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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 lethal force.
Mr. Bush issued a presidential finding last year, after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, providing the basic executive and legal authority for the C.I.A. to either kill or capture terrorist leaders. Initially, the agency used that authority to hunt for Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. That authority was the basis for the C.I.A.'s attempts to find and kill or capture Mr. Bin laden and other Qaeda leaders during the war in Afghanistan.
The creation of the secret list is part of the expanded C.I.A. effort to hunt and kill or capture Qaeda operatives far from traditional battlefields, in countries like Yemen.
The president is not legally required to approve each name added to the list, nor is the C.I.A. required to obtain presidential approval for specific attacks, although officials said Mr. Bush had been kept well informed about the agency's operations.
In November, the C.I.A. killed a Qaeda leader in a remote region of Yemen. A pilotless Predator aircraft operated by the agency fired a Hellfire antitank missile at a car in which Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, also known as Abu Ali, was riding. Mr. Harethi and five other people, including one suspected Qaeda operative with United States citizenship, were killed in the attack.
Mr. Harethi, a key Al Qaeda leader in Yemen who is suspected of helping to plan the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, is believed to have been on the list of Qaeda leaders that the C.I.A. had been authorized to kill. After the Predator operation in Yemen, American officials said Mr. Bush was not required to approve the mission before the attack, nor was he specifically consulted.
Intelligence officials said the presidential finding authorizing the agency to kill terrorists was not limited to those on the list. The president has given broad authority to the C.I.A. to kill or capture operatives of Al Qaeda around the world, the officials said. But officials said the group's most senior leaders on the list were the agency's primary focus.
The list is updated periodically as the intelligence agency, in consultation with other counterterrorism agencies, adds new names or deletes those who are captured or killed, or when intelligence indicates the emergence of a new leader.
The precise criteria for adding someone to the list are unclear, although the evidence against each person must be clear and convincing, the officials said. The list contains the names of some of the same people who are on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of most wanted terror suspects, although the lists are prepared independently.
Officials said the C.I.A., working with the F.B.I., the military and foreign governments, will seek to capture terrorists when possible and bring them into custody.
Counterterrorism officials prefer to capture senior Qaeda leaders for interrogation, if possible. They regard killing as a last resort in cases in which the location of a Qaeda operative is known but capture would be too dangerous or logistically impossible, the officials said.
Under current intelligence law, the president must sign a finding to provide the legal basis for covert actions to be carried out by the C.I.A. In response to past abuses, the decision-making process has grown into a highly formalized review in which the White House, Justice Department, State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. take part.
The administration must notify Congressional leaders of any covert action finding signed by the president. In the case of the presidential finding authorizing the use of lethal force against members of Al Qaeda, Congressional leaders have been notified as required, the officials said.
The new emphasis on covert action is an outgrowth of more aggressive attitudes regarding the use of lethal force in the campaign against terrorism. Moreover, such operations have become easier to conduct because of technological advances like the development of the Predator, which has evolved from a camera-carrying surveillance drone into an armed robot warplane controlled by operators safely stationed thousands of miles from any attack.
The development of the armed Predator drone has made it much easier for the C.I.A. to pursue and kill terrorists in ways that would almost certainly not have been tried in the past for fear of the potential for American casualties. In the strike in Yemen, for example, Mr. Harethi was living in a remote, lawless region where the Yemeni government had little control. Not long before the Predator strike, Yemeni forces attacked Qaeda operatives in that same area and were beaten back with many casualties.
The more aggressive approach to counterterrorism is showing results.
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said in a speech last week that more than one-third of the top leadership of Al Qaeda identified before the war in Afghanistan had been killed or captured.
One recent success, he said, came with the capture of Al Qaeda's operations chief for the Persian Gulf region who had been involved in the planning of the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa as well as the bombing of the Cole in 2000. Since September 2001, Mr. Tenet added, more than 3,000 suspected Qaeda operatives or their associates have been detained in more than 100 countries.
But the decision by the Bush administration to authorize, under certain circumstances, the killing of terrorist leaders threatens to thrust it into a murky area of national security and international law that is almost never debated in public because the covert operations are known only to a small circle of executive branch and Congressional officials.
In the past, the Bush administration has criticized the targeting of Palestinian leaders by Israeli forces. But one former senior official said such criticism had diminished as the administration sought to move aggressively against Al Qaeda.
Still, some national security lawyers said the practice of drawing up lists of people who are subject to lethal force might blur the lines drawn by government's ban on assassinations. That prohibition was first ordered by President Gerald Ford, and in the view of some lawyers, it applies not only to foreign leaders but to civilians. (American officials have said in the past that Saddam Hussein would be a legitimate target in a war, as he is a military commander as well as Iraq's president.)
"The inevitable complication of a politically declared but legally undeclared war is the blurring of the distinction between enemy combatants and other nonstate actors," said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale University and a former State Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration. "The question is, what factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?"
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Senators Support CIA Anti - Terror Effort
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-bush-cia.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Bush administration policy authorizing the CIA to kill individuals on a list of accused terrorists was defended by leading senators on Sunday as appropriate at a time of war.
Sen. Joseph Biden, outgoing chairman of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee, said President Bush had no choice but to make the move disclosed by The New York Times. The newspaper reported on Sunday that Bush had given authority for the CIA to kill principle figures from al Qaeda and affiliated groups if they could not be captured.
The presidential directive, which is apparently an expanded version of a finding issued after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, defines operatives of al Qaeda as enemy combatants.
Bush, however, has not waived the executive order banning political assassinations, officials told The Times.
On the CBS ``Face the Nation'' program, Biden said such a policy was ``totally appropriate as an act of war because that's what they are. These are combatants of war. And I find no difficulty with it.''
``That is different than a policy of assassination, which is proscribed,'' Biden added. ``I think the president has no choice but to do that.''
Republican Sen. John Warner of the Senate Armed Services Committee told CNN's ``Late Edition'' such a policy was clearly warranted.
``I certainly support the president in clarifying and, if needed, broadening that prohibition against killing people to allow the absolute strictest and swiftest reprisal against terrorists and, indeed, to take them out before they have a chance to hit us,'' Warner said.
Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the move was ``something we ought to be doing ... but you've got to have strong controls on this.''
``It ought to be monitored carefully,'' Dodd said.
The Times said the previously undisclosed CIA list included key Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from al Qaeda and affiliated groups. It quoted one official as describing about 25 people listed as ``the worst of the worst.''
It said Bush had ``provided written legal authority to the CIA to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation.''
The White House had no immediate comment on the disclosure. A U.S. official declined to confirm or deny the presidential finding, calling any such action highly sensitive, with potential operational risks in any disclosure.
The reported list follows by more than a year a presidential finding after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, providing the basic executive and legal authority for the CIA to kill or capture terrorist leaders.
In November, the CIA killed an al Qaeda leader in a remote region of Yemen. A pilotless Predator aircraft operated by the agency fired a missile at a car in which Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, also known as Abu Ali, was riding. Harethi and five other people, including a suspected al Qaeda operative with U.S. citizenship, were killed.
Intelligence officials told The Times the presidential finding authorizing the agency to kill terrorists was not limited to those on the list. It is updated periodically.
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Russian Official: Peace Corps Suspicious
December 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Spies.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- The head of Russia's security service suggested Sunday that U.S. Peace Corps volunteers who were forced to leave the country earlier this year had been spying, accusing them of trying to collect information on government officials and on the country's politics and economy.
Peace Corps officials said in August that the Russian government had refused to extend the visas of 30 volunteers already in the country and planning to stay.
The government offered no explanation at the time, but Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service, addressed the issue in a wide-ranging interview. He did not directly accuse the volunteers of being spies but said they were involved in suspicious activities.
``Some of them were engaged in collecting information about the sociopolitical and economic situation in Russian regions, about government employees and administrators and the course of elections,'' Patrushev was quoted as saying in the interview with state-controlled television and Russian news agencies.
Peace Corps officials in Moscow could not immediately be reached for comment.
Despite the end of the Cold War and the general warming of relations between Russia and the West, the espionage trade remains alive and well with Russia and the United States frequently trading accusations of spying.
After Russia refused to extend visas for the Peace Corps volunteers, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to intervene, but Russian officials refused to back down.
Patrushev said that the Peace Corps still has about 200 volunteers working in nearly 30 Russian regions.
The security service, known by its Russian acronym FSB, is the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
Separately, Patrushev expressed concerns about Turkish extremist sects operating in Russia and trying to gain information about the situation in the North Caucasus, where Russian troops are engaged in the second war in a decade with Chechen separatists. He said the alleged sect, Nurcular, set up companies called Serhat and Eflyak to ``tackle a broad range of talks in the interests of the intelligence services.''
``It conducted pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic brainwashing of Russian teenagers, (and) carried out propaganda actions,'' the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Patrushev as saying.
The FSB blocked the activities of more than 50 of the alleged sect's members in mainly Muslim regions of Russia in the last year, Patrushev said.
Patrushev said cooperation with Western security agencies had resulted in the detention in June of Egyptian citizen Abdullah Abdel Hamid Abdel Basit Mahmud, whom he called ``the emissary of Middle Eastern extremist organizations in Russia,'' according to ITAR-Tass. He also said Russia detained a member of the group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a secretive organization that aims to create an Islamic state in Central Asia, on charges of forming an illegal armed group and extradited him to Uzbekistan in April.
