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NUCLEAR
Depleted uranium: war hazard?
Iraq Gives UN Inspectors List of Scientists
U.S. to take N. Korea before U.N.
U.S. Will Refer N. Korea Nuclear Effort to U.N.
North Korea To Expel U.N. Inspectors
Fueled by Russia
Al Qaeda vs. the White House
MILITARY
Iraq's germ weaponry upgraded
Lockheed lands $3.5 billion contract with Poland
Poland to Buy Fighter Jets From the U.S.
Dreaming of Palestine, Teenager Writes a Novel
Israel Razes Palestinian Home After Attack
Turkey and the Iraqi oil
Russia Sticks to Chechnya Peace Plan Despite Blast
Suicide Bombers Kill at Least 46 at Chechen Government Offices
CIA Interrogation Under Fire
U.S. Orders Thousands of Troops to Gulf
Navy told to ready 2 aircraft carriers for Iraq
Navy Activates Hospital Ship, in Flurry of War Preparations
Pentagon Says it Will Give Journalists Access to Frontline War Units
ENERGY AND OTHER
High Levels of Toxic Rocket Fuel Found in Lettuce
Interior Department to Limit Calif. Water
West Nile's Widening Toll
ACTIVISTS
Wilkes-barre PA: Help Stop Military action against Iraq
North Korea Denounces U.S. in Rally
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Depleted uranium: war hazard?
TRAVIS DUNN
December 28, 2002
Disaster News
http://www.disasternews.net/news/news.php?articleid=1687
BALTIMORE - Dr. Doug Rokke has a disturbing habit of laughing when he should probably be crying. See Full Story Reformed Church in America
He laughs when he talks about battlefields contaminated with radioactive waste. He can't stop laughing when he talks about what he claims is a massive government cover-up. And he keeps laughing when he talks about his health problems, which he attributes to deliberate Army negligence, and which will likely kill him.
Talking to Rokke on the telephone is disturbing enough without him laughing about such horrors. A strange echo accompanies every utterance. When this bizarre sound is pointed out to him, Rokke says he isn't surprised: he claims his phone has been tapped for years.
It may be tempting to dismiss Rokke as a crank or a conspiracy theorist, but Rokke is 35-year-veteran of the U.S. Army, and he isn't just a disgruntled grunt. Rokke ran the U.S. Army's depleted uranium project in the mid-90s, and he was in charge of the Army's effort to clean up depleted uranium after the Persian Gulf War. And he directed the Edwin R. Bradley Radiological Laboratories at Fort McClellan, Ala.
Yet if you type Rokke's name into a search engine on any military website, you will draw a blank, as if he doesn't exist.
If you read through hundreds of pages of government documents and transcriptions of countless government hearings regarding the military use of depleted uranium, not once will you come across his name.
That is more than a little unusual, since Rokke and his team were at the forefront of trying to understand the potential health and environmental hazards posed by the use of depleted uranium, or DU, on the battlefield.
"We were the best they ever had," Rokke claims. He's not bragging. He's laughing again.
The use of DU in combat is a fairly new innovation. It was used for the first time in the Persian Gulf War as the crucial component of armor-piercing, tank-busting munitions.
These munitions are tipped with DU darts that ignite after being fired. The shells are so heavy and hot that they easily rip through steel.
"It's like taking a pencil and pushing it through paper," Rokke said.
This uranium "pencil" then explodes inside its target, creating a deadly "firestorm."
As an anti-tank weapon, "these things are great," Rokke said. They enable U.S. troops to quickly take out enemy tanks at long-range.
According to the Web site of the Deployment Health Support Directorate, DU is "a by-product of the process by which uranium is enriched to produce reactor fuel and nuclear weapons components."
In other words, DU is low-level nuclear waste. According to the same Web site, DU can also contain trace amounts of "neptunium, plutonium, americium, technitium-99 and uranium-236."
A total of 320 tons of DU munitions were fired during the Gulf War. Rokke's job was to figure out how to clean up U.S. tanks, the unfortunate victims of "friendly fire," which had been blown apart by DU rounds.
After years of this kind of this work-in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and on practice ranges in the U.S.-Rokke reached a conclusion in 1996.
He told the Army brass that DU was so dangerous that it had to be banned from combat immediately.
That conclusion, Rokke said, cost him his career.
'Contamination was all over'
Burning tanks, burning oil fields, charred bodies.
This was Kuwait after the Gulf War. Rokke had a mission-clean up U.S. tanks contaminated with DU.
What Rokke found terrified him.
"Oh my God is the only way to describe it," Rokke said. "Contamination was all over."
Rokke and his crew were measuring significant levels of radiation up to 50 meters away from affected tanks: up to 300 millirems an hour in beta and gamma radiation, and alpha radiation from the thousands to the millions in counts per minute (CPM) on a Geiger counter.
"That whole area is still trashed," he said. "It's hotter than heck over there still. This stuff doesn't go away."
His team took three months to clean up 24 tanks for transport back to the U.S.
The Army, Rokke said, took another three years to fully decontaminate the same 24 tanks.
But the contaminated tanks weren't the only problem.
Within 72 hours of their inspections, Rokke and his crew started getting sick.
But they continued with their work. They went back to the U.S. to perform tests on Army bases. They deliberately blew up tanks with DU rounds, then ran over and jumped on the tanks while they were still burning. They videotaped the uranium-oxide clouds pouring out, and they measured the radiation being thrown off.
In the past decade, Rokke said 30 men out of 100 who were closely involved in these operations dropped dead.
Rokke's lungs and kidneys are damaged. He believes that uranium oxide dust is permanently trapped inside his lungs. He has lesions on his brain, pustules on his skin. He suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome. He has reactive airway disease, which means he can't stop wheezing and coughing, and experiences a loss of breath when he exercises. He also has fibromyalgia, a condition that causes chronic pain in his muscles, ligaments and tendons.
The VA tested Rokke for uranium levels in his body in 1994. He got the results back two and a half years later. His urine had 5000 times the amount of permissible uranium.
After years of fighting with the VA, Rokke said he managed to get a 40 percent disability, but there is no official acknowledgement that his illnesses were caused by his work with DU.
The Army and the Pentagon continue to insist that DU is safe. Rokke says they know better, because he gave them the proof. He said they can't find evidence of DU's dangers because "they're looking for the wrong stuff, and they're using the wrong procedures."
The problem with DU, he said, is the stuff that's given off when a round is fired. The projectile begins burning immediately, and up to 70 percent of it oxidizes. This aerosolized power-uranium oxide-is the really dangerous stuff, Rokke said, particularly when it is inhaled.
Rokke insists that he and his men were wearing protective equipment-or equipment they thought would protect them. But their face masks were capable of straining out particles of 10 microns or larger. That's as big as the DU particles get, according to the Army and the Pentagon.
Rokke, however, insists that he has measured particles as small as .3 microns, and that scientists at the Livermore laboratories have measured them as small as .1 micron.
Thus these safety precautions, which are still in place now, are utterly useless, he said.
'I'm a warrior and a patriot'
About one quarter of the 700,000 troops sent to the Persian Gulf War have reported some sort of Gulf War-related illness, and Rokke is convinced that DU has something to do with it, along with the host of other chemicals to which troops were exposed, including low levels of sarin gas, smoke from oil fires, countless pesticides as well as anti-nerve gas tablets which troops were required to ingest.
If Rokke is right about the dangers of DU, why does the Department of Defense continue to use it and insist that it is safe?
"When you go to war, your purpose is to kill," Rokke said, "and DU is the best killing thing we got."
Rokke believes that the U.S. military is putting more emphasis on firepower than on the health and safety of its own troops.
He received a memo in the early 90s he says proves his theory.
Dated March 1, 1991, the memo was written by Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico.
"There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of dU [sic] on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of dU on the battlefield, dU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal," the memo reads. "If dU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DoD proponency. If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability. I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports [sic] are written."
The meaning of this memo is quite clear, Rokke said. Since DU munitions are so effective, they must continue to be used in combat, regardless of the environmental or health consequences.
The other issue is financial, he said. If the true effects of DU were known, cleanup costs would be absolutely staggering.
DU contaminated areas extend much farther than the Persian Gulf battlefields. Rokke said DU is regularly used in practice maneuvers in the U.S., namely in Indiana, Florida, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Maryland and Puerto Rico. Then there's Kosovo, where DU rounds were used to take out Serbian tanks.
As the U.S. stands on the brink of another war with Iraq, Rokke said he wants to make sure the American public fully understands that this war will be far worse that the last one, and that numbers of troops sickened by DU is likely to be much higher.
Rokke insists he is no pacifist.
"I'm a warrior and a patriot," he said. Given a verifiable threat against the U.S., "I would go to war in a heartbeat."
But he said that he is speaking out for the good of American troops, and for anyone, including Iraqi troops and civilians, who could be exposed to DU.
"Am I pushing for peace today? Yes, I am," he said.
Before a war with Iraq can even be contemplated, Rokke said, DU has to be removed from every arsenal in the world.
In order for that to happen, however, the Pentagon would have to admit that Doug Rokke is right, and that would come at a price that no one has even imagined. But money can't restore the lives of those that Rokke says have died from DU, and money isn't going to get the uranium oxide out of his lungs. There are people at the Pentagon who understand all this, Rokke claims, and that he deems unconscionable.
"I hope God slam-dunks their butts, because this is absolutely criminal," he said.
Posted December 30, 2002
-------- inspections
Iraq Gives UN Inspectors List of Scientists
Reuters
Saturday, December 28, 2002; 11:13 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47578-2002Dec28?language=printer
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq handed over to U.N. arms inspectors on Saturday a list of the names of more than 500 Iraqi scientists who have participated in banned weapons programs, a U.N. spokesman said.
"Today, we have received from the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate a list of names of personnel associated with Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic weapons programs," Hiro Ueki told a news briefing in Baghdad.
Ueki said the list had more than 500 names and had been demanded by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on December 12.
The inspectors this week began interviewing scientists who might shed light on Iraq's previous and any current programs.
-------- korea
U.S. to take N. Korea before U.N.
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021228-2113768.htm
Bush administration officials have decided to go to the United Nations to seek punishment against North Korea for violating treaties by moving to restart the production of nuclear weapons.
U.S. officials say the administration will urge the International Atomic Energy Agency to go before the U.N. Security Council next month to report the violations.
The IAEA's board of governors is scheduled to meet in Vienna, Austria, on Jan. 6 to discuss a response to North Korea's recent resumption of its nuclear program. The United States will ask the body to condemn North Korea's violations and demand that some type of economic sanctions be imposed upon Pyongyang, U.S. officials said.
Senior policy-makers conducted what is termed a "principals meeting" yesterday at the White House, in which Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council representatives discussed how to respond to the crisis in North Korea. A senior U.S. official confirmed the meeting and the topic but declined to provide specific details.
However, other sources said President Bush will put the military option aside and try to resolve the crisis diplomatically through the United Nations and other channels.
North Korea this week removed IAEA monitoring equipment at its Yongbyon nuclear facility, where sufficient spent nuclear fuel exists to quickly produce up to five plutonium weapons. Yesterday, the communist regime ordered out the last remaining IAEA inspectors monitoring the program.
The regime has admitted to breaking a 1994 agreement with the United States, in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear-weapons program. North Korea recently announced that it is pursuing a program to produce weapons made of enriched uranium.
The Bush administration has stayed silent on exactly how it plans to confront North Korea. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has told Pyongyang that the United States has sufficient military forces to fight two wars simultaneously, against both North Korea and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
When Mr. Bush turns to the United Nations, it will mark the second time he has asked the Security Council to get tough with an "axis of evil" state. In September, Mr. Bush went before the U.N. General Assembly to demand that it force Iraq to comply with the body's own cease-fire resolutions on disarmament. The Security Council eventually approved a resolution authorizing the ongoing weapons inspections in Iraq.
Mr. Bush has labeled Iraq, North Korea and Iran as forming an "axis of evil."
