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NUCLEAR
Project Sapphire: The Mission
The Fallout of War
North Korean radio denounces USA as "nuclear war fanatic"
New uranium process promoted
Pakistan Was Prepared to Use Nuclear Weapons
Non - Conventional Threat Averted Pakistan - India War
U.N. Arms Experts Scrutinize Seven Sites in Iraq
Iraq Faces Tougher Sanctions After U.N. Vote
U.S. Eases Threat on Nuclear Arms for North Korea
Russia Warns N. Korea to Stay in Treaty
U.S. Open To Informal Talks With N. Korea
Its Hands Full, US Leaves N. Korea for Now to IAEA
Court Rejects Lawmakers' ABM Challenge
Rangel calls for mandatory military service
The Accidental Imperialist
MILITARY
Report: Quarter of World in Conflicts
Kim's regime survives on arms dealing
U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup
The reign of Saddam Hussein
Powell: US will develop Iraqi oil
In Baghdad, Many Insist Americans Would Regret an Invasion
ISRAEL, U.S. STILL DISAGREE ON IRAQ RESPONSE
Israeli Troops Slay Palestinian Boy
Soldiers Cannot Refuse to Serve, Israeli Court Rules
Jordan steps up warnings against US war on Iraq
At Camp Pendleton, Marines Ready for War
How the War Party Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to US
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
The Year in Death
ENERGY AND OTHER
Australia renewable power sector condemns report
Britain approves Innogy wind farm off north Wales
X-rays might join carcinogen list
ACTIVISTS
Police subdue Venezuelan protesters
Court rejects Israeli reservists' appeal
Gather The Women:
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Project Sapphire: The Mission
By Chris Flores
Dec 30, 2002
http://www.newsadvance.com/news/specialprojects/ps2-1.htm
Ust-Kamenogorsk has one hotel that caters to western businessmen - the Hotel Irtysh. Today, it has a casino, a good restaurant, air-conditioning and concierge services.
When Riedy's team was there for 40 nights, it had none of those amenities.
U.S. Ambassador to Kazakhstan William Courtney, who was there during the mission only briefly to give the team a pep talk, described the Hotel Irtysh as "livable, but not up to Western standards."
Keeping the American presence low-key was important, so no other guests were allowed to stay at the hotel. "The fact that Americans were at the hotel - you couldn't hide it," said Courtney. "But the Americans weren't going to town very much."
And the town wasn't coming to visit. The hotel was guarded by Kazakh security forces during the Americans' stay.
Michael Dosier, a chief petty officer in the Navy, was part of the team. He recalled the hush-hush nature of the assignmentgiven to him by a Navy commander. "He couldn't tell me where it was or how long we'd be gone, but he said it would be dangerous," said Dosier, who was lead interpreter for the mission.
Most civilian team members were from Lockheed Martin. Many hadn't served in the military or ever traveled far from the Oak Ridge area - but their nuclear expertise was essential. They received their security clearances when they were briefed just before leaving Oak Ridge. None were allowed to tell their spouses anything.
Once in Kazakhstan, team members could call their spouses for 30 seconds and couldn't say where they were or when they would come back. Usually it was just time to say, "I'm fine and miss you."
The calls ended abruptly midway through the mission after information was leaked to a Florida newspaper about a secret project in a former Soviet republic.
In Kazakhstan, the cover story was that the team was composed of International Atomic Energy Agency officials doing an inventory for the Kazakh government. When a group of foreign reporters in Kazakhstan saw them and asked why they were there, the team stuck to the story, and the reporters bought it.
The team's equipment was trucked into Ulba under cover of darkness in vehicles used regularly by the plant. Security forces guarded the trucks and blocked intersections along the route.
Ulba is a huge metallurgical facility that produced fuel pellets for nuclear reactors and is the world's largest producer of beryllium. It was also in terrible shape.
"That was a run-down plant," said Dosier. "There were actually parts of the plant that looked like they had been bombed out." One CIA report said economic conditions at the plant were "deplorable, with employees regularly going months without getting paid."
By the end of the mission the American interpreters likely appreciated the Ulba workers' conditions.
The interpreters often worked 16 to 18 hours, said Dosier. Because they weren't involved in the specialized work, they were given all the mission's "gopher" duties. The interpreters took care of the team members' laundry, exchanged their money and had to be around for anything requiring an interpreter.
"We even had to take the guys to get haircuts," said Dosier.
They also arranged for the team's Russian food for breakfast and dinner and military ready-to-eat meals for lunch.
"Every one of us probably lost about 30 pounds while we were there," said Dosier.
In the first week at Ulba, the team unloaded equipment, and set up tents, a communications center and an electrical grid powered by diesel generators. The mission's director, Jeffrey Starr, stayed in daily contact with the group from his office in the Pentagon via an encrypted satellite phone.
While the mission was veiled in secrecy, it never had a James Bond feel to it in Ulba. The real danger was never about spies, it was about handling radioactive materials.
The glovebox lines and stations were set up at Ulba, along with a ventilation system and health monitoring equipment. The team set up evacuation routes and did emergency drills - standard procedures when handling highly enriched uranium. The room where the team did the repackaging was about the size of a typical elementary school gym.
Operating carefully using three gloveboxes, the team opened the Kazakh containers and transferred the material into American containers that looked like small paint cans, which were secured by a machine that crimped the lids on.
The containers were decontaminated, removed from the gloveboxes, weighed and analyzed for radiation levels. Some of the material was in big clumps and had to be smashed into smaller pieces with a hammer inside a glovebox.
Three or four of the smaller containers were placed inside the barrel-size transportation containers. Once eight transportation containers were filled, they were put into cargo restraint transporters and stored.
Hydrogen levels in the beryllium-tainted uranium became a problem.
Hydrogen helps sustain a nuclear reaction. If there's too much hydrogen packaged with too little uranium, a dangerous release of heat and radioactivity is possible.
There was too much hydrogen or too little uranium in much of the Sapphire material, making the mixtures unsafe.
To remove the hydrogen, team members had to bake, or oxidize, the material. Extreme care was required because the dust and gas was toxic and overheating could ignite the uranium.
"It was already supposed to have been oxidized, but it wasn't," said Dosier.
A furnace manned by Kazakhs had to be used and their methods worried the Americans. Tempers flared and work stopped for two days. The concern, said Dosier, was whether the material could be baked at the temperatures the Kazakhs were using without igniting it.
Part of the reason for the dispute, Dosier added, was that a Kazakh manager was still in a Cold War state of mind. He didn't like the Americans or that they were removing the material.
Starr found himself refereeing from afar. The Pentagon was racing against time, but was sticking to its philosophy that "you support the troops at the front."
The stalemate ended when the Kazakhs agreed to change how they baked the material.
A few years later at Mt. Athos, BWXT would discover firsthand the problems and dangers of baking the material.
Soviet nuclear accounting was notoriously bad and it was never clear if all the Sapphire material was at Ulba when the Americans arrived. Then it appeared there was more than originally estimated.
The Americans' first inventory turned up 4 percent more uranium at Ulba than the Soviet bookkeeping listed.
Part of the accounting problem was the Soviet system of keeping two sets of books, said nonproliferation expert Jon Wolfsthal.
"Every facility had a quota to meet," said Wolfsthal. "Some years, you're better than quota and some years you're worse than quota. So what they would do is, if you had a good year, you would have one set of books that were the official books and said we met quota. And you take the other 10 pounds and hold it over for the next year, so if you had a shortfall, you could make it up."
A trade journal paper written by Lockheed employees said the total amount of Sapphire material was 2,369 kg of uranium-bearing material in 1,200 Kazakhstani containers. It was repacked into 1,304 American stainless steel cans and put into 447 shipping barrels.
Russian nuclear officials told the Russian media only about one-third of that amount was taken from Ulba.
On site, Dosier said the team's worries were more practical - would they get more material than they had planned for.
"They really wanted us to help them clean the place out," said Dosier. "I had nightmares that they were going to come up with more stuff on the last day."
The repackaging process took 25 days - 12 hours a day and six days a week.
After repackaging was completed, the equipment was taken down, inspected and sealed for transport to the airport in Ust-Kamenogorsk.
Two things now worried the team - terrorists and winter.
Once the material was sealed for transport, it was also at its most vulnerable because terrorists could steal it without risking lethal exposures to themselves.
"The Kazakhstanis provided a special militia team, a SWAT-type team," said Courtney, "to help provide security on the way to the airport."
With a helicopter hovering above, the armed convoy left Ulba just after nightfall on Sunday, Nov. 20, with the intention of getting the material out of the country before first light.
"By that time, there was six inches of ice on the roads," said Dosier. "There were times when the trucks were sliding sideways down the roads."
The Kazakh drivers were undaunted. They knew the real winter weather wouldn't hit for weeks yet. Still, the snow and ice initially prevented the three C-5 transport planes from landing.
"The problem was that the planes they staged at an Air Force base in Europe came in and there was a number of false starts because of bad weather," said Starr. One of the planes turned back because of mechanical problems.
The remaining two planes landed through the snow and ice sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. On board were 100 American servicemen to provide additional security, but more importantly, labor to help load the nuclear cargo.
Dosier and a second interpreter scrambled to coordinate the efforts between the Kazakhstanis and Americans as they frantically loaded the 450 transport containers. In the east, the dark winter sky was beginning to lighten and ice was coating the runway.
The C-5s - now loaded with 150 tons of men, materials and equipment - waited as the Kazakhs prepared an unusual form of ice removal - an engine from a Soviet MIG jet mounted on the back of a truck. To the Americans' surprise, it melted the ice.
About 10 a.m. the two planes lifted off on a route that carried them over the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. It took 20 hours for the planes, twice refueled in mid-air from a KC-10 tanker aircraft, to reach Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Once airborne, a message was sent to Washington. Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who was at a White House dinner, informed both Lugar and Nunn that the mission was coming to a successful conclusion.
In a book Carter would co-write in 1998, he said "the operation was completed just in time. The CIA believed Iranian agents were on the trail of the uranium ... that had just been spirited out."
At the sprawling Dover Air force Base, the containers were immediately put in secure armored trailers used for moving weapons-grade uranium. The vehicles are disguised to look like typical tractor-trailer rigs, but carry armaments and have a radio beacon that provides the trailer's location at all times. The convoy also included support vehicles, mostly SUV types, that carried an armed security team.
Through the night the convoy rolled south through Maryland and Virginia, and into Tennessee. About 40 hours after the Sapphire material left Kazakhstan, it was unloaded at Oak Ridge. Two hours later a press conference was held in Washington.
The completion of the operation was a turning point in U.S. relations with Kazakhstan. It never could have happened without the help of the Kazakhstani political leaders, said Starr.
"This was a quantum leap in trust between the United States and the Kazakhstanis," said Starr.
But Kazakhstan was keeping other channels open. A CIA assessment said the country sold 720 kilograms of natural uranium and four to five grams of low enriched (fuel grade) uranium to Iran for $35 million in 1995.
The Sapphire material would remain in Tennessee for nearly a year before it was shipped, over several months, in similar secure armored trailers to Mt. Athos.
But when all the material was finally unloaded in 1996 for processing at BWXT, it appeared something was amiss.
The final accounting of the materials showed a significant amount of the uranium - enough to make two atomic bombs - couldn't be accounted for.
-------- depleted uranium
[The Washington Post has actually mentioned depleted uranium. Mind you, it's only a well-buried aside. One wonders what investment the publishers have in uranium or military industries, that they would avoid the issue so consistently? et]
The Fallout of War
Iraqi Ammo Debris Fell on Jim Stutts in '91. In Many Ways, He's Being Pelted Still.
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52223-2002Dec29?language=printer
BEREA, Ky. -- The doctor sits at home, filling the hours with television, writing himself reminders that look like prescriptions. "From the desk of Dr. James Stutts," says his notepad, itself a reminder that he practiced medicine until, one day, he knew it was no longer safe. He could not remember faces and names.
Before he retired, Lt. Col. Stutts commanded medical staffs on military bases. He used to helicopter into combat zones to treat the wounded. He still keeps his Army uniform pressed and ready, as if someday he might return to duty.
He is 54 and disabled by dementia. He is a casualty of the Persian Gulf War -- one of the tens of thousands of men and women who left feeling healthy but fell sick after coming home. They filed disability claims at a rate far higher than veterans of other wars.
As the United States deploys troops in anticipation of another battle with Iraq, the Pentagon says it still has no answer for an enigma that has confounded experts for more than a decade: What caused all those Gulf veterans' symptoms? The memory lapses, fatigue, joint pains, rashes, headaches, dizzy spells . . . not to mention the cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease and birth defects.
Many vets speculated that they were poisoned by a combination of vaccines, pesticides, oil fire pollution and other battlefield toxins, including chemical and biological weapons stockpiled by Saddam Hussein. For years their maladies weren't taken seriously: It's stress, it happens after every war and it's all in your head, the military doctors said.
Stutts and his wife, Carol, believed as much. They doubted reports of this so-called Gulf War Syndrome. But by 1996, the doctor himself could no longer work. He suffered limb spasms and seizures that made him fall down stairs.
Bracing himself on a cane, Stutts deposits a pile of medical records on the kitchen counter. One file contains images of his brain. "It's like Swiss cheese," he says.
Here are notices from the Pentagon, saying he may have been exposed to the nerve gas sarin in the Persian Gulf. Here, too, is a recent determination from the Department of Veterans Affairs, ruling Stutts fully disabled and citing "neurotoxin exposure" during his deployment. Now he is a patient at a VA clinic in nearby Lexington, where 100 Gulf War vets -- most in their thirties and forties -- are being treated for symptoms of early Alzheimer's.
It's all evidence of . . . something. After 11 years, the VA and Pentagon no longer dispute that troops got sick. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying why.
With his medical training, Stutts understands that good science takes time and hypotheses must be rigorously tested. But as a patient, he has reached certain conclusions.
"I'm not the same person as I was when I left." And: "I would have preferred to have stepped on a land mine than to be exposed to what I was exposed to over there." Out of the Blue?