He also revealed more details about previous accusations of spying involving the United States, including an alleged attempt by Americans using drugged cookies and drinks to recruit a Russian defense employee as an agent in 2001.
The effort backfired and the Russian security service identified the defense worker's contact at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as Yunju Kensinger, a third secretary in the embassy's consular department.
Patrushev said that Kensinger was expelled from the country and two Russian citizens were arrested. U.S. officials have refused to comment on the allegations.
``We prevented a heavy blow from being delivered to Russia's defense capabilities and security,'' Patrushev was quoted as saying.
Patrushev also hailed the conviction of businessman Viktor Kalyadin, who was found guilty this summer of providing military information to the United States. Patrushev said Kalyadin was allegedly trying to collect information about Russian defense priorities, Interfax said.
In a separate incident, an Azerbaijani officer assigned to maintain contacts with the militaries of former Soviet states was apprehended with documents that ``represented a state secret,'' Patrushev said. He identified the officer as Maj. Gen. Rasulov. He has been barred from entering the country for five years.
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Hi-tech arms 'would finish war in a week'
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
15 December 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=361736
The American weaponry likely to be deployed in any military strike against Iraq is so advanced and hi-tech that some was not even ready to be used in the operation in Afghanistan just 12 months ago.
With an armoury including satellite imagery that can distinguish a tank from a bus, even through thick cloud, to microwave bombs that can destroy electrical and computer systems without hurting civilians, military planners preparing for war are confident that any strike would be completed in little more than a week.
"The first Gulf War was fought like the Second World War, with air dominance - pounding their defences, softening up the forces and then going in," said Daniel Gouré, a military analyst with the Washington-based Lexington Institute think tank. "This will be speedier, more precise - an effects-based operation. It will be much more surgical, both in the use of explosive force and in the overall operation."
While the present emphasis is on securing the evidence America would need to go to war - the UN wants a list of Iraqi scientists linked to arms programmes by the end of the month and is stepping up the pace of inspection, swooping on 11 sites yesterday - analysts agree that America's military dominance will ensure any assault on Iraq is brief.
Among the weapons Mr Gouré and others highlight are satellite-guided smart bombs known as Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). While a number of these were used in Afghanistan, many more are likely to be deployed in Iraq.
The smart bombs available have also been upgraded. The GBU-28 "bunker-busters" have been upgraded by the BLU-31. Designed to penetrate hardened underground facilities, these have also been equipped with a new device called the hard-target smart fuse, which allows the bomb to "count" how many floors it needs to penetrate before detonating. A new category of bomb is the thermobaric device - only one was used in Afghanistan, and missed its target - which can penetrate indoor or underground spaces and then set off a blast of heat and pressure strong enough to destroy biological agents such as anthrax or smallpox.
One weapon that is completely untested in battle is the microwave bomb, which British and US experts have been working on for several years. Exploding in mid-air, these bombs release pulses of magnetic energy that seek out electrical systems and computers and burn them out - even if they are buried underground. These can also be used to create a fizzing sensation on a person's skin - something US law enforcement agencies have been testing for crowd control.
Chris Hellman, a senior analyst with the Centre for Defence Studies, said: "If it's available and we get into a situation where we are looking at urban warfare, it will definitely be used. They may not be man-portable, but having them on the back of a truck would not be a problem."
Other new or updated weapons include an improved battle tank, the Abrams MI A2, the Apache Longbow helicopter and a high-altitude version of the unmanned Pred- ator drone, which can be used to carry satellite surveillance equipment or Hellfire missiles. Another is the Stryker, an armoured fighting vehicle offering great manoeuvrability. Planners believe it could be so important that - unlike the recent campaigns in Kosovo and Afghanistan - ground forces could play as important a role as bombers.
John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, another research group, believes the supremacy of US technology will mean any military operation will last little longer than a week.
"I think when this war is written up it will emerge as the re-emergence of the importance of land power," he said.
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Harrier Deadlier To Friend Than Foe
45 Marines Died In Noncombat Accidents
December 15, 2002
By ALAN C. MILLER And KEVIN SACK,
Special to the Hartford Courant
http://www.ctnow.com/news/nationworld/hc-harrier1215.artdec15,0,2420486.story?coll=hc-headlines-nationworld
YUMA, Ariz. -- In the entire U.S. arsenal, only the Marine Corps' Harrier attack jet can lift straight up off a runway, hover like a hummingbird, then blast off toward its target. Though many had died flying it, Lt. Col. Peter E. Yount never thought the plane would let him down.
"Difficult, but honest," he called it.
But in 1998, the Harrier betrayed him - not once, but twice. High above the Southern California desert, the plane's engine quit and refused to restart. Then, when Yount ejected, his seat rotated out of position and his parachute harness smacked violently against his helmet.
The 42-year-old father of two young girls died instantly of a broken neck.
The accident was painfully familiar: Despite nearly three decades of effort and billions of dollars spent to improve it, the Harrier remains the most dangerous airplane flying in the U.S. military today.
It has amassed the highest rate of major accidents of any Air Force, Navy, Army or Marine plane now in service. Forty-five Marines have died in 143 noncombat accidents since 1971. More than one third of all Harriers ever in service have been lost to accidents.
Yet the Marine Corps is not only pressing ahead with the Harrier, but is also pressing a second trouble-prone aircraft that takes off vertically, the V-22 Osprey troop transport. After 20 years in development and $12.6 billion in costs, the Osprey is still undergoing testing to prove its safety. Twenty-three Marines died in two crashes in 2000 alone.
Undeterred, the Marines will receive a version of the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter that can take off after a short roll and land vertically. The plane is being developed for the Air Force and Navy as well, but only the Marine model will have this special capability. Still more such planes are envisioned for the more distant future.
This devotion to the Harrier, and to the challenging concept underlying it, is all the more striking because the plane has played only a peripheral combat role.
"If the Harrier had been decisive many times in battle, we would all still regret horribly the tragedies of the pilots who have been killed, but at least you'd be able to say that the Harrier made a difference," said Philip E. Coyle, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester from 1994 to 2001.
"What makes this situation so difficult is that we just don't have that kind of battlefield record to support the accidental deaths."
In the Persian Gulf War in 1991, for instance, the hot thrust-producing nozzles in the heart of the fuselage - which allow the Harrier to rise and balance in the air - made the plane a magnet for heat-seeking missiles. Its loss rate was more than double that of the war's other leading U.S. combat jets. Five Harriers were shot down and two pilots died.
"It's the most vulnerable plane that's in service now," said Franklin C. Spinney, who evaluates tactical aircraft for the Pentagon. "You can't hit that thing without hitting something important."
Critics add that, in the last decade, the use of laser-guided ordnance by high-flying conventional bombers and unmanned drones has diminished the need for the Harrier's brand of close air support.
Afghanistan provided precisely the kind of austere battlefield where the Marines had maintained the Harrier would make a crucial difference. Yet U.S. commanders held the Harrier out of the first four weeks of combat. As other planes pummeled Taliban and al Qaeda targets, Harriers based on the Navy's amphibious assault ship Peleliu practiced attack maneuvers over the Arabian Sea, hundreds of miles from the action.
Today, the Marines hope the Harrier will play a more dramatic role in a potential war with Iraq. But given the plane's limitations, many defense officials and military analysts doubt it.
In part, the Marines' persistence with the crash-prone aircraft springs from their position as the smallest of the U.S. combat services, and their dependence on the financial overlord of their aviation program, the Navy. Since 1957, the Corps has nurtured the dream of a flying force so different from those of the other branches that its independence would be assured.
At the heart of this vision have been planes that could be positioned close to the edge of combat, able to provide transportation and cover troops without depending on aircraft carriers or traditional airfields. The hybrid aircraft would combine a helicopter's ability to lift off from small clearings or damaged runways and an airplane's speed to race to the rescue of troops in trouble.
The result, generations of senior Marine commanders have believed, would be a fighting force that was both invincible and indispensable.
The Harrier, said one general, was "an answer to a prayer."
It was clear early on, however, that the answer came at a price.
The officers who died in Harrier accidents ranked among America's most accomplished aviators. They typically finished near the top of their flight school classes, often aspiring to become squadron commanders, generals or astronauts.
The Marines acknowledge they have had a rough ride with the Harrier but they say it has been worth it. Accidents, they say, are the price of technological progress. And they deny needlessly jeopardizing lives in pursuit of their vision of a pioneering air wing.
"I would resist with all my moral fiber the idea that we would willingly or knowingly try to bring aboard a program - V-22 or anything else - and so fall in love with the program that we would put people at risk to ride in those vehicles," Marine Corps Commandant James L. Jones said at a military forum last year.
The evidence suggests many of the deaths were preventable.
The Marines knew for years they were flying a plane bedeviled by mechanical problems and exceptionally demanding maintenance requirements. Yet the Corps moved haltingly to fix known shortcomings that threatened pilots' lives.
In Yount's case, a mechanic incorrectly installed a part that led to failure of the temperamental engine. The ejection system that fractured Yount's neck had previously killed two pilots.
Other military planes have killed more pilots because there are more of them, and they log more hours in the air. But by the accepted standard of U.S. military aviation safety - major accidents per 100,000 flight hours - the Harrier has no peer among active planes today.
Major accidents are known in the military as Class A mishaps if they cause death, permanent injury or at least $1 million in losses.