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Non-Proliferation Education Center in Washington, said the United States must stick by its no-bargaining policy with Pyongyang.
"The whole world is watching," said Mr. Sokolski, whose group for years has been in the forefront of warning about North Korea's nuclear intentions. "If we blink with regard to North Korea's nuclear violations, it will be a green light for proliferators around the world."
He said the Security Council "can at least clarify what is intolerable behavior."
"Even if it imposes weak sanctions, it will accomplish this much. This process also has the advantage of forcing [council members] China and Russia on the record. They can't be great nations and walk away from the demand they at least support some punishment for North Korea's violations," he said.
On Monday, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker was asked by reporters whether the United States would seek U.N. action against North Korea.
"That remains to be seen as we watch this over coming days and continue to be in touch with friends and allies," Mr. Reeker said. "That includes Security Council members. Obviously, this is an issue that will be of interest to the United Nations, because North Korea is in violation of many of its international commitments."
He said the North is in violation of four treaties and agreements: the International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards Agreement; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; the North-South Agreement on Denuclearization; and the 1994 Agreed Framework hammered out by the Clinton administration.
The White House position, repeated yesterday, is that it will not negotiate with North Korea while it stands in flagrant violation of the 1994 Framework Agreement.
Mr. Reeker said on Monday, "We will not give in to blackmail. The international community will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we're not going to bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements that it has signed."
Analysts say the reclusive communist regime, whose motives are often difficult to read, probably decided to engage in diplomatic brinkmanship to elicit more offers of economic aid from Japan, South Korea and the United States.
The North's communist-run economy is in shambles. It diverts large resources to maintain a massive military of 1.7 million soldiers, more than half of whom are poised near the border of South Korea.
Under the Agreed Framework, the North was supposed to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for shipments of fuel oil and construction of two light-water nuclear-power plants.
---
U.S. Will Refer N. Korea Nuclear Effort to U.N.
By Peter Slevin and Walter Pincus,
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45828-2002Dec27.html
The Bush administration, surprised by the speed of North Korea's defiant reopening of the shuttered Yongbyon nuclear facility, intends to refer the matter to the United Nations as part of a policy one official described yesterday as "isolate and contain."
Rejecting direct negotiations as unpalatable and a military strike as presently untenable, the administration expects to seek the censure of North Korea at an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency governing board in early January, officials said.
They said if Pyongyang still refuses to back down, the matter likely would be referred to the U.N. Security Council, where the administration would try to muster greater pressure on North Korea, particularly from China. U.S. officials are eager to avoid a distracting confrontation with Pyongyang as conflict with Iraq intensifies.
U.S. officials see no simple way to stop the maneuvers of enigmatic North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. On a day when North Korea ordered the expulsion of international inspectors and took steps to refuel a dormant nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, President Bush's top foreign policy advisers met at the White House to assess Kim's intentions.
Some senior U.S. intelligence analysts believe Kim intends to build nuclear weapons whether or not the international community offers concessions. The construction of an atomic arsenal, this thinking goes, would offer North Korea stature and leverage that he has long craved.
"It may use the current situation to extract concessions, but there is no reason to doubt that Pyongyang will continue," a senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments said yesterday. CIA analysts also believe North Korea may have stored enough plutonium for one or two bombs more than a decade ago.
The administration is facing increasing political pressure to talk with Kim's government, which blames the United States for the emerging crisis. Leading Republican and Democratic foreign policy voices in the Senate have called on Bush to open discussions -- a step the administration believes would demonstrate weakness and invite further brinkmanship.
U.S. policymakers and their spokesmen, mindful of Kim's history of building a sense of crisis to win economic and diplomatic favors, have steadfastly avoided any hint of worry as North Korea has dismantled a 1994 nuclear agreement. Indeed, a high-ranking official yesterday asserted that "no one's really concerned right now."
Yet many outside experts believe a crisis may be boiling. Specialists throughout the national security apparatus have been studying Kim's moves and trying to decipher his strategy, consulting with one another and foreign governments. The reclusive leader has many moves he can yet make if his ambition is escalation, officials point out, although each one brings him closer to a potentially devastating miscalculation.
Beyond restarting the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and a facility to extract plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods, Kim could carry through with the expulsion of IAEA monitors. He could withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, end a moratorium on missile testing or fire a missile over Japan, as he did in 1999.
To deter him, the administration believes it has few encouraging options.
The White House has rejected direct negotiations until Kim takes steps to halt a recently discovered uranium enrichment program. A lightning military strike would be risky, and almost certainly unpopular in the region. And U.S. efforts to marshal international pressure have so far been unsuccessful.
The heart of the administration's strategy, announced in June 2001, is a vow not to reward North Korea for provocative behavior, whether a military or nuclear buildup or aggressive moves toward its neighbors. Bush incensed Kim by naming North Korea a member of his "axis of evil," but the president said he would extend economic and diplomatic cooperation if convinced that Kim was playing fair.
Bush wanted to see progress on a range of issues, from limits on missile sales to a pullback of North Korean troops from its border with South Korea. Steps would be reciprocal and verifiable. Without concrete progress, there would be no U.S. concessions.
"The approach comes from years of being burned," a U.S. official once explained.
"When North Korea confirmed to U.S. envoys in October that it had been working secretly to enrich uranium in violation of a 1994 pledge to halt its nuclear program, the administration demanded to no avail that Pyongyang stop the project. The Americans and their allies halted promised fuel oil shipments in retaliation, angering the North Koreans.
The Kim government blasted the IAEA, whose authority it disdains. Then, last weekend, North Korean workers began removing seals and covering cameras used by the IAEA to make sure the Yongbyon facility, with its reactor and stored fuel remained shuttered. The IAEA, a U.N. organization, accused North Korea of dangerous brinkmanship.
For now, the administration has been pressing foreign governments to lean on Pyongyang and warn Kim that continued defiance will further isolate his regime and worsen the country's economic misery.
Analysts are divided about Kim's ambitions, debating whether the moves at Yongbyon are primarily a scripted drama designed to win concessions or a determined effort to produce plutonium and a nuclear arsenal. One view is that it may be both, with Kim having the option to stop or continue as events dictate.
Korea specialist Don Oberdorfer believes North Korea may have been willing to engage as recently as November, but in response to the Bush administration's tough stance has started on a series of actions that are developing a momentum of their own.
"All indications are that they are moving rapidly to produce a nuclear weapon," Oberdorfer said. Joel Wit, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed, saying that "it may be too late to stop what's going on in North Korea."
"It's still possible this is some sort of negotiating tactic," said Wit, a former Clinton administration official, "but the weight of evidence is that they may have decided to start building up their nuclear weapons stockpile."
The administration has itself partly to blame for North Korea's behavior, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. He said of U.S. officials, "When they say they have no good options, they're continuing a policy of neglect that's worsening a bad situation."
As Kim acts in precisely the provocative way the Bush administration abhors, the unsolved riddle for the White House is how to make him change.
"There's no doubt in anyone's mind that this goes to the Security Council," an administration official said yesterday. "The question is one of timing: Can the Security Council handle North Korea and Iraq at the same time?"
----
North Korea To Expel U.N. Inspectors
Vow to Reopen Nuclear Plant Escalates Confrontation
By Peter S. Goodman,
Washington Post
SEOUL, Dec. 27 -- North Korea today announced its intention to expel U.N. inspectors from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex and said it would reopen a factory that extracts weapons-grade plutonium, sharply escalating its confrontation with the United States while leaving the world guessing about events in the reclusive Communist country.
In a letter sent to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, North Korea said that because "our freeze on nuclear facilities has been lifted, the mission of IAEA inspectors has naturally drawn to an end," according to North Korea's official press. "Our government has decided to send them out."
The letter added that North Korea plans to reopen its plutonium extraction factory to provide "safe storage" for spent fuel rods taken from the reactor. Those fuel rods contain plutonium that, once it is extracted, can be used to make nuclear weapons.
In a swift reply, also by letter, the U.N. body insisted that the inspectors remain in the country to ensure that North Korea complies with its 1994 agreement with the United States that it would not develop nuclear weapons. The agency's director general asked the North Korean government to "inform him immediately should they have a contrary view, so that, if necessary, arrangements for the departure of IAEA inspectors can be made," the IAEA said in a statement.
The White House denounced the planned expulsions and urged the North to end its nuclear weapons program. "We will not respond to threats or broken commitments," said spokesman Scott McClellan in Crawford, Tex.
North Korea's latest moves were seen by arms control experts as predictable if alarming steps in its path of escalation with the Bush administration, a tactic aimed at forcing the United States to resume aid and pursue diplomatic relations. But if North Korea follows through on restarting its reprocessing plant -- the factory where plutonium is extracted from fuel rods -- that would be interpreted by its neighbors and the United States as a far more serious threat than any so far, South Korean and Western officials said. Though the United States has insisted that diplomacy is its favored means of resolving the crisis, a contrary course by North Korea would increase pressure on the Bush administration to consider a military response or at least threaten one, these sources said.
Extracting plutonium "really is crossing the red line," said Han Sung Joo, who served as South Korea's foreign minister during the outbreak of nuclear brinkmanship on the Korean Peninsula eight years ago. "If they go ahead and do that, that's really playing with fire."
Some 8,000 spent fuel rods are being stored in a cooling pond adjacent to the reactor, according to the IAEA. They contain enough plutonium to produce three to six nuclear weapons, said Shin Sung Taek, a nuclear expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a research group in Seoul affiliated with the Defense Ministry. If North Korea restarted the reprocessing plant and began extracting plutonium from the fuel rods, it could manufacture those weapons in as little as five to nine months, Shin said.
The Yongbyon complex is 55 miles north of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
"This puts Washington at a crossroads," said Kim Tae Woo, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. "They either need to heighten their level of threat to North Korea or come down to the table. This situation cannot be left to go on endlessly."
Given that South Korea and perhaps Japan fear they could be devastated by counterstrikes in any U.S. attack on North Korea, analysts have generally ruled out that option. But today's actions appear to have escalated the crisis. "The tension has risen to the degree where a military attack by the U.S. would not be inconceivable," said Tsutomu Nishioka, an analyst at the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo.
The United States had assumed that North Korea would eventually resume its reprocessing operation, according to a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "All the signs are that they are moving beyond merely powering up and putting in good order" the reactor, "and they are in fact focusing on all the facilities at Yongbyon," the diplomat said today, before North Korea's announcements.
Still, he added that reviving the reprocessing plant would amount to "a very serious, serious development -- the most serious in a series of developments. Reprocessing is, in a certain sense, in a realm by itself. It is a step above and beyond." He declined to predict how the United States would respond to such an eventuality.
Arms control experts said such a course would almost certainly prompt the IAEA to file a complaint with the U.N. Security Council asserting that North Korea has violated its commitments under its agreement with the Clinton administration to abandon the development of nuclear weapons. The Security Council could then issue a warning or impose consequences ranging from economic sanctions to military force. An IAEA spokesman said the decision to take a complaint to the Security Council would be up to the agency's board of governors.
In a sign of the region's growing unease, South Korea's president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun, assailed North Korea's continued defiance, saying it jeopardized his ability to continue his country's "sunshine policy" of engagement after he takes office in February. Roh was elected on the strength of his calls to continue South Korea's moves toward reconciliation with North Korea.
"Whatever North Korea's rationale is in taking such actions, they are not beneficial to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia, nor are they helpful for its own safety and prosperity," Roh said in a statement.
Japan's foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, assailed North Korea's decision to expel the U.N. inspectors, saying it violated international agreements and raised "grave concerns" about nuclear nonproliferation. Japan's deputy cabinet secretary, Shinzo Abe, said North Korea "is playing an extremely dangerous game."
