The Observer: 'If it were a smaller force, then it would only be a matter of weeks before they could be made ready. It is true that February is the most likely window for attack, [but] we must remember that we are still in the planning stage, [and] all options are being considered.'
The US is planning a blitzkrieg of 'overwhelming force' if Saddam is proved to be in breach of the resolution, whether or not it gets a fresh resolution on military action from the UN.
Iraqi opposition groups said at a conference in London yesterday that Iraq could be a democracy within a year of Saddam's overthrow.
-------- business
[Check out "the so-called noisy withdrawal provision." Sounds Orwellian, or Hitlerian. I wonder what the Supreme Court will do. And I wonder if this will lead to a lessening of "Homeland Security" expectations. et]
The long arm of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
EDITORIAL •
December 15, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021215-27401320.htm
The names Sarbanes and Oxley are being begrudged all over Europe and Asia. That's because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which President Bush signed in July, lays down regulatory guidelines, not just for American companies, but for foreign companies that list in U.S. stock exchanges as well.
"There is such a thing as overreacting and overshooting the mark," said Frits Bolkestein, European commissioner for the single market, regarding the law's application to foreign companies. His comment is generally reflective of foreign perceptions of the law. In particular, Sarbanes-Oxley's requirement that chief executives and chief financial officers certify earnings and that auditing functions be segregated from consulting services have been bitterly criticized abroad. Also, the so-called noisy withdrawal provision, which requires corporate lawyers to drop their client and inform the Securities and Exchange Commission of their withdrawal if they come upon incriminating information, has also been quite unpopular.
Many U.S. companies are also less-than-enthusiastic about having to comply with stricter regulations. And, since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act sought to restore investor confidence in wake of the Enron and WorldCom implosions, it makes sense that, in the interest of uniformity, foreign companies that list on U.S. exchanges should follow the same rules as U.S. companies.
Some critics contend that foreign companies will choose to list elsewhere, say in London, to escape the law's (over)reach. The chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso, for example, has pleaded this case. But attracting foreign issuers by weakening the laws that apply to them would be misguided.
And the SEC has broad discretion in deciding how the new regulatory rules should be written. It can make special provisions for foreign issuers, if foreign governments already have similar laws that would make complying with new U.S. regulations particularly burdensome or redundant. On Dec. 17, the SEC is holding two roundtable meetings with foreign regulators to discuss the application of the rules outside the United States. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act set a Jan. 26 deadline for the SEC to write new rules in six key areas, including auditor-independence and attorney-conduct rules.
Foreign executives, like U.S. executives, have brought up valid points about the potential impact of new regulations. Specifically, the new rules on attorney conduct seek to bolster accountability, but will also weaken client-attorney privilege - a key element of the U.S. justice system. But foreign issuers shouldn't get blanket exemptions from the U.S. regulations - even if the names Oxley and Sarbanes are taken in vain in Europe and beyond.
-------- india
Hopes and Fears in India Stirred by Hindu Nationalist
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/asia/15INDI.html
AHMEDABAD, India - In just over a decade, Hindu nationalism has traveled from margin to mainstream, with its political standard-bearer, the Bharatiya Janata Party, winning enough seats in Parliament to lead the national government.
Narendra Modi, appointed by that party to be chief minister of Gujarat State just over a year ago, has ridden the wave to become India's most controversial politician.
Some say he has ridden it too far. Five months after he took power, Hindu-Muslim riots erupted last spring that left 1,000 people, mostly Muslim, dead. He was accused of, at best, doing nothing to check the riots, and at worst, according to a citizens' tribunal, of sanctioning them.
His critics say he is an avatar of intolerance whose rise has coincided with increasing aggressiveness by Hindu extremists; his supporters say he is a hero who allowed Hindus to give a fitting rejoinder to Muslims last spring.
On Sunday, India will learn the results of a state assembly election in Gujarat that is at heart a referendum on Mr. Modi's brand of politics, and, some say, India's character.
If Mr. Modi, who has campaigned seeking to unite Hindus against an implicit Muslim threat, wins, many fear that Hindu extremists may export communal polarization, and even violence, to other states as an electoral strategy.
If he loses Gujarat, the last major state the Bharatiya Janata Party controls, the coalition government it leads could be fatally weakened.
The party has bet that Mr. Modi, a provocative campaigner known for vitriolic attacks on political opponents and minorities, will win. Indeed, it believes it needs him to do so.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee chose not to dismiss Mr. Modi for his handling of the riots. Instead, the Bharatiya Janata Party called early elections to capitalize on his popularity.
Hindu extremists have become increasingly enamored of Mr. Modi, even as they have become disenchanted with the more moderate Mr. Vajpayee. Mr. Vajpayee's instruction that the Gujarat campaign focus on governance was openly defied by Mr. Modi and his supporters.
