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NUCLEAR
Afghanistan: The Nuclear Nightmare Starts
Depleted Uranium Weapons in Afghanistan - HELP
Army Major Charges Pentagon with Gross Negligence
Real cost of pollution kept hidden
Transforming the Army
Jordan tries to keep a very big secret
Iraq Says U.N. Teams Have Found No Weapons
U.N. Seeks Iraq Arms Declaration Answers
Israel: Germs, gas and A-bombs; fingers on all the buttons
'Dear Leader' no madman
S. Korea Once Tried to Build Nuclear Arms
North Korea Defends Decision to Restart Nuclear Program
Bush Plays Down Rift With Allies Over U.S. Stance on North Korea
Physicist blows whistle on US missile defence
Israel sharpens Arrows for Iraq war
Fears on nuclear controls
Embattled Los Alamos Director Resigns
Director Quits Los Alamos Under Fire
Report: Nuclear plant kept open despite safety concerns
Hidden Casualties & Secret Diplomacy
Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
Bush has 'no heart' for Kim
Rumsfeld and Iraq
Nixon's nuclear ploy
Games Nations Play
MILITARY
The New Afghanistan: Year 2
Israel asked to stop arms sales to China
US to join Taiwan wargames, first after 1979 [?]
Boeing Rejects Complaints on Leaks to China
Leaflets Point Iraqis to Anti-Hussein Broadcasts
Iraqi railroad labs
$15 billion asked of U.S.
Turkey backs U.S. on Iraq but wary of hosting troops
US says hot pursuit, Pak says no
U.S. says it reserves right to hunt al-Qaeda in Pakistan
Belly up to the 'Talibar'
Navy vision
US troops violated Geneva convention [in Korea in 1952]
U.S. Deleted Iraqi-run Florida Chemical Plant from UN Weapons List
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Homeland Office Is Told to Answer Queries on Its Role
Languishing Civil Rights Agency Gets New Life Under Bloomberg
U.S. proposes rules to ID all international travelers
OTHER
U.S. Trying to Save Washington Forest by Cutting It Down
Study: Nicotine May Enable Cancer
ACTIVISTS
Venezuela Police Fire Tear Gas at Protest
Demonstrators in Pakistan Protest Against Iraq War
Davos Forum Seeks Accommodation With Peaceful Protesters
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Afghanistan: The Nuclear Nightmare Starts
By Davey Garland
January, 2003
Marin County (California) Coastal Post
http://www.coastalpost.com/03/01/03.htm
When questions were asked in the British parliament a year ago about whether depleted uranium (DU) weapons had been used in the military strikes on Afghanistan, "It is not being used at present" was defense minister Geoff Hoon's reply.
A few days earlier, Hoon had been similarly vague on the issue, assuring us that: "No British forces currently engaged in operations around Afghanistan are armed with depleted uranium ammunition. However, we do not rule out the use of depleted uranium ammunition in Afghanistan, should its penetrative capability be judged necessary in the future."
The defense minister played his cards close to his chest, no doubt having been informed that DU or other uranium weapons were being used by the United States (and no doubt British) forces to penetrate the caverns of Tora Bora and other targets (including civilian ones), especially in the vicinity of Kabul.
The refusal of the Ministry of Defense to fully admit that dangerous uranium weapons may have been used in Afghanistan and the conflicts in the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosova), when evidence shows the contrary, illustrates just how sensitive the government is to the possibility that its use, or its collusion in the use, of weapons of mass destruction may be discovered.
This is not just because thousands of innocent civilians will suffer due to radiological (and heavy metal) poisoning, but also because the government is prepared to send British troops and aid workers, possibly for a long occupation of the war zones, ill-equipped and vulnerable to contamination.
When the Afghan crisis began, many of us believed that a great amount of DU/dirty uranium would be used to achieve the US-British campaign objectives, both to penetrate the opposition's hideouts in rocky terrain and to test new weapons systems (dirty uranium or dirty DU contains radioactive contaminants, such as plutonium isotopes, derived from spent fuel from power reactors). The amount used in Afghanistan might have exceeded the several hundred ton's of DU/dirty uranium used in the 1990-91 Gulf War and the Balkans conflicts.
Startling report
A startling new report based on research in Afghanistan indicates that our worst fears have been realized. The study, produced by the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC), points to the likelihood of large numbers of the population being exposed to uranium dust and debris.
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine and radiology and a former science adviser to the US military, who set-up the independent UMRC, has been testing US, British, and Canadian troops and civilians for DU and uranium poisoning over the past few years. His findings confirm significant amounts in the subjects' urine as much as nine years after exposure.
Two scientific study teams were sent to Afghanistan in the aftermath of the conflict in 2001-02. The first arrived in June 2002, concentrating on the Jalalabad region. The second arrived four months later, broadening the study to include the capital Kabul, which has a population of nearly 3.5 million people. The city itself contains the highest recorded number of fixed targets during Operation Enduring Freedom. For the study's purposes, the vicinity of three major bomb sites were examined.
It was predicted that signatures of depleted or enriched uranium would be found in the urine and soil samples taken during the research. The team was unprepared for the shock of its findings, which indicated in both Jalalabad and Kabul, DU was possibly causing the high levels of illness but also high concentrations of non-depleted uranium. Tests taken from a number of Jalalabad subjects showed concentrations 400% to 2000% above that for normal populations, amounts which have not been recorded in civilian studies before.
Those in Kabul who were directly exposed to US-British precision bombing showed extreme signs of contamination, consistent with uranium exposure and with some types of chemical or biological weaponry. These included pains in joints, back/kidney pain, muscle weakness, memory problems and confusion and disorientation. Many of these symptoms are found in Gulf War and Balkans veterans and civilians. Those exposed to the bombing report symptoms of flu-type illnesses, bleeding, runny noses and blood-stained mucous.
The study team itself complained of similar symptoms during their stay. Most of these symptoms last for days or months. The team also conducted a preliminary sample examination of new-born infants, discovering that at least 25% may be suffering from congenital and post-natal health problems that could be associated with uranium contamination. These include undeveloped muscles, large head in comparison to body size, skin rashes and infant lethargy. Considering that the children had access to sufficient levels of nutrition, the symptoms could not be due to malnourishment.
Durakovic and his team have searched for possible alternative causes, such as geological or industrial sources, or the likelihood of Al Qaeda having uranium reserves. But the uranium found is not consistent with the "dirty bomb" scenario proposed by the US (in which stores of radioactive materials might explain the findings), nor is it connected to DU, or an enriched uranium-type dust that has been found in Iraq and Kosova.
The only conclusion is that the allied forces are now possibly using milled uranium ore in their warheads to maximize the effectiveness and strength of their weapons, as well as to mask the uranium, hoping that it may be discounted as part of any local natural deposits.
However, marked differences between natural uranium and the uranium used in the metal fragments found in Afghanistan was uncovered with the use of an electron microscope, which revealed the presence of small ceramic particles produced by the high temperatures created on impact. This method of disguising uranium would benefit governments that are under pressure! from the growing anti-DU lobby.
Repeated warnings of this possible contamination was sent to both the British and Afghan governments in April by scientific researcher Dai Williams in her report, "Mystery Metal in Afghanistan". Warning were also sent to the UN Environment Program, the World Health Organization and Oxfam. All have ignored them and failed to conduct their own investigations.
Iraq
Present information and studies stressing the growing mortality rates amongst young children, especially the new born, indicate that malnutrition and other social causes cannot be the only attributable source of this phenomenon. This is confirmed by health specialists, international observers and a few brave officials from local hospitals who are convinced that this rise in illnesses and malformation are due to uranium/DU weapons.
In October, Durakovic spoke on al Jazeera television, claiming that the amount of DU/uranium used in Afghanistan far exceeded that of past conflicts. He also warned that if the scale of the attacks in Afghanistan was matched or exceeded in a forthcoming war in Iraq, then the consequences would be of appalling proportions for both civilians and military forces alike.
This scenario has substance, if the $393 billion defense authorization bill that Congress approved recently is taken into account. More than $15 million was assigned to modifying bunker busters bombs to nuclear capable, quite apart from uranium being added to conventional and bunker buster systems. Money was also invested in other weapons of mass destruction, including thermobaric and electromagnetic weapons.
The anti-war movement must oppose radiological and other weapons, as well as research and access to the source materials. Many of us have seen the heart-wrenching pictures of deformity and death in Iraq, and know of the growing cancer wards in Bosnia and Kosova, not to mention the 80,000 American, 15,000 Canadian and thousands of British, Australian, French and other troops! who are suffering a painful existence from Gulf War Syndrome - plus the growing number suffering from a Balkans equivalent.
Davey Garland is a coordinator of the British-based Pandora DU Research Project. Source; Green Left Weekly, Issue of December 2002.
----
Depleted Uranium Weapons in Afghanistan - HELP
From: "info@UMRC.net" <info@UMRC.net>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003
Dear Friend,
Uranium Medical and Research Centre (UMRC - http://www.umrc.net) and collaborating scientists are pleased and proud to have provided the original scientific and medical evidence in 1999 of the inhalational effects of Depleted Uranium (DU) used in the Gulf War. The Allied veterans' samples analyzed for Uranium isotopes showed that DU was still retained in individuals who were exposed almost a decade earlier.
This research has been broadly accepted by the international scientific and medical communities and provides key support for the case that DU use contravenes the legally accepted conventions and laws governing weapons of war and warfare.
The world faces a similar challenge today. UMRC's preliminary testing of samples taken from Afghanistan shows very high levels of Uranium in the tissue of individuals living in targeted areas. UMRC has gathered forty (40) additional soil, water and tissue samples - enough to enable conclusive findings.
UMRC's faces its own challenge to find independent funding to support the analysis of these additional samples. Please take a moment to review the attached letter which provides fuller details. If you or someone you know would like to help the effort financially or with other types of support, please respond as soon as possible.
One more request, please forward this email to appropriate individuals in your network of friends or associates who may be interested in supporting this very important work. It may be that you and the individuals you know would fund the analysis of one sample.
UMRC is sending this communication to individuals and organizations who are concerned about the effects of low-level radiation and depleted uranium, and the spread of radioactive waste.
UMRC is a not-for-profit research organization providing independent, objective and expert scientific and medical research into the effects of uranium and other isotopes on the environment and humans.
Project: Afghanistan - http://www.umrc.net/projectAfghanistan.asp
Quotes from Field Team's Trip Report
"The UMRC field team was shocked by the breadth of public health impacts coincident with the bombing. Without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination by Uranium."
"They (the bombs) combined significant explosive force with hard-target penetration features. These weapons punched through three or more layers composed of steel reinforced roofs and two or more concrete walls without detonating. They then passed through the concrete floor/foundation slabs, to bury 3 to 4 meters in the earth before exploding."
"People rush to look for survivors and pull out the bodies. Mr. Sahib Daad digs through the remains of their house to rescue his two young sons. They died in his arms as the sun rose over the mountains. Entangled in the remains of the neighbour's house are eight bodies - mother, grandmother and six little girls."
----
Army Major Charges Pentagon with Gross Negligence in Care of Gulf War Veterans Exposed to Toxic Chemicals and Radiation
Between The Lines
Excerpt of talk delivered by Army Major Doug Rokke in New Haven, Conn.
produced by Melinda Tuhus
January 3, 2003
http://66.175.55.251/btl011003.html
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/01/1556665.php
Major Doug Rokke is a 30-year Army combat veteran and a health physicist who was in charge of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project in the mid-1990s after the Gulf War. On a recent speaking tour, Rokke quoted from several memos and reports that he says revealed a lack of commitment on the part of the U.S. military to clean up depleted uranium that became airborne from targets, such as tanks destroyed by DU ammunition, after the war ended. He also asserts that the Pentagon lacks a commitment to test and treat U.S. Gulf War veterans who were exposed to depleted uranium, chemical weapons, oil well fires and who experienced negative reactions to anthrax vaccine.
Rokke believes these exposures contributed to, if not caused, illness among hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans and the deaths of more than 10,000.
Rokke recently spoke at a Connecticut Peace Coalition event in New Haven, Conn., where he detailed his allegations of U.S. military irresponsibility. We present an excerpt of this talk recorded and produced by Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus Nov. 10.
For more information, contact the Gulf War Veterans Resource Center at 1-(800) 882-1316 Ext. 162 or visit the Center's Web site at www.ngwrc.org
----
Real cost of pollution kept hidden
By Curt Andersen
Friday, January 3, 2003
Green Bay (Wisconsin) News-Chronicle
http://www.greenbaynewschron.com/page.html?article=117720
The price we pay for some things is occasionally much less than their actual cost. There are numerous examples of such "external costs" or "externalities."
The example most familiar to Fox River Valley residents is the cost of papermaking. The price of paper is lower because instead of treating pollution, or not polluting in the first place, mills pass pollution costs to the consumer. This immoral shortcut has led to the pollution of the Fox River and the ruination of the fishing and tourism industries in Northeast Wisconsin.
Operating a mine in Crandon would have external costs. The ore is contained in sulfurous rock. Sulfuric acid is created when sulfurous rock comes in contact with oxygen and water. The mining companies have not proposed building a wastewater treatment plant, so the external cost of mining would include the destruction of the fish habitat in the Wolf and Fox rivers, which would lead to the thumping of the tourism industry and a reduction in property values. Those external costs would be borne by the public, not by the mining company. The use of cyanide in the mining operation would give us a cocktail of trouble for local citizens.
Burning coal to generate electric power leads to methyl mercury contamination. The molecules of methyl mercury travel on the wind and fall into our lakes, where they are taken up by microscopic plants and animals, which are eaten by various forms of marine life, then by fish, which are then eaten by people. Mercury accumulates in the body and can lead to learning disabilities in the young, paralysis, and brain and nerve damage.
The cost is not borne by the power company. It is borne by the families of children who have difficulty in school, by insurance companies who have to cover the cost of diagnosis and treatment, and by the victims, who lose time at work.
The costs of storing spent nuclear fuel and keeping it out of the hands of terrorists for 10,000 years will be externalized and exceedingly high. The cost will be borne by the public through tax dollars. It will not show up on our electric bills where it should be.
A July-August 2000 The Other Side article by the late Jesuit peace activist Phillip Berrigan spoke of yet another external cost from radioactive materials - the use of "depleted uranium" (U-238) for ammunition.
Not much less radioactive than raw uranium, depleted uranium is being used to coat shells used to destroy tanks. The dense material will easily penetrate tanks and armored vehicles. As those shells hit, they shatter into zillions of particles, which can be carried on the wind for up to 25 miles and contaminate the soil for the next 4.2 billion years. These particles were ingested and/or inhaled by many Gulf War troops who came home to suffer with symptoms of radiation poisoning. More than 400 Gulf War veterans have died from cancer, respiratory, kidney or liver failure. More than 110,000 of those veterans suffer from chronic illnesses. Who knows how many babies of veterans were born with deformities because of radiation?
None of those veterans was warned about the deadly spent uranium shells.
How different our lives would be if we had to consider real costs. Maybe it's time we figure that out.
Andersen is a lifelong resident of the Green Bay area and a Navy veteran. He owns a small business and is an adjunct instructor at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. He is vice president of Clean Water Action Council. His column runs Wednesdays. Write to him via e-mail at curtandersen@milwpc.com.
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Transforming the Army
APG: Harford installation tests new equipment, from 3-D computers to trackless tanks, for the next generation of soldiers.
By Lane Harvey Brown,
Baltimore Sun Staff Originally published
January 3, 2003
http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-md.striker03jan03,0,7236606.story?coll=bal-local-headlines
"15th-most powerful computer in the world to develop complex research methods for such diverse uses as weather forecasting on the battlefield, rating armor effectiveness against depleted-uranium bullets and protecting chemical weapons stored in bunkers."
The hill in the center of Aberdeen Proving Ground's Munson Test Area offers a bird's-eye view of an army in transformation:
In the distance, an older M1 tank shares the test track with a new Stryker trackless armored vehicle, rattling over washboard-rough stretches and maneuvering through 9 miles of twisting roads.
Since the Army announced its plan about three years ago to become lighter, faster and more lethal, APG's scientists, engineers and mathematicians, along with mechanics, technicians and other workers, have been working on designs to revamp the way the military fights and wins wars. The Stryker is one manifestation of that effort.
The proving ground, which opened in Harford County in 1917 as a chemical warfare research center, is using cutting-edge technology, from computers that can perform 7.1 trillion math operations per second to a simulator that puts soldiers on a multidirectional treadmill in front of 3-D screens to measure their ability to perform tasks in the field.
The Army's transformation comes in three stages: improving the older, heavier equipment, or "legacy force"; deploying a lighter "interim force" that can move more quickly into the field; and developing a high-tech "objective force" that would be deployed a little more than a decade from now.
Because the program covers so many areas throughout the Army, no total cost estimates are available, military spokesmen say. But for the 2003 fiscal year alone, procurement, research and development, testing and evaluation will run a little over $20 billion.
"Aberdeen and the Developmental Test Command are in the middle of this," said Brian M. Simmons, technical director of the test command. He said they are working two shifts and 20 hours a day lately, especially on Stryker vehicle testing, which is supposed to last until September.
"We are working as fast as we can to get this vehicle ready," Simmons said.
One can spend an entire day at Aberdeen and only scratch the surface of what is in the works.
The Army's developmental testing and chemical, nuclear and biological defense commands are here, as well as about 60 other groups working not only on the transformation of military technology but on the needs of a force faced with a possible war in Iraq and homeland defense.
A few examples:
# An advanced welding shop on the post helped develop containers that the Federal Aviation Administration can use to detonate suspicious luggage.
# Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center researchers have devised environmentally friendly chemical and biological decontaminants, and have helped civilian first-responders develop standards for protective masks and filters.
# And the U.S. Army Edgewood Research Development and Engineering Center's computer-aided engineering team recently designed and produced - in just 28 days - an easy-to-move chemical-nuclear-biological air monitoring trailer for commercial use.
For years, agencies on the post didn't know what other tenants were doing. But all that changed in the 1990s, when cuts in the military compelled agencies to forge partnerships that could help them sell their research talents to private corporations.
Today, these partnerships are vital to amass the kind of research power needed to meet the Army's vision of a technologically superior fighting force.
"You just can't do it independently anymore," said Charles J. Nietubicz, director of the Army Research Laboratory's Major Shared Resource Center.
Nietubicz said the center is using the 15th-most powerful computer in the world to develop complex research methods for such diverse uses as weather forecasting on the battlefield, rating armor effectiveness against depleted-uranium bullets and protecting chemical weapons stored in bunkers.
Engineers are also nearing completion of a three-dimensional computer display with screens 40 feet wide and 8 feet tall that will close around researchers as they stand on another screen.
On a gray December morning atop the hill at the 150-acre Munson Test Area, a Stryker medical evacuation vehicle is parked halfway up a 60-degree incline.
Testers are examining the brakes and seals for leaks and failure. They are about 10 percent of the way through the 30,000-mile tests of the Strykers, which are the first armored vehicles that run on rubber wheels instead of circular tracks.
The vehicles are critical to the interim force Stryker Brigade Combat Teams that the Army is assembling and training to deploy in 96 hours anywhere around the world.
They are lighter and faster than tanks: Stryker's top speed is about 70 mph, compared with a tank's 40 mph. Strykers use the same 8-wheel-drive chassis for a variety of bodies, from troop transporters to missile launchers to mobile medical facilities.
"We're very focused on always watching the bottom line for the customer - better, faster, cheaper - because Department of Defense customers have less and less money," said Gary Schultz, a mechanical engineer who is developing a $40 million heavy-vehicle roadway simulator at the proving ground.
