Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
New Source of Advice on Radiological Protection
Germany's oldest nuclear plant to shut by Nov 2005
Radiation May Help With Brain Defect
U.N. Seeks Spy Plane in Weapons Search
Lab Receives Inspectors' Iraq Samples
Inspectors Search Nuclear Complex in Iraq
U.S. Says Russia Helped Iran in Nuclear Arms Effort
Iran says committed to nuclear power programme
S Korea to use Russian rockets to launch satellites
North Korea Urges U.S. to Join Nonagression Pact
Clinton 'threatened' N Korea over nuclear arms
Nuclear Plant Must Pay for Fish Kill
Donald Rumsfeld as Big Brother
Powell: U.S. Not Trying to Oust Saddam
MILITARY
N. Korea delivers semi-submersible gunships to Iran
Indonesia, Singapore Seek Ways to Root Out Terror
Britain Denies Iraq War Build - Up Under Way
Terror War Draws China Closer to U.S.
Arafat Disavows bin Laden
Blair Invites Palestinian Leaders to London
U.S., Israel Show No Urgency on Mideast Peace Plan
Ukraine Factory Makes Toys From Land Mines
Turkey said building up troops near Iraq border
Chechen Refugees Brace for Upheaval as Camps Close
Russian Colonel Declared Insane in Chechen Murder
The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA
U.N. lists parties that use child soldiers
UN Names Countries, Groups Using Child Soldiers
Venezuelan Army Backs Chavez Against Strike
Saddam has own book of wisdom
Pentagon Debates Propaganda Push in Allied Nations
The Interview That Never Happened
Globalism, free speech and the Internet
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Panel Wants Intel Agency Apart From FBI
Drop in Inmates on Death Row
Limits on drug searches tightened
Saudis, Pakistanis Must Register in U.S.
OTHER
EPA Approves Ohio Nitrogen Oxide Rule
EPA fines two US firms for biotech crop mistakes
U.S. Pushes China on Prisoners, Religious Freedoms
IMF, World Bank-donors must boost food aid for Africa
ACTIVISTS
Clashes Escalate in Caracas as Protesters Seek to Block Highways
'We're not human shields, but we'll stay through the bombing'
Thousands Celebrate Haitian Democracy
Seattle PI asking for letters - would you send your kid to fight Iraq?
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM BUSH
MINNEAPOLIS: Sabo: Preach outside choir
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
New Source of Advice on Radiological Protection
From: "robert james parsons" <rjparsons@hotmail.com>
To: du-list@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002
Announcing a new source of advice on radiological protection "Recommendations of the European Committee on Radiation Risk: The Health Effects of Ionising Radiation Exposure at Low Doses for Radiation Protection Purposes. Regulators' Edition 2003"
A co-ordination of scientists from across Europe is about to publish a new volume of advice on radiation protection. The European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), which includes specialists from countries outside the EU, has developed a methodology which compensates for the well-rehearsed shortcomings of the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
The ICRP model is physics-based, developed before the discovery of DNA. Like all such models it is mathematical, reductionist and simplistic, and consequently has a powerful descriptive utility. Its quantities - "dose" - are expressions of average energy per unit mass and the masses used in the model's application are greater than 1 Kilogramme. By analogy, such an approach would not distinguish between the average energy transferred to a person warming in front of a fire and a person eating a red hot coal. In its application to the problem at hand - internal, low-level, isotopic or particulate exposure - it has been used entirely deductively. The basis of the ICRP's application is the yield of cancer and leukaemia following external, acute, high-dose, gamma ray exposure of a large number of people at Hiroshima. Together with this, other arguments based on averaging have been used to maintain that there is a simple linear relationship (in the low-dose region) between dose and cancer yield. This Linear No Threshold (LNT) assumption enables easy calculations to be made of the expected cancer yield of any given external irradiation.
By comparison, the ECRR is committed to an inductive scientific process which can be characterised as "looking out of the window" at what is happening in the real world. There have been many observations of anomalously high levels of cancer and leukaemia in populations living near nuclear sites, especially where (as in the case of reprocessing plant) environmental monitoring shows contamination from man-made radioisotopes. In addition there are populations who have been exposed to man-made radioisotopes from global weapons tests, downwinders living near nuclear weapon test sites and cohorts exposed to radioactivity from accidents (e.g. the Chernobyl infant leukaemia cohort) or from working in the nuclear industry or the military.
In making its Recommendations the Committee taken into account a range of epidemiological studies showing increased cancer incidence and mortality associated with radioactive releases, such as correlation between global weapons test fallout and the contemporary breast cancer epidemic. The Committee has also considered recent research on phenomena, such as genomic instability and the bystander effect, which can be expected to have somatic effects other than cancer. It does not follow the ICRP in assuming that the only stochastic outcome of radiation exposure is cancer. General health detriment suffered throughout a lifetime may be difficult to quantify, since data may be confounded by advances in health care and improvements in social conditions, but this difficulty does not mean that radiation can be assumed to have no effect on such parameters. The Committee has considered evidence (inter alia) of the disturbance in rates of infant mortality during the period of global weapons fallout, recently acquired data on infant mortality and stillbirth in differentially contaminated parts of the Mayak nuclear reprocessing and fabrication site, and data on a range of non-cancer endpoints from Hiroshima and from areas contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. The committee accepts that such findings are supported by experimental work. Accordingly, it has determined risk factors for categoriess of harm which can be measured and where hard data are absent has extrapolated from infant mortality and other indicators to a risk factor for "reduced mean life quality". It is assumed that this reduction in quality of life would operate on a broad spectrum of morbidity and would feed through to premature death in a system where other factors remained constant. The risk factors are given.
The Committee has developed weighting factors to account for variations in hazard associated with different exposure types. The new weightings, termed "biophysical hazard factor" (Wj) and "isotope bio-chemical hazard factor" (Wk), offer the great advantage that although the newly perceived risks of low level radiation doses from internal or exotic exposures may be very much higher than supposed by the ICRP there is no great need to alter current legal frameworks in relation to maximum permissible doses. It is the doses themselves that will be calculated differently. This is of special relevance to the estimation of health detriment from chronic low dose internal irradiation following ingestion and inhalation of radioactivity which has been discharged to the environment under licence or accidentally released.
There are important implications for the regulation of discharges as well as the deregulation of contaminated land and materials arising from decommissioning.
The ECRR has applied the new weighting factors Wj and Wk to UNSCEAR's figures for effective collective dose commitment from radioactive releases, including weapons tests, up to 1989. The full impact on human health is calculated and is compared with the predictions of ICRP. Total cancer deaths are given as: 61,619,512 (ICRP 1,173,606); total cancer 123,239,024 (ICRP 2,350,000); infant death 1,600,000 (not considered by ICRP); foetal death 1,880,000 (not considered by ICRP); loss of life quality 10% (not considered by ICRP).
The Committee recognises the ethical proboblems that arise when populations are exposed to mutagenic substances without their knowledge or consent and when many of the exposed people (many of whom are yet unborn) can derive no benefit to offset the health detriment. For this reason the Committee includes ethicists, lawyers, environmental campaigners and academics specialising in social attitudes to risk and the construction of knowledge.
The Recommendations offer a critique of the essentially utilitarian ethical approach adopted by the ICRP and an alternative derived from the rights based theories of Rawls.
See www.euradcom.org for "Background to the Committee", the "Basis and Scope of the Report", and the "Executive Summary".
Publication of "Recommendations of the European Committee on Radiation Risk:
The Health Effects of Ionising Radiation Exposure at Low Doses for Radiation Protection Purposes. Regulators' Edition" is expected in January 2003. A further announcement will be circulated by email.
The volume is priced at £UK 45 (euro 75).
The committee is anxious to make this volume widely available and therefore has decided to set aside copies to be sold at a concession price for those individuals, student, etc. who may find the full price beyond their means.
The Concession price is £UK 15 (euro 25).
Information on ordering and a contact address will be added to the web site www.euradcom.org as soon as possible.
-------- germany
Germany's oldest nuclear plant to shut by Nov 2005
REUTERS GERMANY:
December 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19054/newsDate/16-Dec-2002/story.htm
BERLIN - Germany's environment ministry and electricity firm EnBW (EBKG.DE) have agreed to decommission Germany's oldest nuclear power station by November 15, 2005, the two parties said on Friday.
The 340 megawatt Obrigheim plan was to have been decommissioned under the country's nuclear phase-out law next January, but Energie Baden Wuerttemberg (EnBW) applied to have the life of the plant extended.
Under the law, each of Germany's nuclear plants was allowed to produce a fixed amount of energy. Obrigheim's extension is to be matched by a reduction in the lifetime of the Philippsburg I reactor, also owned by EnBW.
The environment ministry and EnBW aim to sign an agreement before the end of December.
Environmental groups and many Greens, junior coalition partners to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats, had been uncomfortable with the decision to extend Obrigheim's life.
-------- health
Radiation May Help With Brain Defect
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-EXP-Surgery-for-Whitney.html
DENVER (AP) -- With the zap of a beam, 5-year-old Whitney Boyce took a leap toward possible recovery from a brain defect that has tyrannically worked to deprive other parts of her body of blood since she was born.
Doctors at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center used a relatively new surgical device to precisely focus a high concentration of radiation on the congenital birth defect made up of a tangle of veins and arteries in a small portion of Whitney's brain.
With the procedure, Whitney joined a handful of patients in Colorado treated with the Novalis Shaped Beam Surgery device, which uses beams of photon energy aimed from several directions to target tumors or other growths that can be stopped with radiation.
With help from computer-generated images and a system that precisely positions the patient using grids, the radiation beams are molded to mirror the shape and size of the growth.
``In your mind, when you hear it's radiation, it's scary. But I think this was the best option,'' Theresa Boyce said.
The device -- slightly larger than a refrigerator with a giant arm -- gave doctors the best tool available to treat Whitney's life-threatening brain defect as well as a host of other ailments, including brain tumors.
It could be two years before they know if the procedure worked.
Success would dramatically alter the life of the plucky kindergartner -- and ultimately may even save it.
Whitney underwent the procedure at the university's Health Sciences Center in November.
As a newborn, she was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation, a golfball-sized cluster of veins and arteries. The engorged knot hogged blood from parts of her body, turning her blue and sending her into congestive heart failure.
Doctors ultimately were able to pull Whitney out of heart failure, but a new problem emerged: She went through a brief spell of suffering seizures. The next several years were punctuated by frequent trips to doctors and specialists who helped Whitney escape major developmental problems. Many times it meant traveling 100 miles to Denver from the family's home in Akron.
Much of the medical work was done by Dr. David Kumpe, director of interventional radiology and interventional neuroradiology at the Health Sciences Center. Kumpe, Whitney's longtime physician, has treated the malformation with a series of non-invasive procedures in which glue and coils were used to stem blood flow into the knot of veins and arteries.
The work helped reduce the influence of the mass, but Kumpe said there was a small kidney-bean sized portion remaining in a very sensitive area. He didn't want to risk another procedure in that part of the brain so he turned to Shaped Beam surgery. It is designed to focus radiation and destroy blood vessels in diseased tissue while leaving surrounding healthy tissue untouched -- a critical factor when treating the brain or other sensitive parts of the body.
Unlike traditional open skull surgery, no incisions are made for the Shaped Beam procedure and the treatment can be administered in just one dose for many patients.
Experts say similar radiosurgery devices have been available for years, but the Shaped Beam system may provide the most versatility.
``It's the best, the newest and most accurate and applicable to the most treatment sites (on the body),'' said Timothy Solberg, director of the medical physics division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles, where the first patient was treated with the system in 1998.
``Up until the point of the Novalis, we couldn't shape the radiation beam. You had to make some compromises, all of which were less than ideal.''
``It's the first time that I've come across something in the medical environment that's actually easier to use, but most importantly is also better for the patient,'' he added.
Eighteen hospitals nationwide already use the device. Solberg said UCLA alone has used the system to treat more than 1,400 brain tumor cases.
Unlike the older Gamma Knife -- which uses a super-concentrated beam of radiation -- the Shaped Beam system does not have a radioactive source that has to be replaced. It uses electricity.
``I think it's the future for radiosurgery because it can be used for many purposes,'' said Dr. Laurie Gaspar, chair of the department of radiation oncology at the Health Sciences Center.
If left untreated, the malformation afflicting Whitney has a 95 percent mortality rate.
With the Shaped Beam surgery, Whitney's prognosis is very good, Kumpe said, adding that he hoped most of the mass had dried up.
``If we do an angiogram in two years, it may show that she may need to get more treatment,'' he said.
Within two days of the procedure, Whitney was home, demanding to be allowed to attend her kindergarten, insisting her presence was required because it was her day to bring classmates a snack.
On the Net:
http://www.uch.edu
http://www.brainlab.com
-------- inspections
U.N. Seeks Spy Plane in Weapons Search
Monday December 16, 2002
AP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2247973,00.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.N. inspectors hunted for weapons of mass destruction at missile plants and nuclear complexes Sunday, while an unusual visitor - Hollywood star Sean Penn - spoke out in Baghdad against a U.S. attack and in support of the Iraqi people caught up in an international crisis.
In Berlin, meanwhile, the German defense ministry said the United Nations had asked it to supply the inspection operation with unmanned spy aircraft to help in the search for banned Iraqi weapons or the facilities to make them.
A decision on whether to supply the LUNA drones and the technicians needed to maintain them likely will be made this week, said a ministry spokesman on customary condition of anonymity. German-U.S. relations were strained over Berlin's opposition to attacking Saddam Hussein, but Berlin has pledged full support for the inspection program.
Also Sunday, coalition jets patrolling the southern no-fly zone over Iraq fired on two installations, a surface-to-air artillery battery and a mobile radar unit, after coming under fire, the U.S. Central Command reported on its Web site.
It said the sites were near An Nasiriyah, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, and Al Basra, 240 miles southeast of the capital. Coalition planes hit three targets in the southern no-fly zone Saturday.
An Iraqi military spokesman said ``the evil American and British warplanes bombed civil and service installations in the provinces of Dhi Qar and Wassit'' on Sunday but offered no futher information, the official Iraqi news agency reported.
Penn issued his comments at the end of a three-day visit to Iraq which was organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a research organization based in San Francisco, California.
``Simply put, if there is a war or continued sanctions against Iraq, the blood of Americans and Iraqis alike will be on our (American) hands,'' Penn said at a news conference in the Iraqi capital Sunday.
U.N. inspectors hunting for banned weapons of mass destruction searched a missile plant south of Baghdad that the United States said had aroused suspicion. It was one of ten sites the newly bolstered inspection team visited Sunday, according to Iraqi government officials and a statement by U.N. inspectors' headquarters in Baghdad.
With the arrival of 15 inspectors Sunday and the routine departure of others in recent days, the total of U.N. sleuths now stands at 105, said Hiro Ueki, a spokesman for the U.N. program in Baghdad. On Saturday, the teams visited a dozen sites, a number Ueki said was the largest single-day site visitation since the inspectors returned to Iraq on Nov. 27 after a four-year hiatus.
The sites visited Sunday included al-Mutasim, a government missile plant occupying the grounds of a former nuclear facility 46 miles south of Baghdad, the inspectors said. As usual, they offered no details about what they sought or found.
Al-Mutasim was cited in a CIA intelligence report released in October that detailed what U.S. officials said was evidence Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons and the means to deliver them. The report also cited the facility for as a site where Iraq might be trying to build nuclear weapons.
Iraqi officials said the inspectors also revisited al-Qa'qaa, a large nuclear complex just south of Baghdad, Sunday that had been searched Saturday and last week as well. The site had been under U.N. scrutiny in the 1990s and was involved in the final design of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions before it was destroyed by U.N. teams after the 1991 Gulf War.
The United Nations offered no details on Sunday's inspection at al-Qa'qaa. During their Saturday visit, inspectors said the question the director of the facility about changes made since teams were last in Iraq four years ago. Last week the teams began taking an inventory of nuclear materials still at the site.
Also Sunday, the inspectors returned to a missile complex north of Baghdad for the second time in two days. The complex, the government-owned al-Nasr Company, 30 miles north of Baghdad, also houses sophisticated machine tools that can, for example, help manufacture gas centrifuges. Such centrifuges are used to enrich uranium to bomb-grade level - a method that was favored by the Iraqis in their nuclear weapons program of the late 1980s.
Haithem Shihab, manager of a factory in al-Nasr, said the inspectors compared the facility to site plans and checked machinery.
``Today's inspection went smoothly, and we provided the inspectors with all the information they asked for. They entered all the places they wanted. We answered all questions. They made sure that there are no prohibited activities in this factory,'' Shihab said Sunday.
Shihab said his factory produced parts for missiles with a range no greater than 43 miles. Under U.N. resolutions, Iraq is limited to missiles with a range of no greater than 90 miles.
Also Sunday, International Atomic Energy Agency experts on the U.N. team inspected Um-Al Maarek - Mother of Battles - a government facility 12 miles south of Baghdad. Nuclear experts visited the site the first time Nov. 30. It is run by the government's Military Industrialization Commission in charge of weapons development.
In the first round of inspections in the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War, the United Nations destroyed tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program - but inspectors do not believe they got all Iraq's banned arsenal.
The inspectors are back under a tough U.N. resolution passed last month that threatens serious consequences if Iraq fails to prove it has surrendered all its banned weapons. The United States already has expressed skepticism at the voluminous Iraqi weapons declaration filed Dec. 8.
----
Lab Receives Inspectors' Iraq Samples
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Iraq.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Washington's showdown with Saddam Hussein moved Monday to a windswept corner of Austria, where scientists with the U.N. nuclear agency's laboratory received the first samples collected by weapons inspectors in Iraq.
The results of their analysis, which the International Atomic Energy Agency said would begin immediately, could bolster -- or undermine -- attempts by the Bush administration to make a case for war.
Eight samples were brought Monday to the IAEA's Clean Laboratory Unit outside Vienna for screening, and another 20 samples were expected by the weekend, nuclear agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told The Associated Press.
Gwozdecky would not elaborate on where in Iraq the samples were taken or say if the initial materials were air, soil, dust or water samples. The IAEA's lab in Seibersdorf, about 40 miles east of Vienna, will screen such materials for signs of unusual radioactivity.
Using electron microscopes, gamma and thermal ionization spectrometers and other tools, scientists at the lab say they will be able to find evidence -- if any exists -- that Saddam has a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Iraq denies it has any weapons of mass destruction.
David Kay, a former chief U.N. nuclear inspector, told the AP he doubts the screenings will turn up enough to make an impression in an increasingly impatient Washington.
``No one really expects the first round of samples to show anything. The Iraqis have gotten much better at hiding than they were in the old days,'' Kay, now a fellow at the Virginia-based Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said in a telephone interview.
``All this just plays right into Saddam's hands,'' he said. ``He's buying time. He knows that with time, the anti-war movement will grow, and he knows that the United States cannot maintain 90,000 troops in the Gulf forever.''
An initial analysis will take two to three weeks, and the findings will be brought to IAEA headquarters in Vienna for interpretation and cross-checking against a database that contains hundreds of thousands of documents from past inspection missions in Iraq, Gwozdecky said.
The IAEA, which is heading the hunt for nuclear weapons in Iraq, hopes to have results from the screening of the first two dozen or so samples by the time agency director Mohamed ElBaradei reports back to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 27.
Swathed in protective suits and caps, IAEA technicians will look for radiation that exceeds the levels normally found in nature as they screen the samples.
The Seibersdorf lab is led by a team of eight scientists backed by a support staff of 200 and a robot that can run samples overnight. A lopsided Christmas tree outside the front entrance testifies to lab director David Donohue's pledge that his staff is prepared to work around-the-clock and through the holidays if necessary.
Using gamma spectrometers, the lab also will be able to distinguish between recent releases of radiation and residue from the distant past, as well as tell the difference between isotopes used for medical applications and those of higher quality and intensity that a nuclear program would require.
