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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