----
Jordan tries to keep a very big secret
"[C]ancer rates in Al-Azraq have risen since the Gulf War, because of depleted uranium that has travelled across the border"
By Sarah Smiles
January 4 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/03/1041566229790.html
Saving face ... King Abdullah II. http://www.smh.com.au/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1041566231624_2003/01/03/04wld_jordan.jpg
On the only highway connecting Iraq to Jordan, oil rigs thunder through the desert, ferrying cheap oil from Baghdad to Amman.
Jordanian exports flow back, and relations seem normal. Iraq, which supplies all of Jordan's oil at a cut price, is Jordan's largest trading partner.
Only the presence of United States troops in the vast Jordanian desert shatters this mirage.
"There have been various troop movements in Jordan recently," says Yahya Sadowski, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, and former fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank.
"Jordan will be a key staging area for US troops, particularly special forces that will be inserted into Iraq's western desert in the early phases of the war."
Jordan's King Abdullah II has gone to great lengths to save face with Iraq, denying a US presence in Jordan and publicly refusing the US access to military bases. Jordanians living in the dusty truck-stop towns alongside the highway to Baghdad reflect their king's predicament - most locals refuse to discuss the military build-up around their towns.
"We're not allowed to admit the Americans are here. It will get us into big trouble. It's a secret to Iraq, so you can't talk about it," says Khalid, 30, from the town of Al-Azraq, 250 kilometres from the Iraqi border, and home to Muafaq al-Salti airbase.
The spectre of a new war on their neighbour nonetheless haunts locals living along the highway, who depend on it for trade with Iraq.
"Iraq is our money, our lives. If the border closes, life will be hard," says Watheq, 26, from Al-Azraq, who works in a salt factory that exports chiefly to Baghdad.
"We are afraid. We are so close to the border, anything could happen here," says Watheq, who fears chemical weapons will be unleashed again in this war.
He says cancer rates in Al-Azraq have risen since the Gulf War, because of depleted uranium that has travelled across the border.
The biggest fear for Anwar, 28, from Ruwayshiad, less than 100 kilometres from the border, is another influx of Iraqi refugees into Jordan, like that of the Gulf War.
"The border was terrible. How can I describe it? There was disease, no food; it was shameful. There were thousands of people here with their goats and sheep."
As one of the key US regional allies, Jordan has been forced into an uncomfortable position and stands to lose millions of dollars in trade with Iraq, absorbing another potentially destabilising wave of refugees.
"The Jordanian Government is horrified about the likely fallout of an invasion of Iraq and has told the US so publicly," Professor Sadowski says.
"Privately the US has been trying to assure King Abdullah that they will make sure he is protected, including compensation for the lack of oil and trade with Baghdad."
Professor Sadowski says Jordan has also asked the US to make Israel promise not to expel or "transfer" the West Bank Palestinians into Jordan during a possible war. The Government is worried the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, will use a US attack to deport a majority of the 1.8 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, making Jordan their substitute homeland.
-------- inspections
INSPECTIONS
Iraq Says U.N. Teams Have Found No Weapons
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/international/middleeast/03INSP.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 2 - The Iraqi government said today that United Nations weapons inspectors had thus far failed, after five weeks of visits to some 230 sites, to uncover any weapons of mass destruction or evidence of other prohibited programs.
"The inspectors did not find any prohibited activities nor any prohibited items in those 230 sites visited up until now," Lt. Gen. Hussam Muhammad Amin, the chief Iraqi liaison to the inspectors, told a weekly news conference.
The general said that his teams of scientists and engineers who accompanied the inspectors had a pretty good sense of what was examined during inspection visits and that they had reported nothing unusual.
"They can of course notice anything which is abnormal which exists at any of the sites visited daily," he said, noting that his liaison officers also attend all the meetings and hence can evaluate the inspectors' activity.
"All those activities proved that the Iraqi declarations are credible and the American allegations and claims are baseless," General Amin said.
He also said that Hans Blix, the chief inspector for biological and chemical weapons, was due to visit Baghdad during the third week of January, just before the Jan. 27 formal deadline for him to report to the Security Council on the findings of his teams thus far.
Up to this point, the United Nations has not disclosed any information about what its inspectors have found.
In an appearance at the Security Council on Dec. 19 to discuss the Iraqi declaration, Mr. Blix suggested that Baghdad was respecting the letter but not the spirit of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which resumed the inspections. He suggested that Iraq still had not provided enough evidence on the outcome of its attempts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Iraq has said repeatedly that all the information about its programs was included in the 12,000-page report handed over to the Security Council on Dec. 8 and that it has no new information to offer.
In his remarks, General Amin echoed comments by Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, who complained earlier in the day about troop buildups in the region, saying that the United States and Britain were forging ahead toward war despite the presence of the inspectors in Iraq.
"The American administration is trying to create some pretexts to attack Iraq, to exercise their aggression against Iraq," he said.
--------
U.N. Seeks Iraq Arms Declaration Answers
January 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Iraq.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Iraq is cooperating with weapons inspections on the ground but needs to answer questions about its recent arms declaration, the chief U.N. weapons inspector said Friday.
Hans Blix, who heads the U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission, charged with investigating Iraq's biological, chemical and missile programs, wouldn't confirm Iraqi claims that his inspectors hadn't found anything so far.
``We are spreading over the country and seeing more sites. There are also samples being taken and analyzed,'' he said.
Blix is to brief the council in fuller detail next Thursday, travel to Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi officials around Jan. 18 and then submit his first official report to the Security Council on Jan. 27.
In the meantime, Blix's office is working out details for conducting interviews with Iraqi scientists. The United States has been pressing hard for inspectors to begin questioning Iraqis who may have inside knowledge of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.
``We are now examining a lot of names here. There will be interviews and we are deciding the modalities, the modes and the place,'' Blix said.
Blix's commission hasn't conducted any formal interviews since inspections resumed five weeks ago after a four-year break. The International Atomic Energy Agency has conducted two interviews so far, both while Iraqi government officials were present, U.N. officials said.
On Thursday, President Bush said he was ``hopeful we won't have to go to war,'' but was skeptical about Saddam's willingness to voluntarily rid his country of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
One reason Bush gave for his doubts were reports of U.N. weapons inspectors' interviews with Iraqi scientists with ``minders in the room.''
Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA chief whose agency is investigating Iraq's nuclear programs, will travel together to Baghdad in the third week of January to meet with their Iraqi counterparts.
On Friday, Blix said the Iraqis were cooperating with inspectors on the ground. But there are ``questions that have arisen as a result of (Iraq's) long declaration ... and we'd like to follow up some of those,'' he said.
Blix's inspectors are charged with investigating Iraq's biological, chemical and missile programs.
Blix told the Security Council last month that Iraq's declaration didn't include a list of nutrients Baghdad acquired for producing biological warfare agents, including anthrax.
He also said Iraq's reporting of its destruction of anthrax supplies from 1988 to 1991 ``may not be accurate.'' Iraq declared earlier that it produced 2,210 gallons of anthrax, but inspectors have estimated it could have been as much as 6,240 gallons. Baghdad hasn't accounted for the destruction of everything that was produced, he said.
Iraq also didn't provide sufficient information about its production of missile engines, 50 conventional warheads it claims were destroyed but haven't been recovered, 550 mustard gas shells declared lost after the 1991 Gulf War, production of the deadly VX nerve agent, and its destruction of biological warfare agents, he told the council on Dec. 19.
On Friday, three teams of inspectors fanned out across Iraq in search of illicit weapons. Missile inspectors visited a plant outside Baghdad and tagged equipment Iraq had manufactured in the past four years. A second team visited a former munitions depot, while a chemical team inspected a chemicals plant east of the Iraqi capital, inspectors said.
-------- israel
Israel: Germs, gas and A-bombs; fingers on all the buttons
The world's best-known and most efficient 'secret' manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction is not Iraq, not even North Korea, but Israel. Neil Sammonds looks at a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare programme that even the Israeli Knesset cannot get access to, let alone the United Nations.
3 January 2003
Index Online
http://www.indexonline.org/news/20030301_103_sammonds.shtml
In September 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear site, revealed to the Sunday Times that the nuclear military programme based there had produced 'over 200' nuclear warheads.
Days later he was tricked into flying to Rome where he was abducted by Mossad agents and secretly transported to Israel. In November 1986, he was tried in camera and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment, 14 of which were spent in solitary confinement.
In 1999, in response to a petition from Yediot Ahronot newspaper, the government released about 40 per cent of the trial documents.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that Israel has the world's fifth largest stockpile of nuclear warheads (more than Britain, which it believes has 185).
In February 2000, Knesset member Issam Mahoul said Israel had '200 to 300' nuclear weapons; in August of that year, the Federation of American Scientists said that Israel could have produced 'at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200'; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates 200.
Other sources, including Jane's Intelligence Review, estimate between 400 and 500 thermonuclear and nuclear weapons.
What Dimona is to Israel's nuclear programme, the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) at Nes Ziona is to its chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme. The high-security facility is absent from aerial survey photographs and maps, on which it has been replaced by orange groves.
Except for token visits to Dimona by a Norwegian team in 1961 and a US team in 1969, there has been no international scrutiny. Even the Knesset is denied access.
However, the 1993 report by the Office of Technology Assessment for the US Congress states that Israel has 'undeclared offensive chemical warfare capabilities' and is 'generally reported as having an undeclared offensive biological warfare programme'.
Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies states that Israel has conducted extensive research into gas warfare and is ready to produce biological weapons.
According to an exhaustive study by Karel Knip, a Dutch journalist, the IIBR's work has included the synthesis of nerve gases such as tabun, sarin and VX.
The October 1992 crash an of El Al cargo plane in Amsterdam that caused at least 47 deaths and caused hundreds of immediate and subsequent mysterious illnesses led to the disclosure in 1998 that flight LY1862 was carrying chemicals including 50 gallons of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - enough to produce 594 pounds of sarin. The DMMP was supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and was destined for the IIBR.
Avner Cohen has catalogued reported uses of biological weapons by Jewish forces during the 1948 war in Palestine. The Israeli historian Uri Milstein alleged that 'in many conquered Arab villages, the water supply was poisoned to prevent the inhabitants from coming back.' Milstein states that one of the largest of such covert operations caused the typhoid outbreak in Acre in May 1948.
The Palestinian Arab Higher Committee reported in July 1948 that there was some evidence that Jewish forces were responsible for a cholera outbreak in Egypt in November 1947 and in Syrian villages near the Palestinian-Syrian border in February 1948.
In May 1948, the Egyptian ministry of defence stated that four 'zionists' had been captured while trying to contaminate artesian wells in Gaza with 'a liquid which was discovered to contain germs of dysentery and typhoid'.
In 1954, it was widely reported that defence minister Pinchas Lavon had proposed using BW for special operations. Cohen says: 'Israel has presumably employed biological or toxin weapons for special operations.'
In 1955, Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered the weaponisation and stockpiling of chemical weapons in case of a war with Egypt. Former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky claims that lethal tests have been performed on Arab prisoners at the IIBR.
There are allegations that Israel has used CBW on numerous occasions:
Chemical defoliants used by the army against Palestinian lands, including Ain el-Beida in 1968, Araqba in 1972 and Mejdel Beni Fadil in 1978; Armed nuclear missiles in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars; Chemical weapons in the 1982 war on Lebanon, including hydrogen cyanide, nerve gas and phosphorus shells; In the 1980s lethal gases against Palestinian civilians and Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli Jewish prisoners.
Discussing delivery systems, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists states that Israel's F-16 squadrons based at Nevatim and Ramon are the most likely carriers of nuclear warheads and that a small group of pilots has been trained for nuclear strikes.
According to the Sunday Times, F-16s crews are also 'trained to fit an active chemical or biological weapon within minutes of receiving the command to attack'. Israel's F-4s, F-15s and Jaguars are also nuclear-capable.
Israel's Jericho I (with a range of 660km) and Jericho II (1,500km) missiles are nuclear-capable. The Shavit satellite launch vehicle is convertible into an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 7,800km.
Israel also has three Dolphin-class submarines, the Dolphin, the Leviathan and the Tekuma, which are reportedly modified to carry nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
It is widely believed to possess a tactical nuclear capability, including small nuclear landmines, and strategic nuclear warheads that it can fire from cannons.
The UN Security Council regularly calls on Israel 'urgently to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.'
Israel has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, but is one of only four countries in the world - with Cuba, India and Pakistan - not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty .
This article first appeared in issue 1/03 of Index on Censorship: Inside the Axis of Evil.
-------- korea
'Dear Leader' no madman
By DAVID WALL
Special to The Japan Times
Friday, January 3, 2003
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20030103a1.htm
CAMBRIDGE, England -- When I was in Beijing the week before Christmas, the topic of North Korea came up several times in conversations with friends and colleagues. Several of them referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a madman. Kim's state of mind is quite an important question at a time when North Korea is trying to gain, or add to, a nuclear weapons capability.
But I don't think Kim is mad -- quite the contrary. There is, of course, a twinge of madness about the "juche" political philosophy of self-reliance about which "Dear Leader" Kim writes so much (around 900 books and articles at last count). This is, however, not much different from the religious flummery that many, including U.S. leaders, surround themselves with.
If we examine Kim's domestic and foreign policy over the last couple of years, the case for impeachment on grounds of madness doesn't hold up well.
Hardly a month goes by without some new reform of domestic policy that introduces some liberalization of the Stalinist economic structure that Kim inherited from his father, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung. Of the 1,000 or so officials who have been sent abroad for training in recent years, almost all were sent to study Western economics.
It is not easy to turn a Stalinist economic system around -- just ask the Chinese or Vietnamese. The rate of reform in North Korea is much faster than it was in those two countries in the early years of their reform programs.
Sure, the North Koreans have made mistakes, especially in farm policy, but who is going to throw the first stone on that one? They need help, not humiliation. They have asked for technical assistance on all aspects of economic policy. They are also asking for thousands of scholarships to send more people to the West for training. Thus domestic economic-reform policy shows no signs of madness.
What about foreign policy? Well, as Kim Jong Il himself has said, the whole world is focusing on him and the problems that his country is facing, so he must be getting something right.
U.S. President George W. Bush managed to get the leaders of Russia, China, Japan and South Korea to stand up with him in Mexico and say that it would be a good thing if the Korean Peninsula were to be a nuclear-free zone. Kim did better than that. In the past week, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi have all indicated that they disagree strongly with using U.S. strategy to achieve that objective.
Over the past two years, Kim Jong Il has visited Beijing (twice) and Moscow. The leaders of Russia, South Korea and Japan have visited him in Pyongyang. Those leaders are now joining him in calling for negotiations -- not threats -- as the best way forward. They have all, in one way or another, criticized the U.S. strategy of "tailored containment."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Kim, strange bedfellows indeed, have done more than anyone else over the past few weeks to turn the United States back to a multilateralist foreign policy. They have forced the U.S. to confront the fact that it cannot run around the world imposing its will. They are now even talking about the need to bring the United Nations in on the Korean issue.
Where does the North Korean position come from? Why not start with the fact that most of North Korea's leaders grew up under Japanese colonial rule -- when control was exercised in its most brutal, inhuman form. Then go on to the fact that they were in their most formative years when the U.S. carpet-bombed their country, annihilating Pyongyang in the process, and, we are told, using biological and chemical weapons.
Think about how the U.S. role in the Cold War, in Vietnam and in Cambodia was perceived in Pyongyang as these leaders came to power. Think about the way the U.S. treats Cuba. Think about Grenada, Chile under elected President Salvador Allende, and Nicaragua.
More recently, think about how the U.S. threw the Palestinians to the wolves of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the leader of a state that has more violations of U.N. articles to its name than any other country.
Think about all of this and then decide what you would do if you were in charge of North Korean foreign policy. Can you still think of Kim as mad?
Would you give up your only bargaining chip before sitting down to negotiate with Bush and his nonelected cronies? What you would do is try to drive a big wedge between the U.S. and the states with more at stake, your neighbors. You would demonstrate the futility and unreasonableness of the U.S. position, leading to dissent within the U.S. itself. You would allow the world to see how the rich and powerful withdraw humanitarian assistance from innocent people without food or heat.
You would also do all you can to make the only bargaining chip you have seem bigger and more threatening than it is. Would that make you mad? No? Kim isn't either, and he has done all of this.
You might not like him or his policies, but that does not mark him as much different from many other political leaders, including Bush. Bush recently welcomed as a house guest a dictator who has massacred his own people and maintains nuclear weapons targeted at allies of the U.S. and the U.S. itself; who brutally suppresses dissent; and whose record on human rights is no better than Kim's: President Jiang of China.
What lesson would you draw from that if you were Kim?
David Wall teaches at the Center of International Studies of the University of Cambridge and is chairman of the China Discussion Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
----
S. Korea Once Tried to Build Nuclear Arms
Friday January 3, 2003
AP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2290664,00.html
SEOUL, South Korea - A Korean dictator launches a clandestine campaign to build nuclear weapons, and the United States applies pressure in an effort to shut it down.
That's the scenario currently unfolding with North Korea, but it was also the case three decades ago, when Washington learned that its ally, South Korea, was trying to build atomic bombs.
Fearful of a nuclear arms race in the region, the United States forced dictator Park Chung-hee to drop the plan, partly by threatening economic penalties for a nation that was then poor and still recovering from the 1950-53 Korean War.
There are conflicting accounts about how close South Korea came to possessing a nuclear bomb, with some saying it was several years away. South Korea has never acknowledged that it had a weapons program, though its existence was widely known in diplomatic circles, and former government officials later testified about it.
Today, democratic South Korea is a signatory to an international treaty that prohibits it from making nuclear weapons, and operates its 17 nuclear power plants under U.N. safeguards.
But its attempt to secure the nuclear deterrent during the 1970s illustrates why its communist neighbor, which preserves a Cold War-era, confrontational mindset, appears so intent on having nuclear bombs.
South Korea's nuclear history also reveals that the current divergence of U.S. and South Korean policy toward North Korea is but the latest conflict in an alliance that has survived intact for half a century.
This week, North Korea expelled inspectors of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency amid moves to restart nuclear facilities that were the center of a suspected weapons program in the 1990s. U.S. officials say North Korea admitted having a second nuclear program in October.
South Korea opposes possible U.S. plans to apply economic pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear activities, and says dialogue is the only solution. In the early 1970s, their roles were reversed: South Korea was the hawk, and its chief ally was the dove.
At that time, the United States was reducing troop levels in Vietnam and South Korea and President Richard Nixon was encouraging Asian allies to do more to defend themselves. Dictator Park feared abandonment and decided that a nuclear bomb was his best defense, according to historical accounts.
South Korea's forces were then believed to be inferior to the North Korean military, and Park's yearning for the ultimate military deterrent may also have stemmed from the Korean Peninsula's long history of invasion by China and Japan.
The United States learned about Park's plan, and reportedly threatened to withdraw all American forces if he went ahead. Park backed off, and South Korea joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1975.
Later, South Korea bowed to the threat of U.S. economic pressure and canceled construction of a nuclear reprocessing plant that would have yielded plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear bombs.
Throughout that period, South Korea, which lacks oil and other natural resources, was in the midst of building a civilian nuclear program that today provides more than 40 percent of the country's energy.
``South Korea is strictly under the safeguard controls of the IAEA and has no facility that is doing anything beyond generating electricity,'' said Kim Hak-ro, an official at the state Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. However, international experts believe South Korea has the potential to develop nuclear weapons.
South Korea has provided most of the funding and technology for two light-water reactors now under construction in North Korea, and North Korean scientists have traveled to the South for training.
In 1991, U.S. tactical nuclear weapons were removed from South Korea as part of arms reductions following the Cold War, according to South Korean defense experts. In the same year, the two Koreas signed a joint declaration pledging not to deploy, develop or possess atomic bombs on the peninsula.
As part of that deal, the two countries agreed to mutual nuclear inspections, but they never took place. The North's ensuing nuclear activities led to a crisis in 1994 that some said nearly led to war.