If the lab gets a ``hit'' -- evidence of an unusual amount of radioactivity -- duplicate samples will be sent to sister labs in the United States, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Japan or Australia for verification.
Among the U.N. inspectors' most important tools are 4-square-inch cotton swabs, which are being used to swipe the sides of suspect buildings in Iraq. The swabs are double-bagged and carefully labeled to avoid contamination and minimize the possibility of a mix-up.
The swabs will collect minute particles of dust, and by analyzing the material, U.N. scientists will be able to detect uranium or plutonium down to a trillionth of a gram, making it impossible to conceal an active nuclear program, the IAEA says.
Kay, the former inspector, said he's skeptical the United States will wait for science to run its course.
``The IAEA thinks inspections can disarm. The (Bush) administration doesn't really believe that,'' he said. ``My gut feeling is this is a process that will be concluded one way or the other by February or early March.''
On the Net:
IAEA, www.iaea.org/worldatom
--------
Inspectors Search Nuclear Complex in Iraq
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Inspectors.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Weapons inspectors returned for the third straight day Monday to a huge complex where Iraqi scientists once worked on a nuclear bomb, while experts in Austria received the first samples sent by the U.N. team in Iraq.
Also Monday, Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, head of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate, said on Lebanese television that Baghdad would comply with a U.N. demand for a list of scientists and workers associated with Iraq's chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs. Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix asked for the list on Friday.
Under U.N. Resolution 1441, which returned the inspectors, they have the right to conduct interviews inside or outside the Iraq, with or without the presence of Iraqi observers.
Inspectors visited 13 sites Monday: two of interest to teams looking at missile capabilities, two with biological weapons possibilities, one chemical facility, and eight potential nuclear weapons sites.
The huge complex that inspectors returned to for the third day in a row, al-Qa'qaa, had been under U.N. scrutiny in the 1990s and was involved in the final design of a nuclear bomb before U.N. teams destroyed Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
During their Sunday visit to al-Qa'qaa, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, inspectors said a chemical team updated information about a sulfuric acid plant, an explosives production plant and storage areas. Sunday's inspection also focused on a production unit built between 1998 and 2002.
Inspectors returned to Iraq on Nov. 27 for the first time in four years.
On Monday, a team examining Iraq's ballistic missile capabilities went to the Taji fiberglass production plant, which has become part of the Thaat Al Sawary plant.
In a statement, the team reported more than 200 workers are employed at the facility, which had ``very few people'' four years ago when last inspected. The plant was part of the Iraqi Scud and Al Hussein missile production system and makes fiberglass tubing.
Also for the third day in a row, inspectors visited Hatteen, a complex 40 miles south of Baghdad. Hatteen houses government factories that produce everything from cars to ammunition.
``We do not have prohibited weapons at this site and all our activities are normal,'' Hussein Mohammed Khaled, Hatteen's director, told reporters after Monday's inspection. He said the inspectors took samples of aluminum bars from the facility and that the visit went smoothly.
In Austria on Monday, experts at a U.N. nuclear agency laboratory received the first samples gathered by inspectors in Iraq and planned to begin analyzing the material immediately.
Using electron microscopes, gamma and thermal ionization spectrometers and other tools, scientists at the lab outside Vienna will look for evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
An initial analysis will take two to three weeks and findings will be interpreted at the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna, Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the U.N. agency, told The Associated Press. Eight samples were brought in Monday and 20 more samples were expected by the weekend.
The nuclear agency has said it hopes to have screening results from the first two dozen or so samples by the time its director Mohamed ElBaradei reports to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 27.
The inspectors are working in Iraq under a Nov. 8 U.N. resolution that threatens serious consequences if Iraq fails to prove it has surrendered all its banned weapons. The United States has threatened to attack Iraq and says it has proof President Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction.
In Washington on Monday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said American officials are studying a voluminous Iraqi declaration to the United Nations Dec. 8 that reiterated Baghdad's contention it has no banned weapons.
Asked whether Iraq would have a chance to make good on any omissions that U.N. or U.S. officials find, Fleischer said it was made ``abundantly clear from the U.N. that this was Iraq's last chance to inform the world in an accurate, complete and full way what weapons of mass destruction they possess.''
-------- iran
U.S. Says Russia Helped Iran in Nuclear Arms Effort
December 16, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/international/middleeast/16DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - American intelligence and defense officials have concluded that Russia - one of the Bush administration's most important allies in the campaign against terrorism - supplied Iran with much of the equipment and expertise it used to build two new facilities that appear to American intelligence agencies to be part of a nuclear weapons program.
The case is the latest example of the Bush administration's growing difficulties with nations that it has hailed as allies in its efforts against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Pakistan has been identified by the C.I.A. as both a supplier of nuclear technology to North Korea and a purchaser of North Korean missiles. Yemen took delivery of a shipload of North Korean missiles over the weekend, after the shipment had been seized at sea. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to let it proceed after Yemen's president angrily told Mr. Cheney that the United States had no right to interfere.
Iran has historically denied that it is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and Russia insists that all of its help has been for energy-related development. "We are in an uncomfortable position where allies we very much need do not see these proliferation dangers the same way we do," one senior administration official said today. "Every week, that is getting more and more obvious."
Russia has long acknowledged aiding Iran's nuclear power program, but it has always denied helping it with any project that could help Tehran build a weapon. Russia's atomic energy minister, Aleksandr Rumyantsev, was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency today as contending that Iran had violated no international rules in building the two nuclear sites that were disclosed last week through commercial satellite photographs. The United States said it was "deeply concerned" about the two sites, which have been known to American intelligence agencies for more than a year.
One of the photographs appears to show a a heavy water plant, critical for the production of a plutonium bomb. Another shows a separate facility for producing highly enriched uranium, another path to producing a nuclear weapon. Like North Korea, which just announced it would restart its plutonium program, Iran appears to be pursuing both approaches simultaneously.
When President Bush visited Russia earlier this year, he was assured by Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, that Moscow was only aiding Iran in the production of nuclear power plants for peaceful purposes. Mr. Bush disputed that view, and their differences on Russia's contracts to aid Iran's nuclear program remain a major source of contention in relations between the United States and Russia.
Mr. Rumyantsev, the Russian atomic energy minister, was quoted over the weekend as saying "you cannot assume anything" from the just-published photographs of the Iranian sites.
A Defense Department official who has monitored developments at the Iranian facilities closely said late Friday that the Russians were involved "in all aspects of the Iranian nuclear program," including the two newly disclosed facilities.
China has also, over the years, been involved in Iran's nuclear program. In the 1980's, Pakistan also reached an agreement to provide scientific help to Iranian nuclear programs, though the defense official said there was no sign of any broad Pakistani government support of the Iranian project.
The official said Pentagon analysts estimate that with outside help, the Iranian uranium-enrichment program could produce enough fissile material to manufacture a nuclear device within a few years, but if no outside aid were forthcoming, it could take until the end of the decade.
North Korea, in contrast, is believed to have enough plutonium already for a few bombs, and if it goes ahead with its threats to restart a nuclear reactor, it could produce several bombs' worth of material every year.
American experts have said in recent years that Iran has skillfully exploited loopholes in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The treaty allows the import of "peaceful" nuclear technology, as long as the International Atomic Energy Agency is permitted to inspect facilities that countries declare as part of their nuclear program. The agency has conducted regular inspections in Iran. But those have not included secret facilities that Iran has not yet declared, including the sites pictured in the satellite photographs.
Iraq used similar loopholes in the late 1980's to receive a certification from the atomic energy agency that it found no evidence of a weapons program. It was only after the Persian Gulf war that inspectors discovered that the country was only six months away from producing a weapon, a fact that an Iraqi general all but confirmed last weekend.
Russia, eager to hold onto its contracts with Iran, insists there is no evidence that the country is secretly pursuing a weapons program, and Iranian officials, too, have repeatedly dismissed Western claims of such a program.
Iran's efforts to get help from China and Russia have been only sporadically successful. Its China deals began to collapse after it pledged in 1997 not to engage in new nuclear cooperation with the country. Russia has stepped in, sweeping aside questions about why an oil-rich nation needed a nuclear power program.
Publicly, the Bush administration has been very low-key about the Iranian projects, pointing out that it could be years before they pose a threat. But when speaking with the promise of anonymity, some officials say there is much more concern that terrorist groups could obtain nuclear technology or know-how from Iran than from Iraq.
The future of Russia's nuclear ties to Iran is uncertain. Over the summer the two countries reached an agreement in principle to build as many as five more nuclear power reactors like one already under construction at Bushehr, a city on the Persian Gulf.
A week after the proposals to build more reactors were disclosed, however, Russia appeared to back away from them. After pointed discussions in Moscow with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Mr. Rumyantsev suggested for the first time that Russia was prepared to take into account "political factors" before deepening its assistance to Iran.
----
Iran says committed to nuclear power programme
by Parisa Hafezi
REUTERS IRAN:
December 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19057/newsDate/16-Dec-2002/story.htm
TEHRAN - Iran said on Saturday it was determined to meet its booming demand for electricity with nuclear power despite U.S. concerns the technology could be used for military aims.
Washington, which has labelled Iran as part of an "axis of evil" bent on developing weapons of mass destruction, accused Iran on Thursday of building two nuclear sites of a type that could be used for making a nuclear weapon.
Iran denied the accusation and said its plans to construct reactors were a peaceful application of nuclear technology. It said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been told about the plants and was free to inspect them.
"Within the next 20 years, Iran has to produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity from nuclear power," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told official IRNA news agency.
Washington has argued that Iran, which is the second-largest oil exporter in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, has no need for nuclear power.
But Iran is keen to avoid diverting too much of its valuable oil exports into the domestic market where subsidies are high. Iran's domestic electricity demand is currently growing 6.5 percent annually and Iran needs to add 2,500 megawatts to its generating capacity each year, Iranian officials have said.
The Islamic Republic's first nuclear power plant, near the southwestern port city Bushehr, is due to come on stream at the end of next year or early 2004.
The 1,000-megawatt plant is being built with Russian help, despite heavy U.S. lobbying of Moscow to block the construction.
A senior government official told Reuters on Friday Iran was currently negotiating with Russia to build several more nuclear power plants in coming years.
Iran's Atomic Energy Council earlier this week commissioned a feasibility study to be carried out on building a second 1,000 MW nuclear plant, IRNA said.
The Vienna-based IAEA on Friday said it was aware of Iran's nuclear power programme and planned to visit the country in February to inspect all facilities currently under construction.
Kharrazi said the inspectors were welcome and dismissed U.S. accusations that Iran was trying to conceal two nuclear plants near the central Iranian towns of Natanz and Arak.
"We will officially invite them for inspections since the agency must carry out its necessary planning and supervision before the centres are implemented," Kharrazi said.
"We have been in contact with IAEA over the two centres and basically there is no possibility of concealing such centres," he said.
The United States and Iran have been enemies since radical students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran shortly after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and held 52 hostages for 444 days.
-------- korea
S Korea to use Russian rockets to launch satellites
AP
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=31463302
SEOUL: South Korea has formally agreed to use Russian rockets to launch two scientific satellites into space after the United States opposed plans to use Chinese and Indian rockets, officials said on Monday.
South Korea originally had planned to launch the two satellites, weighing 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds) and 120 kilograms (264 pounds), respectively, using Chinese and Indian rockets.
But it was forced to move the launches to Russia after Washington intervened, said Lee Chang-yoon, an official at the Ministry of Science and Technology. One satellite will be launched in 2003 and another in 2004.
Key parts of the South Korean satellites were made with US technology, and the United States appeared to be concerned about a possible leak of that technology to China and India, whose space programs are less advanced, Lee said.
"The United States seems to be trying to protect its technologies," he said.
South Korea originally decided to look to a third country to put the satellites in orbit because of high cost of launching them in the United States.
The US Embassy in Seoul did not have an immediate comment on the issue.
South Korea hopes to build on its own a rocket powerful enough to carry a 100-kilogram (220-pound) satellite into orbit by 2005 and to develop by 2010 rocket technology necessary to launch commercial satellites into orbit.
----
North Korea Urges U.S. to Join Nonagression Pact
December 16, 2002
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/international/asia/16CND-KORE.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 16 - North Korea called today for the United States to negotiate a nonaggression pact between the two countries, calling it the only way to avoid a war.
The statement was one of the most explicit to date in a series of calls by the impoverished and heavily armed country to the United States urging Washington to negotiate the normalization of relations between the two countries.
"The only way to prevent a catastrophic crisis of a war on the Korean Peninsula is to conclude a nonaggression treaty between North Korea and the U.S. at an early date," the country's official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said in a report calling the Korean Peninsula "on the verge of war."
Tensions have risen sharply between North Korea and the United States in recent weeks since the revelation in early October that Pyongyang had secretly developed a nuclear weapons program, in violation of many international agreements.
Political analysts here say that Pyongyang's statement was probably also aimed at South Korea, which is three days away from a presidential election that could have a dramatic impact on regional diplomacy.
"This is not an entirely new statement by the North Koreans - they have been begging the Americans to deal with them for quite some time," said a South Korean official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There has been a lot of tension in the last few days, though, and they would like to present a more reasonable face."
Relations between the United States and South Korea have become the second major international issue, alongside the North Korea question. In recent days, huge rallies have been held around the country protesting against the presence of 37,000 American soldiers here, and in particular their involvement in the death by vehicular accident in June of two teenage girls.
The United States Army said today that an American officer was slightly injured in a stabbing incident on Sunday, outside the United States Eighth Army headquarters in Seoul.
The United States punished North Korea for its arms control violations by suspending deliveries of fuel oil to the country, which had been provided for under a negotiated agreement. Pyongyang retaliated last week, saying that it would reactive nuclear power stations that had been mothballed under the agreement.
Raising fears of a nuclear crisis, Pyongyang requested that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency remove video cameras used to monitor fuel rods from its one operable reactor. The surveillance is meant to insure that plutonium is not removed to be used in a nuclear weapon.
According to South Korean news media reports, the race between the two frontrunners in Thursday's presidential election here has become too close to call, and with the diplomatic ups and downs of recent days, the issue of North Korea has become an important, if unpredictable, factor.
The ruling party candidate, Roh Moo Hyun, has urged continued aid and engagement with North Korea, in line with the so-called sunshine policy of his mentor, President Kim Dae Jung, who is barred by law from seeking a second term. Although the publication of polls is banned in the final phase of the campaign, it has been widely reported that Mr. Roh's already narrow lead has shrunk in the wake of the perceived North Korean belligerence.
Campaigning today, the candidate seemed to struggle against charges that his approach toward the North is naïve.
"As we head into the final leg, this is an election that can decide between peace or war," Mr. Roh said in a speech near Seoul's financial district.
"If dialogue is shut off," he added, "who will intercede and how in a nuclear crisis like 1994?"
For his part, Mr. Roh's main opponent, Lee Hoi Chang, of the conservative Grand National Party, has sought to soothe concerns that his approach toward North Korea is dangerously confrontational.
"His distortion of facts to alarm the people has reached shocking levels," Mr. Lee, 67, said of Mr. Roh. "The future of the Korean peninsula will be perilous if we elect as president the candidate who is the inheritor of the failed `sunshine policy' and who will continue sending cash aid to North Korea despite its nuclear arms development."
----
Clinton 'threatened' N Korea over nuclear arms
"We drew up plans to attack North Korea and to destroy their reactors - we told them we would attack unless they ended their nuclear programme" - Bill Clinton
BBC,
Monday, 16 December, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2578497.stm
North Korea's ambitions must be curtailed, says Clinton Former US President Bill Clinton has revealed that his administration threatened North Korea with an attack aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities in 1994 unless it agreed to freeze its plans to build nuclear weapons.
Mr Clinton described the situation between the two countries at the time as "very intense".
North Korea agreed to halt its nuclear activities that same year, in exchange for two light-water power reactors and annual shipments of half a million tons of heavy oil.
But last week, Pyongyang announced that it was planning to reactivate a nuclear reactor following a decision by the US to suspend oil shipments into the country.
North Korea says it needs the reactor for power.
Mr Clinton, who was speaking at a dinner for businessmen in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, warned that North Korea must be persuaded or forced to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Endorsement
Mr Clinton said that before the 1994 agreement, the North Koreans were planning to produce six to eight nuclear weapons per year, with plutonium extracted from power plants.
"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 programme."
Mr Clinton said Pyongyang's nuclear programme remained a pressing concern.
"You do not want North Korea making bombs and selling them to the highest bidder because they cannot feed themselves through the winter.
"I approve of the approach by President [George W] Bush to work with the South Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and Russians to end this programme - but make no mistake about it, it has to be ended," he said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
Nuclear Plant Must Pay for Fish Kill
December 16, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2002/2002-12-16-09.asp#anchor6
TRENTON, New Jersey, AmerGen Energy Company, owner of the Oyster Creek Generating Station, has been fined $190,000 for violations of the New Jersey Water Pollution Control Act that led to a fish kill.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued the fine to the nuclear power plant, and is seeking $182,912 in natural resource damages for the more than 5,800 fish killed by the illegal plant operations.
"AmerGen's serious permit violations caused significant damage to the area's natural resources, " said DEP commissioner Bradley Campbell. "The fines and damage assessment reflect a major loss of aquatic resources and AmerGens's apparent disregard for the environmental consequences of their actions."
The Oyster Creek Generating Station, a nuclear powered energy plant, uses water from the South Branch of the Forked River to cool its reactor and then discharges the resulting thermal wastewater to a manmade canal that flows into Oyster Creek. The generating station discharges about 1.2 billion gallons of cooling and dilution water each day through two independent outfall structures.
The DEP regulates and sets temperature limits for the discharges to protect the marine life inhabiting the canal and Oyster Creek.
On September 23, 2002, AmerGen's operators shut down the station's dilution plant in order to perform scheduled maintenance work on a transformer. Under the facility's DEP issued permit, scheduled maintenance work - which may cause violations of thermal limitations - is prohibited during the months of June, July, August and September.
The generating plant was in full operation when the dilution plant was removed from service, causing a rapid increase of water temperature in the discharge canal. Within an hour of the dilution plant's shut down, the water temperature rose to 101 degrees Fahrenheit and at least 5,876 fish died from heat shock.
AmerGen's permit requires that when the surrounding water temperature reaches 87 degrees Fahrenheit four feet below the water's surface, a dilution pump must be activated. A violation occurred when no pumps were available for activation.
AmerGen was also cited by the DEP for failing to provide the department timely notification of the temperature violations and the resulting fish kill. As required under their permit, AmerGen must notify the DEP within the first two hours of becoming aware of a problem. More than five hours passed before the department was alerted.
Due to the severity of the combined permit violations, the DEP issued AmerGen a $190,000 penalty. In addition to the penalty for permit violations, the DEP is seeking a natural resource damage claim in the amount of $182,912 to compensate the public for injuries to its natural resources.
"Oyster Creek represents a high use recreational fishery," added Campbell. "New Jersey's citizens deserve to be compensated for the loss of aquatic life caused by AmerGen's actions."
Twenty-four fish species were affected by the illegal discharge, resulting in the loss of more than 5,800 fish. Almost three-quarters of the fish collected from the discharge canal and Oyster Creek were striped bass, Atlantic menhaden and white perch. Spot and American eel each comprised about five percent of the fish collected, and the remaining 17 fish species and two invertebrate found comprised less than one percent.
The DEP's natural resource damage assessment is based upon the hatchery value of the dead aquatic species. The DEP allocates money from natural resource damage settlements for restoration projects.
Groups Threaten Suit Over Aplomado Falcon Habitat
SANTA FE, New Mexico, December 16, 2002 (ENS) - Three conservation groups have announced plans to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to force the agency to designate critical habitat for the northern aplomado falcon.
Forest Guardians, the Chihuahuan Desert Conservation Alliance, and Texas Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sent a notice of intent to sue to the USFWS today. The agency has failed to make a 90 day finding on the groups' petition, filed in early September, to designate critical habitat for the rare falcon.