Instead, Mr. Modi and his aides stoked Hindu fears by invoking the event that set off the riots: the burning of 59 Hindu pilgrims after a Muslim mob surrounded their train.
"How can I forget seeing how a mother died clutching her 4-month-old child to her chest?" Mr. Modi asked at one campaign stop.
"Merchants of death," he roared at another, "you are killing people, you are attacking our country, we will not leave you, we will not give you any space in Gujarat."
Reared in Gujarat, Mr. Modi, 52, joined the wellspring of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers Association, as a child.
Founded 77 years ago, it is a secretive, all-male organization that tries to instill Hindu nationalist feelings, beginning in childhood.
Mr. Modi, after leaving home to study politics here, became a full-time traveling propagandist, or pracharak, for the association. In the 1980's, the association sent him to work with the Bharatiya Janata Party, its political wing.
He eventually became the party's general secretary in Gujarat, from where he helped lead the campaign to demolish a 16th-century mosque on a site many Hindus believe is the birthplace of Lord Ram, and then a national party organizer.
In 2001, with the party worried about its flagging fortunes in Gujarat, he was appointed chief minister of a state of 50 million people without ever having contested a popular election. (He narrowly won his first assembly by-election in February.)
For Gujarat, and even for India, Mr. Modi is a political aberration. He has neither a geographical base nor a caste one (he comes from a politically insignificant caste). Rather, his rise has come from his success within the Hindu nationalist family.
"He has no grass roots," said Prof. Ghanshyam Shah, a a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Yet from early on, Mr. Modi demonstrated a knack for mass outreach. He is a first-rate orator with impeccable timing and a finger that wags like a metronome. He can growl when necessary, and he can weep.
He attracts women and youth in particular, said Arun Jaitley, the Bharatiya Janata Party's general secretary, who called Mr. Modi "a little macho."
Mr. Modi is also a technophile who boasts of linking all of the state's districts in a video-conferencing network. The package appeals especially to Gujarat's middle classes. "He is not only a Hindu chauvinist, he's a brainy person," said Harat Bhatt, a 42-year-old engineer.
But he is not a diplomatic one. Partly because he came to power as a party apparatchik, not a politician, he never learned the art of compromise, say friends and analysts.
"He's very, very arrogant," said a longtime friend, Girish Dani, an industrialist who is now a supporter of the opposition Congress Party.
Mr. Modi has filled the state government with like-minded people, quickly transferring anyone who disobeys his orders, including some officials who tried to stop the riots.
Some say Mr. Modi is a realist who knows he cannot ascend in Indian politics without somehow accommodating the country's minorities, especially its 130 million Muslims.
But that is not what the hundreds of volunteers from the World Hindu Council who poured into the state for the election believe. At their Godhra headquarters, they defended the anti-Muslim violence of last spring, and said their goal was to drive Muslims from government in India.
Muslims, the volunteers said, were loyal to Islam before India, slaughtered cows, attacked temples and ran away with Hindu girls. Throughout the campaign, they worked all out on Mr. Modi's behalf.
-------- iraq
Scientists Hold Key To Iraqi Arms Search
U.S., U.N. Seek Experts With Diverse Specialties
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55750-2002Dec14?language=printer
If U.N. officials get the opportunity to question Iraq's scientists about hidden weapons programs, near the top of the list will be a 47-year-old mother with black hair streaked with gray and a talent for growing anthrax bacteria.
Biologist Rihab Taha ran one of Iraq's largest biological weapons programs for more than a decade, a job that earned her the nickname "Dr. Germ" among weapons inspectors. She has at times displayed an explosive temper -- she once smashed a chair during a meeting with U.N. inspectors -- and U.S. officials believe she might eventually spill details about Iraqi plans to wage biowarfare.
But only if Iraq agrees to let her talk.
Three weeks after the start of weapons inspections, the question of access to Iraqi weapons scientists poses one of the biggest challenges yet to U.N. efforts to disarm Iraq. The Bush administration last week repeated its demand that President Saddam Hussein deliver top weapons scientists for interviews outside Iraq. So far, Iraq has given no clear sign that it will cooperate, despite U.S. threats that a refusal could lead to armed conflict.
Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, on Thursday asked Iraq in a letter to turn over the names of all scientists involved in its previous biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs, as required by a Security Council resolution. Meanwhile, the White House is preparing its own list -- a who's who of top Iraqi scientists based on the assessments of U.S. intelligence agencies, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
The identities of the scientists have not been disclosed, but intelligence officials and weapons experts say many of the names are well known from Iraqi documents and seven years of intensive weapons inspections in the 1990s. Collectively the lists represent the best hope of the United States and the United Nations for uncovering the truth about Hussein's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the officials said.