North Korea alleges that U.S. forces still have nuclear weapons in South Korea.
----
North Korea Defends Decision to Restart Nuclear Program
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/international/03CND-KORE.html
BEIJING, Jan. 3 - North Korea's top diplomat here blamed the United States today for his country's decision to restart its nuclear program, calling it an act of self-defense in response to American aggression.
The diplomat, Ambassador Choe Jin Su, also criticized the Bush administration for recruiting mutual allies, like Russia and China, to pressure Pyongyang, saying the crisis could and should be solved by the United States and North Korea without interference.
Mr. Choe said his country was "compelled" to restart its nuclear program and to expel inspectors from the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency. He said those decisions were necessary after President Bush included North Korea with Iraq and Iran in an "axis of evil," made threatening statements toward North Korea and halted shipments of much-needed fuel oil.
"Under this situation, we took our measures," Mr. Choe said at a news conference here, adding that North Korea's moves were a matter of "national dignity."
But none of the North Korean charges were new, and the tone of the briefing was in many ways less belligerent than previous statements, with Mr. Choe repeatedly suggesting that the United States and North Korea should "sit down at the table" in search of a peaceful solution.
"The nuclear situation on the Korean Peninsula can be solved easily if the U.S. will assure us of our security," he said, repeating North Korea's call for a nonaggression pact.
But he expressed skepticism about recent statements from President Bush that the crisis in North Korea could be resolved diplomatically. "The Bush administration is now talking about dialogue, that they have no intention of attacking the D.P.R.K. - but who can believe these words?" Mr. Choe said, referring to North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The United States has said that it will not hold talks with North Korea so long as it is developing nuclear weapons.
In Seoul, an adviser to South Korea's President-elect Rho Moo-hyu, Ben Q. Limb, reiterated that the incoming South Korean government favored dialogue.
"The new government calls for dialogue, and President Bush just mentioned two days ago that North Korea's program could be resolved through diplomacy - now, can there be diplomacy without dialogue?" Mr. Limb said. "The news conference by the North Korean ambassador is a kind of response in his own way to the meeting between the South Korean and Chinese representatives."
But Scott Snyder, the Korea representative of the Asia Foundation, an institute partly financed by the United States government, said the latest North Korean call for talks was "a nonstarter."
"Now that there is a clear condition for dialogue, it is easy to call for unconditional dialogue," he said. "Dialogue now requires some action on the part of the North Korea to undo what they have done.
"The North Koreans have used their ambassadors to float trial balloons in the past," Mr. Snyder continued, referring to earlier tension over North Korea's nuclear program. "There used to be these kinds of press conferences during the '93-'94 process as a way of shaping meetings. It is very typical of their way of trying to manage the process."
In recent weeks, the United States has called on China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to intercede - a tactic that Mr. Choe heatedly rejected. "The United States is now taking steps to create international pressure on us, but this maneuvering will make the issue more complicated and will not help resolve the issue," Mr. Choe said.
"If other countries are concerned about nuclear security on the Korean Peninsula, they should urge the United States to assure us of security and if they can't do that they should be quiet," Ambassador Choe said.
Speaking today to American troops at Fort Hood, Tex., President Bush said, "In the case of North Korea, the world must continue to speak with one voice to turn that regime away from it's nuclear ambitions."
Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang intensified in October, when North Korean diplomats admitted to American officials who were visiting that North Korea had maintained a clandestine nuclear weapons program. More recently, North Korea raised the stakes drastically by reopening a nuclear complex in Yongbyon that had been shuttered under a 1994 agreement intended to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.
In exchange for shutting down the complex, North Korea was to be provided 500,000 tons of fuel annually. Those shipments, provided by an international consortium including the United States, South Korea and Japan, were stopped at the urging of the United States after North Korea's admission that it had a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
--------
Bush Plays Down Rift With Allies Over U.S. Stance on North Korea
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/international/asia/03KORE.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., Jan. 2 - President Bush discounted American differences with Asian nations today on how to handle the nuclear standoff with North Korea.
Mr. Bush argued that Japan, South Korea and the European Union joined him in curtailing oil shipments to North Korea late last year, and that the world would work in concert to ensure "the Korean Peninsula to be nuclear weapons-free."
The president insisted that despite widespread evidence of American disputes with South Korea and China about whether to isolate North Korea, Washington's efforts to rally reluctant Asian nations against Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, might be succeeding.
"They may be putting pressure on and you just don't know about it," Mr. Bush said, referring to China and South Korea. "I know that they're not reluctant when it comes to the idea of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. And we are in constant contact with the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Chinese and the Russians."
Behind the scenes, however, the American effort to force a common position among the Asian allies is heating up. Senior Japanese and South Korean diplomats are coming to Washington this weekend; they are expected to issue a statement on Monday. After that James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, will travel to the region.
Mr. Bush's comments came as his advisers drafted plans to argue in the United Nations Security Council that although Iraq should face military consequences for failing to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction, there was still time for diplomacy and economic pressure to contain North Korea's arms.
Representatives of several countries on the Security Council are beginning to make the case that the inspection process in Iraq should be allowed to run its course, and that Washington should be pressed to take the same kind of step-by-step approach with Saddam Hussein that it is taking with Mr. Kim.
Mr. Bush's aides say they disagree; they plan to assert that Iraq is a special case, impervious to the kinds of economic pressure that Mr. Bush is trying with North Korea. "We have basically exhausted diplomacy and containment in Iraq," one senior administration official said today. "We haven't in Korea."
But in private, several of Mr. Bush's advisers say the North Korean crisis has complicated their diplomatic task at the United Nations. So has Mr. Bush's determination that a pre-emptive strike on North Korea is not viable even if Mr. Kim is only months away from adding to his nuclear arsenal, the advisers say.
"We will be facing considerable skepticism on the question of how we can justify confrontation with Saddam when he is letting inspectors into the country, and a diplomatic solution with Kim when he's just thrown them out," one senior diplomat acknowledged today. "And we're working on the answer."
After a hike around his ranch today, Mr. Bush made his most direct public criticism of Mr. Kim since the crisis began.
Mr. Bush described Mr. Kim as "somebody who starves his people" and who violated the 1994 accord with the United States to forgo nuclear arms in return for energy aid.
"We've got a great heart," Mr. Bush said of the United States, noting the nation's food donations to North Korea, "but I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks."
Mr. Bush's comments today were noticeably different in tone from those he made on New Year's Eve. At that time he was harshly critical of Mr. Hussein but he made no mention of North Korea's weapons projects, its ejection of inspectors or any consequences it might face. The lopsided nature of his comparison worried some of Mr. Bush's advisers, who feared that he was not sending a strong enough message to Mr. Kim.
So today when asked about North Korea, Mr. Bush accused Mr. Kim of economic mismanagement, at a time when, the Central Intelligence Agency estimates, 30 percent of North Korea's gross domestic product goes to the military.
"The United States of America is the largest - one of the largest, if not the largest donor of food to the North Korean people," Mr. Bush said.
"And one of the reasons why the people are starving is because the leader of North Korea hasn't seen to it that their economy is strong or that they be fed."
North Korean officials have said that because of the oil cutoff, they had no choice but to start up the Yongbyon nuclear facility, which has been shut down since 1994.
But Mr. Bush was unapologetic about that American-led move today, pointing out that the decision was made by several nations, and portraying the standoff as pitting North Korea against its neighbors rather than just the United States.
The oil shipments are controlled by the Korean Energy Development Organization, a group set up to meet the West's obligations under the 1994 accord. The organization includes Japan, South Korea and the European Union, and while the vote to cut off oil was unanimous, it was not made without acrimony. South Korea was the most hesitant, warning the United States that cutting off the oil could lead to a rekindling of the country's plutonium production.
Mr. Bush said today that "the decision to cut off fuel oil was a joint decision, it was not a U.S. decision." He also put the blame for the crisis on Mr. Kim. "It's important for the American people to remember the history of Kim Jong Il," Mr. Bush said today.
Mr. Bush recalled the 1994 accord and said that under it, the United States and others would "provide fuel oil and help and in return, he would not enrich uranium."
"But it turns out he was enriching uranium," he said, referring to a second North Korean nuclear project, aided by Pakistan and discovered by South Korean and American intelligence agencies.
"We blew the whistle on the fact that he was in violation of the '94 agreement," Mr. Bush said. "And the parties to that agreement came together and said, well, in return for him making that decision, in terms of him abrogating the agreement there will be a consequence."
Mr. Bush referred today to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, and North Korea's nuclear arms are apparently the only ones remaining. North Korea is believed to have made two weapons before 1994. South Korea was stopped by Washington from developing nuclear arms several decades ago. The United States said in the early 1990's that it was removing its tactical nuclear arms from the peninsula, in part so North Korea would not have a pretext for developing its own, and in part out of concern that the weapons would incite South Korean protests.
-------- missile defense
Physicist blows whistle on US missile defence
From Roland Watson in Washington
January 03, 2003
UK Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-530647,00.html
THE credibility of President Bush's multibillion-dollar missile defence plans are being questioned by leading scientists after claims that the results of key tests were falsified.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is considering an investigation into accusations that fundamental flaws in the proposed "Son of Star Wars" system have been covered up.
The criticism is led by Theodore Postol, a physicist and missile defence critic at MIT, who has said that the institute is sitting on what is potentially "the most serious fraud that we've seen at a great American university".
After months of demanding an inquiry into the affair, Ed Crawley, the chairman of MIT's aeronautics and astronautics department, has reversed previous refusals and recommended an investigation.
The issue in question goes to the heart of missile defence technology, an article of faith among right-wing Republicans and a key plank in Mr Bush's 2000 presidential manifesto. The United States unilaterally withdrew last year from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in order to pursue the controversial proposed system, which is designed to intercept enemy warheads in flight, a feat likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet.
Dr Postol and fellow critics say the ability of an interceptor missile to distinguish between an incoming warhead and the decoys likely to accompany it is deeply suspect. Any such doubts would cripple the credibility of the system.
Such questions date back to mid-1997 when the military contractor TWR Inc was accused by one of its employees, Nira Schwartz, of faking test results on a prototype anti-missile sensor meant to tell hostile warheads from decoys.
The company and its system was given the all-clear by the Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research centre at MIT. But subsequently the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, accused TWR of exaggerating the sensors' performance, saying its conclusions had been "highly misleading".
Dr Postol has written to 20 members of Congress saying that MIT's reluctance to investigate the role of its own research centre "may indicate an attempt to conceal evidence of criminal violations".
Critics say that MIT's independence is compromised by its interest in maintaining hundreds of millions of dollars in annual government contracts.
The missile defence system, the first steps of which Mr Bush announced in December with the aim of having ten missile interceptors in Alaska by 2004, is being built by Raytheon, which beat TWR to the contract. But Dr Postol said the TWR test, which offers a rare glimpse into the highly secretive world of missile testing and is based on the same infra-red technology used by Raytheon, suggests some flaws that challenge the overall feasibility of the entire project.
Dr Postol, a persistent missile defence critic who is accusing MIT of a "serious case of scientific fraud", cannot be lightly dismissed. After the Gulf War he challenged the Pentagon's claims for the success of its defensive Patriot missiles, saying they had intercepted few if any Iraqi Scuds. Despite initial ridicule, his assertion is now accepted.
Since 1999 three of the eight tests of "hit to kill" interceptors have failed. Critics say that wrapping a nuclear warhead in radar-absorbing rubber foam or releasing thousands of small pieces of metal would be enough to fool an interceptor.
Separately the State Department yesterday charged two US aerospace companies with illegally supplying China with satellite and rocket technology that could be used for intercontinental missiles.
Hughes Electronics Corp and its parent company, Boeing Satellite Systems, stand accused of 123 arms control violations by helping China with technical data after failed rocket launches in 1995 and 1996. Hughes said that it had done nothing wrong.
----
Israel sharpens Arrows for Iraq war
By Alan Philps in Jerusalem
03/01/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$XVFY3GJBW5WOLQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/01/03/wisr03.xml/
Israel announced plans yesterday for a final test of its new missile interceptor, a key element in its preparations to defend the country against a feared attack by Iraqi Scuds.
The joint test of the Arrow system with Patriot anti-missile batteries, involving 1,000 US soldiers who will stay for the duration of the expected war in Iraq, will be the biggest and most sophisticated anti-missile deployment seen in peacetime.
The Arrow system, developed with America at a cost of £1.3 billion, has been test-launched nine times, but not in battlefield conditions.
Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli defence minister, said the next trial would involve multiple launches. "Sometimes there are technical problems," he said. "If it doesn't succeed, we will have time to fix it and act accordingly."
The key test of Israeli defences will be the first joint deployment of Patriot anti-missile batteries - which performed poorly in the last Gulf War in 1991 - with the new Arrow system, untried in combat.
War in Iraq has been predicted next month and Israel is marshalling a sizeable air defence system and civilian measures, including gas-mask training for schoolchildren and 20,000 inoculations for military and medical personnel against smallpox.
Two Arrow batteries are already deployed in Israel. Their giant radar arrays, as big as a double-decker bus, are visible from afar to reassure the population that the army is ready.
America is supplying two batteries of the latest version of the Patriot, to work with the older systems that Israel already holds. "The US is storing ammunition and military equipment in Israel in a big way. There will be tests to make the two systems work together and establish which missile will be the most appropriate for the target," said a western military official.
Both systems have a range of more than 60 miles, raising the prospect that incoming missiles could be shot down well before they reach Israeli population centres.
The deployment will be carefully watched abroad, with foreign armies keen to see if the systems do their job on the battlefield, rather than in the imagination of the military, as happened in 1991.
In the first Gulf war, the Patriot was oversold. The Israelis said then it had a 90 per cent strike rate against incoming Scuds. The American military later admitted a hit rate of "less than 25 per cent" and an Israeli expert concluded that only one Israeli missile hit its target.
Only one element is missing from the scenario: the Scuds. Britain estimates that Saddam has only 15 left and that they may have been sawn up, hidden and then welded together. An Israeli official said yesterday Iraq has up to 60 missiles, together with six launchers - giant articulated lorries which must trundle to western Iraq to be within range of Israel.
The Israeli military is keen to maximise the threat to justify the expense of the Arrow and its request to America for £2.7 billion to help pay for home-front protection. But senior military officers admit that the chances of a Scud getting through the upgraded defences are low.
As part of efforts to keep Israel out of the war, America and Britain are expected to take control of western Iraq as a priority to stop the mobile launchers getting within range of Israel. Even if they are moved at night, special forces troops are likely to be watching the roads.
The Scuds fired in 1991 were unreliable. Some broke up in the atmosphere, confusing the Patriots' radar. After 10 years of storage, their state can only be guessed at.
All Israelis have gas masks at home in case of chemical or gas attack and they are renewed regularly. There are no signs of panic at the gas mask depots yet, reflecting the fact that most Israelis think their chances of being blown up in a bus are greater than falling victim to a Scud. The authorities hold regular drills to cope with chemical or gas attack, all designed to reassure Israelis that they are in control.
If Scuds do not get through, military planners are ready for other forms of attack such as kamikaze Iraqi bombers streaking at twice the speed of sound towards Tel Aviv, crop-sprayers loaded with chemical agents flying over the Lebanese border, or an old Soviet-made long-range bomber using a civilian air corridor near Israel and then dashing for the nearest city. The most dangerous threat might be hidden from radars, spy planes and satellites, for example anthrax spores, or poisons in the water supply. The government has warned Israelis to keep a three-day supply of bottled water - the time required to clean a polluted system.
-------- nato
Fears on nuclear controls
Owen Bowcott
Friday January 3, 2003
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicspast/story/0,9061,867923,00.html
Harold Wilson's Labour administration feared that British troops might be ordered to use nuclear weapons by Nato commanders without the government being consulted. In protracted talks on the long-standing agreement for the use of nuclear weapons, ministers became concerned that political control of British units could be lost.
In a letter from the prime minister's office in February 1965, the ambassador in Washington was asked to obtain assurances from Nato officials. "Affirmative replies by [Nato commanders] to our letters are essential if British commanders are to be authorised to give unquestioning obedience to any orders ... to open fire or launch nuclear weapons.
"Otherwise there is a risk of British forces being [sent] into a nuclear action without the prior political concurrence of Her Majesty's Government. It is in the interests of the alliance that the present uncertain situation should be clarified."
The public record office files also show that the US wanted to store nuclear depth charges at British bases.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
Embattled Los Alamos Director Resigns
By LESLIE HOFFMAN
Associated Press Writer
Jan 3, 2002 10:19 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LOS_ALAMOS_DIRECTOR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Reese says the school wants to get to the bottom of whatever has been happening. (Audio)
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) -- Los Alamos National Laboratory's next director must do a better job telling the public about the lab's failures as well as its success, outgoing director John Browne said.
The 60-year-old physicist has resigned amid a growing number of government investigations into charges of widespread theft and fraud at the nuclear weapons lab.
Browne said Thursday was not pressured to quit by federal officials or the University of California, which runs the lab for the Energy Department.
Browne said university president Richard Atkinson told him during a Dec. 23 conversation the lab may need a "management change" to address its problems.
Browne, whose contract was through November, told Atkinson he was prepared to offer his resignation and Atkinson said he would accept it. Browne acknowledged it would have been difficult for UC to renew his contract had he not stepped down.
Browne's resignation is effective Monday. Also stepping down is Joseph Salgado, a principal deputy director at the lab.
In an interview, Browne said he felt his credibility had suffered too much to be able to guide the lab through the latest round of problems.
"The controversy was so strong and so critical of management that I personally thought the best thing for me to do was resign and to have the university come in and take it to the next level of performance," he said.
The Energy Department, the FBI and at least two congressional committees are investigating allegations of credit card abuses at the lab over the past several years and the disappearance of high-tech hardware and other equipment.
Browne said he hopes the interim director - retired Navy Vice Admiral George Nanos - will continue efforts started until Browne's administration to improve lab management, including its purchasing and procurement systems.
"What the laboratory has to learn to do better and better is to communicate with everyone and it's something the new administration at Los Alamos will have to maintain a focus on very strongly," Browne said.
Browne also urged the interim administration to move quickly on improvements and not wait until the university selects a permanent director.
Reflecting on his own tenure, Browne called the job the toughest professional challenge of his life.
Browne said he felt he had made significant improvements as director, but the controversies had distracted him from improving lab management.
"My tenure as director has felt like sailing a sailboat and trying to put up a new set of sails in the middle of a squall," he said.
The lab, during Browne's tenure, was also tarnished by security scandals that included missing computer disks and the controversy involving former scientist Wen Ho Lee. Lee was jailed for nine months after being accused of stealing nuclear secrets. He denied any wrongdoing and ended up pleading guilty to a single felony count after the government's case crumbled.
His resignation comes less than two months after Los Alamos released the results of an audit into its credit card program over nearly four years that questioned $4.9 million in transactions.
The lab has said only $2,800 of the total was identified as being used for illegal buys, but watchdog groups have said the figure should be higher.
Also, two lab investigators went public with allegations of wrongdoing when they were fired in November. Glenn Walp and Steven Doran were hired last year to investigate the lab's handling of government property and money.
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Director Quits Los Alamos Under Fire
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/national/03ALAM.html
The director of the nation's pre-eminent nuclear weapons laboratory has resigned amid investigations of corruption and missing equipment, officials said yesterday.
John C. Browne, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico since November 1997, submitted his resignation on Dec. 23, according to the University of California, which manages the laboratory for the Department of Energy. Joseph Salgado, the laboratory's principal deputy director, also resigned. The resignations will take effect on Monday.
George P. Nanos, a retired Navy vice admiral who is a deputy associate director at Los Alamos, will become interim director while the university looks for a permanent replacement.
