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NUCLEAR
Studies track Gulf War illness
U.S. suspects Iraq hides scientists
U.N. Arms Experts Scour More Suspect Sites in Iraq
Iraq Condemns U.S. Over North Korea
Iraq protests U.S. air strikes
U.S. Seeks Regional Pressure on N. Korea
U.S. Faces Obstacles in Strategy on North Korea
South Korea Criticizes U.S. Plan for Exerting Pressure on North
N Korea Nuclear Weapons Program
North Korean Says Nation Unable to Comply With Key Arms Pact
Appeasement, Please
Musharraf Hints He Considered Nuclear Strike
Suit Over ABM Pact Withdrawal Dismissed
The List
Cotter residents need monitors
A new secret mission
Rumsfeld 'offered help to Saddam'
Budget Director Lowers Estimate of Cost of a War
Ex-Nato commander to stand for US President
MILITARY
Kenya Joyful as Moi Yields Power to New Leader
Libyan Troops Out of C. African Republic
Despair Fills Md. Gun Dealers
Split at U.N. Over Products That Iraqis May Import
U.S. - British Jets Bomb Iraq Facilities
Plan Puebla Panama: The InterAmerican Development Bank Paves Latin America
Kuwaitis seethe with anger as U.S. war drum beats
Chechnya Bomb Toll Rises Past 80; Putin Stands by Vote Plan
'No basis' for Iraq war now
U.N. Broadens Iraqi Import Ban
Pentagon build-up reaches unstoppable momentum
U.S. Soldier Is Wounded
Rangel calls for reintroducing draft
A question of casualties in Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
D.C. Jail Lockdown Sparks New Fears
5 Flee Puerto Rican Prison in Copter
Defense Lawyers In China Find State Is Judge and Jury
At Least 4 Killed in Philippines' Blast
Gunman kills 3 U.S. missionaries
Five Illegal Arrivals Still Elude F.B.I.
15 Freighters Believed to Be Linked To Al Qaeda
ENERGY AND OTHER
OPEC May Increase Supplies
Michigan and Dow Drop Dioxin Pact
Bush Administration Planning to Extend Cuts of Diesel Emissions
ACTIVISTS
New Year's Eve in Iraq Sees Peace Marches
S.Koreans Ignore North's Nukes at Anti - U.S. Rally
Iraqis Focus Of Nuns' Fears
-------- NUCLEAR
[2002 leaves us, blinded by rumors of terrorism and nuclear brinksmanship and political irresponsibility. Gloom and doom are the news of the day, but activists are bubbling forth, and megabytes of information exist now for all to see (see http://prop1.org/nucnews/).]
-------- depleted uranium
Studies track Gulf War illness
TRAVIS DUNN
Disaster News
December 31, 2002 4:17 PM
http://www.disasternews.net/news/news.php?articleid=1688
BALTIMORE (December 30, 2002) - Recent studies investigating the effects of low levels of sarin nerve gas on animals appear to confirm the theory that some forms of Gulf War illness may have been caused by the exposure of U.S. troops to nerve gas.
This is sort of the final link in the chain of evidence that connects brain damage in Gulf War veterans with sarin nerve gas.
-Dr. Robert Haley (Rule)
Preliminary findings from one of these studies, conducted by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense in Aberdeen, Md., indicate exposure to low levels of sarin may cause brain damage in guinea pigs.
"The results suggest that depression of [cholinesterase] activity following low-dose sarin exposure may lead to persistent neurochemical or pathological changes that influence behavior," according to an abstract of the study presented at the November meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
This study and others corroborate the work of Dr. Robert Haley, an epidemiologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, who has been studying the effects of low-dose sarin on human beings for almost a decade.
Haley has published several studies showing a direct correlation between low-level sarin exposure and permanent brain stem damage in some Gulf War veterans.
Haley cites another study, conducted by researchers at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute at the University of New Mexico, which also finds that rats, exposed to low levels of sarin, suffer brain damage, particularly when these rats are also been exposed to a hot environment, similar to what troops would have encountered in the Persian Gulf.
"They're both showing the same thing," Haley said. "This is sort of the final link in the chain of evidence that connects brain damage in Gulf War veterans with sarin nerve gas. None of these pieces of evidence is conclusive in itself. But when you add them up, there's strong evidence."
Haley, however, said he does not mean to imply that all the symptoms reported by sick Gulf War veterans are caused by sarin.
Haley also lends credence to the so-called "cocktail theory," which holds that a variety of substances -- pesticides, depleted uranium, anthrax vaccines, and petrochemical fumes -- may be responsible for the ill-health effects noted by almost a quarter of the 700,000 U.S. troops who were stationed in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm.
Another Army study is looking into the combined effects of both low-level sarin and pyridostigmine bromide (PB) exposure in rats. PB is an anti-nerve gas pill that was given to troops during the war, and which some suspect may have impaired their health.
The power of PON
Scientific studies of Gulf War illnesses have been expanding considerably in the last few years, and received a big boost Oct. 28 when the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it would spend $40 million in FY 2004 on further research, particularly on the neurological basis of some of these illnesses.
Haley, for one, is impressed by the change, since he began his research without any support from the DoD or the VA. His original studies were funded by H. Ross Perot.
At that time, he said, almost all government research into Gulf War illnesses was concentrated on "combat stress," a focus that Haley thought absurd.
But the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses (OSAGWI) -- now the Deployment Health Support Directorate (DHSD) -- sharply criticized the validity of Haley's research for years.
"For years they called Haley a witch doctor. I know because I was there. I've got it on videotape," said Kirt Love, director of the Desert Storm Battle Registry. "They had it in for Haley. They've done everything they can to blackball this guy."
"Dr. Haley was publicly ridiculed on Capitol Hill, "added Steve Robinson, director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. "Now he has survived, and his science has been proven to be true, and his science is going to get funded."
Bernard Rostker, former undersecretary of the Army and head of OSAGWI, at a public hearing on Tuesday, July 13, 1999, called into question the basic logic of Haley's work.
"On various occasions Dr. Haley has also cited that since he's found [brain] damage there must have been sarin on the battlefield and therefore there was sarin on the battlefield," Rostker said. "That circular logic escapes me."
But to Haley the explanation is simple, and there's no circular logic involved.
It all has to do with a substance called paraoxonase Q, or PON Q, a chemical in the human bloodstream that serves only one function -- the elimination of sarin nerve gas.
Haley has no idea why such a chemical exists naturally; he speculates that it may have served some vestigial function in the annals of evolution. But that is beside the point, he said. The fact is, PON Q exists, and by studying blood levels of this chemical, a scientist can learn important information.
Haley's studies indicate that troops who have naturally high levels of PON Q in their bloodstream had relatively normal brains. The sick Gulf vets, however, all had naturally low levels of PON Q. These are soldiers who served in the same units, and would have been exposed to the same environmental and chemical conditions.
According to Haley, there is only one scientific conclusion: the troops he studied were exposed to sarin. No other theory could explain why the vets with high PON Q levels did not get sick.
So where did the sarin come from?
Robinson, who used to work for Rostker and OSAGWI, said the official word from the Pentagon, until 1997, was that no chemical or biological weapons were present in the Persian Gulf theatre. Robinson said he knew better -- the very organization he worked for was deliberately lying to the public.
"Science is proving them wrong," he said.
The DoD has since come to recognize possible low level sarin release from an Iraqi bunker at Khamisiyah. But neither Haley, nor Robinson, nor Love, think that this one site can explain all the sick vets.
At the abovementioned 1999 hearing, Rostker said, "So I don't know the source of the contamination that Dr. Haley relates to...that is another troublesome aspect of Dr. Haley's work. We just can't find with any degree of certainty the source of the contamination that he cites as being present."
Haley, however, has a very definite idea of where the sarin could have come from, and he thinks that if Rostker listened to Czech and French intelligence reports, he might find "the source of the contamination."
On both Jan. 20 and 24 of 1991, Czech units detected low levels of sarin drifting from a storage facilty in Iraq. French units independently confirmed ambient sarin on Jan. 24.
"[The DoD] would prefer that this not be discussed," Haley said.
'A new paradigm of warfare'
Both Robinson and Love are happy with the turn that recent research is taking, but both are concerned that a focus on the effects of sarin might prevent research into other possible causes.
"The studies demonstrate that if good science is applied and researchers are allowed to look at the potential problems, then researchers will find an answer," Robinson said. "That doesn't mean that the other exposures are any less important."
Future research must not lose sight of other possible culprits, he said, such as depleted uranium, the PB pill, experimental drugs, anthrax vaccines, pesticides and the petrochemicals given off by burning oil wells.
"Exposures are part of the reason and causal factors of why [Gulf veterans] are sick," he said. "That's something we've been trying to make people to understand for the last 11 years."
Love, who himself suffers from an undiagnosed Gulf War illness, is heartened by the new studies because they are "going to be harder for DoD to dispute."
And that's a pattern that Love says he has seen in his activism for sick Gulf vets: a pattern of deception and stonewalling on the part of both the DoD and VA to prevent any comprehensive research into Gulf War illnesses.
"That's their job," Love said, "just to stiff arm us and just keep us at bay."
And both men are particularly concerned that researchers are just beginning to understand what happened a decade ago, as U.S. troops are once again deploying for the Persian Gulf.
"It's very interesting that it's kind of all coming together right on the precipice of another Gulf War," Robinson said.
One thing that most Americans don't realize, he said, is that the age of conventional warfare died during the last Gulf War, and that today's conflicts will entail the exposure of our troops to dangerous substances, the effects of which have not been completely studied.
"We're in a new paradigm of warfare," he said. "And we're not talking about it. [Chemical exposure] is just as dangerous as bullets and bombs, but it's just harder to see. And you don't have to die from it to feel the effects."
Love is concerned today's soldiers will not be adequately protected against what they may soon face in "this industrial wasteland they call Iraq."
He claims that some of the protective suits to be provided to the rank and file aren't really much better than the ones in the first Gulf War, and he cites a General Accounting Office report from Oct. 10 that concluded up to 70 percent of these suits were defective.
"I think we're going to have a lot of unnecessary deaths. What I'm fighting for right now is the medical and civil rights of veterans," he said. "I don't think it's right that they're sending these troops out and putting such a low dollar value on them."
-------- inspections
U.S. suspects Iraq hides scientists
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 31, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021231-519991.htm
Iraq is hiding at least two weapons scientists in Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces, U.S. intelligence officials have told The Washington Times.
The intelligence officials also said there are signs that Iraq's military forces recently moved chemical and biological weapons materials to underground storage areas unknown to arms inspectors from the United Nations.
"They've moved the scientists to two palaces," said an intelligence official familiar with internal U.S. government reports on Iraq sent to senior officials last week.
Intelligence reports about the scientists support the Bush administration's conclusion that Iraq is violating the terms of the latest U.N. resolution requiring Baghdad to cooperate fully with weapons inspections.
The Iraqis are hiding the scientists apparently to prevent the arms inspectors from questioning them, the officials said.
The two scientists were not identified by name. The officials said one is believed to be involved in Iraq's covert nuclear arms program and that the second is a specialist in chemical and biological weapons.
The U.N. Security Council, meanwhile, agreed yesterday to tighten restrictions on the humanitarian oil-for-food program for Iraq. The resolution is aimed at blocking Iraq from obtaining military items under the guise of purchasing humanitarian goods.
The new restrictions were added at the request of the United States and were contained in a resolution approved at the world body's headquarters in New York.
The resolution added items to the U.N. "goods review list" aimed at preventing Iraq from acquiring medical supplies that could be used to inoculate its troops against chemical and biological weapons, and blocks the importation of such goods as work boats that could be used in terrorist attacks.
The restrictions come amid preparations for U.S. military action against Iraq and follow recent intelligence reports indicating that Baghdad had obtained a special silicon powder through the oil-for-food program that could be used to enhance chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq also obtained trucks from the program that were converted into mobile missile launchers, according to U.S. officials.
Weapons inspectors searched six sites in Iraq yesterday, some for the second time, looking for banned weapons. The inspectors visited a missile plant, a water-treatment facility south of Baghdad and a communications plant near the Iranian border, according to wire service reports.
It could not be learned whether the information about the two Iraqi scientists was supplied to the inspectors or whether it was specific enough to merit any response from them.
The administration has in the past withheld intelligence from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as Unmovic.
Iraq supplied the United Nations with a list of 500 weapons scientists last weekend.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a Sunday television interview that Iraq has been cooperating with the inspectors but that it is not clear whether the cooperation will continue.
"There's been some resistance in recent days to some of the things the inspectors are looking for, and we are providing more information and intelligence to the inspectors to cue their visits, and we'll see whether that attitude of cooperation continues," Mr. Powell said on ABC's "This Week."
In another television interview, Mr. Powell said the United States has begun supplying intelligence to the arms inspectors. He also disputed Saddam's assertions that Iraq has halted work on weapons of mass destruction.
"Well, we'll establish whether or not that is the case," he said. "We do not believe he has stopped, but the inspectors are hard at work, and we have intelligence information that we are sharing with the inspectors to assist them in their work."
Additional U.N. reports on Iraq's weapons programs are due at the end of January, Mr. Powell said.
Asked whether time is running out for Iraq, Mr. Powell said, "I think that this can't go on indefinitely. We are anxious to see the results of the inspectors' work, and 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. But it's a situation, of course, we are monitoring closely, and, of course, we are positioning ourselves and positioning our military forces for whatever might be required."
Mr. Powell also said there are questions about whether Iraqi weapons technicians being interviewed in Iraq by the arms inspectors are free to talk.
"The first one who came in had a minder with him, somebody with him," Mr. Powell said on "Fox News Sunday."
The U.S. government wants Iraq's "key" arms officials to be questioned outside the country and to have their families protected from retribution by Baghdad, Mr. Powell said.
Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi official in charge of monitoring the inspectors, said yesterday that any interviews with scientists should be held in Iraq.
"They met thousands of scientists for thousands of hours, with the presence of the Iraqi side, without intervention from the Iraqi side," Gen. Amin told Arab satellite TV channel Al Jazeera.
The list of arms technicians provided by Iraq on Saturday includes names of experts who have taken part in building ballistic missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
It was required under Security Council Resolution 1441, passed in November to restart arms inspections.
President Bush said in October that to learn the truth about Iraq's arms programs, "the regime must allow witnesses to its illegal activities to be interviewed outside the country."
"And these witnesses must be free to bring their families with them so they are beyond the reach of Saddam Hussein's terror and murder," Mr. Bush said. "And inspectors must have access to any site, at any time, without pre-clearance, without delay, without exceptions."
U.S. intelligence agencies have identified as many as 46 palaces used by Saddam. Some of the facilities are up to 50 square miles.
The latest U.N. arms inspection resolution reversed an earlier ban on conducting inspections at Saddam's presidential sites. Earlier this month, the weapons inspectors tested Baghdad's willingness to allow full access to any site.
Inspectors were delayed about 10 minutes at a presidential compound west of Baghdad on Dec. 3 before being allowed inside.
--------
U.N. Arms Experts Scour More Suspect Sites in Iraq
December 31, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-inspectors.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.N. arms experts pounced on at least eight suspect sites in central Iraq Tuesday, and the head of an engineering facility complained that the inspectors' conduct was ``provocative and annoying.''
The official Iraqi News Agency (INA) said Tuesday Iraq has invited chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to visit Baghdad to ``review cooperation'' in January, before the experts report back to the U.N. Security council on their mission.
``A team of 14 inspectors visited the company and had access to all documents. Their conduct was not normal unlike previous teams,'' Riyadh khalil al-Hashimi, head of engineering and designing firm Sa'ad General Company, told reporters.
He was speaking after chemical experts from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commissionspent five hours searching his facility.
Hashimi said arms experts visited all departments in the facility, which he said deals mainly with designing and engineering of industrial projects, and searched everything including personal belongings of the staff.
``They looked at personal documents and searched everything, including briefcases of the employees and drawers in an annoying way, and even notebooks of some of the ladies were looked into thoroughly,'' Hashimi said.
``This provocative conduct can be described as a waste of time and an obstruction of the daily work, which in my opinion, has nothing to do with their main goal,'' he said.
``Despite all these measures and direct intrusion, they did not take any document or find anything related to proscribed activities,'' he added.
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.
The United States has threatened to use force to disarm Iraq if Baghdad failed to comply with a tough new U.N. Security Council resolution on inspections.
Under the resolution, the inspectors are to report back to the Security Council on their work in Iraq by Jan. 27.
BLIX INVITED TO BAGHDAD
In a dispatch from New York, INA said President Saddam Hussein's adviser Amir al-Saadi, handed a letter to Blix on Tuesday inviting him to Baghdad to review cooperation.
``I feel it is necessary to meet in Baghdad at a date appropriate to you between the second and the third week of January to review cooperation in the past period,'' INA quoted Saadi as saying in the letter.
Saadi said the meeting would be also a chance to ``boost cooperation in the coming months to achieve our joint aim of speedy implementation of UNMOVIC mandate identified in the U.N. Security Council resolutions.''
More than 110 inspectors from UNMOVIC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are now in Iraq.
Witnesses said an UNMOVIC team drove to a military base in Fallujah, 31 miles northwest of Baghdad. They said the facility is used to train officers in chemical warfare.
Iraqi officials said UNMOVIC ballistic experts visited Al Mansour Company in Tajiyat on the outskirts of Baghdad and Al Maamoun plant in Youssefiyah, some 18 miles south of the capital.
Biological teams were at a pharmaceutical research center and the Baghdad offices of the Ibn Sina company, which runs several facilities linked to weapons programs.
An UNMOVIC chemical team was also in Baghdad, checking out a petrochemical research center.
An IAEA team was at a plant run by Ibn Younees company on the outskirts of Baghdad.
The inspectors scrutinized seven sites Monday, including a water treatment facility south of Baghdad and a missile facility.
-------- iraq
Iraq Condemns U.S. Over North Korea
December 31, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/international/middleeast/31IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 30 (Reuters) - Iraq today accused the United States of using a double standard, contrasting the American military buildup in the Persian Gulf with the Bush administration's decision to use diplomacy to try to settle a nuclear arms crisis in North Korea.
Al Thawra, the official newspaper of President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, said it was unfair that Washington was preparing to go to war with Iraq, which was cooperating with United Nations arms inspectors, but seeking a peaceful solution in North Korea, which had just expelled them.
"Look how Washington deals with the two situations, how it threatens to invade Iraq, which has no weapons of mass destruction," the newspaper said.
"At the same time, the U.S. administration is saying it wants a peaceful end to the crisis with North Korea," it said.
The paper said Baghdad was cooperating fully with the United Nations. "So why do America and Britain continue to threaten it?" the paper wrote. "Is it because Iraq is an Arab country? Or because Iraq is an oil country? Or because the Zionist lobby inside the U.S. administration wants to settle old scores?"
----
Iraq protests U.S. air strikes
From the International Desk
12/31/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021231-045917-1151r
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Iraq has protested to the United Nations about a U.S. and British air strike against targets in the southern "no fly" zone last week that it says left three dead and 16 wounded and destroyed a mosque.
No independent confirmation of the casualties was available and the United States has said the Dec. 26 strikes were aimed at military command-and-control facilities in response to the Iraqi shoot-down of a U.S. unmanned aircraft earlier this month.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri called the air strikes "brutal terrorist aggression," adding that they were "a flagrant material breach" of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
The no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq were established by the United States and its allies in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. The allies argue that they enforce the zones pursuant to U.N. resolutions calling on the Iraqis to cease persecution of the Kurdish minority in the north and the so-called marsh Arabs in the south.
For its part, Iraq says the zones -- and their enforcement with frequent air strikes against targets on the ground -- are a violation of Iraq's "independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity," in the words of Sabri's letter.
The letter, dated Dec. 30 and distributed to news agencies in Baghdad Tuesday, also accuses Kuwait of being "directly involved" in the air strikes. The allied planes took off from airfields in the Gulf kingdom.
"We hope that you would draw the attention of the U.N. Security Council to this aggression," the letter concludes, adding, "We also demand that the security council honestly fulfill its duties under the (U.N.) charter, put an end to this terrorist aggression and have those involved it -- the United States, Britain and Kuwait -- assume legal responsibility for it."
Also Tuesday, arms inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission searched seven sites in central and suburban Baghdad on Tuesday.
An Iraqi Information Ministry official said a team of ballistic missile experts inspected the premises of the al Mansour company in a northern Baghdad suburb, while another team searched a factory run by the Iraqi department for military industries in the area of Yussufiya, just south of the Iraqi capital.
In central Baghdad, a biological team visited a center for medical research and re-visited the Ibn Sina research center, while a chemical team explored an oil research facility and a company specializing in chemical and petrochemical production.
----
U.S. Seeks Regional Pressure on N. Korea
Russia and Japan Convey Strong Messages to Kim, but S. Korea and China Seek Direct Diplomacy
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56240-2002Dec30?language=printer
The Bush administration has concluded that the regional powers in Asia, especially China and Russia, must take a greater role in resolving the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and it is urging those nations to exert maximum pressure on the North Korean regime, officials said yesterday.
The administration's plan would allow U.S. officials to keep focused on the looming confrontation with Iraq in the coming weeks and also sidestep the question of direct talks between the United States and North Korea while it pursues a diplomatic resolution. The administration has insisted it will not engage in discussions with North Korea unless it verifies that it had dismantled a recently discovered nuclear weapons program.
In recent weeks, the administration has sent repeated messages to North Korea to end its nuclear ambitions through each of the key powers in the region -- China, Russia, Japan and South Korea -- with the expectation that each nation would back up the U.S. message with its own statement of concern. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell signaled this approach when he made the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows, telling interviewers "we have ways of communicating with the North Koreans."
In the view of U.S. officials, the Russians and the Japanese have been the most aggressive in relaying tough messages from the United States to North Korea, while China and South Korea have been more ambivalent about pursuing a hard-nosed approach without direct U.S. participation. South Korea's president yesterday faulted the administration's stance, telling his cabinet that "pressure and isolation have never been successful with communist countries -- Cuba is one example."
The administration's efforts to put more of the onus on regional allies are hampered by the fact that there is no regional security organization, such as NATO, and because the regional powers have long and complex histories of warfare and betrayal with one another. The U.S. role in northern Asia, including its 37,000 troops in South Korea, is also a source of tension.
North Korea dramatically raised the stakes last week when, in response to administration decision to cut off fuel oil deliveries, it said it would evict international weapons inspectors and restart a plutonium reactor that had been shuttered as part of a 1994 accord brokered by the Clinton administration. Pyongyang has also admitted a newer effort to produce enriched uranium for possible use in nuclear weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has privately suggested convening a meeting of diplomats from all six nations, including North Korea and the United States, as a way of elevating the back-channel conversations into a more formal setting. U.S. officials are not opposed to the idea, believing it would not violate their pledge against direct talks. But China has been resistant, arguing that the North Koreans would not show up.
"The Chinese have come back and said, 'you need to talk to them,' which raises the question about whether they are carrying our water to Pyongyang or they are carrying Pyongyang's water to us," one U.S. official said.
At a lower level, the United States can also directly communicate with the North Koreans via the United Nations missions, but little use has been made of that conduit in recent weeks. Donald P. Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and chairman of the Korea Society, said yesterday that a regional conference, along the lines suggested by Putin, "would be a face-saving way to sit down and talk to the North Koreans."
North Korea has insisted on direct talks to resolve the dispute, in particular calling for Washington to guarantee North Korea's security with a nonaggression pact. "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," a North Korean foreign ministry statement said on Sunday.
Next week, the administration expects to seek a censure of North Korea at an emergency meeting of the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations. If North Korea still refuses to back down, then the U.N. Security Council would be expected to take up the matter, where once again the administration hopes China and Russia will play important roles.
U.S. officials said they are trying to emphasize that this is as much a regional issue as an international conflict, and that each of the four powers in northern Asia must face up to their own responsibilities to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear-free. U.S. officials have not hesitated to note to their Chinese counterparts that the United States has kept Japan from becoming a nuclear power for a half-century, and that China now owes the United States a return favor on the Korean peninsula.
During the weeks of discussions over the Korean crisis, the Chinese have privately been disdainful about North Korea's ability to sustain a nuclear program, making it difficult to convince the Chinese to take a harder line, one official said.
In fact, despite the long ties between China and North Korea, administration officials increasingly believe that Russia may have more influence with North Korea and its mercurial leader, Kim Jong Il. Russia has been developing economic interests in North Korea, including a new railway crossing the inter-Korean border that Moscow hopes can join the Trans-Siberian, connecting Russia with Western Europe, while Putin is eager to demonstrate his abilities on the diplomatic stage.
Gregg said the Chinese "are willing to do a certain amount, but they have real concerns about a continued U.S. role in the region," especially any impression that they are simply doing the U.S. bidding. The Russians, by contrast, appeared to have developed an increasingly close relationship with the North Koreans. He said that on a recent visit to Pyongyang, he detected a "positive tone" when North Korean officials discussed Putin.
-------- korea
U.S. Faces Obstacles in Strategy on North Korea
Containment Plan Resisted In Asia, Doubted by Experts
By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56452-2002Dec30?language=printer
SEOUL, Dec. 30 -- North Korea, one of the world's poorest, most isolated countries, is a difficult place to employ the containment strategy the United States is now pursuing. The world has little left to withdraw or withhold, according to diplomats and specialists. What levers exist largely have been pulled already -- most recently when the Bush administration cut fuel shipments upon learning that North Korea has a program to create enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
"Economically, there really isn't that much else that we can do to pressure North Korea," said Lee Chung Min, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.