THUD-THUD-THUD. Brown columns of smoke thrust from the desert floor into a milky blue horizon.
"Yeah, baby. Woo!" a soldier shouts. More explosions. "Let's get it on!"
The Army engineers ooh and aah like they're watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's March 4, 1991, and they're in southern Iraq, a few miles from a massive ammunition depot called Khamisiyah. They've rigged charges to blow up 39 of 100 ammo bunkers at the site. The engineers are finishing a job begun during the air war in January, when pilots targeted Hussein's conventional and chemical weapons facilities.
"Air Force, eat your heart out," somebody taunts on a videotape shot that afternoon. Thunderheads of dust and sand roil the sky, resembling nuclear mushrooms.
Suddenly -- incoming! Artillery shells and debris start raining down on troops observing the demolition. The "cook-offs" reach units up to 12 miles away.
"We felt all hell had broken loose," Sgt. Brian Martin of the 37th Engineer Battalion would later tell a congressional panel. His videotape became part of the evidence for a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee report that excoriated the military in 1997 for resisting "strong evidence" linking Gulf War illnesses to battlefield toxins.
Neither Martin nor anybody else on the ground realized that at least one of the bunkers -- No. 73 -- contained hundreds of Iraqi rockets filled with sarin and cyclosarin. Six days later, at a nearby open rubble pit, the troops detonated more rockets.
The CIA knew about this deadly stockpile, but its warnings didn't reach commanders in the field in time, documents show. For five years after the war, the Pentagon denied that U.S. troops were exposed to any chemical fallout.
Then after persistent pressure from Congress and veterans advocates, the military announced in June 1996 that 400 soldiers at Khamisiyah were "presumed exposed." A year later, the number swelled to 100,000, after experts studied the winds and movement of the Khamisiyah "plume." They determined that troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were within range. Personnel received notices saying they "may have been exposed to a very low level" of sarin, but "long-term health problems are unlikely."
How much nerve agent was released? About 818 pounds, according to a Pentagon study two years ago. But that's just the latest guesstimate; earlier intelligence reports said more than a ton was detonated in Bunker 73 alone. (One drop of sarin would kill a person within minutes.)
The Pentagon argues this point: Nobody died at Khamisiyah. Nobody showed obvious signs of being gassed. It wasn't until months later that young soldiers complained of feeling old and feeble.
"I am an ex-paratrooper who needs a cane and wheelchair to get around," Martin, 33, testified. "I get lost when I drive sometimes and forget where I am at sometimes." In Range
In January 1991, then-Capt. Stutts deployed to Saudi Arabia with the 138th Medical Support Company. He recalls being bored. He had served as a medical corpsman during two tours in Vietnam, swooping into jungles amid bloodbaths. Operation Desert Storm, with its 100-hour ground war, produced relatively few casualties.
"I didn't come over here to twiddle my thumbs," he told fellow doctors. Stutts volunteered for air ambulance duty with the 316th Medical Detachment that choppered into southeastern Iraq.
Was he ever close enough to see or hear the explosions at Khamisiyah? Sitting on his living room couch nearly 12 years later, he squeezes his eyes shut and strains to fill his mental screen.
He must have been because he received Pentagon letters confirming it, in 1997 and 2000.
Otherwise, it's all a blank.
"That's the thing that I really hate from day to day," he says. "I can't remember things that are important." The Volunteer
To prod her husband's recollections, Carol Stutts leafs through old military records and photo albums. Who's this handsome guy? She laughs, knowing the answer: It's Jim as a teenage sailor on a hospital ship.
One of six kids in a working-class Milwaukee household, Stutts joined the Navy in 1965, straight out of high school. He viewed the service as his only route to medical school. It took him 17 years to get there.
In between came active duty and the reserves and jobs in Philadelphia emergency rooms. Recalling the onslaught of gunshot victims, he says, "I went from one combat zone to another." He enrolled at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1982 on a full scholarship from the Army.
By 1988, Stutts was raising a daughter and working as director of health services at an Army base in Bayonne, N.J. He'd lost his first wife to cancer.
One day he noticed a personal ad in a local paper. It was placed by Carol -- a buoyant 29-year-old looking to get married and start a family. She quickly decided on Jim. He was stable, determined.
"I had energy I could bottle and sell," Stutts recalls. "I could work circles around the most avid worker."
When America launched Operation Desert Shield, he volunteered. He was 42.
In November 1990, before deploying, the doctor had his ruptured appendix removed. Surgeons also discovered Crohn's disease, a colon disorder, which he controlled with medication and diet. But he felt strong, an officer with taut muscles and no gray in his hair. Falling Down
After four months at war, Stutts returned to take a medical command in Yuma, Ariz. He never before had had trouble completing the two-mile run and calisthenics for his semiannual fitness qualifications. But that summer his muscles and joints ached. He felt fatigued. "I guess I'm just getting old," he told himself.
In 1992 Stutts left active duty, moving the family (now including a young son) to take an emergency room job in Kentucky, near Berea, a charming college town in the Appalachian foothills. He also joined the National Guard.
Later he went into private practice, and did well financially. But his mind -- and overall health -- kept failing. Walking in the back yard or standing in the bathroom, he'd suddenly collapse. He had headaches, dizziness, strange temperature fluctuations.
Just watching TV, sharp pains shot through his legs. He recalls retreating into his den, hoping not to alarm Carol and the children as he rolled on the floor, trying to deaden the pain.
In November 1996, he shut down his practice. But repeated visits to experts showed nothing medically wrong, except some progression of his Crohn's disease. The VA enrolled him in a stress management group.
Carol started to have doubts. Was Jim really sick?
"Knock it off," she screamed at him one day. "Get back to work."
He wanted to, he said. But with worsening memory lapses, he didn't trust himself to drive, let alone care for patients. By late 1997 he was found "unfit for retention" by the National Guard.
One of his doctors, J. Wesson Ashford, wrote in late 1998: "The concern is that these symptoms are caused by sarin neurotoxicity and that sarin is still present in his system."
By now Stutts sometimes needed a wheelchair. By now Carol was starting to feel less like a wife and more like a widow. False Alarms?
Talk to Gulf War veterans around the country and you'll hear this refrain:
"I tell my wife, 'I feel like a 60-year-old man, like I'm falling apart,' " says Todd Kelly, 36, a former Army paratrooper now working as an engineer in Portland, Ore.
After the war, Kelly experienced joint pains and concentration problems; he still has irritable bowel syndrome. The VA gave him a 60 percent VA disability rating. He was near the Khamisiyah demolition, but like other vets, Kelly doesn't blame his symptoms on one possible toxic exposure.
"We cleaned our vehicles with scrub brushes and diesel fuel for a month," he says. "I'm sure it's not very good for you. It's not Palmolive."
The troops endured sandstorms. They inhaled ash and a mist of oil from destroyed wells. They breathed the dust of spent shells that contained depleted uranium. Bedeviled by bugs, they doused themselves with pesticides and wore flea collars.
During the air war, Kelly watched through night-vision goggles as coalition pilots pounded hundreds of targets in Iraq. Everybody knew Hussein was stockpiling nasty germs and chemicals. What became of that fallout?
The troops's chemical attack alarms sounded constantly. Stressed-out soldiers fumbled for their gas masks and heavy protective suits. They gobbled nerve agent pre-treatment pills.
The Pentagon says that the thousands of alarms were all false; that the equipment was overly sensitive. Eventually some commanders just shut them off.
Throughout the 1990s, Senate and House panels gathered documents and testimony suggesting that Gulf troops were harmed by chemical warfare agents. Today, after their own exhaustive studies, defense officials say it's all anecdotal, or wrong, and there's no proof.
But, citing "lessons learned," deployment health experts express confidence that, this time, alarms and protective equipment and training will all be better. The General Accounting Office isn't so sure; it recently cited "many problems in the Defense Department's capabilities to defend against chemical and biological weapons."
The lesson learned by vets like former Pfc. Kelly is not to trust the official story. "I'm a walking experiment for my government" is how he sees it. Like Agent Orange and the atomic tests, it may take decades for the entire truth to come out, he says.
"They knew all along there were chemicals released in the theater of operations, but they didn't want to tarnish the victory. They should be honest about it." The Evidence
A standard-issue gas mask and chemical protection suit decorate one corner of Steve Robinson's small office in Silver Spring. A former Army Ranger sergeant, he's head of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans' advocacy group. Crunching recent VA statistics, he has come up with what he calls the "post-war casualty rate" of America's last war with Iraq.
In his view, the numbers demolish the notion of a clean or easy victory. Estimated veterans: 573,000. Number who have proved, to the satisfaction of government doctors, that they had a service-related medical problem: 160,000.
Which comes to nearly 28 percent -- a rate of approved disability claims exceeding World War II (6.6 percent), Korea (5 percent) and Vietnam (9.6 percent).
Some VA and Pentagon officials say the rate is inflated by the government's recent, more liberal policies of evaluating service-related illnesses. Others say the rigors of military life -- all that running and parachuting -- result in higher claims in categories like musculoskeletal woes. Others postulate that previous generations of vets were just tougher.
But, at both the VA and the Pentagon, the top doctors concur on one point: The Gulf vets are not fakers or malingerers.
"This is not a psychosomatic issue," says Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director for deployment health support in the Department of Defense.
Still, after years of study, military doctors say no research has established an etiology, an underlying physical cause.
As for exposure to sarin or other toxins, "I have not seen any scientific evidence to tie those exposures to the illnesses we've seen among Gulf War veterans," says VA toxicologist Mark Brown. "We know people came back with difficult-to-diagnose illnesses. We don't know the cause, but we can provide treatment."
Activists and congressional investigators say the Pentagon wasted years by focusing on a stress explanation. In the case of sarin -- developed as a pesticide in the 1930s -- the Army has long been aware of its effects.
In his book "Gassed in the Gulf," former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington cites an information sheet the Army distributed to troops a dozen years ago. It listed "symptoms of chronic, low dose exposure" to nerve agents, including sarin: "Memory loss, decreased alertness, decreased problem-solving ability, and language problems are suspected but have not been proved by scientific study."
The Pentagon's official position, as stated twice on its Web site: "Current medical evidence indicates that long term health problems from these levels of nerve agent are unlikely."
But in military-funded animal studies, evidence is slowly accumulating that exposure to non-lethal levels of sarin can later suppress the immune system, and cause brain changes and behavior problems. Other researchers have examined survivors of the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, finding neurological problems and memory loss as seen in Gulf War patients.
Francis L. O'Donnell, a Defense Department consultant who has reviewed Japanese studies of the incident, calls the data "fuzzy." Some of those hospitalized were later shown to have subtle nervous system changes, he says, but he also notes that among them were alcohol users. "Is that important or not? I don't know."
O'Donnell's bottom line: "It is unclear what were the effects of the sarin, versus what were the effects of the panic."
In other words, maybe stress caused their symptoms. 'These Guys Are Sick'
SQUEAK. SQUEAK. SQUEAK. A sharp sound, like a bad wheel on a shopping cart, echoes through the holiday-decorated hallways of the Lexington VA hospital.
"The tin man needs oil," Jim Stutts says, then offers a stoic smile.
It's the noisy metal brace attached to his left leg. As the gaunt doctor-patient limps by, staffers greet him warmly by name.
He's checking in with his physicians, Wes Ashford and Joel Stephenson. As usual they can't offer much optimism. His brain scans keep showing degeneration.
The doctors do have a new memory drug that may help the symptoms, even if there's no cure. And they believe him, just as they believe the other 153 area patients enrolled in the Gulf War clinic.
"These guys are sick," says Stephenson, who oversees the clinic. "Like Dr. Stutts, they are successful people on the outside. They don't want to be here."
Worst off are the combat troops, the doctors say. The men and women from medical units who treated them also report rashes, headaches, other pains.
"About everybody across the board has joint pains -- everybody, including me," says Linda Godfrey, the clinic's case manager. A nurse, she served in the Khamisiyah fallout zone.
A couple of months after returning, her body burned like fire, forcing her to wear ice packs at work. "It came and went without rhyme or reason for four years," says Godfrey.
Extensive neuropsychological tests have demonstrated that the brain damage in Gulf War patients is similar to that of elderly patients with Alzheimer's. "You can't dispute it," Stephenson says flatly.
Ashford, a psychiatrist, is an Alzheimer's specialist who runs the hospital's memory disorders clinic. On a hallway wall, he displays computer images of 10 vets' brains, pinpointing areas of reduced blood flow. Compared to the smooth gray hemispheres of a normal brain, these resemble landscapes pocked by gaping craters. Bombs come to mind.
"The striking thing is," Ashford says, "you don't see these problems in the Vietnam vets, the Korean War vets, the World War II vets."
Yes, one explanation could be sarin: "If you get a few molecules in a particular area . . ."
But that's "idle speculation," Ashford quickly amends. Such a hypothesis must be tested. "We don't have an explanation and I don't want to pretend that we do." Spreading the Blame
The service was Stutts's life: 32 years, counting the reserves and the National Guard.
He doesn't want it to be over. He blames, bitterly, Saddam Hussein; the Western weapons suppliers who sold Iraq its poisons; his own government, for its "deplorable" treatment of vets.
"All I want is my health back," he says, wearing an Army sweat shirt, which he will take off and put on repeatedly as he feels chills, then fevers. "I want my military command back. I want to wear the green uniform. I want my medical practice. I want to be able to get my social and family life back."
It's a long list, but one thing isn't on it. He doesn't ask for an answer. He believes he already has one.
----
North Korean radio denounces USA as "nuclear war fanatic"
30 Dec 2002
Khilafah
http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=5951&TagID=2#
North Korean radio has broadcast a commentary focusing on what it said was US hypocrisy in calling for Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programme while maintaining the world's largest stockpile of nuclear warheads itself. It went on to denounce the USA as a "nuclear villain" and "nuclear fanatic". The following is the text of a report by North Korean radio on 28 December
It is one of the United States' stereotyped methods to put a nuclear hat on other countries and create a commotion all the time.