The groups argued in their petition that the original basis for excluding critical habitat - that none of the birds existed in the United States - is indefensible given confirmed observations of aplomado falcons in southwestern New Mexico over the past three years. The groups are concerned over the erosion of habitat protections needed to support falcon reintroductions underway in south and west Texas, and under negotiation in New Mexico where a population of the falcons already exists.
The groups say protection of habitat, is vital for falcon recovery, despite reintroduction efforts.
Threats to the aplomado's habitat include oil and gas development and livestock grazing on extensive tracks of public lands. The falcon is also threatened by pesticide contamination, which causes eggshell thinning and failed reproduction, and by drastic declines in falcon prey species such as grassland birds.
"The Fish and Wildlife Service's foot dragging on our critical habitat petition is irresponsible, as serious habitat degradation continues to prevent the recovery of aplomados in the Southwest," said Dr. Nicole Rosmarino, endangered species coordinator for Forest Guardians. "With the escalating threat of large scale oil and gas development, and the continued destruction of desert grasslands by livestock, habitat protection for the aplomado falcon is vital."
Oil and gas exploration and development is cited in the petition as a threat to falcon habitat. Existing wells and roads have caused extensive habitat fragmentation, and planned development on Otero Mesa, an area targeted for oil and gas extraction under the Bush Energy plan, will increase this threat to falcon habitat. Otero Mesa contains important habitat for the falcon and planned exploration and drilling on the Mesa will reduce the usability of this key natural area to falcons.
The petitioners also point out that over a century of livestock grazing has transformed much of the falcon's habitat from high quality black grama grassland to scrubland, degrading its suitability for falcons. Livestock also damage soaptree yucca and may limit the ability of this slow growing desert plant to reach sufficient heights to provide falcon nests.
Biologists have suggested that a yucca plant of sufficient height for a falcon nest would take a century to replace. The decline of grasslands is an ongoing trend in the Chihuahuan Desert, and the petition underscores that protecting falcon habitat would help safeguard whole ecosystems in this region.
The critical habitat petition and related information and maps are available at: http://www.fguardians.org/aplomado020903.html
-------- us politics
Donald Rumsfeld as Big Brother
Nat Hentoff
December 16, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021216-87154717.htm
It's not John Ashcroft - the usual target of liberal and conservative civil libertarians - who is responsible for the Bush administration's most controversial assault so far on the privacy of millions of Americans. That operation is nestled in Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department.
Without an official public notice or congressional hearing, the Defense Department's Information Awareness Office - directed by retired Navy Adm. John Poindexter - is creating an omnivorous "centralized grand database" that, as The Washington Times reported on Nov. 15, "would be authorized to collect every type of public and private data," not only on immigrants and visitors, but on American citizens - all without judicial warrants.
By mining commercial and government databases, the Total Information Awareness program, when functioning, will scoop up medical records, telephone calls, the pay-per-view movies you order, prescription purchases, travel reservations, passport applications, records of divorces, court appearances and practically any piece of electronically recorded information about you.
Phil Kent, president of the conservative Southeast Legal Foundation, calls this actualization in real time of George Orwell's "1984" the "most sweeping threat to civil liberties since the Japanese-American internment."
Orwell, who died in 1950, could not have envisioned the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology that may lead to the end of any expectation of privacy. As Orwell prophesized in his novel, "How often, or in what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time."
On ABC-TV's Nov. 14 edition of "Nightline," Ted Koppel distilled the rising apprehension among both liberals and conservatives about this electronic dragnet that is symbolized in the emblem displayed by Mr. Poindexter's office. The symbol was described in the Nov. 12 Washington Post as an eye that "looms over a pyramid and appears to scan the world. The motto reads: 'Scienta Est Potentia' or 'Knowledge Is Power.'" That is, knowledge about all of us.
"Since all of this information is gathered privately, is used privately, is assessed privately by officials in the government who are accountable to no one for this information," asked Mr. Koppel, "how do you know how it's being used?"
How do you know whether it's being used on you?
When Congress returns in January, will there be hearings on this government eye that never sleeps? Will the press stay on this story to ensure that congressional oversight committees question Mr. Poindexter and his boss, Mr. Rumsfeld (who has so far hardly been mentioned in the alarms being sounded around the country)?
After all, this vast collection of mostly very personal data will be shared by all the government intelligence agencies and is being assembled under Mr. Rumsfeld's watch. Perhaps one of the Washington reporters regularly beguiled by the defense secretary's witty televised press conferences will give Mr. Rumsfeld a copy of "1984."
I find curious the usually astute defense secretary's lack of political acumen in enlisting Mr. Poindexter to facilitate the Total Information Awareness program. As Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley noted in the Nov. 17 Los Angeles Times, Mr. Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress and deep-sixing documents in the Iran-Contra scandal (the conviction was later overturned on a technicality), "the criminal conspiracy to sell arms to a terrorist nation, Iran, in order to surreptitiously fund an unlawful clandestine project in Nicaragua . . . . As a man convicted of falsifying and destroying information, he will now be put in charge of gathering information on every citizen."
Yet, Mr. Turley added, "when asked about Mr. Poindexter's prior criminal conduct, President Bush released a statement that he believed 'Adm. Poindexter has served the nation very well.'"
Who is watching the watchers over us all?
A great loss to those of us concerned about the rapidly diminishing right to privacy was Republican Conservative Bob Barr's failed congressional re-election bid. That insistent civil libertarian regards the Pentagon's prospective all-seeing eye as "outrageous."
Mr. Barr is now a consultant to the American Civil Liberties Union on a six-month contract, along with retiring House Majority Leader Dick Armey, another conservative libertarian. Both are even more needed at the Defense Department. It is because of Mr. Armey that "Operation Tips," allowing Americans to spy on each other in their daily lives, was not in the Homeland Security Department law signed by the president. He stripped it out.
Since the Bush administration is creating this truly Orwellian invasion of the privacy of all of us, it is up to us to insist that Congress repudiate it before it is beyond our control. We are the people of the Constitution.
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column runs on Mondays.
----
Powell: U.S. Not Trying to Oust Saddam
By Barry Schweid
AP Diplomatic Writer
Monday, December 16, 2002; 4:44 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62964-2002Dec16?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Colin Powell is assuring the Arab world the Bush administration's demand for regime change in Iraq aims at disarmament, not ousting President Saddam Hussein.
"If he cooperates, then the basis of changed-regime policy has shifted because his regime has, in fact, changed its policy to one of cooperation," Powell said in an interview with a London-based Arab newspaper released Monday by the State Department.
Powell said the policy of regime change in Baghdad was inherited from the Clinton administration by the Bush administration.
"We came into office in 2001 and kept that policy because Saddam Hussein had not changed," Powell told the newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi by telephone last Thursday.
"We now believe it is appropriate for Saddam Hussein to be forced to change, either by the threat of war, and therefore that compels him to cooperate," Powell said.
"So if he cooperates, then that is different than if he does not cooperate," Powell said.
"It remains our policy to change the regime until such time as the regime changes itself," he said.
Powell declined, meanwhile, to offer a final judgment on the weapons declaration Iraq filed with international weapons inspectors. "We approached it with skepticism and the information I have received so far is that skepticism is well-founded," he said Monday at a State Department news conference.
"We will withhold making a final judgment or final statement until we have completed our analysis," hold talks with international weapons inspectors and consult with other members of the U.N. Security Council, Powell said.
After chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix reports to the Council, which is scheduled for Thursday, the Bush administration will make its views public, Powell said.
Powell told the Arab newspaper, meanwhile, that Bush had not decided whether to use force against Iraq.
At the White House, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said U.S. officials were still studying the document.
Asked whether Iraq would have a chance to make good on any omissions that U.N. or U.S. officials find, he said it was made "abundantly clear from the U.N. that this was Iraq's last chance to inform the world in an accurate, complete and full way what weapons of mass destruction they possess."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
N. Korea delivers semi-submersible gunships to Iran
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021216-39526000.htm
North Korea sent 15 gunboats to Iran last week aboard an Iranian freighter that arrived about the same time that U.S. and Spanish warships temporarily seized a shipment of North Korean Scud missiles, The Washington Times has learned.
The gunboats included several special forces craft called semi-submersibles - vessels that move just below the surface of the water.
The 15 gunboats were carried aboard the Iranian freighter Iran Meead that slipped into the port of Bandar Abbas one day before a North Korean freighter was seized and boarded several hundred miles to the south last week. The North Korean ship was found to be carrying 15 Scud missiles and warheads bound for Yemen.
The gunboat delivery, traced by U.S. intelligence, highlights North Korea's role as a major weapons supplier to rogue states.
President Bush has branded both North Korea and Iran part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq.
The gunboats were identified as six Peykaap coastal patrol boats, two Tir gunboats and five Taedong underwater vessels.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was in the Middle East last week, said North Korea is a major exporter of missiles and military technology to dangerous regions. "And they are putting into the hands of many countries technologies and capabilities which have the potential for killing tens and hundreds of thousands of people," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters in Djibouti. "And needless to say, our hope is that that wouldn't be the case."
The Taedong semi-submersibles were further identified as three Taedong-C and two Taedong-B vessels that each carry two, 32-centimeter torpedoes. The small submarines are used in special operations warfare and are a new type of weapon for Iranian naval forces, the officials said.
The ship arrived in Bandar Abbas on Dec. 8.
U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran could use the gunboat and torpedo craft to threaten U.S. ships in the region.
The U.S. military is building up its forces in Southwest Asia in preparation for potential military operations against Iraq.
Iran's naval forces have stepped up submarine patrols near the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Iran has three Russian-made Kilo submarines and scores of coastal patrol boats.
Military intelligence officials view the submersibles as a serious worry.
Adm. Thomas Fargo, currently commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, stated in 1998 that the Iranian submarine threat in the Persian Gulf was a "significant concern."
"Submarines are offensive weapons, not defensive ones, and any torpedo capability would obviously give [Iran] the ability to interdict shipping through the Strait of Hormuz," said Adm. Fargo, who at the time was commander of the 5th Fleet based in Bahrain.
Adm. Fargo said the strait, which carries a major portion of the world's oil, is a lifeline that is being watched carefully.
U.S. officials said the delivery last week was the second shipment of North Korean gunboats to Iran this year. In March, North Korea sent another shipment of coastal patrol boats aboard the Iran Meead. Those types of patrol boats were not identified.
The gunboat deliveries are part of a major buildup of naval forces by the Iranian military and come amid reports that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.
The State Department said on Friday that Iran is concealing elements of its nuclear arms program.
A nuclear complex near the town of Natanz involves some buildings that are being constructed underground that U.S. officials say are part of a covert nuclear weapons program.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said commercial satellite photographs of the facility show that Iran's claims that its nuclear program is for electrical power generation are doubtful.
"You can tell that portions of the Natanz nuclear facility, the suspect uranium enrichment plant, ultimately will be underground," Mr. Boucher told reporters. "It appears from the imagery that the service roads, several small structures and perhaps three large structures are being built below ground and some of these are already being covered with earth. Iran clearly intended to harden and bury that facility."
The concealment shows that Iran did not plan to declare the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency and that it would be used to make fuel for nuclear weapons, he said.
Iranian government and military officials in recent weeks have issued threats to take action against the United States if it attempts to use military force against Iran.
-------- asia
Indonesia, Singapore Seek Ways to Root Out Terror
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-indonesia-singapore.html
BOGOR, Indonesia (Reuters) - The leaders of Indonesia and Singapore discussed ways to fight terrorism on Monday, including catching the ``many'' terrorists still at large in Southeast Asia, Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said.
``We have caught some of them in Singapore and Indonesia. There are still many left outside. So, we discussed co-operative measures to root out the terror infrastructure in this part of the world,'' Goh told reporters after a two-hour meeting with Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
They met in the hill town of Bogor near Jakarta, in a government palace surrounded by herds of grazing deer on a vast expanse of lawn.
Singapore was an early hard-liner in the U.S.-led war against terrorism, identifying the militant Muslim Jemaah Islamiah network as a regional terror network and using its draconian internal security act to arrest more than 30 suspects, beginning late last year.
Indonesia provided early lip service to the anti-terror campaign but was viewed by many analysts as dragging its feet when it came to high-profile action until the October 12 Bali bombings that killed at least 191 people.
Since then Indonesia has arrested more than a score of people over direct and indirect links to that case and 11 over a separate bombing attack.
Many of those Indonesia has arrested have ties to Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and its alleged leader, cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who denies any knowledge of the group.
``We are aware that JI is the Southeast Asia link of al Qaeda,'' Goh said, referring to the Osama bin Laden-led network Washington blames for the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Megawati said cooperation on both anti-terrorism and economics had been discussed, but offered no details, nor did Goh suggest any specific new measures agreed. There is already intensive exchange of information on suspected terrorist activity, however.
Goh was due to meet other officials in Jakarta on Tuesday.
``His visit is to give support to President Megawati's government in overcoming the grave security and economic problems in the aftermath of the bomb blasts,'' Goh's office had said ahead of the visit.
The statement did not elaborate on the security problems, although Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew said monitoring of Internet traffic had identified about 100 radical groups with several thousand members operating in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.
A number of foreign embassies have travel warnings to their citizens still in place, suggesting that tourists avoid significant parts of the vast archipelago and that their nationals working here consider whether it is safe to stay.
The Bali attacks were another black mark for Indonesia's faltering efforts to convince foreign companies that the volatile country is safe for investment, investment of which Singapore has been a major source.
Goh gave security in Bali itself a welcome plug, saying his country's flagship carrier Singapore Airlines was offering thousands of holiday packages to the island.
Bali, he said, ``is a safe place to go.''
-------- britain
Britain Denies Iraq War Build - Up Under Way
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-britain-iraq-troops.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Tuesday that diplomatic efforts were still being pursued on Iraq and denied reports it was asking defense firms to speed up production of military equipment in readiness for war.
The Sun newspaper reported on Tuesday the ministry had begun the build-up for war by issuing Urgent Operational Requirement notices to defense equipment manufacturers and hiring a fleet of cargo ships to transport military equipment to the Gulf.
``It is purely speculative. As the Defense Secretary, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have been saying for weeks, military action is neither imminent nor inevitable and diplomatic routes are still being pursued,'' a ministry spokeswoman told Reuters.
The Defense Ministry said on Saturday it was preparing to send a fleet of naval vessels to the Gulf in February but said the deployment was routine and not part of war preparations.
A spokeswoman said the six-vessel deployment -- called Naval Task Group 2003 -- was part of a long-standing arrangement to take part in exercises with allies in the Gulf and later in the Asia-Pacific region.
Britain has been the United States' closest ally in its bid to force Iraq to comply with U.N. demands, and its troops are expected to play a key role in any military action.
Both countries have signaled that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can expect a war if he fails to comply with a tough U.N. Security Council resolution designed to ensure he has no weapons of mass destruction but say they will await a weapons inspectors report before taking action.
The ministry spokeswoman said that if such a decision was taken, then measures like hiring cargo ships and asking manufacturers to speed up production would be necessary.
``If we were to launch a long distance operation, taking heavy kit, we would need to do that. But that doesn't mean its definitely going to happen.''
Any plans by Britain to participate in military action may be hampered by trade union woes at home.
The nation's firefighters, who have already carried out two nationwide strikes over pay since November, have threatened renewed action in the new year -- which would force thousands of armed forces personnel to provide firefighting cover.
Meanwhile, an opinion poll published by a British newspaper on Tuesday showed Britons are becoming more sure of their stance on any war with Iraq.
An ICM poll for the Guardian newspaper said opposition to a military attack rose three points to 44 percent but those who supported a war also rose, by four points to 36 percent.
The number of people who didn't know whether they would support military action has fallen by seven points to 20 percent.
-------- china
Terror War Draws China Closer to U.S.
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-US-Drawing-Closer.html
BEIJING (AP) -- They've been through tough times in recent years, these two giants: an errant embassy bombing and acrimony over a plane collision, recriminations about human rights and Taiwan -- and worries of regional domination on both sides.
But in this post-Sept. 11 age, the delicate relationship between China and the United States -- one of the planet's pivotal diplomatic dances -- is gaining firmer footing with a flurry of handshakes and official visits.
Though rifts remain, Beijing and Washington are acting like they have more important enemies than each other. Military, legislative and diplomatic contacts are practically a weekly occurrence in recent months -- six visits in the past week.
The talk is squarely about cooperation, on everything from North Korea's nuclear program to Iraqi weapons inspections to fighting al-Qaida terrorists and keeping trade healthy.
``It is essential to both of our countries, as well as to the wider world, that we get this relationship right,'' Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., head of the House International Relations Committee, said during a Beijing visit last week.
Communist China and the United States have traveled a rocky road since they established diplomatic relations in 1979 after 30 years of alienation. Even when the see-saw relationship is at its best, the two are still far less close than the American government is with its allies and some other less friendly partners.
But amity between the United States and China, the world's largest developing nation, grows more crucial for both as the Chinese economy opens and the United States solicits allies for its fight against terrorism.
China's state-controlled media, often used to criticize America, have been relatively muted of late, and Foreign Ministry officials have been spinning things positively in recent weeks.
``China-U.S. relations have recently made important improvements and development,'' Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said, quoted Monday in the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily. ``To push those relations forward another step is a very important matter.''
Particularly notable are the abundant lower-level contacts. It's relatively easy for top leaders to make nice for the cameras, as President Jiang Zemin and President Bush did in October at Bush's Texas ranch. But that visit laid groundwork for this month's follow-ups, which transcend tea-sipping to emphasize the practicalities of statecraft.
Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage departed Friday after two days of meetings with senior foreign policy officials on North Korea's nuclear program and U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq. Both China and the United States are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council with power to veto U.N. actions.
In addition to Hyde, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., arrived this weekend to talk about North Korea. And on Monday in Beijing, another senior American diplomat began the latest round of talks about human rights.
Even more significantly, People's Liberation Army Gen. Xiong Guangkai was in Washington all last week for talks with Defense Department officials. And Adm. Thomas Fargo, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, is in China until Tuesday, visiting cities in its south and west.
Such visits, along with an American warship's port call in China last month, represent a resurgence of military contacts curtailed after a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. spy plane collided over the South China Sea in 2001. The newly inaugurated Bush administration cut back ties after the 24-member crew made an emergency landing on Chinese territory and Beijing detained them for 11 days.
That crash came on the heels of the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Though the Clinton administration insisted the embassy was targeted mistakenly, the Chinese government allowed thousands of its enraged citizens to stage days of ugly anti-U.S. rioting in Beijing.
Add a trade deficit, the question of Taiwan's sovereignty and numerous smaller issues to the mix and there's still abundant potential for volatility -- precisely what this month's exchanges suggest both sides want to avoid.
``The two countries have rediscovered, perhaps more intensely than ever before, the positive potential in their relationship,'' said Tom Farer, director of the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation at the University of Denver.
Hyde, in his speech to college students last week, went further.
``The relationship between the United States and China is already one of the most important on the planet,'' he said. ``And it may one day become the most important.''
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Disavows bin Laden
December 16, 2002
New York Times
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/international/middleeast/16MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 15 - Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, sought to distance himself unequivocally from Al Qaeda in an interview published today, warning Osama bin Laden to stop justifying attacks in the name of Palestinians.
"I'm telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause," Mr. Arafat was quoted as saying in The Sunday Times of London, referring to recent statements by Al Qaeda leaders.
"Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now?" Mr. Arafat said. "He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests."
The comments appeared to be Mr. Arafat's strongest denunciation yet of Mr. bin Laden, and came as attacks attributed to Al Qaeda have been increasing and as the Israeli government has expressed suspicions that the group may be operating in the Gaza Strip.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Palestinian leaders have parried any attempts to link their fight against Israel with Al Qaeda's cause, out of worry about losing international support. Israeli leaders, though, have sought to make the case that the attacks on Israelis and terror attacks elsewhere in the world are essentially the same.