The Class A mishap rate for the first model of the Harrier, the AV-8A, was astronomical - 31.77 accidents per 100,000 hours. Notoriously unstable, it had a propensity for rolling over and slamming into the ground. Well over half were lost to accidents. One tragedy-scarred squadron dubbed the plane "the Widow-Maker."
Promising dramatic improvement, the Marines replaced it in the mid-1980s with the more stable and capable AV-8B model.
"Any safety problems, perceived or real, with the AV-8A have been specifically designed out of the AV-8B," Col. Harold Clark, a Harrier program officer, proclaimed in 1981.
But by 1996, nearly a quarter of the new planes had crashed.
The lifetime accident rate for the Marines' AV-8B is 11.44 per 100,000 hours of flight, well over the combined rates for other attack and fighter planes flown during those years by the Marines, the Navy and the Air Force.
It is more than twice the lifetime accident rate of the Air Force's F-16 Fighting Falcon, a single-engine tactical aircraft like the Harrier that has been in service since 1979.
And it is far higher than the rate of the F/A-18 Hornet, a twin-engine combat plane flown since 1980 by the Navy and Marines that, like the Harrier, operates largely off ships.
All told, Harriers have been involved in more than 300 accidents and 900 less serious incidents, according to the Naval Safety Center's aviation database. The cost to taxpayers exceeds $1.8 billion - and that doesn't include the plane's calamitous first decade.
Across the Atlantic, planes in Britain's much smaller Royal Air Force -which pioneered the Harrier - crashed at an even higher rate in recent years.
The Harrier's accidents cannot be traced to any single problem, but rather to an array of them.
Failures of the cantankerous Rolls-Royce engines have caused more than two dozen major accidents.
The Marines and the Naval Air Systems Command, which oversees Marine aviation safety, knew for nearly eight years that the wing flaps were prone to locking up, but it took three crashes, two of them fatal, before they decided to redesign the problem part.
To keep weight down, the Harrier is built with no protective armor. It carries no flame-retardant foam in its fuel tanks because the foam displaces fuel. The fuel tanks are not equipped with self-sealing membranes to plug bullet or shrapnel holes.
The U.S. Navy has spent nearly $9 billion since 1971 to buy and modify the Harriers and an additional $4.1 billion since 1986 to repair and fly the aircraft. The Marines are rebuilding 74 AV-8Bs at a cost of $28.2 million each, pushing the investment in some of those planes above $50 million.
Many current and former Marine Corps leaders complain that the Navy has not always provided sufficient funding because the Harrier belongs to the Marines alone.
To that, the Navy has had a simple, if brutal answer: The Marines wanted the hybrid plane; if it cost more than they could afford, they should have admitted it.
"The fact that the Harrier turned out to be grossly more expensive than they thought, especially driven by the very high accident rate, was not the fault of the Navy," said John F. Lehman Jr., who was Navy secretary from 1981 to 1987. "That was their miscalculation."
Alan C. Miller and Kevin Sack are Los Angeles Times reporters.
----
Pentagon: No Comment on Report of Troops in N.Iraq
Sun Dec 15,
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20021215/ts_nm/iraq_turkey_usa_dc_1
DUBAI (Reuters) - 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 the Arabic Al-Jazeera television channel.
A Pentagon spokesman in Washington said: "I have nothing on that."
A Turkish military spokesman declined to comment on the NTV report and a U.S. embassy official in Ankara told Reuters: "I have heard nothing. (The NTV report) is not substantiated."
Al-Jazeera quoted Turkish military sources as saying 50 U.S. military trucks had started transporting equipment on Saturday from an air base in southern Turkey into three areas in northern Iraq controlled by Kurds. The report said the trucks had used the Habur border crossing.
"Jazeera learned that there are 500 U.S. special forces training around 2,000 Kurds and making logistical preparations for the arrival of thousands of U.S. troops in the event of an attack on Iraq," the Qatar-based television channel said.
The Turkish military rarely if ever provides information to foreign media.
The Turkish broadcaster NTV also aired a report on Sunday saying 50 U.S. military vehicles had crossed into Iraq through Habur and that the number of "American intelligence and military personnel in northern Iraq has reached 500."
NTV did not give a source for the story.
Washington would look to Turkey for the use of air bases in any military operation against neighboring Iraq over Baghdad's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.
The United States already uses Turkish air bases to patrol a so-called "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq that U.S. and British planes have enforced since the end of the Gulf War.
----
Bush Plans to Seek $14 Billion Hike in Defense Budget
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55390-2002Dec14?language=printer
The Bush administration plans to increase military spending by about $14 billion next year, a figure that White House officials say is in line with the president's pledge to build up the nation's armed forces but that falls short of previous administration projections and what Pentagon officials had hoped for to sustain the war on terrorism and pay for new weapons.
The budget plan, which is due to be presented to President Bush this week, would not eliminate any major new weapons that have been under scrutiny this year but would reduce purchases of a new Army helicopter and a new Air Force fighter jet and impose conditions on the Navy's construction of a new aircraft carrier. It would boost spending for programs that have proven valuable in the counterterrorism war -- notably unmanned aerial vehicles and Special Operations forces.
The proposal would raise total defense spending to $378.5 billion next fiscal year from the $364.1 billion appropriated by Congress for fiscal 2003, which began Oct. 1. Although some Pentagon issues still need to be resolved, several senior officials involved in the budget process said the total amount was unlikely to change substantially.
The proposed increase is less than what the administration projected in February when it first presented its plan for defense spending. Officials, who agreed to discuss the plan on condition of anonymity, attributed the drop to a lower-than-expected rate of inflation this year. One senior official described the increase as essentially $10 billion to pay for programs and $4 billion to cover the cost of inflation.
Pentagon officials had sought an additional $10 billion for a contingency fund to finance operations arising from the war on terrorism. Congress rejected a similar request in the fiscal 2003 budget, regarding it as too much of a "blank check," and Bush's budget advisers want to drop the idea.
Bush has made clear his desire to keep national security a top budget priority. But pursuing this goal has become more complicated in the face of a growing federal budget deficit and political pressure to boost spending on education, Medicare prescription drug coverage and other social programs that will be crucial issues for the president as the country heads toward the 2004 election. Bush also has signaled a desire to propose another round of tax cuts.
White House officials have told nonsecurity agencies to expect budget increases of no more than 1 or 2 percent next year, compared with the 4 percent spending increase projected for defense.
Without the contingency fund, officials said, the costs of counterterrorism operations -- as well as any war with Iraq -- would have to be handled through supplemental spending requests. The military budget plan is due to be presented to Congress in early February, along with the rest of the president's spending program for fiscal 2004.
Administration officials said the budget would boost spending for many programs that military planners regard as critical to transforming the military into a more flexible, quick-reaction force. Defense analysts, however, said the failure to cancel some costly, long-running programs undermines this goal.
"What troubles me is that the administration still hasn't cancelled more of the big defense projects," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert with the Brookings Institution. "The price of transformational change is just being added to the cost of previous plans, and that spells continuing budget pressure."
Bush took office pledging to accelerate transformation of the military from a Cold War force designed to battle the Soviet Union into a more agile force geared to fighting regional wars and terrorist networks. White House budget officials initially resisted a Pentagon request last year for a surge in spending but eventually agreed to a plan to go from $331 billion in 2002 to $451 billion in 2007 with the understanding the Defense Department would press ahead with significant reforms. The buildup would be the largest since the Reagan administration.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tapped close aide Stephen Cambone to review major weapons programs. Cambone, the Pentagon's director of program analysis and evaluation, recommended a number of program changes aimed, he has said, at better integrating the separate military services and placing emphasis on expanded communications, quicker intelligence gathering and more precision-guided munitions.
The proposed cuts would hit hardest at the Army, which had its new howitzer, the Crusader, canceled earlier this year. Last week, defense officials announced a postponement in funding for two of six proposed brigades for a new light-armored, wheeled vehicle called Stryker.
Next year's plan would reduce purchases of the Army's new helicopter, the Commanche, by nearly 50 percent, from about 1,200 to 650, and would limit its role to reconnaissance missions, setting aside plans to give it a "deep attack" role as well.
The Navy has wanted to build two new aircraft carriers -- one in 2007 with a new nuclear power plant, catapult system and other features that would provide a transition to a move advanced model in 2011. Under the proposed budget, the Navy would be allowed to build the first carrier, provided it contains some of the new technology intended for the second.
The Air Force, determined to preserve its new F/A-22 fighter jet in the face of persistent cost overruns, has agreed to order fewer planes if it cannot bring production expenses down. But the budget plan raises uncertainties about both the F/A-22 and another warplane in development, the Joint Strike Fighter, by boosting funds for alternative means of delivering bombs, including unmanned aerial vehicles, experimental hypersonic aircraft and new kinds of cruise missiles. "These categories will provide a kind of mix-and-match set of capabilities," a senior defense official said.
Among the big winners in the new budget plan is Special Operations Command, whose $4.9 billion budget is slated to climb about 20 percent in 2004, officials said. The Pentagon has relied heavily on Special Operations forces in the war in Afghanistan and counterterrorism actions around the world. Much of the extra money, officials said, would go toward additional troops, refitted MH-47 Chinook helicopters and new CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and ASDS submersible vessels.
In the absence of other substantial program cuts or an even greater increase in spending, several defense experts said the budget plan would appear to keep the Pentagon on a path toward developing more new weapons than it can eventually buy, leading to a crunch point by the end of the decade.