Nowadays, the United States is carrying out a nuclear pressure commotion by putting a nuclear hat on our country, Iran, and Iraq. Due to the acts of the United States, which creates a commotion by acting as a nuclear judge although no one ordered it to, peace and stability was destroyed in various regions of the world, and troubles are arising on the word stage. The great leader Korean: suryong , Comrade Kim Il-sung, indicated the following:
A nuclear power, which becomes a practical threat to mankind's survival, is on the front-line and putting unjust pressure on us, a non-nuclear country. This could be called an expression of arrogance by those accustomed to disregarding the principle of justice and equality and demanding their unilateral intentions in international relations.
The United States is the country that manufactured nuclear weapons for the first time in the world, and it is the only country that imposed a nuclear disaster on mankind by actually using nuclear weapons. When the World War II was coming to an end, the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan although this was not militarily necessary with the visible demise of Japan; and the United States took hundreds of thousands of people's lives in an instant.
Furthermore, the United States greatly damaged people by using depleted uranium shells, which is a type of nuclear weapon, during the Persian Gulf war and Yugoslavian war. The United States is the world's greatest country possessing nuclear weapons that gravely threatens mankind's survival.
In 1945, when atomic weapons were developed, the United States had three nuclear weapons. In 1967, after 22 years, the number of nuclear weapons increased to 32,500. This was the greatest quantity in the world. Even now, the United States holds the world championship for possessing nuclear weapons.
There are around 20,000 nuclear weapons in the United States' nuclear weapons arsenal. Stored here are all types of nuclear weapons, including micro-size nuclear weapons, also known as nuclear (?sacks), nuclear mines, and neutron bombs which are weapons of the devil. The quantity of nuclear weapons possessed by the United States can push mankind into nuclear a disaster scores of times. The United States is creating a commotion by saying that someone could have developed one or two nuclear weapons. This is truly an absurd act.
Although the United States advocates nuclear arms reduction from outside, actually it does not intend reducing the vast scale of nuclear weapons it possesses. Using all kinds of deceptive methods, the United States is exerting unlimited efforts not only to preserve and maintain the vast nuclear weapons it already possesses but also to develop and produce new types of nuclear weapons.
As has been revealed, Russia and the United States promised to reduce two-thirds the strategic weapons in their country within 10 years. However, rather than completely destroying the majority of nuclear warheads that will be reduced, the United States is trying to preserve them at a warehouse so that they can be used again in emergency.
This is not a stand on sincerely reducing nuclear weapons, but comes out of its intention to realize its nuclear monopoly while deceiving the world's people.
With regard to this, a Japanese newspaper commented that such news echoing from Washington constitutes the third blow challenging mankind's aspiration for building a denuclearized world.
The United States likes to find fault with other countries' nuclear issues and is making a nuclear commotion. They chodurun are heated up in developing and modernizing nuclear weapons.
Recently, the Bush administration also gave orders to develop nuclear warheads to penetrate underground, capable of destroying underground targets. In accordance with this, nuclear development organizations have been re-organized; an enormous amount of money is being disbursed for this sector; munitions monopolies are competitively engaged in developing nuclear weapons.
Since it conducted its first sub-critical nuclear test in 1997, the United States, which continues to press ahead with nuclear tests while fooling international social circles, has conducted scores of these tests up to the present.
Needless to say, this is a challenge against mankind's demand to conclude the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and international pledges.
Not satisfied with recent sub-critical nuclear tests, the United States is openly engaged in manoeuvres to resume even underground nuclear tests accompanying nuclear explosions.
It is none other than the United States that makes use of nuclear weapons its policy and (?takes the lead) in nuclear pre-emptive strikes.
As has been known, at the beginning of 2002 in the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, the United States designated seven countries, including our country, as nuclear attack targets and fashioned a pre-emptive strike strategy with nuclear attacks as its basis in September 2002.
There is no limit when we list US acts as the nuclear villain and the nuclear fanatic.
The logic and dogmatism of US-styled superpowerism - that only the United States has a moral standard with which it can judge right from wrong; only the United States can do everything; and other countries must unconditionally obey the United States' opinions - can never work in today's world.
The United States must correctly know this; deeply reflect on its nuclear crimes before giving instructions to other countries using the nuclear issue and making a commotion of pressure; and renounce its reckless nuclear policy.
----
New uranium process promoted
By RUSS OATES,
Associated Press
December 30, 2002
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_1640329,00.html
NASHVILLE - Local leaders from five counties near Nashville had the same question after their November tour of a Dutch uranium enrichment plant.
"How do you go back and explain?" Sumner County Executive Hank Thompson said.
The group made the trip to learn more about the gas centrifuge method of uranium enrichment. Louisiana Energy Services wants to use that technology at a proposed $1.1 billion plant on 260 acres of old Tennessee Valley Authority land in Hartsville, about 40 miles northeast of Nashville.
Four Lake Regional Industrial Development Authority, an organization comprising Macon, Smith, Sumner, Trousdale and Wilson counties, bought the land from TVA earlier this year, and LES wants to lease it for a plant that will employ 250 workers.
Thompson, who also chairs the development authority, said he and his colleagues studied the process of enriching uranium and understand it, but he's concerned because the word nuclear "gets people scared."
"It's not Paducah, and it's not Oak Ridge," said Thompson, referring to workers made sick at the uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Ky., and at the now-shuttered uranium facility in Oak Ridge.
Uranium, a naturally occurring radioactive element, contains small amounts of the isotope uranium-235, which fuels nuclear reactors and weapons.
But the concentration of the U-235 isotope must be boosted, or enriched. Most nuclear power plants require uranium containing about 5 percent of the U-235 isotope. Nuclear weapons need about 90 percent.
"The process is to separate the isotopes based on the difference in their mass," said Colin Heath, an LES consultant.
The current method used to do that is called gaseous diffusion and is used at only one place in the United States - a plant operated by USEC Inc. in Paducah. The process isolates the smaller, lighter U-235 isotope by forcing uranium gas through a series of hundreds of filters.
The newer gas centrifuge process, used in Russia and Europe, separates U-235 from heavier isotopes by pumping uranium gas through hundreds of cylinders spinning at speeds from 50,000 to 70,000 revolutions per minute.
That's the method LES wants to use at Hartsville, since it's cheaper and uses about 10 percent of the energy needed for gaseous diffusion, Heath said.
USEC is also trying to secure a gas centrifuge license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and on Dec. 4 it announced plans to build a $150 million operation to test the technology in Ohio.
LES set Jan. 30 as its deadline to submit a license application to the NRC, spokeswoman Nan Kilkeary said.
Meanwhile, Thompson continues to show a video he prepared on local television on gas centrifuge technology, while Citizens for Smart Choices, a group opposed to the LES plant, hosts public meetings and distributes fliers, group leader DeAnna Fry said.
Fry said most people are concerned about how the plant will affect public health and safety, especially what will happen to the uranium left over from the enrichment process.
LES says it will store depleted uranium at the Hartsville site for an amount of time yet to be determined by the NRC, Kilkeary said.
Kilkeary said a person standing beside a cylinder of depleted uranium for a full year would absorb the same amount of radiation given off by "about half a pack of cigarettes."
Halil Avci, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, said radiation from the uranium enrichment process can be shielded, but depleted uranium can damage the kidneys if taken into the body.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan Was Prepared to Use Nuclear Weapons
December 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-India-Nuclear.html
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan's president indicated Monday he had been prepared to use nuclear weapons against India earlier this year, but a spokesman later backed off the assertion, saying that was not what he meant when he spoke of non-conventional war.
In a speech to Pakistani Air Force veterans, President Pervez Musharraf said he personally sent messages to Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee through visiting leaders that if Indian troops moved a single step across the disputed frontier, ``they should not expect a conventional war from Pakistan.''
Musharraf's comments appeared to confirm fears voiced last winter that the world was close to witnessing its first bilateral nuclear war. But hours later, a top official said the mention of non-conventional war was not a reference to the use of nuclear weapons.
Musharraf meant the people of Pakistan together with the conventional army would ``neutralize the enemy's offensive,'' army spokesman Gen. Rashid Quereshi said. ``Nowhere did he say that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons at all.''
The danger point came when India and Pakistan sent troops to their shared border after a deadly attack on the Indian Parliament last December. New Delhi blamed Islamabad for helping to mastermind the assault that killed 14 people, while Pakistan denied playing any part.
India also possesses nuclear arms, and the situation so worried Washington at the time -- just as Pakistan became a key ally in the war on terror -- that it warned Americans to leave India.
During the heightened tension between the nuclear-armed neighbors, the U.S. Ambassador in New Delhi, Robert Blackwell, said there was a chance -- though a ``rather small'' one -- that the conflict between India and Pakistan could have led to nuclear war.
Blackwell said the threat of nuclear war caused the United States to speed up a warning to its citizens to leave India. Washington had long advised Americans to stay away from Pakistan.
The two nations had already fought three wars in 50 years and it seemed another war was imminent, until intensive international diplomacy brought the neighbors back from the brink.
India's army chief said Monday that Pakistan's nuclear capability would not have deterred it.
``We were absolutely ready to go to war. Our forces were well located,'' Press Trust of India quoted Gen. Sunderajan Padmanabhan as saying. ``Such a decision (on whether to go to war) is ultimately a political decision.''
Tensions eased recently as both sides said they were stepping back from their war footing. After massing over a million troops along their common border, India announced in October that it began pulling back its troops. Last month Pakistan said it was doing the same.
India and Pakistan conducted underground nuclear tests in 1998, prompting international condemnation and sanctions against both countries. But the economic penalties were lifted after Pakistan became an ally of the anti-terrorist coalition following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The United States was particularly anxious to avoid an Indian-Pakistani war at a time when it depended heavily on Pakistani support as it waged its war in Afghanistan, Pakistan's neighbor to the west.
India and Pakistan insist they're responsible atomic powers. Each has ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads deep into each other's territory.
Pakistan and India share a 1,800-mile border, a section of which is a cease-fire line that divides Kashmir. Both claim the largely Muslim region in its entirety and have fought two wars over it.
Pakistan-backed militants have been waging a bloody secessionist uprising in Indian Kashmir since 1989 that has killed more than 61,000 people. Militants want either outright independence or union with Islamic Pakistan. Kashmir is India's only Muslim majority state in the predominantly Hindu country.
--------
Non - Conventional Threat Averted Pakistan - India War
December 30, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-india-musharraf.html
KARACHI (Reuters) - Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said Monday the threat of ``non-conventional war'' had helped prevent a conflict earlier this year with nuclear-armed neighbor India.
Musharraf said India had been warned that Pakistan would not respond with conventional war the moment Indian forces crossed the frontline and launched an attack on Pakistan.
He did not say if this meant a nuclear strike.
``Our warning of non-conventional war helped,'' he told top military and retired army officers in the port city of Karachi.
India said last Sunday it had completed the withdrawal of its troops from its border with Pakistan, ending a face-off that nearly triggered a war between the two.
Musharraf said the threat of war was over, as India had withdrawn its troops and Pakistan was in the process of withdrawing its forces.
He said various world leaders had conveyed to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee a message from Pakistan that it should not expect a conventional war from Islamabad. ``I conveyed this message to the Indian government that the moment they step out of the LOC (Line of Control) and the international border, then they should not expect conventional war from Pakistan,'' Musharraf said.
``Their forces would be encircled without any position to concede and my message, I believe, was effectively conveyed to Mr. Vajpayee,'' Musharraf added.
Thousands of Pakistani and Indian troops face each other on more than 700 km (437 miles) long Line of Control that divides the disputed Kashmir region between the two countries.
Pakistan and India have already fought three wars since they gained independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
Tensions flared up between the two countries after suspected Muslim militants attacked Indian Parliament last December.
India amassed hundreds of thousands of troops at its border with Pakistan demanding Islamabad stop supporting what it calls ``cross-border terrorism.''
Pakistan, which denies the Indian charge, also matched the Indian move with its own military buildup.
After intense U.S.-led diplomatic efforts, the two nations, announced in October the withdrawal of their troops, except in Kashmir at the Line of Control where the two sides frequently trade cross-border artillery fire.
-------- inspections
U.N. Arms Experts Scrutinize Seven Sites in Iraq
December 30, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-inspectors.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.N. weapons inspectors searched seven suspect sites in Iraq Monday, and the head of a missile facility accused them of acting like gangsters.
``A team of 25 inspectors stormed into the plant ... in a way never seen before and in a manner similar to the work of gangs,'' Mohammad Hussein told reporters.
He was speaking after the inspectors counted missile engines at the Al Sumoud Company of Al Karamah Company in Abu Ghreib, 16 miles west of Baghdad.
U.N. experts, absent for four years, have been working flat out since resuming inspections on Nov. 27 to check Baghdad's assertion that it has no banned weapons.
There are now 110 inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq.
An UNMOVIC chemical team visited Al Nida Public Company in the Baghdad suburb of Zafaraniyah.
The facility, run by the Military Industrialisation Commission, produces metal molds and tools. Previous U.N. inspectors had listed it as producing modified Scud missiles.
The Al Nida facility was rebuilt after it was destroyed in a cruise missile attack in 1993, one of dozens of plants hit by Western warplanes or missiles in the 1990s.
Biological teams scoured a health laboratory in central Baghdad and a site that belongs to the Agriculture Ministry in the Abu Ghreib area.
An IAEA team visited That al Sawari Public Company in al Taji area, 16 miles north of Baghdad. The U.N. spokesman said the experts inspected two factories at the site -- the Resin Plant and the Fiberglass Plant.
An UNMOVIC multidisciplinary team inspected Al Mahmoudiayah water treatment facility on the Euphrates river, south of Baghdad, which is a central chlorine store for water treatment plants outside Baghdad.
Iraqi officials said a communications group headed toward Mundharieh, 110 miles northeast of Baghdad, near the Iranian border. But the U.N. spokesman did not mention this visit in his statement.
A U.N. Security Council resolution adopted in November gave Iraq one last chance to disarm or face possible war. Iraq says it has no such weapons and no plans to produce them.