For the Bush administration, simply intensifying economic and political pressure on the North involves enormous political obstacles. South Korea has embraced engagement and dialogue as the best way to address the reclusive country to its north. It appears committed to that course -- a fact underscored today as South Korea's president, Kim Dae Jung, rejected containment as a failed doctrine.
"Pressure and isolation have never been successful with communist countries," Kim told his cabinet, in remarks distributed by the presidential Blue House. "Cuba is one example."
Nonetheless, the Bush administration has concluded that the regional powers in Asia, especially China and Russia, must take a greater role in resolving the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and it is urging those nations to exert maximum pressure on Pyongyang, U.S. officials said today. [Details, Page A14.]
Effective economic pressures will all but certainly need the backing of the U.N. Security Council, Lee said. But one council member, Russia, sells military equipment to North Korea and has been openly critical of the Bush administration's handling of the confrontation. "Attempts to isolate North Korea can only lead to a new escalation in tension," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said today.
Another Security Council member, China, now provides North Korea with food and fuel, and appears unlikely to embrace the U.S. approach.
"Of course, China will not support containment," said Jin Linbuo, an Asian security expert at the government-affiliated China Institution of International Studies in Beijing. "If North Korea is in turmoil, then lots of refugees will crowd into China. Moreover, if North Korea collapses, then the Korean Peninsula would be wholly controlled by the United States and its coterie. North Korea's existence protects China from American military domination."
In one respect, the logic of containment rests on indisputably solid ground: North Korea is in dire straits, its economy vulnerable and its livelihood increasingly dependent on outside largess.
Beyond North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, people sometimes freeze to death in darkened, unheated homes because of a shortage of energy, according to defectors. Power stations are idled for lack of fuel, and factories run at about 30 percent of capacity, said Park Suhk Sam, a North Korea expert in the research arm of the Bank of Korea, South Korea's central bank. What energy is available is directed mostly toward the capital, and at factories that make weapons, say recent visitors.
According to Kim Tae Woo, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, North Korea's government secures about $580 million a year through the sale of missiles and missile technology to countries including Yemen, Syria, Egypt and Iran. In an economy whose annual output is estimated at $15.7 billion, those sales are a crucial source of hard currency. Stopping the trade is a requirement for making containment work, Kim said.
Roughly half of North Korea's energy supplies are derived from domestically mined coal, according to Oh Seung Ryeol, an economist at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a research group affiliated with the South Korean government. The other half comes from imports -- the bulk of it from China, as well as some from the Middle East. When the Bush administration halted fuel shipments, that lopped off another portion of North Korea's electricity supply, Oh said.
"Their ability to produce daily necessities is very limited," he said. "They are suffering from serious economic shortages."
Agriculture makes up nearly a third of North Korea's economic output. But the U.N. World Food Program estimated that half of North Korea's tractors are now idled because of a lack of spare parts, tires and gasoline. Oxen are increasingly being pressed into service to compensate for the shortage, an example of the backward steps for which the country is known.
Food is in critically short supply. Though the World Food Program concluded that this year's harvest was slightly better than last year's, North Korea still lacked more than 1 million tons of grain needed to satisfy minimum caloric needs for its 22 million people. According to Oh, North Korea typically produces about 80 percent of the food it needs while importing the rest, most of it from China.
Japan, South Korea and the United States have all made significant contributions of food to North Korea in recent years. But that aid is now in doubt. The World Food Program -- which coordinates aid shipments -- recently warned that it will not be able to feed nearly 3 million people in need, including 760,000 children in nurseries.
The United States has enunciated tough new rules for further food aid to the North. South Korea, which ships nearly $300 million in clothing and food to North Korea, would be deeply reluctant to follow suit.
"South Koreans look at the North and say, 'They are our brothers,' " said a Western diplomat.
Even if containment does make life more miserable for millions of North Koreans, it would not necessarily translate into sufficient pressure on the regime. North Korea's history has proved the endurance of the so-called Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, whose life of excess against the backdrop of broad suffering often draws comparisons to Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu.
In the mid-1990s, natural disasters and the loss of fertilizers and machinery from the Soviet Union led to a series of disastrous harvests and widespread famine in North Korea. While the government said about 200,000 people died, outside experts put the toll at 10 times that number. Many in the South predicted, wrongly, that Kim Jong Il would not endure.
"We cannot assess the stability of North Korea using a Western standard," said Kim Tae Woo, the defense analyst. The famine appears not to have dented Kim Jong Il's willingness to indulge. In a book published recently in Moscow, a Russian general who traveled with Kim last year aboard his personal rail car -- en route to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir Putin -- described orgies of food washed down by French wines. For one meal, they had fresh lobster.
"Every day on board we would discuss the menu for the next day," wrote the Russian general, Konstantin Pulikovsky. "Kim suggested doing so, saying that he had great cooks, who were educated in France. One could order any dish from Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine. Usually the menu he chose consisted of 15-20 dishes."
North Korea's dire economic conditions have, however, forced Kim to alter some policies. When the famine peaked, he reluctantly accepted aid shipments from his biggest enemies: the United States, Japan and South Korea. Since then, he has experimented with economic reforms reminiscent of China's market-opening moves of two decades ago, allowing some private enterprise to take root and foreign businesses to set up operations.
South Korean entrepreneurs have responded, shifting manufacturing to factories outside Pyongyang. Just north of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula, at a newly minted free trade zone called Kaesong, a South Korean entrepreneur is playing a central role in North Korea's grandest experiment with capitalism -- a $9 billion industrial park that will include thousands of factories, homes and hotel rooms. About 500,000 South Koreans have visited Mount Kumgang, a walled-off scenic area developed for tourism inside North Korea.
But even as this trend intensifies, trade between the Koreas amounted to a mere $400 million last year, according to Park, the Bank of Korea economist, so stopping it would not have significant consequences. Much of the trade would be difficult to stop anyway, because South Korean entrepreneurs -- anticipating such a move -- have routed much of their business through ports in other countries, principally in China, Park said.
In the 1980s and into the early 1990s, ethnic Koreans living in then-booming Japan sent as much as $1.5 billion a year back to relatives in the North and to Kim's family, according to Tsutomu Nishioka, an expert at the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo. Much of the money was raised through real estate ventures and pachinko pinball parlors, then carried back in suitcases full of cash on a passenger boat -- the Mangyongbong -- that runs about twice a month between the northern Japanese port of Niigata and Wonsan, on North Korea's east coast.
The Mangyongbong also carried goods such as computers, machine tools and parts for high-quality Japanese tractors, which were needed to construct North Korea's underground military bunkers, Nishioka said.
But when Japan's good times ended, the flow of money turned to a trickle: Nishioka now estimates that no more than $160 million a year makes its way to North Korea from Japan's ethnic Koreans. At the same time, tightened export controls that followed North Korea's test-firing of a missile over Japan in 1998 have sharply limited the transport of technology on the Mangyongbong, though the boat does carry luxury items for Kim Jong Il, said Lee Yong Hwa, a North Korea expert at Kansai University in Osaka.
Ultimately, any effort that does not enjoy China's genuine backing is doomed to fail, experts say. China is not only North Korea's largest external source of food and fuel, but also its largest trading partner and its gateway to the rest of the world.
North Korean textiles are trucked into China, then shipped to Japan and sold with "Made in China" labels, Western diplomats said. China's long border with North Korea has become a kind of anything-goes frontier. According to visitors to the area, North Koreans bribe their way past Chinese border guards to enter nearby towns and cities. There they take jobs that even local Chinese do not want, at lower wages, laboring in sewers and construction zones and brothels, bringing food and scarce goods back to a hungry homeland.
"China, by its own admission, is keeping the North Koreans on life support," said a Western diplomat.
Special correspondents Wang Ting in Shanghai and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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South Korea Criticizes U.S. Plan for Exerting Pressure on North
December 31, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/international/asia/31SEOU.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 30 - President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea said today that pressure and isolation would not persuade North Korea to end its nuclear arms program, pointing up the South's differences with the United States.
"Pressure and isolation have never been successful with Communist countries; Cuba is one example," Mr. Kim told his cabinet, in remarks tailored for an American audience. The United States has announced a plan of political and economic pressure against North Korea to try to force it to halt its renewed nuclear arms efforts.
But today in Washington, the Bush administration suggested that the pressure would be accompanied by diplomatic engagement. The State Department spokesman, Philip Reeker, said the administration was "prepared to pursue a bold dialogue aimed at having a better relationship with North Korea."
South Korea will begin a diplomatic drive to try to resolve the issue, Mr. Kim announced. Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tae Shik will go to Beijing this week, and Vice Foreign Minister Kim Hang Kyung will go to Moscow the following week for consultations, he said.
"We will work closely with our allies to solve this Korean peninsula problem, and we will firmly oppose North Korea's nuclear arms program, but no matter what, we will pursue a peaceful solution," he said. "We cannot go to war with North Korea, and we can't go back to the cold war system and extreme confrontation."
The statement today highlighted the growing rift between the United States and South Korea, long a close ally. Anti-Americanisn has been rising in South Korea, especially among the young.
In Washington, the State Department said today that James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, would travel to South Korea and other countries in the region to discuss ways of countering the new nuclear threat from North Korea.
Mr. Reeker said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke about North Korea over the weekend with the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer; with the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan; and this morning with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain .
Mr. Reeker said the United States would wait until the International Atomic Energy Agency met on Jan. 6 before deciding whether to bring the North Korean situation before the United Nations Security Council. He said there was no suggestion by anyone in the administration that the United States should impose new sanctions on North Korea.
Mr. Reeker denied that there was any emerging rift between the United States and South Korea, noting that the departing and incoming presidents both have endorsed the policy of putting pressure on the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Russia, a North Korean ally, warned it today against withdrawing from the international agreement to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. "Pyongyang's recent decisions to send away I.A.E.A. inspectors and prepare for renewal of the uncontrolled work of its nuclear energy complex cannot but elicit regret," Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said.
Mikhail Lysenko, the director of the Foreign Ministry's security and disarmament department, also warned North Korea against withdrawing from the treaty. He said Russia supported the 1994 agreement and insisted on a "constructive dialogue" among all involved.
North Korea disclosed recently that it was starting a new program to produce nuclear arms. Then it said it would reactivate another nuclear installation, removed monitoring devices and ordered United Nations inspectors to leave.
South Korea's statement today pointed up the growing rift between the United States and South Korea, long a close ally. Angry demonstrations against the American military here are revealing a broader strain of anti-American feelings, especially among young people.
Many South Koreans resent what they see as American condescension, from an era that younger people here do not even remember. These days, South Korea has Asia's second-most-dynamic economy, after China's. Half the people here in their 20's are in college or have degrees, and the country has such large foreign currency reserves that it doles out foreign aid.
South Koreans can rattle off a string of American slights and insults: a Winter Olympics medal taken away from a South Korean skater, a joke in poor taste on an American television show, a lukewarm reception given their president in Washington last spring and the daily friction of 37,000 American troops in one of the world's most densely populated nations.
"It is absolutely necessary to eradicate the toadyism toward the United States," Chun Chu Song, an economics professor with an American doctorate, wrote last week in the daily JoonAng Ilbo. "A conference in Korea is considered enlightening if a famous American scholar attends, no matter what he says."
The anger at the military surged after the accidental deaths last summer of two teenage girls who were hit by an American military vehicle. When an American court martial acquitted the two soldiers who were in the vehicle, protests became mainstream. On Tuesday night, organizers hope to convert Seoul's traditionally festive downtown New Year's Eve into a vigil and an anti-American protest attended by one million people.
Earlier this month, similar mass vigils helped elect Roh Moo Hyun as president. Mr. Roh, a liberal labor lawyer who will take office on Feb. 25, won a much higher percentage of the vote from people under age 40 than from older people.
Now, though, recognizing that the country's security and economy depend in large measure on the American ties, he is asking protesters to use "self restraint."
"To take care of the North Korean nuclear problem is a matter of national survival," Mr. Roh told protest organizers on Saturday, though he also said the need to revise the Status of Forces Agreement, the law that governs the conduct of the 37,000 American troops here, "is a matter of national pride."
South Korea signed an agreement today with the American military to give the South Korean authorities a greater role in investigating crimes committed by American troops.
On Saturday, Kim Hyo Jin, a 26-year-old university student, was seeking participants for the New Year's Eve rally. "When we ask whether these people are protecting us or not, the answer would be no," she said, displaying photos of the girls killed by the American vehicle.
On the one hand, some of the anti-American rallies, an outgrowth of mass rallies last summer by World Cup soccer fans, demonstrated national pride.
"The demonstrations are not about anti-American feeling," said Kim Jae Hwa, a 57-year-old manager of a spice company. As his wife, Sun Sook, 50, nodded in agreement, he said of a demonstration the family attended, "It is more about our people's showing their pride in themselves, trying to be in an equal position with U.S. with our own sovereignty."
Koreans already had a love-hate relationship with the United States, which exerts omnipresent cultural and economic influence here. But there is a backlash. With 69 percent of the economy now dependent on foreign trade, many Koreans contend that they are being passed over for jobs that go to less qualified, but bilingual, Korean-Americans.
South Korea's new leaders are considering a new approach to curb anti-Americanism. "We are telling the young people that American troops are not just here for national security, but for our economic security," said Ben Q. Limb, an adviser to President-elect Roh. "The young people don't know the war, but they know about their affluence."
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N Korea Nuclear Weapons Program
Three Items from Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org/)
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>
Date: Tue Dec 31, 2002 1:10am
Nuclear Weapons Program
Current Status
In early October of 2002, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelley informed North Korean officials that the United States was aware that North Korea had a program underway to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Initially North Korea denied this, but later confirmed the veracity of the US claim. In confirming that they had an active nuclear weapons program, they also declared the Agreed Framework nullified.
The Agreed Framework signed by the United States and North Korea on October 21, 1994 in Geneva agreed that:
North Korea would freeze its existing nuclear program and agree to enhanced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards
Both sides would cooperate to replace the D.P.R.K.'s graphite-moderated reactors for related facilities with light-water (LWR) power plants.
Both countries would move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.
Both sides will work together for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
And that both sides would work to strengthen the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.
Prior to the establishment of the Agreed Framework, intelligence sources believe that North Korea could have extracted plutonium from their reactors for use in nuclear weapons-perhaps enough for one or two nuclear weapons.
Nevertheless, it is unclear whether it has actually produced or possesses nuclear weapons due to difficulties in developing detonation devices.
History
North Korea maintains uranium mines with four million tons of exploitable high-quality uranium. In the mid-1960s, it established a large-scale atomic energy research complex in Yongbyon and trained specialists from students who had studied in the Soviet Union. Under the cooperation agreement concluded between the USSR and the DPRK, a nuclear research center was constructed near the small town of Yongbyon. In 1965 a Soviet IRT-2M research reactor was assembled for this center. From 1965 through 1973 fuel (fuel elements) enriched to 10 percent was supplied to the DPRK for this reactor.
In the 1970s it focused study on the nuclear fuel cycle including refining, conversion and fabrication. In 1974 Korean specialists independently modernized Soviet IRT-2M research reactor in the same way that other reactors operating in the USSR and other countries had been modernized, bringing its capacity up to 8 megawatts and switching to fuel enriched to 80 percent. Subsequently, the degree of fuel enrichment was reduced. In the same period the DPRK began to build a 5 MWe research reactor, what is called the "second reactor." In 1977 the DPRK concluded an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], allowing the latter to inspect a research reactor which was built with the assistance of the USSR.
The North Korean nuclear weapons program dates back to the 1980s. In the 1980s, focusing on practical uses of nuclear energy and the completion of a nuclear weapon development system, North Korea began to operate facilities for uranium fabrication and conversion. It began construction of a 200 MWe nuclear reactor and nuclear reprocessing facilities in Taechon and Yongbyon, respectively, and conducted high-explosive detonation tests. In 1985 US officials announced for the first time that they had intelligence data proving that a secret nuclear reactor was being built 90 km north of Pyongyang near the small town of Yongbyon. The installation at Yongbyon had been known for eight years from official IAEA reports. In 1985, under international pressure, Pyongyang acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). However, the DPRK refused to sign a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an obligation it had as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In July 1990 The Washington Post reported that new satellite photographs showed the presence in Yongbyon of a structure which could possibly be used to separate plutonium from nuclear fuel.
In a major initiative in July 1988, South Korean President Roh Tae Woo called for new efforts to promote North-South exchanges, family reunification, inter-Korean trade, and contact in international forums. Roh followed up this initiative in a UN General Assembly speech in which South Korea offered for the first time to discuss security matters with the North. Initial meetings that grew out of Roh's proposals started in September 1989. In September 1990, the first of eight prime minister-level meetings between North Korean and South Korean officials took place in Seoul, beginning an especially fruitful period of dialogue. The prime ministerial talks resulted in two major agreements: the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, Exchanges, and Cooperation (the "basic agreement") and the Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (the "joint declaration").
In late 1991 North and South Korea signed the Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, Exchanges and Cooperation and the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The Joint Declaration called for a bilateral nuclear inspection regime to verify the denuclearization of the peninsula. The Declaration, which came into force on 19 February 1992, states that the two sides "shallnot test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deployor use nuclear weapons," and that they "shall not possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities." A procedure for inter-Korean inspection was to be organized and a North-South Joint Nuclear Control Commission (JNCC) was mandated with verification of the denuclearization of the peninsula.
On 30 January 1992 the DPRK also signed a nuclear safeguards agreement with the IAEA, as it had pledged to do in 1985 when acceding to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This safeguards agreement allowed IAEA inspections to begin in June 1992. In March 1992, the JNCC was established in accordance with the joint declaration, but subsequent meetings failed to reach agreement on the main issue of establishing a bilateral inspection regime.
When North Korean Deputy Prime Minister Kim Tal-Hyon visited South Korea for economic talks in July 1992, President Roh Tae Woo announced that full North-South Economic Cooperation would not be possible without resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue. There was little progress toward the establishment of an inspection regime, and dialogue between the South and North stalled in the fall of 1992.
The North's agreement to accept IAEA safeguards initiated a series of IAEA inspections of North Korea's nuclear facilities. This promising development was halted by the North's refusal in January 1993 to allow special inspections of two unreported facilities suspected of holding nuclear waste. Ignoring the South-North Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, North Korea refused IAEA inspections and operated nuclear reprocessing facilities, making the world suspicious of its nuclear intentions.
Lack of progress on implementation of the denuclearization accord triggered actions on both sides that led to North Korea's March 12, 1993, announcement of its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The North's threat to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) brought North-South progress to an abrupt halt. Tensions ran high on the Korean Peninsula as the confrontation between North Korea and the United States deepened.
The UN Security Council on 11 May 1993 passed a resolution urging the DPRK to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to implement the 1991 North-South denuclearization accord. It also urged all member states to encourage the DPRK to respond positively to this resolution and to facilitate a solution.
The US responded by holding political-level talks with the DPRK in early June 1993 that led to a joint statement outlining the basic principles for continued US-DPRK dialogue and North Korea's "suspending" its withdrawal from the NPT. A second round of talks was held July 14-19, 1993, in Geneva. The talks set the guidelines for resolving the nuclear issue, improving U.S.-North Korean relations, and restarting inter-Korean talks, but further negotiations deadlocked.
Following the DPRK's spring 1994 unloading of fuel from its five-megawatt nuclear reactor and the resultant US push for UN sanctions, former President Carter's visit to Pyongyang in June 1994 helped to defuse tensions and resulted in renewed South-North talks. A third round of talks between the US and the DPRK opened in Geneva on July 8, 1994. However, the sudden death of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung on July 8, 1994 halted plans for a first ever South-North presidential summit and led to another period of inter-Korean animosity. The talks were recessed upon news of the death of North Korean President Kim Il Sung, then resumed in August. These talks concluded with the Agreed Framework.
Under the framework agreement, the North would freeze and eventually dismantle its existing suspect nuclear program, including the 50 MW and 200 MW graphite-moderated reactors under construction, as well as its existing 5 MW reactor and nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. In return, Pyongyang would be provided with alternative energy, initially in the form of heavy oil, and eventually two proliferation-resistant light water reactors (LWR). The two 1,000 MW light-water nuclear reactors would be safer and would produce much less plutonium, in order to help boost the supply of electricity in the North, which is now in a critical shortage. The agreement also included gradual improvement of relations between the US and the DPRK, and committed North Korea to engage in South-North dialogue.
A few weeks after the signing of the Agreed Framework, President Kim loosened restrictions on South Korean firms desiring to pursue business opportunities with the North. Although North Korea continued to refuse official overtures by the South, economic contacts appeared to be expanding gradually.
A close examination by the IAEA of the radioactive isotope content in the nuclear waste revealed that North Korea had extracted about 24 kilograms of Plutonium. North Korea was supposed to have produced 0.9 gram of Plutonium per megawatt every day over a 4-year period from 1987 to 1991. The 0.9 gram per day multiplied by 365 days by 4 years and by 30 megawatts equals to 39 kilograms. When the yearly operation ratio is presumed to be 60 percent, the actual amount was estimated at 60% of 39 kilograms, or some 23.4 kilograms. Since 20-kiloton standard nuclear warhead has 8 kilograms of critical mass, this amounts to mass of material of nuclear fission out of which about 3 nuclear warheads could be extracted.
Estimates vary of both the amount of plutonium in North Korea's possession and number of nuclear weapons that could be manufactured from the material. South Korean, Japanese, and Russian intelligence estimates of the amount of plutonium separated, for example, are reported to be higher -- 7 to 22 kilograms, 16 to 24 kilograms, and 20 kilograms, respectively -- than the reported US estimate of about 12 kilograms. At least two of the estimates are said to be based on the assumption that North Korea removed fuel rods from the 5-MW(e) reactor and subsequently reprocessed the fuel during slowdowns in the reactor's operations in 1990 and 1991. The variations in the estimates about the number of weapons that could be produced from the material depend on a variety of factors, including assumptions about North Korea's reprocessing capabilities -- advanced technology yields more material -- and the amount of plutonium it takes to make a nuclear weapon. Until January 1994, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that 8 kilograms would be needed to make a small nuclear weapon. Thus, the United States' estimate of 12 kilograms could result in one to two bombs. In January 1994, however, DOE reduced the estimate of the amount of plutonium needed to 4 kilograms--enough to make up to three bombs if the US estimate is used and up to six bombs if the other estimates are used.
On 22 April 1997, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon officially stated, "When the U.S.-North Korea nuclear agreement was signed in Geneva in 1994, the U.S. intelligence authorities already believed North Korea had produced plutonium enough for at least one nuclear weapon." This was the first time the United States confirmed North Korea's possession of plutonium.
In accordance with the terms of the 1994 framework, the US Government in January 1995 responded to North Korea's decision to freeze its nuclear program and cooperate with US and IAEA verification efforts by easing economic sanctions against North Korea in four areas through:
Authorizing transactions related to telecommunications connections, credit card use for personal or travel-related transactions, and the opening of journalists' offices;
Authorizing D.P.R.K. use of the U.S. banking system to clear transactions not originating or terminating in the United States and unblocking frozen assets where there is no D.P.R.K. Government interest;
Authorizing imports of magnesite, a refractory material used in the U.S. steel industry--North Korea and China are the world's primary sources of this raw material; and
Authorizing transactions related to future establishment of liaison offices, case-by-case participation of U.S. companies in the light water reactor project, supply of alternative energy, and disposition of spent nuclear fuel as provided for by the agreed framework, in a manner consistent with applicable laws.
Smooth implementation of the 1994 agreed framework was obstructed for a time by North Korea's refusal to accept South Korean-designed LWR model reactors. US and DPRK negotiators met for three weeks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and on June 12, 1995, reached an accord resolving this issue. North Korea agreed to accept the decisions of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) with respect to the model for the LWRs and agreed that KEDO would select a prime contractor to carry out the LWR project. The KEDO executive board announced that it had selected the South Korean-designed Ulchin 3-4 LWR as the reference model for the project and that a South Korean firm would be the prime contractor. The South Korean prime contractor would be responsible for all aspects of the LWR project including design, manufacture, construction, and management. In this Kuala Lumpur accord to the 1994 Geneva agreed framework, the DPRK also agreed to negotiate directly with KEDO on all outstanding issues related to the LWR project. On December 15, 1995, KEDO and the DPRK signed the Light Water Reactor Supply Agreement. KEDO teams have also made a number of trips to North Korea to survey the proposed reactor site; in the spring of 1996, KEDO and the DPRK began negotiations on implementing protocols to the supply agreement.
Pyongyang is cooperating with Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, whose leading members are South Korea, the United States and Japan. KEDO has reached an agreement on the provision of the light-water nuclear reactors by 2003, and, in return, North Korea has frozen its nuclear program. South Korea, which has promised to bear the lion's share of the reactor project cost estimated at US$4.5 billion, is asking the United States to put up at least a symbolic amount. The US administration, however, has said it can make no contribution to the construction cost as Congress has not appropriated the necessary budget. An official in Seoul, however, said that South Korea cannot drop its demand simply because of domestic problems in the United States. The US Congress has been delaying approval of the cost for the reactor project. South Korean officials said the U.S. refusal to share the reactor cost would make it difficult for them to obtain approval from the National Assembly for the South Korean share.