Today's actions were the latest outgrowth of the unraveling of the deal that settled the previous nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula. Under its terms, North Korea would abandon its nuclear aspirations and submit to continuous inspections in exchange for shipments of fuel from the United States and its allies. But following disclosures in October that North Korea had secretly pursued production of uranium-enriched nuclear weapons at another site, the Bush administration halted the aid. In response, North Korea began reactivating Yongbyon.
President Bush has flatly ruled out any dialogue unless North Korea first abandons its pursuit of nuclear weapons, not only at Yongbyon but also at the uranium-enrichment site. North Korea has refused such demands, saying it would consider such a step only if the United States proffers a guarantee of nonaggression.
Last weekend, North Korea began to resume activity at the reactor complex. First, it dismantled U.N. surveillance cameras while removing seals that had validated the continued closure of the facilities. Later, it said it would revive the reactor -- not to make weapons, it emphasized, but to produce electricity. That claim was pilloried by South Korea and the United States, which argue that weapons production is the only purpose of the reactor complex.
On Thursday, North Korea moved fuel rods into the area of the 5-megawatt reactor, the heart of the Yongbyon complex, in preparation for restarting it. And today it took steps to ensure that the world can no longer see what it is doing there.
While most continue to interpret these actions to be levers being pulled in a negotiation, some call that view naïve, noting that North Korea has genuine fears about U.S. intentions, particularly after Bush labeled it part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq.
"North Korea is intent on succeeding in making nuclear weapons," said Satoshi Morimoto, a national security expert at Takushoku University in Tokyo and a former Defense Agency official. "It's not just their diplomatic card. Once North Korea has nuclear weapons, or makes others believe that it does, the U.S. cannot attack."
North Korea's neighbors continue to try to persuade it to pull back from its nuclear brinkmanship, according to foreign diplomats. South Korea has been engaging the North through a series of such informal channels as an economic cooperation committee. Britain has communicated with North Korea through its embassy in Pyongyang, according to a British diplomat. China and Russia say they have been holding discussions as well.
Even the United States has been maintaining a "New York channel" with North Korea, according to a Western diplomat. North Korea's deputy ambassador to the United Nations holds regular conversations with the State Department's country director for Korea affairs, the diplomat said.
The United States has counted on other governments to pressure North Korea to pull back. The Bush administration views China as central to this effort. "The Chinese, in a certain sense, are the only game in town," said the Western diplomat. "They are the North Koreans' lifeline for food and fuel."
But today came the latest signs that the United States may not enjoy the support it needs. In Beijing, the official China Daily lashed out at Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for comments this week in which he asserted the United States was prepared to wage successful wars in both Iraq and North Korea if necessary.
"This is a hawkish and dangerous warning," the English-language newspaper said. "It will poison the warming relations between the two sides on the Korean Peninsula."
Meanwhile, Russia accused the United States of sparking the crisis by halting fuel shipments to North Korea.
Special correspondents Sachiko Sachimaki and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
-------- russia
Fueled by Russia
Saturday, December 28, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46129-2002Dec27?language=printer
WHEN ASKED this week why his country had just signed an agreement to provide fuel for the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran, the Russian minister for atomic energy seemed unconcerned. "All Iran-Russia cooperation is in accordance with international regulations," he responded. In the past, Russian officials have argued that their involvement in Bushehr will be tightly controlled, pointing out that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have visited the reactor on many occasions. They also note that their agreement is both to provide fuel to the reactor for the next 10 years and to take away the spent fuel so that it cannot be reprocessed for military use.
But the precise details of the Bushehr agreement are not what makes the nuclear relationship between Russia and Iran so disturbing. The trouble is the larger context: Russian commercial and scientific institutions have a long history of involvement not only in Iran's civilian nuclear program, but also in Iran's clandestine military nuclear program. In the 1990s, the Russian government acknowledged this -- up to a point -- and put a stop to some abuses. The Russians now deny any further involvement. The Bush administration thinks otherwise, and points out that the Bushehr arrangement will provide many opportunities for Russian scientists and military technicians to travel in and out of Iran. While the plant itself can be monitored, the exchanges of information cannot be.
At the same time, neither the Iranians nor the Russians have satisfactorily explained why Iran needs either the agreement or the reactor itself. The Iranians appear to have enough oil to meet their domestic needs. They also appear to be developing their own sources of nuclear fuel. It isn't clear what additional purpose the Russian fuel serves -- unless it is to free Iranian resources to develop nuclear weapons.
Finally, this week's agreement is alarming because of what it says about the two countries involved. On most other arms-control issues, Russia and the United States have reached de facto consensus in the past several years. On the question of nuclear proliferation, however, the Russians have steadfastly refused to cooperate. Perhaps that is for financial reasons, perhaps to maintain diplomatic influence -- or perhaps because President Vladimir Putin is not in full control of the Russian nuclear program, and because not everyone in his country shares his stated desire for good relations with the West.
In Iran, the persistent pursuit of nuclear technology also reveals a great deal about internal Iranian politics. Despite public disagreements about all kinds of other issues, there is no visible difference between Iranian "moderates" and Iranian "hard-liners" on this question. Both groups appear to be pursuing nuclear development with equal intensity and shrugging off Western protests with equal equanimity.
The result: On the one hand, administration officials believe there is "no one to talk to" on this issue in Tehran. On the other hand, they concede they may not be talking to the right people in Moscow. Because the issue is so vexing, and because other proliferation issues (Iraq, North Korea) loom so large, the temptation is to bury it. But the opposite reaction is called for: President Bush must keep Iran's nuclear program high on his agenda, his administration must continue to pursue the subject at all levels of the Russian government, and Congress must not allow it to drop.
-------- us politics
Al Qaeda vs. the White House
William Pfaff IHT
Saturday, December 28, 2002
International Herald Tribune Tribune Media Services International
http://www.iht.com/articles/81589.html
Two radicalisms
PARIS Al Qaeda wants revolutionary change. Its attacks on America in September 2001 had the paradoxical effect of propelling the United States on to a policy course that may eventually prove more radically unsettling for world order than anything Islamic militants could ever have expected to do on their own. These are developments that will dominate international relations in 2003.
By overturning America's pre-Sept. 11 assumptions of invulnerability and self-sufficiency, Islamic militants provoked the United States into "war" against terrorism, disarmament of what President George W. Bush calls the "axis of evil" and an attempt to impose a new order on international society through military force and political and economic pressures.
The result, however, has been more disorder rather than order, stimulated by Al Qaeda's continuing attacks, defiance by rogue nations and the amalgamation of international terrorism with long-standing issues of separatism and nationalist revindication.
The imminent, if not quite inevitable, American military intervention in Iraq is expected by the Bush administration to have stabilizing consequences throughout the region. This is a highly improbable outcome, and evidence of the administration's disposition to prefer ideology to empirical evidence.
Conquering Iraq, even if the intervention has a United Nations Security Council mandate, will deepen frustration, instability and anti-American bitterness throughout the Islamic Middle East, and in major Islamic countries elsewhere.
The edifice of assumptions built up by the Bush administration to win popular U.S. support for its new level of global engagement is fragile. Failure might logically precipitate withdrawal into "homeland defense," an improbable but not impossible reaction. It would more likely produce extreme measures.
Middle Eastern instability has already increased because of the Bush government's new policy on Israel and Palestine. Washington has accepted the Sharon government's definition of Israel's needs and priorities, and has effectively abandoned the role sought by previous American governments as broker between the parties. This has changed the Middle Eastern balance.
Iraq is also a potential turning point so far as relations with Europe are concerned. The West Europeans some time ago parted with the United States on policy toward Palestine and Israel, and they have no wish to be part of a war between civilizations.
To them, terrorism remains a problem of politicized violence, to be dealt with by police and internal security agencies, not armies and air forces.
For them, Al Qaeda is less of a threat than Basque separatist terrorism, or the risk that Northern Ireland (or Algeria) could again collapse into sectarian violence. Despite European fears of political disagreement with Washington, 2003 may well be the year EU states openly break with the United States on policy toward the Muslim world.
Washington's efforts to integrate the existing politico-strategic order into an American-dominated system - through NATO expansion, pressure to amalgamate NATO and EU, the globalization of the American military through a system of integrated regional commands, base systems and alliances - is another current source of tension.
The Bush administration's determination to deal with its problems through military means is described by some critics as an intellectual legacy of the Trotskyism of many of the neoconservative movement's founders. The movement dominates administration foreign policy.
It seems a rightist version of Trotsky's "permanent revolution," destroying existing institutions and structures in the millenarian expectation that all this violence will come to an end in a better and happier world.
The Qaeda attacks empowered a policy faction in the United States convinced of America's moral right and political competence to banish "terror" by reordering international society, guided by an optimism that has no empirical evidence to justify it. In practice, this policy has generated disorder, not order. Two radicalisms - Al Qaeda's and Washington's - are at work, and in 2003 they will continue to feed on one another.
-------- MILITARY
-------- biological weapons
Iraq's germ weaponry upgraded
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021228-22052970.htm
Biological weapons are among the few capabilities Iraq has improved since being defeated by a U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, government officials say.
Working under the noses of U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1998, President Saddam Hussein's government probably developed mobile germ-warfare labs and processes to create dried bacteria for deadlier and longer-lasting weapons, U.S. officials and former weapons inspectors say.
Pentagon officials say Iraq's biological arsenal could do the most damage, physical and psychological, if it were used to retaliate immediately against a U.S. invasion rather than in later stages of battle.
Although U.S. troops are being vaccinated against anthrax and smallpox and have protective gear, a biological attack cannot be detected until after exposure. Even if a biological attack did not kill U.S. troops, it could kill many civilians and create a logistical mess that would slow an American advance and strain the military's medical capabilities.
"The most frightening thing is Iraq's biological program," said David Kay, a former chief weapons inspector for the United Nations. "Even in my inspection days, it was the program we knew the least about."
What inspectors eventually learned was disturbing. After the 1995 defection of Saddam's son-in-law, who ran the germ-weapons program, Iraq acknowledged brewing thousands of gallons of deadly germs and toxins and loading some of them in bombs, missile warheads and rockets.
The weapons included anthrax, the germ that killed seven persons in last year's U.S. mail attacks; botulinum toxin, nature's most deadly poison; Clostridium perfringens, a flesh-eating bacterium that causes gas gangrene; and aflatoxin, a fungal poison that causes liver cancer.
In late 1998, frustrated by Iraq's refusal to cooperate, the inspectors withdrew shortly before the United States and Britain began "Operation Desert Fox," a bombing campaign to compel compliance by Iraq. Saddam refused to let the inspectors . Iraq claimed it destroyed all its biological weapons. U.N. inspectors concluded in 1999 that probably was a lie, because Saddam's scientists could have made thousands of gallons of biological weapons without declaring them. U.S. officials say Iraq's latest weapons declaration does not clear up discrepancies.
"Before the inspectors were forced to leave Iraq, they concluded that Iraq could have produced 26,000 liters of anthrax. That is three times the amount Iraq had declared," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said recently. "Yet the Iraqi declaration is silent on this stockpile, which alone would be enough to kill several million people."
The omissions, U.S. officials and former inspectors say, are strong evidence that Iraq has retained at least some of its biological arsenal.
Iraq's development of anthrax-drying technology makes that arsenal even more dangerous than it was during the Gulf war. Its earlier biological-weapons efforts relied on a liquid slurry of anthrax, which let the spores clump together and made it difficult to get the fine aerosol needed to get the germs into people's lungs.
U.N. inspectors in the late 1990s found Iraq had drying machines that could be used to make a powdered form of anthrax.
The Iraqis claimed they were making a biological pesticide from a worm-killing bacteria known as BT, said former inspector Jonathan Tucker. But they were making particles so small they would float through the air, not settle onto crops like a biopesticide should, Mr. Tucker said.
-------- business
Lockheed lands $3.5 billion contract with Poland
By Jeffrey Sparshott
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20021228-70639735.htm
Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $3.5 billion deal to sell F-16 fighter jets to Poland, Polish defense officials announced yesterday.