--------
Iraq Faces Tougher Sanctions After U.N. Vote
December 30, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
BAGHDAD/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iraq, its economy in tatters, faced tougher sanctions on Tuesday after the United Nations named goods such as drugs, trucks and boats that cannot be imported without prior approval.
U.S. and British warplanes attacked Iraqi air defenses after the Iraqis flew military aircraft into the southern ``no-fly'' zone, the U.S. military said.
The 15-nation U.N. Security Council voted 13-0 to adopt the resolution expanding the list of civilian goods under sanctions. Russia and Syria abstained.
The United States and Britain cautioned Iraq against seeing this as a sign of divisions over its obligation -- under former council resolutions -- to give up weapons of mass destruction or face ``serious consequences.''
Iraq said the resolution would aggravate the suffering of its people, who have been under U.N. economic sanctions since Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990.
``We confirm that the Security Council should lift the sanctions and that Iraq has met all its obligations with regard to Security Council resolutions,'' Iraqi envoy Mohammed S. Ali told reporters.
Additions to the U.N. sanctions list range from drugs to protect Iraqi soldiers from poison gas and anthrax to boats like those used in a deadly attack on a U.S. warship two years ago.
At its headquarters In Florida, the U.S. Central Command said in a statement that U.S. and British aircraft used precision-guided weapons to target Iraqi air defense communications facilities and an air defense mobile radar in strikes on Monday.
It marked the second straight day and the fourth in five days that the Western aircraft have attacked Iraqi targets in the southern no-fly zone.
IRAQ CHARGES HYPOCRISY
A top adviser to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the United States was trying to tempt scientists to leave Iraq and entice them to giving false information with financial offers.
Iraq provided names of more than 500 scientists on Saturday, saying they were linked to its nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic weapons programs.
U.N. inspectors began interviewing scientists over Iraq's alleged weapons programs last week but the United States wants some of the interviews to take place outside Iraq.
``This is an American plan with a clear aim. If it succeeds in tempting some of those (scientists) through promises or maybe also through threats it might get information, also false information,'' Amir al-Saadi, Saddam's scientific adviser, said.
The United States has declared Baghdad in material breach of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in November which gave Iraq one last chance to disarm or face possible war.
Washington said an Iraqi declaration over its weapons of mass destruction fell short of revealing arms programs. Iraq denies it has any such programs.
Hussam Mohammad Amin, the head of the Iraqi Monitoring Directorate, told Qatar's al-Jazeera television station Iraq had not rejected the idea of taking the scientists abroad.
Asked what guarantees Iraq sought, he said: ``The guarantees concern above all what the scientists will say. Perhaps something will be attributed to them which they did not state and this would be dangerous and can be used as a justification to launch an attack on Iraq.''
U.N. INSPECTIONS
U.N. weapons inspectors searched at least seven suspect sites in Iraq on Monday, and the head of a missile facility accused them of acting like gangsters.
``A team of 25 inspectors stormed into the plant...in a way never seen before and in a manner similar to the work of gangs,'' Mohammad Hussein told reporters.
He was speaking after the inspectors counted missile engines at the Al Sumoud Company of Al Karamah Company in Abu Ghreib, 16 miles west of Baghdad.
U.N. experts, absent since December 1998, have been working flat out since resuming inspections on November 27 to check on Baghdad's assertion that it has no banned weapons.
There are now 110 inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq.
-------- korea
U.S. Eases Threat on Nuclear Arms for North Korea
By DAVID E. SANGER
December 30, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/international/30DIPL.html?position=top&ei=1&en=19bd19289463b4bc&ex=1042225862&pagewanted=print&position=top
CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 29 - The Bush administration backed away today from a longstanding declaration by the United States that it would not tolerate a North Korean nuclear arsenal, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other officials insisted that it would be counterproductive to set deadlines for North Korea to meet American demands or make threats to take military action.
Appearing on several Sunday television news programs, Mr. Powell refused to characterize as a crisis North Korea's expulsion of nuclear inspectors and its declaration that it would begin manufacturing plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, insisting instead that it was a "serious situation." He acknowledged on the ABC News program "This Week" that the Clinton administration had what he called "a declaratory policy" that if North Korea began to reactivate its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, the country's main nuclear facility, "they would attack it."
"We don't have that policy," said Mr. Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Bill Clinton during the start of the previous North Korean nuclear crisis. "We're not saying what we might or might not do."
The ambiguous signal to North Korea, made after lengthy consultations with President Bush at his ranch here, represents a major strategic gamble. The C.I.A. has warned that once the North begins reprocessing nuclear fuel into plutonium, it could produce five or six weapons by early summer. The C.I.A. has estimated that it already has two.
But Mr. Bush and his aides have concluded that warning North Korea that it would not be allowed to produce more weapons would only create a sense of crisis, exactly what officials say the North seeks, and what they want to avoid. The administration has opted to pursue economic isolation of a country that is already one of the world's most isolated. The administration's position was met with considerable skepticism today by Democrats and Republicans alike.
The Republican who is about to take over the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, declared during an appearance on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that "This is a crisis," and he was mildly critical of the administration for refusing to negotiate directly with the North Korean government.
But he welcomed Mr. Powell's announcement that the administration would work through the United Nations Security Council, saying that approach was working in Iraq, and "it's got to work in Korea."
Several of Mr. Bush's national security aides said in interviews that Mr. Powell was simply giving voice to the military reality that the United States has no effective way of protecting South Korea or Japan from a North Korean counterattack if the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon were bombed.
"I'm not saying we don't have military options," one of Mr. Bush's most senior advisers said in an interview. "I'm just saying we don't have good ones."
Still, the diplomatic, nonconfrontational approach the administration has taken has clearly put Mr. Bush's aides in the odd position of explaining why they are massing troops around Iraq, as it lets inspectors roam the country and releases lists of weapons scientists, while insisting on patient diplomacy with a country that has expelled those inspectors and announced that it will restart plutonium production immediately.
Mr. Powell argued today that the approach makes sense because intelligence officials believe that North Korea has probably been an undeclared nuclear power for some time but has never used any weapons or threatened to use them. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, by contrast, has used chemical weapons before and, Mr. Powell says, has demonstrated far more evil intent, seeking to dominate the Middle East.
He also argued that the administration was actually listening to those who urge it to work with allies, rather than act unilaterally.
Mr. Powell said repeatedly today that the administration was willing to communicate with North Korea, even if it rejected direct talks. He seemed to suggest that messages would be sent through China and Russia, or through the North Korean mission to the United Nations.
But he insisted the North would receive no benefits while its nuclear programs remained active. "They want us to give them something for them to stop their bad behavior," he said. "What we can't do is enter into a negotiation right away where we are appeasing them."
It is unclear what Mr. Powell meant by "right away." Mr. Lugar suggested that, directly or indirectly, negotiations were inevitable.
When not speaking for attribution, some administration officials concede that the argument for confronting Iraq militarily while slowly squeezing North Korea economically seems, in the word of one senior diplomat, "considerably harder to explain on TV than it was a month ago."
"The best you can say about it," he added, "is that North Korea is an example of why we cannot allow Saddam to hold on to his weapons of mass destruction.
"Once he gets them, he'll have the same power to intimidate his neighbors that Kim Jong Il enjoys today," he said, referring to the reclusive and unpredictable North Korean leader.
There are several theories here and in Washington about the underlying strategy Mr. Bush is pursuing.
One is that he simply cannot afford a confrontation with North Korea when the United States military is preparing for a possible war with Iraq.
But Mr. Powell strongly argued that the United States was capable of handling both situations at once, and one of Mr. Bush's senior advisers called a reporter this weekend to argue that if Mr. Bush was seeking to play down the seriousness of the North Korean threat, he would not have ordered the State Department to confront the North Korean government in October with evidence that it was secretly developing a nuclear weapons program.
A second theory is that the administration has calculated that Mr. Kim, even if he adds to his nuclear arsenal, is essentially more predictable and less dangerous than Mr. Hussein, who has never successfully produced a nuclear bomb.
Mr. Powell made that argument today. "This is a country that's in desperate condition," Mr. Powell said. "What are they going to do with another two or three more nuclear weapons when they're starving, when they have no energy, when they have no economy that's functioning?"
For the Bush strategy to work, China and South Korea must go along, officials acknowledge, and for now both are balking. The Chinese fear an economic crisis in the North will lead to a flood of starving refugees. The South Koreans fear Mr. Bush's economic squeeze could lead to a collapse in the North and perhaps a political explosion.
----
Russia Warns N. Korea to Stay in Treaty
By PAUL SHIN
Associated Press Writer
Dec 30, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KOREAS_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Gilbert reports North Korea continues to push for direct `face-to-face' negotiations with the U-S. (Audio)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea expressed alarm Monday at signs communist North Korea was preparing to withdraw from an international agreement to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, and the North's close ally, Russia, warned it not to back out of the treaty.
"We're closely watching what North Korea's next step would be," a South Korean Foreign Ministry official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The diplomatic flurry followed a statement Sunday from Pyongyang suggesting it would abandon the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons - a move that would escalate the crisis over the isolated North's decision to restart its nuclear facilities and expel U.N. nuclear agency inspectors.
In recent weeks, the North cut U.N. seals and impeded surveillance equipment at a nuclear reactor in Yongbyon and its spent fuel pond, a fuel rod fabrication plant and a reprocessing facility. North Korea had agreed to freeze the facilities, which experts believe were used to make one or two weapons in the 1990s, under a 1994 deal with the United States that brought the North economic benefits.
Pyongyang said earlier this month it planned to reactivate the nuclear facilities to produce electricity because Washington had halted promised energy sources. After Washington warned it away from reviving the Yongbyon plant, North Korea said U.S. policy was leading the region to the "brink of nuclear war."
In its statement Sunday, North Korea said the United States was "gripped by the Cold War way of thinking" and should agree to "face to face" dialogue to settle their nuclear dispute peacefully.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday the United States was "looking for ways to communicate with the North Koreans" to ease the nuclear crisis, but will do nothing to help Pyongyang unless it changes its behavior.
Other U.S. officials said Washington would enlist its Asian allies and the United Nations to intensify economic pressure on Pyongyang unless it abandons nuclear development.
Japanese lawmakers were reportedly weighing new sanctions against the impoverished North to pressure the regime. Tokyo is already withholding rice shipments.
Outgoing South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who leaves office in February, said Monday he would continue his "sunshine" policy of engaging North Korea to try to resolve the dispute peacefully.
But President-elect Roh Moo-hyun told the military to set up a contingency plan in case the United States reduces the strength of its 37,000 troops here, stationed in South Korea as a deterrent against the North.
There are no confirmed U.S. plans for a withdrawal. But the South is worried that if the United States reduces its forces - reacting to rising anti-U.S. sentiment among South Koreans - it would be more vulnerable to an attack from the North.
Adopted in 1968 and ratified by 187 countries, the nuclear treaty seeks to confine nuclear weapons to the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China. At least three countries known to possess nuclear weapons - India, Pakistan and Israel - are not members pact.
North Korea signed the treaty in 1985, but U.S. authorities believe the communist nation has at least one or two bombs made from 1980s-vintage plutonium. The North tried to withdraw in 1993 over suspicions it was producing weapons, but that crisis was averted by the 1994 energy deal with the United States.
The latest tensions escalated Friday when North Korea ordered the expulsion of two U.N. monitors, depriving the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency of its last means of monitoring the North's plutonium-based nuclear weapons program.
Withdrawing from the treaty means the North would not have to accept inspections. Many fear North Korea would begin actively producing nuclear weapons within months, posing a direct threat to its neighbors.
"Pyongyang's recent decisions to send away IAEA inspectors and prepare for renewal of the uncontrolled work of its nuclear energy complex cannot but elicit regret," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said, according to the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies.
Also in Moscow, Mikhail Lysenko, the director of the Foreign Ministry's security and disarmament department, warned Pyongyang against withdrawing from the treaty. He said Russia supports the 1994 agreement and insists on a "constructive dialogue" between all involved, and that Moscow was consulting with both Koreas, the United States, Japan and China.
----
U.S. Open To Informal Talks With N. Korea
No Attack Over Weapons Considered, Powell Says
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52068-2002Dec29?language=printer
WACO, Tex., Dec. 29 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today sought to defuse a nuclear confrontation in Asia, declaring that the United States is seeking communication with North Korea and that the administration is not contemplating military action in response to that country's move to restart its nuclear weapons program.
Powell, designated as the administration spokesman today while President Bush vacationed on his ranch near here, confirmed that he would dispatch to South Korea the top American diplomat for the region and said that the Bush administration is dropping a Clinton administration policy vowing an attack if Pyongyang resumed nuclear weapon production.
Appearing on all five major Sunday television news talk shows, Powell repeatedly sought to play down a sense of crisis on the Korean peninsula even as he asserted the government's view that North Korea already has two nuclear weapons. Wrapping up a week of alarming developments in the region that shifted attention away from the showdown with Iraq, Powell said the matter with North Korea requires patience and will "play out in the weeks and months ahead."
North Korea evicted international weapons inspectors last week and said it would restart a plutonium reactor that had been shuttered as part of a 1994 accord brokered by the Clinton administration.
American officials believe the vow to restart the Yongbyon facility, which is of little non-military use, may be a bluff to produce more international economic concessions, but they believe North Korea is serious about expanding nuclear weapon production.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which led the nuclear inspections for the United Nations, will decide Jan. 6 whether to seek action from the U.N. Security Council. The administration is encouraging that step, but Powell said there are no plans yet for an American-authored resolution; the administration has been eager to demonstrate that North Korea is defying the world, not just the United States.
Powell indicated that the United States is open to talks with North Korea but not to anything that would appear to be a negotiation. James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, will go to the region in the next week or two but has no plans to speak to the North Koreans.
"We are looking for ways to communicate with the North Koreans so some sense can prevail," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press." He said that there are "channels open" and "ways of communicating with the North Koreans," but that the United States would not capitulate to provocations by saying, "Let's have a negotiation because we want to appease your misbehavior."
North Korean officials, for their part, urged the United States to negotiate with them.