Al Qaeda, which has in the past mentioned the Palestinian issue only glancingly, claimed responsibility for the simultaneous attacks on Israelis in Kenya last month, in which a bomb at a hotel killed 10 Kenyans and 3 Israelis, and two missiles narrowly missed an Israeli charter jet. A statement from a Qaeda leader on the attacks said, "Liberation of our holy places, led by Palestine, is our central issue."
In the article, Mr. Arafat is also quoted as dismissing as "lies" statements by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel that Al Qaeda is active in Gaza. On Saturday, Israeli officials repeated the accusation, saying moreover that the arrests in Jordan of two men in the slaying of an American diplomat there proved that Al Qaeda had opened up a "second front" in moderate Arab countries as the United States prepares for possible war against Iraq. Two men who Jordanian officials say admit to being Al Qaeda members have been arrested in that killing.
Israeli officials today confirmed their decision that Mr. Arafat would not be permitted to attend Christmas ceremonies in Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus.
Israel's position was announced today at the weekly Israeli cabinet meeting, in which Israeli leaders also said they would not pull their troops back from Bethlehem before Christmas even while allowing tourists to go there for celebrations.
Mr. Arafat, who is in effect confined by Israeli troops inside his damaged compound in Ramallah, about 12 miles away, had attended Christmas celebrations for six years before 2001, when he also was not permitted to attend. The decision today angered Palestinian leaders.
"This is a continuation of the provocation policy that Sharon had always used," Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian information minister, said today. "I think he wants to please his extreme-right constituency to show how much he is tough and uses such methods."
Also today, three Palestinian men were charged with planning to shoot down an Israeli government helicopter as it landed on the Parliament building, and to attack Mr. Sharon's home. Officials said the three men were arrested several weeks ago.
A court also gave long prison terms to four Palestinian men who were convicted of being members of a terror cell that engineered eight attacks that killed 35 Israelis. One of the four, Waal Kassam, 31, was sentenced to 35 life terms; another received 50 years in prison. The attacks included the bombing at Hebrew University last summer and a suicide bombing at a cafe last spring.
--------
Blair Invites Palestinian Leaders to London
December 16, 2002
New York Times
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/international/europe/16CND-BRIT.html
LONDON, Dec. 16 - Prime Minister Tony Blair said today he was inviting Palestinian leaders to London next month for a meeting aimed at supporting reforms to the Palestinian Authority and advancing the Middle East peace process.
"It is in the interests of both the Palestinians and Israelis that these reform efforts succeed, so that we can make a reality of President Bush's vision of two states - Israel and Palestine -living side by side in peace and security," Mr. Blair said in a statement to Parliament.
The conference, to be chaired by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, would include representatives of the so-called quartet - the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia as well as officials from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The government would not say which Palestinian leaders would be included, though it was thought unlikely that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat would be among them.
Britain, the United State's principal ally, has been quietly pressing Washington on the dangers that London believes continuing violence in the Middle East poses to the conduct of the war on terror and the effort to disarm Saddam Hussein. Mr. Blair had been hoping to convene a meeting in London between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, but he told the Commons that progress on the Israeli side had been delayed by the scheduling of elections on Jan. 28.
Mr. Blair appeared in parliament fresh from a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at which the two men pledged to further the dialogue between their two countries despite some sharp differences in their views on Iraq and the Middle East.
"Disagreements are obvious and clear, but I believe that a process of engagement with Syria is the right way forward," Mr. Blair told a joint news conference. For his part, Mr. Assad said that despite the differences, he viewed the discussion as "realistic and constructive" and was determined to "push forcefully forward" Syria's relations with Britain.
Mr. Blair had said before the meeting that he would challenge the Syrian leader to rein in militant groups based in Damascus, but Mr. Assad said there were no such organizations operating in his country.
"We don't have, in Syria, organizations supporting terrorism," he said.
"We have press officers. These press officers represent Palestinians who live in Syria and Palestinians who live in Palestine. Palestinians have a right to have someone to express their opinions."
Britain and the United States believe that Syria is host to groups launching suicide bombers and other attacks on Israel like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Mr. Blair made no reference to that in the news conference but added, "We condemn totally anybody who is engaged in terrorist activity of any sort at all, wherever in the world."
A year ago, Mr. Assad had used a similar joint appearance in Damascus to ambush Mr. Blair with a public rebuke over the Middle East while Syrian reporters stood by applauding his remarks. Today's session was businesslike and free of grandstanding.
Mr. Blair noted that Syria had been among the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council which unanimously demanded that Iraq disarm or face "serious consequences" and said Mr. Assad was backing international efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Assad, who became president after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, two years, spent the years 1992-1994 here studying ophthalmology, and his wife, Asma al-Akhras, is British-born and a computer studies graduate of King's College in London. He noted that he had had the chance to know many Britons and learn about British culture first hand, and at one point in the news conference he began to answer a question in English before catching himself and reverting to Arabic and letting his interpreter resume translating.
On Iraq, an unnamed senior British official was quoted in The Financial Times today saying that London was "very disappointed" with last week's weapons declaration and thought it left big gaps which might cost the regime the chance to avoid a war. But Mr. Blair told the news conference that his government was still forming its judgment.
"Our position on the report is that we simply have to study it," he said. "We have not completed our study yet."
The report of British disappointment echoed remarks by American officials and some United Nations diplomats last week that the 12,000-page report fell far short of the full disclosure demanded by last month's Security Council resolution.
Mr. Assad said he thought that Baghdad had shown "good cooperation" with the United Nations weapons inspectors, and he said he was hopeful that war could be avoided. "What this means is to give the inspectors the opportunity to do their job properly," he said. "I don't think it's our job to expect, or not to expect, but I am optimistic now."
--------
U.S., Israel Show No Urgency on Mideast Peace Plan
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-israel.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel and the United States on Monday talked about a new Middle East peace plan that will dominate a meeting of mediators in Washington on Friday but neither side indicated any urgency in completing it.
Israel has asked the United States to go slow on the plan, known as the ``road map,'' until Israeli elections on Jan. 28, and Washington has discouraged expectations that the Quartet meeting this week will release a definitive document.
It came up again at talks on Monday between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, a hard-liner who has advocated expelling Palestinian President Yasser Arafat from the Palestinian territories.
``They talked about how to move forward down that path to be laid out in the road map. The secretary said we continue to discuss and develop it with the Quartet this Friday,'' said a U.S. official who asked not to be named.
``We didn't specifically talk about where we get to on Friday,'' the official added.
On Friday Powell will host talks with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. The aim is to devise a timetable for steps leading to Palestinian statehood, possibly in 2005.
Mofaz, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said he did not want to talk about the peace plan because he would discuss it on Tuesday with White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But he repeated Israel's conditions for negotiations with the Palestinians -- that they change their leadership and that they stop what he called ``terror activity.''
Powell and Mofaz talked about Israel's need for U.S. financial assistance but the U.S. official said they did not mention any particular amount.
Israel is asking the United States for $4 billion in grants and guarantees for loans of $8 billion, media reports say.
-------- landmines
Ukraine Factory Makes Toys From Land Mines
Monday December 16, 2002
AP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2249011,00.html
DONETSK, Ukraine - Next holiday season, Ukrainian children will find something new under their trees: plastic toy pelicans and sandbox tools.
The toys themselves are unremarkable: scoop-billed birds the size of a shoebox and mini shovel-and-pail sets. But their history is something else: In their former incarnation, these toys were casings for anti-personnel land mines.
The mines-to-toys project evolved from an $800,000 NATO-sponsored program to help demilitarize this Texas-sized country of 48 million people. It aims to reduce Ukraine's stockpile of some 6.4 million anti-personnel mines - the fourth largest arsenal in the world after China, Russia and the United States - and help the country's massive defense complex retool for peaceful production.
The project is based at the formerly top-secret Donetsk State Chemical Plant in eastern Ukraine, where workers packed explosives into artillery shells and missiles that the Soviet military targeted at the West.
``I always used to ask myself, 'What can I tell my kids about my job?''' said Lena Kazakova, a 14-year veteran of the plant whose twins were born the same year she started working.
``I used to just make something up. But now I can tell my girls something positive - 'We're saving people's lives' - and that makes me happy.''
Kazakova is one of nine women who have been trained to shuck open mines and remove the explosives.
The mines are taken from a storage shed to a workroom, where a young woman carefully counts the boxes, checks that the mines haven't been destabilized in transit and removes the detonator. They then pass to a reassembly table where several women in lab coats and headscarves pry open the mines and remove the mechanical components.
The mine bodies, still armed, are then loaded into a pneumatic press that punches out the explosives. Two women then take the empty plastic mine bodies and explosive material off to be washed and recycled.
The whole process takes about 10 minutes per mine.
``I never imagined I'd be doing this,'' said Natalia Voloulina, an explosives handler who's spent 23 years at the plant, adding that her new work was ``the most satisfying job I've had.''
All the mines stored at the plant, some 400,000 in all, are expected to be dismantled by September 2003.
The Donetsk plant's Soviet experience working with explosives made it a good fit for NATO's project; so did its toy-making history. In addition to its weapons production, the plant manufactured toys until Ukraine split from the Soviet Union in 1991, but then lost state subsidies and couldn't find plastic cheap enough to compete with China.
The NATO mine destruction project prompted the plant's staff to use the mine bodies, mixed with higher-grade plastic, to resurrect its toy production.
Factory management plans to sell the toys, but will also donate many to the region's orphanages and kindergartens that struggle to survive on an ever-fraying shoestring after wrenching post-Soviet budget cuts.
``We have to think about social issues (and) what we can do ... kids need help,'' said Nikolai Potapchuk, the plant's director.
The plant's engineers also designed innovations to make the sticks of TNT that coal miners use in Ukraine's methane-infused mines safer and cheaper, reusing explosives from the disarmed land mines and other munitions.
The region's coal miners need all the help they can get. More than 3,700 have died on the job in Ukraine since 1991 and some 240 have been killed this year alone. Safer industrial explosives are a big part of the factory's work, and are a natural complement for their toys.
``We need to save the lives of fathers (miners) so that they can buy toys for their kids,'' Potapchuk said, half jokingly.
Project workers see the NATO project as a chance to position the plant to win work in what they hope will be a growing market.
``Who knows? Soon we may be helping America destroy its mines,'' chief engineer Grigoriy Volodchenko mused.
-------- mideast
Turkey said building up troops near Iraq border
16/12/2002
By Reuters
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=241718&contrassID=1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0
TUNCELI - Turkey has deployed troops and engineers near its border with Iraqto prepare for any U.S.-led war on Baghdad, a senior military official said Monday.
The official, in the border province of Sirnak, gave no figure for the size of the deployment but local sources put it at 10,000-15,000 troops.
The official, who requested anonymity, confirmed widespread local reports of Turkish units moving close to border crossings and deploying along the mountainous border with northern Iraq.
"In the last few days there have been some troop deployments," he told Reuters by telephone. "The reason for the deployments is ensuring that the Turkish military is ready in all ways for the possibility of an Iraq operation."
The Turkish General Staff was not immediately available for comment.
The military official refused to comment on reports that a convoy of U.S. military vehicles crossed into northern Iraq over the weekend.
Turkey opposes a U.S.-led war against its neighbor, worried fighting could spark a wave of refugees and upset its economy. Ankara is also concerned that moves toward Kurdish independence in the north of Iraq could rekindle violent Kurdish nationalism within Turkey.
The military official said the recent deployments were heavy with engineering units ready to build bridges and ensure Turkish access into the mountains of northern Iraq if needed.
Turkey has NATO's second-largest armed forces with around 500,000 men under arms, the vast majority of them conscripts doing compulsory military service.
A close U.S. ally, Turkey is expected to give reluctant support to Washington if it launches a military campaign because of alleged Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction. The United States would look to Turkey for use of air bases and probably passage of special forces across the frontier.
The main thrust of any attack against Iraq would come probably from the flatter south of Iraq rather than Turkey.
Turkey plans to set up a "buffer zone" inside northern Iraq to provide for any refugees before they reach Turkish territory. U.S. diplomats say they are pressing Turkey not to act independently in the region but work in concert with Washington.
The United States already patrols the skies of northern Iraq from a joint Turkish-U.S. air base and is offering to upgrade other Turkish facilities for use in any operation.
Building work at some facilities close to the border has encouraged rumors that deployments of U.S. troops can be expected.
Washington is skeptical that Baghdad will co-operate with United Nations officials searching for evidence of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. It says it is prepared to oust President Saddam Hussein if necessary and many here expect an attack early next year.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechen Refugees Brace for Upheaval as Camps Close
December 16, 2002
New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/international/europe/16CHEC.html
NAZRAN, Russia, Dec. 14 - The night Salaudi Dukhigov lost his home - a tent in a refugee camp in the village of Aki-Yurt - it was 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The local police had ordered him to take it down. When he refused, they cut the ropes that held it up.
The cold that night last week was not the only problem. Mr. Dukhigov, a refugee from the secessionist conflict in Chechnya, cares for 20 children. His new abode, a wood-floored hut without electricity warmed by a small portable heater, is a whirlwind of shoes, blankets and crying children.
Mr. Dukhigov, 39, is in the middle of a monthlong standoff between the Russian authorities and Chechen refugees living in tent cities in Ingushetia, a region bordering Chechnya. The authorities say they are offering refugees an opportunity to return home. Some are taking it. But many have refused. In the camp at Aki-Yurt, that meant losing tent homes that had stood for two years.
"We were grabbing plates, blankets, our children's clothes," said Rosa Elbukayeva, another camp resident, recalling the day her family had to leave its tent and find other shelter.
The refugee resettlement is part of a larger effort by the Russian authorities to show the world and Russian citizens that the war in Chechnya is over. President Vladimir V. Putin signed a decree this week setting a date to vote on a new constitution. There are plans for presidential elections. Official statements describe the situation in the republic as stable.
But a guerrilla war drags on and Chechens continue to live in fear of attacks. A distrust of Russian officials has hardened since the latest war began in 1999, when the Russian Army re-entered the republic to repel an attack by Chechen fighters.
The camp at Aki-Yurt was built in 2000 to accommodate Chechens who had fled the war. It was home to 1,700 to 3,700 people, and the refugees received assistance from relief agencies like Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross. The camp had a school, a bathhouse, gas pipes for heating and electricity.
It was one of six camps that have been a drain on Ingushetia, a small region of 350,000. Russia spends $157,200 a month to maintain each camp, plus $9,000 a month on food for refugees. In all, displaced Chechens in Ingushetia number 110,000, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Of those, 20,000 live in tents.
But Aki-Yurt was not closed because of the cost. On Nov. 19, three weeks after Chechen terrorists took a Moscow theater audience hostage, the local health inspector recommended that the camp be closed, citing worn-out tents, fire hazards and a sharp increase in illness. Officials also have said Chechen fighters use the camps as bases.
"Not one camp corresponds with international norms," said Pyotr P. Panasyuk, deputy head of Russia's Federal Migration Service, who arrived in Ingushetia with about 30 officials on Nov. 21 to deal with the situation. "Every family has a sick child. Tent life is degenerating."
But international relief organizations disagree.
"It was an average camp - not the best, not the worst," said Magomed Amerkhanov, an employee of the Red Cross, whose work brought him to Aki-Yurt, about 37 miles north of Nazran, three times a week over the past several years.
Human rights groups contend that the closure was an attempt to erase signs of war. Minkail Ezheyev, deputy chairman of the Society of Russian-Chechen Friendship, interpreting the state's thinking on resettlement, said: "If there are no tents, there are no refugees and if there are no refugees there is no problem. If there is no problem, there is no war."
Some refugees have left. Beginning in May, the Federal Migration Service began offering refugees free transportation and stipends to return to Chechnya. Since then, in all six camps, 1,800 refugees returned, Mr. Panasyuk said. That is about 10 percent of all tent residents.
Alec Bourshikov, 31, and his wife, Medina Khasiyeva, 30, decided to return to Chechnya in the hope of finding work. Last month, tired of working odd jobs in construction in Ingushetia, Mr. Bourshikov rented a room in Grozny, Chechnya's capital. The couple received five months of food supplies and have been promised a subsidy of $10 a day.
But many are unwilling to risk the dangers of life in Chechnya, and fears of new closures are rife among residents of other camps. Families with teenage sons, particularly vulnerable in Chechnya as they are first to be suspected of terrorist activities, often resist going back.
International criticism of the closure at Aki-Yurt has focused on forced resettlement. While it does not appear that anyone was physically compelled to leave, the authorities have turned off the gas and electricity, making the site virtually unlivable.
To light his hut, Mr. Dukhigov hooks a wire onto a nearby power line. With no gas, he and his family light wood fires in their small stove. Trees are sparse in this area of barren, rolling hills, and he and others left in the camp have been stripping wood from tent foundations.
It is still unclear exactly how many refugees have actually left Aki-Yurt. Mr. Panasyuk would give no details on numbers. A count this week by Imran Ezheyev, the Chechen representative of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, turned up 688 refugees living in industrial buildings on the premises and in rented rooms in the nearby village.
Mr. Ezheyev estimated that more than two-thirds of camp residents simply moved to barns and warehouses on the premises, instead of returning to Chechnya.
Housing in Grozny, ruined by war, remains in short supply, though Mr. Panasyuk said a five-story building for 1,000 people would be ready this month.
Now residents of other camps are wondering if they will be next. The authorities have promised no would be forced to return, though refugees say the local and federal police have told them to leave.
"It's not resettlement, it's returning," said Alaudi Khisimenkov, deputy head of the Migration Department in Chechnya, on an official visit to one camp. "Chechen people belong in Chechnya. Only they can revive life in Chechnya."
"Soon," he added, enigmatically, "many will be returning home."
--------
Russian Colonel Declared Insane in Chechen Murder
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-russia-chechnya-trial.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian doctors Monday declared insane the first senior army officer to go on trial for crimes against civilians in the breakaway region of Chechnya, paving the way for his release for treatment.
President Vladimir Putin's Chechnya human rights envoy said such an outcome was likely to met with dismay in the war-ravaged republic.
In a case seen as a test of Russia's willingness to clamp down on human rights abuses in Chechnya, Colonel Yuri Budanov faces charges of killing an 18-year-old Chechen woman two years ago, in the early stages of Moscow's drive against separatists.
``Regarding acts incriminated to Budanov, it was recognized that while committing those deeds he did not perceive their meaning and significance,'' defense lawyer Alexei Dulimov said in televised remarks.
Speaking from the site of the trial in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, Dulimov said Budanov was now likely to be cleared of criminal charges and sent down for compulsory treatment, as recommended by the forensic psychiatrists.
``People in Chechnya are convinced that Budanov is a criminal, a murderer. Such mild verdict, de-facto acquittal, will disturb Chechen society,'' Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, presidential Chechnya rights envoy, told Itar-Tass news agency.
The trial, monitored by human rights groups, has been repeatedly interrupted for psychiatric tests on the defendant.
Moscow's Serbsky psychiatric institute, which declared many dissidents insane in Soviet times, said earlier this year Budanov could not be held responsible for the killing as he was ``temporarily insane'' at the time.
DOUBTS OVER REFORM
A senior U.S. diplomat said the conduct of the trial raised doubts about how serious authorities were about proceeding with military reform.
``It does raise serious concerns as to whether (the military),...particularly the officer corps, are going to held to account when they commit excesses in Chechnya,'' the diplomat told Reuters.
He said post-Soviet military reform was proceeding slowly and ``borders on resistance to reform.''
Budanov, commander of a tank regiment, is accused of having strangled Elza Kungayeva during an interrogation after his men stormed into her village and took her back to a military base.
The victim's father, Visa Kungayev, who lives in a tent city housing thousands of Chechen refugees just outside Chechnya, expressed incredulity at the psychiatrists' verdict.
``I served in the Soviet army when I was a bit younger. It's a shame that insane colonels serve in the Russian army today and kill civilians,'' he told Reuters outside his snow-covered tent.
``But I don't believe he is insane. How can he be insane? He looks like a smart man. I will insist they carry out an additional, and this time independent, examination into whether he is actually insane.''