"Unless they increase the top line more than projected, they can't expect to get to the levels of procurement they're planning," said Steve Kosiak, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan think tank.
"They could make some offsets by cutting force structure, but they don't seem to be talking about that either."
The senior defense official said the budget plan contains a number of "shifts in resources" that should make the crunch point problem "less onerous than it was."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
A Plea to Virginia: Free the Innocent
Sunday, December 15, 2002
Washington Post; Page B08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51042-2002Dec13?language=printer
After the exoneration of more than 100 wrongfully convicted people using DNA evidence, no one can dispute that innocent people sometimes are imprisoned for other people's crimes. When that happens, most people would agree, the courts should correct the injustice. But freeing innocent people through the courts has not been possible in Virginia because of a rule that makes judgments final after 21 days and prohibits the consideration of new evidence. After that, not even conclusive proof of innocence is relevant in court.
That is beginning to change. In 2001 the General Assembly created an exception for the consideration of DNA evidence -- but only if it was discovered by scientific techniques developed after a person's trial. Now the state Supreme Court has proposed a change in the rules that would let a person request a new trial on the basis of other new evidence of innocence.
But there's a catch. As with the DNA exception, evidence missed through attorney error or evidence that only suggests innocence cannot be presented. While the court's proposed relaxing of the 21-day rule is a step in the right direction, it does not give innocent people the access to the courts necessary to present the truth.
A good example of an innocent person for whom the proposed rule would do nothing is Jeff Cox. Based on questionable eyewitness identification, Cox, a 22-year-old New Kent County air-conditioner repairman with no criminal record, was arrested and charged with the abduction and murder of an elderly woman in Richmond. Cox eagerly awaited his trial date. He was innocent, and he had faith that the truth would set him free. But on Feb. 13, 1991, this innocent man was convicted and sentenced to life plus 50 years.
Cox took and passed a polygraph immediately after his trial, but the 21-day period passed before his attorneys did anything else. At that point under Virginia law, Cox's innocence became irrelevant to the courts.
In 1997, when his last possible handwritten request for justice was about to be dismissed for technical reasons, his mother persuaded us to represent him. For the next four years, we fought the state to obtain the original police file and any information about what had gone wrong with the investigation. We were told repeatedly that Cox's innocence was irrelevant.
Finally, through the heroic intervention of an FBI agent and others, on Nov. 14, 2001, Jeff Cox was released from prison when the state attorney general conceded that his convictions should be vacated. What made the difference was the confession of another man.
Cox's exoneration would not have been possible under the current law that permits the consideration of new DNA evidence. The DNA evidence contained in the fingernail scrapings from the victim had been destroyed years ago. Nor could he have received a new trial under the proposed exception for newly discovered evidence. Our investigation uncovered evidence of Cox's innocence and reasons to doubt the eyewitness accounts. But even under the more relaxed rule being contemplated, none of this evidence would count. The proposed rule would prohibit the consideration of impeachment or cumulative evidence, such as proof that the witnesses lied or evidence that is merely more persuasive than what was offered at trial.
The proposed rule also would prohibit the use of any evidence that could have been discovered by an attorney before trial. All of the new evidence we found could have been discovered at the time -- had Cox's lawyers sought it aggressively. Much of it served to impeach the eyewitnesses; although devastating to their credibility, it was not evidence that the proposed rule would allow.
The problem in Cox's case was that there was no smoking gun -- until the guilty man confessed. Even that testimony, had it been in the form of a witness recantation, would be considered inadmissible under the proposed rule.
It took 11 years and several near miracles for Jeff Cox to gain his freedom. At a minimum, the purpose of any change in the rules should be to reduce the system's reliance on miracles to free the innocent. Yet Virginia still resists the changes necessary to restore truth to its proper place in the courtroom.
Virginians expect swift and certain punishment, but only for the person who commits the crime. The finality of Cox's conviction ensured not merely that he would be punished unjustly but that the real murderers would remain free. Virginia can ensure that the right people are held responsible for their crimes only when it provides the opportunity for the truth to be heard in court at any time. Innocence must always be the key to freedom.
-- Steven D. Benjamin
-- Betty Layne DesPortes
are criminal defense lawyers in Richmond.
-------- death penalty
Death Penalty Foes Gather in Chicago
December 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Death-Penalty-Illinois.html
CHICAGO (AP) -- Former death row inmates gathered with activists Sunday to draw attention to flaws in the administration of capital punishment and encourage one of the anti-death penalty movement's darlings, Gov. George Ryan.
Ryan, who in 2000 imposed a moratorium on executions in Illinois, is considering the clemency petitions of more than 140 death row inmates.
Forty former death row inmates from around the country spoke briefly about their cases at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school.
They opened the afternoon of speechmaking by talking briefly about the details of their cases, then lighting a candle before taking a seat.
``It's like a death row reunion,'' said Ronald Jones, a former Illinois death-row inmate cleared by a DNA test in 1999.
Two of the inmates -- including Kirk Bloodsworth, who became the first U.S. death row inmate to be exonerated through DNA evidence in 1993 -- read a letter asking Ryan to grant clemency to all prisoners on Illinois' death row.
``Others just like us remain on death row today, still waiting for the miracle to come,'' Bloodsworth said.
Center director Lawrence Marshall also asked for a blanket clemency, saying Ryan ``holds the fate of 160 men and women in his hands.''
``How do we tell the mother of a death row inmate that we have to kill your son even though we know the system is wrong ... to bring closure to other people?'' Marshall asked.
The gathering, which continues Monday, comes amid increased efforts between capital punishment's supporters and opponents to influence the Republican governor just a month before he leaves office.
Last month, a group of retired judges urged Ryan in a letter to commute the death sentences of any inmate whose conviction was tainted by flaws in Illinois' capital punishment system.
Family members of the victims of those inmates recently met with Ryan and urged him not to commute the death sentences to life in prison.
--------
U.S. Death Row Population Falling
December 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Capital-Punishment.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of death row prisoners dropped last year for the first time since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, the Justice Department reported Sunday. The decline was part of a trend that has seen fewer people sentenced to die in recent years.
The death row population fell from 3,601 in 2000 to 3,581 in 2001, the first year-to-year decrease in 25 years. Last year's total of 155 was the lowest number sentenced to die and put on death row since 1973. It was the third straight year of declines.
The number of death sentences imposed last year compares with 303 in 1998 and 319 in 1996, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Sixty-six people were executed last year, compared with 85 the year before. Through Dec. 11 of this year, 68 people have been executed.
Death penalty experts say juries and prosecutors appear to be exercising greater care in using the death penalty, particularly considering recent cases in which DNA evidence has proved that people were wrongly convicted. More prosecutors also appear to be accepting plea bargains in which a defendant accepts a sentence of life without parole.
``There is more selective use of the death penalty going on,'' said Richard Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, a capital punishment research group. ``The key issue, which is disturbing to people, is that they've seen inmates who may have been close to execution walk off from death row.''
The government figures show that 63 men and three women were put to death last year, all by lethal injection. The racial breakdown was 48 whites, 17 blacks and one American Indian.
A death row inmate is most likely to have previous felony convictions, never have been married and have no more than a high school education, the statistics show. Only 10 percent have attended college.
Oklahoma executed the most people in 2001, with 18, followed by 17 put to death in Texas and seven in Missouri. In all, executions were carried out last year by 15 of the 38 states that have a death penalty. The federal government executed two men, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and drug lord and murderer Juan Raul Garza.
Preliminary statistics for this year show that Texas conducted 33 of the 68 executions nationwide.
Some other key statistics from the report:
--The average prison stay for those executed in 2001 was 11 years and 10 months, or about five months longer than the year before.
--Three states housed 40 percent of all death row inmates at the end of 2001: California, with 603; Texas, 453; and Florida, 372. New Hampshire was the only capital punishment state with no one on death row.
--The youngest person on death row in 2001 was 19, the oldest 86.
--More whites than blacks were sentenced to death -- 1,989 whites, 1,538 blacks.
--There were 51 women on death row, compared with 36 a decade ago.
Capital punishment methods are changing, too. By 2001, 36 states had authorized lethal injection as the method of execution, compared with 22 a decade earlier. Since 1977, 584 of the 749 executions, or about 78 percent, have been by injection.
Alabama is among the most recent converts, switching from the electric chair to injection in May. Anthony Johnson, 46, last week became the first Alabama death row inmate to die by lethal injection.
Yet some states still authorize, in certain circumstances, electrocution, use of gas, hanging and -- in Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah -- death by firing squad.
Ninety people had their death sentences removed or overturned by the courts in 2001, with Florida leading the way with 11. Of the 90, 46 inmates now are serving life sentences, and most of the others were awaiting new trials or sentencing hearings.
Seven inmates had death sentences commuted. Nineteen death row inmates died while awaiting execution.
On the Net: Bureau of Justice Statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs
Death Penalty Information Center: http://deathpenaltyinfo.org
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters call for oversight of U.S. military
By Soo-jeong Lee
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 15, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021215-12599359.htm
SEOUL - Tens of thousands of South Koreans holding candles marched through Seoul yesterday to protest the deaths of two South Korean girls who were hit by a U.S. military vehicle.
Anti-U.S. sentiment in South Korea, a key U.S. ally, rose after two U.S. soldiers involved in the accident were acquitted of negligent homicide charges in U.S. military courts in November.