"The one thing that survived the Gulf War and sanctions was Iraq's brain trust," said a Pentagon intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's one thing to go to Iraq and see a piece of equipment. But the most important thing is to be able to talk to the guy who worked the equipment."
The scientists who will likely make up the U.S. list reflect nearly every type of weapons specialty, from relatively crude chemical weapons such as mustard gas to nuclear bombs. Many have earned degrees from prestigious U.S. and British universities. Some received specialized training -- and, in the case of Taha, live cultures of deadly bacteria -- directly from the United States through legal academic or commercial connections.
Whether the scientists will talk -- or possibly defect -- is uncertain. Hussein in the past retained the loyalty of his scientists through a combination of privileges and threats, including an explicit threat of imprisonment, torture and death for scientists and their family members. One of Iraq's best-known nuclear scientists, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, was persuaded to head Hussein's nuclear program only after a stint in a Baghdad prison.
But if their safety can be guaranteed, at least some of the scientists would almost certainly jump at the chance to defect, according to former weapons inspectors and an Iraqi defector who worked with many of them. Exactly how those guarantees would be made, and how and where the interviews would be conducted, remain matters of intense debate.
"In my opinion, 80 to 90 percent will defect," said Khidhir Hamza, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who fled Iraq in 1994 and now lives in Virginia. "Think about it: If you're an Iraqi scientist getting by on a few dollars a month and you have a chance to live in freedom with your family for the rest of your life -- why wouldn't you cooperate?"
Hamza, like several former Iraqi weapons officials interviewed for this story, declined to talk about specific scientists for fear they would face reprisals in Iraq. The experts were especially reluctant to talk about lesser-known and mid-level scientists whose identities the Iraqis fought to keep secret during the inspections of the 1990s.
But many of Iraq's top weapons scientists are profiled in U.N. and Iraqi weapons reports as well as in books by Iraqi defectors, including Hamza's autobiography, "Saddam's Bombmaker," published in 2000.
Because the group's collective knowledge of advanced weapons is so deep, some weapons experts argue that they should be encouraged to defect, regardless of whether they produce any helpful leads in the investigation of Iraq's current weapons program. "Even if they tell you nothing," said David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute of Strategic and International Studies, "at least they are no longer building weapons."
Here, according to U.N. documents and weapons experts, is a sampling of some of the better-known Iraqi weapons scientists who would likely be included on any list of experts sought by U.N. officials for questioning.
Rihab Taha
Taha is perhaps the most colorful of Iraq's senior weapons scientists, and arguably one of the most dangerous. Since assuming her first post in one of Iraq's early bioweapons labs in 1984, she has been something of an oddity: a rare female scientist and manager in a world dominated by men. A British-trained microbiologist, Taha in 1987 was put in charge of Iraq's top-secret biological research lab at Al Hakam, which explored the weaponization of the pathogens that cause anthrax and plague, among others. It was around this time that she ordered and received biological specimens from U.S. companies that would later be used in the production of weapons.
Her reputation as "Dr. Germ" was well established when she met and married the Iraqi oil minister, Lt. Gen. Amir Mohammad Rasheed, in 1993. Taha's position ensured that she would be a frequent subject of U.N. interrogations during weapons inspections in the 1990s. Under intense questioning, the normally soft-spoken Taha often showed her famous temper, storming out of the room and sometimes leaving overturned furniture in her wake.
The frustrations were apparently mutual. Richard Spertzel, a former head of the U.N. inspectors' bioweapons teams, recalled his exasperation when Taha clung to false accounts of her lab's activities even when confronted with contradictory evidence. "It is not a lie," Spertzel recalled Taha saying, "when you're being ordered to lie."
Jaffar Dhia Jaffar
The man some regard as the father of Iraq's nuclear weapons program never aspired to the title, according to former colleagues now living in the West. Hussein used imprisonment and torture to persuade the British-trained physicist to help him in his quest to become the Arab world's first nuclear-armed head of state.
Among his punishments: being forced to watch as guards broke the back of an elderly man and left him to suffer in Jaffar's presence. "He recanted and returned to work," Hamza, a former subordinate, wrote in "Saddam's Bombmaker."
The deputy head of Iraq's atomic energy agency ultimately took command of Iraq's secret "Petrochemical-3" unit, which ran clandestine programs to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. At its height, the unit employed more than 20,000 people and cost an estimated $10 billion.
After his jailhouse conversion in the early 1980s, Jaffar promised to deliver Hussein a nuclear weapon within 10 years. By Western estimates he came very close -- perhaps as near as a few months -- when the program was disrupted by the outbreak of war in 1991.