"These changes reflect the university's deep concern about the allegations that have been made about Los Alamos business practices and our absolute and steadfast commitment to addressing them in a timely manner," Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of California, said.
The university said it delayed the announcement of the resignation until Admiral Nanos had been selected as interim director and laboratory employees returned to work.
In a stern letter to Dr. Atkinson on Dec. 24, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he was "deeply concerned" about the situation at Los Alamos. Noting that in November the laboratory fired two investigators looking into the accusations, Mr. Abraham wrote that the reported abuses "reflect a systematic management failure, one for which laboratory management must be held accountable."
The University of California has run Los Alamos under contract to the federal government since the laboratory was founded in 1943, developing during World War II the world's first atomic bombs. The latest five-year contract extension began in January 2001.
But Mr. Abraham said in his letter that "taken together, these problems have called into question the University of California's ability to run the Los Alamos National Laboratory."
Other management changes will put the laboratory under closer scrutiny. Los Alamos's auditor, administrators and business managers will now report directly to the university president instead of the laboratory's chief administrator. A management oversight board will be appointed to help Admiral Nanos.
In March, Glenn Walp, a former chief of the Arizona Capitol police hired by the laboratory, wrote a memorandum to Los Alamos administrators outlining more than $3 million worth of equipment than had been reported lost from October 1998 to September 2001. An investigation also found credit card abuses, including an employee who tried to buy a $30,000 Ford Mustang.
Another investigator, Steven Doran, who was police chief of Idaho City, Idaho, before being hired by Los Alamos in July, said yesterday that he and Mr. Walp had uncovered rampant abuse in the use of the laboratory's credit cards and purchase orders. Laboratory employees - primarily members of the support staff, not the scientists - had bought expensive lawn furniture, barbecue grills, gift certificates for massages, jewelry and even $9,000 worth of military knives, Mr. Doran said.
"We found just an extensive abuse and misuse of taxpayer dollars, in the millions," he said. "It's part of the culture. Even now, they truly cannot see the error of their ways."
Mr. Doran said that when he was fired he was told only that he "did not fit in with lab culture."
A review by a former inspector general for the Energy Department and accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers L.L.P. found $3.7 million of unreconciled purchases. But the laboratory said that as of Dec. 18 all but $121,000 of its purchasing accounts had been reconciled, and $20,000 worth of questionable transactions were still being reviewed.
"The allegation that there are millions of dollars of Los Alamos property involved in the misuse of credit cards is absolutely false, and that was proven by this external review," said Linn Tytler, a laboratory spokeswoman.
At the time of the firings, Philip Kruger, the deputy human resources director for Los Alamos, said the firings were not in retaliation, but "were related to loss of confidence."
Investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy's inspector general's office and Congress are also looking into the accusations.
-------- ohio
Report: Nuclear plant kept open despite safety concerns
1/3/2003
Associated Press.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-01-03-nuclear-concern_x.htm
CLEVELAND (AP) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission could have shut down a nuclear power plant several months before an acid leak was discovered but wanted to avoid hurting the plant owner financially, according to a report by the agency's watchdog.
The NRC's Office of Inspector General concluded that top agency safety officials had "strong justification" to order the Davis-Besse plant shut down early because of concerns over public safety, The Plain Dealer reported Friday. The newspaper obtained the document before its public release.
Inspectors in March discovered that leaking acid had nearly eaten through the 6-inch-thick steel cap that covers the plant's reactor vessel. It was the most extensive corrosion ever at a U.S. nuclear reactor.
The damage was discovered during a maintenance shutdown, and the plant, near Toledo, has remained closed.
The NRC in December said regulators suspected there could be leaks at the plant, but allowed it to stay open a few more weeks because they didn't think there was much risk.
According to the inspector general report, the agency struck a deal with plant owner FirstEnergy Corp. to allow it to continue making energy at Davis-Besse until Feb. 16, instead of shutting down for an inspection before the end of 2001.
The agency had enough information at the time to suspect that there were cracks in the reactor lid, the report concluded.
The company had told NRC that shutting the reactor before the planned maintenance shutdown in February could be costly and could cause power shortages in Ohio.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich said the report shows that "FirstEnergy and the NRC worked together to put profits above public safety. It's unacceptable."
But NRC Chairman Richard Meserve defended the agency's actions at Davis-Besse.
"Safety is in fact our highest priority," Meserve told the newspaper. "You're faced with a situation where you had some uncertainty about conditions in the plant."
Meserve, who has 90 days to prepare a formal response to the report, said NRC officials made the right decisions based on the information they had available at the time.
Meserve announced last month he will resign from the agency at the end of March, more than a year before his term expires, to become president of a prominent research center in Washington.
The inspector general decided to investigate after receiving complaints from the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group that supports tighter safety rules for nuclear plants.
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, also is looking into why the plant continued to operate despite the concerns.
FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider said Friday the company's own investigation concluded that the managers at Davis-Besse put too much emphasis on production goals and not enough on safety concerns.
"Ten managers and executives have left the company as a result of this," he said.
But Schneider added that before the shutdown, the Akron-based company was unaware that there was any potential for acid to damage the reactor head.
-------- us politics
Hidden Casualties & Secret Diplomacy: The History of US Relations with North Korea
by PATRICK CARKIN
CounterPunch
January 3, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/carkin01032003.html
For the past 50 years the US policy toward North Korea has been proof that most conflicts and wars can be prevented. In light of the last two years under the Bush administration, this history also shows just how inept the Bush White House is when it comes to formulating effective foreign policies that will make the world more safe for all of us.
Although most people don't realize it, the Korean War never officially ended. It has been a legal ceasefire for the past 50 years. The public has been led to believe, however, that the war was, for all practical purposes, over. The truth is, the fighting has never stopped. Proving this fact and how it illustrates how we can avoid full scale war if we truly desired to do so is difficult because much of the evidence is classified.
For one year, from September of 1989 to September of 1990, I served in a high level intelligence unit in South Korea called CSCT #1, or Combat Support Coordination Team #1. Its mission was to act as a liaison unit between the US 8th Army and the South Korean 1st Army. What I learned while there, from both classified and private sources, helps illustrate why a war with Iraq is clearly not about the threat of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
Before I was sent to my unit I received a classified briefing at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona that was attended by all US Army personnel who had received similar orders. Everyone there was informed of how grave the situation was in South Korea. Riots, tear gas, and low level combat were all possible. We were advised by one speaker to hope and pray that we didn't receive orders for the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) because, on average, about eight American soldiers were killed there every year by North Korean forces by sniper fire or in small skirmishes.
Eight soldiers a year might sound like a low number. But the important thing to note is that this information, at least to my knowledge, has never been made public before. The majority of soldiers who were killed by North Korean forces were almost assuredly never recognized for their ultimate sacrifice. In other words, there could be approximately 400 families out there, and perhaps more, who were never told that their son or daughter was killed in combat. Most likely, they were told that they were swept away in a flooded river or died by accident when a grenade or some other weapon malfunctioned.
Multiple incidents, some publicly known and others never before revealed, validate the eight soldiers a year estimate.
In 1968, for example, one US sailor from the captured USS Pueblo died (and may have been killed) while in custody of the North Koreans. In 1976 two soldiers were brutally killed with axes when they attempted to remove a tree that was obstructing the vision of UN soldiers on the DMZ. In another incident in 1984, one South Korean and three North Korean soldiers were killed in a gun battle when a Soviet translator attempted to defect by crossing the DMZ into South Korea. All three of these incidents, among numerous others, are widely known, including the axe murders which were captured on film by the US Army.
Far more astonishing are the events about which the public was never told. These incidents are particularly revealing as to how much effort the US has put into avoiding going to full scale war since 1953.
For example, it's estimated that North Korea has dug approximately 20 tunnels under the DMZ into South Korea. These are invasion routes, two for every North Korean combat infantry division along the border. In the late winter of 1990, the same year that Iraq invaded Kuwait, one of these tunnels was discovered by the US Army. This was the fourth such tunnel that had been found since the beginning of the 1953 ceasefire. The official story offered by the US military at the time was that only a few bomb sniffing dogs were killed by mines.
However, a soldier I knew who served in the unit which went down into the tunnel told me a far different story. According to this man, US and South Korean forces were confronted by an entire North Korean company under the DMZ on the South Korean side. What ensued was a firefight which resulted in the deaths of more than 50 North Koreans as well as a half dozen or so American soldiers. That same year, approximately two months after this skirmish, it was announced that North Korea was finally releasing the remains of several soldiers who had been killed during the Korean War. According to my source, the North Koreans did this in exchange for the bodies of all the men who were killed in the invasion tunnel months earlier.
Another incident was recently revealed to me at an anti-war presentation I was giving where I met a man who served in the US Army in the early 1960s and was stationed in South Korea on the DMZ. According to this man, one of his buddies was killed by sniper fire while he was driving his Jeep. The man's parents were told that he died when his vehicle overturned on a slippery road. The casket, as is likely common in deaths such as this, was sent home sealed according to my source.
These public and hidden events fit into a long history of hostility between North Korea and the United States. Despite what the White House has stated, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, North Korea has always been militarily a far greater threat than Iraq. They have had more soldiers under arms, have been committed to using those soldiers in combat against South Korean and US soldiers for the past 50 years, and have been controlled by an extreme and brutal isolationist, Stalinist-style Communist regime that is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. If we added up the numbers, the North Korean government is responsible for far more deaths than Saddam Hussein.
There has been much controversy about the recent admission by North Korea that they have nuclear weapons. However, in 1989 and 1990 US Army Intelligence believed that they already had developed such weapons. Around mid-1990 I also read an official ranking of military powers across the globe. At that time President Bush Sr. stated that Iraq had the "fourth largest" force in the world. However, classified US Army analysis indicated that Iraq wasn't even in the top ten in terms of strength - but North Korea was. The Army had concluded even then, when Iraq had a far stronger military than it does now, that North Korea was a more powerful enemy. In other words, North Korea is, and has been for many years, the threat that the US government has been making Iraq out to be. Furthermore, while Saddam Hussein was our ally in the Middle East for many years, North Korea has always been our enemy - an enemy that's been killing our soldiers and threatening invasion of South Korea for 50 years.
Despite this history of conflict, the US has generally shown a pattern of reserved warnings to North Korea that we will defend South Korea. In other words, we will respond only if they act. This is in stark contrast to President Bush's recent push to preemptively and unilaterally attack with no provocation, very little if any evidence, and a host of hidden agendas that have nothing to do with regime change, weapons of mass destruction or even the brutality of Saddam Hussein. There is in fact a mountain of evidence which clearly points to the US replacing Saddam with a pro-US dictator who will simply give us access to Iraqi oil.
None of this is to suggest that we should go to war with North Korea. Such an argument would be ludicrous, especially given the brutality of the Korean War in which over four million people, including more than 33,000 American soldiers, were killed in three years. This is a rate far greater than what we saw in Vietnam. No one wants to fight this war all over again, including most likely the vast majority of those with more hawkish views. Diplomacy has been the logical preferred route under all Presidents since Eisenhower.
Until now. The Bush administration, out of sheer belligerence, ineptitude, or some foolish hidden agenda, appears to be taking the approach to North Korea that it has with Iraq. For example, Donald Rumsfeld recently warned that the US could fight two wars simultaneously, one in Korea and another in Iraq, and still win. These remarks not only exacerbated tensions with North Korea, but also angered South Koreans who, according to recent polls, now fear George Bush more than they do a nuke-wielding North Korea.
The Bush administration has made some effort at diplomacy. White House spokesman Sean McCormack recently stated, "We've made very clear we want a peaceful resolution to the situation North Korea has created by pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program, and as the president has said before, we have no intention of invading North Korea." However, as McCormack's statement shows, the Bush administration's attempts at diplomacy only go so far. Part of the problem is that they have been refusing to dialogue with North Korea because they seem to think that a conversation is an immediate concession. Such an attitude can only make the situation worse, especially since the common wisdom is that North Korea is aggressively posturing because it so desperately needs outside aid and assistance or, perhaps, truly feels threatened by the new US doctrine of preemptive attack and believes that it must act in self defense. Either way, Bush seems to be only interested in using the stick, not the carrot.
Before George Bush came to office the United States seemed committed to avoiding war with North Korea. We've used a long list of tactics, from negotiation to threatening force to exchanging prisoners and/or bodies. But never, not since 1953, an outright war. Why? Why exert all this effort to avoid war with a brutal regime such as North Korea's? Could it be that it would be senseless to fight a war which would result in hundreds of thousands of casualties if not far worse? Yes, that's true. But the answer probably lies closer to a resource that we Americans have foolishly staked our future upon - oil. There is none in North Korea.
So why the apparent change in tactics toward North Korea? There seems to be no definite indication as to what the Bush administration's intentions are. It's also extremely troubling to note that we are now emphasizing North Korea's "only recent" violations such as their illegal use of machine guns into the Demilitarized Zone. Is this some attempt to quietly shift American public opinion to view North Korea as a threat without mentioning all the other horrible things that have happened between our two nations? There's no way to tell at this time.
The public needs to know about the events of the past 50 years because they prove that the Bush administration's lack of diplomacy and new tactics of aggression simply do not work. The past 50 years also prove that if we committed ourselves to a path of avoiding war, with North Korea, Iraq, or any other nation for that matter, we would most likely succeed. But this will never happen while we continue our addiction to oil, view other nations as our resources to be used and manipulated, or behave as if only our interests matter.
Patrick Carkin is currently the Co-Director of NH Peace Action and the owner/administrator of birddogger.org, a web site tool to assist those who challenge US politicians. He can be contacted at: info@nhpeaceaction.org.
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Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By ADAM CLYMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/politics/03SECR.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 - The Bush administration has put a much tighter lid than recent presidents on government proceedings and the public release of information, exhibiting a penchant for secrecy that has been striking to historians, legal experts and lawmakers of both parties.
Some of the Bush policies, like closing previously public court proceedings, were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and are part of the administration's drive for greater domestic security. Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney's battle to keep records of his energy task force secret, reflect an administration that arrived in Washington determined to strengthen the authority of the executive branch, senior administration officials say.
Some of the changes have sparked a passionate public debate and excited political controversy. But other measures taken by the Bush administration to enforce greater government secrecy have received relatively little attention, masking the proportions of what dozens of experts described in recent interviews as a sea change in government openness.
A telling example came in late 2001 when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the new policy on the Freedom of Information Act, a move that attracted relatively little public attention.
Although the new policy for dealing with the 1966 statute that has opened millions of pages of government records to scholars, reporters and the public was announced after Sept. 11, it had been planned well before the attacks.
The Ashcroft directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no "foreseeable harm" from the release.
Generally speaking, said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, while secrecy has been increasingly attractive to recent administrations, "this administration has taken it to a new level."
Its "instinct is to release nothing," Professor Brinkley said, adding that this was not necessarily because there were particular embarrassing secrets to hide, but "they are just worried about what's in there that they don't know about."
The Bush administration contends that it is not trying to make government less open. Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said, "The bottom line remains the president is dedicated to an open government, a responsive government, while he fully exercises the authority of the executive branch."
Secrecy is almost impossible to quantify, but there are some revealing measures. In the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, most of which came during the Bush presidency, 260,978 documents were classified, up 18 percent from the previous year. And since Sept. 11, three new agencies were given the power to stamp documents as "Secret" - the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
In Congress, where objections to secrecy usually come from the party opposed to the president, the complaints are bipartisan. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat first elected in 1974, said, "Since I've been here, I have never known an administration that is more difficult to get information from." Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said things were getting worse, and "it seems like in the last month or two I've been running into more and more stonewalls."
Mr. Cheney says the Bush policies have sought to restore the proper powers of the executive branch. Explaining the fight to control the task force records to ABC News last January, he said that over more than three decades: "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. We saw it in the War Powers Act, we saw it in the Anti-Impoundment Act. We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that the presidents cough up and compromise on important principles. One of the things that I feel an obligation on, and I know the president does, too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."
Mr. Bush has made similar comments. But the more relevant history may have been in Texas, where Mr. Bush, as governor, was also reluctant to make government records public. Confronted with a deadline to curb air pollution, he convened a private task force to propose solutions and resisted efforts to make its deliberations public. When he left office, he sent his papers not to the Texas State Library in Austin, but to his father's presidential library at College Station. That library was unable to cope with demands for access, and the papers have since been sent to the state library.
Framing an Argument
One argument underlies many of the administration's steps: that presidents need confidential and frank advice and that they cannot get it if the advice becomes public, cited by Mr. Cheney in reference to the task force and by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in explaining the administration's decision to delay the release of President Ronald Reagan's papers.
Mr. Gonzales said "the pursuit of history" should not "deprive a president of candid advice while making crucial decisions."
Some administration arguments are more closely focused on security. Mr. Ashcroft has said that releasing the names of people held for immigration offenses could give Al Qaeda "a road map" showing which agents had been arrested.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has threatened action against Pentagon officials who discuss military operations with reporters, said before troops at the Army's Special Operation Command on Nov. 21, 2001, "I don't think the American people do want to know anything that's going to cause the death of any one of these enormously talented and dedicated and courageous people that are here today."
The critics argue more generally. Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, argues that secrecy does more harm than good. The Central Intelligence Agency's exaggerated estimates of Soviet economic strength, for example, would have stopped influencing United States policy, Mr. Moynihan said, if they had been published and any correspondent in Moscow could have laughed at them.
"Secrecy is a formula for inefficient decision-making," Mr. Moynihan said, and plays to the instincts of self-importance of the bureaucracy.
Mary Graham, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, saw two major risks in this administration's level of secrecy.
"What are often being couched as temporary emergency orders are in fact what we are going to live with for 20 years, just as we lived with the cold war restrictions for years after it was over," Ms. Graham said. "We make policy by crisis, and we particularly make secrecy policy by crisis."
Moreover, she said, it ignores the value of openness, which "creates public pressure for improvement." When risk analyses of chemical plants were available on the Internet, she said, people could pressure companies to do better, or move away.
Mr. Fleischer contends that there is no secrecy problem. "I make the case that we are more accessible and open than many previous administrations - given how many times [Secretary of State Colin L.] Powell, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft have briefed," he said.
Asked if there was anyone in the administration who was a consistent advocate of openness, who argued that secrecy hurt as well as helped, Mr. Fleischer said President Bush was that person. He said that was exemplified by the fact that while "the president reserved the authority to try people under military tribunals, nobody has been tried under military tribunals."
In the cases of Zacarias Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh, he said, Mr. Bush has opted for the more open and traditional route of the criminal justice system.
Shielding Presidents
The Bush administration's first major policy move to enforce greater secrecy could affect how its own history is written.
On March 23, 2001, Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel, ordered the National Archives not to release to the public 68,000 pages of records from Ronald Reagan's presidency that scholars had requested and archivists had determined posed no threat to national security or personal privacy. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents were to become available after Jan. 20, 2001, twelve years after Mr. Reagan left office. Mr. Reagan's administration was the first covered by the 1978 law.
The directive, which also covered the papers of Mr. Reagan's vice president and the president's father, George Bush, was to last 90 days. When Mr. Gonzales extended the sealing period for an additional 90 days, historians like Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University attacked the delays, saying they were designed to prevent embarrassment and would nullify the records law's presumption of public access to those documents.
On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush issued an even more sweeping order under which former presidents and vice presidents like his father, or representatives designated by them or by their surviving families, could bar release of documents by claiming one of a variety of privileges: "military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, presidential communications, legal advice, legal work or the deliberative processes of the president and the president's advisers," according to the order.
Before the order, the Archivist of the United States could reject a former president's claim of privilege. Now he cannot.
The order was promptly attacked in court and on Capitol Hill. Scott L. Nelson of the Public Citizen Litigation Group sued on behalf of historians and reporters, maintaining that the new order allowed unlimited delays in releasing documents and created new privileges to bar release.