A large crowd gathered in downtown Seoul, shouting, "Bring back alive Shin Hyo-sun and Shim Mi-son." The two 13-year-old girls were on their way to a friend's birthday party when they were run over and killed in June.
Organizers said that about 300,000 people joined the protests in South Korea. Without giving their own estimate, police said the organizers' figure was inflated. Local media estimated the crowd in Seoul at 30,000 to 50,000.
After a two-hour rally in Seoul, protesters with candles marched and sang the popular Korean folk song "Arirang." Police stopped them a block from the U.S. Embassy. Some protesters tore apart four large U.S. flags.
There were no immediate reports of violent clashes between marchers and thousands of police deployed nationwide.
In Daegu, a city 200 miles southeast of Seoul, two students broke into a U.S. military base and climbed onto a 100-foot-high water tank.
Television footage showed the students, draped in South Korean flags, shouting, "Retry them in our court." They were arrested by South Korean police two hours later, all-news cable network YTN said.
Protesters in Seoul clapped and roared when speakers demanded a retrial of the soldiers in a South Korean court and a revision of an agreement with Washington to give South Korea more jurisdiction over the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed here.
Protesters denounced the South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, for "groveling" to the United States and called him a U.S. "puppet."
President Bush apologized for the accident in a telephone conversation Friday night with Mr. Kim. Mr. Bush "pledged to work closely with the South Korean government to prevent such accidents in the future," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.
But activists said the apologies fell short of their main demand: more South Korean jurisdiction over U.S. troops.
----
The Crusader [Ramsey Clark]
Ramsey Clark Was LBJ's Attorney General. Now He's Busy Denouncing U.S. 'War Crimes' in Places Like Iraq, N. Korea. How Did That Happen?
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page F01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50271-2002Dec13?language=printer
NEW YORK
Ramsey Clark says he hasn't changed at all since the days when he was Lyndon Johnson's attorney general. He knows that a lot of people don't believe him, but he doesn't seem to care.
"All I've been doing," Clark says in his soft Texas drawl, "is what I thought would prevent war and strengthen international institutions and protect human rights and create social and economic justice."
Maybe. But his crusade for peace and justice has taken some strange detours over the last couple of decades.
These days, for instance, Clark, 74, serves as a lawyer for Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav dictator now on trial for war crimes at an International Criminal Tribunal in Holland. Clark is also defending Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan clergyman charged with genocide in connection with the massacre of Tutsis in 1994.
Over the years, Clark has also served as an attorney for the Palestine Liberation Organization. And for Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb general indicted on charges of genocide in 1995. And Lyndon LaRouche, the American political cult leader convicted of mail fraud in 1988. And Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called "blind cleric" convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role as spiritual adviser to the men who exploded a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993.
But defending clients isn't all Clark does. He also serves as what one former colleague describes as "a one-man opposition State Department" -- flying to Iran, Iraq, Panama, Serbia, Libya and North Korea to denounce the United States for what he calls "war crimes" or "genocide" against those nations. Then he comes home to convene propaganda tribunals, where leftist activists try -- and inevitably convict -- the United States for crimes against humanity.
Clark also works as a political organizer. He's the founder and chairperson of the International Action Center, an antiwar group created and dominated by members of a tiny Marxist-Leninist sect called the Workers World Party. The IAC and a spin-off group, International ANSWER, organized the antiwar demonstration that drew nearly 100,000 to Washington on Oct. 26. Now, they are organizing a sequel scheduled for Jan. 18.
Clark has drawn merciless fire from commentators across the political spectrum. Conservative pundit George F. Will dismisses him as "a piece of lint from the 1960s." Liberal commentator John B. Judis wrote that Clark "inhabits the furthest reaches of the fevered swamps of American politics." Salon, the online magazine, called him "the war criminal's best friend." And an anarchist Web site called the Shadow ran a story titled "The Mysterious Ramsey Clark: Stalinist Dupe or Ruling-Class Spook?"
How does Clark explain the political odyssey that took him from serving as attorney general of the United States to serving as prosecutor in a ragtag show trial that charged the United States with war crimes in Korea?
He doesn't.
The man who made a career out of defending controversial political figures declines to defend himself.
"I've been accused of not only not promoting myself but not defending myself," he says, sitting in the cramped conference room of his Greenwich Village law office, beneath a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. and an El Salvador solidarity poster. "Because I think the important thing is to affirmatively stand for something, not spend your time being diverted by people who are making up stuff or who want to change the subject."
'The Preacher'
The scourge of U.S. foreign policy possesses an impeccable Establishment pedigree.
His paternal grandfather was president of the Texas Bar Association. His maternal grandfather served on the Texas Supreme Court. His father, Tom C. Clark, was Harry Truman's attorney general before Truman appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1949.
At 17, Clark defied his father's wishes and dropped out of Washington's Woodrow Wilson High School to join the Marine Corps in the waning days of World War II. He served as a courier and saw horrific scenes of destruction in Germany, Poland, Russia and China, which left him with a deep loathing of war.
He came home, earned a history degree at the University of Texas, then a law degree at the University of Chicago. He married a UT classmate, Georgia Welch, and they reared two children -- Tom, who is now a lawyer for the Justice Department, and Ronda, who was born deaf, epileptic and profoundly retarded. Clark spent hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and countless hours of effort -- on Ronda's health, his son says.
"His relationship with Ronda is revealing," says Tom Clark, "because it shows his compassion, his tenderness and his willingness to work with very difficult situations."
Clark spent a decade at the family law firm in Dallas and then, in 1961, President Kennedy appointed him assistant attorney general. In his early thirties, he was the youngest assistant AG, but he wasn't afraid to speak his mind. He raised moral questions on so many issues -- including wiretapping and the death penalty -- that he was nicknamed "the Preacher."
"He brought an ethical boldness," says Victor Navasky, publisher of the left-liberal magazine the Nation and author of "Kennedy Justice," a book on Robert Kennedy's Justice Department. "To dissent on a matter like wiretapping when you're the youngest assistant AG -- that takes a certain kind of self-confidence."
Impressed with Clark's guts, his bosses dispatched him to the scenes of the great civil rights battles of the era -- Ole Miss, Birmingham, Selma. For Clark, watching poor, unarmed black people defy entrenched racism was a life-changing experience that gave him a lingering sympathy for dissidents.
In 1966, President Johnson appointed Clark attorney general. He was 39. Clark's father swore him in and then resigned from the Supreme Court to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
He became the most liberal attorney general since World War II. He cut back on wiretaps. He declared a moratorium on federal executions and federal prison construction, arguing that the best way to fight crime was by ending poverty and racism. He opposed the Vietnam War -- but out of deference to LBJ didn't speak publicly.
Despite enormous pressure from Congress, Clark refused to indict black militants and antiwar leaders for inciting riots when protests turned violent in 1968. But Clark did prosecute Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, and four other antiwar activists for a conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. Their convictions were later overturned.
Many of Clark's antiwar friends are still peeved at the Spock prosecution, but he defends it. "The Department of Justice worked on principle," he says, "and we applied the facts to the law and I thought there was sufficient action there to warrant an indictment."
In 1968, Richard Nixon turned Clark into an issue in his presidential campaign, promising at every whistle-stop to fire Clark and hire somebody who'd crack down on crime.
When Nixon won a narrow victory, LBJ blamed Clark. He stopped speaking to his attorney general and pointedly failed to invite him to his farewell Cabinet luncheon.
Clark left Justice in 1969 and tried his hand at high-powered corporate law, signing on with the firm of Paul, Weiss in Manhattan. But it didn't work out.
"I had a hope that representing major corporations would alter their policies in certain ways, like employment nondiscrimination and stuff like that," he says. "But from my experience, that's the last thing in the world they want their own lawyer tellin' 'em. They want their own lawyer tellin' 'em how to do what they want to do, not what they ought to do."
In 1973, he quit Paul, Weiss. In 1974, he ran for the U.S. Senate in New York. He won the Democratic primary and then took on incumbent Jacob Javits, a popular liberal Republican.
Clark ran a maverick campaign. He urged a 50 percent cut in the defense budget, refused to take contributions over $100 and insisted on telling voters exactly what they didn't want to hear.
"I went out to Grumman on Long Island, which was the largest employer in Nassau and Suffolk County, making a military plane I didn't like," he says. "I came out for closing the plant. I went upstate and told the hunters I thought we ought to abolish handguns and license long guns. And on and on like that."
Not surprisingly, he lost.
The Defender
"It's true I ran for office once, but I'm not really suited for it," Clark says.
He pauses, fiddles with a paper clip, reaches down to scratch his long, lanky left leg, just above an argyle sock that peeks out from one of his ankle-high beige Wallabees, a style of footwear rarely seen since the '70s.
"My experience in the Senate would have been miserable," he continues. "I would have been a misfit. I never would have been a member of the club because I would have been fighting against the very things they were doing without any real chance of converting more than a handful."
Clark's political failure freed him to pursue a path more conducive to his maverick personality -- a lawyer and international activist accountable to no constituency except his own conscience.
In the '70s, Clark became a lefty "movement lawyer," defending dissidents, prisoners and revolutionaries of every variety: The Attica prison rioters. The Berrigan brothers and six other pacifists who entered a defense plant and hammered on the nose cone of a missile. Leonard Peltier, the Sioux Indian activist convicted of killing two FBI agents. Lori Berenson, the American convicted by a Peruvian military court of aiding Marxist guerrillas.