Since the conclusion of the Supply Agreement in December 1995, six related protocols have come into effect and three rounds of expert-level negotiations have produced solid results. The ROK power company, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), is the prime contractor for this project and has as its responsibility the design, manufacture, procurement, construction and management of the reactors. On 19 August 1997 KEDO and North Korea held a groundbreaking ceremony to begin construction of two light-water reactors.
In October 2002, North Korean officials acknowledged the existence of a clandestine program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons that is in violation of the Agreed Framework and other agreements.
Sources and Resources
North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program, Congressional Research Service
North Korean Nuclear Program, U.S. State Department release, October 16, 2002
Text of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
Text of the Agreed Framework
North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program Larry A. Niksch, Foreign Affairs and Trade Division, Congressional Research Service, October 9, 2002
STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE U.S.-DPRK FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT Thomas L. Wilborn, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College -- April 3, 1995 [40 pages, 125 kb PDF]
Assessing the U.S.-North Korea Agreement Masao Okonogi Joint Forces Quarterly Spring 1995 [215 kb PDF] The North Korean leadership is attempting to sell its outmoded baggage of the Cold War.
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) The Nuclear Potential of Individual Countries Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons Problems of Extension Appendix 2 Russian Federation Foreign Intelligence Service 6 April 1995
Nuclear Nonproliferation: Implications of the U.S./North Korean Agreement on Nuclear Issues (Letter Report, 10/01/96, GAO/RCED/NSIAD-97-8).
N Korean Nuclear Arsenal By Lee Wha Rang, April 27, 1996
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N Korean Nuclear Arsenal
By Lee Wha Rang
The US-N Korea Geneva Nuclear Accord freezes N Korea's nuke "activities" in return for six billion-plus dollars in aids. N Korea's existing nuclear sites are not immediately affected. The accord does not address the "existing" nuclear devices. Its primary interest appears to be curtailing further expansion of nuke production in N Korea.
Nuke Sites
Yongbyon 0.1 megawatts thermal (MWt) critical assembly - This small reactor is believed to be the first nuclear reactor in N Korea. It was provided by the Soviet and went into operation in early 1960s. Its primary function is isotope production.
Yongbyon Reactor I - The construction of this natural uranium-graphite power reactor began in 1980 at Yongbyon, 100 km north of Pyongyang. It is based on a 1950 MAGNOX technology (graphite moderator, aluminum-magnesium clad natural uranium fuel , CO2 gas cooling). The reactor was completed in 1984 and it as was activated in February 1987 under Prof. Ha Kyong Won, a Korean physicist educated in US. After many startup problems, it was operating at 20-30 MW by 1990.
N Korea removed about 30 lb. of plutonium from this reactor in 1988 and built two nuclear bombs. From 1989 to 1991, N Korea may have extracted additional 60 lb. of plutonium, enough for five nukes.
Yongbyon Reactor II - A 50 MW MAGNOX-type reactor was started in 1984. N Korea built a military nuclear complex next to this reactor. This complex was completed in 1989 and the reactor was tentatively activated in 1992. This reactor alone is capable of producing enough plutonium for 10-12 nukes a year.
Taechon Reactor I - The construction of a 200 MW MAGNOX-type reactor was started at Taechon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang in 1988 and it is expected to be completed in 1996.
Taechon Reactor II - A 600-800 MW reactor is also underway at Taechon (completion possible by 1997). This reactor could produce 180-230 Kg of plutonium a year, enough for 30-40 nukes.
Simpo Reactor I - This 635mw reactor is based on a German design. In May 1989, N Korea and Germany signed a comprehensive agreement on the transfer of "substantial" amounts of German nuclear technology and nuclear weapons materials, including enriched uranium, to Pyongyang. The transfer of the German nuclear know-how has continued via Iran, Libya Syria and Yugoslavia.
Yongbyon Separation Plant - A plutonium separation facility ("Radiological Research Lab") was built at Yongbyon in 1987. This plant is capable of handling several hundreds of tons of fuel a year, enough to handle fuel from all of the reactors , some 33 lb. of plutonium annually.. The plutonium factory for the nuclear weapons is a single story building constructed on top the main plutonium reprocessing facility, deep underground. In 1993, N Korea completed a second plant, doubling its capacity for plutonium production.
About 70 lb. were believed to have been extracted from the reactors since 1991. In 1992, N Korea bought 120 lb. of plutonium from a former Soviet block country and may have produced 10 bombs. It is quite possible that N Korea has acquired additional nuclear material from the former Soviet republics.
Most intelligence sources, including Russian and Chinese, state that N Korea has close to 10 operational nuclear warheads for its missiles and two nuclear devices that can be carried by truck , boat or transport aircraft. N Korean warheads are of 50 KT class, weighing around 1,100 lb.
N Korean Missiles
N Korea has deployed over 300 Nodong-x (medum range - Japan and Okinawa) and close to a thousand Scud-B/C missiles (short range - S Korea) all of which can carry nuclear or chemical warheads. NoDong-1's have a range of 1,300km and NoDong-2's have a range of 1,500-2,000km. N Korea is believed to have a limited number of Taepodong-x ICBMs (long range - America) hidden in underground tunnels.
The Taepo Dong-2 ICBM has a maximum range of 6,200 miles. The US DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) estimates that the missile has a range of about 4,650 miles with large nuclear warheads and 6,200 miles with smaller warheads. At the extreme of 6,200 mil es, the missile could reach all major West Coast cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego,,,) and reach as far east as Chicago.
A Physicist Defector's Account of North Korea's Nuke Labs
Source: ????????????????
Comments by Lee Wha Rang
Lee Mi (not her real name) was born in 1955 in Pungsuh-gun, Jagang-do ??????) and graduated from the Pyongyang Physics College (??????) in 1974. The college was headed by Dr. Kim Myong Whan (???). Upon graduation, Lee was assigned to a nuke lab, where she worked until her dismissal on February 21, 1999.
Map: North Korea's nuclear labs.
She escaped to China in September 2000 and later, went to a third country (probably South Korea or the United States). It is believed that her first-hand account of North Korea's nuclear weapons program was a key factor leading to the public disclosure of Kim Jong Il's nukes in recent weeks.
Park Kwang Ho (??? - currently, president of the Kim Il Sung University) directed the nuclear program prior to the inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1990. Kim Jong Il took over right after the inspection. After Kim Il Sung died in 1994, central controls and supplies diminished somewhat for a while but now the controls are tighter and the lab gets all the supplies it needs.
There are several nuke labs in North Korea. They are code-named: The 101st Research Lab, The 304th Research Lab, The 206th Research Lab, The 175th Industry, The 66th Industry, The August Industry, The February Industry and so on. There is no open communication among the lab workers, who are paid 20-30 percent extra for security. Lee worked at the 304th Research Lab located in Bungang (??) near Youngpyong.
Dr. Doh Won Son directs the lab. He came from South Korea in 1950. Dr. Kim Do Sul is a section chief. He studied at the Dubna Lab in the Soviet Union. Some of the key staff members are: Dr. Park Myong Jung (studied nuclear physics for 15 years abroad), Dr. Whang Jung Man (studied in the Soviet Union), Dr. Kim Jong Bok (studied at Dubna), Kim Gyong Sung (Dubna), Dr. Kim Duk Soo (Dubna), Hyun Chul (Dubna), Kim Do Whi (Czechoslovakia), and Kim Oh Gyo (the Soviet Union). The 304th Lab operates a reactor built with Soviet assistance. Most of the lab equipment are of Soviet origin or design. The lab workers live in housing areas provided by the lab.
North Korea's nuclear weapons program began in 1950, when Kim Il Sung ordered Lee Hak Mun, a two-time national hero medal winner, to develop nuclear weapons. Lee Hak Mun recruited Dr. Lee Sung Ki (???), Dr. Doh Won Sung, Do Sang Rok and other prominent South Korean scientists during North Korea's brief occupation of South Korea in 1950. A nuke lab was established at Bungang (???????????) in late 1950. Dr. Lee Sung Ki set up a branch lab in Hamhung and Doh Wong Sup and Kim Do Sul headed the main lat at Bungang.
--
Lee Wha Rang notes: Lee's statements are inaccurate.
North Korea's bomb was made possible by three noted scientists:
Dr. Lee Sung Ki, a world-class chemist. Dr. Lee Sung Ki (1905 - 1996) was noted for his invention of vi nylon and his devotion to make man-made textiles for the poor of Korea. He invented high-explosives for North Korea's artillery - called "Lee Sung Ki canons" in his honor. Dr. Lee was the first director of North Korea's Atomic Energy Agency and directed its nuclear weapons program.
Dr. Do Sang Rok (1903 - 1990) was a quantum field theorist. He published research papers on quantum mechanics in Japan and the US as early as 1930. He was an expert on nuclear matters and nuclear energy. He built his own particle accelerator and conducted North Korea's first experiment on nuclear reactions.
Dr. Han In Suk was born in South Korea and studied physics in Japan and Germany before Liberation. He taught physics at the Seoul National University after Liberation but fled to North Korea soon after. After the Korean War, he studied physics at Moscow University. He returned to Pyongyang in 1960 and published numerous research papers on nuclear physics.
In addition to these three renowned scientists, there were many other outstanding scientists: Dr. Kim Gyng Wan, a chemist and president of Kim Chaik University; Dr. Yo Gyong Ku, a son of Yo Wun Hyung, who studied nuclear physics in the USSR; Dr. Jung Gun, Dr. Choe Hak Soon, Dr. Keh Yong Soon and Dr. Park Kwan Oh. Several hundred of North Korea's top scientists studied at the Dubna Nuclear Research Institute in the USSR.
--
The 304th Lab is primarily for nuclear weapons development but it also does research and development in chemical weapons. More than 70 percents of the staff are foreign-trained experts. The staff numbers about 150. The lab has research areas, shower rooms for radiation safety, and other modern nuclear weapons research facilities. Doctoral staff members head research teams of technical assistants.
The 206th Lab is mainly (70-80%) made of physicists numbering about 100. It is also located at Bungang and doe research and development of new weapons. The Applications Research Institute (?????) performs research and development of military technology in general. It has s staff of about 150. The 175th Industry builds equipment needed by nuke labs. The August Industry started after the IAEA inspection in 1990. It is located inside a forest and is connected to Bunsang via a rail road. It processes uranium compounds needed by nuke labs. The 101st Research Lab has a staff of about 100. It is comparable to the 304th and 206th nuke labs and performs research and development.
The 66th Industry is a support service organization responsible for plant construction and maintenance. It also builds living quarters for the lab staff members and provides daily necessities of the labs and staff. It is a large enterprise employing over 20,000 workers. The Trading and Supply Company (???????) acquires materials from foreign sources for nuke labs. The February Industry (?????) was created after the 1990 inspection. It operates a reactor.
Nuclear facilities operate in caves dug deep into mountains: the Yaksan, Dongdeh, and Sokdeh mountains.
The underground facilities were constructed by the 66th Industry deep beneath Mt. Yaksan at a huge human costs. Many workers died in various accidents during the construction.
Map: Entrance to the Yaksan underground facility.
The construction began in 1965 and completed in 1970. The underground caves branch out into different interconnected tunnels. The complex is extremely large and well illuminated. Its entrance is large enough for trucks to enter. Concrete walls block the entrance and clever camouflage hide it from outsiders.
The caves are used to hide lab equipment and other evidence of nuclear weapons program in case of inspections or other events. During the IAEA inspection, tell-tale equipment and materials were secretly moved into the Yaksan cave. During the inspection, the lab staff members wore military uniforms. The Mt. Sokdeh facility is located near residential areas. It is next to a hospital. It is a shelter for the lab staff in case of an emergency. There are two entrances to this underground facility, which has its own power generation.
The Pyongyang Physics College is guarded by armed sentries. It is housed in a 2-story apartment building next to a hospital in Pyongyang. Its students are mostly children of the scientists at nuke labs. The students come from well-established party cadres and selected from the brightest high school graduates. The College is under the direct control of the Workers' Party of Korea. It has about 300 students and a staff of 50 or so. The staff members are selected from the basic research scientists at nuke labs.
In 1990, the world was astonished to learn that North Korea had nuclear weapons and the United States forced North Korea to accept an IAEA inspection. The staff members at Bungang were given temporary military ranks and uniforms, and moved with their families to a secret hiding place. A new site was constructed at Pyongsan (???????). Lee's elder sister's husband directed the mass migration of the staff and family. The lab equipment were moved to a hiding place. The reactor is now at the February Industry attached to the 304th Research Lab.
Lee has no direct knowledge of nuclear weapons actually assembled. Research ideas of staff members are passed on to senior research project managers, who pass viable ideas to experimental labs operated by other groups. The originators of ideas are excluded from experimentation. Several researchers have been exposed to radiation over dose and had deformed children.
The Bungan lab was created in the late 1950 with the help of Soviet scientists and advisors. Special living quarters were built along Guwol-gang (???) River and the staff members were bused to the lab. Families lived in the staff quarters. Chosen members were sent to China, Russia and other nations to study nuclear physics and chemistry. The staff scientists are not allowed to travel abroad or even within North Korea on their own. If a problem cannot be resolved by the staff, then special permission is given to go abroad to find the solution. Some of the staff members sent abroad engaged in reactionary activities and were sent to labor camps.
As stated earlier, the nuclear weapons program was started in late 1950 under the direction of Lee Hak Mun. When the war ended in 1953, a branch lab was established in Hamhung. There were about 200 Soviet and foreign advisors working at the lab. Some time before 1970, North Korean security agents broke into the safe that kept secret blue prints and made a cope of them. Soon after, the foreign advisors were sent home.
The reactor at Bungang was built in the 1950s. Later, new reactors were built at a branch lab and at the February Industry after the 1990 IAEA inspection. In the early days, reactor parts came from the Soviet Union but in the later days, they came from China. Uranium is mined domestically.
Dr. Kim So In is the son of Prof. Kim Do Sul. The younger Kim in still in his 30s. His father and mother are both nuclear scientists. Kim So In's younger brother, also a scientist, works under him. Dr. Kim So In was born at Dubna and returned home when he was 3. Kim So In is considered to be a genius. At age seven, he entered the Bungang High School (???????). Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il took note of the boy genius and had him educated at the Kim Il Sung University under an individual tutelage. At age 13, he was sent abroad to study nuclear physics. He received a master's degree at age 19 and a doctorate at age 21.
Dr. Kim So In is a member of the young scientists nurtured by Kim Il Sung. Kim So In is being groomed to succeed Dr. Lee Sung Gi at the lab in Hamhung. Kim Jong Il has a core of about 20 young scientists, like Dr. Kim So In, working on research and development of modern warfare. They receive the best care North Korea can provide. Their whereabouts are kept secret.
Dr. Kim So In is married to Dr. Lee Sung Gi's daughter, and is the leader of the this group. He reports directly to Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Il said: "I will unite the country with the help of these young scientists."
Related Webs:
American Nuclear Threats and North Korea's Counter Strategy -- by Hahn Ho-suk, Director. Center for Korean Affairs
North Korean Nuclear Arsenal -- It has been an open secret that North Korea has nukes.
--------
North Korean Says Nation Unable to Comply With Key Arms Pact
December 31, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-russia.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A senior North Korean envoy said Tuesday that Pyongyang was unable to meet its obligations under a key non-proliferation pact because of nuclear threats by Washington, Interfax news agency said.
Pak Ui Chun, Pyongyang's ambassador to Moscow, was quoted as saying the United States had followed moves to cut off fuel oil supplies by ``threatening us with a preventative nuclear strike.''
``In these circumstances, we also cannot fulfill the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the basic clause of which is the obligation of nuclear states not to use the nuclear weapon against states which do not possess it,'' he said.
The secretive Stalinist state joined the treaty, designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, in December 1985.
It said Friday it was firing up a reprocessing laboratory that could convert spent fuel into the plutonium needed for making nuclear bombs and had begun moving fresh fuel rods to a five-megawatt research reactor.
It ordered International Atomic Energy Agencymonitors to leave the country, escalating a crisis that analysts say is part of a bid to secure aid from Washington and its allies.
North Korea said it was taking this action because a 1994 agreement had broken down. Under the pact, the United States, the European Union, Japan and South Korea promised North Korea oil and nuclear power stations for civilian use in return for a freeze on a plutonium-based nuclear arms program.
The North Korean ambassador blamed Washington for the crisis, saying the United States ``openly tries to internationalize the nuclear question on the Korean peninsula by creating an atmosphere of pressure on the Democratic People's Republic (North Korea).''
Repeating Pyongyang's calls for direct negotiations with the United States, he said the Korean nuclear question was not an international issue and could be solved only by Pyongyang and Washington.
The United States has labeled North Korea part of an ``axis of evil,'' along with Iran and Iraq, for seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Russia, whose relations with North Korea have warmed under President Vladimir Putin, Monday denounced Pyongyang's nuclear moves but also told Washington to halt ``aggressive rhetoric'' toward Pyongyang.
--------
Appeasement, Please
The case for paying North Korea's nuclear blackmail.
By Fred Kaplan
Tuesday, December 31, 2002
http://slate.msn.com/id/2076213/
On Oct. 18, 1962, the third day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy, sitting in the Cabinet room with his advisers, wondered aloud why Nikita Khrushchev had launched this adventure. He figured that it must be part of some bargaining scheme and that, to make him get rid of the missiles, we had to come up with some way of letting the Soviet leader save face, of "giving him some out." It would be good to know if anyone inside President Bush's White House is thinking along similar lines in the current crisis-or, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prefers to call it, "serious situation"-with North Korea. True, this is not the Cuban Missile Crisis; Kim Jong-il is not Nikita Khrushchev; North Korea is not the U.S.S.R. Still, few would dispute that Kim's latest outrageous move-which will have him churning out A-bombs by the dozen in six months' time, unless something is done stop him-amounts to a desperate bargaining ploy, a time-tested way of frightening everyone around him (nukes!) and extorting them into giving him what he needs.
As any review of North Korea's diplomatic record would indicate, this is par for the course. From its very beginnings, North Korea has thrived-in many ways, has survived-on a diplomacy of permanent crisis: shrill invective, outlandish (but not quite incredible) threats, gross intimidation, and seemingly fearless brinkmanship. Korea, as one proverb has it, is a "shrimp among whales," and North Korea's rulers (there have been only two-Kim Jong-il and his father, Kim Il Sung) have been masters at the art of turning their own weakness into strength and their foes' strength into weakness. In the game of highway chicken, North Korea is the shrewd lunatic who very visibly throws his steering wheel out the window, forcing the other, more responsible driver to veer off the road. North Korea's long-chosen path of severe secrecy and isolation-Saddam Hussein's Iraq is practically a Western democracy by comparison-helps assure its success at this game. Neither its friends nor foes really know what the hell is going on inside the inner sanctum. Richard Nixon tried to intimidate North Vietnam by pretending to be a "madman." Kim Jong-il, at least by the standards of normal international relations, is a madman.
So, what is a country like the United States to do? On the one hand, as many Bush officials have noted, it's a bad idea in principle to pay off blackmailers. On the other hand, what choice do we have? Kim can sustain this crisis far longer than we can. First, his regime thrives on it. Second, he doesn't need to worry about domestic political groups or foreign allies because he doesn't have any. Third, if all else fails and the United States doesn't go along with his demands, he ends up with nukes, which he can use for further diplomatic games or sell and barter for much-needed currency, fuel, and food.
By contrast, look at our situation on each point. First, with the war on terrorism still brewing and a war with Iraq on the horizon, the last thing Bush needs is a nuclear stand-off in northern Asia. Second, South Korea has just elected a new president on a platform of friendlier relations with the North; Japan, China, and Russia aren't keen for confrontation, either; yet, in any successful counter-brinkmanship strategy, we would need the seamless support of all these players. Third, we really don't want North Korea to possess, or be able to pass around, a handful, much less a cargo-full, of nuclear weapons. Nor, alas, is the Osirak gambit much of an option. Unlike Iraq, when Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981, North Korea is already believed to have a couple of nukes, and it definitely has 11,000 artillery tubes (and who knows how many reloadable shells) less than a minute's flight-time from downtown Seoul. The risk of retaliation-and endangering tens of thousands of South Korean citizens and American soldiers-is commonly regarded as too high.
In short, we have almost no means of leverage in this game, and we might as well face that fact while those spent fuel rods, though unlocked and unmonitored, are still in place.
What does North Korea say it wants from this adventure? A non-aggression pact with the United States (thus ending the 1950-53 war) and a resumption of our obligations under the 1994 Agreed Framework negotiated with President Clinton. The events leading up to that accord were similar to today's. North Korea removed the fuel rods from its experimental nuclear reactor and threatened to pull out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Partly as the result of an unauthorized visit to Kim Il Sung by ex-President Jimmy Carter, a settlement was reached whereby the United States would provide food, fuel, and a light water nuclear reactor (which cannot in any way be used to make a bomb) in exchange for North Korea's continued compliance with the treaty.
This arrangement, administered by a jerry-rigged but highly competent entity called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO (headed by a U.S. diplomat and staffed by Americans, Japanese, and South Koreans), worked well for a while and even helped relax regional tensions generally. It hit a big obstacle when a North Korean submarine wound up in South Korean waters. It started to unwind when President Bush, upon entering office, made clear he had no interest in continuing this entente. It fell apart altogether when Bush, in his post-9/11 address on terrorism, accused North Korea, Iran, and Iraq of forming an "axis of evil." It crumbled to bits last October when, after much probing and interrogation, American diplomats got North Korean officials to admit that they had restarted their nuclear program. In response, the United States stopped shipping fuel and food-to which North Korea replied by unsealing the fuel rods, disconnecting the IAEA's cameras and ordering the inspectors home.
Who's ultimately responsible for this breakdown is, in some ways, an academic question. Neither side can claim to be purely an innocent bystander or victim. But would it be so terrible-would it really be "appeasement," as many conservative commentators have thundered-to offer a resumption of KEDO, simultaneous with a resumption of North Korea's responsibilities under the Non-Proliferation Treaty? If Bush wants to take control of the negotiations, as opposed to letting Kim define the terms and then manipulate them, he could go further and offer a whole package of economic investments, tied not just to denuclearization but to a gradual opening of North Korean society-which, in the long run, would be in our interests.
In the longer run still, the United States-if not Bush, then whoever follows-must devise a nuclear proliferation policy, because North Korea, though unique in many ways, does point a scraggly finger toward the future. In the 1960s and '70s, many arms-control scholars warned that 20 or 30 countries would acquire nuclear weapons in the next decade. It didn't happen, not because those countries were unable to do so, but rather because the Cold War was an international security system. The United States and the U.S.S.R. each extended the deterrent of its nuclear arsenal to its circle of allies. With the U.S.S.R. vanquished, this "nuclear umbrella" has folded up as well, and it will become harder and harder to keep particularly insecure powers from building their own nukes-especially since, as North Korea is now demonstrating, you only need a few nukes to be suddenly taken seriously.
Sidebar, Slate, December 31, 2002
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085595/sidebar/2085596/
Article 4 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty promises that, in exchange for signing the treaty and thus forswearing nuclear weapons, signateurs will receive assistance in developing, exchanging information about, or receiving the economic fruits of, peaceful nuclear technology. In a more pertinent example still, in that ultimate nuclear crisis of October 1962, President John F. Kennedy got Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to pull his nuclear missiles out of Cuba, in part by pledging not to invade the island and (secretly) by withdrawing U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey. Was Kennedy succumbing to Khrushchev's blackmail? To some degree, yes. Was he smart to do so? Absolutely yes.
-------- pakistan
Musharraf Hints He Considered Nuclear Strike
Pakistani Government Says President's Remarks on India Standoff Were Misconstrued
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56211-2002Dec30?language=printer
KARACHI, Pakistan, Dec. 30 -- Pakistan's president suggested today that he was ready to use nuclear weapons earlier this year if Indian forces crossed the border, but his government backed off the assertion, saying he never specifically mentioned atomic weapons.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf's comments appeared to confirm fears, voiced at the time, that the world was close to witnessing its first bilateral nuclear war. India also possesses nuclear arms, and the situation so worried Washington at the time -- just as Pakistan had become a key ally in the war on terrorism -- that it warned Americans to leave India.
The danger point came when India and Pakistan sent troops to their border after a deadly attack on the Indian Parliament last December. New Delhi accused Islamabad of helping to organize the assault, in which 14 people were killed, while Pakistan denied any role.
"I personally conveyed messages to [Indian] Prime Minister [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee through every international leader who came to Pakistan that if Indian troops moved a single step" across the disputed frontier, "they should not expect a conventional war from Pakistan," he told Pakistani air force veterans. However, an army spokesman, Gen. Rashid Qureshi, said later that the president's mention of nonconventional war was not a reference to the use of nuclear weapons.
Qureshi said Musharraf meant that the people of Pakistan together with the conventional army would "neutralize the enemy's offensive. Nowhere did he say that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons at all."
The two nations have fought three wars in 50 years, and it seemed last winter that another was imminent, until intensive international diplomacy brought the neighbors back from the brink.
Tensions eased recently as both sides said they were stepping back from their war footing. After massing more than a million troops along their common border, India announced in October that it had begun pulling back its forces. Last month Pakistan said it was doing the same.
-------- treaties
Suit Over ABM Pact Withdrawal Dismissed
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56772-2002Dec30?language=printer
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 that the withdrawal, which took effect in June, was unconstitutional because Bush had not sought congressional approval.
U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled yesterday that the lawmakers lacked standing to bring the case, and that 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 said that it became outdated after the Cold War, and that 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 the withdrawal. "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 that the lawmakers were not authorized by the House or any committee to bring the lawsuit, and that they 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," Bates said.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
The List
by Geov Parrish,
Seattle Weekly
December 25 - 31, 2002
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/printme.php3?eid=40801
I WANT a list.