House Republicans were among the order's sharpest critics. Representative Steve Horn of California called a hearing within a few days, and Representative Doug Ose, another Californian, said the order "undercuts the public's right to be fully informed about how its government operated in the past." The order, Mr. Horn said, improperly "gives the former and incumbent presidents veto power over the release of the records."
On Dec. 20, the White House sought to silence the complaints by announcing that nearly all the 68,000 pages of the Reagan records were being released. Legislation introduced to undo the order never made it to the House floor, where leaders had no interest in embarrassing the president. And a lawsuit challenging the order languishes in Federal District Court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Historians remain angry. Robert Dallek, a biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, said, "This order of Bush, we feel it's a disgrace - what it means is if this policy applies, they can hold presidential documents close to the vest in perpetuity, the way Lincoln's papers were held by the family until 1947."
Battling the Congress
The administration's most publicized fight over secrecy, and its biggest victory to date, has come over its efforts to keep the investigative arm of Congress from gaining access to records of the energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.
This fight is only the showiest of many battles between the Bush administration and members of Congress over information. Such skirmishes happen in every administration. But not only are they especially frequent now, but also many of the loudest Congressional complaints come from the president's own party, from Republicans like Senator Grassley and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana.
The vice president framed the fight as being less about what the papers sought by the General Accounting Office might show than over power - what Congress could demand and how it could get it or what essential prerogatives the executive branch could maintain, especially its ability to get confidential advice. And he welcomed the battle. In an interview the day before the suit was filed, he said. "It ought to be resolved in a court, unless you're willing to compromise on a basic fundamental principle, which we're not." And on Dec. 9, Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court ruled for the vice president.
Judge Bates ruled that David M. Walker, who as comptroller general heads the General Accounting Office, had not suffered any personal injury, nor had he been injured as an agent of Congress, and therefore the suit could not be considered. An appeal is all but certain to be filed, but for the time being, the administration clearly has a victory.
"Vice President Cheney's cover-up will apparently continue for the foreseeable future," said Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who pressed Mr. Walker to act, hoping to find evidence of special interest favoritism for Republican donors in the Cheney documents.
There have been other bitter fights over disclosure between the White House and the Congress. While the Democrats controlled the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the chairman, James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont, repeatedly threatened last year to subpoena the Environmental Protection Agency for documents explaining the scientific basis and potential impact of its proposed air pollution rule changes requiring aging power plants to install new pollution controls when their facilities are modernized. Mr. Jeffords, who never got around to issuing the subpoena, argued that the administration had broken its promises of cooperation.
Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was infuriated last August when the Justice Department said it would send answers to some of his questions about how it was using the USA Patriot Act to the more pliant Intelligence Committee, which was not interested. Mr. Sensenbrenner threatened to issue a subpoena or "blow a fuse."
Mr. Grassley, the incoming chairman of the Finance Committee, said administration obstruction required him to go and personally question government officials working on Medicare fraud cases, instead of sending his staff. But his new chairmanship and the Treasury confirmations before it may give him a lever. He said he told a White House aide of his problems and asked, "How can I get a presidential nominee through if I have to be spending my time doing things my investigators could be doing?"
Closing the Courtroom
Legal policy is where the administration's desire to maintain secrecy has excited the most controversy. Since the first few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has insisted on a rare degree of secrecy about the individuals it has arrested and detained.
The immigration hearings held for hundreds of people caught in sweeps after the bombings have been closed to relatives, the news media and the public.
The names of those detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been kept secret, along with details of their arrests, although on Dec. 12 the Justice Department told The Associated Press there had been 765 of them, of whom only 6 were still in custody.
A few dozen individuals have been held as material witnesses, after the Justice Department persuaded federal judges that they had information about terrorism and might flee if released. Neither their names nor the total number of them have been made public.
The administration has also kept a tight lid on the identities of the military detainees being held at Guantánamo, Cuba. But in considering how to deal with them, in military tribunals, the government has moved away from secrecy. When Mr. Bush directed the Defense Department in November 2001 to set up military tribunals to try noncitizens suspected of terrorism, one reason cited was the ability to hold those proceedings in secret, to protect intelligence and to reduce risks to judges and jurors. But when the rules were announced in March, they said "the accused shall be afforded a trial open to the public (except proceedings closed by the presiding officer)."
While the government's policy in the immigration cases has suffered some judicial setbacks, appeals and stays have allowed it to remain in effect.
Fundamentally, the government has argued against opening hearings by contending that they would make available to terrorists a mosaic of facts that a sophisticated enemy could use to build a road map of the investigation, to know what the government knew or did not know, and thus to escape or execute new attacks.
That argument was also made in the main case involving releasing the names of those detained, where the government also maintains that the Freedom of Information Act's right to privacy would be violated by a release of the names.
Legal scholars have objected particularly to the decision to close all the immigration hearings, rather than parts of them. Stephen A. Schulhofer, a professor at New York University Law School, said there was already a legal provision for closing a hearing when a judge was shown the necessity.
The "road map" explanation seemed implausible, Mr. Schulhofer said, because the detainees had a right to make phone calls, in which "a real terrorist could alert cohorts who would not have known he was detained."
At a recent seminar at Georgetown University Law School, Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said protecting privacy was the main reason for suppressing the names. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, dismissed that rationale, asking Mr. Chertoff, "How can you even say that with a straight face?"
So far, the government has won challenges to the detention of material witnesses.
On releasing the names, it lost in a Federal District Court here, but appeared to have impressed two of the three appeals court judges who heard the case in November.
On the question of a blanket closing of "special interest" immigration hearings, an appeals court in Cincinnati ruled against the government in August and one in Philadelphia ruled in its favor in October. The Supreme Court is likely to be faced with choosing between them.
Putting Sand in the Gears
Immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, governments at all levels feared that information they made publicly available could be useful to terrorists, and began moves to curtail access, a trend the Bush administration encouraged.
The first of the strictures on information resulting from Sept. 11 were described by Ms. Graham, the Brookings and Kennedy School scholar, in her book, "Democracy by Disclosure" (Brookings Institution Press, 2002).
"Officials quickly dismantled user-friendly disclosure systems on government Web sites," she wrote. "They censored information designed to tell community residents about risks from nearby chemical factories; maps that identified the location of pipelines carrying oil, gas and hazardous substances; and reports about risks associated with nuclear power plants."
Many of those withdrawals mirrored efforts industry had been making for quite a few years, arguing that the public did not really need the information. Some information has been removed from public gaze entirely. James Neal, the Columbia University librarian, said that officials of libraries like his around the country that serve as depositories for federal information "have some concern about the requests to withdraw materials from those collections." Perhaps even more important, Mr. Neal said, was that "we also do not know what materials are not getting distributed."
Some material that has been removed from Web sites is still available, though obviously to fewer people, in government reading rooms. The chemical factory risk management plans cited by Ms. Graham are no longer available through the Internet, said Stephanie Bell, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency. But individuals can look at up to 10 of them and take notes (but not photocopies) in 55 government reading rooms around the country, Ms. Bell said. There is at least one reading room in every state except Maine, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.
Last March the Defense Department issued a draft regulation concerning possible limits on publication of unclassified research it finances and sharp restrictions on access by foreign citizens to such data and research facilities.
This prompted some concerted resistance from scientists. Bruce Alberts, a biochemist who heads the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, told the academy's annual meeting on April 29:
"I am worried about a movement to restrict publication that has been proceeding quietly but quickly in Washington. Some of the plans being proposed could severely hamper the U.S. research enterprise and decrease national security. It is being suggested that every manuscript resulting from work supported by federal funds be cleared by a federal project officer before being published, with serious penalties for violations. Another rule could prevent any foreign national from working on a broad range of projects."
Even though the department withdrew its proposal and officials say there has been no decision on whether to try again, the scientists say they are still worried.
The new Ashcroft directive on Freedom of Information requests has also begun to be felt. A veteran Justice Department official said he believed that fewer discretionary disclosures were being made throughout the government because "as a matter of policy, we are not advocating the making of discretionary disclosures."
Delays are one clear reality. The General Accounting Office reported last fall that "while the number of requests received appears to be leveling off, backlogs of pending requests governmentwide are growing, indicating that agencies are falling behind in processing requests."
To Thomas Blanton, who helps run the National Security Archive, which collects and posts documents gained through Freedom of Information Act, that is a clear effect of the Ashcroft order.
"What these signals from on high do in a bureaucracy, they don't really change the standards," Mr. Blanton said, "but they put molasses or sand in the gears."
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Bush has 'no heart' for Kim
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 3, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030103-23339022.htm
CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush accused Kim Jong-il yesterday of starving North Koreans and said that U.S. allies are quietly pressuring Pyongyang to halt development of nuclear weapons.
"Kim Jong-il is somebody who starves his people," Mr. Bush said in response to a question from The Washington Times. "I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks."
Mr. Bush disputed a reporter's suggestion that North Korea's neighbors are wary of calling on the leader of the secretive communist state to disarm.
"I don't think the countries are reluctant," Mr. Bush said at his Texas ranch. "Well, they may be putting pressure on and you just don't know about it.
"But I know they're not reluctant when it comes to the idea of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. And we are in constant contact with the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Chinese and the Russians."
Mr. Bush reiterated his aversion to using military force to resolve the standoff.
"I believe the situation with North Korea will be resolved peacefully," he said. "It's a diplomatic issue, not a military issue, and we're working all fronts."
But even as he called for diplomacy, he criticized Mr. Kim for breaking a 1994 promise to stop developing nuclear weapons. The Bush administration discovered the breach last year and confronted North Korea, which admitted that it had been secretly developing weapons all along.
"It's important for the American people to remember the history of Kim Jong-il," Mr. Bush said. "He created some international tension, and the United States of America went and signed an agreement with him."
The president pointed out that the agreement called for the United States and other nations to "provide fuel oil and help, and, in return, he would not enrich uranium."
"Well, it turns out he was enriching uranium," Mr. Bush added. "And we blew the whistle on the fact that he was in violation of the '94 agreement."
The United States and its allies responded by cutting off the oil aid. North Korea then upped the ante by declaring last month that it would reactivate its plutonium-based nuclear program.
Mr. Kim's reclusive and unpredictable regime then removed monitoring seals and cameras from nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. This week, Pyongyang expelled inspectors from the United Nations who monitored those facilities. It also has hinted that it would withdraw from a global nuclear-arms-control treaty.
Instead of threatening military force, the United States is considering economic sanctions against North Korea. But the White House is unlikely to cut off food aid to the impoverished nation.
"The United States of America is the largest - one of the largest, if not the largest - donor of food to the North Korean people," Mr. Bush said. "And one of the reasons why the people are starving is because the leader of North Korea hasn't seen to it that their economy is strong or that they be fed."
Although China has been widely portrayed as reluctant to challenge North Korea, Mr. Bush pointed out that Beijing last year declared its opposition to nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula.
The declaration came during a U.S.-China summit at the president's ranch.
"It was right here at this spot when Jiang Zemin, the leader of China, and myself got together and put out a joint declaration that we expect for the Korean Peninsula to be nuclear-weapons free," Mr. Bush said. "And that was a serious statement."
Athough the administration has vowed to use diplomacy, Pyongyang has said it suspects that the United States eventually will use military force. The Associated Press reported yesterday that North Korea's state media said Pyongyang would not give in to U.S. pressure.
"If the United States tries to settle the issue with [North Korea] by force, [North Korea] has no idea of avoiding it," said government newspaper Minju Joson in a report carried on the country's foreign news outlet, Korean Central News Agency.
It said North Korea's army was strong and ready to fight.
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Rumsfeld and Iraq
An editorial
January 3, 2003
Madison News
http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/editorial/39885.php
For the past year or so, a lot of Americans were concerned that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network might have helped Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein develop weapons of mass destruction.
With the release of previously classified U.S. government documents, however, we now know that Saddam's accomplice was not Osama. It was Donald Rumsfeld. Along with other members of the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the man who now serves as defense secretary for another Bush administration aided and abetted Iraq at the time when it was developing and using weapons of mass destruction.
A review by the Washington Post of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policy-makers shows, according to the Post, "that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses" during the 1980s.
Indeed, the Post reports, "The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague."
Even after the State Department informed the Reagan administration in November 1983 that Iraqis were using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in a war with Iran that was then taking place, the United States continued to provide diplomatic and material support to Iraq. Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, Rumsfeld, traveled to Baghdad on Dec. 20, 1983, to tell Saddam that the United States was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations with Iraq.
In interviews this year, Rumsfeld claimed that he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq fight Iran in the 1980s, and that he "cautioned" Saddam about the use of chemical weapons. But State Department records suggest otherwise.
According to recently declassified State Department documents, Saddam and other Iraqi leaders pronounced themselves to be "extremely pleased" with Rumsfeld's visit, which they said had "elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."
Iraq was removed by the Reagan administration from the State Department terrorism list and, with a license from Reagan's Commerce Department, Saddam's government began doing business with U.S. firms - such as Union Carbide and Honeywell - that provided chemicals, missile components, and computers used for military purposes.
After Rumsfeld paved the way for normalized relations, the Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq. Iraq imported dozens of biological agents, including strains of anthrax that were identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program.
Luckily, Iraq's capacity to threaten its own people or its neighbors has been dramatically reduced. Scott Ritter, who served as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations during the 1990s, says, "While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agents produced by Iraq."
So why is Rumsfeld now spending billions of U.S. tax dollars to prepare for a war with Iraq? That's a question members of Congress should ask him. And, while they're at it, they should inquire as to why U.S. citizens should now trust the judgment of a man who played such an integral role in strengthening Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military.
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Nixon's nuclear ploy
By William Burr & Jeffrey Kimball
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
January/February 2003,
Volume 59, No. 1, pp. 28-37, 72-73
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2003/jf03/jf03burr_print.html
Richard Nixon thought a secret, worldwide nuclear alert would remain unknown to the American public, and he was right. But his strategy-to threaten the Soviets into helping bring an end to the Vietnam war-was unsuccessful. They may not even have noticed.
In 1969 President Richard Nixon ordered a worldwide nuclear alert-one of the largest secret military operations in U.S. history. Only Nixon, his special adviser for national security affairs Henry Kissinger, Kissinger's National Security Council aide Col. Alexander Haig, and White House chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, knew that the underlying purpose of the alert, known as the "Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test," was to convince the Soviets that helping to end the war in Vietnam was in their best interests.
The alert began on October 13, 1969, when U.S. tactical and strategic air forces in the United States, Europe, and East Asia began a stand-down of training flights to raise operational readiness; Strategic Air Command (SAC) increased the numbers of bombers and tankers on ground alert; and the readiness posture of selected overseas units was heightened. On October 25, SAC took the additional step of increasing the readiness of nuclear bombers, and two days later SAC B-52s undertook a nuclear-armed "Show of Force" alert over Alaska, code-named "Giant Lance." Three days later, U.S. intelligence detected Soviet awareness of the heightened nuclear alert and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird ordered commanders to terminate the test at the end of the month.
The alert, along with Nixon's orders to launch it, remained secret from much of the government as well as the public until 1983, when journalist Seymour Hersh reported on one of its phases and speculated about the reason behind it. Hersh suggested that it was a manifestation of Nixon's strategy in Vietnam, related in some way to "Duck Hook"-a massive mining and bombing operation Nixon had threatened to unleash against North Vietnam if Hanoi did not yield to Washington's terms at the Paris peace negotiations.
Hersh's report was an investigative coup, but his version of events was brief, fragmentary, and partially incorrect. Inexplicably, it was little noted, even at the time.
The declassification of documents in the 1990s, however, confirmed that the readiness test had in fact occurred. At least one analyst speculated that the test was "an apparent effort to add credibility to the U.S. threat to intervene in a Sino-Soviet conflict." But documents that have been released more recently, and statements by former senior Nixon-era officials who have become more willing to talk about Nixon-Kissinger policies, show convincingly that Nixon invoked the alert as part of an unsuccessful strategy for ending the Vietnam War. No direct evidence has turned up to support the theory of a connection between the alert and the Sino-Soviet border crisis.
Nixon hoped that the nuclear alert would cause the Soviets and North Vietnamese to think it was a lead-up to Duck Hook, thus jarring them into making the diplomatic compromises demanded by the United States. Although a bluff, the alert also had a compensatory purpose. Because Moscow and Hanoi would discover after November 1 that he had not carried through with Duck Hook, the nuclear readiness measures, he thought, would at least serve to salvage his reputation for toughness and irrationality, and thus his credibility, by reminding the North Vietnamese, and especially the Soviets, that he was capable of taking dangerous and unpredictable escalatory steps.
The war in Vietnam
Nixon had campaigned on a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, and he believed at his inauguration that he was well on the way to fashioning the outlines of a strategic plan that would enable him to extricate American troops from Vietnam, win a release of American prisoners of war, and preserve the non-communist government of South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu.
In contrast to skeptical anti-war critics, Nixon, Kissinger, and other policy-makers believed that achieving their goals in Indochina would have a critical bearing on the global influence of the United States. If they were perceived to have abandoned a client and ally, they felt, American credibility would be undermined on issues ranging from nuclear arms to Mideast politics.
The plan included Vietnamization, de-Americanization, international diplomacy, and negotiations with the Vietnamese communists in Paris-all coupled with what Nixon referred to in one of his memoirs as "irresistible military pressure."
Nixon and Kissinger believed that by offering détente, they could persuade the Soviet Union to lever the North Vietnamese into being "reasonable" at the negotiating table. And by détente they meant more than a simple matter of relaxing tensions. As Raymond Garthoff put it, détente was a "strategy to contain and harness Soviet use of its increasing power" by enmeshing it in "a web of relationships with . . . the United States, a web that he [Nixon] would weave."
But the benefits of détente would not become available unless Moscow used its influence to help Washington reach a Vietnam settlement. "We should be hard and pragmatic in dealing with the Soviets," Nixon told French President Charles de Gaulle in February 1969. He believed Soviet influence would be pivotal because "85 percent of [North Vietnam's] weapons came from the Soviet Union."
Attempting to lever Hanoi by offering favors to or putting pressure on Moscow-and later on Beijing-was also known as "triangular diplomacy." It was a game that Hanoi and Beijing engaged in as well, with Hanoi playing China and the Soviet Union against each other, and Beijing playing the American card against the Soviet Union.
On the military front, Nixon continued to carry out the ground operations in South Vietnam begun by the last administration, including "pacification" and big-unit sweeps-and he envisioned adding more ground and air options.
At the core of Nixon's notions was a diplomacy-supporting stratagem he called the Madman Theory, or, as he and Bob Haldeman described it, "the principle of the threat of excessive force." Nixon was convinced that his power would be enhanced if his opponents thought he might use excessive force, even nuclear force. That, coupled with his reputation for ruthlessness, he believed, would suggest that he was dangerously unpredictable. The Madman Theory undergirded not only his policy toward North Vietnam but also toward other adversaries, including the Soviet Union.
Although Nixon favored this theory more than most, threatening excessive force was nothing new. In the 1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and then-Vice President Nixon, had overtly practiced a version of the Madman Theory by means of the "uncertainty principle" and coercive nuclear "brinkmanship."
The Nixon Vietnam plan
Nixon viewed the different elements of his evolving Vietnam plan as an interrelated whole. Expanded conventional military operations would not only have military consequences on the ground and bolster the morale and staying power of the Thieu regime, they would lend credibility to the Madman stratagem by signaling his willingness and ability to escalate the war. In turn, threats to use even greater force would bolster linkage and triangular diplomacy, and vice versa-or so he hoped. He decided on and implemented these elements in stages, however, as his hopes and fortunes waxed and waned in relation to the vicissitudes of the war in Vietnam and public opinion in the United States.