"It is quite self-evident that dialogue is impossible without sitting face to face and a peaceful settlement of the issue would be unthinkable without dialogue," said a government spokesman quoted on KCNA, North Korea's state-run news agency.
Although officials said Powell's offer to talk was not a change in the administration's refusal to yield to nuclear blackmail, the gesture came after many Democrats and a few Republicans urged Bush to engage North Korea directly. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said today on ABC's "This Week" that North Korea "should hear from our lips just how significant their missteps have been."
Powell, in all his appearances, objected to describing the Korean situation as a crisis. "It suggests we're about to move forces or there's a war about to break out, and that's not the case at all," he said on CNN's "Late Edition." Although he described the situation at times as "serious" and "grave," Powell, citing American intelligence, said North Korea has probably had two nuclear weapons for a decade.
By restarting the plutonium facility, North Korea could have four more nuclear weapons in six months, he said. "But it is not yet a crisis that requires mobilization or for us to be threatening North Korea," he said. "Quite the contrary. We have been saying to North Korea that we have no plans to invade you. We have no hostile intent towards you."
Powell typically has a softer touch than administration hawks, but the White House's selection of him as its point man was an indication that the North Korea matter would be handled with diplomacy rather than confrontation. Powell explicitly set aside the Clinton administration's stated commitment to attack if Yongbyon were to reopen. "In fact, the Clinton administration did have a declaratory policy that if anything else happened at Yongbyon, they would attack it," he said on ABC. "We don't have that policy. We don't -- we're not saying what we might or might not do. We think it's best to try to use diplomacy."
Powell, on NBC, said he did not "want to prejudge" what the administration would do if North Korea built more bombs -- but he committed to action if the country shipped nuclear weapons. "This, I think, would be a red line that would definitely be crossed," he said.
The secretary said a strike on the North Korean facility, now that it is operational, would cause radioactive contamination. Though not ruling out military actions, he said: "Nobody's going to attack North Korea. We have no plans to attack North Korea. We've said it repeatedly, the president has said it repeatedly. Why would we want to attack North Korea?" The solution, he said, was in pressure supplied in cooperation with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea.
The relaxed response to the Korean provocation has been in marked contrast to Bush's determination to disarm or depose Iraqi President Saddam Hussein because of that leader's weapons program. Both nations are part of Bush's "axis of evil," and the president has said repeatedly that it is unacceptable to allow such powers to have nuclear weapons. The disparity in treatment has come even though North Korea has expelled inspectors while Iraq has admitted them.
"By any measure, in my view, if things get out of hand in North Korea, a lot more damage can be done to U.S. interests than can be done in the near term in Iraq," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC.
Powell acknowledged that North Korea has a larger army and more active nuclear weapons program than Iraq. But while he called the Korean situation "emerging," he said Iraq has been defying international will for 12 years and has a history of using its weapons of mass destruction. Powell also expressed amusement that the Bush administration, often accused of being "unilateralist" and militarily aggressive, is now "being criticized for not threatening somebody with a gun."
In another Iraq-related matter, Powell declined to comment on reports that Saudi Arabia had agreed to allow the United States to use its air bases and key operations center at Prince Sultan air base outside Riyadh for defensive purposes. "I'm not unhappy with the level of cooperation we've received from the Saudis," he said.
Staff writer Peter Slevin in Washington contributed to this report.
----
Its Hands Full, US Leaves N. Korea for Now to IAEA
December 30, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-un-usa.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States, its hands full preparing for war with Iraq, is in no rush to bring North Korea's nuclear arms program to the attention of the U.N. Security Council for possible international sanctions, U.S. and U.N. officials said on Monday.
Worried the North Korea crisis could swamp the council at a key time in the prelude to possible military strikes on Baghdad, Washington instead wants the matter to remain in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency for the next month, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
U.S. officials said they were hopeful the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency could maintain the lead on North Korea throughout January, making sufficient progress without the United States and the United Nations having to take the lead.
The IAEA was already on board, U.N. officials said.
They said the IAEA board of governors was expected at its meeting next Monday to say that the watchdog agency would itself pursue a diplomatic solution for now, rather than refer the matter to the 15-nation Security Council.
``The governors will choose to handle the issue through diplomatic means rather than through the council. This wouldn't be for longer than a month,'' one key U.N. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
``If this goes to the council on top of Iraq, the issue could be blown out of proportion,'' the U.N. official added.
The council's agenda is topped next month by a report due Jan. 27 on the findings of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq.
Acting under a Nov. 8 resolution giving Baghdad one last chance to disarm itself or face ``serious consequences,'' the inspectors are to present the council with their first substantive report on what they have found since arms inspections resumed on Nov. 27.
Amid charges Washington was pursuing a double standard in the Iraq and North Korea crises -- bearing down on Baghdad while shunning confrontation with Pyongyang -- pressure had been building on the United States to raise North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship in the council as early as this week.
But the U.S. delegation had no instructions to raise the matter, council diplomats said.
At next Monday's board meeting in Vienna, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei was expected to report that his agency can no longer verify whether North Korean nuclear materials are being diverted to nuclear weapons, despite Pyongyang's acceptance of IAEA inspections under an earlier safeguards agreement.
But Secretary of State Colin Powell sought on Sunday to discourage talk of crisis and conflict with North Korea, saying Washington was ready to wait months to see if diplomacy could persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programs.
``The IAEA will make a decision on the 6th of January whether they're going to refer it to the United Nations or not,'' Powell told the Fox network.
``We are not, at the moment, preparing to introduce a separate resolution (in the council), but I don't rule out what might happen in the weeks ahead. I've been in close touch with (U.N. Secretary-General) Kofi Annan, spoke to him about it a day or two ago,'' Powell said.
The White House and State Department on Monday confirmed it was up to the IAEA to decide whether -- and when -- to refer the North Korea crisis to the Security Council.
``That's an IAEA decision,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
North Korea last week ordered the U.N. nuclear inspectors to leave the country as it pressed on with plans to reactivate its mothballed Yongbyon facility, 55 miles north of the capital. The plant can produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The North Koreans say they need the plant to generate electricity, replacing fuel oil withheld by the United States, but U.S. officials say the amount of power that could be generated was insignificant.
North Korea's defiance of international opinion has invited comparisons with Iraq, which President Bush has threatened to disarm by force if it does not meet U.N. disarmament requirements.
-------- terrorism
Court Rejects Lawmakers' ABM Challenge
December 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-ABM-Treaty-Lawsuit.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by 32 lawmakers who wanted to stop President Bush's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
The plaintiffs had contended the withdrawal, which took effect in June, was unconstitutional because President Bush had not sought Congress' approval.
U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled Monday that the lawmakers lacked standing to bring the case, and the withdrawal from the treaty was a political matter, not judicial.
The ABM Treaty was a vital arms control agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. Bush claimed it became outdated after the Cold War, and the United States needed to develop missile defenses to protect itself from attacks by small countries with missiles and animosity toward the United States.
Bates said lawmakers could have tried political action to prevent Bush from withdrawing from the treaty. For example, they could have sought to deny money for anti-ballistic missile systems.
``The fact that plaintiffs have several political arrows in their legislative quiver underscores the reluctance of the courts needlessly to involve themselves in interbranch disputes,'' Bates said.
He also noted the lawmakers were not authorized by the House or any committee to bring the lawsuit, and lawmakers were unable to win support for a resolution to urge Bush to consult with Congress on the withdrawal.
``Permitting individual congressmen to run to federal court any time they are on the losing end of some vote or issue would circumvent and undermine the legislative process,'' he said.
-------- us politics
Rangel calls for mandatory military service
CNN
Monday, December 30, 2002
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/29/mandatory.military/index.html
WASHINGTON -- A Democratic lawmaker said Sunday he will introduce a bill in the next session of Congress to make military service mandatory.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-New York, said such legislation could make members of Congress more reluctant to authorize military action.
"I'm going to introduce legislation to have universal military service to let everyone have an opportunity to defend the free world against the threats coming to us," Rangel said on CNN's "Late Edition."
"I'm talking about mandatory service."
The Korean War veteran has accused the Bush administration and some fellow lawmakers of being too willing to go to war with Iraq.
In October, he voted against a joint resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. It passed 296-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate.
"When you talk about a war, you're talking about ground troops, you're talking about enlisted people, and they don't come from the kids and members of Congress," he said.
"I think, if we went home and found out that there were families concerned about their kids going off to war, there would be more cautiousness and a more willingness to work with the international community than to say, 'Our way or the highway.' "
Rangel did not provide specifics of his proposal.
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The Accidental Imperialist
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, December 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52358-2002Dec29?language=printer
As the United States enters the new year facing crises -- and the potential for war -- in Iraq and North Korea simultaneously, an obvious question presents itself: Did the Bush administration bring all this trouble on itself?
Most Europeans would say it did. So would several of the emerging Democratic presidential candidates. This, they would say, is the natural consequence of Bush's aggressive unilateralism, his militaristic new doctrine of preemption, his insistence on expanding a justified war against al Qaeda to a misconstrued "axis of evil."
When Bush took office two years ago, this argument goes, neither Iraq nor North Korea looked very worrisome. Didn't Colin Powell himself, at his first press conference with the president-elect, dismiss Saddam Hussein as a "weak" dictator "sitting on a failed regime that is not going to be around in a few years time"? As for North Korea, the outgoing Clinton team seemingly had come to within inches of striking a comprehensive deal that would have ended the WMD threat from Pyongyang. Dictator Kim Jong Il was engaging with the South, and appeared ready to open his hermit state to the outside world.
Had the Bush administration stuck with Powell's initial strategy of patching up the "box" in which Iraq had been contained during the previous decade and embraced his impulse to continue the negotiations with North Korea, the United States might be entering 2003 fully focused on winning the still-formidable fight with al Qaeda and stabilizing a still-volatile Afghanistan -- a pretty full plate. Instead it is mobilizing tens of thousands of troops and juggling U.N. Security Council debates to deal with two dictators, both capable of defending themselves with weapons of mass destruction, who could have been managed or left to stew on back burners.
Or so goes the argument. Yet there is another way of looking at the history of the last two years: not as a tale of an arrogant cowboy stirring up the world's rattlesnakes, but of an initially cautious, uncertain and quasi-isolationist president reacting to the crystallization of a new global era.
The Bush administration of pre-9/11 actually appeared content to string along the old policies on Iraq and North Korea. Iraq hawks inside the administration were a distinct minority, and Powell eventually won the argument about whether to reopen talks with Pyongyang. Bush's foreign policy mostly consisted of trying to retreat from international treaties and foreign military deployments. His signature initiative was missile defense, which implicitly signaled a strategy of ignoring rogue states until their missiles reached the territory of the United States.
This was a policy for the world of the 1990s, when the minority of Americans who cared about international affairs debated the indiscernible shape of the "post-Cold War era," when a booming United States felt free to nurse along, or simply neglect, threats from the likes of Iraq. There was the luxury to debate whether it was worthwhile to intervene to stop a war of aggression -- even if it were in Europe -- or one of history's worst episodes of genocide -- if it happened in Africa.
Then a new era came knocking, and not just in the form of hijacked airliners. As sanctions on Iraq crumbled, it became more and more obvious that Saddam Hussein had not been contained: He had developed new weapons -- drone aircraft and longer-range missiles -- and was aggressively hunting for nuclear materials. The supposedly peaceable Kim Jong Il was discovered to have launched another secret bomb project even while Madeleine Albright was negotiating with him. The minimalism with which a contented America engaged the world in the 1990s, and with which the Bush administration began, suddenly looked like a dangerous shirking of responsibility. In a recent meeting at The Post, my colleague David Broder asked a senior administration official why Bush had come to embrace "an almost imperial role" for the United States. The answer was long, eloquent, and revealing. "A few years ago, there were great debates about what would be the threats of the post-Cold War world, would it be the rise of another great power, would it be humanitarian needs or ethnic conflicts," the official said. "And I think we now know: The threats are terrorism and national states with weapons of mass destruction and the possible union of those two forces."
"It's pretty clear that the United States is the single most powerful country in international relations for a very long time. . . . [It]is the only state capable of dealing with that kind of chaotic environment and providing some kind of order. I think there is an understanding that that is America's responsibility, just like it was America standing between Nazi Germany and a takeover of all of Europe. No, we don't have to do it alone. But the United States has to lead that."
By that account, the conflicts that will shape this difficult winter of 2003 were mostly inevitable. It's just that, as half a century ago, Americans were slow to understand the threat, and reluctant to take it on -- until inaction seemed the worst choice.
-------- MILITARY
Report: Quarter of World in Conflicts
December 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-World-Conflicts.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- About a quarter of the world's countries struggled with armed conflict this year, mostly low-intensity battles against terrorists or guerrillas, the kind of conflict that poses the greatest threat to global stability, according to a report released Monday.
It says the U.S. military is ill-equipped for such warfare.
The report, issued by the conservative National Defense Council Foundation, found 53 countries struggled with conflict during 2002, six fewer than last year. But F. Andy Messing Jr., the author, said an even deadlier threat is posed by potential foes of the United States secretly developing chemical, nuclear and biological weapons.
``Right now the Pentagon is fighting wars that have morphed over the past few years,'' said Messing, executive director of the Alexandria, Va., think tank and a former Army Special Forces officer. ``But they still have a predominance of conventional warfare thinking, and that's just not satisfactory.''
In a statement, the Defense Department said the U.S. armed forces are prepared to meet a variety of threats, including low-intensity conflicts.
``The efforts of our special operations forces provide a prime example of our ability to manage missions that range from combating terrorism to humanitarian affairs,'' the statement said.
The foundation annually surveys 193 nations.
Its report suggests the United States should enhance intelligence activities with pre-emptive special operations, thoroughly vetted assassinations and psychological and anti-guerrilla operations. Messing said the goal should be to use the lowest amount of force to put an end to a conflict.
``The reason this is important is the proliferation of nuclear weapons; you don't want to trip the nuclear trip wire,'' he said.
Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a more liberal research group that has issued reports skeptical of increased military spending, agrees that the United States is not equipped to deal with low-intensity conflict. He said, however, that pre-emptive action, especially the assassination of political figures would set dangerous precedents.
``We have studiously avoided assassinations for a very simple reason: by and large, our political leadership is way more vulnerable to that type of activity than the Saddam Husseins of the world,'' he said.
The report said sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East remain the most war-prone areas. War in Afghanistan spilled over into other South-Central Asian countries ``like a cancer in the region'' to create growing unrest there.
Iraq is considered the site of the most dangerous conflict because development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons ``is almost a foregone conclusion,'' the report said.
The foundation's report added 10 countries this year to its list of conflict zones, including Jordan, Kuwait, North Korea and Venezuela. It removed 16 nations from the list, including the United States, Malaysia, Macedonia, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia.
Its criteria for conflict include political, economic and social unrest as well as military.
The report said the ``stupidest conflict'' occurred in Nigeria, where a newspaper reporter wrote that Islam's founding prophet Mohammed would have approved of staging the Miss World pageant in that African nation and might have wanted to marry a contestant. The story sparked Muslim rioting and Christian retaliation in which more than 200 people were killed. The pageant was relocated to London.
On the Net:
National Defense Council Foundation: http://www.ndcf.org
-------- arms sales
Kim's regime survives on arms dealing
By Richard Lloyd Parry,
December 30, 2002
UK Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-527369,00.html
IF THE United States makes good its threat to intercept North Korea's missile shipments, it will deprive the regime of one of its most important sources of foreign income. The risk is that it may provoke a North Korean attack.
In 1994, when Jimmy Carter, the former American President, made a successful intervention in the last North Korean nuclear crisis, Pyongyang made it clear that it would regard economic sanctions as an act of war.
According to US government analysts, North Korea raised $560 million (Ł355 million) from weapons sales in 2001 alone. With the sale of drugs and counterfeit dollars, missiles and missile technology have helped to tide North Korea over the economic crisis that has followed the end of the Cold War.
These sums pale in comparison with the largest arms proliferator of all - the US, which earned $14 billion from defence sales in 2000.
But arms deals are still an economic life support, one of the few sources of foreign currency for a country whose conventional industries have almost ceased to exist.
North Korea's customers are believed to include Iran, Libya, and Syria as well as American allies such as Egypt and Yemen, to which a recent shipment of Scud missiles was heading when it was intercepted by Spanish naval vessels this month.
The incident ended in embarrassment when the US ordered the ship to be released because there was nothing unlawful about the transaction.
The trade operates in two directions: for example, with Pakistan, the US's supposed ally in the campaign against Osama bin Laden, swapping uranium weapons for North Korean missile technology.
North Korea bought its first Scud missiles during the 1960s from the Soviet Union and China. Over the years scientists in North Korea enhanced the original Soviet technology, but all were inaccurate, mechanically unreliable, and had ranges of only a few hundred miles.
A breakthrough came with the development of the Nodong missile, with a range of up to 800 miles. It is still an inaccurate weapon, but it could potentially be used to carry nuclear or chemical warheads. This was the weapon said to have been purchased in blueprint form by Benazir Bhutto, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, in 1993.
North Korea's most shocking ballistic gesture came in 1998 when it test-fired a new three-stage long-range missile into the Pacific Ocean. The course of the so-called Tae Po Dong took it over the north coast of Japan; even more alarmingly, its range approached that of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
North Korea's Scuds are able to reach all of South Korea, its Nodongs could attack Japan, and the Tae Po Dong 2, which is believed to be in development, has the potential to threaten Alaska, Hawaii and Australia.
----
U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup
Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52241-2002Dec29?language=printer
High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."
A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.
Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction.
"It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of "The Threatening Storm," which makes the case for war with Iraq. "My fellow [CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."
"Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."
What makes present-day Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. U.S. Shifts in Iran-Iraq War
When the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. U.S. officials had almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.
By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening U.S. oil supplies.
"You have to understand the geostrategic context, which was very different from where we are now," said Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. "Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."
To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.
The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.
Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West." When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had "elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."
In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he "cautioned" Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that "inhibited" U.S. efforts to assist Iraq.
Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.
As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq -- along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen -- was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.
Some former U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist. Iraq Lobbies for Arms
While Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town.
"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."
One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs."
According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.
At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under "Operation Staunch." Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.
Although U.S. arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.
When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes.
A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.
The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide." Chemicals Kill Kurds
In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged -- but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.
"The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives," Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."
Bush administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons "against his own people" -- and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah -- to bolster their argument that his regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.
The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.
Far from declining, the supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francona, "Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace." Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad.
Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation."
The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that Bush "wanted better and deeper relations," according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man," the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."
-------- iraq
The reign of Saddam Hussein
Washington Post Photo/timeline
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/daily/graphics/saddam_123002.html
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/daily/graphics/saddam_123002.gif
----
Powell: US will develop Iraqi oil
CAMERON SIMPSON
Editorial comment
Dec 30th 2002
UK Herald
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/30-12-19102-1-15-53.html
THE US said yesterday that it plans to secure Iraqi oilfields if it invades the country and it is looking at the possibility of using oil production to pay for post-war reconstruction.
However, last night it was warned that it would "reap a terrible whirlwind" if it went ahead with this strategy in a second Gulf war.
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state,told NBC's Meet the Press: "The oilfields are the property of the Iraqi people. And if the coalition of forces goes into those oil fields, we would want to protect those fields and make sure they are used to benefit the people of Iraq and are not destroyed or damaged by the failing regime on the way out the door."
Mr Powell said that revenue generated from the oilfields would be used "in accordance with international law and to benefit the people of Iraq".
Administration officials also say they planned to keep the United Nations oil-for-food programme running, at least temporarily, to ensure that post-invasion oil dollars are spent on the country's basic needs.
International oil companies such as Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell would want to take part in any rehabilitation of the country's oil industry, analysts said.
However, as the Bush administration neared a decision on whether to take military action to eliminate Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, Mr Powell said it was seeking a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis with North Korea.
The apparent inconsistency in US foreign policy towards Iraq was seized upon by George Galloway, Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin. He said: "The point of the invasion is to steal Iraq's oil. This is naked confirmation that they intend to seize it, ramp up production, and thus cut the price of oil.
"They are no longer hiding the purpose of aggression, and they are fooling themselves if they think they are fooling the Arab population. I am speaking from Egypt, where a US state department poll has just revealed that only 6% of Egyptians have a favourable view of the United States. They are going to reap a terrible whirlwind from all of this."
Iraq sits on top of the world's second largest oil reserves, but war and a decade of sanctions has withered its oil infrastructure and official exports. The Bush administration is carefully weighing how oil policy in a post-Saddam Iraq might affect oil prices, officials say. Its decision could have implications for the fragile global economy.
Increasing Iraqi oil production may help Western nations that consume oil, including the US, by lowering oil prices. However, it could hurt key US oil-producing allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, by reducing their revenues from oil sales.
As UN arms experts searched four suspect sites in Iraq, Washington signalled it was increasing the pressure on Baghdad by sending more troops, aircraft. and ships to the Gulf.
US officials said Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had signed an order to move thousands of troops, dozens of strike aircraft and probably two more aircraft carrier battle groups to the Gulf, starting early next month.
The deployment would at least double the 50,000 US military personnel already near Iraq, and more might be sent in February, US officials said.
US and British warplanes yesterday attacked two Iraqi radar sites after Iraqi forces moved them into the southern "no-fly" zone, the US central command said, adding that the radar system posed a threat to allied patrols over the zone.
More than 100 UN weapons inspectors are now in Iraq, but the 200 searches they have carried out since November 27 have apparently uncovered no trace of the chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programmes Washington insists Iraq is pursuing.
Mr Powell, indicating frustration with the inspectors' slow progress, said: "I think that this can't go on indefinitely. The president has not made a decision yet with respect to the use of military force or with respect to going back to the United Nations.
"Of course we're positioning ourselves - positioning our military forces for whatever might be required."
----
In Baghdad, Many Insist Americans Would Regret an Invasion
Saddam Hussein doesn't need his people's love to command their loyalty, Iraqis contend, saying the U.S. faces a populace primed to fight back.
By Sergei L. Loiko
Los Angeles Times
December 30 2002
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-iraqis30dec30,0,6850901.story
BAGHDAD -- Engineer Qusai Jabbar has a word of advice for Americans who think Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is so unpopular that ousting his regime will be a cakewalk: Remember Stalin.
"Russia lived under a bloody tyrant for a long time," Jabbar said. "This tyrant killed millions of his own people and sent millions ... to Siberia. But when the big war came, his people rallied around him and fought like the possessed."
Just as Russians struggled against Nazi Germany's World War II attack regardless of their feelings toward Soviet dictator Stalin, virtually all Iraqis will fiercely resist any U.S.-led invasion, Jabbar predicts.
"You don't need to be in love with Saddam to defend your country to the last," he said. "Americans think they will come here and rule us. They don't know what they are coming into. If they get food from someone, it will be poisoned. If they turn around with their back to us, we will stick a knife in it. Snipers will be looking for them from every rooftop."
In Iraq today, talk among artists and intellectuals revolves around United Nations sanctions, U.N. weapons inspectors and what is widely seen as the prelude to war. Public anger is fueled by the sanctions, which are viewed as unfair and inhumane, and by memories of the bombing that Baghdad endured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when a U.S.-led effort drove out Iraqi forces that had taken Kuwait. Iraqis do not necessarily see their country as the aggressor in that invasion.
"You don't know the history of the conflict. Kuwait was stealing our oil, cheating on us all the time," complained Amal Khoderi, 65, an amiable and energetic patron of the arts in Baghdad. "We appealed to the world community many times to stop it, but nothing was done."
At the busy open-air Rashid Street book market, where men squat to peruse books in languages including English and Russian, bookseller Hussein Ali, 55, bemoans what sanctions have done to his life.
A retired high school biology teacher with five children, Ali says he draws a pension worth just $4 a month. Buying and selling books brings in about $50 a month, which is nearly enough for his family to live on, he says.
"Sanctions are killing us slowly," Ali said. "The war will kill us fast."
Abdul Khalak, a novelist who sports a Saddam Hussein-type mustache, shared his views at a cafe frequented by writers and students. A color portrait of Hussein hung on the wall, in this case with the beaming strongman holding not his usual gun but a cup of coffee. Some of the customers were smoking traditional narghiles, or water pipes.
Khalak said the U.N. inspectors' work reminds him of "a most boring Indian movie which goes around in circles and never ends."
"You want to stand up and leave the movie theater," he said. "Right now, our problem is that we can't. We have to watch it to the end. And the end is bitterly predictable: The U.S. may attack us any second with no respect for what the inspectors find or do not find."
Broad willingness to rally around the government in the face of any U.S.-led invasion comes partly from a widespread belief that Washington is not being honest about its motives, said Wamidh Nadhmi, a political analyst who teaches at Baghdad University.
"What Americans really care for is oil -- and help to Israel," he said. "They are not concerned with the fate of human rights and freedoms in Iraq."
War seems almost inevitable to many Iraqis.
"One day, when Americans maybe understand us better, they will see that we are not animals eating human flesh," said Khoderi, who occasionally stuck small, even pieces of dry wood into her fireplace to cut the winter chill. "Thousands of years of civilization can't be discarded and downtrodden just like this. But I am afraid that Americans -- I mean those Americans who are prepared to give orders to bomb us out of existence -- don't have an understanding of history and the meaning of it. They don't care."
Khoderi was speaking in a house overlooking the Tigris River in old Baghdad that now serves as an art salon, museum, shop and center for music recitals.
A two-story brick-and-wood structure on a gray and dusty street, it boasts arched ornamental ceilings, a walled-in garden with palm trees and flowers, and hundreds of craft items ranging from drawings to carpets and elaborate calligraphy tapestries. Agatha Christie used to stay in the house when she visited Baghdad, Khoderi said.
During the Gulf War, when the United States bombed a bridge just a hundred yards from her home, the attack also destroyed half the house, which she inherited from her father. After that, she was determined to rebuild.
"It was really the ruins of the bridge, not my crippled house, which sent this signal to my very heart," she explained.
"This house is my life, and my life is this house," she said. "They once tried to bomb my life out of existence. Now, they are ready to try again. You know, only people with no sense of history and its role in our civilization can drop bombs on such cities as Baghdad. It is as if they are not humans but some kind of aliens who come from another planet and know nothing about our civilization, our history and culture."
Khoderi predicted that any invasion force will face fierce battles in the city.
"We will resist," she said. "We may see Baghdad burned to ashes, but we will resist. It is not the first time in history that Baghdad is burned. The Tigris River may become red with blood again, as it was in the past, but we will not surrender."
-------- israel / palestine
ISRAEL, U.S. STILL DISAGREE ON IRAQ RESPONSE
December 30, 2002
MENL
http://menewsline.com/stories/2002/december/12_30_1.html
TEL AVIV [MENL] -- Israel and the United States continue to disagree over the prospect of an Iraqi attack on the Jewish state.
Western diplomatic sources said the disagreement focuses on Israel's response to an Iraqi missile or weapons of mass destruction attack. The sources said the dispute took place during strategic talks between the two countries last week during the visit by Defense Undersecretary Doug Feith to Israel.
The focus of the disagreement was a scenario in which Iraq preempts an expected U.S. attack on Baghdad. In this scenario, Iraq launches a missile or WMD attack on Israel in an attempt to spark a Middle East war and divert international attention away from the regime of President Saddam Hussein.
The sources said Israel insists that it must respond to such an attack. The Israeli delegation to the strategic talks maintained that under such a scenario U.S. forces would not be in a position to defend against or respond to such an Iraqi attack.
----
Israeli Troops Slay Palestinian Boy
Official Tells Sharon to Use 'Targeted Killings' Only as Last Resort
By Mark Lavie
Associated Press
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51926-2002Dec29.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 29 -- An 11-year-old Palestinian boy was killed today by Israeli gunfire during a demonstration in the West Bank, and Israel's attorney general told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that "targeted killings" of wanted Palestinians could be used only as a last resort.