The sale gives the company a foot into the central European market, where three countries joined the NATO alliance in 1999 and seven more, in central and Eastern Europe, were offered membership in November.
As part of its sales pitch to Poland's government, the company agreed to make $3.5 billion in investments in Poland, and the U.S. government backed up the sale with a loan and an agreement to train Polish personnel to use the aircraft.
"The deal is very important on a number of levels, with government-to-government relations, in that we've penetrated the central European market and that we have a new member of [the] F-16 team," said George Standridge, Lockheed's campaign director for the Poland F-16 program.
Lockheed won over two European bids: the Gripen jet, made by Sweden's Saab AB and Britain's BAE Systems, and the Mirage, made by France's Dassault Aviation SA.
But the F-16 is used by nine other NATO countries, and Poland has a close strategic relationship with the United States, Mr. Standridge said.
"This is an optimum solution for the military security of the state, and it meets our obligation as an ally," Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski said at a news conference, the Associated Press reported.
The chairman of Dassault Aviation said Poland chose politics over performance and price, the AP reported.
"The political element was the chief element, well beyond the quality or the price," Charles Edelstenne told French radio station France-Info on Thursday, before the official announcement, the AP reported.
Lockheed will build the 48 jets in Fort Worth, Texas, and deliver them from 2006 to 2008. Components will be made in Poland, where U.S.-based manufacturers Pratt & Whitney and Goodrich Corp. operate facilities.
The $3.5 billion investment component of the sale, called offsets, involve a wide range of investment, procurement or other types of projects in Poland during a 10-year period. Projects include technology transfers to upgrade an oil refinery, technical assistance for an aerospace company that wants Federal Aviation Administration approval for an aircraft, procurement from Poland's largest software firm and investment in local facilities by Lockheed or partner firms such as Pratt & Whitney, said Philip N. Georgariou, regional manager for international industrial cooperation at Lockheed.
Lockheed officials are hopeful that more opportunities will arise in the region as new NATO members upgrade military capabilities. But national budgets are strapped: Poland is running a heavy deficit, and the Czech Republic had to cancel a fighter-jet offer because of a lack of funds. In addition, the role of countries recently invited to join the alliance is not yet defined.
-------- europe
Poland to Buy Fighter Jets From the U.S.
December 28, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/business/worldbusiness/28JETS.html
WARSAW, Dec. 27 (Reuters) - The Polish government confirmed today that Lockheed Martin had been chosen to modernize Warsaw's air force with a $3.5 billion order for 48 combat jets.
Lockheed's F-16 Fighting Falcon won over the Mirage 2000-5 jet fighter from Dassault Aviation of France and the Gripen, built by Saab of Sweden and BAE Systems of Britain. Saab is controlled by Investor. The deal is Lockheed's first major order in Eastern Europe and came after a major lobbying effort by the Bush administration.
Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski dismissed criticism that Poland, a NATO member since 1999, had succumbed to American pressure, saying that the best package of planes and reciprocal investments in Polish industry had won the day.
"Poland based its decision on merit, not politics," he said at a news conference today. "This deal guarantees our ability to participate in NATO operations and increases our security."
The F-16's will be delivered between 2006 and 2008, enabling Poland to scrap its obsolete Soviet-era planes, some of which have been in service since the 1960's. Military experts rate the F-16 and Mirage roughly equal as fighting machines, with the cheaper Gripen third.
Lockheed said it won on technical and financial grounds.
As part of the deal, Poland gains a $3.8 billion low-interest loan from the United States government. It will repay only due interest from 2003 to 2010, and then interest and principal from 2011 to 2015. The Polish defense ministry said the contract's total costs, including debt servicing, should not exceed $4.7 billion.
In addition, Lockheed, with its partners, pledged to pump as much as $9.8 billion into Poland's defense and civilian industries over 10 years or so.
Contracts for the planes are to be completed by the end of March.
The F-16 flies in nine NATO air forces and has a track record dating back to the 1970's, but Lockheed says the model it offered Poland is the most modern flying in Europe today.
The plane, powered by F-100-229 engines from the Pratt & Whitney unit of United Technologies, is fitted with Northrop Grumman radar and electronic warfare systems.
-------- israel / palestine
SATURDAY PROFILE
Dreaming of Palestine, Teenager Writes a Novel
December 28, 2002
New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/international/middleeast/28FPRO.html
MILAN - At first Randa Ghazy wrote the kind of prose that many teenage girls do, with characters who pined for romance or worried that they were not as pretty as they wanted to be.
Then, around the time of her 15th birthday, she decided to try something more ambitious. There was a short-story competition that she wanted to enter, and what she produced for it was unlike anything she had done before.
Miss Ghazy's experiment paid off. Although she did not win the contest, her story impressed one of the judges, an editor who asked her to expand it into a full-length novel. That book was published in Italy last spring and has since been translated into six languages.
"It was very unexpected," said Miss Ghazy, now 16, during a recent interview here, as she smiled sweetly and chewed a piece of gum. "I was a little star." But her success is not a simple tale of precocious achievement, and the fact of her book is perhaps less interesting than its content and fallout.
The novel, "Dreaming of Palestine," mounts a fiery case against the Israelis' treatment of Palestinians, whom Miss Ghazy portrays as pitiable victims of unrelenting terror.
The book drips blood and outrage, and Jewish groups in France, where it recently went on sale, have been asking the government to withdraw it from circulation, citing a 1949 law that prohibits forms of expression that promote violence and hate among minors. "Dreaming of Palestine" has been marketed there, as it was in Italy, for young adults.
Miss Ghazy, who was born and reared in Italy by parents who emigrated from Egypt, said she was confused over the controversy.
"It's stupid," she said, leaning on an adjective that she used more than once. Each time she did, it was a reminder of her age, as was the vigilant presence throughout the interview of her mother and an executive with Fabbri, her Italian publisher.
But at other moments Miss Ghazy seemed years ahead of her peers, citing journalists and historical details with which few other 16-year-olds would be familiar and switching effortlessly between Italian and English as she talked.
She also mustered a diplomatic explanation for the political slant of her book, saying she was simply plumbing one perspective, imagining the Palestinian mind-set and trying "to explain the hate that Palestinians have."
She was, in other words, something of a riddle. Most perplexing of all was why and how she came to feel strongly enough about the issue to churn out, in what she said was little more than two weeks of frenetic work, the 216 rough-hewn pages of "Dreaming of Palestine," which tracks several young Palestinians united by misery and a sense of righteous mission.
She has never been to Israel or the Palestinian territories. Before writing the book, she said, she spent more time watching MTV than broadcast news. Before her book tour, she added, she had never met a Palestinian.
Nonetheless, Miss Ghazy wove a story, lighter on plot than on raw passion, of deep-seated, lopsided enmity.
"Isn't there a way to stop these sinners, the Jews?" one Palestinian character in the novel asks another. "They're killing us all."
Other Palestinian characters allude to the Holocaust and suggest that Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what was done to their own ancestors.
All of this came from a high school student whose extracurricular activities include volleyball and who at certain points during the interview seemed more concerned with how she looked in jacket photographs than with any protest over the book.
It was written in the late afternoon hours after her Greek and Latin classes, on a home computer in a middle-class suburb of Milan, where her father, Ibrahim, runs a rotisserie shop. He moved to Italy 30 years ago, when he was selling cars and there was more money to be made here. He and his wife, Sana, who is also Egyptian, had three children.
The family was in a tiny minority, both as Arabs and as Muslims who observed certain rituals, like the Ramadan fast. Miss Ghazy said she was acutely conscious of that. "I felt different from the others, because of my skin, my religion," she said. "I was very insecure about myself."
"Not that anything happened," she added. Even so, she added, "I asked my mom to take me to a psychologist, but she said, `You don't need it.' "
Miss Ghazy became transfixed by other minorities' experiences. A fervent reader, she devoured "Uncle Tom's Cabin," then "The Color Purple."
In other respects she was a typical Italian teenager. She listened to American rock music. She hung posters of American movie heartthrobs, like Ben Affleck and Brad Pitt, but replaced them when she was 14 with images of "The Simpsons."
"I'm growing up," she explained.
She said that she had never felt any particular interest in current politics. But her curiosity was piqued roughly two years ago when she noticed a pair of news images. The first showed a Palestinian father shielding his son from gunfire. The next showed the boy dead. Almost a year later she wrote her short story. Then she did some research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wrote her novel. "I feel Egyptian," she said. "So I also feel Arab and, thus, Palestinian."
Besides, she said, "Israelis have the power, and the guns."
Between the short story and the novel came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Miss Ghazy said those events surely influenced her, although she could not specify how.
At high school, she remembered, "Everyone was saying, 'But you agree with bin Laden?'" It was a ridiculous question, she said, and it again made her feel isolated and scrutinized. "They have such ignorance," she said.
She said only a handful of her classmates had read "Dreaming of Palestine." It sold about 14,000 copies in Italy, where there was no outcry over it. The Jewish population here is tiny, and sympathy for Palestinians is more widespread than in the United States.
But one classmate who did read it, Miss Ghazy said, is the only Jewish person she knows at school. "She thought I hated her," Miss Ghazy said, dismissing the notion as silly. "She doesn't know anything about the war."
"I'm not racist," she said. "I'm angry - angry with the Israeli government. This doesn't mean that I hate the whole nation."
As Miss Ghazy spoke, her mother sat close to her, watching and listening, as if frightened by the terrain her daughter had entered. Luisa Sacchi, the editorial director of Fabbri, also monitored Miss Ghazy's words.
Only Miss Ghazy seemed more or less unfazed.
At one point she held up the brand new Norwegian edition of "Dreaming of Palestine," which had an odd image of a giant orange on its cover.
"Isn't it cute?" Miss Ghazy said.
--------
Israel Razes Palestinian Home After Attack
December 28, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
GAZA CITY (Reuters) - Israeli soldiers shot dead a nine-year-old girl outside her home in the Gaza town of Khan Younis on Saturday, Palestinian security sources said.
Israeli military sources said troops in the area had been shot at and returned fire but could not say if they had hit anyone.
The violence in Gaza came a day after two Palestinian gunmen dressed in army uniform shot dead four seminary students in the Jewish settlement of Otniel near the West Bank city of Hebron. They were later shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Friday's attack, saying it wanted to avenge Israel's killing of eight Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Wednesday and Thursday.
Two of the four dead seminary students from Otniel were unarmed off-duty soldiers, participating in a program that lets religious Israelis study as part of their military service, an army spokesman said.
Palestinian militants often target Jewish settlements in their fight for statehood. The international community says the settlements are illegal. Israel disputes this.
In Khan Younis, nine-year-old Hanin Abu Suleiman was playing outside her home next to a cemetery lying between the Palestinian town and an adjacent Jewish settlement when she was shot in the head on Saturday, Palestinian witnesses said.
Palestinian security sources said Israeli soldiers had fired from a watchtower in the settlement. Israeli military sources said troops had returned fire in the direction of the cemetery after gunmen shot at their outpost.
After more than two years of Israeli-Palestinian violence, the United States has appealed for calm to help Washington win Arab support for a possible war on Iraq.
A week ago the quartet of mediators -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations -- called for an immediate truce between Israel and the Palestinians and said their peace plan was nearly complete.
SHARON MORE SATISFIED WITH NEW PEACE DRAFT
The newest draft of the plan, which includes stricter conditions for Palestinians on the issue of security and democracy, was presented to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Friday, diplomatic sources said.
The sources added that Sharon was more satisfied with the new draft than with previous ones.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat has said he will respond to the peace plan, also known as the ``road map,'' next month.
In a move that could help advance peace, the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization called on Saturday on its highest decision making body to meet to discuss the quartet's plan as well as Washington-requested reforms.
The Palestinian Central Council has not met since the start of the Palestinian uprising for independence that began in September 2000 after the collapse of peace talks. Its decisions are binding on Arafat.