Just seven days after his inauguration, Nixon met with Kissinger, Laird, and Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to discuss "the possibility of working out a program of potential military actions which might jar the North Vietnamese into being more forthcoming at the Paris talks" and thereby "preclude prolonged stalling tactics."
Nixon described the link between a Vietnam settlement and other issues to Soviet Amb. Anatoly Dobrynin at a February 17 meeting. As Haldeman noted, the "President made clear that progress on political issues [is] bound to have real bearing on progress on arms control. . . . President hoped that Soviets would show constructive attitude in Middle East talks and do what they could to get Paris Vietnam talks off dead-center, since progress in these two areas bound to be helpful in reaching agreement on other issues."
On March 17 Nixon showed his inclination to send tough signals to adversaries when he launched "Operation Breakfast"-a massive B-52 bombing campaign against communist base areas in Cambodia. Kept secret from the public and most government officials, it was intended as a dramatic signal to "demonstrate to Hanoi that the Nixon administration is different and 'tougher' than the previous administration," as one "well-placed" official put it.
Meanwhile, Vietnamization, the publicly visible element in Nixon's plan, was only slowly taking shape. On April 10 he ordered the preparation of timetables for incremental American troop withdrawals, and at Midway on June 8 he told President Thieu that 25,000 American troops would be withdrawn between July 1 and August 31.
By the time the withdrawals actually began, however, Vietnam policy was at a critical juncture. North Vietnam had not been intimidated, and Kissinger's efforts to persuade Moscow to help with Hanoi had not succeeded. The talks in Paris were deadlocked, and the anti-war opposition at home was becoming restive. Laird and Rogers wanted to accelerate troop withdrawals; Kissinger did not.
"Going for broke"
Nixon wrote in his post-war memoirs that he emerged from a July 7 meeting with Kissinger on the presidential yacht Sequoia intending to "'go for broke' in the sense that I would attempt to end the war one way or the other-either by negotiated agreement or by an increased use of force." He could either escalate the war to force a favorable negotiated agreement or he could accelerate the withdrawal and do what was necessary to protect American forces while they were leaving. In either case, he said, "We'll bomb the bastards."
In July and into August, Nixon was disappointed by the lack of success on the diplomatic front. With public patience waning, he decided to appease everyone with simultaneous Vietnamization and military escalation.
Nixon and Kissinger set in motion the enhanced-threat phase in July and August. Kissinger met with Dobrynin on July 11, just four days after the Sequoia meeting, to warn him that Nixon might use "other alternatives" against North Vietnam unless Hanoi made concessions. Should this happen, Kissinger hinted, it would likely cause Soviet-American relations to fall to a "dangerous minimum."
Four days later Nixon continued his arm-twisting campaign by sending a letter to Ho Chi Minh via the North Vietnamese representatives in Paris. Nixon called on Ho "to move forward at the conference table toward an early resolution of this tragic war." Nixon told Thieu in Saigon on July 30 that he would send "a warning to Hanoi . . . in an unorthodox way."
Kissinger flew to Paris, where he held his first secret meeting with the North Vietnamese, during which he reminded Xuan Thuy of the letter to Ho. At another meeting on the same day, he told French Foreign Ministry officials that "it was important that [the United States] not be confounded by a fifth-rate agricultural power."
By mid-August Nixon, Kissinger, and presidential advisers Haldeman, John Mitchell, and John Ehrlichman believed that for political reasons the administration had to bring the war to a favorable end "in six to nine months," but that the "process will be difficult." Soon after returning to Washington from an around-the-world trip, Nixon began to prepare himself for the heat he believed he would get should he resume the bombing of North Vietnam. Reviewing alternatives on August 18, Nixon felt the need to make a "total mental commitment."
Although they were unaware of contingency planning for the bombing of North Vietnam, Laird and Rogers opposed military escalation and continued to press for accelerated Vietnamization. Concerned about Nixon's resolve, but supported by Haldeman, Mitchell, and Ehrlichman, Kissinger lobbied vigorously against Vietnamization while advocating the second phase of escalation.
According to Haldeman's notes, Nixon reviewed Kissinger's "contingency plan for Vietnam" at the western White House on August 28. That plan was probably the emerging blueprint or "study" for a contemplated military operation against North Vietnam-code-named "Pruning Knife" by the military but known as Duck Hook at the White House and National Security Council.
On August 30, Nixon received Ho Chi Minh's reply to his July 15 letter. Ho rejected Nixon's negotiating terms, put forward his own plan for a negotiated solution to the war, and brushed aside Nixon's threats.
His warnings having failed to intimidate either Hanoi or Moscow, Nixon knew that he would soon have to make a decision about which alternative to pursue-military escalation or accelerated Vietnamization.
In late August or early September Kissinger formed a group of NSC staffers-sometimes called the "September Group"-which was charged with designing a scenario for what they hoped would be final negotiations, and drafting a presidential speech scheduled for November 3 in which Nixon would announce and defend renewed bombing.
On September 9, Kissinger met with General Wheeler to "discuss military planning for the Duck Hook operation . . . and to convey to him the president's personal mandate that planning be held strictly in military channels," thereby precluding "discussion of the plan and the ongoing detailed planning with even the secretary of defense."
By September 16, if not before, the "concept of operations," was complete. It called for the bombing of military and economic targets in and around Hanoi, the mining of Haiphong and other ports, air strikes against North Vietnam's northeast line of communications as well as passes and bridges at the Chinese border, and air and ground attacks on other targets throughout Vietnam. The September Group continued to debate which parts of the operation to include or exclude.
Threat-making accompanied operational planning. In a meeting with Republican senators on September 27, Nixon staged simultaneous ploys with the senators and Ambassador Dobrynin. With the senators he "planted a story," as he put it, that he hoped would be leaked to the press and "attract some attention in Hanoi." He told them he was considering a plan to blockade Haiphong harbor and invade North Vietnam. By prearrangement, Nixon phoned Kissinger, who was meeting with Dobrynin, and instructed him to tell the Soviet ambassador that Soviet cooperation on Vietnam was essential before a dangerously uncontrollable process unfolded.
Having temporarily mollified Laird and public opinion by announcing the withdrawal of 40,000 troops and holding open the accelerated Vietnamization option, several days later Nixon concluded that "the long route can't possibly work," because "the doves and the public are making it impossible to happen." He needed to go through with "the tough move"-Duck Hook.
A change of plans
But even as the Duck Hook plan moved forward, Nixon's resolve melted. At home, Laird and Rogers opposed military escalation; there were reservations about Duck Hook's potential effectiveness; public support for the war continued to decline; and there were signs of political slippage. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese negotiators remained steadfast; there was lowered enemy-initiated fighting in South Vietnam; and the Soviets were still not cooperating.
Two major anti-war actions were scheduled for October and November: the Moratorium on October 15, and the Mobilization Against the War on November 13-15. Nixon was concerned that they would erode confidence in his leadership and blunt Duck Hook's impact.
In an October 3 Nixon-Kissinger-Haldeman meeting, Kissinger presented stark choices, arguing that the only two courses were a "bug out" (accelerated Vietnamization) or escalation (Duck Hook), without which, he said, the president would be lost. Nixon believed that he was "lost anyway if that fails, which it well may."
Kissinger countered that the only question is "whether P can hold the government and the people together for the six months it will take." But that was precisely the rub for Nixon, since "it's obvious from the press and dove buildup," Haldeman noted, "that trouble is there whatever we do."
Nixon continued to "talk through alternatives" until October 11, but it was probably on October 6 that he decided against Duck Hook. His televised speech to the nation, scheduled for November 3 to announce the resumption of bombing, would have to be rewritten as an attack on his domestic and foreign opponents and as an appeal for the American public to support his Vietnam strategy.
Even after canceling Duck Hook, Nixon could continue to show resolve to the North Vietnamese on the battlefield. But "the Soviets would need a special reminder," he said in his memoir. That special reminder was the nuclear alert.
On October 6, Nixon initiated the alert by telephoning Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. As Haig wrote to Kissinger, the president asked Laird to order U.S. military forces to take a "series of increased alert measures designed to convey to the Soviets an increasing readiness by U.S. strategic forces."
In recent interviews Laird has confirmed that when Nixon ordered the alert measures, he was recalling Eisenhower's 1953 strategy for dealing with Korea by threatening China: "Nixon did it because of Soviet aid to North Vietnam-to alert them that he might do something. This was one of several examples of the Madman Theory. . . . He never used the term 'madman,' but he wanted adversaries to have the feeling that you could never put your finger on what he might do next. Nixon got this from Ike, who always felt that way."
Later in October, Kissinger reminded Nixon that in a forthcoming meeting with Dobrynin, "your basic purpose will be to keep the Soviets concerned about what we might do around November 1" and also to "make clear that . . . unless there is real progress in Vietnam, U.S.-Soviet relations will continue to be adversely affected."
If the Soviet ambassador raised the subject of "our current military measures," Kissinger suggested that Nixon should, in oblique diplomatic language, coolly reply that they were "normal exercises relating to our military readiness." In sum, Nixon and Kissinger were hoping that the "unusual" readiness test, or nuclear alert, would frighten the Soviets into helping force concessions out of the North Vietnamese.
The alert
The morning after Nixon's phone call, Laird's military aide, Col. Robert E. Pursley, called Kissinger aide Haig. Pursley told Haig he was sending a "plan for increased SAC alert." But this first paper disappointed Haig, who told Kissinger it was "merely a résumé of an already approved East Coast air defense exercise, which was not responsive to the president's instructions."
Haig asked Pursley for more impressive measures, telling him that the White House wanted military measures that the Soviets would consider "unusual and significant" but not "threatening." The White House also wanted actions that were not expensive, did not require allied approval, would "not degrade essential missions," and would have a "minimal chance of public exposure."
The next day, October 8, Pursley responded with a list of actions that were closer to Haig's criteria. The new plan called for communications silence; a stand-down of combat aircraft (cessation of training flights); increased reconnaissance operations around the Soviet periphery; increased ground alert rates for SAC bombers and tankers; the dispersal of SAC aircraft with nuclear weapons to designated military bases around the country; and the alerting/sending to sea of ballistic-missile submarines.
While the Joint Staff went to work on the details, Nixon took action. Kissinger passed Pursley's first list to Nixon and recommended radio silence, aircraft stand-down, increased surveillance of Soviet shipping, higher alert rates for SAC aircraft, and dispersal of SAC bombers "phased appropriately through the week." Kissinger did not approve increasing aerial reconnaissance operations near Soviet territory or raising alert levels of nuclear-armed submarines, thinking them too provocative or too hard to conceal (although measures involving submarines would come into play later). After Nixon signed off on these steps, Haig called Pursley and asked for a detailed plan and implementing instructions.
Deep secrecy was needed to avoid public exposure. Haig may also have seen secrecy as useful for protecting Soviet prestige-if the measures became known, Soviet leaders might have found it necessary to take countermeasures.
Given the emphasis on secrecy, only a small number of individuals in the U.S. government knew about the alert or why Nixon had ordered it. At the White House only Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and Haldeman knew. Apparently, even NSC staff experts on Vietnam and Soviet affairs were not told about the decision. At the Pentagon, only Laird, Pursley, and General Wheeler may have had the full picture. Secretary of State Rogers and Undersecretary Richardson may not have learned about the readiness measures until October 13-if then-and by then the alert was already beginning.
Although NSC-State Department relations were steadily deteriorating, Haig believed that Rogers and Richardson had to be told, although they "will most probably strongly object." Unless they were informed, "feedback will most certainly come immediately through State channels." In other words, some government, perhaps a NATO ally, was likely to notice heightened military activities and lodge a question with a U.S. ambassador. Haig further observed that "I do not believe Rogers or Richardson will forgive our failure to keep them informed," and that the White House would face criticism if the press learned that State had been shut out. Whether Rogers or Richardson learned about the readiness test remains unknown.
Laird quickly brought Wheeler into the planning, and on October 10, Wheeler notified the CINCs (the Commanders-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command, European Command, Pacific Command, Atlantic Command, Southern Command, Strike Command, Alaska Command, and North American Air Defense Command) that "higher authority" -President Nixon-had directed the Pentagon to "institute a series of actions" from October 13 to 25 to "test our military readiness in selected areas world-wide to respond to possible confrontation by the Soviet Union." According to Wheeler, "these actions should be discernible to the Soviets but not threatening in themselves."
Laird briefed Nixon and Kissinger on October 11. In the meantime, SAC began to prepare. At 8 a.m. on Monday, October 13, SAC canceled tactical training flights and put as many nuclear bombers and tankers on ground alert as possible, although forces assigned to Vietnam were excluded. Wheeler did not need to include intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) forces in the directive, because these were routinely on a high state of alert, ready for launch on warning. If Nixon wanted a "show of force" that Moscow would notice, SAC bombers were the best instruments for that purpose because their alert status could be visibly heightened.
Standing orders called for SAC to maintain 40 percent of each squadron-six aircraft for each 15-on ground alert ready to strike Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) targets if early warning sensors detected a missile or bomber attack. But shortages of bomber crews-due mainly to Vietnam War commitments-had forced SAC to reduce the number of bomber and tanker "sorties" on alert. Actual ground alert bomber and tanker forces were substantially below SIOP requirements. Had it been a real emergency, SAC would have needed four to six hours to staff the degraded alert sorties. Given the personnel shortage, canceling flight training was essential to any effort to increase the numbers of aircraft on ground alert.
SAC increased forces on ground alert to 144 B-52s, 32 B-58s, and 189 KC-135s-still below the 40 percent SIOP requirement, but close enough. Haig believed that an increase in the ground alert rate could be reached "without undo costs and risks," but General Wheeler deflected White House pressure on SAC. To ensure that Moscow noticed the readiness test, though, SAC tried to bring more nuclear-armed aircraft into it.
Other U.S.-based commands with nuclear-capable air forces expanded the scope of the test. On October 15, Strike Command ordered Tactical Air Command (TAC) to begin a stand-down. Pilots at TAC bases around the country stopped flying nuclear-capable aircraft-F-105 Thunderchiefs and F-4 Phantoms-as well as C-130s used for tactical airlift operations. During the stand-down, TAC cancelled 4,216 scheduled sorties, using the spare time to raise the combat-ready status of aircraft. The nuclear-capable air defense forces of the Alaskan and Continental Air Defense Commands also joined in the stand-down.
By October 15, the U.S. European Command was participating in the readiness test. On order from Commander-in-Chief Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, U.S. air forces tightened security around European bases and stood down training flights. United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) alone had a formidable force of nuclear-armed and nuclear-capable tactical aircraft, including F-4 Phantoms. By October 19, those forces had obtained an average operational readiness rate of 94 percent. In addition, Goodpaster ordered the Sixth Fleet to enact controls over communications, but otherwise keep ship movements on schedule. Pacific Command received orders to instruct component forces to join the test. For example, on October 15, activities by South Korea-based units of the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) were standing down training flights and increasing numbers of aircraft slated for "SIOP alert."
But why?
The commanders who presided over the readiness test could only puzzle why the White House had requested the exercise. When SAC Commander-in-Chief Bruce Holloway called the Pentagon for more information, for example, he learned nothing. Correctly believing that Henry Kissinger was involved in the operation, senior officers at SAC headquarters speculated over a possible connection to the Vietnam negotiations in Paris and noted the return of U.S. negotiators to Washington for consultation as well as Nixon's announcement that he would make a major address on Vietnam on November 3.
Lack of knowledge about the alert's purpose made it difficult for operational planners at SAC, among other commands, to respond to a Joint Chiefs Staff's request for additional suggestions for action; they could only wonder whether their proposals were even relevant.
To ensure the operational secrecy the White House wanted, the Pentagon imposed strict requirements on the services. Initially, and on the assumption that something would leak to the public, the guidance authorized public affairs specialists to respond to media queries with the flat statement that "we are merely testing current readiness posture." But the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs weighed in with more rigorous guidance prohibiting any public announcement of the exercise and forbidding any response to questions unless specifically permitted. The Pentagon's public affairs officers soon relaxed the latter restriction by allowing officials to answer queries with the statement: "We do not comment on readiness tests." But no questions arose.
Ordinarily, higher alert postures would be accompanied by messages indicating a change in Defense Readiness Condition or DEFCON status. But, consistent with secrecy, no increase was ordered.
High Heels
General Goodpaster, wearing two hats as Commander in Chief of European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, believed he should inform NATO about the USAFE stand-down in progress, not least because under NATO procedures, ordering a stand-down unilaterally would raise questions from allies and pose "serious problems." Haig believed the contrary-that telling NATO anything would risk leaks and jeopardize operational secrecy.
Haig told Kissinger on October 14 that Laird was "reluctant" to proceed further. In addition to general concerns about the risks, Laird had another objection: The readiness test would interfere with an already scheduled secret nuclear command post exercise, "High Heels." An annual exercise begun in the early 1960s, High Heels involved the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CINCs, and the State Department, among other agencies, around the world. The "High Heels 69" scenario posited a series of aggressive Soviet moves leading to a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States and the "exercise" of U.S. nuclear war plans in retaliation.
The Joint Staff and some of the CINCs believed that carrying out and supervising such a complex nuclear exercise while implementing readiness measures would overload communications and decision-making systems. Another concern was that the intelligence agencies would have difficulty differentiating between Soviet reactions to the alert measures and to High Heels.
The proposal for increased surveillance of Soviet ships en route to North Vietnam was another area of contention. Wheeler wanted to hold that measure in abeyance because of its expense and its ramifications-the dangers of an incident and the likelihood of Soviet charges of interference with shipping. The U.S. Navy, among other military and intelligence agencies, routinely monitored Soviet shipping to Vietnam; Wheeler may have felt that was enough. Haig, however, suggested that Kissinger should "encourage" Laird to take action on surveillance.
On High Heels and NATO consultations, among other areas of divergence, Haig told Kissinger that Laird's objections were "not overriding." Nevertheless, Laird was a powerful figure in the government, which made it necessary for Kissinger to get the president's support.
Kissinger met with Laird and Chairman Wheeler to adjust High Heels and the alert measures so as to ensure their implementation. Haig believed that "it was necessary to have the measures completed sufficiently before 3 November for the president to ascertain beyond a doubt whether or not the signals have been effective." In other words, before Nixon finished work on his speech, he had to know whether the alert measures had had an impact on Moscow's Vietnam policy.
No record of the discussion with Laird and Wheeler is available, but Laird agreed to modify High Heels so that it would not complicate the readiness test. For the first time, the Pentagon limited High Heels to the "Washington area alone," leaving the CINCs free to concentrate on the readiness test. As for the problem of NATO consultations, Haig recommended that Goodpaster tell any inquisitive allies that the stand-down was an "additional aspect of the High Heels operation." Whether Goodpaster received such instructions or whether NATO officials asked about the USAFE stand-down remains unknown.
At the meeting with Kissinger, Wheeler received instructions about the alert's duration: On October 14 he notified the CINCs that the nuclear alert would last until the first minute of October 30. SAC forces would be on heightened ground alert for more than three weeks. Exactly how long the alert would last would depend on the timing of Soviet reactions. At some point on or after October 10, it had been decided-who made the decision is unknown-that the activities would "continue until our intelligence indicates that the Soviets have become aware of the increased readiness." To make such a decision possible, Wheeler established a special intelligence watch to look for information suggesting that Moscow was aware of the U.S. alert.
Searching for the Soviet reaction
The Pentagon and the White House approved new air, ground, and sea-based readiness measures for implementation in Europe, the Near East, East Asia and the Pacific, and North America. Wheeler also allowed a temporary relaxation of the stand-down to meet air force concerns about flight training. Meanwhile, Kissinger hoped that Dobrynin's request for a meeting meant that the alert was having an effect on Moscow, but the Soviets remained unresponsive to Nixon's pressure.