I want a full accounting of every weapon in the country. Not Iraq. I could give a fig about Iraq. It's dirt-poor, halfway around the world, almost completely disarmed, has no way to attack us, and knows that any move to threaten anyone would be instantly suicidal. America faces many threats. Iraq is not one. Among all the American-trained dictators plaguing the planet, Saddam is the least of our problems.
I want a list of our weapons.
After all, we pay for them--and pay and pay. And that was even before 9/11 and the giant sucking wound where the federal surplus once was. That money, yours and mine, went almost entirely for yet more weapons and the capacity to use them. I want an accounting.
It's the United States, after all, that poses a threat, not just to its neighbors but countries anywhere in the world. Ask Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Serbia, Pakistan, Sudan, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Panama, Libya, or Grenada--all countries we've bombed or bullied in the past 20 years. It's the United States whose foreign policy now officially reserves the right to invade any place in the world for any reason or none at all. It's the United States that sells weapons to one or more sides of virtually every one of the five dozen or so wars now raging. It's America, with the oldest and biggest nuclear weapons program in the world, the U.S. alone, that has proudly used them. It's the United States that has shredded the world's arms-control structure, the U.S. that breaks international treaties the way other countries fund health care. Routinely.
OURS ARE THE WEAPONS of choice for everyone from psychotic serial killers to jungle guerrillas to kleptocratic dictators the world round. Every American embassy makes it a priority to pay for the marketing, credit underwriting, and purchase of those weapons, and closes the deal. It's the U.S. that underwrites and trains intelligence agencies and secret police the world over, including any number of countries where state torture and murder are the norm. We pay for it all. I want a list.
I want it in three weeks.
I want to know every single weapon or potential weapon possessed by the United States. Not just the Pentagon. Every single agency, down to the Mint and the Library of Congress. If the Library of Congress' assistant medical archivist carries mace in her purse when she goes to the parking garage, I want to know. I also want every potential weapon government employees possess. Every firearm John Ashcroft and his NRA- loving appointees own, and everyone else down to the grade C-3 summer interns. That includes dual-use weapons, like nail files, or certain kitchen spices which, when mixed with a nasal decongestant, can produce a splotchy red rash. I want the list. All of it. No typos, please.
But that's not all. It's not just our government that poses a threat to the world; corporate America does, too. If Coca-Cola doesn't constitute an invading army, I don't know what does. Therefore, I also want all of the weapons or potential weapons possessed by any entity that does business in the United States. Whether or not Americans own it. Air Botswana, this means you. That includes all employees and all subcontracting employees and agencies. Like Coke's Ouagadougou bottling plant. Can't be too careful.
You've got three weeks. And it had better be complete. And indexed.
OF COURSE, I DOUBT you'll cooperate. The Pentagon alone doesn't know what happened to billions of dollars. Accounting individually for every paper clip--after all, they're pointy--seems unlikely. I expect many companies won't fully cooperate, either.
They'll claim proprietary information or some other lame excuse.
Weasels.
We'll have to do inspections, of course. Unannounced, accompanied by a battalion or two. When they object, we'll call it part of their sustained pattern of noncooperation.
Have I mentioned that I retain the right to shoot down any aircraft that appear over the skies of Kentucky, Ohio, or Indiana? They'll probably pitch a fit about that, too.
But then, that's what you'd expect from people whose love of power is so fierce that they'd willingly endanger their own people, right?
After all, by inspiring billions of people to loathe America, it's you and I who are put at risk. We're the ones who'll walk past exploding hotels or work in collapsing office towers. We're the collateral damage.
And we're paying for it, out of every paycheck. We pay for the carnage. Now and later.
The least we can get is a list.
Three weeks.
gparrish@seattleweekly.com
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- colorado
Cotter residents need monitors
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002
From: "P. Elofson-Gardine, Exec. Dir/EIN" pelofson1@attbi.com
Some of you might have seen news items over the past few months regarding the Cotter Mine, located in the SW Colorado area near Canon City in Fremont County. They have been involved with taking in radioactive waste streams from all over the US and other countries, and "processing" it. This includes incineration. There are extensive surface impoundments and airborne releases to the local community from their operations, which are unfortunately being run (read: being allowed to run amok), under the auspices of the NRC -- with little or no monitoring of releases.
There are local residents that live around this site that have been affected by these releases. The local citizens are looking for answers regarding the magnitude of the extensive contamination around this site. The agencies involved have been looking the other way for decades, and are now dragging their feet and playing games with non-answers. We are seeking the most recent information regarding best or reduced prices for hand held radiation monitoring devices such as the RadAlert monitors for these Canyon City residents. If anyone has any available at a reduced price, or might be willing to donate one to this nonprofit group (CCAT) in Canon City, please let us know. These citizens need some tools to help them fight this public health and environmental menace.
To those of you with knowledge of reactor operations and waste, these citizens could use additional input regarding the hazards of different types of waste streams that you might have experience with. Sharyn Cunningham is the contact person in the Cotter area (Sharync@iris.net), and is working most directly with our good friend Joan Seeman (jseem@earthlink.net). I would encourage you to get involved with networking information with us regarding these problems to help support the local residents.
Best Wishes, and Thank you!
Paula Elofson-Gardine Biochemist Executive Director Environmental Information Network 303.233.6677
P.S: I am attaching a few photos from Sharyn that she took a little over a week ago. Here are her descriptions:
1. Cotter Pond 12-20-02 1.jpg: You are facing North in this photo, toward Canon City. Homes are just on the other side of the hills to the north, and 1/4 mile to the left or West. The primary impoundment has lots of white surrounding the water. This is a 91 acre pond. It appears that the water is covering approximately 25% of the total pond area. That leaves much of the tailings exposed to the elements, and the NOV says Cotter's efforts to stop emissions was not verified in November by air sampling to be effective. The smaller cells are evaporation ponds to get rid of excess water. In the spring, the evaporation cells were full, and water covered the white area and beyond. A year ago or more, water covered area well beyond the white. All tailings from processing since the mid-eighties have gone into this pond.
2. Cotter SecPond Shallow 5 12-20-02.jpg: You are facing WNW. This is the Secondary Pond (44 acres) that holds the tailings from the Old Unlined Tailings Ponds that were moved from 1980-83. Cotter has not been allowed to add any further tailings to this pond, and they are required by Consent Decree and Remedial Action Plan of 1988 to keep at least one foot of water covering the tailings. The peninsula jutting out into the pond is the Solid Waste Disposal area, which should not have water on it. As you can see in this photo, to the left, or on the South side, there are tailings sticking above the surface of the water, obviously not covered by 1 foot of water.
Sharyn 1614 Grand Avenue Canon City, CO 81212 (719)275-3432
-------- virginia
A new secret mission
By Chris Flores
Dec 31, 2002
http://www.newsadvance.com/news/specialprojects/ps3-1.htm
The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union disintegrated. The Cold War had thawed. But Project Sapphire left BWX Technologies in the lingering shadows of cold war secrecy.
The BWXT Mt. Athos plant is in the northwest corner of Campbell County about three miles from the Lynchburg city limits. Mt. Athos refers to a church in the area, not the terrain. The 560-acre site is situated in a secluded basin adjacent to the James River.
Often veiled in mists from the river, the plant has a look of secrecy and security.
By the late fall of 1995, when the Sapphire material was moved to Mt. Athos for downblending, the project's top secret classification had been lifted, but the remaining steps remained veiled in secrecy.
Less than 24 hours after the planes spiriting the highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to the United States touched down, the federal government called a press conference in Washington, D.C., and declared, "mission accomplished."
That declaration oversimplified the situation. Closer to the truth would have been, "Part one accomplished. Part two is just beginning."
And part two proved to be far more complicated and riddled with problems than anyone anticipated.
In Washington, attention shifted to more pressing security issues, said Jon Wolfsthal, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He worked on non-proliferation issues at the Department of Energy during Project Sapphire.
"Once (the Sapphire Material) got into the states," said Wolfsthal, "people simply said, 'Look, we know how to do security. We have massive amounts of material that's a lot more attractive than this stuff and so it was no longer a security issue."
Nonproliferation experts kept their focus on Russia and potential rogue nations seeking the tons of nuclear material there.
The story quickly fell off the media's radar screen because the process of downblending doesn't have the panache afforded a secret mission. Only a small circle within the nuclear industry knew the Sapphire material was the subject of numerous problems almost immediately after it arrived in Tennessee.
"Part of that is the government's fault," said Wolfsthal. "They treated this as a sexy, boom, we finished it. Part of it is the nature of the news business."
From a proliferation standpoint, the most important work was complete once the material reached the United States. But the tricky policy questions and technical challenges of turning weapons-grade uranium into nuclear fuel - both for Sapphire and the United States stockpile that was about to be reduced - were just beginning.
Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) was the private defense contractor running the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the Sapphire material was taken for temporary storage.
It sat there for nearly a year, caught in a bureaucratic snag.
As the recovery team was gathering the Sapphire material in Kazakhstan, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the federal agency that oversees health and safety at DOE sites, found problems at Y-12. Those problems caused DOE tohalt operations at Y-12 four days before the Sapphire material arrived.
The plant, which dated back to the World War II-era Manhattan Project and America's first atomic bomb program, would not reopen for a year. Only a hastily negotiated exception - mostly because there were no other options - allowed Y-12 to receive and store the Sapphire material.
It wasn't unloaded from its temporary storage at Y-12 until the shipments to BWXT began in July 1995 - more than eight months after it arrived.
Throughout most of 1995, DOE and Martin Marietta reviewed procedures for safer operations when Y-12 reopened at the end of the year.
Martin Marietta was already being monitored for past safety problems. Then, the safety board told the company in March 1995 it wasn't following proper procedures for special operations like Sapphire.
The United States Enrichment Corp. was created in 1992 to take over the uranium enrichment activities of the government. USEC enriches uranium for the American commercial nuclear power industry and manages projects to downblend and sell uranium from the disarmament treaties signed by the United States and Russia.
Wolfsthal said USEC has had problems, which should have been anticipated, that stem from having national security programs placed on a commercial entity.
"A decision was made to handle (downblending) through a commercial entity whose bottom line is dollars and not security," said Wolfsthal. "Martin Marietta quickly found itself in the crosshairs of that problem."
Martin Marietta wasn't alone.
BWXT voluntarily halted all operations for a month in 1994 in its uranium recovery area, because workers weren't following procedures. This is the recovery unit that would eventually process the Sapphire material.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that a week before the shutdown, BWXT fired a recovery worker. He didn't go quietly. He told BWXT that he was going to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about unsafe practices in the plant's recovery area.
BWXT made changes based on the allegations and told the NRC that the problems were the fault of a new foreman unfamiliar with procedures. BWXT said senior recovery workers would help him do his job better.
BWXT would have more problems in the future when it finally received and began processing the Sapphire material, not from procedure problems, but because the DOE never determined exactly what was in the material shipped to BWXT.
But the DOE was supposed to know that.
In the weeks after the Sapphire material arrived at Oak Ridge, Martin Marietta said it would determine exactly what the material contained to uncover possible safety hazards.
The plan called for about 850 tests on the contents of 130 of the 1,300 containers. The sampling would have determined the potential for a nuclear criticality, radiation levels and the potential for release of toxic substances and fire and explosion. Those tests were never performed.
"Since it wasn't clear how long (the Sapphire material) was going to stay there," said John Conway, chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, "we wanted to know everything that was in it ... You'd rather know before it comes in."
A letter in December 1994 from Troy Wade, a former top DOE official, questioned why the safety board wasn't involved in the Sapphire operation.
"If it has been determined that the DNFSB must review and approve all operations involving nuclear material, why was it not necessary to have them review the plans for the recovery of the Kazakhstan uranium?" he wrote.
He also questioned the use of Martin Marietta workers in the operation, "the same contractor found by your staff and by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to be 'not qualified' to safely operate the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge have been asked to carry out a covert activity determined to be necessary to the defense interests of the U.S."
Conway said testing was the only way to determine potential safety hazards.
But the tests never took place, despite a specific request by the safety board in March 1995 that they be completed before the material was moved.
Nearly all the Sapphire material was shipped to BWXT in the same containers it was placed in in Kazakhstan. What BWXT received was a mystery blend - and a potential disaster.
The Sapphire contract was awarded to BWXT by the United States Enrichment Corporation on June 20, 1995. But BWXT did not issue its usual press release about a multi-million dollar contract.
One reason the company preferred this contract remain quiet was security. Another was concern about adverse publicity. And a third was involved legal matters.
An envionmental group had filed suit in federal court over the Sapphire material shortly after it arrived in Tennessee.
The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) sued the Department of Energy in May1995 claiming the Sapphire project knowingly violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The act outlines what documents the government must prepare before undertaking major projects that affect the environment, as well as what must be included in the documents. The paperwork by Jeffery Starr's Tiger Team had intentionally left out specifics about the material.
OREPA sued because an environmental impact statement was not prepared before the Sapphire material was brought to Y-12 at Oak Ridge. Nor was one planned before shipment to BWXT.
"It's not surprising that when they (OREPA) caught wind of this that they wanted to, at the very least, put the DOE on notice that this is not going to be allowed as the rule of thumb, not the model," said Wolfsthal.
DOE had prepared a classified Environmental Assessment, a less detailed document, before the material went to Y-12. It said citizens near facilities where the Sapphire work might be done would not be at significant risk.The DOE issued a Finding of No Significant Impact in October 1994 - a month before the Sapphire material was brought to the U.S. - allowing it to be shipped to both Tennessee and Lynchburg without a detailed environmental document. Those documents were classified.
The government anticipated there would be problems with environmentalists and preferred to shut them out rather than engage them, said Laura Holgate, who left the Pentagon in 1998 to head the DOE office that oversees downblending.
"It was known that there was no time to do the kind of public campaign that would result in calming everybody," said Holgate, who worked with the Sapphire planning team. "So this was a national security mission and there's clearly rules within NEPA to allow for classification ... and so the answer to the public acceptance question was secrecy."
Wolfsthal said he understands why the environmentalists were so leery.
"The DOE has a terrifically bad track record on environment," he said, "on environmental protection, on environmental security, on openness, transparency and back then they were going through - and it's not done - a process of transforming the way they do business."
The environmentalists asked the court to prevent the DOE from transporting or downblending the material until an impact statement was prepared.
The case was heard by a federal judge James Jarvis in Tennessee.
The government's case was that shortcuts were taken in the interest of national security. The U.S. promised the Kazakhstan government that the project would be completed in six to nine months. That timetable couldn't be met if an impact statement, requiring public comment, was involved.
An impact statement would soon be performed for the United States stockpile, and Sapphire should require one too, said environmentalists. The judge disagreed because the Sapphire material was a fraction of the United States stockpile.
The judge ruled in favor of the government, but not because of the expediency claim.
"Either the downblending of the HEU has a significant effect on the environment or it doesn't," said the judge's decision. "Political exigencies should not factor into this equation." He determined there weren't signicant environmental risks.
Despite the environmentalists' desire to create publicity with the lawsuit, Central Virginians didn't know there were any environmental concerns associated with the project about to be undetaken in their community.
BWXT never mentioned the lawsuit when it made public that it was working on Project Sapphire six months later. BWXT later said it didn't mention the lawsuit because BWXT hadn't been sued.
BWXT has been reluctant to talk publicly about Sapphire. The company declined all requests for in-person interviews about the Sapphire project and would only respond with written statements to written inquiries for this series.
"BWXT was not involved in the order to which you are referring except that it caused minor delays in our initial receipt of the material," said BWXT in response to written questions.
Following the Clinton Administration's Project Sapphire press conference in November 1994, BWXT spokesman Ron Hite told The News & Advance the company might do the downblending work.
That contract was awarded in seven months later, but not announced to the public until after shipment of all of the material to Mt. Athos was completed in October 1995. And that disclosure did not mention the Sapphire material.
Instead, BWXT and DOE told The News & Advance at that time that the Mt. Athos plant was a potential site to downblend highly enriched uranium from the American nuclear weapons stockpile.
BWXT's Hite also said the company expected to get between 35 and 60 percent of the contracts to downblend 200 metric tons of American uranium.
The DOE announced at the same time that a public workshop would be held a month later in Knoxville. The workshop would allow the public a forum to ask questions and comment on the environmental statement and downblend plans. A toll-free number was also provided for people to call with comments.
There was no mention of the Sapphire material.
BWXT finally disclosed it was involved in downblending Sapphire materials in December 1995. BWXT officials said at the time the company had won a $7.8 million contract "this fall" to work on the Sapphire material, "which had not been placed in a warhead and therefore not mixed with plutonium."
The mention of plutonium is important. BWXT's comments came as the company said it would not seek to downblend Russian nuclear materials because of the plutonium content in those materials. BWXT had spent years seeking contracts to downblend Russian nuclear materials and discussed this with the Russians in 1993 and 1994.
BWXT also reiterated its historical claim that it didn't have a license to possess plutonium and that there wasn't any at the plant. Neither statement was completely accurate.
Although the Sapphire material hadn't been in a warhead, it did contain plutonium.
BWXT did not disclose the Tennessee lawsuit and the environment questions raised there. It also did not say there was a copy of an Environmental Assessment for the Sapphire material available to the people living near the plant.
A BWXT manager also downplayed the downblending, comparing it to diluting Kool-Aid. "If you had some concentrated Kool-Aid solution and it tasted too strong, you pour some water into it. That's basically what we're doing."
The DOE was also falling short of full disclosure at this time.
DOE official Bert Stevenson said most inquiries made through the DOE hotline dealt with "concerns about the cost ... some questions about safety, but no claims that diluting the uranium poses a danger."
But the report on comments to the DOE hotline showed people did raise concerns about effects on the environment, people and animals. Many had also called seeking more information.
"I am very much opposed of the plan to bring uranium into Lynchburg through B&W, which will drop the value of our property and also cause an extra added risk that we don't need," said Gary Condon of Lynchburg.
Peter Alexander of Lynchburg was among those wanting to know why a public workshop wasn't held at Lynchburg.
"I would like to have something local rather than have to take my time to go out to Knoxville, Tennessee to attend a workshop. I think that would be fair, and I think it's right and that's what I'd like to see. I like my phone call returned please," he said.
The Proctor family of Madison Heights had a number of concerns about safety and wanted their land - located across the James River from Mt. Athos - tested. They also left a number and asked for someone to contact them.
The DOE did not return calls from The News & Advance about the hotline comments.
BWXT did notify the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality before the Sapphire material was delivered. BWXT thought it might need new permits because the discharge from the plant into the James River could be altered by the downblending.
But only the federal government, not the state, has any regulatory role in radioactivity.
Michael Scanlan, who did the environmental review for DEQ, doesn't remember any response from BWXT on water radioactivity emissions. "This has always been a strange area for me, because if you find something, you want to do something," said Scanlan.
But a General Accounting Office study of environmental oversight of national security programs showed the EPA was never notified when the environmental documents were prepared for Project Sapphire.
So the waste water from the downblending would be treated and released into the James River - a drinking water source for hundreds of thousands of Virginians.
-------- us politics
Rumsfeld 'offered help to Saddam'
Declassified papers leave the White House hawk exposed over his role during the Iran-Iraq war
Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday December 31, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,866942,00.html
The Reagan administration and its special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, did little to stop Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s, even though they knew Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons "almost daily" against Iran, it was reported yesterday.
US support for Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war as a bulwark against Shi'ite militancy has been well known for some time, but using declassified government documents, the Washington Post provided new details yesterday about Mr Rumsfeld's role, and about the extent of the Reagan administration's knowledge of the use of chemical weapons.
The details will embarrass Mr Rumsfeld, who as defence secretary in the Bush administration is one of the leading hawks on Iraq, frequently denouncing it for its past use of such weapons.
The US provided less conventional military equipment than British or German companies but it did allow the export of biological agents, including anthrax; vital ingredients for chemical weapons; and cluster bombs sold by a CIA front organisation in Chile, the report says.
Intelligence on Iranian troop movements was provided, despite detailed knowledge of Iraq's use of nerve gas.
Rick Francona, an ex-army intelligence lieutenant-colonel who served in the US embassy in Baghdad in 1987 and 1988, told the Guardian: "We believed the Iraqis were using mustard gas all through the war, but that was not as sinister as nerve gas.
"They started using tabun [a nerve gas] as early as '83 or '84, but in a very limited way. They were probably figuring out how to use it. And in '88, they developed sarin."
On November 1 1983, the secretary of state, George Shultz, was passed intelligence reports of "almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]" by Iraq.
However, 25 days later, Ronald Reagan signed a secret order instructing the administration to do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq losing the war.
In December Mr Rumsfeld, hired by President Reagan to serve as a Middle East troubleshooter, met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and passed on the US willingness to help his regime and restore full diplomatic relations.
Mr Rumsfeld has said that he "cautioned" the Iraqi leader against using banned weapons. But there was no mention of such a warning in state department notes of the meeting.
Howard Teicher, an Iraq specialist in the Reagan White House, testified in a 1995 affidavit that the then CIA director, William Casey, used a Chilean firm, Cardoen, to send cluster bombs to use against Iran's "human wave" attacks.
A 1994 congressional inquiry also found that dozens of biological agents, including various strains of anthrax, had been shipped to Iraq by US companies, under licence from the commerce department.
Furthermore, in 1988, the Dow Chemical company sold $1.5m-worth (£930,000) of pesticides to Iraq despite suspicions they would be used for chemical warfare.
The only occasion that Iraq's use of banned weapons seems to have worried the Reagan administration came in 1988, after Lt Col Francona toured the battlefield on the al-Faw peninsula in southern Iraq and reported signs of sarin gas.
"When I was walking around I saw atropine injectors lying around. We saw decontamination fluid on vehicles, there were no insects," said Mr Francona, who has written a book on shifting US policy to Iraq titled Ally to Adversary. "There was a very quick response from Washington saying, 'Let's stop our cooperation' but it didn't last long - just weeks."
----
Budget Director Lowers Estimate of Cost of a War
December 31, 2002
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/politics/31BUDG.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - The administration's top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion, a figure that is well below earlier estimates from White House officials.
In a telephone interview today, the official, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the Office of Management and Budget, also said there was likely to be a deficit in the fiscal 2004 budget, though he declined to specify how large it would be. The administration is scheduled to present its budget to Congress on Feb. 3.
Mr. Daniels would not provide specific costs for either a long or a short military campaign against Saddam Hussein. But he said that the administration was budgeting for both, and that earlier projections of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush's former chief economic adviser, were too high.
Mr. Daniels cautioned that his budget projections did not mean a war with Iraq was imminent, and that it was impossible to know what any military campaign against Iraq would ultimately cost.
"This is nothing more than prudent contingency planning," Mr. Daniels said from his home in Indianapolis, where he was reviewing the fiscal 2004 federal budget at his kitchen table. "At this point there is no war."
Mr. Daniels's projections place the cost of an Iraq war in line with that of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, which cost more than $60 billion, or about $80 billion in current dollars. But the United States paid for only a small part of that conflict, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Japan bearing the brunt of the costs. This time, the gulf nations are less supportive of the United States and, diplomats say, Americans are likely to bear most of the cost of a war with Iraq.
Mr. Daniels declined to explain how budget officials had reached the $50 billion to $60 billion range for Iraq war costs, or why it was less in current dollars than the 43-day gulf war in 1991. Mr. Daniels also declined to specify how much had been budgeted for munitions and troops. "All of these are major costs," he said.
The driving expense for the military in any war would be the size of the American force and the length of the conflict. In the 1991 war, 550,000 American troops were based in Saudi Arabia, which picked up the cost of virtually all housing, fuel, food and water.
If President Bush orders an attack against Iraq, the American force would be half the size of that in the 1991 war. The Pentagon's war plans call for deploying as many as 250,000 troops, but the initial offensive should start with a much smaller number, with a sizable force in reserve.
The budget director's projections today served as a more politically palatable corrective to figures put forth by Mr. Lindsey in September, when he said that a war with Iraq might amount to 1 percent to 2 percent of the national gross domestic product, or $100 billion to $200 billion. Mr. Lindsey added that as a one-time cost for one year, the expenditure would be "nothing."
Mr. Lindsey was criticized inside and outside the administration for putting forth such a large number, which helped pave the way for his ouster earlier this month. He could not be reached for comment this evening.
But today, Mr. Daniels sought to play down his former colleague's remarks. "That wasn't a budget estimate," he said. "It was more of a historical benchmark than any analysis of what a conflict today might entail."
Pentagon officials say that the cost of munitions in a potential war with Iraq will not be materially more than the cost of munitions in the 1991 gulf war. The reason, they say, is that the military now uses more precision-guided bombs, which are far more accurate, so fewer are needed.
In 1991, about 10 percent of bombs and munitions were precision guided. In the conflict in Afghanistan, the share of precision weapons rose to about 60 percent.
Although precision-guided bombs cost more than conventional munitions, they are not always exorbitantly more expensive, at least by Pentagon standards. Many of the "smart" bombs used in Afghanistan, for example, were simply 2,000-pound unguided bombs with a $20,000 mechanism attached to the bomb's tail that allowed it to be steered to a target by satellite.
The major costs of an Iraq war, Pentagon officials say, will be those for dispatching tens of thousands of troops overseas, feeding and sheltering them, and maintaining the military equipment deployed to the gulf.