On the council's agenda will be formulating a Palestinian constitution as well as discussion of the road map.
Washington has demanded Palestinian Authority reforms be implemented as part of the peace plan, which calls for the creation of a Palestinian state.
No date or venue was set for the meeting, which could be complicated as some of its members live abroad.
At least 1,749 Palestinians and 675 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising for independence began in September 2000 when peace talks failed.
-------- mideast
Turkey and the Iraqi oil
Iraq-Turkey, Politics,
12/28/2002
Arabic News
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/021228/2002122810.html
The Turkish daily Sabah said yesterday that Turkey informed the US officially that it wants a share of the Iraqi oil at a rate of 10%, noting that in case that Washington approves the said request, Ankara will get a 5.5 billion dollars of the oil revenues annually.
The paper quoted Murad Murjan, the deputy chairman of the Turkish justice and development party, as saying that a group of academics had prepared a study to this effect and it was submitted officially to certain American officials.
Murjan indicated that the said study is based on Luzanne Treaty which Turkey had signed with Britain during the demarcation of the Turkish borders with Iraq in 1926. The Treaty states to offer Turkey a rate of 10 % of the Iraqi oil production.
Murjan added that Luzanne agreement has not only confined to offering Turkey the said 10% rate but also states an obligatory item for Turkey to get a share of oil companies revenues and from oil transportation as well as a share from other oil byproducts.
Worthy mentioning that the Luzanne agreement which was signed in 1926 and according to which Turkey was afforded 10% of the oil revenues in al-Mousel for 25 years. However, Turkey had given up its share for 500,000 Sterling Pound.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia Sticks to Chechnya Peace Plan Despite Blast
Sat December 28, 2002
By Clara Ferreira-Marques
Reuters
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=1969278
MOSCOW - Russian politicians vowed on Saturday to press ahead with the Kremlin's peace plan for rebel Chechnya, a day after a bomb attack killed 55 people at the pro-Moscow government headquarters in the region.
Two vehicles packed with explosives rammed barriers around Chechnya's most tightly guarded building on Friday afternoon, in one of the most deadly assaults of the current conflict.
But Chechnya's pro-Moscow Prime Minister Mikhail Babich, speaking as rescue workers tied up their search through piles of rubble on Saturday, said the city was under control and denied the blast was the start of a full-scale rebel assault on Grozny.
"There is no strike on Grozny. The attack happened as we know and saw, but there are no forces left capable of destabilizing the situation," he said in televised remarks. "We have tightened security in the city."
The attack is the most serious blow to Russia's claims to control the region since Chechen guerrillas seized a packed Moscow theater in October, leaving 129 people dead.
Russia's General Prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into how the two vehicles -- a truck and an off-road vehicle -- slipped through at least three checkpoints.
A blast in the heart of Grozny -- one of Russia's strongholds in the mostly Muslim region -- is also a severe setback to Russia's plans to skirt talks with rebel leaders by pressing ahead with a new regional constitution and elections.
Russian politicians, who expressed anger at footage of dazed rescue workers, shocked survivors and body parts among the debris, said the plans should not be altered.
"We should not lapse into any extraordinary measures, we should not panic," Viktor Ozerov, a deputy in the Federation Council upper chamber, told the Izvestia daily.
The Russian Foreign Ministry -- which rarely comments on internal affairs -- said in a sharply-worded statement that the blasts would not upset the political process in the region.
"The terrorist act against the government of Chechnya clearly shows the real aims of rebels and their supporters: to frighten everyone who works to restore a peaceful life for the Chechen people and to spoil the normalization process in the region," the statement said. "They will not succeed."
WEAKENING GRIP
But Russian liberal media said the attack, which turned the newly restored government block into a hollow shell, proved Moscow's faltering grip on the region.
"This tragedy again clearly demonstrated that (pro-Moscow Chechen administrator Akhmad) Kadyrov's team has no control over the situation, either in the republic or in the center of Grozny," the Noviye Izvestiya daily said in a front page spread.
"The Grozny tragedy reminded us all that the Chechen war is not over. Its worst echo may burst into our lives at any moment, and no special forces...will be able to guarantee our safety."
The Emergencies Ministry on Saturday put the death toll at 55, though television reports also quoted a Chechen Health Ministry list naming 39 dead.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the explosions, but officials blamed Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, ousted when Russian troops poured back into Chechnya in 1999.
"The situation has been deteriorating in the region recently because of an order handed out by Maskhadov, telling fighters to attack Chechens working for the local administration," Ilya Shabalkin, a spokesman for Russia's forces in Chechnya, told Russian television.
But Maskhadov, in a statement of condolences to relatives posted on rebel Web Sites on Saturday, condemned the attack.
"I speak to those who have decided to take the path of self-sacrifice after suffering painful experiences and losses. I understand you but I cannot support you," Maskhadov said. "The Kremlin uses any means to link Chechens to international terrorism. Our task is not to prove them right."
Russian President Vladimir Putin rejects any talks with Maskhadov or key field commanders and has placed his bets for a settlement on a constitution referendum planned for next March.
Putin, who rose to power on the back of his ultra-tough stance on Chechnya, said in a message of condolences sent to Kadyrov that he was "deeply shaken by the tragedy in Grozny."
--------
Suicide Bombers Kill at Least 46 at Chechen Government Offices
December 28, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/international/europe/28CHEC.html
MOSCOW, Dec. 27 - Suicide bombers plowed two explosive-laden vehicles through a military perimeter today and blew up the headquarters of Chechnya's pro-Russian government in Grozny, killing at least 46 people and wounding scores more in two terrific blasts.
It was the deadliest bombing inside Chechnya in more than three years of war, and it sent yet another powerful signal that militants seeking to split the semiautonomous Chechen region from Russia are far from being subdued.
The last signal came barely two months ago, when Chechen separatists took control of a Moscow theater and terrorized hundreds of hostages for several days. The government raid that ended that crisis resulted in the deaths of nearly 130 civilians.
The regional government office in Grozny, the Chechen capital - which was opened to great fanfare barely 20 months ago as a beacon of political stability - was among the most protected buildings in the area.
Russian television showed images today of civilians and soldiers, many soaked in blood, stumbling or being carried from the wreckage of the four-story concrete building. A huge crater near the entrance, more than a dozen feet deep, marked the site of the explosions.
Tonight Russia's Emergencies Ministry put the death toll at 46. Another 70 people were reported to have been taken to hospitals, at least 20 of them critically injured. But an Emergencies Ministry official said the number of injured could reach 200, because the blast had destroyed a nearby two-story building, containing a canteen and government offices, as well as the main building.
Wounded government workers were still being removed from the canteen and other areas tonight, and three cranes were lifting concrete rubble in search of victims.
"We do not know so far how many people are still under the wreckage," Chechnya's acting prosecutor, Vladimir Kravchenko, told the Interfax news service.
The region's first deputy finance minister, Stanislav Tereshchuk, said the second building was crowded with ministry workers who had been reconciling the Chechen government's books on one of the last working days before New Year's Day, Russia's biggest holiday.
"I didn't hear the second blast," Mr. Tereshchuk, clearly dazed, said in a television interview. "The first one was too strong. Our information and technical section room caved in. I am sure one of my people was there. We had just hired him."
The head of Chechnya's civil administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, and the new prime minister, Mikhail Babich, were away from the building when the blast occurred.
In Grozny, a rubble-strewn wasteland since Russian jets destroyed it in late 1999, Hospital No. 9, the main hospital treating victims of the blast, was without power. Interfax reported that doctors were working by candlelight and flashlight.
President Vladimir V. Putin met tonight with the head of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the K.G.B., for a report on the bombing.
The bombers, traveling in a large truck and an off-road vehicle, struck shortly before 2:30 p.m., barreling through the last gate of a heavily fortified perimeter surrounding the government headquarters. The blasts devastated the main building - blowing out all of its windows and extensively damaging its front - and largely destroyed the adjacent canteen.
The offices of the regional prosecutor and the Federal Security Service were also damaged.
It is not clear how the bombers gained access to the government complex, which was deliberately set on a barren stretch of land and divided into sectors walled off by concrete fences.
The TVS television network reported tonight that drivers of heavy trucks required a special pass to enter central Grozny. The drivers would have had to pass through two checkpoints at the government compound before reaching the last gate, which raised the prospect that a security breakdown was responsible for the disaster.
The government-run ORT television reported tonight that the heavy truck bore military license plates.
Mr. Kadyrov told Interfax that officials would search for security lapses that might have permitted the bombing, but he despaired of its doing much good. "We have done this so many times, and what's the use?" he said. "Terrorists still rule in Grozny."
Russian troops sealed off all roads around Grozny and mounted a search for organizers of the attack.
"This is the latest monstrous atrocity by the terrorists, those very same people who staged the explosions in Moscow, Volgodonsk, Buinaksk and Grozny," Mr. Putin's human rights representative in Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, said tonight on ORT. "These are people who have openly declared war on their own people. They are, of course, in their death throes."
Mr. Sultygov was referring to bombings in late 1999 - mostly unsolved but ascribed to Chechen militants - which heavily influenced Mr. Putin's decision to send the Russian Army into Chechnya for the second time in five years.
Russia effectively lost the first war, giving Chechnya de facto independence. Moscow has claimed victory in the second, saying it has reduced the guerrillas to a handful of scattered and hunted bands. The Kremlin recently released a draft of a new Chechen constitution as a prelude to a spring referendum on forming a new government.
But Russia's military grip on Chechnya has remained shaky at best. Russian soldiers die weekly in ambushes, and Chechen militants effectively have the run of Grozny at night. The blast today, the fourth major strike against Russia's presence in Chechnya in five months, suggests that militants are increasingly resorting to headline-grabbing acts of violence to press their cause.
More than 40 Chechen militants seized a theater in the heart of Moscow in October, provoking a costly rescue attempt by Russian forces that left the militants as well as nearly 130 theatergoers and performers dead.
Another 121 people died in August after guerrillas shot down an overloaded military transport helicopter over the main Russian military base outside Grozny. Twenty-two died in October when a bomb destroyed a Grozny police station.
The military warned last month that suicide bombers were planning a series of strikes in Grozny and central Russia, with their principal targets likely to be government buildings, including the one hit today.
Indeed, the same building was bombed in September of last year, less than five months after it opened, when an explosive device left in a women's restroom went off, killing a cleaning woman. In July investigators found tons of saltpeter and a bomb in a garage about 1,000 feet from the building - enough, police officials said then, to level the complex.
Tonight Mr. Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya's civil administration, called the latest bombing the work of militants tied to Aslan Maskhadov, a onetime Chechen president who is commander of the Chechen guerrillas, at least in name. A spokesman for Mr. Maskhadov, Akhmed Zakayev, denied that tonight.
Others blamed Islamic extremists, some of them foreigners, who have sought to reinvent Chechnya's separatist movement as an Islamic revolution.
While suicide bombings have been a hallmark of Islamic extremism elsewhere, one Moscow expert on Russian regional problems and the Russian military, Dmitri Trenin, said labeling those responsible for the explosions might not be so simple. "Islamic extremism is part of it," said Mr. Trenin, a scholar at the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Part of it is separatism. It's a deadly cocktail that you have out there."
He said major acts of sabotage like this might grow more common, in Chechnya and other parts of Russia, because they had proved to be the one means of striking at the Russian presence against which there was little defense.
"Russia, as we have seen, cannot even seal its capital from such acts of terrorism," he said. "On the other hand, these same forces cannot hope to drive Russia out. Unfortunately, I think we are stuck with what we have now."
-------- spy agencies
CIA Interrogation Under Fire
Human Rights Groups Say Techniques Could Be Torture
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 28, 2002; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45609-2002Dec27?language=printer
A leading human rights group said yesterday that the CIA's method of interrogating al Qaeda detainees could constitute torture and result in the prosecution of U.S. officials by courts around the world.