Hazem Ali
Of the many questions U.N. officials would likely pose to this Iraqi virologist, the most urgent is this: Does Iraq possess the smallpox virus?
Ali's role in Iraq's secret viral research in the 1980s attracted the attention of U.N. officials as they investigated whether Iraq may have tried to weaponize smallpox. At the time, Ali headed Iraq's research into the "camel pox" virus, a close cousin to the variola virus that causes smallpox. Inspectors later found an industrial freeze-dryer in a viral vaccine factory that bore the word "smallpox" on its label.
Spertzel, the former U.N. inspector, described Ali as a brilliant virologist who earned his doctorate in Britain. He said inspectors never fully questioned him because Iraqi authorities, sensing the increasing interest in the scientist, put Ali out of reach.
"One day he announced to our team he was leaving to become director of a college of veterinary medicine. But when we went to the college he wasn't there," Spertzel said. "We kept on asking for him. The Iraqis clearly knew where he was and what he was working on."
Mahdi Obeidi
When Iraqi leaders decided to try to master the difficult feat of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, they turned to well-respected Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi. For inspiration, Obeidi in turn looked to the world's leading experts in enrichment technology: the United States and Europe.
Obeidi and Hamza, the nuclear scientist who later defected, learned about emerging technologies for enriching uranium during a 1975 visit to the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. In the 1980s, Obeidi led efforts to build gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, using designs and expertise bought from German businessmen.
Iraq ultimately used a combination of technologies to produce the fissile material needed for nuclear weapons. Designs for the equipment were never surrendered to U.N. inspectors after the Gulf War, and are believed to still exist in Iraq, along with the practical know-how acquired by Obeidi through years of trial and error.
Although Obeidi's current role in Iraqi weapons research is unknown, some experts on Iraq's nuclear program believe his knowledge would be critical to any current efforts to build an Iraqi bomb. "Iraq probably could not start a centrifuge [enrichment] program without him," said Albright, the former weapons inspector.
Abdul Nassir Hindawi
In 1988, Abdul Nassir Hindawi, a microbiologist, wrote a letter to a British military laboratory asking for a sample of the common bacterium that causes anthrax in cattle. The specific strain he requested was known as "Ames," a variety that was little known outside microbiology at the time, but has since become infamous: It is the same strain used in the deadly anthrax attacks in Washington, Florida and New York in the fall of 2001.
Hindawi's request was turned down, and it is unclear whether the U.S.-trained scientist succeeded in acquiring the strain elsewhere. But what is clear is that Hindawi played a key role in helping create Iraq's biological weapons program and shaping its direction.
After studying microbiology at Mississippi State University, Hindawi returned to his native country in time to observe Hussein's use of chemical weapons to counter superior numbers of enemy troops in the Iran-Iraq War. In 1983, U.N. documents say, Hindawi wrote a secret paper for Iraq's ruling Baath party suggesting the possibility of mass-produced, inexpensive biological weapons as an alternative to chemicals.
Within two years, Iraq established its biological weapons program at Al Muthanna State Establishment, a project designated by officials as a "presidential priority." Hindawi was appointed to help direct the program, and he picked as one of his top aides a promising young female biologist who had recently returned to Iraq after completing her studies in Britain.
Her name: Rihab Taha, Iraq's future "Dr. Germ."
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
---
Saddam given two weeks to name scientists
By Julian Coman in Washington and David Blair in Baghdad
15/12/2002
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/15/wirq115.xml/
Hans Blix, the United Nations chief weapons inspector, has bowed to intense pressure from the United States and given Saddam Hussein two weeks to provide the names and location of Iraqi scientists linked to his arms programmes.
A letter sent by Mr Blix to the Iraqi presidential adviser, Amir al-Saadi, insists that Iraq "provide the names of personnel" involved in weapons programmes by the end of the month.
The ultimatum is the first step towards a likely showdown between Saddam and the UN. Inspectors have the right under last month's UN resolution on Iraq to fly scientists and their families out of the country for interview. Baghdad is widely expected to resist such a move, which would place it in material breach of the resolution.
The new deadline follows intense lobbying of Mr Blix by Washington, which is determined to head off a lengthy and inconclusive inspections process.
Mr Blix recently questioned the feasibility of taking scientists out of Iraq, insisting that weapons inspectors were not "serving as a defection agency".
Pentagon officials have insisted, however, that Washington is determined to test Saddam's willingness to comply fully with the toughest clauses of the UN resolution.
Fears of protracted investigation mounted yesterday when Mohammed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the UN would need "a few months" to reach a conclusion on the 12,000-page Iraqi declaration on its weapons programme.