Since October 10, when the CINCs received the first message on the readiness posture, they had been sending Wheeler suggestions for additional military actions. Within a few days, the Joint Staff had sifted through and digested the advice, and on October 17 Wheeler forwarded new instructions to the CINCs designed to signal, with mounting intensity, increased U.S. readiness.
Significant details of Wheeler's instructions, especially those concerning nuclear weapons, remain classified. Nevertheless, their clear purpose was to intensify the readiness test, making it even more apparent to Soviet intelligence. Strike Command received orders for Middle East Force to deploy destroyers and destroyer escorts to the Gulf of Aden to conduct multiple ship exercises, while the Continental Air Defense Command was to keep its forces on alert and join the Alaskan Command in increasing air interceptor deployments. Wheeler instructed Atlantic Command to order the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Newport News, and a hunter-killer anti-submarine warfare group led by the carrier Yorktown, to rendezvous in the North Atlantic.
Two other aircraft carriers, the Forrestal and the Franklin D. Roosevelt, were to leave ports in Virginia and Florida respectively and steam at high speed to points in the Western Atlantic. The Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Command would also stand down air patrol activities in the North Atlantic as well as flight training between October 25 and 30. U.S. Army Europe increased surveillance and intelligence gathering at the East-West German border. U.S. Army Europe also increased surveillance of the Soviet Military Liaison Mission, which monitored U.S. forces in West Germany.
Adm. John McCain, the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command , revived the proposal for the surveillance of Soviet ships en route to North Vietnam. Following McCain's suggestion, Wheeler directed that as of October 21 Pacific Command was to monitor those Soviet ships as well as any en route to the Bering Sea. In addition, Wheeler approved another McCain suggestion: to increase the number of Polaris missile submarines on patrol in the Pacific.
On October 17, Wheeler gave SAC new instructions drawing on suggestions from General Holloway, and relaxed the stand-down to ease the burden it had imposed on flight training. When SAC resumed the stand-down on October 25, it was to place additional aircraft in the "highest state of maintenance readiness." They would be "EWO [Emergency War Order] Configured"-that is, equipped with nuclear weapons but not on ground-alert status or assigned with crews with combat mission folders (target lists) on board. Maintenance readiness was a less demanding alternative to ground alert; it raised SAC's readiness posture without further straining the crew-shortage problem, thus tacitly meeting White House interest in a larger-scale nuclear alert.
Wheeler also approved Holloway's recommendation for a "Show of Force" by SAC nuclear bombers, which involved an airborne-alert exercise of the Selective Employment of Air and Ground Alert (SEAGA) system. Wheeler ordered "Giant Lance," a SEAGA "Show of Force" operation, to begin late in the day on October 26. SAC bombers and tankers would fly the "Eielson East orbit," referring to Eielson air base in east-central Alaska (south of Fairbanks). The Pentagon rejected Kissinger's proposal to send a carrier task force farther north into the Tonkin Gulf.
On October 17, Dobyrnin requested a meeting with Nixon, which Kissinger interpreted as meaning that the test was already having an impact on Moscow. Yet the Nixon-Dobrynin meeting on October 20 was inconclusive. Ignoring Nixon's threatening language, the Soviet ambassador offered nothing on Vietnam, but sought to defuse tensions through "reverse linkage"-by making a positive response to an earlier U.S. proposal to begin Strategic Arms Limitation or SALT Talks.
The Pentagon eagerly scoured reports for Soviet reactions to the alert. Moscow noticed the stepped-up naval activities in the Gulf of Aden; Soviet ships in the area reversed course and headed toward the Gulf. The Pentagon decided to continue the Gulf activities but kept assessing Soviet naval actions.
No doubt the Chinese and the North Koreans noticed U.S. naval operations in the Sea of Japan, but only the Soviets reacted to them. On October 21, several Soviet Badger medium bombers flew in the vicinity of the U.S.S. Constellation task group, which was monitoring Soviet shipping in the Sea of Japan. Probably on a reconnaissance mission, the Badgers flew within a mile of the Connie's port bow right after U.S. fighter aircraft intercepted them. Overflights of U.S. naval activity were routine, so this was not necessarily a reaction to the readiness test as such, but Moscow may have wondered why the task force was lingering in the Sea of Japan. U.S. military intelligence could not tell, however, whether the Soviets saw the naval operations in the Sea of Japan and the Gulf of Aden, much less any of the readiness test, as part of a larger pattern.
Giant Lance
In keeping with his orders from General Wheeler, the Commander in Chief of Strategic Air Command ordered his commanders to generate additional bomber and tanker aircraft, over and above those on ground alert, to the "highest state of maintenance readiness." The nuclear-armed aircraft would have "adequate supervision" and undergo daily inspection, with tires rotated and engines and other systems checked at regular intervals. This action was to begin no later than 8:00 a.m. local time on October 25 and would last "through the first week of November and possibly longer."
Also to increase the intensity of the readiness test, the SAC commander instructed the commanders of the 22nd and 92nd Strategic Wings to implement the "Show of Force" to begin on October 26. The bomber wing commanders were told that the airborne alert would not be accompanied by a declaration of DefCon 3, which was the usual procedure, and that it could continue into early November.
The "maintenance generation" that began on October 25 assured that a large portion of SAC's non-alert bomber and tanker force-about 65 percent-was loaded with four or more bombs and missiles. At about 8 a.m., on October 27, the 22nd and 92nd Wings began flying six nuclear-armed bomber aircraft continuously "over the frozen terrain of the Arctic." It wouldn't take long for Soviet early warning systems to detect this activity.
While SAC was implementing Giant Lance and the other alert activities continued, U.S. military intelligence searched for signs of Soviet reactions. The Pentagon kept monitoring specific actions, such as stepped-up activities at the East-West German border or a stand-down of air patrol operations in the North Atlantic, but it found no evidence that Moscow had noticed. On October 28, Acting Joint Chiefs Chairman William Westmoreland told Laird there had been no specific Soviet reactions to measures in the European and Atlantic areas. He also reminded Laird that the test would end on October 30 as previously scheduled. The next day, Westmoreland instructed the CINCs to end test activities at the first minute of October 30 GMT. Thus, after 17 days of ground alert, stand-downs, surveillance, heightened naval activity, and airborne alert, the test ended on schedule.
Years later, Defense Secretary Laird recalled that the readiness test ended when U.S. intelligence picked up Soviet communications expressing "concern" about the alert measures. That would have been consistent with White House instructions to end the test when the Soviets had reacted, but so far no documents confirm Laird's account. Perhaps new intelligence became available after Westmoreland wrote to Laird. In any event, it appears that when Westmoreland decided to end the test, the elaborate alert measures had not elicited any discernible Soviet reaction.
Post-mortems
While military officers pondered the experience of the readiness test and the CINCs responded to requests for evaluation, Nixon and Kissinger may have puzzled over its impact. They had hoped that military pressures would jar the Soviets enough to facilitate a Vietnam "breakthrough," but that proved illusory. Conversations that Dobrynin held with Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson a few days after the test ended showed that Moscow was not about to take the kind of steps on Vietnam that Washington would regard as helpful.
To Thompson, Dobrynin frankly emphasized Soviet antipathy toward such U.S. pressures as Nixon's earlier visit to Romania, linkage on Vietnam, and statements of neutrality in the Sino-Soviet conflict. He did not bring up U.S. military moves: Either he did not know of them, was not free to mention them, or did not consider them significant compared to other pressures. In any event, Dobrynin insisted that pressure would not elicit Soviet assistance on Vietnam: "The reaction in the Kremlin to tactics of this kind would always be the opposite of what [Washington] desired."
Whether the nuclear alert even had an impact on Moscow's Vietnam calculations is worth some speculation. As historian Roger Dingman has put it, "Nuclear weapons are slippery tools of statecraft." Nixon and Kissinger could not be certain that the Soviets had read their message as intended-that is, if they had even seen the readiness test's larger pattern, although they presumably did. The simultaneity of the readiness measures and Nixon's October 20 "bad cop" message to Dobrynin might have appeared to Moscow as just a coincidence.
If the Soviet leadership saw a connection, however, it very likely saw the readiness test as a bluff. As one Soviet official said many years later about an October 1973 alert, "Mr. Nixon used to exaggerate his intentions regularly. He used alerts and leaks to do this."
To the Soviets, Nixon's October 1969 alert must have paled in comparison to the nuclear alert staged during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when SAC raised readiness levels to DEFCON 2-with 145 missiles and 1,436 bombers on high alert, all ready to strike targets in the Soviet bloc. Kennedy's coercive nuclear diplomacy combined with a blockade of Cuba helped force a change in Soviet conduct. Although Nixon may have gotten Moscow's attention in October 1969, his avoidance of strongly threatening measures possibly reduced the readiness test's impact.
How the Soviet high command interpreted the October 1969 alert may be unknowable until Russian documentation becomes available. That the alert was pitched at a level that Moscow would not regard as threatening reduced the possibility of an overreaction. And the alert was at a somewhat lower level of intensity than the White House may have preferred, owing to Wheeler's opposition to bomber dispersal. Whether Nixon and Kissinger even saw that as a problem, however, is also imponderable.
Nixon had no diplomatic coup to announce on November 3. All he could do was explain his past efforts for peace, attack anti-war opponents, criticize Hanoi's obstructions, threaten "strong and effective measures," and summon the "Silent Majority" to rally behind him. Two days after Nixon delivered his speech, Dobrynin expressed Moscow's derision to Llewellyn Thompson, remarking that he did "not understand why there had been such a big build-up beforehand."
The failure to jar Moscow did not dampen Nixon's interest in the Madman Theory. Nixon and his advisers continued to believe that threats of force, military signaling, and alerts intimating nuclear threats were valid and necessary tools of diplomacy. The deployment of naval strike forces in the eastern Mediterranean during the September 1970 crisis over Jordan, and into the Indian Ocean during the 1971 South Asian war, and the raising of alert levels of military forces during the October War in 1973, demonstrated Kissinger's willingness to use threats of force to deter Soviet military intervention in regional conflicts (even if the Soviets had no plans to intervene).
Despite the scale and scope of the readiness test, Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig made only indirect and cryptic references to it in their memoirs. Perhaps they thought it was too sensitive or wondered whether their hastily improvised effort would withstand public scrutiny. Perhaps Nixon and Kissinger did not care to revisit the desperate and wishful thinking that encouraged them to think that the pressure of nuclear alerts would induce Moscow to give greater assistance on the Vietnam problem. Nevertheless, the readiness test demonstrated their conviction that a show of force was essential to salvage U.S. Vietnam policy and the credibility of American power.
William Burr is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and director of the U.S. nuclear history documentation project. Jeffrey Kimball is a professor of history at Miami University and the author of Nixon's Vietnam War (1998). A longer, fully documented version of this article appears in the January 2003 issue of Cold War History (www.frankcass.com/jnls/index.htm).
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Games Nations Play
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/opinion/03KRUG.html
What game does the Bush administration think it's playing in Korea?
That's not a rhetorical question. During the cold war, the U.S. government employed experts in game theory to analyze strategies of nuclear deterrence. Men with Ph.D.'s in economics, like Daniel Ellsberg, wrote background papers with titles like "The Theory and Practice of Blackmail." The intellectual quality of these analyses was impressive, but their main conclusion was simple: Deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior.
I know, it sounds obvious. Yet the Bush administration's Korea policy has systematically violated that simple principle.
Let's be clear: North Korea's rulers are as nasty as they come. But unless we have a plan to overthrow those rulers, we should ask ourselves what incentives we're giving them.
So put yourself in Kim Jong Il's shoes. The Bush administration has denounced you. It broke off negotiations as soon as it came into office. Last year, though you were no nastier than you had been the year before, George W. Bush declared you part of the "axis of evil." A few months later Mr. Bush called you a "pygmy," saying: "I loathe Kim Jong Il - I've got a visceral reaction to this guy. . . . They tell me, well we may not need to move too fast, because the financial burdens on people will be so immense if this guy were to topple - I just don't buy that."
Moreover, there's every reason to take Mr. Bush's viscera seriously. Under his doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. can attack countries it thinks might support terrorism, whether or not they have actually done so. And who decides whether we attack? Here's what Mr. Bush says: "You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you." L'état, c'est moi.
So Mr. Bush thinks you're a bad guy - and that makes you a potential target, no matter what you do.
On the other hand, Mr. Bush hasn't gone after you yet, though you are much closer to developing weapons of mass destruction than Iraq. (You probably already have a couple.) And you ask yourself, why is Saddam Hussein first in line? He's no more a supporter of terrorism than you are: the Bush administration hasn't produced any evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Maybe the administration covets Iraq's oil reserves; but it's also notable that of the three members of the axis of evil, Iraq has by far the weakest military.
So you might be tempted to conclude that the Bush administration is big on denouncing evildoers, but that it can be deterred from actually attacking countries it denounces if it expects them to put up a serious fight. What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? Talk trash but carry a small stick?
Your own experience seems to confirm that conclusion. Last summer you were caught enriching uranium, which violates the spirit of your 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration. But the Bush administration, though ready to invade Iraq at the slightest hint of a nuclear weapons program, tried to play down the story, and its response - cutting off shipments of fuel oil - was no more than a rap on the knuckles. In fact, even now the Bush administration hasn't done what its predecessor did in 1994: send troops to the region and prepare for a military confrontation.
So here's how it probably looks from Pyongyang:
The Bush administration says you're evil. It won't offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won't even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.
The incentives for North Korea are clear. There's no point in playing nice - it will bring neither aid nor security. It needn't worry about American efforts to isolate it economically - North Korea hardly has any trade except with China, and China isn't cooperating. The best self-preservation strategy for Mr. Kim is to be dangerous. So while America is busy with Iraq, the North Koreans should cook up some plutonium and build themselves some bombs.
Again: What game does the Bush administration think it's playing?
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
The New Afghanistan: Year 2
By Robert Oakley
Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3922-2003Jan2?language=printer
A year after the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan's future, there is considerable ground for optimism about that country. Living conditions are still harsh for many people, and episodic violence continues. But at the same time substantial progress has been made in Afghanistan, thanks to patient, persistent efforts both inside and outside the country.
With leadership from the United States, al Qaeda forces and the Taliban were defeated, relief was provided for the population and some 2 million returning refugees, and a start was made on developing sustainable Afghan self-governance. Barring a reversal by either the Afghans or their international supporters, the stage is set for much greater progress over the next year, although serious problems will remain. But if U.S. leadership falters, so will other international efforts, with potentially disastrous consequences not only for the Afghan government, but also for the campaign against al Qaeda and the future of neighboring Pakistan.
The United States had a wise initial strategy for avoiding the sort of fatal mistakes the Soviets made in Afghanistan in the 1980s. By establishing a broad political coalition, including Muslim countries, and using small Special Forces teams to fight alongside Afghans against al Qaeda and hard-core Taliban, the United States avoided being seen as occupying Afghanistan or going to war against Islam. This was reinforced by large-scale relief for the destitute population and the political empowerment of Afghans by the Bonn Conference and the country's loya jirga, or national assembly. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Japan and the European Union set up the Afghan Reconstruction Steering Group, which includes the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and is becoming increasingly effective. The United States, France and Britain have begun a multi-year program to train a new Afghan national army. Germany has done the same for the police, with U.S. help. The threat from al Qaeda and the Taliban has been reduced to manageable levels in much of the country, and the International Security Assistance Force has helped establish the security that is vital for Kabul. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Afghanistan and Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi have won the confidence of all parties with low-key advice and coordination for donors and the new government.
Starting from zero a year ago, the administration of President Hamid Karzai has achieved many attributes of a responsible government. It has a long-term national development framework and budget, worked out with the World Bank, the United Nations, the United States and other donors, and is carefully applying it to ensure that donor proposals meet Afghan realities. A central bank, fiscal discipline and a new national currency have been established. Construction of the large-scale Ring Road program has begun; large-scale community development projects will soon follow smaller efforts. An Afghan Defense Commission (including senior "warlords") has reached agreement on the size, makeup and training of the new army and the demobilization of local militias. This will take time but will ultimately be the Afghans' own solution to their endemic security problems. Prudence has proven to be better than prematurely deploying unready international peacekeepers (with inadequate resources) to remote areas. The violence that would have followed such deployments, involving al Qaeda, the Taliban and warlords, would have seriously disrupted both the war against terrorism and the process of gradually stabilizing the country.
As it stands today, the process of building the new government at the center appears to have readied it for the next decisive step: becoming effectively operational in the countryside.
For this to succeed, the flow of international assistance, which has recently accelerated, must continue. This includes the Bush administration and Congress actually funding the four-year, $3.3 billion Afghanistan Freedom Support Act, as well as training the country's army -- actions vital both for the badly needed resources and for the strong signal to all parties of a long-term U.S. commitment. It will also require that international donors and nongovernmental organizations reorient their programs outside of Kabul in order to enhance the operations of the government ministries rather than the prestige of donors and regional power centers.
Obviously, all this cannot happen without security. The United States and President Karzai have agreed on a new plan to shift the priority of coalition efforts from combat to stability operations for most of Afghanistan during the next year, creating eight or more joint regional teams with civil and military membership, including coalition forces and small Afghan army contingents. These teams will have enough capability -- with on-call backup -- to provide increased security for reconstruction by the Afghan government and international donors.
The achievements of the first year augur well for the long-term future of Afghanistan. But should the United States falter in its leading role, so would the coalition. This would create dissension within the Afghan government and with the provinces, reigniting ethnic and regional rifts. Worse, it would reinvigorate al Qaeda and the Taliban, which could shift back from Pakistan for a major assault in Afghanistan. Backing away would also have a devastating effect on efforts by Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to uproot al Qaeda and the Taliban, neutralize their supporters and bring political, economic and social reform to that country. And it could have serious negative repercussions on Kashmir and India-Pakistan relations. Given the potential that still exists for a political-religious explosion in Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons, and the prospect for increased tensions stemming from Iraq, this could have incalculable consequences for the entire region and the United States.
The writer is a former ambassador to Pakistan and a visiting fellow at the National Defense University.
-------- arms sales
Israel asked to stop arms sales to China
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 3, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030103-40829176.htm
The Bush administration has asked Israel to halt arms sales and technology transfers to China in a bid to reduce Beijing's growing military threat to Taiwan, U.S. officials said yesterday.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the appeal was made during regular consultations between U.S. and Israeli officials.
"During these consultations, the United States has made very clear the strategic implications for U.S. security interests, of Israel's defense trade and transfer of U.S.-made equipment and advanced defense technologies to China," Mr. Boucher told reporters.
Disclosures yesterday about U.S. concerns over Israeli arms sales to China followed U.S. intelligence reports in July that Israel sold China several anti-radar drone missiles known as Harpys.
The Harpy drones - a propeller-powered cruise missile that homes in on radar signals - were spotted in June with Chinese military forces near Taiwan, U.S. intelligence officials said. The arms transfer was first reported by The Washington Times on July 2.
Mr. Boucher said the appeals to Israel on its arms sales to China are based on strategic concerns and not related to "commercial considerations," as Israeli defense officials told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, which first reported the U.S. worries.
The newspaper quoted the officials as saying Israel has suspended all contacts for exports of arms and security equipment to China in response to the U.S. requests, made last month.
U.S. companies have been barred from selling China military goods since the 1989 massacre of protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
In a related development, the State Department has accused two U.S. aerospace companies of illegally giving China missile technology.
A letter sent to Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Satellite Systems accuses the two companies of 123 technology transfer violations related to two Chinese rocket failures in 1995 and 1996 attempts to boost U.S.-made satellites into space.
"The number and the substance of the charges reflect the seriousness of the violations," Mr. Boucher said. "Any assistance to improve the launch vehicle is clearly prohibited by the U.S.-China bilateral agreement on technology safeguards."