The ruling followed recent violence that raised concerns about a new escalation in Israeli-Palestinian fighting before Israel's Jan. 28 parliamentary elections.
The Palestinian child, the second killed by Israeli soldiers in as many days, was shot when a group of schoolchildren pelted troops with rocks and bottles in the West Bank town of Tulkarm. Troops firing rubber-coated bullets also wounded another Palestinian boy, Palestinian witnesses said.
The military said that non-lethal methods were used. These often include use of rubber-coated bullets, which can kill at short range.
In the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians say a 9-year-old girl was killed by Israeli gunfire Saturday, soldiers opened fire in the direction of about 150 Palestinian demonstrators as they neared an Israeli checkpoint.
An Israeli army spokeswoman, Capt. Sharon Feingold, said the soldiers fired on the crowd because they felt endangered.
The Palestinians were protesting severe Israeli travel restrictions on Palestinians in the area, which is near several Jewish settlements. The area is the scene of almost nightly gunfire between Israeli forces guarding the settlements and Palestinians from nearby refugee camps.
During the weekly session of the Israeli cabinet, Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein instructed Sharon to use targeted killings of suspected Palestinian terrorists only as a last resort.
The ruling followed reports that Sharon had ordered an increase in the practice as part of efforts to stop Palestinian violence.
An Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied that Sharon favored an increase in the killings. The official said that they were ordered only when arrest was impossible or when the suspect was a "ticking bomb" and an immediate threat to Israelis.
Also today, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said that in the past two months, Israeli forces had arrested more than 1,200 suspected Palestinian militants. He called it an unprecedented campaign.
--------
Soldiers Cannot Refuse to Serve, Israeli Court Rules
December 30, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/international/middleeast/30CND-ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 30 - Israel's Supreme Court ruled today that reserve soldiers do not have a right to refuse to serve in the occupied territories. It held that Israeli society was too polarized and embattled to permit selective assertions of conscience by its fighters.
In a decision that tried to balance Israel's democratic values and its social and security needs, the court called this a "time of division" and warned that "the recognition of selective conscientious objection might loosen the links that hold us together as a people."
The ruling was a setback to a group of combat soldiers and officers who, while saying they would serve elsewhere, refuse to serve in the West Bank or Gaza Strip because they say their duties there involve "dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people."
The fortunes of their campaign, called "Courage to Refuse," reflect the hardening of Israeli public opinion under the threat of Palestinian suicide bombings. The campaign, which began early this year, has drawn 512 members, but its leaders acknowledge that it has failed to gain much political traction nationally for its claim that the occupation is corrupting Israeli society.
Feeling that they are in constant danger, Israelis have broadly supported the army's offensives and its tactics, from imposing 24-hour curfews on Palestinian cities to tracking and killing wanted Palestinians.
But beneath that broad agreement, the court found enduring fissures in Israeli society that is said it would render a selective refusal to serve dangerous to the state.
The reservists' group was seeking a right accorded those who object on moral grounds to performing any military service: to appear before a committee with the power to grant a conscientious objector an exemption from service. But the court found a distinction between refusing any service, and refusing only specific duties.
While the objection today might be to service in the occupied territories, the court said, "tomorrow the objection will be against the evacuation of various settlements in the area."
It warned: "The people's army might turn into an army of peoples, made up of different units each having its own spheres in which it can act conscientiously, and others in which it cannot. In a polarized society such as ours, this consideration weighs heavily."
The lawyer for the reservists' group, Michael Sfard, said that, as a democracy, Israel should be willing to endure a bit more difficulty in administering its military. "We pay a lot of prices for the values democracy represents," he said.
He said he would feel sympathy for an extremely religious soldier who, regarding the West Bank as deeded by God to the Jewish people, might object to an order to evacuate a settlement.
In violence in the territories today, Israelis soldiers killed three Palestinians. Near the city of Jenin, a Palestinian man was shot dead after his car collided with an army jeep. The army said that soldiers opened fire after the man emerged from his vehicle carrying a suspicious object. Soldiers found no weapon at the scene.
Palestinians described the man as a 37-year-old school teacher who was carrying groceries in his car, a small Peugeot.
In Nablus, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man who was preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail at them, soldiers and Palestinians said. Just outside the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian was shot dead as he attempted to infiltrate a kibbutz, the army said. The army said he was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and grenades.
Mr. Sfard, himself a veteran of the war in Lebanon who has refused to serve in the territories, said that he and his comrades were pleased that the court had recognized they were motivated by what it called "real conscientious reasons" and not by politics, as some critics have said.
After performing three years of compulsory service, Israeli men under 45 then serve in the reserves for about a month each year. Since the conflict began 27 months ago, many have had to do duty guarding checkpoints and settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, or fighting inside Palestinian cities.
Today's ruling means that those who refuse to serve will continue to be vulnerable to up to 35 days of prison time each time they reject a reserve call-up. For that reason, about 200 reserve soldiers have served terms of 28 to 35 days in the last 18 months, Mr. Sfard said. Some, called up more than once, have already served more than one term.
After the decision was announced, Lt. David Zonshein, a founder of the group, was returned to Military Prison No. 6 to serve 18 days remaining on a sentence for refusing a call-up. He told Israel radio that, compared to his fighting in Lebanon and the territories, his tour in prison was "the most significant reserve duty ever." He said it might alert the public to "what is causing the state to send its best soldiers to prison."
He said that the court erred in not recognizing the particular dangers to Israel of service in the West Bank and Gaza. "The situation is that our small Zionist state is abandoning all its moral force when it goes to the occupied territories, and is fighting against itself," he said.
Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt during the Six-Day War in 1967.
The court did not rule on a separate claim by the group, that the occupation itself was illegal. The group decided to downplay that claim after the justices indicated during oral arguments that they were more interested in resolving the issue of freedom of conscience.
Mr. Sfard said that the group might eventually mount a second case based on the claim that the occupation was illegal.
In a concurring opinion today, Justice Dorit Beinisch wrote that "the considerations of state security and the integrity of Israeli society must be considered against the arguments of conscience and belief, however sincere."
She continued: "The questions raised by the fight against terrorism are at the crux of an intense political debate. Were this debate to be conducted within the army, it might result in serious and substantial harm."
-------- mideast
Jordan steps up warnings against US war on Iraq
AAP
December 30 2002,
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/29/1040511258460.html
Jordan's foreign minister has warned that the Middle East faces a bleak 2003 if the United States leads a war on Iraq amid continuing violence in the Palestinian territories.
The official Petra news agency quotes Minister Marwan Moasher as saying that the region will witness very difficult political conditions if the escalation in the Palestinian territories continues amid the possibility of a military strike on Iraq.
The minister says that Jordan - which is dependent on Iraq for oil - has no choice but to make contingency plans for war.
But he says Jordan won't participate in any war on Iraq and its territory won't be used as a launchpad for military action.
He says the Iraqi people alone have the right to decide who rules them -- a clear rejection of United States calls for regime change in Baghdad.
-------- us
At Camp Pendleton, Marines Ready for War
Training Intensifies as Troops Take Holiday Leave Before Expected Deployment
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52059-2002Dec29?language=printer
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. -- While diplomats, policymakers and network news talking heads debate the outcome of the intensifying standoff between the United States and Iraq, the Marines at Camp Pendleton are preparing for war.
"We have to assume that it is not a matter of if, but of when we have to fight," said Col. Bennett W. Saylor, chief of staff of the 1st Marine Division, the largest combat force on the base. "We look at the holidays as our last week of peace."
Comprising more than 60,000 Marines at the sprawling coastline campus set on 200,000 hilly acres north of San Diego, Camp Pendleton's 1st Marine Expeditionary Force will likely be well-represented among the thousands of U.S. troops President Bush has said he will send to the Persian Gulf early next year.
Thousands of Saylor's charges left town last week on a holiday leave that many expected to be their last chance to spend time with friends and family before being deployed.
The arid terrain of Camp Pendleton and its sister base east of Los Angeles at Twenty-nine Palms are an ideal training ground for desert warfare. An undisclosed number of Marines from Camp Pendleton are already stationed in Kuwait under the U.S. Central Command, which has jurisdiction over northeast Africa and the Middle East. On Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered "significant" ground forces, combat aircraft and logistical support to the Gulf.
"We all get the sense that something is coming up soon," said Sgt. Shawn Smith, 23, of Beaver Creak, Ohio. "We just want to be ready."
Before being dismissed for holiday leave, more than 25,000 Marines were given a 90-minute "pre-deployment briefing," prepared by the base's public affairs and division staff to educate servicemen on the mission that may soon be at hand.
"It's important that they have some understanding of what the mission is and why they may get sent over there," said Capt. Joseph Plenzler, 31, of Toledo, a public affairs officer who made the presentations, which included some information on Iraqi weaponry, the Gulf's geography and the intricacies of Arab culture.
The Marines' training, though always intense, has taken on an increased sense of urgency in recent months, several said. Camp Pendleton has what may be the largest Marine Operations on Urbanized Terrain course, where more than 100 Marines at a time can practice fighting in a post-apocalyptic-looking cityscape, seeking out snipers firing "SIM" rounds tipped with colored chalk.
The base's heightened focus on urban warfare began with the initiation of "Project Metropolis," a curriculum designed in 1999 by the Marine Warfare Lab, which sought to reduce casualty rates in urban fighting from the historical average of 30 percent to 40 percent or more in bloody battles such as Hue City during the Vietnam War.
In training, the Marines now say, the casualty rate has fallen to about 20 percent.
"We drilled and drilled and drilled, and eventually got better at it," said Sgt. Smith, the range's safety officer for the day. All around him about 80 Marines threw grappling hooks into window frames to climb walls and advanced building to building in small numbers down exposed city streets. "If they ever have to do it for real, they'll be glad they did this," he said.
The Marines carry gas masks strapped to their hips, and instructors occasionally surprise the trainees by releasing a canister of CS gas, a mild tearing agent.
The threat of chemical or biological warfare is never far from the mind of any Marine. Each Wednesday, all Marines are required to carry their masks with them, and to wear them for at least 30 minutes during the workday.
"It gets us used to the gear and comfortable in it," said Sgt. Jose E. Guillen, 24, a combat correspondent from Pomona, Calif. "When it happens for real, you can't afford mistakes."
Later that afternoon a battalion of almost 500 Marines embarked on a "hump" -- a mandatory biweekly five-to-15-mile hike -- in their chemical- and biological-warfare suits.
Last week, the battalion got off easy: The hike lasted only a couple of hours, and they were not required to carry their loaded backpacks, which can weigh more than 75 pounds. But the pace was quick, and some had to "fall out" of the formation with fatigue or injuries and ride behind in jeeps.
As the group reached the home stretch, several CS canisters erupted along the trail. Though the Marines were wearing masks, some broke into coughing fits after swallowing a corrosive mouthful.
After the hike, many of the Marines returned to their barracks to pack their bags. While some embarked on up to 10 days of leave, others were required to work one of the holiday weeks so the base would always be staffed.
"It's an important time to make sure everything is okay at home," said Sgt. Maj. Michael F. Jones, of the 2nd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment. "We'll call them back early if we need to, but many of them have not deployed before, so they will be having some serious talks with their families."
-------- propaganda wars
How the War Party Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to US
by Mitchel Cohen
December 30, 2002
Antiwar
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cohen1.html
"The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes."
- President George Bush, NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991
In October, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington before the House of Representatives' Human Rights Caucus. She testified that Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait on August 2nd tore hundreds of babies from hospital incubators and killed them.
Television flashed her testimony around the world. It electrified opposition to Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, who was now portrayed by U.S. president George Bush not only as "the Butcher of Baghdad" but - so much for old friends - "a tyrant worse than Hitler."
Bush quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in one month he referred to "312 premature babies at Kuwait City's maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor,"(1) and of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor." Bush used Nayirah's testimony to lambaste Senate Democrats still supporting "only" sanctions against Iraq - the blockade of trade which alone would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die of hunger and disease - but who waffled on endorsing the policy Bush wanted to implement: outright bombardment. Republicans and pro-war Democrats used Nayirah's tale to hammer their fellow politicians into line behind Bush's war in the Persian Gulf.(2)
Nayirah, though, was no impartial eyewitness, a fact carefully concealed by her handlers. She was the daughter of one Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. A few key Congressional leaders and reporters knew who Nayirah was, but none of them thought of sharing that minor detail with Congress, let alone the American people.
Everything Nayirah said, as it turned out, was a lie. There were, in actuality, only a handful of incubators in all of Kuwait, certainly not the "hundreds" she claimed. According to Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait's primary care system, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the maternity hospital, there were few if any babies in the incubators at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Nayirah's charges, they said, were totally false. "I think it was just something for propaganda," Dr. Matar said. In an ABC-TV News account after the war, John Martin reported that although "patients, including premature babies, did die," this occurred "when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors stopped working or fled the country" - a far cry from Bush's original assertion that hundreds of babies were murdered by Iraqi troops.(3) Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no evidence for the incubator claims.
It is likely that Nayirah was not even in Kuwait, let alone at the hospital, at that time; the Kuwaiti aristocracy and their families had fled the country weeks before the anticipated invasion. Some defended their country at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo, where at least one member of the ruling family was reported to have gambled away more than $10 million as his fellow rulers called for economic and military assistance from abroad.
As invasions go, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was relatively - I stress the word "relatively" - bloodless. Despite the heart-rending testimonies TV viewers in the U.S. were subjected to night after night, fewer than 200 Kuwaitis were killed. Compare that to such "peaceful" ventures as the U.S. invasion of Panama the year before, which killed an estimated 7,500 Panamanians; or, a year after the Gulf War, the 10,000 Somalis killed by U.S./U.N. troops in what was portrayed as a "peace mission" to bring food aid to the allegedly starving region.(4)
How did Nayirah first come to the attention of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which put her before the world's cameras? It was arranged by Hill & Knowlton, a public relations firm hired to rally the U.S. populace behind Bush's policy of going to war. And it worked!