Budanov acknowledges killing Kungayeva, saying he believed she was a sniper. Budanov's lawyers have called for his release on grounds that he was not responsible for his actions, while Kungayeva's relatives accuse Budanov of raping and killing her in a drunken rampage.
The charges carry a jail term of up to 20 years.
Moscow has come under repeated international criticism of its human rights record in Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim province where Russian troops have been trying to stamp out a separatist rebellion for nearly a decade.
-------- spy agencies
The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA
Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy
Robert Dreyfuss,
December 16, 2002
American Prospect
http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html
Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war. These morsels sometimes go directly to the president.
The war over intelligence is a critical part of a broader offensive by the party of war within the Bush administration against virtually the entire expert Middle East establishment in the United States -- including State Department, Pentagon and CIA area specialists and leading military officers. Inside the foreign-policy, defense and intelligence agencies, nearly the whole rank and file, along with many senior officials, are opposed to invading Iraq. But because the less than two dozen neoconservatives leading the war party have the support of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they are able to marginalize that opposition.
Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war. At the State Department, where Secretary of State Colin Powell's efforts at diplomacy have thus far slowed the relentless pressure for war, a key bureau is chilled by the presence of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Elizabeth L. Cheney, the vice president's daughter, who is in charge of Middle East economic policy, including oil. "When [Near East Affairs] meets, there is no debate," says Parker Borg, who served in the State Department for 30 years as an ambassador and deputy chief of counterterrorism. "How vocal would you be about commenting on Middle East policy with the vice president's daughter there?" Undersecretary of State John Bolton is also part of the small pro-war faction.
And at the Pentagon, where a number of critical offices have been filled by hawkish neoconservatives whose commitment to war with Iraq goes back a decade, Middle East specialists and uniformed military officers alike are seeing their views ignored. "I've heard from people on the Middle East staff in the Pentagon," says Borg, referring to the staff under neocon Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs. "The Middle East experts in those officers are as cut off from the policy side as people in the State Department are."
But the sharpest battle is over the CIA. "There is tremendous pressure on [the CIA] to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted," says Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. What's unfolding is a campaign by well-placed hawks to undermine the CIA's ability to provide objective, unbiased intelligence to the White House.
Voice crackling over his cell phone, Jim Woolsey is trying hard to sound objective and analytical, but he is, well, gloating. The former CIA director has been one of the leaders of the get-Saddam Hussein faction for years, promoting a unilateral U.S. strike against Baghdad. Woolsey is not quite a private citizen, serving as an adviser to the CIA and as a member of the Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by the ringleader of the pro-war neocons, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. Woolsey has also, at least once, served as unofficial liaison to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and other Iraqi opposition groups.
What's got him excited is an Oct. 7 letter, recently declassified, from CIA Director George Tenet that put the CIA on record for the first time as saying that there have been "high-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade"; that Iraq and Osama bin Laden's gang have "discussed safe haven"; that members of al-Qaeda have been present in Baghdad; and that Iraq has "provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases."
"The CIA has started saying things that the Defense Department has been saying all along, but up until that letter, I hadn't seen any evidence publicly that the CIA was acknowledging all these contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda," says Woolsey. "What I read the Tenet letter as saying is that they are starting to. The CIA has started to come around to point out some of the things that the Pentagon has been talking about."
Tenet's statement on Iraq and al-Qaeda was a significant departure from the consensus view among intelligence professionals. Since September 11, many of them, inside government and out, have pooh-poohed the notion that Iraq has provided support to al-Qaeda, and they continue to do so. Daniel Benjamin, co-author, with Steven Simon, of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC) in the late 1990s, and he oversaw a comprehensive review of Iraq and terrorism that came up empty. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link [between] al-Qaeda and Iraq," says Benjamin. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact. No other issue has been as closely scrutinized as this one." The State Department's annual review of state-sponsored terrorism hasn't mentioned any link, either.
A sign of how the Iraq-al-Qaeda issue is roiling the agency is how Tenet himself qualified the analysis. In his letter, addressed to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet wrote: "Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability." Benjamin, along with other analysts, points out that the CIA's letter seemed to strain to make the connection, noting that the phrase "sources of varying reliability" is "a way of saying that there isn't much evidence."
But if after failing to find links between Iraq and al-Qaeda for years the CIA is suddenly discovering a connection between the two, some analysts believe that it is Tenet, the CIA director, playing politics and arranging to tell the Pentagon what it wants to hear. "[The CIA] is giving Bush what he wanted on Iraq and al-Qaeda," says Melvin Goodman of the Center for International Policy, who is also a former CIA Soviet expert and a fierce critic of politicized intelligence. "Tenet is playing the game, to a certain extent." Goodman, who has maintained contacts inside the agency, says that the CIA's key intelligence analysts are upset with Tenet and concerned that he will frame their conclusions in a way that kowtows to the Pentagon's preconceived view. "There's a lot of anger and questions about whether Tenet will hold off this pressure," Goodman says. "[The CIA analysts are] worried, and they don't have a lot of confidence in him. But the analytical core is holding fast to the evidence, and the evidence doesn't show that link."
However, the intense pressure from the Pentagon seems to be having an effect. Tenet is, after all, a politician, not a CIA veteran. After serving as staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet moved over to the CIA itself and was named to the director's job by President Clinton. But he took pains to ingratiate himself with the Bushes, père et fils. He quickly acted to name the CIA headquarters after former President Bush in 1998, organized a major intelligence conference at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University -- itself headed by Robert Gates, a former CIA director -- and personally briefed then-Texas Gov. Bush during the 2000 election campaign. Tenet's quiet politicking was enough to persuade Bush to keep him on at the CIA, and the director's recent actions signal that he doesn't intend to buck the drive toward war.
"It's demoralizing to a number of the analysts," says Cannistraro. "The analysts are human, and some of them are also ambitious. What you have to worry about is the 'chill factor.' If people are ignoring your intelligence, and the Pentagon and NSC keep telling you, 'What about this? What about this? Keep looking!' -- well, then you start focusing on one thing instead of the other thing, because you know that's what your political masters want to hear."
Spy vs. Spy
For more than a year, one of the main sources of Defense Department pressure on the CIA has been a unnamed, rump intelligence unit set up in Undersecretary Feith's policy shop at the department. Begun as a two-person group, it has since expanded to four and now five people, and was set up to provide Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Feith with data they can use to disparage, undermine and contradict the CIA's own analyses. Established just after September 11, the unit's main focus -- though not its only one -- has been on Iraq, especially Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda and Iraq's alleged intent to use its alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
In a controversial Oct. 24 briefing at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld noted that a primary purpose of the unit was to provide him with ammunition that he could use to harass the CIA staffer who briefs him every morning. "In comes the briefer, and she walks through the daily brief and I ask questions," said Rumsfeld. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this? Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Using powerful computers and having access to reams of intelligence factoids, Feith's team could create a steady stream of data bits that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith himself could use to pick apart the CIA's conclusions, sending the CIA's collectors and analysts back to rewrite their reports.
The fact that the unit is overseen by Feith, an ideologically committed partisan who is pushing for war with Iraq, raises questions about its impartiality and its willingness to reach conclusions that might contradict the Pentagon leadership's stated policy intentions. "It's one thing to create a unit to provide an independent look, and it's another thing to go on a fishing expedition," says Benjamin, the former NSC official. "The fact that this unit has been there for more than a year suggests that it is a fishing expedition."
Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was elected to the Senate in 1976, he "brought with him some of [Sen. Henry M.] Jackson's most militantly neoconservative former aides, among them Elliott Abrams, Chester Finn, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt," according to a 1986 account in The Washington Post. Perle was also a former Jackson aide, and Shulsky, Perle and many kindred thinkers got jobs in President Reagan's Department of Defense in the 1980s. Shulsky also spent years at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), and at the RAND Corporation. At RAND, along with other fellow neocons, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff), Shulsky contributed a study called "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War." That study was a forerunner of the recent military strategy document released by the Pentagon suggesting that the United States act to preserve its global hegemony, even if it means preemptive war or preventive war making.
Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky's for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA's might. "It might turn out to be a David against Goliath," says Godson.
Dubious Intelligence
The Pentagon's war against the CIA relies heavily on intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress. But most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider the INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil. Yet, Perle, Woolsey and the Pentagon's policy-makers increasingly use the INC as their primary source of information about Iraq's weapons programs, its relationship to terrorism and its internal political dynamics. "A lot of what is useful with respect to what's going on in Iraq is coming from defectors, and furthermore they are defectors who have often come through an organization, namely, the INC, that neither State nor the CIA likes very much," Woolsey told me.
Earlier this year, the State Department abruptly stopped funding an INC scheme to collect intelligence inside Iraq. "The INC could only account for $2.5 million out of $4.5 million they received for the program," says a State Department official. "I can't say that there was evidence of corruption or embezzlement, but $2 million was unaccounted for." The more the INC began getting into intelligence work, the more the State Department grew uncomfortable funding the program. "The only reason they stopped paying for that program is that the State Department hates the INC," says a knowledgeable source. Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon picked up the tab. Now, whatever intelligence the INC collects goes straight to the Defense Department, according to spokesman Lt. Col. David Lapan. "The intelligence guys here get the information first and do the analysis," he says. Goodman, the former CIA analyst, concurs, saying, "The INC is in the Pentagon every day."
But the Pentagon's critics are appalled that intelligence provided by the INC might shape U.S. decisions about going to war against Baghdad. At the CIA and at the State Department, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, is viewed as the ineffectual head of a self-inflated and corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but not much else. [See "Tinker, Banker, Neocon, Spy," tap, Nov. 18.] "The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," says Cannistraro. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."
Adds Cannistraro, "They're willing to twist information in order to serve that interest. They've opened up a channel at the Pentagon to collect intelligence from Iraqi exiles, using people off the books, contractors. It's getting pretty close to an Iran-Contra type of situation."
Manipulating the CIA is nothing new, of course. For decades, politicians annoyed that intelligence from the agency might work against policy goals have sought to bring pressure to bear on the CIA to alter its views or, failing that, to diminish the CIA's standing. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon disparaged CIA analyses that cast into doubt the projected "light at the end of the tunnel." In the 1970s, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush invited a so-called Team B group of neoconservative hawks to spin out a report accusing the CIA ("Team A") of consistently underestimating the Soviet threat. (Team B, it's worth noting, was created at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, the political godfather to Perle, Wolfowitz, et al.) That pressure continued, in other forms, during Ronald Reagan's military buildup in the 1980s. In the 1980s, too, then-CIA Director Bill Casey was notorious for constantly trying to politicize the CIA, repeatedly trying to influence the agency's reporting on Central America, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.
The Uses of Endless War
The hostility by the hard-liners against what they see as the CIA's myopia on Iraq at least matches any of those earlier fights. Perle, who said recently that the CIA's analysis of Iraq "isn't worth the paper it's written on," adds that the CIA is afraid of rocking the ark in the Middle East. "The CIA is status-quo oriented," he told me. "They don't want to take risks. They don't like the INC because they only like to work with people they can control."
According to informed sources, Perle, who's currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has for the past several years sponsored the work of a former CIA clandestine operative, Reuel Marc Gerecht, helping him financially, lending him the use of his villa in France to write a book and getting him a fellowship at AEI. Gerecht, who spends much of his time living in Brussels, maintains close ties to the INC via its centers in London and Washington. According to a person familiar with the arrangement, Gerecht is privately working with the INC's intelligence people to help funnel information to Feith's office in the Pentagon.
Asked whether he is working as an unofficial intelligence handler for the INC, Gerecht demurs but doesn't deny it. "It's pretty overstated," he says. "I talk to the Iraqi opposition now and then, but there are a lot more people in Washington who talk to the Iraqi opposition. So I don't think that Pentagon requires my assistance ... in gathering information from Iraqi opposition." But Gerecht is quick to criticize the CIA over Iraq. "There is a great deal of hesitancy if not opposition to the war at the agency," he says. "I don't think [Rumsfeld] is terribly happy. The collective output that CIA puts out is usually pretty mushy. I think it's fair to say that the civilian leadership isn't terribly cracked up about the intelligence they receive from CIA."
To call Gerecht a hard-liner on Iraq would be an understatement. For him and for many of his allies -- Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and others -- an attack on Iraq is a strategic necessity, not because Saddam Hussein is a threat but because America needs to display an overwhelming show of force to keep unruly Arabs and Muslims all over the world in line. "If we really intend to extinguish the hope that has fueled the rise of al-Qaeda and violent anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, we have no choice but to re-instill in our foes and friends the fear and respect that attaches to any great power," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal last December. "Only a war against Saddam Hussein will decisively restore the awe that protects American interests abroad and citizens at home. We've been running from this fight for 10 years."
The Pentagon's campaign against the CIA is broader than just Iraq. Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has been squeezed by the military again and again. Through its control over the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other entities, the Pentagon already controls the vast bulk of America's spy budget. To consolidate that control, Rumsfeld is currently pushing to create an intelligence czar at the Pentagon whose power and influence would rival that of the CIA director's. And more and more often, the CIA's covert-operations arm finds itself dominated by the Defense Department's Special Forces units, the gung-ho soldiers who've been on the front lines in the ongoing, and apparently endless, war on terrorism.
What's at stake here is far greater than a bureaucratic turf battle. The CIA exists to provide pure and unbiased intelligence to its chief customer, the president. George W. Bush, whose knowledge of world affairs is limited at best, probably depends more heavily than most presidents on what his aides tell him about the outside world. And there is mounting evidence that the decision to go to war is based on intelligence of doubtful veracity, which has been cooked by Pentagon hawks.
-------- un
U.N. lists parties that use child soldiers
12/16/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-12-16-child-soldiers_x.htm
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Remnants of the Taliban, conflict-ridden governments and rebel groups all use child soldiers, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
The report by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan listed 23 parties that recruit and use child warriors in violation of internationally accepted standards.
"Those who violate the standards cannot do so with impunity," the report said, but stressed "more needs to be done" to stop the practice.
Rebel groups in Burundi, Congo, Liberia and Somalia, as well as factions in Afghanistan still recruit and use child warriors, according to the list, which was part of Annan's third report on children and armed conflict.
The list was limited to conflicts currently on the Security Council's agenda, but it said children have also been recruited for combat in Colombia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Sudan, northern Uganda and Sri Lanka.
Demobilization and reintegration programs for child combatants are under way in recently ended conflicts in Angola, Kosovo, the Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, the report said.
Remnants of the hard-line Taliban and factions associated with the former Northern Alliance and in the south of the country were singled out for drawing children into war. Northern Alliance troops were U.S. allies in the war on terror in Afghanistan.
"Following the fall of the Taliban government, there was significant demobilization of soldiers, including children," the report said. "However, recent reports indicate that some armed groups have resumed recruitment ... including underage boys."
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers last year estimated that more than 300,000 children were fighting as soldiers in 41 countries.
The London-based group said the children, including about 120,000 in African armies, were used as front-line fighters, minesweepers, spies, porters and sex slaves.
"We ... see this report as a solid foundation for acting to end this shameful practice," said coalition coordinator Casey Kelso. "The challenge to the Security Council is to demand accountability and take action to stop children being used as soldiers."
The report cited progress in protecting children during conflict, including three Security Council resolutions and two landmark international treaties setting age limits.
International law prohibits recruiting children under the age of 15, while several United Nations conventions condemn the practice of having anyone under 18 serve as a soldier.
"For the first time in an official report by the secretary-general, parties in conflict which continue to recruit and use child soldiers are named and listed," said Olara Otunnu, Annan's special representative for children and armed conflict.
U.N. officials and activists said they hoped the list would send an important message and help move the international community from words to action.
--------
UN Names Countries, Groups Using Child Soldiers
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-un-children-rights.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Despite global treaties, children are being recruited as soldiers by governments in the Congo, Burundi and Liberia and are prevalent among rebel groups in Colombia, the Philippines, Uganda and Sri Lanka, a new United Nations report said on Monday.
Olara Otunnu, the U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict, said the report for the first time named governments and groups recruiting youths younger than 18 for military combat.
``This shows the international community is serious and also that the community is watching,'' he told a news conference.
According to UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund, an estimated 300,000 child soldiers were carrying arms in over 40 countries worldwide, most of them in Africa and East Asia.
The report listed 23 groups including governments and rebel factions in five countries where child soldiering is common -- Afghanistan, Burundi, Liberia, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
While the governments of Congo, Burundi and Liberia were named as recruiters of child soldiers, Otunnu also listed myriad rebel groups in those nations that use children as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.
Armed groups were also using children as soldiers including factions in Colombia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Sudan, Uganda, Sri Lanka, among others, the report said.
Regional warlords and the remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan recruit or conscript children. However, the Afghan National Army, which was designed to replace all armed groups in the country, will not do so, Otunnu said.
Otunnu said the report represented the ``beginning of a systematic effort in a new era of monitoring and reporting on the conduct of parties and how they treat children during conflict.''
The standards being violated include a number of human rights pacts as well as an amendment to the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child that prohibits the use of children younger than 18 in combat.
These standards apply to insurgent groups as well as governments, making both accountable for such actions, the report said.
Otunnu also said some countries where civil wars recently ended, such as Angola and Sierra Leone, had implemented demobilization and re-integration programs for child veterans.
-------- venezuela
Venezuelan Army Backs Chavez Against Strike
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-venezuela.html
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela's army on Monday threw its weight behind efforts by President Hugo Chavez to break an opposition strike, describing the shutdown of the nation's vital oil industry as an attack against the state.
Venezuelan army commander Gen. Julio Garcia Montoya said in a statement that the military opposed the crippling strike and he urged representatives from both sides of the political divide to settle the crisis in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.
``Venezuela's army ... has its best resources at the ready to prevent this attempt to cause the nation's social and economic collapse,'' Montoya said at a Caracas military base.
Opposition leaders, who are pressing Chavez to resign and call immediate elections, have stepped up the two-week shutdown that has halted refineries, choked oil output to less than a third and paralyzed oil exports, which account for about half of government revenues.
Chavez was elected in 1998 and survived a military coup in April. He has ignored calls for an early vote from foes who accuse him of pushing the nation toward economic ruin and Cuban-style communism.
STRIKE TOUCHES U.S. OIL
The opposition strike, which started Dec. 2, has rattled oil markets and fueled tensions in the sharply divided South America nation. With Venezuela supplying more than 13 percent of U.S. oil imports, the strike could also complicate Washington's preparations for a possible war in Iraq.
Oil prices surged on Monday, with U.S. oil futures closing up more than a dollar at $30.10 on the Venezuelan crisis. International benchmark Brent crude prices touched the highest levels since mid-October.
Chavez, who dismisses the strike as an illegal attempt to topple his government, has sent troops to secure gasoline supplies and he is importing fuel and food to offset shortages. Fears of supply cuts have sent Venezuelans rushing to supermarkets and gasoline stations.
Production at other state industries, such as iron, steel and aluminum, have also been hurt, threatening to further undermine a faltering economy. Venezuela's gross domestic production has contracted more than 6 percent this year.
The international community has urged restraint to prevent a repeat of the street violence that killed more than 60 people during April's short-lived, chaotic coup. Since loyal troops restored Chavez to power, violent clashes and protests have stoked fears of another military uprising.
But Gen. Montoya's comments appeared to indicate that the army, the most powerful branch of the armed forces, would not move against Chavez, despite calls from some opposition sectors for it to intervene.
PROTESTERS BLOCK HIGHWAYS
Anti-government demonstrators took to the streets again on Monday to block highways and show support for the strike protest. Riot police fired tear gas and shotgun pellets to break up protests and to keep rival Chavez supporters and foes apart in separate parts of the sprawling capital.
``I voted for Chavez but he deceived us, he's turned into a dictator. I'm purging my guilt over voting for him,'' said Tony Hernandez, 49, an electrical engineer taking part in one of the Caracas protests. ``We'll be here until he falls.''
Peace talks, brokered by the Organization of American States, have so far failed to bring reach an accord on an electoral solution to the turmoil.