Human Rights Watch, based in New York, sent a letter to President Bush calling for an investigation of the "stress and duress" techniques allegedly used by the CIA on some captives at the U.S.-held Bagram air base in Afghanistan and other facilities overseas.
Those techniques, described in a front-page article in Thursday's Washington Post, include keeping prisoners "standing or kneeling for hours" while hooded or wearing spray-painted goggles, holding them in "awkward, painful positions" and depriving them of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights.
In the letter to Bush, Human Rights Watch's executive director, Kenneth Roth, said those methods "would place the United States in violation of some of the most fundamental prohibitions of international human rights law."
The letter warned that torture and other "grave breaches" of the 1949 Geneva Conventions "are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that they can be prosecuted in any national criminal court."
Human Rights Watch also objected to the alleged U.S. practice of turning over some captives for interrogation by countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, which have been criticized by the State Department for using torture.
"It is a violation of international law not only to use torture directly, but also to be complicit in torture committed by other governments," the letter said. It called on Bush to issue a statement clarifying that U.S. policy does not condone torture, to take immediate steps to stop such acts, and to prosecute the individuals who ordered and carried them out.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday that "we are not aware we have received the letter." He added, however, that "we believe we are in full compliance with domestic and international law, including domestic and international law dealing with torture." Wherever U.S. forces are holding combatants, they are being held "humanely, in a manner consistent with the third Geneva Convention," McClellan said.
Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of law at Yale University, said it is debatable whether the CIA techniques constitute torture under the U.N.'s definition, which is the intentional infliction of "severe pain or suffering" to obtain information.
Wedgwood she was "somewhat skeptical" of the description of what goes on at Bagram air base. "The guys like to talk tough, so you have to be careful that this is not professional swagger," she said.
Moreover, she said, some of the alleged conditions, such as lights burning 24 hours a day, are typical of civilian jails. As for holding prisoners in "awkward, painful positions," she said, it depends on exactly what that means. "If it's hanging someone from their wrists, absolutely not -- that's prohibited," she said. "But if it's keeping someone in handcuffs or temporarily hooded during transport, maybe yes -- as a legal matter, there could be legitimate reasons for that."
But Diane F. Orentlicher, a professor of international law at American University, said she believes the CIA techniques are a clear violation of international law. She noted that the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1978 that the use by British forces in North Ireland of five similar techniques -- hooding, forced standing, deprivation of sleep, subjection to noise and deprivation of food and drink -- were not torture.
But, Orentlicher said, the European court found that such methods were "inhuman and degrading," and therefore illegal under various treaties. "One way or the other, it's clearly prohibited," she said.
Staff writer Dana Milbank in Waco, Tex., contributed to this report.
-------- us
U.S. Orders Thousands of Troops to Gulf
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer
Dec 28, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon has ordered a major military force to the Persian Gulf in preparation for a possible war with Iraq.
Thousands of troops, two aircraft carrier battle groups and scores of combat aircraft have received orders since Christmas to ready themselves to head to the region in January and February, defense officials said Friday. Military personnel will go to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain, among other locations.
The Bush administration waited until after the holiday to issue the orders, which alert units across the United States and possibly overseas to prepare for deployment to the Persian Gulf, officials said. Officials said tens of thousands of military personnel will receive orders to go to the region, but a precise figure was unavailable.
Some of the units being sent to the region are combat-ready, including infantry units, warships and strike aircraft, officials said. Many more are logistics, engineering and support teams, which will prepare for the arrival of even larger combat units in the months ahead, officials said. They will add to the 50,000 U.S. military personnel already in the region.
"We don't comment on specific unit deployments. However, forces will be flowing to the region to be in place should the president decide to use them," said Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman at U.S. Central Command, which would oversee operations in Iraq.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week such deployments will "reinforce diplomacy." The Bush administration hopes the threat of military action will increase the pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to fully disclose his efforts to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The Pentagon ordered the Navy to select and prepare two aircraft carrier battle groups and two amphibious assault groups to go to the region, defense officials said. The orders, sent in the last two days, require the Navy to have the vessels ready to sail to the seas around Iraq within 96 hours after a certain date in January, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. They did not specify that date.
The Navy has determined that one the carriers will be the USS George Washington. The ship just arrived home to Norfolk, Va., from the Persian Gulf region and has remained ready to return. The Navy has not yet decided on the second carrier, but officials said it will either be the Everett, Wash.-based USS Abraham Lincoln, which is currently in port at Perth, Australia, having just left the Persian Gulf region, or the USS Kitty Hawk, currently in port in Japan.
An aircraft carrier battle group includes six to eight surface escorts, including cruisers, destroyers, frigates and other vessels, dozens of strike and support aircraft and about 7,500 sailors. An amphibious ready group has about 2,200 Marines.
The defense officials said the amphibious assault groups have not yet been selected. Those groups center on a large, carrier-like vessel that can launch helicopters and carry Marines.
Already in the region is the carrier USS Constellation and the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, and their escorts, officials said. The Nassau group carries another 2,200 Marines.
A fourth carrier group, centered on the USS Harry S. Truman, is in the Mediterranean Sea.
In addition, the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort is expected to put to sea from its home port in Baltimore next week and prepare for action, military officials said Friday. It will be headed to Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean where the United States bases numerous military aircraft, to support any potential conflict with Iraq.
The 1,000-bed floating hospital will initially sail with a crew of 61 civilian mariners and 225 Navy personnel, including enough doctors to support two operating rooms, said Marge Holtz, spokeswoman for the Navy's Military Sealift Command. Hundreds more will be flown to the ship as needed, she said.
Air Force officials said units from five U.S.-based combat wings have received orders to prepare to deploy. They include F-15 fighters from Langley Air Force Base, Va.; F-15E Strike Eagles from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C.; B-1B bombers from Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D.; rescue helicopters and Predator drones from Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.; and C-130 cargo planes and possibly more rescue helicopters from Moody Air Force Base, Ga.
Air tankers and transport aircraft are also expected to take part, officials said. Dozens of fighters already based in the Persian Gulf fly daily patrols over most of Iraq.
The size of the Army deployment was not clear, but it included infantry as well as support units, officials said. The Army also keeps air defense units in the region.
Last week, officials said the Army was expected to deploy troops from the 1st Armored Division and 1st Infantry Division, both based in Germany, as well as an air mobile unit.
The main Marine Corps contingent is likely to be the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. The 1st MEF's headquarters unit already has moved to Kuwait to prepare for combat operations.
A Coast Guard unit, based in Tacoma, Wash., that operates six small patrol boats has been deployed to the Persian Gulf, according to the office of Sen. Patty Murray.
On the Net:
DefenseLink: http://www.defenselink.mil
USS George Washington: http://www.spear.navy.mil/gw/
U.S. Central Command: http://www.centcom.mil/
----
Navy told to ready 2 aircraft carriers for Iraq
From combined dispatches
December 28, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021228-35859108.htm
The Pentagon has ordered the Navy to prepare two aircraft carriers and two amphibious assault vessels for possible action in Iraq, defense officials said yesterday, as U.N. arms experts interviewed a key Iraqi scientist in Baghdad and inspected three suspect sites.
The Pentagon's orders, sent in the last two days, require the Navy to have the vessels ready to sail to the seas around Iraq within 96 hours after a certain date, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. They declined to specify that date.
The ships and the escorts would bring a powerful military force to the region, adding several warships, scores of strike aircraft and roughly 4,400 Marines to the forces already within striking distance of Iraq.
In Baghdad, U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki said inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Iraq had interviewed a metallurgist from a high-profile state company, but the scientist, Kathim Jamil, denied any links to Iraq's nuclear program.
"He provided technical details of a military program," Mr. Ueki said in a statement. "This program has attracted considerable attention as a possible prelude to a clandestine nuclear program."
Mr. Ueki said the scientist's answers "will be of great use in completing the IAEA assessment" of Iraq's nuclear program.
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr. Jamil was a specialist in the use of aluminum tubes used to produce 81-mm missiles with a range of six miles. An Iraqi monitoring official attended the interview that lasted one hour.
The United States and Britain have raised the alarm in recent months over suspected attempts by Iraq to buy aluminum tubes that could be used to process uranium. Iraq denied the charges and said it had had the tubes since the 1980s.
Inspectors from the IAEA and a U.N. mission toured the Modern Co. for Brewery and other sites yesterday as the mission to scour Iraq for traces of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons entered its second month.
The 100-plus inspectors - whose predecessors left the country in 1998 after Baghdad halted cooperation - are due to issue their next report on January 9 and a final one on January 27, and speculation is growing that this could spark war.
A U.N. Security Council resolution last month gave Iraq a last chance to come clean on its weapons programs, as required by resolutions dating back to the 1991 Gulf war - or face the consequences, which is diplomatic-speak for possible war.
If the Pentagon gives the order to sail, the USS George Washington battle group would be sent from the Atlantic fleet, officials said. The George Washington returned to its base in Norfolk from the region on Dec. 20 and is considered best prepared for action.
Either the USS Abraham Lincoln or the USS Kitty Hawk battle group would be sent from the Pacific fleet. The Abraham Lincoln is in Perth, Australia, having just left the Persian Gulf region. The Kitty Hawk is in port in Japan.
An aircraft carrier battle group includes six to eight surface ships, including cruisers, destroyers, frigates and other vessels, and about 7,500 sailors. An amphibious-ready group has about 2,200 Marines.
The defense officials declined to say which amphibious assault groups are most likely to be sent to conduct operations in Iraq. Those groups center on a large, carrierlike vessel that can launch helicopters and carry Marines.
Already in the region is the carrier USS Constellation and the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, and their escorts, officials said. The Nassau group carries another 2,200 Marines.
A fourth carrier group, centered on the USS Harry S. Truman, is in the Mediterranean Sea.
In addition, the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort is expected to put to sea from its home port in Baltimore next week and prepare for action, military officials said yesterday. It will be headed to Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean, where the United States bases numerous military aircraft, to support any potential conflict with Iraq.
The 1,000-bed floating hospital will initially sail with a crew of 61 civilian mariners and 225 Navy personnel, including enough doctors to support two operating rooms, said Marge Holtz, spokeswoman for the Navy's Military Sealift Command. Hundreds more will be flown to the ship as needed, she said.
The white-painted vessel, marked with red crosses, is equipped to handle combat casualties, including those injured in chemical- or biological-weapons attacks, Miss Holtz said.
It may leave as early as Monday, Miss Holtz said.
----
THE MILITARY
Navy Activates Hospital Ship, in Flurry of War Preparations
December 28, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/international/middleeast/28DEPL.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - In one more major sign of preparations for a possible war against Iraq, the Navy has activated one of its two 1,000-bed hospital ships, the Comfort, to be sent for possible duty in the Persian Gulf, Navy officials said today.
The Baltimore-based ship will initially be staffed with 225 military medical technicians, laboratory workers, other support personnel and 61 civilian seamen, officials said. But the medical staff would expand to 1,200 in wartime.
Here in Washington, officials also confirmed today that the Pentagon had issued a directive ordering the Navy to keep two aircraft carriers and two Marine amphibious assault groups ready to be sent to the Persian Gulf on 96-hour notice.
The Comfort will leave in the next few days for the Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia, Navy officials said. The Comfort, a converted supertanker, was sent to the Persian Gulf during the war in 1991 and was sent after the Sept. 11 attacks last year to New York City, for use as a logistics and rest station.
"Its primary mission is to provide flexible medical response to support wartime operations," Marge Holtz, a spokeswoman for the Military Sealift Command, said today.
Activating the Comfort signals that the Bush administration is preparing for large numbers of American casualties, and is ready to take the risk to back up its threat to use military force to disarm Iraq. The Comfort has 12 operating rooms and is equipped to deal with major trauma cases and casualties from chemical and biological weapons.
"Hospital ships make a profound political statement," said Vice Adm. Michael L. Cowan, the Navy's surgeon general. "It's a national statement that we're serious about this mission."