But Clark didn't defend just leftists. He has also worked for eccentric extremist Lyndon LaRouche. And several former Nazi concentration camp guards. And the Branch Davidians who sued the federal government over the Waco raid.
His foreign clients are even more controversial. He defended Yasser Arafat and the PLO when they were sued by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist killed by PLO terrorists on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. He defended Karadzic when the Serb general was sued in a U.S. court by Bosnian women who accused him of war crimes. And now he's defending Milosevic and Ntakirutimana in international war crimes tribunals.
"Lawyers defend people," Clark says. "That's what they're supposed to do."
But Clark is also one of the few members of the defense bar who conduct their own foreign policy.
In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, he flew to Hanoi and denounced the U.S. war effort.
In 1980, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the U.S.-backed shah of Iran, Clark flew to Tehran at the behest of President Carter to try to win the release of 53 American hostages. He flew home without the hostages, but then he returned to Iran and participated in a tribunal that convicted the United States of colluding in the shah's crimes. That made Carter so mad he threatened to prosecute Clark for violating a ban on travel to Iran.
In 1986, after the United States bombed Libya in response to a terrorist bombing of a Berlin disco, Clark flew to Tripoli, met with dictator Moammar Gaddafi and denounced the air raid. Later, he sued the U.S. government on behalf of Libyans killed and injured in the bombing, but the suit was thrown out of court.
In 1990, after the United States invaded Panama to arrest dictator Manuel Noriega for dope dealing, Clark flew to Panama, denounced the invasion and claimed Americans killed between 2,000 and 4,000 people. When a reporter asked him for evidence, Clark snapped, "You are an investigative journalist. You find the sources." A study by the independent Panamanian Committee for Human Rights later put the death toll at 565.
Later that year, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Clark embarked on a crusade that enmeshed him with a Communist splinter group called the Workers World Party.
The Tribunals
He gets very emotional when he talks about Iraq.
"We bombed them for 42 days in 1991," Clark says. "I was there for 14 of them. I drove 2,000 miles just seeing civilian damage. We were hitting every civilian thing you can think of -- taxicabs, school buses, mosques, synagogues, hospitals. I didn't see a hospital that had windows in it -- all of them were smashed! We dropped 88,500 tons of bombs! That's a Pentagon figure. That's 7 1/2 Hiroshimas! A hundred fifty thousand Iraqis died! We lost 155. That's a slaughter! That's a slaughter! You can't slaughter people like that!"
After that trip, Clark returned to New York and presided over a mock war crimes tribunal that found the United States guilty of "crimes against humanity." Every year since then, he has returned to Iraq to bring medicine and denounce the United States for "genocide" for promoting economic sanctions that he and others claim have killed more than a million Iraqis. (The U.S. government attributes Iraqi deaths not to sanctions but to Saddam Hussein spending his nation's wealth on the military.)
Clark's actions in Iraq aren't surprising. People expect him to do those things. What they didn't expect was that the former attorney general would volunteer to serve as the leader of an antiwar group founded and dominated by the Workers World Party, a communist fringe group that embraces North Korea, the world's last unrepentant Stalinist regime.
That strange story began in late 1990, when two competing groups of antiwar activists organized two rival demonstrations against the Gulf War. One group was a broad-based coalition that denounced Hussein's invasion of Kuwait but urged the United States to respond with economic sanctions, not war. The other group, founded and controlled by the Workers World Party, refused to denounce Hussein and opposed both war and sanctions.
Clark signed on to support the second group, which shocked his old friends in the antiwar movement. One of them, David McReynolds of the War Resisters League, visited Clark to inform him that he was being used by Workers World.
"He didn't seem too impressed by what I was saying," McReynolds recalls. "Maybe he thought it smacked of McCarthyism and name-calling."
In 1991, when Clark organized his war crimes tribunal on Iraq, several Workers World leaders appeared as speakers. In 1992, when Workers World organizers, some of them working out of space in Clark's law office, created an antiwar organization called the International Action Center, Clark was -- and still is -- listed as the IAC's "founder" and "chairperson."
Workers World's domination of a group that Clark nominally heads has been the subject of countless articles over the past decade, but Clark says he knows nothing about the party.
"I know that there's a Workers World Party and I think they have a newspaper," he says when asked about the group. "My association with Workers World? I don't know of any. I have no formal association with Workers World. There's a Workers Party in Turkey that supported the Kurdish people, and I've always supported the Kurdish people. . . . I have no knowledge or involvement in Workers World. I should know more, I suppose."
Indeed, he should. In 2001, Clark traveled to North Korea -- Workers World's favorite nation -- with a delegation that included Brian Becker, who is both co-director of the IAC and a member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party. In Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, Clark held a news conference to denounce the United States for what he called 50 years of war crimes against Korea.
When the delegation returned home, the IAC sponsored the "Korean Truth Commission International War Crimes Tribunal." Becker was the tribunal's "co-coordinator." Clark served as the prosecuting attorney. The United States was the defendant. Nobody dwelt on the inconvenient fact that the Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea.
To the surprise of no one, the "jury" found the United States guilty on all counts.
The Rationale
Ramsey Clark is baffling, even to old friends.
He is, says a Texas buddy, historian Ronnie Dugger, "a very deep and mysterious person."
"I remain mystified by Ramsey," says McReynolds. "I have no idea what makes Ramsey tick, and I don't know anyone who knows what makes Ramsey tick."
"He's an enigma," says Mel Wulf, who was Clark's law partner for five years. "He's superficially very congenial but you never get past the superficiality of it. He totally keeps his own counsel."
Like a lot of people in New York's left-wing circles, Wulf has a pop-psych theory about Clark. "My pop psychology is that he did some terrible things when he was AG and maybe he's been trying to atone ever since," he says. "I think part of his problem is that he's always so totally uncomfortable with the hypocrisy of his indicting Spock."
Another popular theory is the one that John Judis advanced in a scathing article in the New Republic in 1991: Clark's radical politics are the product of rebellion against his conservative father. Tom Clark was a Commie-bashing attorney general, Judis wrote, and his son became "an ally of the people his father was willing to suppress."
"Pop psychologists say he's atoning, but I don't buy that," says Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation and a friend of Clark for 30 years.
Navasky has his own theory: "Ramsey is in the tradition of the great dissenters," he says. "He's a romantic and an idealist. He really believes one person can make a difference."
Navasky sometimes disagrees with Clark, but he doesn't see him as a dupe of Workers World. "My assumption is that he feels that if he's worked with you in a cause he believes is just, he isn't going to worry if you're a member of the Communist Party or the Workers World Party."
Meanwhile, Clark's son, Tom, says he's not at all mystified by his father.
"I don't find him unpredictable," he says. "He has always had a core set of beliefs -- in the rule of law, in civil rights, in human rights. . . . He is not willing to alter his beliefs to win a vote or gain a client or earn a fee. He's going to give it to you straight and he's not going to sugarcoat it. People find it hard to believe, but it's a genuine thing."
The Digressions
Deep into a four-hour interview, Clark is asked: What are your politics?
He pauses, thinks for a moment.
"Probably my politics are to have no politics in the traditional sense," he says. "I mean, I vote. I voted for [Democrat] Carl McCall for governor. I like Carl and I thought it would be wonderful to have an African American as governor of New York."
Then he digresses into a story about working for universal voter registration during the '70s. Then he digresses into a riff on how pathetic U.S. voter turnout rates are, which leads to a digression on how money controls politics in the United States, which is why, he says, Congress didn't heed the will of the public and vote against Bush's new war on Iraq.
After all that, he returns to his political views, which are, he says, strictly non-ideological. "I want to see an end to hunger, you know," he says in his Texas drawl, "and I don't think I'm gonna see it by gettin' into a debate between capitalism and Marx. I think you're gonna solve it by gettin' the food out there."
That's the way the interview goes: Ask a question and he digresses, then tells a story about Bobby Kennedy, then denounces U.S. foreign policy from the Monroe Doctrine right up to the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan: "It was foolish from every standpoint. We shot the place up. It's totally out of control. We're going to have to find a way out somehow."
Along the way, he explains himself in bits and pieces. He defends controversial clients because "if you believe in the rule of law, you're never afraid to represent anybody." He's defending Milosevic and Ntakirutimana because he believes that ad hoc war crimes tribunals are inherently unfair and ought to be replaced by a permanent world criminal court.
Besides, he says, "I feel strongly that Pastor Ntakirutimana is innocent." As for Milosevic: "I don't judge him one way or another. But when I saw [Yugoslavia] turn him over against the will of its people, I perceived that as just power politics persecuting a guy."
He scoffs at the pop-psych theories about his political odyssey: "That sounds ridiculous." It fact, he doesn't believe he's had a political odyssey. He says he's still working for the same goals he had as attorney general, bringing the ideals of the civil rights movement into the international realm.
"The idea that it's a political odyssey is ridiculous," he says. "It's beyond anything I know. It may appear that way, but all I know is that I've been working hard -- and I do work hard -- to support things like peace, like nondiscrimination, like the elimination of poverty and war and things like that."
Then he's off on another digression, this one about how U.S. sanctions against Vietnam were a form of genocide.