Washington, which would prefer any military action against Iraq to take place before the spring, intends to reach an assessment of Saddam's willingness to disarm in a far shorter time. On Thursday, a senior administration official pressed Mr Blix to begin interviews with scientists by early next month at the latest, preferably outside Iraq.
Baghdad is understood to have moved leading biological and chemical weapons scientists outside Iraq in recent weeks to put them beyond the inspectors' reach. Others are believed to have been switched to "safe" jobs with no involvement in Iraq's nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programmes.
Several of the likely interviewees trained in Britain, including Gen Amer al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein's chief weapons adviser.
Dr Rihab Taha, identified in the British Government dossier published earlier this year as a central figure in Iraq's biological weapons programme and nicknamed "Dr Germ", trained at the University of East Anglia.
She is married to Gen Amer Rashid, a former engineering student at Birmingham University who oversaw the production of Saddam's illegal arsenal.
Senior figures in the Bush administration, such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and Vice-President Dick Cheney, believe that without inside information from Iraqi scientists, inspectors are unlikely to stumble across significant evidence.
"The hawks inside the administration are forcing the pace," said a former national security adviser who still has close links to the administration.
"They weren't too happy about getting involved in inspections. Now they're making sure we're not inspecting all the way to next summer."
Washington has poured scorn on the weapons declaration that Iraq handed over to UN officials last week, although it has yet to complete its examination of the report. President George W. Bush is expected to respond next week to Iraq's declaration.
Britain is also expected to give its "preliminary" assessment within the next few days after its experts have finished the dissection of the document. They are understood to share the view of their American counterparts that there was little new material in the declaration.
Meanwhile, UN inspectors returned to an infectious diseases centre yesterday to examine rooms they were locked out of a day before. A second team re-examined an Iraqi nuclear centre where almost two tons of low-grade enriched uranium are stored.
Additional reporting by David Wastell
-----
Meeting of Iraqi Opposition Seeks to Bar U.S. Dominance
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/middleeast/15OPPO.html
LONDON, Dec. 14 - Opponents of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq opened a conference here today in hopes of forming a united front and planning for a transitional government that would prevent the United States from imposing its own vision on a post-Hussein Iraq.
While there is plenty of dissension among the conference's 330 delegates about how and when such a transitional government should be formed, a string of speakers from across the opposition's political spectrum expressed unanimity in their demand that the United States leave Iraq's political future to Iraqis.
In particular, the opposition rejects the prospect, floated by the Bush administration, of a military transitional government or of an Iraqi transitional team chosen by the Americans and under the supervision of an American military officer.
"We must not leave the door open for the imposition of external military rule or foreign control of Iraq's oil or the loss of Iraq's national sovereignty," said Abdelaziz al-Hakim. His brother, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, is an Iran-based ayatollah who leads the main Shiite Muslim opposition group, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The fractured and fractious opposition, whose various groups have enjoyed uneven and fitful support internationally, hopes to emerge from the two-day conference with an unassailable mandate to take over Iraq if the United States succeeds in ousting the Hussein government.
But there remain deep divisions in the opposition over when an Iraqi-nominated transitional team should be named.
One camp, led by an Iraqi businessman, Ahmed Chalabi, is pushing for a transitional team to be formed before any American-led invasion against Mr. Hussein's government. The team, according to Mr. Chalabi's view, would move to Iraq if Mr. Hussein was ousted and would immediately form a transitional government that would rule the country until a constitutional assembly and subsequent parliamentary elections could be held.
A competing bloc prefers to leave the formation of a transition team until Mr. Hussein is removed. That group consists of Kurds who already govern northern Iraq, former officials of Iraq's ruling Baath Party with ties to dissidents in the current Iraqi government and Shiite Muslims who have armed forces both in the country and in neighboring Iran.
Mr. Chalabi's backers worry that if a transitional team is not appointed in advance, the other groups, which have an armed presence in Iraq, would rush to fill the power vacuum in the wake of an attack, leaving Mr. Chalabi and others outside the country in a weakened position.
They also argue that by forming a transitional team before any move to remove Mr. Hussein, they would force the United States to give them a leading role in the governance of a post-Hussein Iraq.
"It would blunt a U.S. move to impose a transitional government of their own," one of Mr. Chalabi's supporters said after the conference's morning session. He noted that Iran, too, is worried about such a move by the United States.
A United States government official speaking on the sidelines of the conference. did little to dispel the opposition's fears.
He said that "where appropriate, Iraqis either inside the country or outside could play a role" in some sectors during a transitional period. He added, "Whether there should be some sort of Iraqi legitimizing role is something we're talking about, and we wouldn't exclude that, but we're still of the view that it's too early to discuss a provisional government."