The hospital ship's assignment is one of a number of signs of a buildup, including the new Pentagon order to prepare additional aircraft carriers for gulf duty, coming exercises to test long-range B-2 bombers and the military's command and control procedures, and the announcement of a new deputy for military operations in the gulf.
About 50,000 American reinforcements, mainly logistics specialists like port handlers and crane operators, are beginning to flow into the region, and will roughly double the American force there. Additional Air Force fighters, bombers and cargo planes are expected to be sent to gulf next month, as well.
The Pentagon's directive on the aircraft carriers and Marine amphibious assault groups formalized a practice the Navy had in place for several months to keep one of each on both the East and West coasts ready to move on short notice. The alert order allows the Pentagon to quickly send back a carrier that has returned from the gulf, like the George Washington, in Norfolk, Va.
Or it could accelerate the scheduled assignment of another carrier to meet the requirement. The Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, is not due to leave Norfolk for the Mediterranean until spring, but a Navy official said it could be sent as soon as February, if needed.
In the Pacific, the alert order has an immediate effect on the carrier Kitty Hawk, which is based in Japan, and the Abraham Lincoln, which is on port leave in Perth, Australia, en route to its home port in San Diego.
As the Navy readies its armada, the Air Force is preparing exercises to test the ability of B-2, B-1 and B-52 bombers to conduct operations from bases in Diego Garcia and England.
The Air Force is planning to station B-2's overseas for the first time, but Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, wants to ensure that the plane's special radar-evading skin can be properly maintained at bases abroad. "We have a series of exercises planned before I'm ready to agree to a concept of operations with B-2's forward deployed," General Jumper said in an recent interview.
The Central Command recently completed a weeklong exercise to test the command-and-control arrangements among the various military headquarters in the gulf region and in the United States.
A senior military official said today that Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of American forces in the gulf, might conduct a follow-up exercise in late January or early February to see if the kinks identified in the first drill have been worked out.
General Franks is getting new help for any war against Iraq. Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, whose ancestors immigrated to the United States from Lebanon, has been named a deputy commander of United States forces in the Middle East, military officials said today.
The Central Command, based in Tampa, Fla., will now have two deputies. The current deputy, Lt. Gen. Michael P. DeLong of the Marine Corps, will stay in Tampa, a military official said, to keep a special focus on military activities in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. Given the time difference of eight to nine hours between here and the gulf, General DeLong could also deal with officials in Washington late in the day.
General Abizaid, who speaks Arabic, German and Italian, would be based at the command's headquarters in Qatar in any war with Iraq, and focus on gulf and Middle East operations. He commanded a battalion during the military's relief operation in northern Iraq after the 1991 gulf war.
General Abizaid is now director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and previously commanded the First Infantry Division in Kosovo. He is also a former commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in combat in Grenada.
-------- propaganda wars
THE NEWS MEDIA
Pentagon Says it Will Give Journalists Access to Frontline War Units
December 28, 2002
New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/politics/28MILI.html
FORT BENNING, Ga. - After decades of battling reporters who demanded access to frontline troops during combat operations, the Pentagon is now pledging to arrange for hundreds of journalists to join the vanguard of American fighting forces should the United States attack Iraq.
Senior Pentagon and military officials said in interviews that limits on access to frontline units, which they defended in past years as necessary to guard the secrecy of missions or to protect correspondents unskilled in the arts of war, would be loosened if President Bush ordered military action.
The Pentagon has made similar pledges of greater access before without making good on the promise. Even now, as the Pentagon completes plans to "embed" correspondents, photographers and video crews within frontline units - and offering military training so journalists can maneuver safely with the troops - officials say it is premature to announce how many would be included, with which units or how close they would be to decisive operations.
Still, Pentagon officials say the evidence of their commitment is that for the first time, they are organizing "media boot camps" like one here at the Army's infantry training center, to prepare journalists so they can report on the troops.
Sig Christenson, military writer for The San Antonio Express-News who is a founder of a journalists' advocacy group, Military Reporters and Editors, said, "It certainly appears on the surface that the Pentagon is serious."
Otherwise, Mr. Christenson said, "why go to all of the trouble of having these boot camps and talking as publicly as they have about putting journalists in with frontline units?"
In previewing outlines of the evolving strategy on the news media, Defense Department and military officials say they are answering demands from news organizations for greater and more direct access to American military missions than has been given in any recent offensive, including the wars in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.
Senior Defense Department and military officials also acknowledge an element of self-interest in altering their news media strategy.
Several Pentagon officials lamented that the military had too often damaged its image by failing to engage the news media. The result, they said, is that the military has found itself surrendering the fight over world opinion to the propaganda of adversaries.
"The primary reason we're doing this is because it's what editors and reporters want," said Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon's deputy spokesman, who met here with the 60 journalists who recently attended the second round of the media training camp.
He put forth another argument for increasing access to the troops.
"Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar," said Mr. Whitman, a former Army Special Forces major. "What better way to combat disinformation on the battlefield than to have you report objectively about what the situation really is?"
Pentagon officials concede that they might have benefited in Afghanistan from news reports by witnesses who could describe difficult, complicated and bloody operations with a credibility borne of independence - which is simply beyond the power of those who carry the portfolio of government spokesman.
Despite the American victories in Afghanistan, these officials said, they risked squandering public opinion on a number of controversial fronts, including civilian casualties, treatment of detainees and alliances with warlords of questionable integrity.
The new policy was tested here at Fort Benning, when an Army Black Hawk had barely touched down before the 10-person squad leaped out, took two steps and crouched in semi-circles on both sides of the helicopter.
These were not combat troops, but correspondents training to get off a helicopter, blades whirring and under fire, without losing their heads. They were participants in the training program organized for the first time ever by a Pentagon in anticipation that journalists would cover frontline units in any war with Iraq.
The weeklong training at Fort Benning covered combat first aid, land navigation and dead reckoning, camouflage and concealment, small-unit maneuvers under direct and indirect fire, protection from chemical or biological attack, minefield detection and the laws of war.
"The first visuals and reports from this conflict will be crucial, because they will set the tone for the entire campaign," said James R. Wilkinson, spokesman for the United States Central Command, which controls American military operations in the Persian Gulf region.
The military has been slow to learn that it has lost two of its traditional wartime monopolies. It can no longer control access to the battle zone, as proven by the numerous correspondents who were on the ground in Afghanistan even before American combat troops. In addition, it can no longer exert command over the instant flow of information from those fields of combat in an era of inexpensive satellite communications.
During the conflict in Afghanistan, permission to live among frontline troops and travel with them did not occur until most of the fighting was over. Even subsequent missions were conducted without direct access, something the Pentagon came to regret on several occasions, officials say.
Perhaps the most dramatic was a July mission in which AC-130 gunships were summoned to strike a crescent of southern Afghan villages, killing or wounding scores of civilians. The Pentagon blamed Taliban fighters for placing women and children near valid military targets and for firing antiaircraft artillery at the Americn warplanes. Correspondents who got to the scene - on their own and after the attack - were told a different story by villagers, that a wedding party was taking place.
If correspondents had been embedded with those ground units that had been patrolling the area - Special Forces troops said they had come under consistent, hostile fire from those villages - an alternative version of events might have quickly emerged, officials now concede.
Decades of reluctance to give correspondents a front-row seat for military operations is a remnant of the Vietnam War, but even the military's top generals say it is time for a new approach.
"This legacy of distrust from Vietnam has simply got to go away," said Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the commanding general of Fort Benning who also serves as commandant of the Army's Infantry Center. "Our isolation serves this country poorly. You are going to get the story, one way or the other. And these engagements with the media will allow the people of the United States of America to see what their spouses and sons and daughters are up to."
One general, now retired, whose exploits in Vietnam were portrayed by Mel Gibson in a recent movie, addressed the journalists to say he imposed two simple rules for correspondents with him in Vietnam, and two simple rules for his troops.
The officer, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, commanded the United States' first major ground engagement in Vietnam, the battle at Ia Drang in November 1965, which he recounted in his book, "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young." It was made into a film this year.
"I told reporters, `Don't get in the way. And don't give up my plans,' " General Moore said. "And I told my troops, `Talk from your level - don't speak for the highers. And tell the truth.' "
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
High Levels of Toxic Rocket Fuel Found in Lettuce
by The Environmental Working Group Oakland, California
From: "Hanforddownwinder@yahoo.com" hanforddownwinder@yahoo.com
Sat, 28 Dec 2002
http://www.ewg.org/reports/rocketlettuce/
Summary
Eating lettuce or other vegetables grown in fields irrigated by the Colorado River may expose consumers to a larger dose of toxic rocket fuel than is considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to test data and documents obtained by Environmental Working Group (EWG).
Test results never before made public show that leafy vegetables grown with contaminated irrigation water take up, store and concentrate potentially harmful levels of perchlorate, a thyroid toxin that is the explosive main ingredient of rocket and missile fuel.
Sworn depositions and other courtroom documents show that the giant aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed Martin - a major user of perchlorate responsible for widespread contamination of Southern California water supplies - knew as early as 1997 that vegetables stored high concentrations of the chemical, but said nothing to the EPA or state health officials. Since most perchlorate-related work by defense contractors is done for the U.S. military, the Department of Defense may also have known, but said nothing to warn other agencies, consumers - or farmers whose crops, through no fault of their own, may be tainted by contaminated irrigation water.
If the perchlorate levels reported here are confirmed by further testing, immediate government action will be needed to reduce perchlorate in lettuce and other vegetables. In the interim, we strongly recommend that the Food and Drug Administration immediately begin testing lettuce and selected other vegetables grown with Colorado River water for perchlorate, and that the results of this testing be made public as soon as they are confirmed.
In addition, any grower who is adversely affected by perchlorate contamination of their crops should be fully compensated for any and all economic losses to their farming operations and property values.
Perchlorate in food could threaten human health
In a front-page story on Dec. 16, 2002, The Wall Street Journal reported that "tests on several vegetable samples from a perchlorate-contaminated farm in Redlands found the plants concentrated perchlorate from local irrigation water by an average factor of 65, according to calculations by Renee Sharp of the Environmental Working Group in Oakland, Calif., one of the few nonprofit groups focused on perchlorate contamination. That means the perchlorate dose in the vegetables was 65 times the amount in the water." Sharp told the Journal: "If people are eating it, on top of drinking it, the EPA will have to lower its proposed drinking-water standard substantially."
Perchlorate, which impairs the thyroid's ability to take up iodide and produce hormones critical to proper fetal and infant brain development, has contaminated almost 300 drinking water sources and farm wells in California and an unknown number of sources in at least fifteen other states. Sources known to be contaminated include the Colorado River from near Las Vegas to the Mexican border - the primary or sole source of irrigation water for farms in California, Arizona and Nevada that grow the great majority of the lettuce sold in the U.S. during winter months.
If the perchlorate concentrations shown in the test results obtained by EWG and cited by the Journal affect the entire Colorado River winter vegetable crop, it would have huge implications for current efforts to set safety standards for exposure to perchlorate. It would signal that decades of negligence by chemical manufacturers, the aerospace industry and the U.S. military have contaminated not only the drinking water of millions of Americans, but their food supplies as well.
Both the EPA and the state of California are working toward establishing standards for perchlorate in drinking water. Under state law, California is supposed to set a standard by January 2004, although progress has been delayed by a lawsuit filed by St. Louis-based Lockheed Martin and Kerr-McGee Corp. of Oklahoma City, which until 1998 manufactured the chemical at a now-closed plant near Las Vegas that is a main source of contamination of the Colorado River. (The sole remaining U.S. producer of perchlorate is American Pacific Corp. of Las Vegas; until 1988 its plant, now in Cedar City, Utah, was near Kerr-McGee's in Nevada.) EPA says it doesn't plan to adopt national standards for perchlorate in drinking water until at least 2006, although both local and state elected officials in California - where more contaminated sources are discovered almost weekly - are calling for faster federal action.