Hill & Knowlton's yellow ribbon campaign to whip up support for "our" troops, which followed their orchestration of Nayirah's phony "incubator" testimony, was a public relations masterpiece. The claim that satellite photos revealed that Iraq had troops poised to strike Saudi Arabia was also fabricated by the PR firm. Hill & Knowlton was paid between $12 million (as reported two years later on "60 Minutes") and $20 million (as reported on "20/20") for "services rendered." The group fronting the money? Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a phony "human rights agency" set up and funded entirely by Kuwait's emirocracy to promote its interests in the U.S.
"When Hill & Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign to sell the Gulf War to the American public, the owners of this highly effective propaganda machine were residing in another country" - the United Kingdom - writes Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden in PR Watch. "Should this give pause for thought? Does it demonstrate a certain potential for the future exercise of global political power - the power to manipulate democratic political processes through managing public opinion," which Hill and Knowlton demonstrated 10 years ago?(5)
All of this is concealed in a new HBO "behind-the-scenes true story" of the Gulf War, which is being released at this crucial political moment. As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writes, "HBO's version of history never makes clear that the incubator story was fraudulent, and in fact had been managed by an American PR firm, not Iraq. Curiously, however, the truth seems to have been clear to Robert Wiener, the former CNN producer who co-wrote 'Live from Baghdad.' As he explained to CNN's Wolf Blitzer (11/21/02), 'that story turned out to be false because those accusations were made by the daughter of the Kuwaiti minister of information and were never proven.' Unfortunately, HBO viewers won't know that when they see the film."(6)
NOTES
1. Doug Ireland, Village Voice, March 26, 1991.
2. The use of the Big Lie to manipulate public opinion and neutralize opposition to a particular war was not invented by Bush. See, for instance, James Laxer, "Iraq: US has match, seeks kindle: American leaders have often falsified reasons to attack other countries," (ActionGreens, Mar. 31, 2001). Laxer is a Political Science Professor at York University, Toronto.
3. ABC World News Tonight, 3/15/91.
4. In actuality, people in only certain areas of Somalia were starving - those that had been subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs. See, Mitchel Cohen, "Somalia & the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger," Red Balloon Collective, 1994.
5. Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden, "PR Watch," Volume 8, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 2001. The PR firm has since been working at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry to ban over-the-counter vitamin and nutritional supplement sales in Europe.
6. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax?" December 4, 2002.
comments on this article? send them to backtalk!
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cohen1.html
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- death penalty
The Year in Death
Monday, December 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52362-2002Dec29?language=printer
THE YEAR 2002 saw an end to the dramatic decline in executions that took place during the previous two years in this country. According to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, the states put 71 convicts to death this year, up slightly from the 66 executions in 2001 but still markedly below the recent peak of 98 executions in 1999. For death penalty opponents cheered by the trend of decline -- a drop that coincided with new scrutiny of capital punishment prompted by DNA exonerations -- this year's uptick, though slight, may seem like a discouraging reversal. The reality is more complicated. Behind the increase in overall executions lies evidence of the continued marginalization of a punishment that should have been banned long ago.
Fewer states (13) conducted executions this year than in any year since 1993. Texas alone, which executed 33 people, accounted for nearly half the state-sponsored killing. The next state in number of executions, Oklahoma, put to death only seven people -- less than a quarter of Texas's total. Outside the South, where 61 of the executions took place, only three states (California, Ohio and Missouri) executed anyone. Moreover, the number of new death sentences has declined significantly, and the growth of death rows nationwide finally has leveled off. In other words, outside of a few states, the penalty remains in decline.
This trend of regional concentration of capital punishment augurs well for those who believe, as we do, that the death penalty should be abolished. Assembling a national consensus for eliminating it is impossible today. Policymakers in states such as Texas, Missouri and Virginia are committed to it, and most voters continue to support capital punishment. But if other states start permitting the death penalty to slip into disuse or nearly so, death no longer will seem so obvious an option for the criminal justice system. And if states with nominal death penalties begin striking them from their books -- a step none of the 38 death-penalty states has yet taken -- the isolation of those states that carry out executions will grow further. This irreversible punishment under the best of circumstances is capriciously applied and in many cases is a reckless gamble that guilt is certain. An array of states legally endorse its use, but that base is something of a mirage; a few states collectively account for the overwhelming majority of all executions. The more clearly isolated they become, the greater the pressure for reform will be.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Australia renewable power sector condemns report
REUTERS AUSTRALIA:
December 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19223/story.htm
MELBOURNE - Australian renewable electricity generators said that a report recommending the end to a mandated target for increased green energy use was flawed and would put at risk billions of dollars in investment.
"A recommendation to abolish it has no credibility and should be dismissed," Renewable Energy Generators Australia Ltd Chairman Peter Rae said in a statement.
"The committee's recommendations would see key industry development programmes abandoned."
A review committee before Christmas released its final report on Australian energy market reform, covering a wide range issues including measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It called for the introduction of a national emissions trading scheme to replace a range of different programmes aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
But its proposal to end the mandated renewable energy target (MRET) scheme comes as several groups have recently called for the target to be set at more ambitious levels.
Australia in 2001 mandated a two percent rise in the share of renewable energy in electricity use by 2010.
Rae said the final report included recommendations to ensure that renewable energy developers, who have invested in projects as a result of the current MRET arrangements should be protected.
But he said the committee had not understood the full benefits of the MRET scheme and why it should be continued.
"The report is, in this respect, valueless because it lacks intellectual rigour and factual relevance. It is seriously wrong," he said.
The recommendations in the report will be considered by the federal and state governments.
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Britain approves Innogy wind farm off north Wales
REUTERS UK:
December 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19235/story.htm
LONDON - Britain has given the go ahead to utility Innogy (RWEG.DE) to build an offshore wind farm at Rhyl Flats off the North Wales coast.
The 100 megawatt project will produce enough electricity to power 50,000 homes and is expected to be completed by 2004, said the Department of Trade and Industry in a statement.
The farm will be built by Innogy's unit National Wind Power offshore Limited which also plans to build a wind farm on the neighbouring North Hoyle site.
North Hoyle, which is expected to start generating next year, will be Britain's first commercial offshore wind farm.
The goverment sees offshore wind as key to reaching its target of generating 10 percent of Britain's electricity from green sources by 2010 from around three percent at present.
Innogy, one of the UK's largest utilities, is owned by Germany's RWE.
-------- health
X-rays might join carcinogen list
By Tim Friend,
USA TODAY
12/30/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2002-12-30-xray-usat_x.htm
The federal government has begun evaluating whether medical X-rays should be declared a carcinogen - a move experts say could reduce unnecessary exposures to radiation and force doctors to pay closer attention to the risks.
The evaluation, which will be conducted over the next year, was prompted by a request from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The listing is being considered for the National Toxicology Program's 11th Report on Carcinogens due in 2004.
The cancer risks of radiation exposure are well documented in studies of atomic bomb survivors, but risks from medical sources are controversial and often downplayed by physicians.
"There is a lot of data showing that radiation is a carcinogen at very high levels," says G. Donald Frey of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. "What is scientifically unsettled is whether it causes cancer at low levels. We don't really absolutely know."
But according to the National Cancer Institute, major organizations "agree there probably is no low-dose radiation 'threshold' for inducing cancer, i.e., no amount of radiation should be considered absolutely safe."
Christopher Portier, director of the NIEHS, says the agency is concerned that use of Computed Tomography (CT) scans, fluoroscopy, mammography in younger women and medical X-rays are exposing the public to increasingly higher levels of radiation.
Fred Mettler, a spokesman for the American College of Radiology and professor of radiology at the University of New Mexico, says radiologists are supposed to "optimize" radiation doses by exposing patients only to enough radiation to get a clear image. The risk of exposure is balanced against the medical benefit.
The NCI says the use of CT in adults and children has increased seven-fold in the past 10 years. Of particular concern is exposure to unnecessarily high levels of radiation in children.
A CT scan is equal to 100 chest X-rays. For every 1 million children scanned with CT, an estimated 1,500 will develop cancer two decades later. Up to 3 million children receive CT scans each year. Children are typically given adult doses during CT scans. The NCI issued an alert to radiologists in October asking them to reduce CT doses to children.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Police subdue Venezuelan protesters
Oil prices reach 15-month high
AP
Monday, December 30, 2002
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/americas/12/30/venezuela.strike.ap/
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Police fired tear gas to separate supporters and opponents of President Hugo Chavez in a western city Monday, as leaders of an anti-Chavez strike called for protests in the president's strongholds in the capital.
Chavez opponents broke past police lines and tried to tear down a tent set up by supporters of the president in Maracaibo. Police firing tear gas shoved the two sides apart.
The four-week strike has depleted gasoline supplies in the world's No. 5 oil exporter but failed to force the president from office.
"The strike will continue until the last consequences," said Carlos Ortega, president of Venezuela's largest labor confederation. "This regime is only prolonging its agony. Venezuelans, your indignation is just. The people never give up."
Ortega's comments Sunday came after hundreds of thousands of Chavez opponents marched through the street of Caracas -- the latest in countless of protests that have accompanied the strike since it began December 2.
Opposition leaders are threatening more civil disobedience, including urging citizens not to pay income taxes.
Venezuela's strike and the crisis in Iraq sent European benchmark Brent crude oil futures soaring to a 15-month high of $30.70 a barrel Monday.
The opposition called rallies in two of poorest neighborhoods in the capital on Monday, trying to chip away at Chavez's support in the slums, where many still consider him the first leader in generations to stand up for their interests.
Chavez's popularity has slipped to about 30 percent, as discontent grows over a wrenching economic recession and political turmoil. The former army paratrooper, however, still counts on almost 45 percent support in the poor regions. Chavez: 'never going to leave'
On Sunday, Chavez again vowed he wouldn't quit. He insisted he was foiling a strike that has slashed oil exports from 3 million barrels a day to 160,000 and forced Venezuela to look abroad for food and fuel.
"I think I'm never going to leave. I feel so loved that I am never going to leave," Chavez said during his weekly television show. "It's a treacherous oligarchy that wants to break the government and break the Venezuelan people."
Chavez hosted the show outside the Yagua gasoline distribution center in the western state of Carabobo, and applauded every time a gasoline truck left the installation. Two hundreds trucks left, said Chavez, who replaced striking managers at Yagua.
Gasoline shipments were coming from Venezuela's La Isla refinery in Curacao and Trinidad, Chavez added. One oil tanker has already arrived from Brazil.
Mile-long lines persisted at service stations. Many Venezuelans were doing without products like fresh milk, soft drinks, beer and tissue paper.
Ali Rodriguez, president of PDVSA, said Venezuela is currently producing between 600,000 and 700,000 barrels a day. Striking PDVSA executives saying it is producing less than 200,000 barrels a day. Production is normally about 3 million barrels a day.
Venezuela's largest labor confederation and business chamber called to demand Chavez accept a nonbinding referendum on his rule. Many in the opposition now demand early elections -- which constitutionally can only take place if Chavez resigns.
They accuse the president of running roughshod over democratic institutions and wrecking the economy with leftist policies.
Chavez says opponents should wait for a possible recall referendum midway through his term, or August 2003, as permitted by the constitution. He was elected in 1998 and re-elected in 2000, and his term ends in 2007.
Negotiations sponsored by the Organization of American States, which have produced few results, were to resume Jan. 2 after a brief break for the holidays.
----
Court rejects Israeli reservists' appeal
BBC
Monday, 30 December, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2614327.stm
Israel's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a group of reserve soldiers who have refused to serve in the occupied territories.
The campaigners belong to "Courage to Refuse" - which rallies conscientious objectors who consider areas gained by Israel during the 1967 to be occupied illegally.
The court however did not address the legality of the occupation but whether conscientious objection is permissible in the army.
An Israeli soldier in the West Bank Israeli soldiers have no right to conscientious objection "Yesterday the objection was to [military engagement in] Lebanon... tomorrow it will be to dismantling certain settlements," a panel of judges said, adding reservists had to go wherever the army sent them.
According to a BBC correspondent, the lawyer representing the reservists said they had gained some ground.
Judges rejected the prosecution's accusation that the reservists were engaged in civil disobedience as their motives were political rather than moral.
The reservists are not typical conscientious objectors.
They are willing to serve in the army, but not if they are posted to the West Bank in Gaza, they say.
David Zonshein, who filed the petition, will return to prison where he is being held for refusing to serve in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
"Our refusal to serve in the occupied territories is the most Jewish and Zionistic ideal that can be upheld in this situation," said Mr Zonshein after the hearing, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Other reservists say they will continue their fight by going to prison when they are called up for service in the occupied territories.
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Gather The Women:
Important Global Event In March 2003
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE!!
From: wpe@openheart.com
Date: Tue, Dec 31, 2002, 1:11am (CST+6)
I am writing to let you know of an important global event taking place in March 2003 that is of particular interest to women worldwide.
(So, if you are a man receiving this notice, please pass it on to the women in your life).
This grassroots movement, called Gather the Women, is being sponsored by Women of Vision and Action, an international organization of women leaders who take spirit-based action to create positive change in the world. I serve as the Executive Director of this non-profit organization.
Beginning March 3, we envision thousands of local events being planned throughout the world with women gathering in prayer, forgiveness and "purposeful action" in preparation for International Women's Day on March 8, when millions of women will gather all around the globe to combine their energies to create a balanced, harmonious and peaceful world.
The interactive Gather the Women website serves as an electronic hub for women to connect and exchange information about events being planned, to post their actions for positive change and to post their prayers, visions and intentions for a peaceful world.
This initiative is being funded through the power of one dollar donations sent to Women of Vision and Action. For more information visit
http://www.gatherthewomen.org
and please spread the word to all women you know. Only Love Prevails, Carol Hansen Grey Founder, World Peace Experiment (www.openheart.com/peace) Executive Director, Women of Vision and Action
http://www.wova.org
Do you feel the call? IT'S TIME TO GATHER THE WOMEN
Find out how you can participate
Visit: http://www.gatherthewomen.org
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