While opposition members expressed wariness over America's intentions, they celebrated Iran as a longtime ally.
Mr. Hakim, the brother of the Tehran-based ayatollah, was the lead speaker at the conference, and Mr. Chalabi, who just returned from a meeting in Teheran with the ayatollah and a Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, pointedly thanked Iran in his remarks for its long support of the Iraqi opposition. He went on to say "Regretfully, the United States has let down the Iraqi people many times."
Mr. Chalabi welcomed the presence at the meeting of a United States envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, noting that Mr. Khalilzad, an Afghan-born scholar of Middle Eastern political and military affairs, was "a Muslim who comes from our own environment."
While the opposition speakers at the conference closed ranks against an American-imposed post-Hussein political solution for Iraq, they remain at odds over many points in their various visions of the future. Many speakers voiced support for dividing Iraq into a federation of states, but a retired Iraqi general, Hassan al-Naqib, warned that the opposition should not rush to settle on solutions before considering the wishes of Iraqis in the country.
Many Iraqis with ties to the Sunni Muslim minority that has historically ruled the country worry that a federal solution would empower the Shiite Muslim majority and the Kurds at their expense. Another point of contention is over the treatment of Baath Party officials in a post-Hussein Iraq. Some opposition figures favor what they call the de-Baathification of the country, likening such a process to the purge of Nazi officials in Germany after World War II.
The opposition conference is to continue on Sunday with delegates breaking into working groups that will draft a statement on the opposition's vision for the future of Iraq, a unified political manifesto and the principles under which a post-Hussein transitional government would be formed.
The conference is also expected to name a coordinating committee of around 50 people that will represent the opposition in future discussions with other countries and international groups.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechen warlord dies in jail
Sunday, 15 December, 2002
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2577065.stm
One of the most notorious Chechen rebels, Salman Raduyev, has died in jail in Russia.
Raduyev was sentenced to life imprisonment for multiple murders and terrorism, in December, 2001.
Chechen guerrilla Raduyev led one of the most powerful rebel groups Prison officials said Raduyev died from internal bleeding at his prison in the Urals town of Solikamsk.
Russian officials denied any suggestion of foul play.
"I have already been asked today whether he was beaten, killed. But this is not even an issue," said Yuri Kalinin, deputy justice minister.
Raduyev, 35, led an infamous raid on the southern Russian republic of Dagestan in 1996, taking hundreds of people hostage at a hospital and using some as human shields.
A total of 78 people were killed in the attack.
He was captured by Russian forces in Chechnya in March, 2000, and tried in court in Dagestan.
He was the most prominent Chechen rebel to be captured by Russia in its fight against Chechen separatists.
Ruthless
During the Chechen war of 1994-1996, Raduyev controlled one of the most powerful rebel groups in the breakaway Russian republic.
But it was his daring raid on the hospital in the town of Kizlyar which earned him a reputation for ruthlessness.
Raduyev said he was taking orders from his father-in-law, the late Chechen President, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who was killed by a Russian missile in 1996.
Raduyev's unit fled Kizlyar with about 150 hostages and fought their way through Russian troops to escape back to Chechnya.
Back from the dead
In March, 1996, Raduyev was shot in the head in an assassination attempt and reported dead.
However, he reappeared four months later after treatment abroad, becoming a bitter opponent of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov.
In 1999, Raduyev underwent major surgery to reconstruct his face, having first signed an agreement promising not to take revenge on the surgeons if the operation proved unsuccessful.
His death comes as Akhmed Zakayev, the deputy prime minister in the ousted Chechen government, faces proceedings in London to extradite him to Russia to face charges of murder and waging war.
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Shadow Warriors
'No Room for Error'
by John T. Carney Jr. and Benjamin F. Schemmer
Reviewed by James Bamford
Sunday, December 15, 2002
Washington Post; Page BW04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48053-2002Dec12?language=printer
NO ROOM FOR ERROR
The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan
By John T. Carney Jr. And Benjamin F. Schemmer
Ballantine. 334 pp. $25.95
THE SECRET SERVICE The Hidden History Of an Enigmatic Agency By Philip H. Melanson with Peter F. Stevens Carroll & Graf. 374 pp. $26
A quarter of a century ago, the Central Intelligence Agency wisely decided to take a hard look at the psychological effects that the agency's arcane secrecy system was having on its employees. The study found that the dizzying labyrinth of code words, compartments, classifications and caveats produced a culture resembling that of a "primitive secret society."
"It has its initiation, its oaths, its esoteric phrases," the study said, "its sequestered areas, and its secrets within secrets. And in place of passwords and hand signs, there are letter designations on badges. There are in-groups and out-groups. . . . Secrecy by its very nature may affect the personality of its practitioners." The authors concluded, "On balance, the psychological side effects of the codeword compartment seem to diminish rather than enhance security." They then sent the report on to the director - after first covering it with multiple classification stamps.