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The Ghosts of Economic Demonstrations Haunt Italy
December 15, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/europe/15ITAL.html
ROME, Dec. 14 - The bombing that shattered windows and lodged shrapnel in the walls of Genoa's police headquarters last Monday reminded many Italians of the fighting between the police and antiglobalization protesters at the Group of 8 summit meeting there last year. The purported bombers even offered a mnemonic device to jog the country's memory.
The little-known July 20 Brigade, which claimed responsibility for the two explosions, is named for the date last year on which a police officer shot dead a young rioter, a day when smashed storefront glass blanketed the sidewalks and tear gas filled the air.
But Italy hardly needs reminders.
For more than a year, the country has been haunted by the violent clashes between the police and antiglobalization protesters that injured hundreds of people. The ghosts are now out in force.
Documentary films, commemorative CD-ROM's and dozens of books recount the story while nearly every Italian city has at least one wall spray-painted to express solidarity with Carlo Giuliani, the 23-year-old man killed by the police. The prosecutors' decision this month to drop charges against the officer who shot him and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's expressed distrust of the antiglobalization movement have kept the story running.
"Genoa was a shock" over the events of July 2001, said Paolo Ceri, a sociologist at the University of Florence who has written several books about Italy's antiglobalization movement. "For the first time in a long time there was a huge movement again and it struck the collective imagination. That remains."
But the government is not happy about the movement's staying power. Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu, addressing the Senate on Wednesday, said the recent bombing had meant to be fatal and "drastically raises the danger which, in the last year and a half, had showed itself as small-scale terrorism."
Those minor threats have been met with mixed results. Earlier this month, 11 people were arrested for looting and causing damage during the July 2001 protests. That followed the court-ordered release of 18 other protesters who had spent two weeks in jail on charges of subversion and conspiracy.
Some of the movement's leaders say they would like to move on and insist that the government is milking last year's melee to portray them all as trouble-makers.
"The government has done everything possible to try to make the situation more tense and create a fearful environment," said Vittorio Agnoletto, a leader of the antiglobalization movement and former spokesman of the Genoa Social Forum that organized last year's protest.
Supporters of Italy's antiglobalization drive say the movement's real face was seen not in the violence of last year, but during an enormous demonstration last month, when more than half a million people convened peacefully in Florence. That march also marked a shift in aims.
The movement's opposition to war, especially with Iraq, has taken center stage, becoming both a magnet and an umbrella for its deepened ranks. There were also Palestinian kaffiyeh scarves around marchers' necks and Osama bin Laden images brandished on some of their red flags.
"In part, the movement has become more anti-American," said Professor Ceri.
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Thousands Protest Against HK Plans for New Law
December 15, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-rights-hongkong.html
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Hong Kong people took part in one of the territory's biggest marches in years on Sunday, denouncing plans for an anti-subversion law they fear will erode freedom and civil liberties.
Holding banners, black balloons and pumping their fists in the air, the protesters marched to government headquarters urging the administration to drop plans to enact the controversial law.
``This evil law will embroil Hong Kong, heaven and earth forbid,'' marchers chanted in the biggest display of public outrage since the government unveiled the law in September.
The constitution requires Hong Kong to pass the law, which Beijing is eager to see introduced in order to keep what it calls hostile forces from using the territory to subvert the mainland.
March organizers said about 50,000 people participated in Sunday's protest, which ended without any incident. Police declined to give a figure.
The proposed law has disturbed rights, legal and civic groups both in Hong Kong and overseas.
They worry it may be exploited by authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong against anyone they dislike in the former British colony, promised a high degree of autonomy when it was handed back to China in 1997.
``This law will threaten the rights of many, many people in Hong Kong, how can I not protest?'' said one marcher who identified himself only as Mr Wong.
GROUPS UNITED AGAINST LAW
People found guilty of acts of treason, sedition, secession from, or subversion of, the mainland government could be imprisoned for life under the new law.
As many as 100 civil and religious groups joined in the march, including the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned in China.
Although legal in Hong Kong, the group fears a crackdown when the new law is enacted, since it will make illegal Hong Kong organizations linked to groups banned on the mainland.
The government, which insists the planned law has the support of the majority of Hong Kong people, is even at odds with the local Roman Catholic diocese, which is against the law.
Sunday's protest march began at sprawling Victoria Park with a prayer session organized by more than 70 Christian groups.
Bishop Joseph Zen, head of the Catholic diocese in Hong Kong, has repeatedly warned that the law will roll back religious freedom and free speech -- freedoms Beijing promised to leave alone in Hong Kong for 50 years at the handover.
Rights experts say concepts like ``state secrets'' and ``national security'' in the law are too vague, leaving them open to abuse.
There is also unhappiness at the government's refusal of a second round of consultations before sending the law to the legislature, a body perceived as so compliant it is unlikely to try to raise any serious objections or change major provisions.
Hong Kong's government has said, however, it will not import legal concepts from the communist mainland or curb rights.
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Hong Kong Subversion Law Draws Protests
December 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Hong-Kong-Subversion.html
HONG KONG (AP) -- At least 12,000 demonstrators marched on Sunday to protest a planned anti-subversion law they fear will undermine Hong Kong's freedoms and put the territory more firmly under the thumb of mainland China.
``We don't want darkness to fall on Hong Kong,'' said Lee Cheuk-yan, a legislator and union leader, as the protesters advanced to Hong Kong government headquarters, waving signs, chanting and popping balloons.
Many sang the civil rights anthem ``We Shall Overcome'' in the peaceful demonstration, in which the line of demonstrators stretched nearly four miles.
Police said 12,000 people had turned out, while organizers put the number at 25,000.
The march was enormous by Hong Kong standards -- rivaled in recent years only by the crowds that turn out each June 4 to commemorate China's bloody crackdown on protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Ever since Hong Kong was returned from British to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997, it has been required by its mini-constitution to outlaw subversion, sedition, treason and other crimes against the state.
The government recently began work on the legislation. Critics say officials are going too far -- apparently to please Beijing -- with a law so loosely written it would let the authorities trample on people's freedoms or ban groups the government doesn't like.
Hong Kong Secretary for Security Regina Ip has dismissed such concerns as groundless, saying the territory's laws also protect civil liberties, and that will not be changed.
Many here don't believe the government.
``I don't want Hong Kong to become like China,'' said Philip Cheung, a 48-year-old civil servant who joined Sunday's demonstration.
``The rights we have are not guaranteed in the future,'' grumbled a 25-year-old bank clerk, Sam Ho.
Since Hong Kong's handover, free speech rights have been guaranteed under a government arrangement dubbed ``one country, two systems,'' and there are hundreds of demonstrations every year, mostly involving dozens of people or fewer.
The size of Sunday's demonstration indicated strong discontent among Hong Kong's 6.8 million citizens over the bill, which the government hopes to pass by July.
The Hong Kong Security Bureau said the protest proves the government's contention that local civil liberties are intact.
``Today's rally bears testimony to the freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate which are enjoyed by Hong Kong residents,'' the bureau said in a statement. ``These rights and freedoms are guaranteed.''
The protest snarled traffic in the city center in the late afternoon, but appeared to be winding down peacefully early Sunday night.
Pro-democracy politicians and human rights activists opposed to the law have been joined by some in the business community who fear the exchange of some financial information could theoretically be targeted and wreck Hong Kong as a business center.
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'Ordinary people' join peace protests
The threat of a U.S. attack on Iraq brings unfamiliar faces into the activist crowd
Joe Garofoli,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, December 15, 2002
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/15/BA104336.DTL
Each calls herself an ordinary person. A pregnant mother with two small children in Albany. A waitress in San Rafael. A Lafayette book club member.
Yet in the past few weeks, these people who have lives and kids and aren't prone to protesting every injustice they see on a tacked-up flyer have left their comfortable homes to protest the possibility of war with Iraq. Their common motivation: They feel that Washington isn't listening.
Some point to these living-room revolutionaries, as well as to Internet petition campaigns, "Peace Is Patriotic" billboards in the Bay Area and an uptick in bumper sticker sales, as the tip of an iceberg of anti-war protest floating toward the country's midsection.
But aside from demonstrations in October that drew tens of thousands in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., others dismiss such uprisings as more ice cubes than icebergs of activism -- and hardly unexpected in the Bay Area, given its left-of-the-dial leanings.
If a movement is growing, these critics say, then why didn't Congress heed it instead of supporting a resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq? Among those who backed it were Democratic Reps. Ellen Tauscher of Walnut Creek, Tom Lantos of San Mateo and every congressional Democrat with presidential ambitions.
"Everybody likes to say that they represent millions, but they usually only represent themselves," said Mo Fiorina, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and political science professor at Stanford University. "Until you see Republicans in Congress deserting the president the way that Democrats deserted (President Lyndon) Johnson during Vietnam, then this doesn't amount to much."
A noontime rally in Oakland last week drew 150 mostly veteran demonstrators -- hardly evidence that the revolution had spread to Atherton.
"When someone told me the other day that so-and-so sold 1,000 bumper stickers," Fiorina said, "I responded, 'That's nice, but 100 million people voted in the last presidential election.' "
Activists say it's impossible to measure the movement at this stage. But what gives them hope is that pockets of activism are showing up in unlikely places -- and without a draft dipping into the middle class, which is what awakened suburban protest during the Vietnam War.
From study circles of high-tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to Thursday's first meeting of a coalition in Walnut Creek, anti-war protest is smelling more like mall-bought Givenchy than Telegraph Avenue-purchased patchouli.