Mr. Daniels said that Mr. Bush had been kept apprised of the budget projections for a war with Iraq and that all preparations were still in the realm of the theoretical. "At this point our position is that the president has made no decision," Mr. Daniels said.
The cost of any war with Iraq would not be part of the fiscal 2004 budget that Mr. Daniels is reviewing. Rather, the money would have to be appropriated as emergency spending by Congress. The cost of a war would also not be part of a record $355 billion military spending measure approved by Congress this year.
Mr. Daniels declined to specify the amount of a likely deficit for fiscal 2004, but he described the tax cuts scheduled to take place that year as only a "minor factor" in the red ink. Critics of the administration's tax cut acknowledge that the costs of the tax cuts will grow to large numbers only in 2006.
The budget director laid blame for the deficit on the sluggish economy and the slump on Wall Street and said there would be deficits without the administration's tax cuts. After four years of surpluses, the Bush administration announced a deficit of $159 billion for the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30. It has projected a deficit for the current fiscal year of $109 billion.
Mr. Daniels said today that the fiscal 2004 budget is one of "moderate growth" and that he was not projecting any immediate return to a balanced budget.
"Last year was a year when we presented a lot of new spending," he said. "This year we've said we'll be looking at much lower growth. The big reasons for that are the flatness in revenue and the return of deficits, as well as the uncertainty in the potential expansion of the war on terror."
----
Ex-Nato commander to stand for US President
Tuesday 31st December 2002
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_734898.html
Former Nato Supreme Commander Wesley Clark is planning to run for US President as a Democrat.
The retired general has canvassed support with Democrat activists and donors, and visited Iowa and New Hampshire, sites of the first two primary contests. General Clark, who now works as an investment banker in his native Little Rock, has also appointed a member of former Vice President Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign team as his top aide.
Gordon Fischer, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said Gen Clark is a candidate for the 2004 election.
"He's getting in touch with opinion leaders, neighbourhood leaders and county leaders, discussing his qualifications to become president."
Gen Clark, 57, who led Nato during the Kosovo campaign, has yet to officially put his name forward for the race.
"I'm not going to speculate," he told USA Today. "I'm just out talking about our country, where it is and what it needs."
The media-friendly former military commander could provide the Democrats with their best chance of defeating President George Bush.
He comes from outside the Washington political circles that alienate many voters. Unlike most Democratic presidential hopefuls, Gen Clark is not a member of Congress.
The Rhodes scholar and Vietnam veteran could also provide a strong message on national security, an issue which cost the party in this year's mid-term elections.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Kenya Joyful as Moi Yields Power to New Leader
December 31, 2002
New York Times
By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/international/africa/31KENY.html
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec. 30 - Giddy Kenyans turned out by the hundreds of thousands today to see their longtime ruler, Daniel arap Moi, hand over power to a new president, Mwai Kibaki, who vowed to change the course of the beleaguered country.
Kenya entered a new chapter with the swearing in of Mr. Kibaki, who heads a coalition of parties that until the election last Friday had been long relegated to the opposition. All at once this afternoon, 39 years of domination by Mr. Moi's ruling Kenya African National Union party came to an end.
Mr. Kibaki, a former finance minister and vice president to Mr. Moi who broke with him a decade ago, pledged to begin immediately his plans to revive the economy, stamp out corruption and rebuild government without any vestiges of the departing leader's autocratic rule.
"Fellow Kenyans, I am inheriting a country which has been badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude," Mr. Kibaki said bluntly, with Mr. Moi sitting expressionless nearby. "There has been a wide disconnect between the people and the government."
The retiring president, who has ruled Kenya since 1978 but was forced by the Constitution to step down this year, ceded power graciously today in a ceremony few Kenyans ever imagined they would see.
"We have come a long way together," Mr. Moi said wistfully, as some in the crowd heckled him. "We have accomplished much, but there is much new to do."
Expectations for the new government could not be higher. Street children in rags joined smartly dressed business people today in dancing in the streets, all hopeful their lives would improve with a change at the top.
"I never thought I would see this day," said Mercy Gachiri, 42, who slept in Uhuru Park to get a good view of the hand-over ceremony.
The hastily arranged inaugural drew some regional leaders, including the presidents of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia and the wife of President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. But it was everyday Kenyans, poor but proud, who made the celebration their own.
They climbed into trees for a peek at their new president. They pushed and shoved their way past security personnel. When Mr. Kibaki arrived, they exploded into a frenzy that some said equaled the celebrations held at the time of independence in 1963.
"This is liberation," said Elvis Odoyo, 24, an accountant. "It's like gaining independence one more time."
The departing Mr. Moi, 78, was from the old-school of African politicians that demand absolute loyalty from the populace. For much of his tenure it was against the law to speak ill of him.
Mr. Kibaki, 71, comes from the same generation as Mr. Moi but he sounded a far different note today. "I promise not to let you down," he said. "I will be your servant with all humility and gratitude."
Tackling corruption will be his immediate priority, Mr. Kibaki said. He also plans to eliminate the fees charged to Kenyans who send their children to primary school, a costly promise but a hugely popular one. Most of all, Mr. Kibaki vowed to form a government with a different attitude than the departing one.
"The era of anything goes is now gone forever," Mr. Kibaki said. "Government will no longer be run on the whims of individuals."
Still to be worked out is how aggressively to go after past economic crimes. Mr. Kibaki has talked of a reconciliation commission to allow former officials to confess their misdeeds as well as a prosecutorial body to push forward cases that are ready for court. Today, he said he would not engage in any "witch hunting" but would not turn his back on the misdeeds of the past either.
The American ambassador, Johnnie Carson, said that if Mr. Kibaki began a serious crackdown on corruption it would most likely prompt international financial institutions to restart the aid to Kenya that has been frozen in recent years because of concerns over misspending in the Moi government.
"Something very dramatic has happened here in the last week," Mr. Carson said in an interview, calling the peaceful transition from Mr. Moi to Mr. Kibaki "strong affirmation that democracy can work in large African countries."
Kenya's step forward comes as other countries on the continent, like the once-stable Ivory Coast or Zimbabwe under the autocratic Robert Mugabe, find themselves sliding backward, mired in conflict and hardship. Democratic transitions like the one played out in Kenya remain pipe dreams in places like Congo, Sudan and Eritrea.
--------
Libyan Troops Out of C. African Republic
December 31, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Central-African-Republic-Libya.html
BANGUI, Central African Republic (AP) -- Members of a regional security force patrolled the capital of this central African country Tuesday, after Libyan soldiers ended a yearlong deployment to protect the government against a string of coup attempts.
The last Libyan forces boarded a plane for home Saturday, state radio reported over the weekend.
Journalists were not invited to witness the troops' departure. But by Saturday, Libyan soldiers were no longer visible in the capital, Bangui.
Some 230 soldiers from nearby Gabon -- the first members of a regional security force expected to number 350 -- guarded President Ange-Felix Patasse's residence and circulated in the streets.
Troops from Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Mali are also expected to join the force.
The Libyan troops sent by Moammar Gadhafi in May 2001 helped Patasse's government put down three coup attempts.
In Tripoli, Maj. Abdel Baset al-Lafi said Saturday that none of the 81 Libyan soldiers deployed in Central African Republic were killed.
But military officials in Bangui said the Libyan force numbered about 300, and at least two members were killed in the last power grab in October -- which saw rebels battle their way to within blocks of Patasse's residence.
The insurgents -- loyal to a former military chief -- were later driven back to the north of country with the help of the Libyans and about 3,000 rebel fighters from neighboring Congo.
The Congolese fighters terrorized Bangui for days after the uprising, raping and looting, according to residents. They are currently helping the government hold the north and west of the country, and there has been no indication when they will leave.
Central African Republic -- a former French colony rich in diamonds, gold and uranium -- has weathered nine coups or coup attempts since independence in 1960, with six in the past six years.
-------- arms sales
Despair Fills Md. Gun Dealers
Few Weapons Will Meet Trigger-Lock Law's Standards
By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56389-2002Dec30?language=printer
The nation's first state law requiring all new handguns to be outfitted with built-in trigger locks will take effect in Maryland tomorrow, a measure gun control advocates predict will save lives but one that has gun dealers fearing for their livelihoods.
Only six models of handguns and integrated trigger locks now on the market would meet the law's standards, and manufacturers of other models have started cutting back their distribution in Maryland, several dealers said yesterday.
Sanford Abrams, of the Maryland Licensed Firearms Dealers Association, said limiting the sales options to such a small array of models will be painful, and he offered a gloomy forecast for the dealers' long-term survival.
"It will have a disastrous effect," he said. "Companies are not and will not be compliant. There will be hundreds of models that will no longer be available."
The dealers are hoping that legal action or the party change in the Maryland governor's office will help blunt the impact of the provision. And a spokeswoman for Gov.-elect Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) yesterday repeated Ehrlich's campaign pledge to "take a fresh look at this law, as well as all laws surrounding the sale of guns."
But dealers were not optimistic that such efforts would prove meaningful. "Short of seeing the General Assembly pass a new law, I don't see a lot of hope for intervening," Abrams said.
The gun control advocates who aggressively lobbied to see the measure put in place said they are not overly concerned about gun dealers' potential hardships.
"How do you balance saving the life of a child against the prospects that sales might decrease somewhat?" asked Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), one of the chief sponsors of the measure. "To me, when you look at the balance, it comes out heavily on the side of saving lives."
The trigger-lock provision was part of a raft of gun control measures the Maryland General Assembly passed in 2000 despite bitter opposition from the rural reaches of the state and the National Rifle Association, which enlisted its 50,000 Maryland members to phone lawmakers just before key votes.
Passage came on the strength of support from Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) and from legislators in the state's larger, more liberal-leaning counties, and it prompted President Bill Clinton to make his first and only trip to a state capital to attend a bill signing.
At the time, Clinton called the law a model for how government can help eliminate accidents that can occur when children play with guns. It will do so, advocates said, by limiting the sale of handguns to those with an integrated locking system that can limit the use of the weapon to people who hold the key or know the combination.
"This will save lives," said Matt Fenton, president of Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse Inc. "It's the way of the future."
Lillian Pubillones Nolan, the Montgomery County chapter director of the Million Mom March, said the law will help protect Maryland's children.
"Tragically, we have too many instances where children wind up victims in an accident because guns are left unattended," Nolan said. "If this means saving lives, I think responsible gun owners should see it as a minor inconvenience."
But gun enthusiasts remain doubtful about the potential benefits.
"The problem with this is, you're trying to make the object safer instead of the individuals who handle it," said Richard Berglund, president of the Maryland Arms Collectors Association.
In the meantime, store owners worry that the law could lead to serious financial problems.
"In the short run, it might increase business, as people buy the last of the new guns" manufactured before the Jan. 1 deadline, said Steve Schneider, who owns Atlantic Guns of Silver Spring. "But in the long run, it's a scary prospect."
Schneider said he believes that it is unlikely that gunmakers will take steps to remodel their weapons just to comply with the laws of one small Mid-Atlantic state. He compared it to asking automakers to build cars with the steering wheel on the right-hand side just for sales in Maryland.
"I hope they will do it," Schneider said. "But you have to wonder how much they feel the need to suit Maryland's whims."
Already, there are rumblings that some in the industry plan to sue the state to test the validity of the law.
Carl Roy, owner of Maryland Small Arms, an indoor shooting range and weapons distributor in Upper Marlboro, said he is banking on the chance that such a lawsuit will lead to a temporary restraining order, halting enforcement of the law.
"I believe it's a restraint of trade," Roy said. "It's basically going to ban new guns in the state. We've already had a number of distributors saying they won't ship guns into the state."
Frosh noted that the final version of the measure was a compromise with gun enthusiasts.
The measure mandated the locks, created mandatory sentences for gun crimes, required ballistic "fingerprinting" of shell casings from new guns and required those wishing to purchase a handgun to complete two hours of safety training.
But Glendening agreed to eliminate provisions that would have required even more advanced high-tech locks, such as those that would unlock only if sensors in the grip recognize the owner's fingerprints.
Gov. James E. McGreevey (D) made New Jersey the first state to require the "smart gun" technology this month. But that law won't take effect until three years after the state's attorney general determines that the technology is sound.
-------- iraq
DIPLOMACY
Split at U.N. Over Products That Iraqis May Import
December 31, 2002
New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/international/middleeast/31NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 30 - The Security Council, acceding to anxious pressure from the United States, voted today to revise a list of goods that must be approved by the United Nations before Iraq can import them.
In a sign of fissures in the unity the United States achieved in November with Resolution 1441, which obliged Iraq to cooperate with new weapons inspections, Russia and Syria abstained today. The other 13 Council members voted in favor.
The goods review list was first drawn up last May under what is called the oil-for-food program, in which the United Nations uses revenues from Iraqi petroleum sales to buy goods for the civilian population. Broad economic sanctions imposed by the Council on Iraq in 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait have severely eroded living conditions for most Iraqis.
The United States was determined to add its items to the list by Dec. 31 to bar Iraq from making new purchases of questionable goods in January, when administration officials expect the pace of their own preparations for a potential war with Iraq to quicken.
The United States also wanted to pass the measure before the composition of the Council changes at the turn of the year, when five new countries not familiar with the issue will become members.
Russia, a permanent Council nation, withheld support because it failed to have one model of Russian-made heavy dump truck removed from the list, Russian diplomats said.
Earlier this year, the United States said it had satellite photos to show that Baghdad had converted some of the dump trucks to use as mobile rocket-launchers. Russian diplomats argued that Washington's pictures did not prove that Iraq had used trucks it bought from Russia and not years ago from the Soviet Union.
"The record we have is that there was no proof presented," the Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, said today.
American and British diplomats made little secret of their frustration with Moscow, noting that France and China, the other permanent Council members, had supported the measure.
James B. Cunningham, the United States deputy representative, said pointedly that Russia had withheld its support over a "very narrow item."
"It must be sad to go from superpower to truck seller," one senior Bush administration official said in exasperation.
Washington had little difficulty persuading the other Council members to accept most of its revisions to the list, many of which were items - like rocket motor cases and full-motion flight simulators - that Baghdad would be hard put to argue that it required to care for the needy.
In a compromise, the Council agreed to ask the United Nations to come up with standards to evaluate the quantities that Iraq would be allowed to import of medicines like Atropine and Pralidoxime, as well as Ciprofloxacin and several other antibiotics. Baghdad made requests for large quantities of the drugs, raising Washington's suspicions that it intended to use them as chemical and biological warfare antidotes for its military troops.
--------
U.S. - British Jets Bomb Iraq Facilities
December 31, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq-Airstrike.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- American and British warplanes flying multiple missions attacked Iraq air defense facilities after an Iraqi fighter jet penetrated the southern no-fly zone, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
By the Pentagon's count, the bombing Monday brought to 78 the number of days this year that strikes were launched by the U.S-U.K. coalition that for a decade has been patrolling two zones set up to limit operations of President Saddam Hussein's military.
Hostilities in the zones have ebbed and flowed over the years, and the 2002 year-end total of 78 coalition strikes is much higher than the 43 of 2001, but nearly matches the 80 of 2000.
Pentagon officials said the annual numbers give a general idea of activity in the zones, but cautioned that comparisons can be misleading partly because the military has changed the way it counts Iraqi firings, incursions and other hostilities over the years.
The warplanes in Monday's attack used precision bombs, and a damage assessment was under way, said a statement from the command.
The coalition aircraft targeted the sites after Iraqi forces flew a MIG-25 some 110 nautical miles into the southern zone.
At 2:30 p.m. EST Monday, coalition aircraft struck cable repeaters that are part of Iraq's air defense communications system running between Al Kut and Al Basrah and between Al Kut and An Nasiriyah; and at 3:40 p.m. they targeted a mobile radar unit that Iraqis also had moved into the zone, near Al Kut, said U.S. Central Command spokesman Maj. Pete Mitchell.
An Nasiriyah is some 300 miles south of Baghdad and Al Basrah some 200 miles south. Al Kut is about 160 miles southeast of the capital.
Mitchell declined to say how many planes participated in the missions or how many bombs were dropped. A Pentagon official said Navy aircraft flew from the USS Constellation and British and U.S. Air Force planes flew from land bases. He declined to name them, but planes monitoring the northern zone that protects Iraq's Kurdish minority fly out of Incirlik air base in Turkey and those in the south have routinely flown from Kuwait, though officials said recently that Saudi Arabian officials have been allowing U.S. warplanes to fly strike missions from there as well.
Iraq says the U.S. and British patrols violate its sovereignty and its forces frequently shoot at allied pilots in both zones.
Penetrations by Iraqi jets into the zone are less frequent but not uncommon. A week ago, an Iraqi MIG-25 shot down a U.S. Predator drone conducting reconnaissance near Al Kut, U.S. military officials said.
However, Iraqi state-run television appeared to say that ground-based air defenses shot it down.
Before Monday afternoon's multiple strikes, the previous coalition attack in southern Iraq was Sunday, when allies targeted surface-to-air missile sites near Ad Diwaniyah, about 75 miles south of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Iraq has protested a U.S. airstrike that reportedly killed three Iraqis and wounded 16 others in the nation's south, calling it a material breach to Security Council resolutions.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri described the Dec. 26 airstrike as ``a barbaric and terrorist act, with a direct participation of the rulers of Kuwait, and it represents a material breach to the Security Council resolutions.''
-------- latin america
Plan Puebla Panama: The InterAmerican Development Bank Paves Latin America
by Brendan O 'Neill
12/31/02
ACERCA
http://www.asej.org/ACERCA/ppp/ppp.html
The InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) is literally paving the way for corporate globalization in Central America with the massive industrial development project called Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). PPP and its southern twin, the Regional Infrastructure Integration Initiative (IIRSA), threaten the social and ecological integrity of all of Latin America. PPP and IIRSA are "regional integration" projects that call for the construction of hydroelectric dams and high-impact roadways throughout indigenous territories and intact rainforests, the dredging of deep water ports in fragile ocean ecosystems and the creation of sweatshop factories in industrial development zones throughout the region. These projects, coordinated by the IDB, will be funded by development bank loans, private corporations and public institutions.
PPP and IIRSA will lay the infrastructural foundation upon which "free trade" can be built and expanded over the geographical area encompassed by the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The PPP covers Mexico through Central America, while IIRSA picks up in Colombia where the PPP leaves off, reaching into South America. Critics of the PPP argue that, like the FTAA and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it was created by a handful of regional political and corporate elites. The IDB has only held token "consultations" with hand-chosen organizations in the region and has intentionally excluded those who will be impacted most by the project.
The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is currently being negotiated by the US, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. This agreement to advance free trade and to "forge closer economic relations" follows in the same neoliberal vein as NAFTA. Negotiators hope to have an agreement before December 2004. In the words of President Bush, the passing of CAFTA would be another step toward completing the FTAA. Any advancement in CAFTA or the FTAA promises to intensify corporate pressure to implement the PPP and IIRSA.
PPP: Development for Whom and by Whom?
PPP was originally proposed by Mexico's President Vicente Fox to link the region from Puebla, Mexico, all the way to Panama, with a north-south industrial transportation corridor (i.e. superhighway to move goods) running along the Pacific Coast. In addition, the PPP calls for the creation of key industrial development zones (i.eŠsweatshops), as well as the dredging and privatization of deep water ports that would destroy critical habitat. A series of "dry canals" (superhighways and high speed railways) running east-west across southern Mexico and Central America would connect the ports on both coasts with the industrial zones and the north-south corridor. The dry canals threaten to displace rural indigenous people and destroy the ecosystems of the region.
Other PPP megaprojects include the creation and privatization of a regional energy grid involving the construction of dozens of hydroelectric dams from Panama to Mexico, which would feed industrial development. This promises to flood indigenous communities and ecosystems. Additionally, privatization of basic services and natural resources would enable massive oil, mineral, forestry and commercial agriculture development by multinational corporations.
PPP's CORPORATE INVESTORS
Who are some of the multinational corporations that are investing in (and will be profiting from) the Plan Puebla Panama?
... International Paper Company and Boise Cascade are currently purchasing land in Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico for plantation forestry. International Paper is also investing in research for genetically engineered trees.
... Grupo Pulsar- a Mexican biotechnology corporation, is investing in Chiapas in plantation forestry, biotechnology, and research on genetically engineered trees.
... ENDESA (a Spanish corporation) is the principal investor in the regional energy interconnection initiative to privatize energy and develop hydroelectric dams.
... Harken Energy, Applied Energy Services (AES), Duke Energy, and Harza are all U.S. energy corporations that are investing from Mexico to Panama in the development of hydroelectric dams and the privatization of the energy grid.
... DELASA Prescott and Follet is U.S.-based investment group that has a 25-year lease on the privatization, port modernization and creation of megaprojects (including factory zones and road expansion) in the port town of Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Other investors include:
Tribasa, Caros, GAN, ICA, Imbursa, Texas Connection, International Shipholding Corporation, Monsanto, Shell, Dow Chemical, Exxon, Shell, and Hutchinson Holdings.
Adapted from a poster by Mexico's Citizen Democracy Movement (MCD) and the Mexican Action Network Confronting Free Trade (RMALC). Additional research conducted by the Working Group of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec / GTCI (Mexico) and Action for Community and Ecology in the Regions of Central America / ACERCA (USA).
PPP INSTITUTIONAL SPONSORS
Which public and multilateral institutions are financing the Plan Puebla Panama?
1) The federal governments of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. They will use taxpayer funds to finance any "high impact" investments that will not generate immediate profits for the private sector.
2) The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) administers the Mexico Fiduciary Fund, which finances the PPP infrastructure projects. The IDB acts as the coordinating body for investment in the PPP.
3) The Inter-Institutional Technical Group (GTI) of the PPP includes the IDB, the Central American Economic Integration Bank (BCIE), the Latin American Economic Commission (CEPAL), the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), INCAE, United Nations Development Program (UNDP), The Central American Integration System (SICA), and the Secretary of Central American Integration (SIECA).
4) Other participating organizations include: Latin American Association of Integrations (ALADI), Central America Environment and Development Commission (CCAD), Coordination Center for the Prevention of Natural Disasters in Central America (CEPREDENAC), Central American Indigenous Council (CICA), Indigenous and Peasant Coordination of Community Agroforestry (CICAFOC), and Fund for Development of Indigenous Peoples (FONDIN).
5) The World Bank and the UN's Global Environmental Facility (GEF) administer the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which has been tied to the PPP.
6) Other financial investors and donors include the World Bank, the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation, the European Union, Spanish government, and other bilateral agencies. Within Mexico, funds and support also come from the governments of the following states: Campeche, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz, and Yucatan.
Adapted from a poster by Citizen Democracy Movement / MCD (Mexico) and the Mexican Action Network Confronting Free Trade / RMALC (Mexico). Additional information from International Rivers Network / IRN (USA) and Interaction (USA).
Resistance to the PPP
Indigenous organizations such as the Organization of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus (UCIZONI) have adamantly rejected a proposal for a dry canal through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. Since the announcement of the dry canal in 1997 UCIZONI declared, "The Isthmus is not for sale!" Thus, resistance to this dry canal by UCIZONI and other indigenous organizations existed long before it was formally incorporated as one of many megaprojects of the PPP.
From March 4-18, Action for Community and Ecology in the Regions of Central America (ACERCA) led a delegation of North American activists and grassroots organizers to Nicaragua's North Atlantic Autonomous Region. Indigenous communities living in the region are opposing a PPP project that would expand the Bilwi-Puerto-Cabezas port into the largest in the Caribbean. DELASA, a private US corporation, is a major player behind this $150 million, three-part business plan that threatens to irrevocably alter the entire region. The company intends to enlarge and pave a road from Managua to Bilwi and to expand the Bilwi-Puerto-Cabezas port. This would result in the displacement of many nearby communities. Indigenous resistance to these projects includes coordination between ACERCA, the Sumu/Mayagna indigenous community organization (SUKAWALA) and the Nation of Mosquita Consejo de Ancianos.
Unified opposition and alternatives to these corporate globalization projects create the possibility for the development of locally based, socially and ecologically just alternatives. While the anti-globalization movement has targeted the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, we must also target shameless regional banks like the IDB. Opposition to the FTAA has been strong, but to fully combat corporate globalization, we need to unify the struggles against the PPP, IIRSA, CAFTA and the FTAA.
With every proposal of the PPP, whether in the form of a hydroelectric dam or a dry canal, the privatization of natural resources or the creation of sweatshops, there is solidarity, resistance and alternatives being built from the bottom up. At a July forum against the PPP in Managua, Nicaragua, ACERCA dialogued with more than 1,000 activists from around the world about how to stop the PPP in its tracks. The final declaration of this event included a call to Northern activists to participate in an international day of action on October 12, demonstrating our absolute rejection of the PPP and FTAA, in solidarity with Mesoamerican resistance.
To get involved with the Network in Opposition to the Plan Puebla Panama (NoPPP) and to organize for the day of action against the Plan Puebla Panama, contact ACERCA, (802) 863-0571; brendan@asej.org; www.acerca.org.
Brendan O'Neill is the Central America and Colombia campaigner at Action for Community and Ecology in the Regions of Central America (ACERCA). He has participated in two international forums against the Plan Puebla Panama.