Excessive secrecy has been a major contributing factor in a number of the nation's most devastating intelligence disasters, including the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. As authors John T. Carney Jr. and Benjamin F. Schemmer point out in No Room for Error, their book on special operations, such mistakes have cost many brave lives and never seem to be learned from.
A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Carney was one of the key early members of the elite special operations forces and commanded a small group of highly trained combat controllers that at one time was nicknamed Brand-X. It was this group's job to get to the site of an operation before the commandos laid out a makeshift landing strip and then guided the aircraft in. The first assignment came in April 1980. Members of Brand-X were to rescue 53 Americans being held hostage by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
The mission, according to Carney and Schemmer, was a disaster. "Everything that could go wrong, did." Eight men died in the desert during the night of April 24-25 during a helicopter mishap, and the hostages were never rescued, although the Iranian government eventually released them unharmed.
Much has been written about the events at Desert One, including The Guts to Try, by retired Air Force Col. James Kyle, the former site commander at the desert airstrip where the rescue mission went up in flames. But it is a useful subject to revisit, given the Bush administration's allocation of an expanded role in the war on terrorism to the white-knuckle fighters of Delta Force, Seal Team Six and other special operations units.
According to the authors, a key blunder in the rescue attempt was the decision to over-compartmentalize the mission in the name of "operational security." The rescue had to be aborted because two of the helicopters, while flying over the Iranian desert, ran into blinding and disorienting dust clouds called "haboobs" and were forced to turn back. This phenomenon was well known to weather experts attached to the Military Airlift Command's Air Weather Service, but because of secrecy they were not allowed to brief the pilots. Also, absolute radio silence prevented the pilots from contacting other pilots at Desert One who had just made it safely through and could have advised them simply to climb to a higher altitude.
Similar mistakes were repeated several years later during the second major special operations mission - to prevent a Marxist takeover of the small Caribbean island of Grenada and rescue American medical students there. The invasion, called Urgent Fury, was supposed to be a quick, surprise coup de main. But it turned instead into a nine-day operation with six days of bloody, street-to-street fighting.
President Ronald Reagan termed it a "textbook success," and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger called it "a complete success." Carney and Schemmer have a different take: "To this day, I doubt that any one person knows how ineptly Urgent Fury was planned and executed." Once again, excessive secrecy played a major role. To prevent any leaks, not even the Defense Mapping Agency was notified of the operation, so the invading force was sent in without up-to-date tactical maps. "The gag order that prevented the Defense Mapping Agency from printing maps of the island until . . . after the invasion was under way, would prove to be a 'killer oversight,' " say the authors. Nineteen American soldiers were killed - nine of them from special ops - and 123 were wounded while attempting to bring about a regime change in a country barely twice the size of Washington, D.C. Carney quit the military in disgust but later returned.
Excessive secrecy is also a key topic discussed by Philip H. Melanson in The Secret Service, which examines the history of that little-known agency. But here the purpose of secrecy has been to hide from the world the agency's abysmal performance during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. "The Secret Service immediately began a pattern of lies about its fatal missteps in Dallas that day and the days preceding it," Melanson writes. "The agency was experiencing the worst crisis it had ever faced." Two agents, says Melanson, lied to the Warren Commission while other officials attempted to blame the victim, hinting that Kennedy was responsible for his own death because of his recklessness or fatalism.
"These outright lies and half-truths cannot absolve the Secret Service," writes Melanson, "for losing the life of a president for the first time in its history." For example, Kennedy is often blamed for refusing to allow agents to place a bulletproof bubbletop on the limousine, but that see-through cover was not actually bulletproof anyway. Among the errors the authors point to is that during the six or seven seconds between the first shot and the second, "kill" shot, the supervisory agent in the front passenger seat simply froze and failed to take any actions that might have saved Kennedy. Worse, the driver of the presidential limousine inexplicably slowed down after the first shot was fired rather than hit the gas, swerve or take other evasive maneuvers.
The planning was also critically flawed, they believe. The advance team in Dallas chose a bad motorcade route and then failed to check out such potential sniper perches as the Texas Book Depository. Also, on the night before the assassination, nine of Kennedy's on-call agents were out drinking.
At a time when the Bush administration is going to unprecedented lengths to hide from the public everything from the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force to Bush's father's White House files, these two books teach a needed lesson. Excessive secrecy can sometimes be hazardous to the nation's health. ‹
James Bamford, the author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency," writes frequently on intelligence issues.