Weighing into the crisis, the United States on Friday urged the president to call early elections. But Chavez says a binding referendum on his mandate can only constitutionally be held in August 2003 -- halfway through his current term.
In what appeared to be a wary qualification, the White House said on Monday that it supported a referendum rather than early elections. But the U.S. government did not specify a date for the poll.
CHAVEZ WON'T RESIGN
Opposition leaders have called for a nonbinding referendum in February on whether Chavez should resign. The poll would not force Chavez out of office, but his foes hope an overwhelming rejection vote could press him into resigning.
Chavez's populist ``revolution,'' which includes cheap credit and land reform, has won a following among the poor. But opinion polls show his popularity has fallen sharply since his landslide election victory four years ago.
In an interview in The Washington Post on Monday, Chavez said he would consider resigning only if violence and economic turmoil made Venezuela ungovernable but that the worst of the strike had passed.
``If I realize that I have failed, the president could resign, but not if they put a gun to my head,'' Chavez said.
In his attempts to break the strike, Chavez has threatened to bring in foreign oil experts. One tanker left Venezuela on Monday, but more than 40 oil vessels are still moored off Venezuela's coast. Strike leaders have dismissed his efforts to restart the battered oil industry.
-------- propaganda wars
Saddam has own book of wisdom
By Bassem Mroue
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021216-70590661.htm
BAGHDAD - Libya's Moammar Gadhafi has his "Green Book." China's Mao Tse-tung had his "Little Red Book." Now, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has a pocket-size, white-bound pamphlet filled with his words of wisdom.
The pamphlet includes such advice as, "Don't be attracted to easy paths because the paths that make your feet bleed are the only way to get ahead in life."
Earlier this year, the Iraqi Information Ministry brought out "Saddam Hussein: Great Lessons, Commandments to Strugglers, the Patient and Holy Warriors." Most Iraqis were already familiar with the free pamphlet's contents: 57 quotations drawn from speeches made by Saddam, including one in 2000 marking the 12th anniversary of the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Since 2000, selections from the 57 commandments have been painted on school walls, carved on statues, printed in Iraqi newspapers, splashed across huge billboards, framed and placed on the walls in government offices, printed in Iraqi newspapers - all of which are controlled by the state, Saddam's Ba'ath party or Saddam's son, Odai.
The Muslim call to prayer is broadcast on state television in Iraq, and after every call - five times daily - a few of the commandments are read.
Saddam's commandments cover all aspects of life. He advises against making decisions in anger or humiliating enemies after defeating them. He calls for doing good, depending on brains as well as brawn, ruling fairly, planning well, keeping people's secrets and learning from others' mistakes.
At Baghdad's Al-Quds Elementary School, the commandments are painted in black and red on the walls of the entrance and in the classrooms.
"Who is going to recite for us one of the leader's commandments?" Al-Quds Principal Khawla al-Ani said after introducing a reporter to a class of earnest little girls.
Seven-year-old Ilaf Marwan raised her hand, then stood and recited confidently: "Keep your eyes on your enemy and be faster than him."
The principal called Saddam's commandments "lessons from the heart to the heart."
Such praise for Saddam is common in Iraq, where criticism of him can bring jail or worse. The United States may consider him a stockpiler of weapons of mass destruction who gives terrorists a haven and leads an "axis of evil." But in Iraq, according to a blurb on his pamphlet, he is a "great son" of the Arabs.
Sabih Fakher, an Information Ministry official who helped compile the pamphlet, said the commandments are "very important lessons to the people of Iraq in the shadow of the continuous aggression and the unjust siege."
The United States has threatened to topple Saddam's government if he does not cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors who resumed their search for weapons of mass destruction last month for the first time in four years.
Iraq denies that it has such weapons. The United States and Britain insist Saddam is hiding some.
If Saddam is seeking advice as the standoff intensifies, he might turn to Page 11 of his pamphlet:
"Don't provoke a snake unless you have the intention and power to cut off its head."
----
Pentagon Debates Propaganda Push in Allied Nations
December 16, 2002
New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/international/16MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The Defense Department is considering issuing a secret directive to the American military to conduct covert operations aimed at influencing public opinion and policy makers in friendly and neutral countries, senior Pentagon and administration officials say.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has not yet decided on the proposal, which has ignited a fierce battle throughout the Bush administration over whether the military should carry out secret propaganda missions in friendly nations like Germany, where many of the Sept. 11 hijackers congregated, or Pakistan, still considered a haven for Al Qaeda's militants.
Such a program, for example, could include efforts to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism across the Middle East, Asia and Europe. It might even include setting up schools with secret American financing to teach a moderate Islamic position laced with sympathetic depictions of how the religion is practiced in America, officials said.
Many administration officials agree that the government's broad strategy to counter terrorism must include vigorous and creative propaganda to change the negative view of America held in many countries.
The fight, one Pentagon official said, is over "the strategic communications for our nation, the message we want to send for long-term influence, and how we do it."
As a military officer put it: "We have the assets and the capabilities and the training to go into friendly and neutral nations to influence public opinion. We could do it and get away with it. That doesn't mean we should."
It is not the first time that the debate over how the United States should marshal its forces to win the hearts and minds of the world has raised difficult and potentially embarrassing questions at the Pentagon. A nonclandestine parallel effort at the State Department, which refers to its role as public diplomacy, has not met with so much resistance.
In February, Mr. Rumsfeld had to disband the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, ending a short-lived plan to provide news items, and possibly false ones, to foreign journalists to influence public sentiment abroad. Senior Pentagon officials say Mr. Rumsfeld is deeply frustrated that the United States government has no coherent plan for molding public opinion worldwide in favor of America in its global campaign against terrorism and militancy.
Many administration officials agree that there is a role for the military in carrying out what it calls information operations against adversaries, especially before and during war, as well as routine public relations work in friendly nations like Colombia, the Philippines or Bosnia, whose governments have welcomed American troops.
In hostile countries like Iraq, such missions are permitted under policy and typically would include broadcasting from airborne radio stations or dropping leaflets like those the military has printed to undermine morale among Iraqi soldiers. In future wars, they might include technical attacks to disable computer networks, both military and civilian.
But the idea of ordering the military to take psychological aim at allies has divided the Pentagon - with civilians and uniformed officers on both sides of the debate.
Some are troubled by suggestions that the military might pay journalists to write stories favorable to American policies or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of American policies.
The current battlefield for these issues involves amendments to a classified Department of Defense directive, titled "3600.1: Information Operations," which would enshrine an overarching Pentagon policy for years to come.
Current policy holds that aggressive information tactics are "to affect adversary decision makers" - not those of friendly or even neutral nations. But proposed revisions to the directive, as quoted by senior officials, would not make adversaries the only targets for carrying out military information operations - abbreviated as "I.O." in the document, which is written in the dense jargon typical of military doctrine.
"In peacetime, I.O. supports national objectives primarily by influencing foreign perceptions and decision-making," the proposal states. "In crises short of hostilities, I.O. can be used as a flexible deterrent option to communicate national interest and demonstrate resolve. In conflict, I.O. can be applied to achieve physical and psychological results in support of military objectives."
Although the defense secretary is among those pushing to come up with a bolder strategy for getting out the American message, he has not yet decided whether the military should take on those responsibilities, the officials said.
There is little dispute over such battlefield tactics as destroying an enemy's radio and television stations. All is considered fair in that kind of war.
But several senior military officers, some of whom have recently left service, expressed dismay at the concept of assigning the military to wage covert propaganda campaigns in friendly or neutral countries. "Running ops against your allies doesn't work very well," Adm. Dennis C. Blair, a retired commander of American forces in the Pacific, advised Pentagon officials as they began re-examining the classified directive over the summer. "I've seen it tried a few times, and it generally is not very effective."
Those in favor of assigning the military an expanded role argue that no other department is stepping up to the task of countering propaganda from terrorists, who hold no taboo against deception.
They also contend that the Pentagon has the best technological tools for the job, especially in the areas of satellite communications and computer warfare, and that the American military has important interests to protect in some countries, including those where ties with the government are stronger than the affections of the population.
For example, as anti-American sentiment has risen this year in South Korea, intensified recently by the deaths of two schoolgirls who were crushed by an American armored vehicle, some Pentagon officials were prompted to consider ways of influencing Korean public opinion outside of traditional public affairs or community outreach programs, one military official said. No detailed plan has yet emerged.
Those who oppose the military's taking on the job of managing perceptions of America in allied states say it more naturally falls to diplomats and civilians, or even uniformed public affairs specialists. They say that secret operations, if deemed warranted by the president, should be carried out by American intelligence agencies.
In addition, they say, the Pentagon's job of explaining itself through public affairs officers could be tainted by any link to covert information missions. "These allied nations would absolutely object to having the American military attempt to secretly affect communications to their populations," said one State Department official with a long career in overseas public affairs.
Even so, this official conceded: "The State Department can't do it. We're not arranged to do it, and we don't have the money. And U.S.I.A. is broken." He was referring to the United States Information Agency, which was absorbed into the State Department.
One effort to reshape the nation's ability to get its message out was a proposal by Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Republican who is chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Mr. Hyde is pushing for $255 million to bolster the State Department's public diplomacy effort and reorganize international broadcasting activities.
"If we are to be successful in our broader foreign policy goals," Mr. Hyde said in a statement, "America's effort to engage the peoples of the world must assume a more prominent place in the planning and execution of our foreign policy."
----
The Interview That Never Happened
When the Masters of Spin Go Silent
by Christopher Deliso in Skopje
December 16, 2002
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/deliso62.html
With the White House seemingly on an unavoidable collision course with Saddam Hussein, hawkish policy planners now face a new challenge: how to sell the war to an increasingly unenthusiastic public. All across America - from Long Island to Minneapolis, from Boston to Atlanta, from Sioux Falls to Sacramento to Seattle - antiwar demonstrations have been springing up, as even citizens normally disinterested in foreign affairs voice concern over the possible negative effects war would have on the economy. In addition, there is a growing unease that war with Iraq would negatively impact on America's image abroad, and perhaps incite further al Qaeda terrorism as a form of revenge - although, ironically, bin Laden has no affection for Saddam. The president, of course, is desperately hoping he can find the two in cahoots, somehow.
Keeping in mind that Iraq never attacked the United States, neither in 1990 or now, the looming war is hard to justify. That is, unless public relations can again save the day.
A Paradigm Shift
The Gulf War was the first time America played the humanitarian card to justify attacking a much weaker country. What began with Bush's "babies in incubators" myth (handled by PR whiz Hill & Knowlton) was perfected by Clinton, who almost ten years later used the all-too-popular (and all-too-bogus) myth of "ethnic cleansing" to justify attacking Serbia. Almost four years on, anti-Serbian bias still pervades the British and American media and think-tanks. Anti-Iraq coverage goes without saying.
After September 11th, the paradigm has shifted from humanitarian intervention to terrorism pre-emption. Yet the White House's self-declared right to "shoot first and ask questions later" portrays the administration negatively, as both cowboy desperado and confused paranoic. It also begs the question of whether ulterior motives are at work here, as John Pilger argues in a scathing indictment of US energy goals in Iraq.
Although Americans are much more clever this time around, after witnessing a decade of PR propaganda in the Yugoslav wars, the White House apparently believes that the average citizen will still support war, if it is only spun the right way. The only question is who will do the spinning.
Enter Rendon?
The last Gulf War was brought to you partially by a little company in Washington known as the Rendon Group. This PR giant has clients around the world, but none quite so grand as the United States government. Rendon was once enlisted to make the case - subtly and deceptively - for why America should support a war against Saddam. And in the end, it worked. But the worst thing? The PR blitz that captivated both media and ordinary citizens alike was paid for by the very people it was meant to seduce - the American taxpayers, whose funds continue to grease the wheels for the government's war machine. However, the people ate it up - sadly, re-affirming the adage that the voters get the leaders they deserve.
The Unsuccessful Request
I thought, therefore, that an interview with the Rendon Group about their past successes and future aspirations would allow them a chance to give their side of the story - since most published reports have been overwhelmingly critical. However, my requests for an interview met only with silence. Were the nuanced masters of eloquent persuasion really at a loss for words?
Since they apparently are, I have been forced to conduct an interview with a respondent who is absent, drawing on Rendon's publicly-made statements and independent investigations. Coming from an aggressively outspoken PR firm, silence would seem incrimination enough. Yet as we will see, even their own statements give them away.
In the following, the questions I had prepared come at the headings of each section.
How Would You Describe Your Services and Objectives?
"The Rendon Group (TRG) is a Global Strategic Communications Consultancy providing products and services to both public and private sector clients. TRG's expertise includes strategic communications consultation, planning and evaluation; information strategy and operations; public and media relations planning and implementation; crisis management; news collection and analysis; information mapping; survey research; media production; and tactical communications team deployment. To date, TRG has worked in eighty (80) countries, frequently on location in a conflict environment, and has considerable experience in establishing field offices to support program objectives."
This description - culled directly from the Rendon Group's website - gives in "official" language a picture that can basically be boiled down to two words: information war. After first accumulating data, they manipulate it - and in some cases, sanitize it - to win either people's emotional support or their dollars. In this age of civilized excess, when we are constantly being bombarded with information, it requires a careful shaping effort to make that information meaningful. And, as we will see below, producing meaningful information is the first step towards producing war.
Who Are Your Clients?
PR companies are essentially soulless. Like mercenaries, they will work for anyone and everyone who can pay - with the possible exception of racist or subversive organizations, as that would be bad for their own PR.
However, this general lack of values is, paradoxically, what accounts for their perceived legitimacy. Working as it has for innocuous clients like the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the National Education Association has given the Rendon Group a veneer of respectability.
Among the full list of global clients, however, one finds others whose goals are ambivalent, or somewhat suspicious, or even downright dangerous. In most cases, however, the connection keeps coming back to support of US government and big business interests.
For example, we have the United States Trade & Development Agency, Colombian Ministry of Defense, the Government of Kuwait and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.
The USTDA facilitates major international projects, funding feasibility studies and development for US-connected business interests. Wherever large infrastructure projects like oil pipelines are being contemplated, there is the TDA.
Oil is the link to the KPC, a company run by an assortment of sheiks - most of them educated in the United States. The company was founded in 1934 by a British-American consortium that has since morphed into BP and Chevron - two companies with large interests in the Middle East and Caspian areas. The government of Kuwait is a no-brainer, given Rendon's efforts against Saddam in the Gulf War. And as for Colombia, the US has for years been selling arms to expedite the Colombian government's war on Leftist rebels, and fuelling an unwinnable "War on Drugs" at the same time. It is clear that while the Rendon Group may have some "independent" clients (like the Association of Massage Therapists), the majority lie within a closed circle of governmental bodies that share overlapping policies - sadly, often harmonizing in war.
Which Clients Inhabit the Unknown Zone?
Then there is the rather odd assortment of Caribbean clients: the governments of Haiti, Antigua & Barbuda, Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, and neighboring Panama. Finally there is the St. Lucia Labour Party. There is little information for what must be a very interesting relationship here, as Rendon is silent about the affairs of its clients. What is publicly known is that in the mid-1990's Rendon helped the embattled Aristide in Haiti (he paid through a bank account in Washington) and worked on a CIA contract to aid the opposition to Manuel Noriega in 1989. This was emulated soon thereafter in Iraq.
And Which Clients Should We Be Afraid Of?
Finally there are the decisively pro-War clients. There is the Air Intelligence Agency (AIA), which runs the Air Force's "information warfare" center from its base in Lackland, Texas. In addition to the Defense Department itself, Rendon has worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. This secretive body is currently involved with the Bush Administration's grandiose plans for an all-seeing national supercomputer. Although it is not mentioned on the company website, the CIA is one of the Rendon Group's longest-standing partners. The final client is the White House itself, which of course has the final say over all of these bodies.
Have You Worked In The Balkans?
The Rendon Group was not so involved as other companies, notably Ruder-Finn, in the Yugoslav wars. However, it did aid Bosnian privatization and helped set up an interesting little project paid for by the US Department of Defense - the "Balkan Information Exchange." This sprung up during the Kosovo bombardment to bolster the government's position. And if its relation to previous government contracts was in any doubt, the fact that it eventually morphed into the "Balkan Times" settles the question.
A glossy, slickly-presented slice of the internet - available in a whopping nine languages - the Balkan Times is paid for by the US Department of Defense.
What Were Your Biggest Successes?
Company president John Rendon, a self-described "information warrior," fondly recalled to a military audience one of his biggest successes of the Gulf War:
"If any of you either participated in the liberation of Kuwait City... or if you watched it on television, you would have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags," John Rendon said in his speech to the NSC. "Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags? And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs." The flag shenanigan was so important because it "proved" to Arabic and other Muslim television viewers that America was their friend. People waving American flags and cheering on the US of A is a potent tactic anywhere in the world where jaded viewers need reassurance. As in Kuwait, such displays are generally encouraged - except, however, for times when they show American policy in contradiction, as in the mountain wilds of Macedonia.
Have There Been Any Failures?
Although they would be loath to admit it, there have been several instances of unprofessionalism from Rendon that only ended up wasting a lot of money. Most embarrassing of all was the anti-Saddam radio hour - conceived and executed six years ago, by a bunch of college kids in Boston.
For $3,000 a month - in which he worked about 8 days total - a Harvard Arabic student was whisked by limo to a recording studio rented out by Rendon. His qualifications? "I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation," the student disclosed anonymously. The student's job was to mimic Saddam in bogus speeches and mock the Iraqi leader in radio broadcasts that would (or so they thought) strike a chord with the Iraqi people. However, the conscientious student quickly found that the organization and execution of the project left something to be desired:
"The point was to discredit Saddam, but the stuff was complete slapstick," the student says. "We did skits where Saddam would get mixed up in his own lies, or where [Saddam's son] Qusay would stumble over his own delusions of grandeur... no one in-house spoke a word of Arabic," he says. "They thought I was mocking Saddam, but for all they knew I could have been lambasting the US government."
The scripts, he adds, were often ill conceived. "Who in Iraq is going to think it's funny to poke fun at Saddam's mustache," the student notes, "when the vast majority of Iraqi men themselves have mustaches?"
Rendon also employed Jordanians and Egyptians whose accents were barely intelligible to the average Iraqi. The result? "The radio broadcasts were a complete mumble," says the student - who has since left Rendon out of frustration at their ineptitude. While working there, however, he was kept in the dark about who was behind it all:
"I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots," says the student, "but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin were very well and completely cut loose."
This is corroborated a CIA agent who disparaged the project, charging that "the scripts were put together by 23-year-olds with connections to the Democratic National Committee."
Should This Be Upsetting To American Taxpayers?
The short answer is yes. The clumsy student radio program was only part of Rendon's work for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a pseudo-diplomatic proxy used as a puppet by Rendon and the CIA. The enormous INC fiasco shows better than anything else how the hard-earned money of the American taxpayer has gone directly down the drain, to fuel a propaganda war whose prime victims were those who had unwittingly paid for it.
What Was Rendon's Role in Propping Up the Iraqi Opposition?
ABC's Peter Jennings disclosed in 1998 that Rendon burned $23 million dollars in the first year of its contract with the CIA. It set up and christened the Iraqi National Congress (INC), as well as the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) and Radio Hurriah, a vehicle for Iraqi opposition propaganda.
The INC, a disparate group of Kurds and Iraqis opposed to Hussein, was set up in both northern Iraq and big Kurdish diaspora areas, notably London. In 1992 the CIA set up Ahmed Chalabi, an MIT-educated mathematician and dissident, to front the organization. Years later, the "help" Chalabi received from Rendon would come back to haunt him. An inside picture of the PR giant presents it as not only a puppet of war-mongers, but also as woefully corrupt and unaccountable - a double deceiver of the American people.
Rendon's INC Free-For-All
A former CIA agent who worked with the INC called Rendon's involvement details the prolonged scam that cost American taxpayers up to $150 million:
"The money went to consultants in Washington - millions, and millions, and millions of dollars," he said, on strict condition of anonymity. "Millions" went to American consultants in London, as well as to other consultants posted around the Middle East, he alleged, who made small fortunes that were used later to buy big houses in poshest Washington neighborhoods.