"People are desperately craving community to talk about this, to express themselves," said Michael Nagler, emeritus professor of classics and literature at UC Berkeley and founder of the school's Peace and Conflict Studies Program.
JUGGLING PROTESTS, NAP TIME
In the Bay Area, that craving is personified by Julie Tovar, the pregnant Albany mom who organized a 200-person march in her neighborhood Nov. 3. By Amelia Fay-Berquist, the waitress who got arrested at her first demonstration. And by Janet Thomas, the book clubber who stood on a main drag in Lafayette and waved a sign -- and to her surprise was joined by 100 of her neighbors.
"I just couldn't sleep at night," said Tovar, 35, the mother of a 2- and a 4-year-old. Aside from a demonstration while a UC Berkeley student a decade ago, Tovar hasn't protested since her parents took her on a Cesar Chavez-led march in the 1970s, when she was as old as her youngest child. These days, she's a full-time mom.
But the Bush administration's actions in the Middle East were upsetting her,
she said, and "I knew in my heart that others felt the same way."
So during the wee hours one night this fall -- "I think it was my hormones, " Tovar said -- she posted an item on an Internet forum popular with parents.
Amid postings selling Graco strollers and soliciting for nannies, Tovar asked "if many other parents are feeling like I am: pretty voiceless regarding the current (relentless) move toward war on Iraq."
Plenty did. Yet many told Tovar that if they did something publicly, they didn't want it to be "real Berkeley." Translation: Easy on the rhetoric and ask the speakers to confine their comments to a single issue.
Oh, and several asked that the event not be scheduled from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
-- that's nap time for the kiddies.
So she tailored an event for her middle-class neighborhood. There were only two speakers and both addressed only anti-war sentiment, not the grievances of the Palestinians or Israelis.
The 200 participants walked down Solano Avenue, Albany's main street, and gathered in Albany Memorial Park for a balloon-festooned gathering that more resembled an overgrown birthday party than an anti-war rally.
Which was the point, Tovar said. "People have this image of families, that we're only interested in gassing up our SUVs to take the kids to soccer practice. People care. I can't tell you how many wrote and said, 'I don't have the time to help, but I'll definitely be there.' "
A BOOK CLUB TRANSFORMED
Thomas, a 51-year-old Lafayette schoolteacher, was pleasantly surprised by a similar reaction she found in her town, which isn't known as a hotbed of activism.
"I know it's a stereotype, but we don't have a lot of time for socializing with other adults," said Thomas, who has three children. "Most of that is done around the soccer field -- and you don't talk about a lot of issues there. You talk about your kids."
Yet shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, her book club was transformed by a visit from former Orinda resident Ellen Schwartz. With the group overwhelmed with anxiety after the attacks, members were rapt with Schwartz's book, "Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance," which suggests many little things people can do to change their neighborhoods.
A subgroup began concentrating on public service. Over the next several months, these suburban parents invited sweatshop activists and refugee agency leaders to speak to them, and passed the hat to help their causes.
When war rhetoric heated up this fall, the group felt compelled to do something more dramatic. On the Monday before Congress voted on the war resolution, Thomas and 20 friends stood near Mount Diablo Boulevard, the town's main thoroughfare, greeting the rush-hour traffic. Within minutes, the group swelled to 100.
"We were mutually frustrated by the way our culture was evolving," said Thomas, who hadn't marched in a protest since 1970, when she was a Stanford student.
Only a few motorists heckled, and the jeers were as tame as the neighborhood. Said one heckler, "I hear there's a sale on Birkenstocks at McCaulou's."
FINDING TIME FOR ACTIVISM
Fay-Berquist, the 22-year-old San Rafael resident, also was moved to action by the congressional vote.
She's too busy to be an activist, between getting up at 6 a.m. for her waitress job, her studies at College of Marin and the salsa class she takes at night.
But the war resolution vote made the possibility of an "unnecessary war" seem real. She learned of a protest at a federal office building in San Francisco.
At 4 p.m. on Oct. 10, she was marching down Market Street. At midnight, she was camped out overnight with people who had been total strangers just hours before. At 7:30 a.m., she was arrested for blocking the entrance to the building. She was released from jail later that afternoon. Civil disobedience charges were dropped a month later.
Since then, Fay-Berquist has spent her Fridays volunteering her database- crafting skills at Global Exchange, an anti-war coalition in San Francisco. Her bigger challenge: to recruit friends and family to future protests.
"I'd love to have a friend walk with me, but there haven't been any takers, " she said. "People think it's awesome what I'm doing, but it's just not for them. Yet."
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Sanctions don't deter students
By Jesse J. DeConto jdeconto@seacoastonline.com
Portsmouth Herald, NH,
Sunday, December 15, 2002
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12152002/news/3152.htm
HAMPTON - Numerous sources estimate at least 350,000 and probably more than half a million Iraqi children have died because of economic sanctions imposed by the United States in 1990.
"Until you see the faces, it's just a number," said Winnacunnet High School senior Jared Middleton.
He's never visited Iraq, but he has seen a documentary by New Hampshire filmmaker Tom Jackson titled "Greetings from Missile Street." By watching the film and interacting with other N.H. residents who've been to Iraq, Middleton learned something about the children there.
"The kids like to paint and draw," Middleton said.
That's why he and his friends from the WHS chapter of Amnesty International have begun a donation drive to send art materials, toys, children's clothing and basic medical supplies to Iraq.
The fact that this is illegal is both an obstacle and an opportunity for the kids. They plan to find some alternative route to get the supplies to the Iraqi equivalent of the Red Cross, but not before visiting a post office on Saturday morning, Jan. 26, and trying to mail the donations as a protest against the U.S. sanctions that prohibit Americans from sending anything to Iraq without a license from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The WHS students will have to find a delegation that has a license or is willing to risk penalties by carrying items to the Middle East.
"That's really the only way," Jackson said.
Jackson visited Iraq twice in 2000 with a group called Voices in the Wilderness. Now, members of that organization are facing $60,000 in fines for illegally delivering aid to Iraq without federal approval.
"There's potential for really severe jail time and fines," he said.
According to U.S. Treasury Department spokesman Robert Nichols, "You can't just send money to Iraq. We just don't want to prop up their economy."
These sanctions, which first took effect only days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, are aimed at keeping Iraq's military in a weakened position. However, the United Nations Children's Fund reports the sanctions have drastically impacted Iraq's 23 million civilians, especially children. More than one in 10 babies born in southern and central Iraq die before they reach age 5. Five thousand children die every month.
"Diarrhea leading to death from dehydration and acute respiratory infections account for 70 percent of child deaths," states a UNICEF report on humanitarian action in Iraq released in October.
Iraqi civilians are in a catch-22. The Gulf War of the early 1990s destroyed much of their infrastructure, including water treatment facilities. Yet even though the U.N. has slackened the trade restrictions since 1996 through the "oil-for-food" program, Iraq is still unable to import enough water-purifying materials to produce the potable drinking water the people need. As a consequence, disease spreads quickly.
A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document dated Jan. 22, 1991, outlined the expected results of the U.N. sanctions on the people of Iraq.
"Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid would occur," the DIA reports states, as quoted in The Progressive magazine.
Middleton would like to be able to send chlorine and other water treatment supplies in the January package, but these dual-use items are on a list of goods whose shipment must be reviewed by a U.N. monitoring commission because they can be used in making weapons.
"Those are the really risky things to send," Middleton said. "We're fully ready to be risky. To us, that shouldn't be illegal."
When Middleton says "us" he means himself and friends Jake Hess and Chris Caesar, who have organized a group called Student Advocates for Freedom and Equality. It's not an official extracurricular group at Winnacunnet, but a grassroots organization that aims to attract students from all over the United States.
Middleton says today's youth are interested in peace, social action and accountable government. He's also working with the American Friends Service Committee in Concord to recruit students from other N.H. communities to join the "Mail to Iraq" effort.
"So many people know the repercussions of U.S. intervention in a country that's already knocked back to the Stone Age," he said. "The more that comes out about this war, the more upset they get."
The planned post office protest would certainly not be the first in the Seacoast. In August, more than a dozen members of Seacoast Peace Response tried to mail medical supplies to Iraq, but were snubbed at the post office on Daniel Street in Portsmouth.
"If they try to mail them, the post office is going to refuse to send them," Jackson said.
Seacoast Peace Response is the local arm of N.H. Peace Action, and that agency's co-director Patrick Carkin said the Winnacunnet student activists are a rarity in the state.
"This is the first time I'm aware of a student group doing it," Carkin said. "It's not too often that high school students do things like this."
Carkin said he is among nearly a dozen N.H. residents who have personally delivered humanitarian aid to Iraq in violation of U.S. law.
"Tomorrow they could come along and nail us with a fine and press charges," he said.
Ironically, Carkin argued, the same government that could prosecute him is guilty of destroying Iraq's water treatment capabilities against the Geneva Convention.
"That, in itself, is a war crime," he said. "We prevent what treats the diseases as well as what will prevent the diseases."
As part of their relief packages, the Winnacunnet youth plan to send generic medical supplies such as aspirin and vitamin supplements, particularly iron.
"People can donate Flintstones vitamins if they want," Middleton said.
To help with the "Mail to Iraq" project, e-mail info@safeaction.org or call the American Friends Service Committee at 224-2407.
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