But the newly revealed test data suggest that vegetables from the Imperial Valley region of California and Arizona, which produces most of the nation's lettuce sold nationwide from November to March, may be a more significant source of perchlorate exposure than drinking water.
In a 1999 study, the EPA's National Environmental Research Lab grew lettuce seedlings in perchlorate-contaminated water and found that "perchlorate was accumulated in the leaves to significant levels" - by factors of 100 times or more. (Susarla et al. 1999.) The tests showed that lettuce was able to take up and store 95 percent of the perchlorate in the water. This extraordinarily high rate of bioaccumulation would mean that lettuce grown in water with even low levels of perchlorate could deliver large doses of the toxin to consumers - doses far higher than the EPA's provisional drinking water standard.
But EPA discounted the results of the 1999 tests because the water used was contaminated with concentrations of perchlorate much higher than are typically found in water supplies, and because the lettuce seedlings were grown in greenhouses and harvested before maturity. Another 1999 lab study found that a variety of native (non-crop) plants took up perchlorate from water, a potential biological aid to remediating oil and water contaminated by the chemical. (Bacchus et al. 1999.) Despite the troubling results of these studies and the absence of data on perchlorate in U.S. or imported produce, the EPA concluded that "other available information suggests that foods do not contribute to perchlorate accumulation in the human body." (EPA 2002.)
To close the data gaps, in April 1999 the EPA convened an "eco-summit" whose attendees included the Air Force; a coalition of perchlorate manufacturers and users, including Lockheed Martin, called the Perchlorate Study Group; and five Indian tribes who are major producers of winter vegetables irrigated by the Colorado River. The year before, at a perchlorate forum in Henderson, Nev., the environmental manager for the Yuma, Ariz., Quechan tribe stated:
"Irrigation is a way of life for our people. We have 13,000 acres dedicated to the production of lettuce. We produce annually eight heads of lettuce for every man, woman and child [in the United States]. That food is produced from Colorado River water and 23 million people derive their water supply from the lower Colorado River in three states and two countries. That's how big this problem is." (Rogers 1998.)
At the "eco-summit," top priority was given to a "real-world" study that would test a variety of crops through the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Defense provided $650,000 to fund it and other studies. EPA, USDA and the Food and Drug Administration developed an extensive protocol for the study - before deciding it was too expensive and postponing it indefinitely.
Instead, the Air Force decided it would pay for a second study of greenhouse-grown lettuce. The findings of this second study have never been made public. In 2000, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request by a California public-interest law firm for "All materials related to any investigation or research conducted by, or for, any U.S. Government Agency, regarding the health effects of perchlorate on humans beings and the environment," the Air Force provided some material, but nothing on either of the lettuce studies. The Air Force stated that those and other records "are fully exempt from disclosure until the formally sponsored EPA peer review is complete. They contain information that is exempt under the deliberative process privilege." The EPA-sponsored peer review of proposed perchlorate standards is now complete, but the lettuce studies remain unreleased.
In October 2002, at a water industry-sponsored perchlorate conference in Ontario, Calif., Air Force spokesman Dave Mattie was asked about the second greenhouse lettuce study before a group that included regional EPA officials. Mattie replied that the study had been completed, but "someone walked away with the data." When asked why the "real world" study of vegetables grown with Colorado River water had been cancelled, Mattie again said it was for lack of funds.
But unknown to the EPA, there had in fact been a "real world" study of lettuce grown with perchlorate-contaminated water in 1997 - two years before the "eco-summit" at which such a study had been made a priority. And Lockheed Martin, a key member of the Perchlorate Study Group, was intimately aware of its results. Since the Air Force has worked closely with Lockheed Martin and other members of the Perchlorate Study Group on a number of perchlorate research projects - including unethical tests on human subjects - the U.S. military may have known of these earlier lettuce tests as well.
Lockheed Martin is responsible for polluting dozens of water supplies in the Redlands area of San Bernardino County, Calif., with high levels of perchlorate and other chemicals. A class action lawsuit has been brought against the company by more than 800 residents of the area, who blame contaminated drinking water for a variety of health problems including cancer. Farms in the area are not irrigated by the Colorado River, but draw from wells that have been contaminated by perchlorate plumes from now-abandoned Lockheed facilities.
Lawyers at Engstrom, Lipscomb and Lack in Los Angeles, who represent the Redlands residents suing Lockheed Martin, learned that the company had earlier been in negotiation with Lucky Farms, a San Bernardino grower of lettuce and other vegetables, over contamination of the farm's water supply. The lawyers subpoenaed all materials from the negotiations, and have discovered that Lockheed was sitting on startling evidence of vegetables' uptake and concentration of perchlorate.
The subpoenaed documents, obtained by EWG from the lawyers, showed that in late 1997 and early 1998, Lucky Farms conducted a series of tests on its produce to see if they were contaminated with perchlorate. These tests were conducted on four samples of "leafy vegetables" and four samples of some kind of "vegetable matter" which was not identified.
The results of the testing were dramatic: The four "leafy vegetable" samples averaged 4,490 micrograms of perchlorate per kilogram (ug/kg), with a maximum concentration of 6,900 ug/kg. Perchlorate levels in the "vegetable matter" were lower, averaging 213 ug/kg with a high of 420 ug/kg. Overall, the vegetables were found to have an average of more than 2,600 micrograms of perchlorate per kilogram - thousands of times higher than what the EPA considers to be a safe amount in a liter of water. Although there is currently no federal drinking water standard for perchlorate, the EPA's proposed "reference dose," which is what the agency considers the level that is safe to consume each day, is just one microgram per liter of water or two micrograms per day for an adult.
Despite the startling results, Lucky Farms was somehow persuaded not to bring legal action against Lockheed Martin. However, there was one significant result. Since at least 1995, farm workers living and working on Lucky Farms property were required to sign a form stating that they had been warned of the dangers of drinking irrigation water. But after perchlorate was found in the water (and vegetables) in 1997, the forms were amended to include a more specific warning: "This water may cause cancer or birth defects."
According to EWG's analysis, if a pregnant woman were to eat a typical serving of vegetables with the contamination level found at Lucky Farms, she would get a dose of rocket fuel more than 100 times higher than the EPA considers safe in a liter of drinking water. (Figure 1.) One sample of "leafy vegetables" contained 386 micrograms of perchlorate per one-cup serving, and the average amount of perchlorate in the vegetable samples was 146 micrograms per two-ounce serving.
According to other documents acquired by Engstrom, Lipscomb and Lack, the perchlorate concentration found in the five wells on Lucky Farms' property ranged from 10 to 130 parts per billion (ppb) and averaged 40.1 ppb. Because it is not known which wells were used to irrigate which samples it is difficult to calculate exactly how much each of the tested vegetables concentrated perchlorate, but using average figures for the amount of perchlorate found in the wells and the vegetables, EWG analysis shows that the vegetables concentrated perchlorate by a factor of 65. This means that perchlorate levels in the vegetables were on average 65 times higher than the levels in the water.
Such results are consistent with the high concentrations of perchlorate that have been found in non-crop plants growing in contaminated areas. (EPA 2002.) But the data has profound implications for future perchlorate drinking water standards - as well as for anyone who eats Imperial Valley lettuce.
The lower Colorado River is used to irrigate an estimated 1.46 million acres of farmland in California and Arizona. Water is distributed from the Colorado River to the nearby Imperial Valley of California and southwestern Arizona via extensive irrigation canals. It is used to grow a variety of crops including cotton, alfalfa, lettuce, wheat, citrus, barley, melons, dates, grapes, avocados, tomatoes, onions, carrots and cauliflower. (CRWUA 2002.)
Of particular concern for perchlorate accumulation is a high water content crop like lettuce (which requires three acre-feet of water per acre). In Imperial County, CA, 20,000 acres of iceberg lettuce and 10,500 acres of leaf lettuce were harvested in 1999. (Imperial County 2002.) That year, 45,000 acres of wintertime head lettuce, 5,300 acres of leaf lettuce and 9,300 acres of Romaine lettuce were harvested in Yuma County, AZ. (UA Extension 2002.)
EPA and the state of California are in the process of developing drinking water standards for perchlorate, and both are required to consider sources of exposure other than drinking water. The preliminary research on vegetable uptake of perchlorate strongly suggests that food is likely to be an equal or greater source for perchlorate, but so far this hasn't been reflected in the proposed drinking water standards of either agency.
California's latest draft public health goal (PHG) of 2 to 6 parts per billion (ppb) assumes that 80 percent of a person's exposure to perchlorate comes through drinking water. (OEHHA 2002.) EPA has calculated a "drinking water equivalent level" of 1 ppb for their most recent proposed reference dose (RfD), but has not yet considered the issue of relative source contribution in calculations of a proposed drinking water standard. (EPA 2002.) If vegetables irrigated with Colorado River water are in fact concentrating perchlorate, the drinking water standards will have to be substantially lower to account for the considerable exposure coming from food.
If Lockheed-Martin's perchlorate is indeed contaminating crops to unsafe levels, FDA will have to take emergency action to keep the food off the market. And the growers will have to be compensated for damage to their farming operations and property values.
Recommendations
If the perchlorate levels reported here are confirmed by further testing, immediate government action will be needed to reduce perchlorate in lettuce and other vegetables. In the interim, we recommend that the Food and Drug Administration begin immediately testing lettuce and selected other vegetables grown with Colorado River water for perchlorate, and that the results of this testing be made public as soon as they are confirmed.
In addition, any grower who is adversely effected by perchlorate contamination of their crops should be fully compensated for any and all economic losses to their farming operations and property values.
References
Bacchus et al. 1999.
CRWUA 2002. Colorado River Water Users Association. http://www.crwua.org.
EPA 2002. Imperial County 2002. Agricultural Commissioners Report for 1999.
OEHHA 2002. Rogers, Keith, 1998. Chemical's effect on crops worries tribes. Las Vegas Review-Journal. May 20, 1998.
Susarla et al. 1999. UA Extension 2002. University of Arizona Cooperative Extension. http://ag.arizona.edu/crops/counties/yuma
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[What other government games could be played with water, and why? et]
Interior Department to Limit Calif. Water
By SETH HETTENA
Associated Press Writer
Dec 28, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CALIFORNIA_WATER?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Chavez reports officials may opt to conserve rather than trying to bring in additional water from another source. (Audio)
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- California officials have less than four days to come up with a water conservation plan after the Interior Department announced it will reduce the state's dependence on the Colorado River by 13 percent next year.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton warned of a cutback earlier this month after the collapse of a 75-year deal to transfer Colorado River water from desert farms to cities by Dec. 31. The deal-breaker was the Imperial Valley's refusal Dec. 9 to sell a drop of its massive share of Colorado River water to coastal cities.
It was unclear, however, exactly who would be affected and by how much until the Interior Department on Friday approved 2003 orders for Colorado River water.
"This is a California choice," said Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley, the Bush administration's point man on Western water issues. "It's time to deal with reality."
Norton is the first interior secretary to use her authority to ensure the seven Western states on the river get their share. Besides California, the other states that draw on the river are Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Advertisement
For years, California has used excess water from the Colorado River because other states didn't use the full amount they were entitled to under a 1929 accord. Rapid growth in the West, combined with the worst drought in the river's recorded history, has forced the Interior Department to crack down.
Imperial Valley officials said the deal's main flaw was that it failed to address its concerns over the Salton Sea, California's largest lake, which would quickly become too salty for fish and birds if it weren't for water running off farm fields.
Interior officials did, however, give California a way out.
The state can avoid the cutback - enough to supply about 1.4 million people - if Southern California water agencies resurrect the transfer deal, which will ensure river water allocations for six other Western states.
The impending cuts will increase the pressure on water officials in the Imperial Valley to approve the deal. The Imperial Valley water board has scheduled a meeting for Monday, following several days of intense discussions with other Southern California water agencies aimed at reviving the deal. The board said it may take action.
"We're working really hard to make a long-term regional solution happen," said Sue Gill