"There was one woman who was getting $500,000 a year in salary" to work on the Iraq campaign in London, he said. "She was getting per diem when she was hired, about $400 a day in London." Then she was put on the payroll, "but they never stopped the per diem," he said. "So she was getting a salary of a hundred [thousand] and something, and then she moved into an apartment, so she wasn't paying for a hotel. And this went on for three years. And then she said, 'I need some office space,' and so she went out and rented this office space. And then she subleased it. So right there I can account for a million dollars, siphoned off.
...At the end of the year we - the CIA's Iraq Group - had money left over, so we got instructions from the DO [the CIA's Directorate of Operations]: 'Well, go and spend it.' So we went out and bought brand new Jeep Cherokees... all the cars we had in the Middle East for the Iraqi program were going to the wives of the COS's [the chiefs of station]... It was a $150 million rip-off. Go up to northwest [Washington, D.C.] and look at those big houses, and you'll know how they got paid for."
When the inevitable CIA audit came years later, however, Ahmad Chalabi was blamed for the waste; "but according to the CIA man, "Chalabi got nothing [illegal] from it."
What Has Rendon Been Working On Since 9/11?
Shortly after al Qaeda struck in New York and Washington, the Rendon Group was enlisted to help pave the way for an attack on Afghanistan - at that time, something that was not a given. The urgency of the task was indicated by the fact that Rendon was awarded a contract - on a no-bid basis. Apparently, the military had no time to lose in selling a war before cooler heads could prevail and the window of opportunity slam shut. The PR effort was not only meant to win domestic support - but also "to win over the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims worldwide." While the former won general acceptance, the latter did not succeed, and probably never will.
On 25 October 2001, Pentagon media officer Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan explained why Rendon was chosen:
"We needed a firm that could provide strategic counsel immediately... we were interested in someone that we knew could come in quickly and help us orient to the challenge of communicating to a wide range of groups around the world."
At first, the company was awarded $400,000 over four months to monitor media, conduct focus groups and opinion surveys, and cook up other ways to counter what the Pentagon saw as "disinformation" (i.e., any antiwar dissent). The contract was renewed for 2002.
Earlier this year, the Rendon Group was asked for some further details about this (and other) propaganda campaigns. But just like now, they were silent:
"A spokeswoman for the company said she could not reveal what the company did for the Pentagon on that project, but a well-informed source who has worked with Rendon said it went beyond wooing foreign journalists to setting up disguised-source, pro-U.S Web sites in several foreign languages and blast-faxing foreign media and search engines with pro-U.S. information."
Will Rendon Help Spin Gulf War II?
Other investigators have found that the Rendon Group is "tight-lipped" about its involvement with the upcoming installment of Gulf War II. A current Rendon Arabic translator commented, "All I can say is that nothing has changed - the work is still an expensive waste of time, mostly with taxpayer funds." While it would not be surprising if Rendon is hired to spin the next war, it will be interesting to see whether the American people will once again take the bait.
The verdict therefore seems to be that, while America clumsily bullies its way militarily across the Middle East, it will unleash an equally unprofessional - but lucrative - public relations campaign, and probably with the help of the now-tarnished Rendon Group. But that is no reason to be upset or surprised: after all, we get what we pay for.
----
Globalism, free speech and the Internet
EDITORIAL •
December 16, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021216-72056657.htm
Tuesday's Australian High Court ruling that New Jersey-based publisher Dow Jones can be sued for libel under Australian law because of an article available on the Internet is a grave setback for freedom of the press and illustrates anew the dangers of globalism. Siding with mining magnate Joseph Gutnick, the Australian High Court held that, although the offending article was published halfway around the world, because it could be downloaded in Melbourne, Mr. Gutnick's home town, he had grounds to sue in Australia. The ruling subjects journalists and publishers to the peril that they can be sued anywhere in the world where libel cases are easy to bring, even where the local judiciary lacks independence, if their work is accessible on the Internet.
Legitimate investigative reporting, exposes of corruption and the public right-to-know will suffer because of the Australian precedent. Consider the current flap over Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma's role in selling advanced radar systems to Iraq. It is a legitimate subject for media inquiry, but the Australian justices have made it riskier for American journalists to pursue. Unlike the United States, Ukraine allows government officials to sue for libel. The lax law has resulted in novel tactics to control the opposition press and independent media. Politicians sue in jurisdictions with favorable judges, and are awarded huge damages. They then purchase the bankrupt news organization to silence it. In one astounding case, a newspaper editor was jailed for a "libelous" story about a Ukrainian oligarch, Grigory Surkis, that hadn't even been published. A draft of the offending article was leaked to parliamentarian Victor Medvedchuk, a business associate of Mr. Surkis, who turned it over to Ukraine's procurator general. He pursued the case although the draft had never been printed.
Ukraine's libel laws, and less-nuanced means of silencing journalists like intimidation, beatings and government-sanctioned killing, earned it the distinction of number six on the world's list of enemies of the press from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists in 1999.
The Australian ruling opens the door to global jurisdiction-shopping for libel suits in places like Zimbabwe. Anywhere an offending article can be downloaded can become a venue for a trial. Combined with the trend toward corporate acquisitions of news organizations, the result will stifle a critical press. Mega-corporate ownership of news media means the parent corporation often has assets in emerging markets like China, Russia, or Africa that could be at risk in local libel trials. Does anyone think Disney's management will let ABC air an expose about Chinese officials after it has invested hundreds of millions in a theme park in China?
Globalism poses two perils to the First Amendment. A reporter's work can be posted on the Internet even without the journalist's or publisher's consent, subjecting them to libel suits anywhere. The effect is globally chilling for journalists, especially those who aren't backed by deep pockets and corporate lawyers. The second peril is that the Australian ruling lowers the hurdle on libel suits to those countries whose laws afford the press the least protection. Despite our sovereign Bill of Rights, this will erode our First Amendment. Americans will read less about foreign corruption and Russian mafias if our media fear the risks.
In this collision of globalism and freedom, there are technological and legal remedies. The technological remedy is an Internet embargo. In response to the Australian High Court ruling, the Internet publishing community - AOL Time Warner, Amazon, Yahoo, Bloomberg LP, and others who filed briefs in the Dow Jones case - should use technology to block all Australian users access to their sites. The same high-tech blockade should be applied to other countries that adopt the Australian precedent.
The legal remedy is immunity. A priority for the upcoming congressional session is legislation immunizing American publishers and journalists from this spurious litigation. Now is the time to assert the primacy of our First Amendment and its protections, before the leveling hammers of globalism crush it.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Panel Wants Intel Agency Apart From FBI
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Commission.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI could be perceived as ``a kind of secret police'' if allowed to continue carrying out traditional law enforcement duties while also gathering terrorism intelligence, a federal commission said in a report issued Monday.
The panel suggested creating a new agency to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence. The National Counter Terrorism Center would include analysts now working for the CIA, FBI and other agencies.
``It is ... important to separate the intelligence collection function from the law enforcement function to avoid the impression that the U.S. is establishing a kind of `secret police,''' said the commission, comprising federal, state and local officials and chaired by former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore.
Justice Department officials opposed the recommendation. Attorney General John Ashcroft ``believes that the FBI is well suited to serve as the domestic intelligence and terrorism-prevention agency in the United States,'' spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said.
And FBI Director Robert Mueller said in an interview last week that the FBI was ``uniquely positioned'' to do the job because it could both detect the threat and arrest any individuals involved.
``There has to be a mechanism for deterring those individuals,'' Mueller told The Associated Press. ``We have the same people who have knowledge of intelligence and knowledge of criminal activity being undertaken by these individuals.''
Gilmore said intelligence agencies still are having problems sharing information, and a new agency could help resolve those difficulties.
``The threats to the country are not diminishing,'' he said. ``There are still people out there who seek to do us a great deal of harm.''
The panel warned that efforts to fight terrorism must not infringe upon Americans' civil liberties.
``If we pursue security to the point where we give up that which makes us Americans, the enemy has won,'' Gilmore said.
In its fourth annual report, the commission, created after the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, made 59 recommendations, including:
--The House and Senate should each designate one committee to oversee the Homeland Security Department, and one committee, probably the intelligence panel, to oversee the National Counter Terrorism Center, if it's created.
--The federal government should spend $1 billion a year to improve state and local health systems, including efforts to help local authorities and hospitals cope with potential bioterrorism, nuclear and chemical attacks. --A separate independent commission should be set up to study ways of protecting ports, railroads, bridges, dams, computer networks and other infrastructure. A White House cybersecurity panel released a draft report recommending new federal mandates and voluntary efforts to improve computer security.
--The government needs to look at possible terrorist attacks directed against U.S. farms and the U.S. food supply. The panel called for information on how serious the threat is, and suggested new laboratories be set up to test for animal diseases.
On the Net:
Commission report: http://www.rand.org/nsrd/terrpanel
-------- drug war
Limits on drug searches tightened
December 16, 2002
AP
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20021216-70271132.htm
ANNAPOLIS (AP) - The state's highest court has further limited police drug searches, ruling that officers cannot search passengers for drugs solely because a canine smells narcotics in a car.
The ruling last week draws a distinction between passengers and the vehicle. It also draws a distinction between passengers and the owner or driver. The Court of Appeals ruled that a link must exist between the suspected drugs and the passengers before an officer can search passengers.
"A passenger in an automobile is generally not perceived to have the kind of control over the contents of the vehicle as does a driver," Judge Dale Cathell wrote in a case stemming from a 1999 drug arrest in Annapolis.
Defense lawyers say the ruling increases the protection of individual citizens.
"I think it matters to anyone who rides as a passenger with someone else," said Bradford Peabody, the assistant public defender who successfully argued the appeal.
The state attorney general's office argued that if a canine alerts police to the possibility of drugs in a vehicle, everyone inside falls under suspicion. Officials said that they'll consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
"It limits what the police can do," said Kathryn Grill Graeff, chief of the office's criminal appeals division.
The case stems from the arrest of Earmon Wallace Sr. on July 9, 1999, after a traffic stop in Annapolis. Wallace was one of four passengers in a car that was stopped for speeding and running a red light.
During the stop, a canine detected a drug odor. Officers who searched the passengers said that they found a plastic bag of crack cocaine that belonged to Mr. Wallace. He was arrested.
William Davis, an assistant public defender, argued during Mr. Wallace's trial two years ago that it was unreasonable to search a busload of riders in the event that a canine smelled drugs on the bus.
Mr. Wallace was convicted of possession with intent to distribute drugs.
He was sentenced to five years in prison, with 15 years suspended. His conviction was overturned by the Court of Special Appeals in February, a decision upheld Wednesday.
-------- death penalty
For First Time Since 1976,
Drop in Inmates on Death Row
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 16, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/national/16DEAT.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 (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 today.
The death row population fell to 3,581 in 2001 from 3,601 in 2000, the first year-to-year decrease in 25 years. The 155 defendants sentenced to die last year were the the fewest since 1973.
In 1998, 303 people were sentenced to death, while in 1996 it was 319, 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 were executed.
Death penalty experts say juries and prosecutors appear to be exercising greater care in using the death penalty, especially after recent cases in which DNA evidence proved that people had been 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 C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group critical of capital punishment. "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 3 women were put to death last year, all by lethal injection. Forty-eight were white, 17 were black and one was American Indian.
A death row inmate is most likely to have previous felony convictions 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 in Texas and 7 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, Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Juan Raul Garza, a murderer.
Preliminary statistics for this year show that Texas has conducted 33 of the 68 executions nationwide.
-------- immigration
Saudis, Pakistanis Must Register in U.S.
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Registering-Aliens.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Men in the United States who are from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan will be required to register with the government under a program intended to fingerprint and photograph those from countries considered high risk for terrorists.
The addition Monday of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan brings to 20 the number of countries covered under the registration program, which has drawn sharp criticism from Muslim activist groups as heavy-handed and unlikely to identify any terrorists.
Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are considered U.S. allies in the war on terror, but both also have had questions raised about their levels of commitment. In particular, Saudi Arabia recently was put on the defensive against allegations it was doing a poor job of disrupting terrorist financing and even may have inadvertently made payments to one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers.
The latest registration notice affects males from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who are age 16 or older and entered the United States on or before Sept. 30, 2002. If they plan to stay in the United States into late February, they will have until Feb. 21, 2003, to register and provide documentation to the Immigration and Naturalization Service about their visit.
The announcement coincides with a deadline Monday for registration for a similar program affecting men from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Men from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen face a registration deadline of Jan. 10.
Those who fail to register can be deported. The program does not affect permanent residents, men with INS ``green cards,'' or to naturalized citizens from those countries. Diplomats also are excluded, as well as those seeking or already granted political asylum in the United States.
Women and children were excluded because their numbers would have made the program impossible to administer, Justice Department officials say.
On the Net:
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
EPA Approves Ohio Nitrogen Oxide Rule
December 16, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2002/2002-12-16-09.asp
CHICAGO, Illinois, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved rules submitted by the state of Ohio requiring a 70 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants and other large boilers in the state.
EPA Region 5 administrator Thomas Skinner, who signed the approval, said, "We congratulate Ohio for developing this plan to cut an air pollutant that helps form ozone in Ohio."
The EPA required Ohio and 18 other states in the eastern part of the country, plus the District of Columbia, to regulate nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants. Ohio EPA's plan will reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from regulated utilities and industries in Ohio by about 120,000 tons each year, beginning in 2004.
"The new rules are a significant accomplishment," said Ohio EPA director Christopher Jones. "This plan will be a great benefit to Ohio citizens, who will breathe cleaner air, and experience less ozone pollution."
The state's plan is a cap and trade program, offering opportunities for plants to get nitrogen budget allowances for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. One percent of the trading budget will be set aside for facilities that cut their demand for electricity or that use wind, solar, biomass, and landfill methane gas as power sources.
Nitrogen oxides combine in the atmosphere with other chemicals on warm, sunny days to form ground-level ozone, also called smog. Ground level ozone can cause breathing problems, reduced lung function, eye irritation, stuffy nose and reduced resistance to colds and other infections.
Ozone can aggravate asthma and speed up aging of lung tissue. Children, the elderly and people with chronic respiratory diseases are the most sensitive.
A notice of the action will be published soon in the Federal Register and will be available at: http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-AIR
-------- genetics
EPA fines two US firms for biotech crop mistakes
Story by Randy Fabi
REUTERS USA:
December 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19072/newsDate/16-Dec-2002/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Two U.S. seed companies on Thursday agreed to each pay a fine of less than $10,000 to settle federal allegations they mishandled experimental biotech corn crops in Hawaii, the Environmental Protection Agency said.
The action comes a week after the U.S. Agriculture Department fined a Texas biotech company for allegedly contaminating soybeans with a new corn plant engineered to produce medicine.
U.S. consumer advocates, environmentalists and food groups have urged the government to toughen its biotech regulations to ensure no unapproved crops seep into the food supply.
Pioneer Hi-Bred International and Dow AgroSciences are the first seed companies to be charged by the EPA for violating regulations imposed to keep unapproved biotech crops from seeping into nearby U.S. farmland.
Pioneer, a unit of chemical giant DuPont Co. (DD.N) agreed to pay $9,900 in civil penalties. Dow AgroSciences, a division of Dow Chemical Co. (DOW.N), was fined $8,800 in civil penalties.
The EPA said there was no evidence that any commercial crops were contaminated by the experimental corn. But under the settlement, Pioneer must perform additional crop testing to ensure its unapproved corn did not taint other fields.
"EPA required strict conditions in these particular permits to maximize containment to ensure that no pollen from the experimental corn is transferred to other corn," said Wayne Nastri, administrator for EPA's Pacific Southwest Region.
In the agreement, both seed companies neither admit nor deny any wrongdoing.
The EPA accused Pioneer of planting its experimental corn crop too close to where conventional crops were grown.
Dow AgroSciences allegedly did not isolate its insect-resistant corn variety properly and failed to plant enough trees to prevent cross contamination. The company said it did not seek EPA's approval in the Hawaii planting, thinking it met federal regulations.
The company was "taking steps to ensure that it does not happen again," said Pete Siggelko, a Dow AgroSciences vice president.
Pioneer was not immediately available for comment.
Consumer activists said the EPA should have been tougher with the companies.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest said EPA's "puny fines" would not prevent biotech companies from making similar mistakes in the future.
"EPA needs to institute a strong inspection and compliance program if the food supply and the environment are to be protected from (biotech) crop experiments," said Gregory Jaffe, the group's biotechnology project director.
Biotech crops are regulated by several federal offices.
The EPA has jurisdiction over plants engineered to produce pesticides, while the USDA is responsible for overseeing field trials of experimental biotech crops. The Food and Drug Administration has authority over the safety of foods produced from biotech crops.
On Friday, the U.S. Agriculture Department issued its first fine against a biotech company for improperly planting experimental crops. Privately owned ProdiGene Inc. agreed to pay a $250,000 fine, plus an estimated $2.8 million to buy and destroy contaminated soybeans in Nebraska.
-------- human rights
U.S. Pushes China on Prisoners, Religious Freedoms
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-rights-china.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. rights envoy Lorne Craner on Monday began two days of high-level talks with Chinese officials in which he was expected to press Beijing to free political prisoners and increase religious freedoms.
In a resumption of a bilateral human rights dialogue, last active in October 2001, Craner said he would discuss human rights and democracy issues, but did not elaborate on specific cases he would raise.
``We're hoping for a very productive session today and results in the coming weeks and new year,'' Craner, U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor affairs, told reporters.
China's criminal justice system and workers' rights would also feature in talks with senior Foreign Ministry official Li Baodong and Chief Justice Nan Ying. China imprisoned labor leaders during mass protests this year.
Predominantly Buddhist Tibet and the Muslim-populated region of Xinjiang would also be discussed during the talks, which were also to be attended by John Hanford, U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom, the U.S. embassy said.
U.S. concerns about human rights in China have continued to stand out as a stumbling block in a relationship that has improved, with closer cooperation, since the U.S.-led war on terror began in September last year.
China was quick to back the campaign, but called for international support for its own fight against separatists from Xinjiang's Uighur ethnic minority, who foreign rights groups say suffer wrongful persecution under Chinese rule.
Beijing has accused Uighur separatists of joining forces with Osama bin Laden, chief suspect for the September 11 attacks, and of terror-linked bombings and killings on Chinese soil.
Human rights has always been a thorny issue between the two nations, partly due to differing views on individual versus collective rights. The Sino-U.S rights dialogue stalled after the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Washington said the bombing was a mistake.
SLEW OF CASES
Craner was to visit Xinjiang on Wednesday and Thursday in a move that could placate rights groups that are worried that human rights issues may play second fiddle to broader bilateral political objectives.
Fears that Washington might overlook human rights issues in exchange for strengthened political support arose in September, when the United States put a group named the East Turkestan Islamic Movement on its list of terrorist organizations.
Some western diplomats described the move as a quid pro quo to win China's support for U.S. plans in Iraq.
A spokesman for the Germany-based East Turkestan Information Center said by telephone that political pressures had touched all levels of Xinjiang society since the September 11 attacks and that thousands of Uighurs had been rounded up by Chinese police.
``The Chinese government thinks that all kinds of people are linked to separatism,'' the spokesman said. ``Islam has been seen as a more dangerous religion after September 11.''
Uighurs abroad hoped Washington would go beyond talks and exert concrete political pressure on China to loosen religious controls and improve the human rights situation, he said.
``(The United States) should help us establish a local non-governmental human rights observation organization,'' he said.
``That way we can give feedback on the local situation to international human rights organizations in time, instead of listening to what the Chinese authorities say.''
The U.S. embassy declined to comment on specific cases Craner was likely to bring up during the bilateral talks.