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Candid Cameras Cover the Bases
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55521-2002Dec14?language=printer
On the south end of the tarmac at a British air base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, two portable maintenance shelters for B-2 stealth bombers sit like high-tech cocoons, erected by the U.S. Air Force in anticipation of the possibility of war with Iraq.
While no American reporters have been allowed on the base for more than a year, a think tank in Alexandria posted a commercial satellite photograph of the shelters on its Web site last week, confirming that they were in place, and raising a host of national security issues about the privatization of spy satellite images.
The think tank, GlobalSecurity.org, purchased the satellite photo from an Israeli company, ImageSat International, for $200. It has also posted even higher resolution satellite photos from two U.S. companies, Space Imaging and Digital Globe, of the Air Force's growing Al Udeid base in Qatar, which would be a major staging area for warplanes in any military campaign against Iraq.
Some military analysts argue that these photos could possibly endanger national security, tipping off Iraq and other adversaries about U.S. military abilities and plans.
But the CIA and the Pentagon have voiced no such objections, largely because they benefit more than anyone else from these new high-resolution commercial imaging satellites. With a small fleet of highly classified spy satellites overtaxed and the next generation satellites over budget and behind schedule, their commercial counterparts are beginning to help shoulder the burden, and offer an important insurance policy against any future interruptions in service.
In fact, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), an intelligence organization inside the Pentagon, has increased its spending on commercial images this year by 10 times to about $100 million, according to defense and intelligence officials.
What's more, the government has absolute "shutter control" under licensing agreements with the satellite companies and can stop them from photographing particular countries for national security reasons.
A year ago, when the war began in Afghanistan, NIMA exercised what some analysts have called "checkbook shutter control" by agreeing to buy all imagery of Afghanistan produced by Space Imaging, then the only American company operating a high-resolution satellite.
Bobbi Lenczowski, a senior NIMA official, said Friday that the agreement wasn't a form of shutter control: NIMA needed the commercial imagery, she explained, to keep commanders supplied with battlefield maps made from the satellite photos.
But beyond this government utility, the availability of commercial satellite images has had a far more visible impact in the public debate over national security issues. Think tanks and media organizations have begun obtaining photographic intelligence that was, as recently as three years ago, the exclusive preserve of the CIA and the Pentagon.
As GlobalSecurity.org published the ImageSat photo of the B-2 shelters on Diego Garcia last week, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, CBS News and the BBC were all using commercial satellite pictures to buttress stories about growing concern in the Bush administration over nuclear facilities in Iran and North Korea.
Ann Florini, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that commercial imagery is likely to have a far greater impact "democratizing" public policy debates than jeopardizing military operations.
With images showing renewed activity at Iranian and North Korean nuclear facilities openly available, she said, the U.S. government can no longer respond by saying no comment. "And that," she said, "is the way policies are supposed to be debated in this country."
John Copple, chairman and chief executive officer of Space Imagining, based in Thornton, Colo., said that the commercial satellite industry must "practice a reasonable amount of restraint in producing and analyzing these images when there is the possibility that it could threaten or harm in some way U.S. interests; otherwise the U.S. government has shutter control."
But Copple argued that the ability of nations all over the world to obtain high-resolution satellite pictures of conditions along their borders serves to increase global transparency and "reduce fear of what's going on."
"There is a long-term benefit that could come from having this transparency, and we're seeing it happen already in the news media," Copple said.
Space Imaging launched the first high-resolution commercial satellite with "one meter resolution" -- meaning it can capture objects as small as one meter (39.37 inches) in size -- in September 1999. It was followed into space in October 2001 by Digital Globe, based in Longmont, Colo., which launched a satellite with 0.6 meter resolution. (The capabilities of U.S. spy satellites are highly classified, but they are believed to be capable of 0.1 meter resolution.)
In June, CIA Director George J. Tenet signed a memo directing NIMA to use commercial imagery to "the greatest extent possible." Commercial imagery, Tenet said, should become the "primary source" of data for use in military mapping.
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Bush Has Widened Authority of C.I.A. to Kill Terrorists
December 15, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/15INTE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, senior military and intelligence officials said.
The previously undisclosed C.I.A. list includes key Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials said. The names of about two dozen terrorist leaders have recently been on the lethal-force list, officials said. "It's the worst of the worst," an official said.
President Bush has provided written legal authority to the C.I.A. to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation. Some officials said the terrorist list was known as the "high-value target list." A spokesman for the White House declined to discuss the list or issues involving the use of lethal force against terrorists. A spokesman for the C.I.A. also declined to comment on the list.
Despite the authority given to the agency, Mr. Bush has not waived the executive order banning assassinations, officials said. The presidential authority to kill terrorists defines operatives of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for l