What is NoPPP? (top)
What is the Network Opposed to the Plan Puebla Panama? NoPPP is a network of northern-based organizations forming strategic alliances to stop the Plan Puebla Panama. We also support our southern partners' diverse initiatives for more equitable, locally-planned and ecologically sound forms of community development. The "Plan Puebla Panama" proposes the industrialization of southern Mexico through Panama, connecting the region with dry canals, superhighways, a regional energy grid, and constructing a string of new "development zones" of sweatshops. We recognize that the PPP, Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) are a package of initiatives to open the doors for corporate globalization in Latin America. The PPP was developed without any prior consultation with local communities, and is completely contrary to our southern partners' community-based initiatives for economic, social, cultural and ecological justice.
The NoPPP is a group of northern-based organizations that:
... Supports important previous and ongoing PPP organizing in Mexico and Central America
... Develops popular education materials in English and Spanish
... Conducts broad-based popular education campaigns on PPP
... Mobilizes US constituencies to lobby Congressional representatives
... Conducts campaigns focusing on International Financial Institutions and corporations promoting PPP
... Promotes mutual information and education exchange (between North and South)
... Supports voices struggling to establish economic, social and cultural autonomy
... Supports the capacity building efforts of Central American and Mexican-based community organizations
... Strengthens North-South, North-North and South-South relationships
These principles guide our work to stop the Plan Puebla Panama. To join the NoPPP e-mail acerca@sover.net or call 802-863-0571
-------- mideast
Kuwaitis seethe with anger as U.S. war drum beats
By Michael Georgy,
December 31, 2002
MSNBC
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters12-31-035240.asp?reg=MIDEAST
KUWAIT, Dec. 31 - Kuwaitis in American-style shopping malls, coffee shops and mosques are hoping for Saddam Hussein's downfall. But they no longer trust the old friend who ousted the Iraqi leader's forces from their country in 1991 -- the United States.
Country Profile
As thousands of U.S. soldiers train for war in Kuwait near the Iraqi border, some of the people they have promised to protect are growing tired of what they call U.S. President George W. Bush's ''cowboy'' style of leadership.
''We don't like Saddam. But we hate the Americans,'' said Ramiz Abu Qweidar, a civil engineer who lives in the poor town of Jahra, a 30-minute drive from the capital.
Perhaps the United States thought its liberation of Kuwait in 1991 would give it unlimited political mileage in the country, where many people still drive big, gas-guzzling American cars.
Many Kuwaitis -- from Islamic militants to lawyers to parliament members -- would disagree.
Although they believe only the United States has the military firepower to topple Saddam, many Kuwaitis complain that Washington has gone too far in its war on terrorism and unilateral calls for regime change in Iraq.
Those mixed emotions were palpable at a diwaniya, an informal gathering of parliamentarians, lawyers and businessmen.
WAR JITTERS AND ANGER
At a spacious villa, two elderly friends in flowing robes sat twirling worry beads through their fingers while speculating on the date of a possible war. ''January 21,'' said one. ''No February 21,'' said the other.
There were few kind words when the subject turned to the man whose father helped save Kuwait from Iraqi tanks -- Bush.
''This is highway robbery. It is the policy of a cowboy. Bush can just say 'I don't like that leader's face so he must be removed'. If he removes Saddam he will do the same in the whole region,'' said lawyer Ali Radwan.
''If anyone removes Saddam it should be the Iraqis.''
Anti-American sentiment in Kuwait boiled over in November when a Kuwaiti policeman shot and seriously wounded two U.S. soldiers. There have been a number of reports of shots fired at U.S. troops training in the Kuwaiti desert.
While many Kuwaitis condemned the attacks, some said U.S. policies in the Middle East invited hatred and violence.
''The attacks in Kuwait were not surprising and I expect more to take place. The Americans talk about democracy in the Arab world but that is not their motivation. Everyone knows that,'' said Mahmoud Awadi, a retired businessman.
The U.S. embassy in Kuwait has warned Americans to avoid apartment buildings and public places where Westerners gather.
Anti-American sentiment was even running deep at a coffee shop where teenagers puffed on cigarettes and water pipes while watching U.S. pop stars in music videos.
On the wall, a large photograph of a Kuwaiti official aiming a Kalashnikov rifle who was killed in the Gulf War reminded customers that oil-rich Kuwait remains vulnerable.
''It is a game. The Americans are just trying to impose their influence on Muslims. We hate the Americans,'' said Salih al-Bishr, 17.
For now, Kuwaitis are preparing for war by simulating chemical weapons attacks in the event that Baghdad takes revenge against the land it once called Iraq's 19th province.
''When the Americans liberated Kuwait my wife used to make drawings for them and I used to give them art as presents. But now things are clearer. We know why they are here. It is not for the sake of the beautiful eyes of Kuwaitis,'' said Khalifa Ikhrafi, a municipal council member.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechnya Bomb Toll Rises Past 80; Putin Stands by Vote Plan
December 31, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/international/europe/31CHEC.html
MOSCOW, Dec. 30 - The unofficial death toll in the bombing of Russian regional offices in Chechnya on Friday soared today past 80, and President Vladimir V. Putin warned that militants were using more violent tactics in a campaign to sabotage the restoration of Russian rule in the region.
But Mr. Putin said no amount of violence would disrupt plans for a long-delayed constitutional referendum in Chechnya this spring, a vote billed as the start of a new era of civil rule in the war-ravaged republic. A draft constitution would establish Chechnya as a self-ruling republic in the Russian Federation, a status held by a number of other regions.
"It is overwhelmingly clear to political leaders and also ordinary citizens that we are talking about another attempt to derail the process of political settlement in Chechnya," the Interfax news service quoted Mr. Putin as telling cabinet ministers in the Kremlin today. "They can increase the number of victims, including their own people, but they will not succeed in holding up the process of finding a solution to the conflict."
As he spoke, Russian television and news services quoted unidentified Chechen officials as saying the number of dead, previously placed at about 60, was now above 80 and likely to increase as workers cleared the remaining rubble from the four-story government center. The Interfax news service said 15 people remained in critical condition.
The State Emergencies Ministry placed the official toll at 63 dead and 178 wounded, some of whom have been taken to Moscow and other regions for treatment.
The bombings, the single most deadly attack on pro-Russian civilians in more than three years of war, came two months after Chechen guerrillas seized a downtown Moscow theatre, prompting a counterattack in which at least 129 civilians died.
Russian television offered new glimpses today of the scope of the devastation caused by the blasts, showing that it shattered windows in buildings blocks away and all but gutted the interior of the four-story concrete headquarters building. Smaller structures adjacent to the headquarters appeared to have been wiped out by the explosions.
Three still-unidentified suicide bombers blew up the main offices of Chechnya's pro-Russian government in Grozny, the capital, after maneuvering two vehicles crammed with explosives through a maze of checkpoints. The three bombers passed all but the final checkpoint without incident, then rammed through a fence when guards at the last stop tried to inspect the vehicle.
Today, investigators reported that they had found an engine part from one of the vehicles that bore a serial number, raising hopes that the vehicle's owners could be traced. They said earlier that the vehicles bore military license plates and that the drivers, who sounded and looked like native Russians, appeared to have proper documents to enter the government complex.
Chechnya's new prime minister, Mikhail Babich, said on the Russian television network NTV today that three commanders of the Kurgan OMON, a Siberian special militia assigned to guard the outermost perimeter of the complex, would be charged with negligence in connection with the blasts.
The authorities continued to insist today that evidence links the onetime elected president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, to the bombing plot. Mr. Maskhadov, the commander of the guerrilla forces, has denied responsibility and said he rejected suicide bombings as a mean of achieving the guerrillas' aims. Some officials suggest that Islamic extremists led by a Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev, shares responsibility for the bombing.
Interfax quoted Col. Ilya Shabalkin, an official with regional counterterrorism forces in Chechnya and surrounding provinces, as saying Russian forces had found documents in Chechnya in which Mr. Maskhadov ordered terror attacks against pro-Russian Chechen officials and the police.
-------- un
'No basis' for Iraq war now
BBC
Tuesday, 31 December, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2617783.stm
Kofi Annan
I don't see an argument for military action now
Kofi Annan told Israeli radio that Baghdad was co-operating with UN weapons inspectors and that no military action should be considered at least until they had reported back to the Security Council.
United States President George W Bush later said no decision had yet been taken to go to war with Iraq.
"I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully," he told journalists at his ranch at Crawford, Texas.
He added that the US was not sure whether Iraq had nuclear arms despite attempts to develop a programme in the past.
Earlier, an unnamed weapons inspector told a US newspaper that he and his colleagues had found no concealed material in Iraq.
The inspector added that he had seen none of the intelligence reports that Washington has said it is supplying to help in the search for weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, Iraq has invited chief weapons inspector Hans Blix for talks.
'Zilch'
The official news agency INA said a letter had been sent to Mr Blix asking him to come to Baghdad between the second and third week of January.
We haven't found an iota of concealed material yet
Unnamed inspector Mr Annan said he expected the weapons inspectors to produce their first report on 27 January, although there might be an interim report before that.
But one of the inspectors, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times daily on condition of anonymity, said that they currently had "zilch" to put in such a report.
"We haven't found an iota of concealed material yet," he said.
BBC Middle East analyst Roger Hardy says a picture emerges from the inspector's remarks of a team of experts under intense pressure from Washington to produce results but up against an Iraqi Government that is always one step ahead of them.
The inspector said Iraqi officials had faster cars and better radios with which to warn colleagues where they were going and what they were looking for.
They were forced to behave like spies, he said, passing information to each other on paper to avoid bugs and often driving in circles in an attempt to confuse their minders.
Intelligence
But the inspector said even unlimited access was not enough.
Inspectors at Abu Ghreib missile facility The Iraqi Government always seems to be a step ahead "Even if they open all the doors in Iraq for us and keep them open 24 hours a day, we won't be able to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there," he said.
"We need help. We need information. We need intelligence reports if they exist."
However, a senior US official told the LA Times that "high-quality" information on chemical and biological weapons was being passed on to the inspectors.
The inspector said that if this was so, he had not seen any yet.
Deadly work
He was sceptical about whether interviewing Iraqi scientists would produce any results.
"It's stupid to think that we can offer them to go abroad to testify," he said.
"Once any of them expresses a desire to go abroad for an interview, his brains will be kicked out in no time - his and his entire family's."
The inspector said he and his colleagues thought it possible Iraq really had eliminated its banned materials.
But it still had its scientists, who could resume their deadly work, he added.
----
U.N. Broadens Iraqi Import Ban
Viruses, Motorboats Among Items With Possible Military Use
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56748-2002Dec30?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 30 -- The U.N. Security Council today adopted a U.S.-sponsored resolution that tightens regulations on Iraqi imports of some viruses, airplane flight simulators, communications equipment and high-speed motorboats that have potential military applications.
The 15-nation council voted 13 to 0 to add the items to a 302-page list of products that require Security Council approval before they can be imported into Iraq. Russia and Syria abstained, marking the first open sign of council division on Iraq policy since it unanimously passed a resolution last month demanding Iraq submit to the resumption of U.N. inspections.
The council's decision to regulate additional imports to Iraq follows an intense effort by the Bush administration to convince council members that Baghdad may convert these items to military uses in a war against a U.S.-led coalition. It immediately drew charges from Iraq and Syria, the council's only Arab member, that today's action would worsen the plight of ordinary Iraqi citizens.
"This will hinder and create obstacles in the implementation of the oil-for-food program," said Iraq's deputy U.N. ambassador, Mohammed S. Ali, referring to a U.N.-supervised humanitarian program. "This program has not been able to respond to the needs of the Iraqi people, and nothing but the lifting of sanctions will end their suffering."
Washington failed to win council support for one its most important initiatives: a proposal to regulate Iraqi imports of atropine, a standard heart drug that also is a nerve agent antidote. Citing concerns that Baghdad may be purchasing large quantities of atropine in preparation for a chemical weapon attack against American troops, U.S. officials argued that the council should play a central role in monitoring its use in Iraq.
But faced with opposition from France and Russia, Iraq's two major suppliers of atropine, the United States settled for a compromise that would allow Iraq to import atropine without council monitoring in doses typically used for medical purposes. Council approval would be required for the import of atropine in larger doses that are traditionally associated with a chemical weapons use. The deal also would allow Iraq to import a limited number of atropine autoinjectors, a standard component in a soldier's chemical warfare defense kit, to protect victims of pesticide exposure or bee stings.
The Iraqi government has imported more than 3.5 million vials of atropine, primarily from French and Russian companies, through a U.N. humanitarian program over the past five years. The vast majority -- more than 3.4 million ampoules -- contained 0.6 milligrams of atropine, which is consistent with the dosage given to heart attack victims. A victim of pesticide or nerve agent poisoning would generally require a dose of at least 2.0 milligrams of atropine.
One U.S. official conceded that the procedures for atropine imports "needed to be stiffened a little bit" but added that "we can always revisit it in the future." Despite the setback, U.S. officials said they were "quite satisfied" with the council's action.
"The United States is pleased with the outcome today; it meets the goals we set for ourselves," said James B. Cunningham, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Today's resolution grants U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan broad authority to determine the amount of atropine autoinjectors and other medicines, including ciprofloxacin and doxycycline, that Iraq could import without Security Council supervision. The resolution also requires Security Council approval of a host of new items, including hantavirus and lumpy skin disease virus, missile components and global positioning system jammers.
The resolution eases restrictions on a category of high-powered trucks that were previously subject to Security Council scrutiny. But Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov said he abstained from today's vote in part because the United States refused to accommodate a Russian request that an even larger group of trucks, including the Russian-made Kamaz-6520 garbage truck, be removed from the import list. The United States maintains that Iraq has used the hydraulics from dump trucks to build mobile missile launchers and used other civilian trucks to haul artillery pieces.
-------- us
Pentagon build-up reaches unstoppable momentum
Julian Borger
Tuesday December 31, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,866919,00.html
The Pentagon's order to deploy large numbers of combat troops, warplanes and a hospital ship in the Gulf have created a near unstoppable momentum towards war with Iraq, US military analysts said yesterday.
Over the year, the US military has conducted low-profile preparations for a conflict, moving headquarters and equipment into the region. But the new deployment orders reported over the weekend represent a serious commitment of manpower and resources from which it will be hard to climb down without ousting Saddam or at least forcing his disarmament.
"There is a bit of 1914 in this in that once mobilisation begins, it's hard to turn it off. There are financial costs and practical costs," Ralph Peters, a former army intelligence specialist on the Middle East said. "You've already decided to take the political costs mobilising reserves, and the world is psychologically prepared for it. It would take an act of great fortitude to stop the train now."
The White House wanted to hold back the deployment orders until after the new year, but the Pentagon (which would have preferred the large-scale troop build-up to begin in early December) insisted it begin earlier if an invasion was to take place before March. The Iraqi spring heat begins to make desert warfare much more difficult.
After the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, signed the deployment order, the army's 3rd Infantry Division based in Georgia was put on alert. The 101st Airborne Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which have both been intensively rehearsing urban warfare techniques, are also preparing to leave for the Gulf.
About 25,000 troops are expected to fly to the region in the next few months to join 60,000 already there, with many more on 96-hour notice to leave. Up to 80,000 soldiers are expected to spearhead an assault along with marines and airborne troops.
The air force's Air Combat Command sent out deployment orders to F-16 and F-15 fighter units in Virginia and North Carolina and B-1 bombers based in North Carolina. The navy put the 10,000 sailors on board the George Washington aircraft carrier and its battle group of warships and submarines on 96-hour alert, despite the fact that they had just returned from a six-month tour of duty. And in a move that some military experts had earlier predicted would be a signal that the administration was serious about going to war early in 2003, a hospital ship, the USS Comfort was ordered to prepare a 1,000-bed trauma centre and make preparations to leave for Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
The Bush administration insists that no decision has yet been taken on whether to go to war, while it waits for results of UN weapons inspections under way in Iraq. But most observers believe that only a radical move by Baghdad - such as a confession to stockpiling weapons of mass destruction - or a dramatic worsening of the North Korean crisis can stop an invasion.
"Nothing is inevitable, but the logic of the situation points towards a war sometime in February," said Gary Schmitt, the head of Project for a New American Century, a conservative thinktank with close links to the administration.
"It's very hard for a country to mobilise for war, and not to go for war without a very serious reason. If you signal to the world that you're serious, and you don't do anything, then you're saying you're not a serious country."
Mr Peters said that the international community now believed that a conflict was inevitable and that regional allies like Saudi Arabia were prepared to offer limited assistance, after much cajoling by US officials.
Stephen Baker, a retired US Navy rear-admiral now at the Centre for Defence Information, said that the troops on standby would be able to fly in to the Gulf and pick up their pre-positioned equipment in a few days.
However, he said the deployments were not a "point of no return".
----
U.S. Soldier Is Wounded
December 31, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/international/asia/31SOLD.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 30 - An American soldier was wounded in the head in a firefight along the border with Pakistan on Sunday afternoon, the United States military announced today.
The soldier, who was grazed by a bullet from an AK-47, was evacuated to Bagram Air Base and then later transferred to Germany for further treatment, the military statement said.
He was the second American soldier evacuated to Germany with head wounds in two days. A soldier shot in the head in circumstances that did not involve hostile fire was evacuated on Saturday. The incident is under investigation, the Bagram news center reported.
--------
Rangel calls for reintroducing draft
12/31/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002-12-31-rangel-draft_x.htm
NEW YORK (AP) - Rep. Charles Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War, says he plans to introduce legislation to resume the military draft in the event of a war against Iraq.
In an opinion piece published in Tuesday's editions of The New York Times, the Democrat from New York said he would ask Congress next week to support his proposal. USA TODAY Rangel
Rangel said the prospect of a draft would make Congress less likely to support a war.
"I believe that if those calling for war knew their children were more likely to be required to serve - and to be placed in harm's way - there would be more caution and a greater willingness to work with the international community in dealing with Iraq," Rangel wrote.
Military service should be a "shared sacrifice" asked of all able young Americans, he said, noting that minorities make up a "disproportionate number" of enlisted members of the military.
"Service in our nation's armed forces is no longer a common experience," said Rangel, who voted against the congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq.
Rangel said his legislation would require "alternative national service" for people who are physically unable to serve and for those who refuse to serve for "reasons of conscience."
President Bush has said he doesn't intend to revive the draft, which ended in 1973.
-------- propaganda wars
A question of casualties in Iraq
Public support of war likely to hinge on combat toll, military analysts say
By Michael Kilian
Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau
December 30, 2002
http://iraq-info.1accesshost.com/trib7.html
WASHINGTON -- On the basis of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the campaigns in the Balkans and the anti-terrorist war in Afghanistan, the American public has grown accustomed to victorious U.S. military operations with relatively little cost in American blood.
But, as some military leaders have privately cautioned in recent days, a fight to the death with Saddam Hussein in Iraq could reap a grim harvest in dead and wounded in terms of American military personnel and Iraqi civilians in whose midst Hussein might make his last stand.
A big unknown facing U.S. war planners as they prepare for operations that could commence as early as next month is the death count and its effect on U.S. and world opinion.
"No one can predict the casualties that will result," said Anthony Cordesman, military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a leading Middle East expert. "People make estimates and they get put in the papers, but they're meaningless. We just don't know--especially if Saddam Hussein decides to use his weapons of mass destruction."
The United States won the Persian Gulf war with fewer than 150 American dead, a low number when compared with previous American wars that had losses in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The 1999 assault on Yugoslavia liberated the province of Kosovo without the loss of a single American in combat. The invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban and has resulted in fewer than 40 American deaths.
If another Iraq war were to yield significantly more deaths, some say, the administration could find itself with a version of a Vietnam problem: mounting body bags that prompt the public to question why the U.S. is at war half a world away.
"If you get [the toll] into the mid-hundreds running up toward a thousand, you will see public sentiment questioning the legitimacy of what we're doing," said Jay Farrar, a former Marine Corps officer and Defense Department official. "The public will want to know more about what it is we're doing on a more regular basis, and why we're doing it this way, and what is leading to this number of deaths."
Avoiding heavy losses
The Bush administration is not publicly addressing the question of casualties, although its battle plans appear designed to avoid a high U.S. death toll. The White House may fear such talk could weaken public support for the war.
Yet success or failure may turn on the casualty factor more than any other one.
As the Vietnam and Korean Wars have shown, too many U.S. losses--combined with too little progress over too long a time--can erode the political support a president needs to wage war.
A slaughter of Iraqi civilians also could diminish support at home while alienating U.S. allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf, provoke further bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians and inflame anti-American feelings among fundamentalist Muslims.
Some estimate that up to 50,000 Iraqi civilians could die in a U.S. onslaught. The exact number would depend on whether the vaunted U.S. precision bombs and missiles work as advertised, and to what degree Hussein decides to use his country's noncombatants as shields.
As for U.S. military deaths, that number is likely to be determined by the American battle plan and how large a force goes in, whether American troops are compelled to wage urban warfare in Baghdad, and--in a worst-case scenario--whether Hussein uses weapons of mass destruction.
Seizing port first
According to many analysts, the most probable attack scenario calls for American troops to seize the Iraqi port of Basra and key sections of southern, western and northern Iraq, but to surround rather than invade the heavily defended capital, in the hopes that a siege will force Hussein's fall without a great loss of American life.
As in Afghanistan, where most of the fighting was done by the Northern Alliance and other Afghan tribal groups, the U.S. would rely heavily on Kurdish and Shiite Muslim rebels to take and hold territory and would urge defections in the Iraqi military.
Massive, highly focused use of air power and precision bombs and missiles would play a major role in the operation.
William Taylor, a Washington military consultant and former West Point instructor, predicted that U.S. losses likely would be held under a thousand, as they were in the first gulf war.
"A lot of people said we'd lose 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 at the time," Taylor said. "We ended up with 148 killed."
U.S. casualties could mount, however, if the Baghdad siege became protracted or if an all-out assault on the city and Hussein's elite Republican Guard proved to be the only way to dislodge the Iraqi leader.
The Iraqis, for their part, are predicting a high number of U.S. deaths.
"The assault against Iraq will not be a cakewalk for the Americans, but a fierce war during which the United States will suffer losses they have never sustained for decades," vowed Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz this year.
Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution, said the number of U.S. casualties should not be underestimated.
"The United States could plausibly lose ... as many as 5,000 troops if the Republican Guard fights as hard and as effectively as its size and weaponry would plausibly allow within the urban settings of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities," O'Hanlon said. "While such a war would not become a quagmire under even the worst of circumstances, it could be rather bloody."
If that scenario materializes, the shock to the American system could be considerable. Over the past three decades, Americans have recoiled anytime the number of deaths in a world hot spot has grown beyond a handful--which adversaries have used to their advantage.
In 1983 after President Ronald Reagan sent about 2,500 Marines into Lebanon, about 250 died when terrorists bombed their barracks. The U.S. swiftly withdrew the force.
President Bill Clinton called a halt to operations in Somalia after losing just 29 military personnel--18 of them in the "Black Hawk Down" battle of Mogadishu. These casualties represented less than 0.5 percent of the forces deployed, but their deaths were considered evidence of failure.
Going further back, the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam turned out to be an enormous American victory by any objective military measure, with the U.S. retaking all positions lost and suffering 1,536 battle deaths to the enemy's 45,000, according to the Pentagon's figures. But the bloodshed turned public opinion overwhelmingly against the war.
"The American people take a very simplistic view of military operations," said Farrar, a former National Security Council staff member. "Everyone thought Tet was a huge U.S. defeat because that was the way it was portrayed. As you know, it was a huge victory. The North Vietnamese were on the verge of collapsing."
Too afraid of casualties?
A phenomenon of recent times is the perception that the U.S. military and its political overseers have become too casualty-averse to wage an effective war.
The U.S. campaign against the Serbs in Kosovo was confined mostly to the air, and combat pilots were forbidden to operate below 15,000 feet, lest they fall to Serbian anti-aircraft weapons. In World War II, losses of 10 percent or more in long-range bombing raids were commonplace--a casualty rate that would be unthinkable in an air war today.
It was not until Kosovar partisans began engaging Slobodan Milosevic's forces on the ground, and the U.S. threatened to do the same, that the Serb military began to run from its hiding places.
Taylor emphasized that his low casualty estimate of less than 1,000 in an Iraq war does not take into account the possible use of chemical and biological weapons by Hussein's forces.
"That's a different ballgame," he said. "If Saddam decides to commit suicide and use them, we're going to take casualties, no doubt about it--and no one can give you an estimate."
The Pentagon has stockpiled thousands of chemical and biological protective suits for its troops. But the suits have not been widely tested in combat, their use is of limited duration, and they make combat and even movement unpleasant in the heat--especially the 120-degree-plus temperatures typical of an Iraqi spring or summer.
Chemical weapons used
Hussein has been willing to unleash weapons of mass destruction. He used chemical weapons against his own people in the northern Kurdish area and against Iranian troops during the war between Iran and Iraq.
In the 1980-1988 war with Iran, after suffering 250,000 battle casualties to Iran's 300,000, Hussein sought unsuccessfully to end the stalemate by using mustard gas and nerve gas, killing 10,000 Iranians, according to a UN report.
Given the global nature of the terrorist threat and the increasing animosity toward Americans among radical Muslims, the response to significant numbers of Iraqi casualties among the Arab public is another worry.
"The problem of civilian casualties and collateral damage can always become a sudden political crisis, in spite of U.S. attempts to minimize it--complicated by a worst case in which allied attacks on Iraqi military facilities release significant amounts of chemical and biological weapons," Cordesman said.
Taylor said U.S. technology has improved twelve-fold since the 1991 war, and precision bombs and weapons are now the norm. But recent experience suggests that even this dazzling technology is not perfect.