But U.S. Ambassador to Beijing Clark Randt told business people last month that he had consistently raised a slew of unresolved rights cases involving prisoners of conscience and people held in defiance of China's own laws.
Randt mentioned Xu Wenli, jailed for 13 years in 1998 for organizing an opposition political party, and Rebiya Kadeer, a leading Uighur businesswoman imprisoned for eight years for mailing newspaper clippings to her U.S.-based husband.
U.S. officials have also expressed concern about Yang Jianli, a dissident detained in April after entering China on a friend's passport and trying to leave on fake identification papers.
Randt said he hoped further dialogue with China on specific cases would lead to concrete results, as in the case of Tibetan nun Ngawang Sangdrol, who was freed ahead of an October summit between Chinese President Jiang Zemin and U.S. counterpart George W. Bush.
-------- imf / world bank
IMF, World Bank-donors must boost food aid for Africa
REUTERS USA:
December 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19061/newsDate/16-Dec-2002/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Donors have not come up with enough food aid to help millions of starving people in Africa and the amount urgently needed is double the original estimate, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said on Friday.
Severe drought combined with with the HIV/AIDS pandemic have crushed agricultural production in many countries in the region leaving millions facing starvation.
So far only $286 million has been raised from a United Nations appeal for food aid, and more than $900 million still needs to be found.
"The food security situation in the southern and eastern Africa has continued to deteriorate since the summer," the bank and IMF said in a joint statement.
"Donors' response to date has met only half of the midyear appeal for aid...Since then the needs have doubled and we urge donors to increase assistance provided to deal with this enormous humanitarian crisis."
In Southern Africa food stocks are largely depleted and the World Food Program estimates that up to 14.4 million are likely to be affected by hunger in early 2003, up from an earlier estimate of 13 million.
And another food crisis is developing in Ethiopia and Eritrea where it is estimated that over 15 million people are at risk.
The United Nations initially estimated that $507 million in food aid and $104 million in non food assistance was needed. But now an extra $600 million will be needed to cover the costs of aid for the unfolding crises in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The bank and fund also point to an increasingly clear link between the food crisis and HIV/AIDS which in turn boosts dependency in the region on foreign aid.
"HIV/AIDS has reduced agricultural productivity and increased the demands on a declining working population for food provision," they said.
The scale of the crisis varies from country to country but they said almost half the population in Zimbabwe is at risk, a country they said is "facing a continuing disaster".
They also noted the refusal by the Zambian government to allow genetically modified maize even if milled before entry "has complicated aid delivery".
-------- ACTIVISTS
Clashes Escalate in Caracas as Protesters Seek to Block Highways
December 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Venezuela-Strike.html
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Firing tear gas and rubber bullets, police clashed with stone-throwing protesters Monday after demonstrators barricaded major highways and roads in an escalation of their campaign to oust President Hugo Chavez.
Clouds of tear gas wafted in the air as the heavily armed police dispersed several dozen demonstrators and kicked down piles of stones blocking the intersection on Andres Bello Avenue in central Caracas. Some of the protesters hurled stones and chunks of debris from the rooftops of nearby buildings onto police, who fired up at them with rubber bullets.
The confrontation at the intersection marked an escalation of tensions after organizers of a 2-week-old opposition strike called for a day of highway blockades. In and around the capital, strikers closed off routes with disabled trucks, cars, tree branches and stones.
In southern Caracas, police armed with rifles tried to keep apart rival bands of Chavez supporters and opponents squaring off on the blockaded six-lane Prados del Este highway.
``The government will fall, the government is going to fall!'' anti-Chavez demonstrators chanted gleefully, banging pots and pans, as hundreds of people milled about on the highway. Kept away by police, the pro-Chavez supporters -- some of them carrying sticks -- lit fireworks and shouted back insults.
Demonstrators began the new round of protests Monday after Chavez appeared unfazed by a 1-million-strong weekend opposition rally.
Angered by the president's resolve to hang on to power, strike leader Carlos Ortega called on protesters to block roads and rally around shopping centers. Road blockades were reported across the country Monday, including in the western city of Yaracuy, where residents built a flaming tire barricade across a highway.
Chavez, who twice won elections but stands accused of misrule and of running the economy into the ground, dismissed a call by Washington for early elections, saying it would violate Venezuela's constitution.
``Venezuela cannot permit any country's attempt to influence domestic affairs,'' Chavez said in a regular weekend broadcast, clutching a miniature copy of Venezuela's constitution. ``No country can allow that. Venezuela is a sovereign nation and has its constitution and its laws.''
In the broadcast, Chavez skewered his foes and did not mention the giant rally late Saturday -- the opposition's biggest show of strength since the strike began Dec. 2. The strike has led to gasoline shortages, panic buying and shuttered shops.
Chavez's attitude infuriated foes.
``The only thing we ask of you is to call elections now,'' said Ortega, the president of Venezuela's largest labor confederation, in televised comments directed at Chavez. ``But you are not a democrat. You do not want elections. What you want is confrontation and violence.''
Anger over Chavez's leadership has been building since before an April coup attempt knocked the president from power for two days.
Chavez's critics blame the president's leftist policies for an unraveling economy that shrank 6.4 percent in the first nine months of this year. The jobless rate now hovers at 17 percent and inflation is expected to top 30 percent for the year.
He has also been accused of polarizing the South American nation with his fiery leftist rhetoric.
But the president has said his adversaries are to blame for the recession, which he calls an ``economic coup.'' And the government has appeared intent on breaking the strike that Chavez says doesn't exist.
On Sunday, soldiers toting rifles boarded a striking oil tanker and brought in a new crew.
The tanker Pilin Leon, carrying 9.6 million gallons of gasoline, has been idle for almost two weeks on western Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo -- and has become an emblem of the strike that has paralyzed the oil industry, the world's fifth-largest supplier.
----
'We're not human shields, but we'll stay through the bombing'
By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
15 December 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=361737
They have been accused of naivety and vilified as traitors, but for Kathy Kelly and her colleagues in Voices in the Wilderness, that is something which comes with the territory.
Many of them have suffered far worse than abuse in their years of campaigning for peace. Ms Kelly, who founded the group, spent a year in a maximum security prison in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1988 for repeatedly trespassing on to a nuclear missile site. She currently faces a $10,000 (£6,300) fine for breaking sanctions regulations.
Now members of her group intend to stay in Iraq for the next few critical months, during which a war may begin. They have inevitably become known as "human shields" who position themselves at bombing targets, in the hope of deterring American and British warplanes.
"It is not a term we have ever used ourselves, but it has caught on," said Ms Kelly, a 50-year-old teacher from Chicago who is on her 17th visit to Iraq. "I am not sure the Iraqi authorities will allow us into their sites to become shields, even if we wanted to. But we do feel it is important to show solidarity with the people of Iraq. If this means we have to stay here during the bombing, then it has to be done."
Members of Voices have been involved in most of the causes célèbres in the human rights field, from South Africa to Chile, Nicaragua and Palestine. It is not difficult to see why they make easy targets for the hawks in Washington and London, who sneer at them as do-gooders and cranks.
The most common accusation is that they have failed to criticise Saddam and his brutal rule while attacking the West. Their mere presence in Iraq, say critics, is sanctioning the regime. "Our view is that there are plenty of channels for opinions about Saddam and the rulers of Iraq to be expressed," said Ms Kelly.
"We want to concentrate on the terrible effect the economic war is having on Iraq and how the country will be devastated if the US and Britain decide to attack."
---------
Thousands Celebrate Haitian Democracy
December 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-haiti.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - After weeks of protests against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, thousands of Haitians assembled around the National Palace on Monday to celebrate the 12th anniversary of Aristide's first election victory.
The crowds reaffirmed their loyalty to the former Roman Catholic priest who helped lead a popular uprising against Haiti's dictatorship in the mid-1980s and who became the first freely elected president of the impoverished Caribbean nation.
Aristide, now in his second term as president, has faced growing discontent in recent weeks as the economy founders and donor nations continue to withhold aid in protest against disputed parliamentary elections more than two years ago.
``Aristide must finish his term. If Aristide is not there, who will replace him?,'' said one Haitian supporter. ``If Aristide is not there we will react violently.''
Local radio stations reported that a similar rally was held in the southern town of Jacmel.
In the last month Haiti has been rocked by a series of demonstrations organized by opposition parties demanding Aristide step down and by students who claim Aristide's government has been interfering in the education system.
Aristide was elected president Dec. 16, 1990, but he was ousted in a coup months later and spent three years in exile. Haiti's military rulers were forced out by a U.S.-led invasion force in 1994 and Aristide was restored to power.
He relinquished the presidency to his protege, Rene Preval, at the end of his term. In November 2000, he was re-elected president.
Aristide has since been mired in a political dispute with the opposition coalition Democratic Convergence, which said the 2000 parliamentary election results were calculated to favor Aristide's Lavalas Family party.
International donors agreed and withheld some $500 million in foreign aid to Haiti's 8 million people. Prices have soared, the currency has slumped and political violence has escalated.
----
Seattle PI asking for letters - would you send your kid to fight Iraq?
I felt there might be some quite eloquent responses from those on this list. - met
Sunday, December 15, 2002
From: mtap706180@aol.com
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/99846_horseysun.shtml
New feature: Horsey's burning questions
I've got some burning questions and it's your answers I'm interested in.
This week, and every other week for months (and years?) to come, I'll be posing a provocative question in the Saturday editorial page and asking readers to send in their responses. The following Saturday, we'll present your thoughts packaged with my own cartoon opinion of the subject.
We'll keep this two-week cycle of questions and answers going from Saturday to Saturday for as long as you are engaged and as long as I have something to ask.
So, let's begin with an issue that is on everyone's mind: war. We would all defend our homes if some invading army came marching down I-5. Most of us would have proudly gone to fight Hitler. Today, though, the majority of us are not being asked to risk very much. War has become a TV show fought by a professional army with high-tech weapons.
Acquiescing to a war is easier when all but a few are let off the hook. With that in mind, here are my Burning Questions of the week:
Would you send your son or daughter to fight a war in Iraq? Would you go yourself?
SEND YOUR ANSWERS
Send your answers to David Horsey by E-mail at burningquestions@seattlepi.com or mail them to Burning Questions, c/o P-I Editorial Page, P.O. Box 1909, Seattle, WA 98111-1909. You may also fax your thoughts to 206-448-8184.
Keep your messages short; what we have in mind is three or four paragraphs, and they may be edited to include as many voices as possible. For verification, include your full name and address and a daytime telephone number.
We need your responses by Wednesday, so start writing!
----
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM BUSH
From: "International A.N.S.W.E.R." <nowardc@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002
Frustrated that Iraq appears to be cooperating with the United Nations' intrusive weapons inspections, the Bush Administration is rushing this week to proclaim that the so-called disarmament effort has failed: that inspections are an empty effort and the 12,000 page Iraqi declaration is insufficient.
It is urgent that the anti-war movement not be lulled into a false sense of optimism because Iraq and the UN are cooperating. Various governments are reporting that they are hopeful that the inspections process can help avoid war. UN General Secretary Kofi Annan went out of his way to say that war is not inevitable.
However, the extent to which the world is voicing cautious optimism about a peaceful solution, is also the extent to which the Bush foreign policy team is racing to dash all hope for such an outcome. There is now an almost perfect inverted ratio between the worldwide clamor for restraint and peace and the Bush Administration's eagerness to publicly announce that war is certain.
By the end of this week, we can expect that Bush will try to announce that Iraq has failed to come clean about its purported weapons program. Then the war mobilization can go onto automatic pilot and the gauntlet will be thrown down to the vacillators: "Are you with Us or Them?" In so doing, the White House will inadvertently reveal a truth known to all objective observers of this conflict -- that the disarmament of Iraq was never really the issue. The nuclear scare was to keep Americans frightened of the "enemy" as the Bush Hawks frantically prepared to wage aggression against a country that possesses 10% of the world's known oil reserves.
The administration has a real objective and a stated objective. The real objective is to wage war against Iraq and conquer and occupy that country. To do so requires 1) overwhelming force and 2) the elimination of dissenting opposition that can derail Bush's dreams of empire. The U.S. has massive force. But it has encountered formidable opposition from people around the world and in the United States. So, the Bush administration shifted its claimed objective from regime change to disarmament, a much more palatable purported objective for public distribution and one that can be embraced by even those who support peace.
The White House wants to get the people of the U.S. behind this claimed objective of "disarmament." Once having done so, the administration can insist that the mechanisms in place for the purported disarmament have failed, or cannot accomplish the task, and that military might is necessary.
There is only one reason that makes the war drive rapidly escalate in the face of the apparent success of the new inspections process: The Bush Administration has never intended the "inspections" process to serve as anything but a trigger for war. This is why the Iraqi cooperation with the inspection process and disclosure has failed to produce even the slightest slowing in the preparations for war and, in fact, has seemed to produce an escalation in the rhetoric from Washington, including recent policy statements confirming Bush's plans for first-use deployment of nuclear weapons. The Washington Post reported that a classified version of the new Bush Doctrine "breaks with the fifty years of counter-proliferation efforts" by planning for the use of nuclear weapons against countries that not only have not attacked the US but that do not themselves possess nuclear capability ("Preemptive Strikes are Part of U.S. Strategic Doctrine," front page, December 11, 2002).
These signals from the White House and Pentagon provide no basis for optimism to believe that the war has been averted. The inspections process, whose true purpose is solely to serve as a trigger for war, at the moment is not providing the political cover that Washington needs to attack Iraq and seize its oil and land.
The warmongers in the Bush Administration will need now to manufacture other circumstances to justify an attack and occupation of Iraq.
The Bush Administration rammed Resolution 1441 through the Security Council for one reason: to provide the diplomatic fig leaf for a US war. To the extent that the process serves as a political restraint, Bush and Co. will scuttle the process.
The Administration now needs a new trigger. It will use the resolution 1441 to create an obvious source of provocation. The U.S. forced language into the resolution that would allow for the forcible removal of Iraqi scientists, government officials, and their families and children to be held incommunicado in other countries and interrogated by U.N. inspectors.
The U.S. wants to abduct Iraqi officials and interrogate them planning that by threat or bribe one will help create the trigger that the U.S. desperately needs and the "evidence" that the U.S. has long claimed to have but has never put up. One need only remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Pentagon Papers, or even the lie manufactured about the Iraqi army throwing babies out of incubators (put in cite) to judge the quality of results likely produced by this effort.
In the New York Times for December 16, 2002, William Safire urges that Iraqi scientists should be visited at home, removed to other countries by helicopter on the spot, and be threatened that they must provide the right answers in order to "ameliorate sentences at war-crimes trials." And of course, any failure of Iraq to facilitate these abductions will itself be considered "material breach" of the Security Council resolution.
There is really only one restraint that can block the war. It lies within the people themselves. Neither Congress nor the Security Council will stop Bush's dangerous war drive. The optimism of the antiwar forces must be premised on reality. If we can mobilize the millions - in the US and around the world - and ignite a firestorm of activism then the political climate can be changed, and changed dynamically.
Public opinion is Bush's enemy. Time is also an enemy for the warmakers. With each passing the day antiwar momentum grows. The global desire for a peaceful outcome is considered subversive because from that sentiment can emerge a potent mass movement - as happened during the Vietnam era.
With the cooperation of the Corporate-owned media, the White House has attempted to create a false myth of consensus about the war. False polls, false reports and non-stop propaganda have filled the airwaves so that the American people will be paralyzed and confused. Yet people all over the country are talking to their neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, and congregations and learning that they too oppose Bush's war, that there is, in fact, widespread, deep, and passionate opposition to the war. When hundreds of thousands marched on October 26th, the same corporate media tried to whiteout the sudden emergence of this movement. But they were confronted by overwhelming demand for truth from people across the country and some were forced to correct their coverage.
The peoples movement continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
On January 18, massive protest will again fill the streets of Washington DC and San Francisco. Thousands of cities, towns, college campuses, high schools, religious and civil rights organizations are mobilizing together.
The scenario for January 18th includes a brief rally on the West side of the Capitol Building in Washington DC starting at 11 am, followed by a massive march to the Washington DC Navy Yard -- a massive military installation located in a working class neighborhood in Southeast Washington DC that parks warships on the Anacostia River. We will demand the immediate elimination of US weapons of mass destruction and a people's inspection team will call for unfettered access and a full declaration of U.S. non-conventional weapons systems.
How YOU can GET INVOLVED
HELP SPREAD THE WORD! Download a new flyer at: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/resources/index.html If you are unable to open or print the flyer, call us at 202-544-3389and we can mail you an original copy or a stack of flyers.
UPDATE ON THE SCENARIO AND POLITICS OF JAN. 18: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/j18/j18endorse.html#scenario (scroll down to find update)
To find out about TRANSPORTATION FROM YOUR CITY or SIGN UP AS AN ORGANIZING CENTER, go to: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/j18/j18contacts.html
To VIEW ENDORSERS or ADD YOUR ENDORSEMENT, go to: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/j18/endorsers.html
FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.InternationalANSWER.org http://www.VoteNoWar.org dc@internationalanswer.org New York 212-633-6646 Washington 202-332-5757 Los Angeles 213-487-2368 San Francisco 415-821-6545
Sign up to receive updates (low volume): http://www.internationalanswer.org/subscribelist.html
------
MINNEAPOLIS: Sabo: Preach outside choir
BY CASEY SELIX
Pioneer Press
Mon, Dec. 16, 2002
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/local/4747778.htm
About 350 people interested in pushing for peace packed the pews of a Minneapolis church Sunday afternoon, but they were advised to quit preaching just to the choir.
U.S. Rep. Martin Sabo, one of five Minnesota members of Congress who voted against authorizing war with Iraq in October, told people to spread the word to unlikely quarters.
"My observation in American politics is that most people talk to people who think like themselves - regardless of where they are in the political spectrum,'' the Minneapolis DFLer told the audience at Lyndale United Church of Christ. "You need to have more cross-conversations. ... You've got to spend time with people who may be prospects, who are not already committed."
Sabo said he's not a big fan of rallies or demonstrations, and that sometimes "form and style" can "alienate" potentially sympathetic people. He pointed to the backlash resulting from the memorial service that some thought turned into a political rally for the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, who was a strong opponent of a war with Iraq.
The veteran congressman also said people need to contact President Bush about their opinions because the White House will be making the decisions about war.
Betty Tisel, a volunteer for Women Against Military Madness, said after Sabo's speech that she appreciated the congressman's advice but she stood by the effectiveness of organized protests.
"They can have a galvanizing effect on participants,'' she said. "They can inspire people to carry the work beyond the day and they can be used as a power plant to generate energy."
Tisel took Sabo's advice to heart though, telling the crowd that she planned to talk to the only neighbors at her Minneapolis intersection who don't have a "Say No to War With Iraq" sign in the yard.
One gauge of the antiwar sympathies in the Twin Cities, she said, is that WAMM keeps running out of the brown signs. About 1,000 have been sold so far (from $10 to $20), and another shipment arrives this week.
Another gauge of antiwar sympathies, organizers said, is that 300-plus people chose the town hall meeting with Sabo instead of going to the mall 10 days before Christmas or watching football.
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who has attended other antiwar rallies, sat in the last pew of the church with his wife.
"I oppose war like many other people in the room,'' Rybak said as he prepared to leave the church. "I had the choice of watching the Vikings today or being with these people. I felt this was where I needed to be today."
The meeting, which was sponsored by the church's social justice committee, attracted the young, the old, the middle-aged. Liberals and conservatives munched on bars and Christmas cookies afterward.
Joshua Benson, 18, came for an optional school assignment from government teacher Meredith Aby at Bloomington Jefferson High School. Benson hopes to attend the U.S. Naval Academy; Aby is active with the Antiwar Committee in the Twin Cities.
"This has broadened my perspective and opened my eyes to other opinions, but it's not going to change my views,'' said Benson, who supports the Bush administration.
Said Aby: "Josh and I have respectfully disagreed on the war in Iraq. ... I want students to see the process. They don't have to agree with it, but they need to express themselves."
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.