The U.S. mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy and attacked a civilian passenger train in the Kosovo war, for example. And an American gunship shot up a civilian wedding engagement party in Afghanistan, provoking outrage throughout the Islamic world.
Risks high in close fight
These risks will increase if the battle for Baghdad becomes a bloody hand-to-hand fight.
"There's been a lot of loose talk about how high technology allows you to do all sorts of new things," O'Hanlon said. "But in cities it's pretty tough."
Farrar said he doubts Americans would be greatly concerned about Iraqi civilian deaths.
"That sounds pretty cold, but yeah, people in the U.S., if it doesn't touch us in a real defined way, tend to see things very abstractly," he said.
Opinion polls bear out the notion that U.S. public support for a war on Iraq, which has been fairly strong, could fade quickly if the body bags mount.
In a CBS News/New York Times poll taken in October, 67 percent favored military action to remove Hussein. But 54 percent still supported it if there would be substantial U.S. military casualties, and 49 percent if there were substantial Iraqi civilian losses.
Before commencing an attack, Taylor said, Bush would have to provide the same kind of stark evidence of Iraqi capabilities and intentions as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson did in 1962 when he showed the Security Council photos of Soviet missiles being moved into Cuba.
"In Europe, no one wants to go to war in Iraq," said Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies and a former British army major. "Americans don't want to do it. They will do it if they feel they have to and it's in their national interest. But they don't actually want to do it."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
D.C. Jail Lockdown Sparks New Fears
Tension Rising, Inmate Says
By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56332-2002Dec30?language=printer
D.C. jail inmates remain on lockdown more than two weeks after a rash of stabbings, prompting concern among advocates and family members who fear the prisoners will become violent and conditions unsanitary.
Three inmate-on-inmate stabbings, two of which were fatal, occurred during a 70-hour period that ended Dec. 14, according to correction officials. The killings were the first at the Southeast Washington facility in nearly five years. After the last incident, officials implemented a facility-wide inmate lockdown.
That lockdown has continued "to address the security concerns within the agency," said D.C. Corrections Department spokesman Darryl Madden.
"We have discovered some contraband, but before we release the lockdown status, we want to make sure we've gone through every aspect of the facility," Madden said of the 400,000-square-foot jail.
Under lockdown, inmates generally must remain in their cells except when they see visitors, are treated for medical problems or obtain psychological care, Madden said. Inmates had been allowed one hour of exercise a day starting Dec. 26; that was increased to two hours yesterday, he added.
About 75 percent of the cells hold two inmates, and the others are singles, Madden said. Televisions, radios and books are prohibited in cells, but inmates can have two days' worth of newspapers. They are allowed to shower at least once every 48 hours.
Family members and advocates said the lockdown has gone on too long and could create the unintended consequence of frustrating inmates to the point of violence.
Elias Henderson said he spoke with his grandson, an inmate who is incarcerated for violating parole, on Sunday. The grandson said that "tension was mounting," Henderson said, and that some inmates had started a fire in a cell.
"He's nervous, and he's mad, like all the rest of the inmates," Henderson said. "They feel like they're being mistreated because they are being punished for something they had no control over."
Advocates questioned whether crowding at the jail, which is designed to hold 2,424 and whose population was 2,305 yesterday, has convinced officials that the only safe way to operate the facility is to severely limit prisoners' movement.
"After the stabbings, they needed to do a search. They did the search. If they haven't completed it yet, I don't understand why. That's a very long time," said J. Patrick Hickey, a lawyer who has worked on D.C. jail cases for 30 years. "It is very crowded, but that does not justify a permanent lockdown. If they think the only way to manage a jail with 2,400 inmates is to have a permanent lockdown, they've got real problems there."
Madden acknowledged that the length of the lockdown is unusual. However, he said the jail had not had any killings in many years, and "given that, the length of this lockdown thus far is not disproportionate."
Madden added: "I will also say this: Managing an inmate population is very difficult during the holiday. "People miss home. . . . That's not to say under these circumstances you immediately lock people down, but given the rash of occurrences going into the holidays, we needed to make sure we took the most appropriate action."
D.C. Council member Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said she was disturbed by the indefinite lockdown.
"You can't run a jail like that," she said. "That only creates another dangerous situation."
Ambrose and Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) have been working on legislation to limit the population at the jail. A court-ordered population cap of 1,674 was lifted in June after 17 years.
"Assuming the reason they went into the [long] lockdown was because of the overcrowding, this is not a good fix," Ambrose said. "Let's seriously deal with alternatives."
----
5 Flee Puerto Rican Prison in Copter
By John Marino
Reuters
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56226-2002Dec30?language=printer
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, Dec. 30 -- Five prisoners broke out of a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico today, clambering onto a roof where a helicopter landed to carry them away, local authorities said.
Police described the inmates as "very dangerous" and said they were all serving sentences in excess of 100 years for murder and other crimes.
Two unidentified men rented the helicopter from Caribbean Helicorp in San Juan, saying they needed to inspect construction work in the southern city of Ponce. As they approached Ponce, they forced the pilot at gunpoint to land on the roof of Las Cucharas prison, officials said.
The jailbreak occurred during morning recreation. The five fugitives -- Orlando Valdes Cartagena, Jose A. Perez Rodriguez, Victor Gonzalez Diaz, Hector Marrero Diaz and Jose M. Rojas Tapia -- fled the recreation area and scrambled onto the roof, where the helicopter was waiting. The helicopter flew them to a remote area in the Caribbean island's central mountains where the group escaped, investigators said.
The pilot, whose name was not released, then called police with his cellular telephone.
"This is an extremely worrisome event," said Corrections Secretary Miguel Periera, a former police chief who took over his new post earlier this month. Periera promised an exhaustive investigation of internal security at the prison, as authorities believe the fugitives may have had help from guards within the institution.
Earlier this year, Hector "Pelin" Roman Ortiz escaped from an armored prison van in front of the San Juan courthouse while being transported there for a hearing. The man, charged with several rape and murder counts, was eventually hunted down and captured in the Dominican Republic in October.
An equally brazen escape occurred at the Rio Piedras State Penitentiary in San Juan in 1991, when a helicopter landed in the courtyard of the prison and flew away with three prisoners serving time for drug trafficking.
Besides security problems, the Puerto Rico prison system has been the target of a decades-long lawsuit in which inmates have sued over crowded conditions and other problems, such as a lack of health services.
-------- courts
Defense Lawyers In China Find State Is Judge and Jury
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56520-2002Dec30?language=printer
HAICHENG, China -- With his rich baritone, classy ties and retro eyewear, Mo Shaoping cuts a dashing figure, a Chinese Perry Mason.
In a decade as a defense lawyer, Mo has courted trouble by taking sides in some of China's most sensitive cases. His clients have included the founder of the banned China Democracy Party, Xu Wenli, who was released from jail on Christmas Eve and flown to the United States. Another is the leader of worker protests this year in Liaoning province, Yao Fuxin, who remains in jail and has been denied his legal right to counsel. Mo has represented Internet essayists and capitalists-turned-dissidents.
The case that haunts him most is a murder investigation in a town in Hebei province called Renqiu, where police seeking confessions allegedly hung his clients from the wall by their wrists, shoved electric cattle prods into their mouths, squeezed their flesh with pliers and beat their legs as they squatted. "They have absolutely no proof. It was torture, pure and simple," Mo said of the case, which has been grinding on for six years. "They all know it down there."
Each case presents its unique challenges. On a recent weekday, for instance, Mo was in Haicheng, a grimy Manchurian town 500 miles northeast of Beijing, defending a police officer accused of dereliction of duty. In his last visit here, on Nov. 20, prosecutors had arrested all of Mo's witnesses to block his defense. Worried that he, too, could end up in jail, Mo brought a group of reporters, one American among them, to Courtroom No. 4, an old meeting hall in the back of the Haicheng court. True to form, the prosecutor accused Mo of illegally telling witnesses how to testify, but did not arrest him.
"I guess he didn't dare," Mo said. "They usually don't go after big-city lawyers like me. We can still fight another day."
The battle for justice, due process and media coverage being waged by defense lawyers like Mo Shaoping tells much about how legal power is wielded in China these days and how much the country has -- and has not -- changed during two decades of economic development. This story, the last of an occasional series on how power works here, looks at the conflict between the organs of state power -- the nearly all-powerful police and prosecutors -- and the emerging influence of lawyers, scholars, common folk and even some officials who are calling for wider rule of law.
Ever since the Communist Party seized control of China in 1949 behind Mao Zedong's slogan that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," the government has had a troubled relationship with law. Lawyers were effectively wiped out in the 1950s, arrested by the thousands and labeled "rightists." With economic reforms, the profession was rehabilitated in 1979. Then China had 212 lawyers. Today, it has more than 120,000, and President Jiang Zemin has vowed to make China a country "ruled by law."
Still, lawyers have no place at the pinnacle of power. None of the nine Standing Committee members of China's all-powerful Politburo is a lawyer; they are all engineers. Only six of China's 3,000 national legislators have a background in law.
In a speech on Christmas Day, Zhou Yongkang, soon to be appointed minister of public security, ranked "loyalty" to the law and "consciousness" of the law last on a list of priorities for the police. Zhou is also expected to be placed in a more influential position on the party committee that sets judicial policies than the head of China's highest court.
Jiang Ping, former president of the University of Politics and Law, said the pending appointment heralds a worrying trend. "We had hoped that the courts would be given more power and be given a position above the police," he said. "Some things in China are moving forward and some things are moving back." A Weakened Profession
Mo Shaoping was one of the first lawyers to join a private practice when partnerships were permitted in 1992. Three years later he opened his own firm, Beijing Mo Shaoping Law Firm, with offices in a courtyard near the Forbidden City. With a sprawling duplex and a daughter in the best high school in Beijing, he is, by many measures, a success.
But Mo's profession is under assault, and his work is a struggle. Over the last few years, authorities have manipulated the new criminal procedure law and the revised criminal code to weaken the ability of defense attorneys to defend their clients. Across China, prosecutors have hit upon a novel technique to deal with attorneys who put up a stiff defense: arrest them.
Since the criminal code was revised in 1997, more than 400 defense lawyers have been detained on perjury charges in cases that the state risked losing, sources at the All-China Lawyers Association said. Mo represents the most prominent of these: Zhang Jianzhong, head of the Beijing Lawyers Association's committee on lawyers' rights. In addition, following defeats in criminal cases, police routinely rearrest defendants and dispatch them -- without trial -- to labor camps.
This happened in October during a high-profile case against a Protestant sect called the South China Church that Mo was also involved in defending. The head of the church, Gong Shengliang, was sentenced to life in prison on charges of ordering his followers to beat police and opponents of his sect. But a court in Hubei province acquitted four nuns who had been accused of assault. When the nuns announced they would file civil lawsuits against police for alleged torture, police re-arrested them and sentenced them to three years' labor reeducation.
In Beijing, government statistics show that fewer lawyers are taking criminal cases. In 1990, lawyers in the capital argued an average of 2.64 criminal cases a year. In 2000, the average was less than one case a year. Nationwide, defendants in only one of every seven criminal cases get legal representation, according to internal government statistics. This does not count defendants sentenced to labor camps, because they do not have the right to an attorney.
Defense lawyers like Mo have trouble getting access to evidence, their clients, witnesses and the attention of the judge. Legal decisions in important cases are made more often by a small committee of government and Communist Party officials than by the judge. The concept of a judiciary independent of party control has been rejected by Chinese officials as high as President Jiang.
The 1996 criminal procedure law says that police and prosecutors are required to hand over all "important" evidence amassed during their investigation, but police and prosecutors determine what "important" means. As a result, defense lawyers say, police and prosecutors rarely hand over evidence detrimental to the state's case. And if defense lawyers suspect them of holding back, the only place they can go for redress is the prosecutor.
Cases often are initiated or decided on the basis of political directives. In the Haicheng case, prosecutors accused police officer Jiang An of dereliction of duty in connection with a robbery that occurred in 1996. A villager in Jiang's home town had lost $2,500, complained to Jiang and pointed out a man whom he suspected of stealing his money. Jiang approached the man, and the man's family returned the cash. Case closed.
In September, however, Haicheng's prosecutors decided to use the case as part of a campaign to demonstrate their zeal in cracking down on police abuses. When the trial opened Nov. 20, practically the whole security apparatus of the town turned out, along with a local television crew from a state-run station.
The only problem was that Mo mustered a spirited defense.
At the end of the morning session, the prosecutor requested a recess and arrested Mo's witnesses. Among those arrested was Ma Kai, the victim of the burglary, and his wife. "He's the victim, not the criminal!" said his son, Ma Jingwei. "What's he doing in jail?"
By the next session, on Dec. 11, after a week in custody during which, local sources confirmed, the witnesses were splashed repeatedly with cold water in the middle of a Manchurian winter, they had recanted their testimony.
Prosecutor Mei Xiaoming accused Mo of trying to forge evidence. "The witnesses had a good attitude while they were in custody and confessed that they had been told to lie by their lawyer," he said. Mei praised the articles in the criminal procedure law that allow prosecutors to arrest defense attorneys. "I believe we'll get even tougher regulations in the future," he said. Coerced Confessions
Of all the cases Mo is working on, the double homicide in Renqiu disturbs him the most because, he said, it combines two of the most pernicious problems in China's system: torture and lack of judicial independence.
Sometime before dawn on Aug. 2, 1996, two female attendants of a state guesthouse in Renqiu, an oil town 80 miles south of Beijing, were savagely murdered. One was stabbed 30 times, the other 36. By May of the following year, the case had yet to be broken. Police Chief Li Yinchi, under pressure from city authorities, issued an order that it be solved -- no matter what -- by August, according to an official account of the case written by a Renqiu police officer, Gu Kaihe.
Such orders are common among the police in China and, legal experts say, often lead to judicial abuses.
By July, police had arrested five suspects and advanced a theory: One suspect, a local government official, had had an argument with one of the attendants and decided to kill her. He asked two other suspects, who both ran video arcades, to do the deed. Another suspect drove the getaway car. A fifth suspect was present when the plan was hatched but did not participate in the murder.
Police got confessions from all five suspects. But there was scant physical evidence. At the crime scene, police found no fingerprints to match those of the suspects and no blood on any of the suspects' clothes. They found only several footprints.
The case against the fifth suspect, Cui Xiaodong, was so weak that he was released on Dec. 30, 1997. But then he made a mistake: He submitted documentation signaling that he was preparing to sue the police for arresting him. Within weeks, he was rearrested.
In the following months, prosecutors in Cangzhou, a bigger city near Renqiu with administrative responsibility, sent the case back to the police twice for more evidence, according to Yao Guomin, a prosecutor there. But, they were told, no new evidence was available. Then the government got involved. After two high-level meetings between police and government officials in Cangzhou in late 1998, the government decided to order prosecution anyway, sources said.
"Two main issues were of concern," said a participant who spoke on condition of anonymity. "First, the government had already broadcast news of the arrests, so we couldn't backtrack, because that would look bad. Second, we believed that even if we didn't have any physical evidence, the confessions would stand up in court."
In early 1999, when proceedings opened, Mo recalled, the courtroom erupted as suspect after suspect stood up and pointed to police officers, directly accusing them of torture. Soon thereafter, the police officers stopped attending, he said.
Cui Bing, a 34-year veteran of the Renqiu police force, was on duty one evening shortly after the men were arrested. That night, he said, investigators beat one suspect, Xing Jinsong, at a police station. Xing's screams "were horrible," said the 58-year-old police officer.
"They were just beating the crap out of the suspect," he recalled. "He was howling like some kind of animal. It lasted for hours all night, until 11 p.m. They got him to confess, but all of us knew it was forced. I stopped pulling overtime after that. I couldn't stand it."
In testimony, Xing said a police officer "gripped my fingers, my chest and my inner thighs with pliers. He also cut the bottom of my feet with a knife, and put salt into the wounds."
At one point, Xing tried to kill himself, jumping out of a second-story window, Cui said.
Cui had another reason to be upset at what he heard. His son is Cui Xiaodong, the suspect who was rearrested after threatening to sue the police. While his son was in jail, Cui said, he frantically tried to stop investigators from torturing him.
"They went lighter on him than the others," Cui said. "But they broke him all the same."
In court, Cui Xiaodong said police "hung me from the wall, made me squat as if I was riding a horse. When I faltered they beat me. I wanted to die."
Chen Jianhua, Renqiu's deputy police chief, denied his men tortured the suspects. "They told you that?" he said. "Well, that makes sense. They usually claim they've been tortured in police custody. But I tell you, we didn't."
Police in Renqiu said Cui Bing's views on the case cannot be taken seriously because his son was involved. Verdicts Without Evidence
On July 29, 1999, a court in Cangzhou convicted the five men of the murders. Three of them -- Cui Hongtao (no relation to Cui Bing and his son), Xing Jinsong and Xu Wei -- were sentenced to death. Hu Bin and Cui Xiaodong were given shorter sentences. Authorities in Renqiu organized a parade to cheer the police. Medals were handed out to six officers.
All five of those convicted lodged appeals. Mo and other lawyers from his firm represented Xu Wei, Hu Bin and Cui Hongtao. On June 9, 2000, Hebei province's highest court sent the case back to Cangzhou, demanding more evidence. For the next two years, the case ping-ponged between Cangzhou and the court in Hebei, with Cangzhou sentencing them to death and the Hebei court demanding more proof. On June 6 this year, the Cangzhou court upheld its verdict but included no new evidence. That verdict is being appealed.
Sources said the Hebei court ruling was accompanied by an internal letter raising questions about the case. Among them: Why did the police forensic report mention three footprints, one Cangzhou court judgment mention six and a later Cangzhou judgment remove any mention of footprints? How could it be that a shoe store that figured in the case opened for business only after the murders occurred?
Zhao Yuhe, a judge at the Cangzhou court, acknowledged problems with the case but said that because so much time had passed, it would be almost impossible to find someone else to take the blame.
"We adhere to our judgment, and one reason is that it would be very difficult to find more evidence," he said. "The case was broken by the police a long time after it happened. You can only gather important evidence at the beginning of a case. So it might be true that some shortcomings exist in our judgment."
Cui Xiaodong, meanwhile, was recently released from jail, having served his 3 1/2-year term.
-------- terrorism
At Least 4 Killed in Philippines' Blast
Dec 31, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PHILIPPINES_EXPLOSION?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
COTABATO, Philippines (AP) -- A New Year's Eve bomb blast at a market in the southern Philippines killed at least four people and injured 26 others, police and the military said.
The explosion was triggered either by a 60 mm mortar shell equipped with timer or a grenade place next to a stall selling fireworks in the town of Tacurong in Sultan Kudarat province on southern Mindanao island, chief police inspector Jaime Guiballa said.
It went off shortly before 8 p.m. and most of the casualties were New Year's revelers, he said.
No one has claimed responsibility, but authorities have blamed the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front for a series of bomb attacks and an ambush that killed 30 people and injured dozens in the last two weeks in the southern Philippines. The rebels have denied the charge.
----
Gunman kills 3 U.S. missionaries
By Ahmed Al-Haj
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 31, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021231-4456484.htm
JIBLA, Yemen - A Muslim extremist, cradling his hidden gun like a baby under his jacket, slipped into a Southern Baptist hospital in Yemen yesterday and opened fire, killing three American missionaries and seriously wounding a fourth, Yemeni officials said.
A Yemeni man was arrested, and a government official said security forces were searching for a terrorist cell targeting foreigners and prominent locals that Islamic militants deem too secular.
A Yemeni official said the arrested man, Abed Abdul Razak Kamel, told police that he shot the Americans because they were Christian missionaries and he wanted to "cleanse his religion and get closer to God," Reuters news agency reported.
"The gunman confessed to being a member of the Islamic Jihad group and said he shot the Americans because they were preaching Christianity," the official told Reuters, referring to a local group unrelated to the Palestinian movement also called Islamic Jihad.
Americans have been repeatedly warned by the State Department to be cautious in Yemen, a country where central government authority is weak in tribal areas, guns are plentiful and Muslim militants have found refuge. Yemen, the ancestral homeland of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, has been a key front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
The White House condemned the Jibla attack but said it was too soon to tell whether it was linked to terror groups. U.S. investigators were working closely with the Yemenis "to bring to justice all those who are responsible," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
The gunman entered the complex of Jibla Baptist Hospital, slipping past a security check by hiding his semiautomatic rifle under his jacket to make it resemble a child, officials and the missionary organization said. It's not uncommon in Yemen for children to be carried under loose-fitting clothes.
The attacker entered a room where hospital director William E. Koehn was holding a meeting and opened fire, said the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, based in Richmond, Va.
Mr. Koehn and two others were shot in the head and died instantly, Yemeni officials said. The gunman then went to the hospital's pharmacy and shot and wounded the pharmacist, Donald W. Caswell.
Mr. Koehn, 60, of Arlington, Texas, had planned to retire in October after 28 years of service. The mission board identified the other two killed as purchasing agent Kathleen A. Gariety, 53, of Wauwatosa, Wis., and Dr. Martha C. Myers, 57, of Montgomery, Ala.
Mr. Caswell, 49, of Levelland, Texas, was shot in the abdomen. Hospital officials said he was in critical condition.
The killings are "a crime unacceptable in any religion. This contradicts Islam," said a Jibla woman who gave only her first name, Fatima, and who said she used the hospital. "They cared for us and looked after us. I can't even count the number of children they treated and saved."
After the attack, a Yemeni military jeep with a soldier behind a large machine gun was posted outside the gates of the hospital, a compound of one-story, corrugated tin-roof buildings 125 miles south of San'a, the capital.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh sent a message to President Bush condemning the shootings as "criminal and disgraceful" and pledging to punish the perpetrators, the official news agency, Saba, said. Mr. Saleh's government has cooperated with Washington in the war on terrorism.
In San'a, American Ambassador Edmund J. Hull said U.S. officials did not envision a general evacuation but, "We will assist American citizens in Jibla if they wish to leave."
About 30,000 U.S. citizens, most of Yemeni origin, live in the country, the embassy said. The embassy urged Americans to step up security.
Jack Graham, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, called the three victims "martyrs" who were "killed in the line of duty." Speaking from Plano, Texas, Mr. Graham said that aside from providing humanitarian aid, the missionaries were "there because they're Christians and they have no doubt been sharing their faith."
Jerry Rankin, president of the group's mission board, said his organization would continue to operate in Yemen.
He said there had been threats against his group's missionaries, though not specifically against the hospital. The threats are taken seriously, he said. "It goes with being a Christian missionary now, but also with being an American."
It was the second recent attack on American missionaries in the region. On Nov. 21, an American missionary nurse was fatally shot in the Lebanese city of Sidon. Lebanese authorities have yet to determine who was behind that shooting.
Kamel is reported to have said during interrogation that he plotted the shooting in collaboration with Ali al-Jarallah, who was arrested for killing a senior Yemeni leftist politician on Saturday.
Another security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said authorities were searching for five to eight extremists targeting foreigners and Yemeni politicians or other figures who, like the slain politician, do not adhere to Islamic fundamentalism.
The mission board said its 80-bed Jibla hospital treats more than 40,000 patients a year, and its missionaries also teach English and clinical skills at a nearby nursing school.
Impoverished, factionalized and predominantly Muslim, Yemen has for years been a haven for wanted Islamic extremists. Bin Laden enlisted thousands of Yemenis to fight alongside the mujahideen of Afghanistan in their U.S.-backed war against an occupying Soviet army in the 1980s.
Many have since returned to Yemen.
On Oct. 6, an explosives-laden boat rammed a French oil tanker off Yemen's coast, killing a crew member. U.S. intelligence officials suspect militants linked to al Qaeda in the attack.
Two years earlier, a suicide bomber in a small boat attacked the USS Cole in the southern port of Aden, killing 17 sailors in an attack blamed on al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda also carried out the September 11 attacks against the United States.
----
Five Illegal Arrivals Still Elude F.B.I.
December 31, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/national/31FBI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - F.B.I. officials said today that they had received numerous tips in response to their call for information that would help them find five Middle Eastern men who are believed to have entered the country illegally around Dec. 24.
But law enforcement officials said that they had not made any progress in locating the five men, whose names, photographs and dates of birth were put on the bureau's Web site, www.fbi.gov, on Sunday evening.
Officials repeated that they had no information linking the men to any planned terrorist act, but that they were concerned because of the report that they had illegally entered the country. One official said it was out of an abundance of caution that officials were seeking to find the men, saying that, at the very least, the incident raised concern about border security.
"It is part of a smuggling ring investigation," an F.B.I. spokesman told The Associated Press. "There is no specific or credible threat, but we just wanted to talk with them in the broader context of 9/11 and the New Year."
Law enforcement officials have identified the men as Abid Noraiz Ali, 25; Iftikhar Khozmai Ali, 21; Mustafa Khan Owasi, 33; Adil Pervez, 19; and Akbar Jamal, 28.
----
15 Freighters Believed to Be Linked To Al Qaeda
U.S. Fears Terrorists at Sea; Tracking Ships Is Difficult
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56442-2002Dec30?language=printer
U.S. intelligence officials have identified approximately 15 cargo freighters around the world that they believe are controlled by al Qaeda or could be used by the terrorist network to ferry operatives, bombs, money or commodities over the high seas, government officials said.
American spy agencies track some of the suspicious ships by satellites or surveillance planes and with the help of allied navies or informants in overseas ports. But they have occasionally lost track of the vessels, which are continually given new fictitious names, repainted or re-registered using invented corporate owners, all while plying the oceans.
As they scramble to keep tabs on the largely unregulated and secretive global maritime industry, U.S. officials have no end of worries about how nautical terrorists could attack U.S. or allied ports or vessels, officials said. They cite such scenarios as al Qaeda dispatching an explosives-packed speedboat to blow a hole in the hull of a luxury cruise ship sailing the Caribbean Sea or having terrorists posing as crewmen commandeer a freighter carrying dangerous chemicals and slam it into a harbor.
Concerned about the vulnerabilities of American shipping since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials have started paying more attention than ever to what cargo is loaded onto ships entering U.S. waters, and to who serves on crews, as well as to stowaways and individuals who appear to be surveying U.S. ports.
In addition, U.S. intelligence agencies have set up large databases to track cargo, ships and seamen in a search for "anomalies" that could indicate terrorists on approaching ships, said Frances Fragos-Townsend, chief of Coast Guard intelligence.
"If all you do is wait for ships to come to you, you're not doing your job," she said. "The idea is to push the borders out."
Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's leader, and his aides have owned ships for years, some of which transported such commodities as cement and sesame seeds. But one vessel delivered the explosives that al Qaeda operatives used to bomb two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, U.S. officials said.
Since September 2001, the U.S.-maintained list of al Qaeda mystery ships has varied from a low of a dozen to a high of 50. Some are ships up to 400 feet long that do not need to refuel on extended journeys, and therefore are less likely to draw scrutiny. U.S. officials do not know precisely how each of these "ships of concern" is being used, except that some are generating profits for al Qaeda. Any of them could be used in an attack anywhere in the world, officials fear.
As Western societies have "hardened" their facilities on land against terrorist attack, al Qaeda has escalated its attempts to launch assaults at sea because it believes waterborne targets are easier, terrorism experts said. Starting with the suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000 by al Qaeda men in an inflatable dinghy, a strike that killed 17 sailors, U.S. officials have discerned a steady increase in nautical attacks, some of which were aborted by the planners or uncovered by authorities at the last moment. The latest attack came in October, when the hull of the French oil tanker Limburg was blasted by a speedboat off Yemen, causing a widespread oil spill.
Cruise ships are another worry. The concern is not so much that al Qaeda would hijack hundreds or thousands of passengers while making political demands, as Palestinian terrorists did with airliners in the 1970s, and the Italian Achille Lauro cruise ship off Egypt in 1985. The most feared scenario is that terrorists in speedboats or a cargo vessel would pull up alongside a cruise ship and blow a hole in it.
But cruise industry executives point out that their vessels can outpace most ships in the water, and that they are designed to be so secure and ride so high above the waves that a sea-level blast is unlikely to sink any cruise ship -- and in any case would explode far from passengers. Security at cruise ship terminals is as tight as it is at any airport, industry sources said. 'A Shadowy Underworld'
For decades, U.S. intelligence focused on foreign shipping only sporadically. Soviet vessels were the main target for years, and later U.S. officials traced ships concealing cocaine and Chinese missiles. But after Sept. 11, U.S. officials realized the danger of terrorists attacking from the sea, and rushed to gain expertise about the world's commercial shipping industry.
Now Navy and Coast Guard intelligence have the unenviable job of sorting through the corporate papers of the world's 120,000 merchant ships, many of which hide their ownership under layers of corporate subterfuge -- a centuries-old practice in a trade that thrives on lax regulation and independence from governments. U.S. intelligence officers also must collate the names and mariner's license numbers of tens of thousands of seamen from around the world, a sizable percentage of whom carry fake documents and use pseudonyms.
"This industry is a shadowy underworld," said a senior U.S. government official knowledgeable about the effort. "After 9/11, we suddenly learned how little we understood about commercial shipping. You can't swing a dead cat in the shipping business without hitting somebody with phony papers."
But U.S. government officials said they have made up for lost time in the past 15 months. Working out of its headquarters in Suitland, Navy intelligence has struck data-sharing agreements with dozens of allied navies, and enlisted tipsters among port managers across the globe, as well as shipping agents, crew manning supervisors and seafarers unions.
Within weeks after Sept. 11, the Coast Guard established new rules for medium- and large-size ships. Ninety-six hours before reaching a U.S. port, they now must provide data about their cargo, the names and passport numbers of the crew, the ship's corporate details and recent port calls. This information is fed into computers at a new intelligence facility in West Virginia, and merged with other data, such as satellite photos of ships or ports.
Oddities in the data stoke officials' suspicions -- a fishing vessel reporting it caught fish not found in waters it has visited, for example, or a port visit that is unlikely given its cargo. Ships that cause concern may be boarded at sea, or police may be asked to tail a crewman when he disembarks.
Sometimes the evidence is misleading. In September, Coast Guard officers spent a day searching a 700-container ship in New Jersey because it had taken on cargo at two ports deemed a concern -- in Pakistan and Iran -- and because officers' radiation detectors buzzed when they boarded. But the radiation came from ceramic tiles.
At times the Coast Guard has underreacted. In October, a 50-foot wooden freighter, undetected by the Coast Guard, ran aground near downtown Miami and its 220 undocumented Haitian passengers clambered ashore. Some U.S officials expressed concern that al Qaeda fighters could infiltrate the country via the same route.
"If the Coast Guard can't stop 200 people on a freighter from coming into the port of Miami, how can they stop a terrorist with a dirty bomb?" asked Bruce Stubbs, a former Coast Guard captain and now a security consultant.
Dozens of Navy and allied ships are scouring the Arabian Sea in search of al Qaeda ships and fighters, in one of the largest naval seahunts since World War II. Members have searched hundreds of ships, and issued hundreds more "challenges" by radio asking for information.
In that part of the world, U.S. naval officers suspect they are as likely to find terrorists aboard a 300-foot freighter as they are aboard a dhow, the small sailing vessel common along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. U.S. officials believe traders sailing small craft have been bribed for months to help al Qaeda fighters escape from Pakistan to Yemen and other countries.
U.S. efforts to track al Qaeda's activities at sea received a boost last month with the capture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, an alleged mastermind of al Qaeda's nautical strategy who officials say is now cooperating with U.S. interrogators.
U.S. officials say they are on alert for signs that al Qaeda would use exotic craft to launch underwater attacks -- small submarines and "human torpedoes," underwater motor-propelled sleds that divers use. Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger terrorist movement has been developing such equipment for years, said Tanner Campbell, vice president of the private Maritime Intelligence Group, which consults for shipping interests.
Captured al Qaeda operative Omar al-Faruq has told interrogators that he planned scuba attacks on U.S. warships in Indonesia, Campbell said. Apparently as a result of his confessions, U.S. officials recently visited hundreds of scuba shops nationwide asking about suspicious visitors.
The alarming scenario of al Qaeda operatives infiltrating freighter crews and seizing the cargo ships -- which range in size from 100 feet in length to more than 1,000 -- has led Navy and Coast Guard intelligence analysts to pore over the student lists of hundreds of seaman's academies worldwide. Diplomas from these schools are needed for work on most ships, and trade in fake certificates is brisk in many port cities. 'Flags' of Convenience
Another new preoccupation for U.S. intelligence is the thousands of merchant ships worldwide that are registered in "flag of convenience" nations, some of which ask for almost no information from shipping firms that "flag" their vessels with them. Belize allows companies to register vessels online, for example, and countries such as Comoros, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines -- and even landlocked Bolivia -- barely keep track of their ships, U.S. officials said.
Flag-of-convenience vessels are notorious for catching fire and running aground, and their operators frequently abandon crews in foreign ports without pay. Scores of these ships have been found illegally running guns and drugs.
Navy officials say al Qaeda has used one shipping fleet flagged in the Pacific island of Tonga to transport operatives around the Mediterranean Sea. The firm -- which is called Nova and is incorporated in Delaware and Romania -- has for years engaged in smuggling illegal immigrants, U.S. and Greek officials said. Its ships also frequently change names and countries of registry, officials said.
Last February, eight Pakistani men jumped ship off one of its freighters, the Twillinger, at the Italian port of Trieste after a trip from Cairo. U.S. officials say they determined that the men -- who lied about being crewmen and carried false documents and large sums of money -- had been sent by al Qaeda. With the help of Romanian intelligence, U.S. officials began an investigation of the firm and a search for its vessels, according to accounts by the Romanian newspaper Ziua that European officials confirmed.
In August, the captain of another of Nova's freighters, the recently renamed Sara, radioed to maritime authorities in Italy that 15 Pakistani men whom the ship's owner had forced him to take aboard in Casablanca, Morocco, were menacing his crew. Although the 15 claimed they were crewmen when questioned by U.S. and Italian naval officers, the captain said they knew nothing about seafaring.
U.S. officials say they found tens of thousands of dollars, false documents, maps of Italian cities and evidence tying them to al Qaeda members in Europe, and concluded that they, too, were possibly on a terrorist mission. The 15 were charged in Italy with conspiracy to engage in terrorist acts.
In October, European navies set up a dragnet for another Nova freighter, the oft-renamed Cristi, which Navy sailors eventually located and boarded in Greek waters. Nothing amiss was found on board, U.S. officials said.
Greek merchant marine minister George Anomeritis told reporters then that besides the Cristi, NATO also has been looking for 24 other ships suspected of terrorist ties.
"These companies and strange ships change flags," he said. "With all those peculiar names, they create much confusion."
Staff writer Douglas Farah contributed to this report.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
OPEC May Increase Supplies
Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Washington Post; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56320-2002Dec30?language=printer
A hint from Kuwait's oil minister that OPEC would consider increasing supplies if prices remained at current levels for much longer soothed energy traders and cooled red-hot energy markets around the world. Light, sweet crude for February delivery slumped $1.35 to settle at $31.37 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Wholesale prices for heating oil and gasoline also fell.
In London, Brent crude futures for February delivery fell 50 cents, to $29.66 per barrel, on the International Petroleum Exchange. At the retail level, though, gasoline prices remain on an upward trend as refiners pass along the high cost of crude to motorists. The Energy Department reported that the average retail price of unleaded gasoline rose 4 cents last week, to $1.44 per gallon. The average price at the pump has now gone up 8 cents in the past two weeks.
-------- environment
Michigan and Dow Drop Dioxin Pact
State Backs Away from Plan to Relax Pollution Standards
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A02
Michigan Gov. John Engler's administration has abandoned efforts to significantly ease state standards for toxic dioxin pollution that would likely have allowed Dow Chemical Co. to avoid huge cleanup costs near its Midland, Mich., plant.
The proposed rule change, negotiated by the outgoing Republican governor's Department of Environmental Quality and Dow officials, had drawn fire from Gov.-elect Jennifer M. Granholm (D) and regional officials of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and was the subject of a lawsuit filed earlier this month by a coalition of environmental groups.
The proposed deal -- a consent order -- fell apart last Friday when Dow rejected language demanded by the state attorney general's office.
"While it continues to be my belief that a consent order to address the dioxin contamination in Midland is the appropriate solution, it has become impossible at this late date to prepare a final document that not only complies with the environmental statute, but also reflects the substantive comments received from all parties," said Russell Harding, director of the state's Department of Environmental Quality.
Chris Bzdok, a Traverse City attorney who represented the environmental groups, said that while he would drop the suit, "We're still going to keep a careful eye on the process and the dioxin in Midland."
Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported on the controversy, in which environmental groups charged that Engler was handing Dow a "sweetheart deal" that would essentially relieve the company of a large part of its liability for contamination of a major watershed in the Great Lakes.
Dioxin is a potent toxin that can cause cancer and disrupt the immune and reproductive systems. Experts say that elevated levels of dioxin found in Midland soil likely came from the burning of chlorinated compounds, while the dioxin in the Tittabawassee flood plain likely came from Dow waste ponds that overflowed in a 1986 flood.
The proposed rule change would have increased by more than ninefold the amount of dioxin allowed in Midland's soil. Some environmentalists said that if the rule change had prevailed, it would become the de facto standard for the state -- an assumption that state and Dow officials disputed.
--------
Bush Administration Planning to Extend Cuts of Diesel Emissions
December 31, 2002
New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/national/31ENVI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - In an effort to reduce a dangerous source of air pollution, the Bush administration is devising rules that would sharply cut diesel pollutants from construction vehicles, certain farming and mining equipment and other off-road vehicles.
Environmental groups are hopeful that the standards, which may not take full effect for almost a decade, will continue the administration's stance against health hazards caused by diesel engines.
Those policies, which include strong support of a Clinton administration plan to cut pollutants from trucks, buses and other diesel-powered highway vehicles, have drawn praise even from environmentalists who criticize the Bush administration for its stance on other air-quality issues.
Government officials said the plan would prevent more than 8,000 premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of respiratory illnesses every year. A similar plan already in place to cut pollutants from trucks and buses by 2007 is expected to save 8,300 lives annually.
The rules for off-road vehicles, which are being written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Management and Budget, are expected to be proposed by April and completed within about a year, after a public-comment period. Details of the deliberations were reported today by The Washington Post.
According to officials at the environmental agency, the new rules would probably force refiners to cut the sulfur content of diesel fuel for bulldozers, tractors and other off-road vehicles to 15 parts per million, down from current levels of as much as 3,400 parts.
The rules would also require makers of diesel engines to reduce sharply the amount of particulate, nitrogen oxide and other pollutants produced by the engines they sell. Administration officials said the cuts for most vehicles would eventually come to more than 95 percent - in line, they said, with those the truck and bus plan calls for.
Administration officials, though, are still debating the timing of the new plan and are also likely to allow engine makers to delay emissions cuts on some vehicles if they make reductions in others. Federal officials said that this proposal would not lessen the beneficial impact to the environment, but environmental groups were concerned that a plan for trading emissions could undermine the requirements.
Jeff Holmstead, the E.P.A.'s assistant administrator for air and radiation, said that officials were debating two approaches on the plan's timing. The first would require refiners to reduce the sulfur content to 15 p.p.m. by 2007. The second is a "two step" approach that would call for a reduction to 500 p.p.m. by 2007, then a further reduction to 15 p.p.m. by 2010.
"At this point, we are leaning toward the two-step approach," Mr. Holmstead said.
The timing of rules that require cleaner-burning engines would be tied to the introduction of cleaner fuel, administration officials said, since fuel with high sulfur content can easily foul new pollution-control devices.
While it would be "theoretically possible" to use a trading plan to weaken the new emission standards, Mr. Holmstead said, the E.P.A. administrator, Christie Whitman, "has been very clear that's not what we're going to do with the rule."
In addition to the health benefits, Mr. Holmstead said the new rule would save "tens of billions of dollars" in lower health care costs and reduced employee sick days.
John Walke, director of the clean-air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the administration's plan, based on its track record defending restrictions on diesel pollutants.
But Mr. Walke said he was concerned that the trading plan could weaken the rules already in place, which were first proposed by the Clinton administration, for emissions cuts from diesel trucks and buses by 2007.
Mr. Walke, who called the Bush administration's diesel-pollutants policy "the one bright light among a thousand points of darkness" on air-quality issues, also said he was concerned about what he called the highly unusual involvement of the White House - through the O.M.B. - in making the rule.
"There's still a big question over the direction they are planning to take with this farm and construction-equipment rule," he said.
Allen Schaeffer, the executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, a group representing refiners and makers of diesel engines and pollution control devices, predicted that the industry would be able to meet whatever rules the administration set out.
"This new round of emissions standards is clearly another challenge," he said, "but one I think industry is working on with the agency and is prepared to meet."
But battles remained on some crucial issues, he said. "The most contentious issue deals with the stringency of the standards and the time frame," he said. "The new rules will present challenges for manufacturers and fuel refiners alike."
-------- ACTIVISTS
New Year's Eve in Iraq Sees Peace Marches
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; 4:07 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59775-2002Dec31?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Hundreds of Iraqi children led by an actress marched through Baghdad streets on New Year's Eve chanting anti-war slogans and releasing white pigeons into the air. Some cried, "Down with America, enemy of peace."
Other Iraqis and visiting American and European peace advocates staged New Year's anti-war demonstrations, while the United States and Britain persisted that Saddam Hussein prove he has no weapons of mass destruction or face an attack.
President Bush warned that Saddam "has not heard the message." The president said Tuesday he had not decided whether to attack Iraq, but suggested the economic cost of a war to disarm Saddam was better than risking an attack from him later on.
"Any attack of Saddam Hussein or a surrogate of Saddam Hussein would cripple our economy," Bush said in Texas, responding to a question about reports that his administration was ready to spend between $50 billion to $60 billion to fight the Iraqi leader.
For U.N. inspectors searching for forbidden arms, New Year's Eve was a normal day: They visited seven sites, including a plant manufacturing short-range missiles and a medical research center.
Iraq invited chief inspector Hans Blix to visit in the coming weeks, expressing hope that remaining questions about Iraq's lethal weapons could soon be resolved.
A letter to Blix from Amir al-Saadi, chief Iraqi liaison to the inspectors, said he hoped their meetings could "review the aspects of cooperation between us during the past period and the prospective to enhance such cooperation in the coming months."
Also Tuesday, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri complained to the United Nations about a U.S. air strike last week which Iraq says killed three people and injured 16. The United States announced U.S. and British warplanes hit again Monday, attacking Iraq air defense facilities after an Iraqi fighter jet penetrated the southern no-fly zone
The peace march through Baghdad by an estimated 2,000 children was guided by police and led by a Syrian actress who uses one name, Raghda. She asked the crowd, "What is the new year bringing to Iraqi children? What is Santa Claus bringing them? Bombs?"
Many chants and posters echoed Iraqi government slogans, such as "Bush, Bush listen carefully - we all love Saddam Hussein."
But some youngsters expressed their own fears.
"America wants to strike us to take our oil," 12-year-old Heba Saad said. "I'm afraid, but God willing, there will be no war."
Ahmed Hassan Jassim, 8, was wrapped in an Iraqi flag and carried a banner that read, "No to war, no to sanctions, no to America." He said his aunt gave him the banner.
A delegation of American church officials prayed for peace with Iraqi Christians at the Church of St. Mary in downtown Baghdad Tuesday evening, and activists from the U.S.-based Iraq Peace Team demonstrated outside the U.N. inspectors' headquarters.
Jim Winkler, an official of the United Methodist Church, said the delegation had found "a human face" to Iraq in its talks with people at schools, hospitals, churches and mosques. He said he would take a message back to the American people: "Remember there are ordinary people in Iraq who want peace as much as you and I do."
Winkler told The Associated Press he believed church opposition to a war had kept a conflict from starting already. "I believe in my heart we can keep pushing back the prospective date for the war and let the arms inspectors do their work."
For many Iraqis, New Year's Eve was a reminder of the poverty they face because of 12 years of sanctions imposed after Saddam invaded Kuwait. The sanctions cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify that Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons have been eliminated.
Jinan Abdel Ahad, 40, said she hoped sanctions would end in the new year so "to be able, we and our children, to lead a normal life." She and friends were planning a small party at home. "We can't afford to party out."
The story was different in Baghdad's wealthier district, where waiters at some restaurants said all tables were booked and evening shows included belly dancers, singers and disk jockeys. Revelers here can expect to pay about $11 per person, the average monthly salary of a teacher.
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S.Koreans Ignore North's Nukes at Anti - U.S. Rally
December 31, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-usa-protest.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Thousands of South Koreans chanted songs and slogans by candlelight in the heart of Seoul Tuesday to protest against the U.S. military and mourn two teenage girls killed by an American army vehicle in an accident.
The numbers were far less than the one million protesters organizers had predicted.
An estimated 12,000 braved the cold and shrugged off deepening international concern over North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship to attend the protest. Some criticized U.S. efforts to press Pyongyang to scrap its atomic arms program and others slammed the campaign against Iraq.
Spurning President-elect Roh Moo-hyun's call for restraint after months of anti-U.S. demonstrations, organizers had vowed to gather a million people in the center of Seoul for the largest of more than 50 protests since the girls' deaths in June. But the turnout on a frosty New Year's Eve was much smaller and crowds started dwindling at around 10 p.m. as many protesters headed off for holiday revelry, witnesses said. Dozens of South Korean cities held similar protests, local media said.
Police in Seoul were taking no chances, deploying more than 10,000 helmeted riot police and hundreds of buses to block planned marches on the U.S. embassy. There were some scuffles with police and protesters broke a bus window, but the crowd largely obeyed calls from organizers to remain peaceful.
The protests follow the election two weeks ago of Roh, who tapped anti-U.S. sentiment in his campaign, and takes place as a nuclear weapons row between North Korea and the United States and its allies escalates.
Min Keong-min, joining the rally with his two daughters, said he wasn't sure North Korea really had nuclear arms.
``If they do, I don't think North Korea is going to aim them at South Korea. The North probably built them to protect itself from the United States,'' said the 41-year-old Min.
One of scores of banners carried by the marchers bore a stock line from North Korea: ``U.S. stop threatening nuclear war! Sign a non-aggression treaty with North Korea.''
The youthful protesters, holding candles and singing songs, demanded that two U.S. soldiers involved in the June road accident undergo a new trial and that President Bush apologize again for the accident.
A U.S. military tribunal acquitted the pair of negligent homicide charges last month after their mine-clearing vehicle crushed the two girls during a training exercise.
``Bush, apologize directly!'' said a huge yellow banner next to a stage where pop singers performed amid nationalistic speeches.
Bush has apologized several times over the incident, most recently in a telephone conversation with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung on December 13, when he conveyed his ``deep, personal sadness and regret'' over the deaths.
But the anti-U.S. activists and many South Korean media outlets have dismissed the apologies as insincere.
``Declare the trial invalid and completely revise the SOFA,'' chanted student members of the Committee for the Deceased Girls.
The Status of Forces Agreement, governing the rights and conduct of U.S. forces in Korea, is a major target of the protesters.
The pact currently requires U.S. soldiers charged with crimes while on duty to be tried in U.S. military tribunals. Protesters seek wider South Korean jurisdiction over U.S. servicemen.
``We have not been treated equally by the U.S.,'' said Kim Beong-suk, 24 year-old college student in Seoul.
``This candlelight vigil symbolizes Korea finding its right place in the international community,'' he said.
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Iraqis Focus Of Nuns' Fears
War worries inspire campaign
Newsday, By Bart Jones
STAFF WRITER
December 31, 2002
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-linuns313067401dec31,0,331194.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines
Sister Margaret Galiardi broke the U.S. ban on traveling to Iraq two years ago and saw the suffering faces of the Iraqi people and dozens of nuns from her order who live and work in the land of Saddam Hussein.
Now, as the United States appears poised to launch a war against Iraq, Galiardi and other members of the Amityville Dominican Sisters fear the Iraqi people they met and their fellow nuns - along with thousands of other Iraqis and Americans - will be injured or killed.
They are organizing an anti-war campaign, handing out bumper stickers and buttons that proclaim, "I Have Family in Iraq."
"It's almost impossible that we avoid this war," said Sister Nancy Goult, one of three Dominican sisters from Long Island who made the journey to Iraq in February 2000. "But I have to keep dreaming."
The third, Sister Marjorie McGregor, recalls hugging Iraqi mothers as they stood over their dying babies in hospitals she said were devastated in part by U.S.-led economic sanctions. Now, McGregor fears more suffering will come to blameless and ordinary Iraqis.
"We have to work toward peace," she said.
The Dominicans are members of one of the larger orders of nuns in the United States and on Long Island, with about 8,200 members nationwide including 650 in Queens, Brooklyn and Nassau and Suffolk counties.
It has thousands more overseas, including about 135 in Iraq, where a branch was established in 1873. The vast majority of Dominican sisters in the heavily Muslim nation are natives of Iraq.
In 1999, Galiardi and others started organizing delegations made up mainly of Dominican sisters to visit Iraq to protest the sanctions, which human rights groups blame partly for the deaths of thousands of children. She and the other Long Islanders took a 12-hour ride across the desert from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad and faced $25,000 fines from the U.S. government, although none were punished.
Earlier this year, the Dominican order helped bring to the United States two of their brethren from Iraq, in part, to build bridges between the two nations. When the two attended a national meeting of Dominican sisters in October and spoke of their homeland, the order decided to launch the "I Have Family in Iraq" campaign.
"Really, I am scared," one of the nuns, Sister Luma, who was a biology teacher in Iraq, said yesterday in a telephone interview from Springfield, Ill., where she has moved. "When they bombed, they bombed everything."
The Dominicans on Long Island, whose efforts also are being organized by Sister Margaret Mayce, started receiving their bumper stickers and buttons three weeks ago. They're handing them out to anyone who wants one.
The sisters contend that the Bush administration has failed to convincingly make the case that the United States needs to wage war against Iraq. They assert that while they are not cheerleaders for Hussein, war will result in thousands of Iraqi and American deaths, further destabilize the Persian Gulf and Middle East, provoke more terrorist attacks against the United States and do little to help capture Osama bin Laden.
They believe many Americans agree with them.
"I think a lot of people are very nervous about this war," Galiardi said. "It's not like we're trying to be rebellious teenagers. ... For us the primary law is God's law. And God's law says, 'Thou shall not kill.'"
Added Mayce, "I think everybody agrees something has to be done, but ultimately more harm and more devastation will come from waging war."
The Bush administration argues that Hussein's regime possesses weapons of mass destruction and must be eliminated before he attacks the United States and its allies.
Galiardi said she fears war will simply increase the suffering of the Iraqi people. When the nuns visited the hospitals there, a woman who had given birth was in danger of dying and needed a blood transfusion. The sisters from Long Island offered to be donors.
But doctors said they couldn't: The hospital didn't have the plastic bags needed for a transfusion.
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