U.S. officials have said the technology provided by the companies improved the reliability of Chinese space launchers, which are the same systems used to launch Chinese nuclear warheads.
Regarding the Israel-China cooperation, Mr. Boucher would not say what specific items or technology Israel had supplied to China. But he mentioned the aborted sale to Beijing in 2000 of Israeli Phalcon airborne warning and control aircraft.
"The United States and Israel share many strategic interests, and just as we are sensitive to Israel's strategic interest, we believe that Israel should be and is sensitive to ours," Mr. Boucher said.
The concerns deal with "advanced technologies that might be introduced in a region," Mr. Boucher said, without providing further details.
The spokesman said the consultations have focused on "the need for any suppliers of weaponry to be considerate and concerned about this strategic situation and region that's of great sensitivity and importance to us."
Asked to specify U.S. strategic concerns, Mr. Boucher said: "I don't think I can explain the entire strategic situation in Asia, but certainly the situation in the Taiwan Straits has been the primary concern over some of these sales."
Israeli government officials were surprised by the administration's appeal but agreed to comply in order not to undermine billions in U.S. aid, the Associated Press reported.
"Everyone learned from the Phalcon issue," an Israeli official said. "No one wants things like that to happen again."
An Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman said yesterday that the security ties between Israel and China "will continue in an orderly way."
"Periodically, concrete issues arise that require more discussion between ourselves and China and between ourselves and the U.S., and these talks influence specific subjects," the spokesman said.
A Bush administration official said the demand that Israel stop selling military goods and technology to China is part of a new push to halt the spread of arms to unstable regions, including Taiwan.
The discovery of the Harpy drones deployed near Taiwan was a key item of discussion with the Israelis in talks, the official said.
Israel also announced last year that it was selling China several commercial communications satellites, known as Amos, which U.S. officials fear that the Chinese military could use.
It is not known whether the satellite deal will be halted under the Israeli freeze.
The Amos deal was concluded between Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), which lost out in the Phalcon sale, and China's Ho ng Kong Space Technologies. IAI also makes Harpy drones.
The first Amos satellites, designated HKSAT-1 and HKSAT-2, are to be delivered to China for launch on a Chinese booster in the coming months.
Mark Regev, an Israeli Embassy spokesman, said Israel supports U.S. strategic trade controls.
"Clearly, Israel is committed to the United States' concerns when it comes to weapons deals or technology deals with third countries," Mr. Regev said. "Israel will not do anything to negatively impact U.S. national security. We take that commitment very seriously."
The U.S. government has accused Israel in the past of passing to China sensitive U.S. military technology, including know-how related to Patriot air-defense missiles and F-16 jet fighters.
According to defense analyst Richard Fisher, China's new J-10 jet fighter "contains technology from the U.S. F-16 that was transferred from Israel via the Lavi," a since-canceled project for an improved Israeli-made F-16.
"That Israeli design was then transferred in parts to China to help design the J-10," said Mr. Fisher, a private-sector specialist on the Chinese military.
Both Israel and China escaped sanctions from the U.S. government for the improper transfer of U.S. weapons technology to China.
China has produced 10 J-10s and recently moved the first batch of fighters to an airfield in southern China, according to Chinese press reports.
Recent photographs taken from U.S. reconnaissance planes over the South China Sea showed Chinese interceptor aircraft armed with Israeli-made Python-3 air-to-air missiles.
• Abraham Rabinovich contributed to this report from Jerusalem.
-------- asia
US to join Taiwan wargames, first after 1979 [?]
Jang Group of Newspapers (Pakistan),
Friday January 03, 2003 -- Shawwal 29, 1423 A.H.
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jan2003-daily/03-01-2003/world/w1.htm
TAIPEI: The United States will this year participate in Taiwan's biggest annual military exercises for the first time since 1979, Taiwanese authories said Thursday, in a move expected to anger China.
Taiwan Vice Defense Minister Chen Chao-min confirmed a media report that the US military personnel would take part in the Han Kuang (Han Glory) 19 exercise. "Taiwan-US military exchanges are conducted in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act, and we are reinforcing (the military exchanges) to ensure the best interests of the country," Chen said.
"Hopefully through the exchanges we can better protect security in the Taiwan Strait and stability in the Asia-Pacific region." Chen did not provide details as to exactly what the US involvement would be but the Taipei-based China Times reported Thursday that no American troops would be involved.
Instead the United States would form an "expatriate evacuation team" that was restricted to Taiwan's military command centre. The American group would advise Taiwan's military with data regarding the strength of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) and its possible military tactics in invading Taiwan.
"They will stay in the Hengshan military command until the end of the exercise," the paper said. Sitting in a tunnel at Taipei's Tachih district, Hengshan military command gives orders for Taiwan's routine military operations and various wargames. In previous Han Kuang drills, a mock war across the Taiwan Strait has been waged, with Taiwan trying to resist Chinese attacks for at least two weeks while awaiting international intervention.
The United States pulled its last troops out of Taiwan in 1978 ahead of Washington switching its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing a year later. China opposes any foreign military exchanges with Taiwan, which it has regarded as part of its territory since they split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan should the island declare formal independence. Beijing rattled the nerves of Taiwan and the world when the PLA lobbed ballistic missiles into the shipping lanes off Taiwan in 1995-1996 in a bid to scare Taiwan voters not to vote for President Lee Teng-hui who was seeking another four-year term.
The missile crisis did not end until the United States sent two battle carrier groups to waters near Taiwan in an apparent warning to Beijing. The date of this year's Han Kuang exercises has not been set but they are usually held around the middle of the year.
-------- business
Boeing Rejects Complaints on Leaks to China
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
January 3, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/international/asia/03EXPO.html?ei=1&en=d8f3b26180b7cdfb&ex=1042614667&pagewanted=print&position=top
WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 - The Boeing Company today rejected State Department complaints that it failed to guard against technology leaks to China, calling security concerns a priority for the company and promising negotiations to resolve the matter.
Randy Brinkley, president of the company's satellite systems unit, said Boeing had spent millions of dollars increasing staff and upgrading procedures to ensure that it abides by laws on sharing technology with foreign customers.
The State Department said yesterday that it was pursuing new legal action over technology-sharing incidents involving satellite and rocket data with China dating back to the mid-1990's. The department threatened Boeing with more than $60 million in penalties as well as export restrictions that could be even more costly to the company.
Boeing was evaluating the potential cost of restrictions on its overseas sales, said Dan Beck, a company spokesman.
"I can't talk about the scope of what that would mean, but it would seriously hamper our ability to do our business overseas," Mr. Beck said.
It was not clear whether the penalties would include nonmilitary exports like commercial aircraft, he said. In 2001, Boeing had about $20 billion in overseas sales, including $1.5 billion in China.
The complaints against Boeing date to 1995 and involve technical help for the Chinese in determining the causes of failed rocket launches for commercial satellites, said Louis Fintor, a State Department spokesman.
The original accusations involved three companies, including Boeing Satellite Systems and Hughes Electronics Corporation. Boeing acquired Hughes's space-launch division in 2000. The third company, Loral Space and Communications, negotiated a settlement over similar accusations by agreeing to pay a $14 million fine and spend $6 million on steps to prevent such technology transfers in the future, Mr. Fintor said.
"Unlike Loral, Hughes and Boeing have both failed to recognize the seriousness of the violations and have been unprepared to take steps to resolve the matter and to ensure no recurrence of violations in the future," he said.
The State Department complaint said that Hughes and Boeing committed 123 violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman.
"The number and the substance of the charges reflect the seriousness of the violations," Mr. Boucher said.
Boeing stock rose today to $33.88 per share, from $32.99.
The Justice Department, after reviewing the matter, decided last year against pursuing criminal charges against any of the three companies involved. The new State Department complaint will be handled as a noncriminal matter by an administrative law judge.
-------- iraq
Leaflets Point Iraqis to Anti-Hussein Broadcasts
Reuters
Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3885-2003Jan2?language=printer
Warplanes taking part in U.S.-British patrols dropped 480,000 leaflets on two cities in the "no-fly" zone over southern Iraq yesterday, pressing Iraqi troops and citizens to listen to U.S. Special Forces radio broadcasts to the area, the U.S. military said.
Leaflets providing frequencies of broadcasts criticizing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and providing information on U.N. arms inspections in Iraq were dropped over the cities of Basra and Nasiriyah, the U.S. Central Command said in a statement.
It was the 12th such mass drop of leaflets, including many warning the Iraqi military to stop targeting U.S. and British warplanes, in the last three months.
Western military aircraft have increased attacks on Iraqi air defenses in the "no-fly" zones of northern and southern Iraq with bombs and missiles in recent months in response to what the U.S. military says are attempts to shoot down its jets.
The U.S. Central Command said last month that modified C-130 cargo planes were being used to broadcast messages to the Iraqi people. More recently, the broadcasts have been directed to the area by Special Operations ground stations outside Iraq.
"Do not let Saddam tarnish the reputation of soldiers any longer. Saddam uses the military to persecute those who don't agree with his unjust agenda," the Central Command quoted one such broadcast yesterday.
----
Iraqi railroad labs
Inside the Ring Notes from the Pentagon,
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
January 3, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030103-9789688.htm
Defense officials tell us Iraq is suspected of converting railroad cars into mobile weapons laboratories as a way to circumvent U.N. arms inspections.
The intelligence reports were distributed within the U.S. government by a Pentagon intelligence service, but the CIA was skeptical.
U.N. inspectors have not conducted any searches of Iraqi rail facilities for such labs, which could be disguised as mobile medical facilities.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters in July that Iraq had deployed biological weapons labs in trailers. U.N. arms inspectors have not reported finding any of those mobile labs.
-------- israel / palestine
$15 billion asked of U.S.
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 3, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030103-83943580.htm
JERUSALEM - Israel is putting the final touches on a $15 billion special aid request to the United States to bolster an economy under pressure from the Palestinian uprising and preparations for any attack by Iraq.
Israeli treasury officials, who have met with aides to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, are preparing to present the package to Bush administration officials in the coming weeks.
The package, comprising about $5 billion in new military aid and $10 billion in loan guarantees, would be spread out over a three- to five-year period. It would be in addition to nearly $3 billion that Israel receives from the United States each year.
"Fighting terrorism is not only about security, it's about the economy," said Finance Ministry Director General Ohad Marani.
"It's very difficult funding the extra needs of defense. The burden is made more difficult because the economy has shrunk. We're asking the Americans to share part of the burden," Mr. Marani said.
Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, receives about $2.1 billion annually in military aid and $600 million in civilian aid.
A State Department official declined to comment on Israel's supplemental aid request but reiterated long-standing U.S. support for the Jewish state.
The official said the United States is committed "to maintaining and enhancing Israel's security and qualitative edge over any combination of adversaries."
The Palestinian uprising is straining Israel's budget by inflating military expenditures while putting the economy in recession. That, in turn, has forced the government to cut spending in line with lower tax receipts.
The Israeli economy is expected to shrink 1 percent this year, compared with the 4 percent annual growth that analysts believe should be within the country's ability.
Analysts say the timing of the request as war clouds gather in the Persian Gulf isn't coincidental.
Israel hopes to receive the aid as a reward for good behavior during a war in which it may be asked once again to restrain itself even if it absorbs missile strikes from Iraq.
"The unspoken word is that it is going to be part of an inducement package for Israel to stay on the sidelines," said Scott Lasensky, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"It's a positive inducement. It's like political risk insurance. Companies buy it and so do countries," he said.
Israeli officials believe it is unlikely that a new aid package would be approved in Washington before a campaign to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, for fear of alienating Arab countries whose political support will be crucial in the effort.
The aid, they say, will help defray costs of deploying the Arrow missile, Israel's anti-ballistic missile system on which the country will rely to intercept Iraqi Scud missiles.
The military package also would make up for $800 million in aid pledged by the Clinton administration to ease the burden of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Neither President Clinton nor President Bush has followed through on the promise.
The loan guarantees, in which the United States would act much as a co-signer, would provide Israel a cheaper alternative to finance its national debt than floating bonds on local financial markets.
-------- mideast
Turkey backs U.S. on Iraq but wary of hosting troops
1/3/2003 2:49 PM
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-01-03-turkey-us_x.htm
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - President Bush is right to send ground forces to the Persian Gulf to pressure Iraq into disarming, but Turkey is wary about hosting a large number of U.S. troops, the foreign minister said Friday.
Turkey is a leading U.S. ally in the Middle East but its people overwhelmingly oppose war in Iraq. The government has repeatedly balked at U.S. requests to deploy thousands of U.S. troops in Turkey for a possible invasion of neighboring Iraq.
"The United States is our ally but there might be issues on which the interests of allies do not meet," Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis told NTV television. "It would not suit us. Then, Turkey would become a country opening a front against its neighbor."
About 50 U.S. warplanes fly regular patrols over northern Iraq from Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, where 1,500 U.S. soldiers are based. Support from Turkey is considered key to any U.S. operation against Iraq.
Using Turkish bases for a ground attack would give the United States the ability to attack from both the north and the south, surrounding central Iraq, Saddam Hussein's heartland of support.
Yakis did not outright reject a possible troop deployment.
"Such a decision should be taken in the broadest consensus with public, parliament and non-governmental organizations," he said. "The opposition is obvious but it is not clear what can be accepted."
The government earlier said that it would make a decision on a troop deployment after U.N. inspectors checking Iraq for weapons of mass destruction release their report in late January.
Still, Yakis said he supported U.S. troop deployment in the Middle East. Washington has already deployed thousands of troops to the region.
"You can't tell Iraq 'disarm or else' from a distance," Yakis said. The United States "is doing the right thing by narrowing the circle around it ... and showing that there is no place to escape."
Yakis' Justice and Development Party took office after November elections and is extremely sensitive to the anti-war sentiment.
The party is conservative, and its core constituency is pro-Islamic and strongly opposed to military action against fellow Muslims. Turkey also fears that a war would harm its fragile economic recovery and would lead to instability on its border.
Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul is scheduled to visit Syria, Egypt and Jordan beginning Saturday, in part show that he is doing all he can to avoid a war.
State Minister Kursad Tuzmen is expected to visit Baghdad next week on a similar mission.
Turkey was a staging area for attacks against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and Washington is pressing for an answer on the use of Turkish bases so it can upgrade facilities that it would use.
-------- pakistan
US says hot pursuit, Pak says no
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK
FRIDAY, JANUARY 03, 2003
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=33270294
WASHINGTON: The United States and Pakistan dressed up their ugly weekend spat on the Afghan border on the first working day of the year, but ties between the most allied allies is fraying amid mistrust and recrimination.
The US military on Thursday announced that it had the right of hot pursuit into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists and fugitives and that Pakistan had agreed to it. But Islamabad contested this and denied any deal in the matter even as the political establishments in the two countries scrambled to make up language that would paper the cracks.
"There is no room or legal sanctions for any cross-border operation by US forces to pursue fugitives into Pakistani territory. We have no such policy," Pakistan Interior Minister Feisal Saleh Hayat was quoted as saying in Islamabad.
"There is no question of allowing any hot pursuit into our territory."
True to form, administration officials involved with the art of information management first sought to downplay last Sunday's skirmish in which US forces for the first time ever bombed Pakistani forces just inside the border of Pakistan.
The incident occurred after a Pakistani Scout shot and injured an American soldier during a joint operation against al-Qaeda.
Various versions of the incident are available, but broadly, it appears the two sides were in a joint combing operation on the Afghan side of the border when an out-of-position Pakistani Scout disregarded US orders to move back into Pakistani territory.
Whether he resented the way he was addressed or had a deeper grievance, he then shot at a US soldier before disappearing back into Pakistan and hiding in a madrassa.
US forces sought him, were denied, following which they called in close air support and bombed the madrassa. According to some accounts in the Pakistani media, this was preceded by a fierce clash between the two sides in which the Pakistanis killed seven US soldiers. The US bombing was initially reported to have killed two Pakistanis.
But officials here discount any deaths in the episode and say the US soldier is in a stable condition and the Pakistani fugitive is under the custody of the Pakistani authorities.
In any event, what quickly became apparent is the speed with which the US military publicly announced its retaliatory action against its ally even as the political establishment in Washington was still in the year-end holiday mode.
The clear message sent out was: Don't mess with us.
It appears there is a simmering resentment among the US ground forces operating in the area about sniper attacks from gunmen who then disappear into Pakistan.
The military not only does not share the political establishments rosy view of Washington's most allied allies - having to operate in ground conditions - but is also not constrained by diplomatic niceties and nuances that is the domain of the state department.
Over the weekend, Uncle Sam got as tough and blunt as he can get.
----
U.S. says it reserves right to hunt al-Qaeda in Pakistan
1/3/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-01-03-us-pakistan_x.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The U.S. military said Friday it reserves the right to pursue fleeing al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters into Pakistan after an American soldier was wounded at the border earlier this week. While American officials have said before they might chase enemy fighters "in hot pursuit" into Pakistan, until now they have pledged to do so only as a last resort and with the consent of Pakistani authorities.
Friday's declaration came as thousands of Islamic hard-liners rallied in Pakistan's major cities to protest a possible war on Iraq and Pakistan's cooperation with the United States.
"We do reserve the right to go after them and pursue them and that is something that Pakistan is aware of," said U.S. military spokesman Maj. Stephen Clutter. "In hot pursuit, we're going to chase down the bad guys."
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan said his country was looking into the American military's statement, but had no immediate comment.
"We are in the process of verifying if the statement was really made and at what level," he told The Associated Press in Islamabad.
While Pakistan is an ally in the war on terrorism and has extradited hundreds of terror suspects to the United States, U.S. forces and the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf have rarely spoken about military incursions, for fear of angering anti-American Islamic militants who could also pose a threat to Musharraf's regime.
U.S. officials have expressed concern that al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants from Afghanistan have crossed into Pakistan, despite the deployment of thousands of Pakistani troops along the 1,344-mile frontier.
"It is a long-standing policy that if we are pursuing enemy forces, we're not just going to tiptoe and stop right at the border," Clutter told reporters at Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan.
Clutter said, however, that U.S. forces had yet to cross into Pakistan in any hot pursuit operation.
He said the closest they've come was during the attack Sunday in which a rogue Pakistani border guard shot a U.S. soldier, wounding him in the head just a few hundred yards from the Pakistani border.
The border guard retreated to a nearby building, inside Afghanistan but under Pakistani control, which was bombed in a U.S. airstrike. The border guard survived and was taken into custody by Pakistani authorities, the U.S. military said.
A military spokeswoman, Master Sgt. Kelly Tyler, said the building, a checkpoint and a fence were all under Pakistani control, although they were inside Afghan territory.
The Pakistani government has said it is investigating the incident.
"It is important to reiterate that personnel on either side of the border should not approach coalition forces engaged in the conduct of their mission, as they place themselves in danger," Tyler said.
In March 2002, Maj. Gen. Frank Hagenbeck, then commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said American troops might chase al-Qaeda fighters into Pakistan in hot pursuit. But he said that would be done only as a last resort and with the approval of Pakistan's government.
At the same time, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said "that's a possibility" but stressed such action would come under limited circumstances and with Pakistani consultation.
Tyler said the U.S. military's official rules of engagement had not changed but were not generally publicized "as it can become a security issue and endanger the lives of our soldiers."
"U.S. forces have always retained the right to defend ourselves from hostile actions. If it is necessary to pursue the enemy in that defense, then that is what will happen," Tyler said. "We retain the right and the obligation to protect our soldiers by any means necessary."
Sunday's incident along the Afghan-Pakistan border prompted Islamic groups in Pakistan to call Thursday for the United States to pull its troops out of the region, saying the clash showed the dangers of the American presence.
Many hard-line politicians in northwestern Pakistan have long been outraged over Musharraf's decision to join the U.S.-led campaign to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban rulers following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
-------- spy agencies
Belly up to the 'Talibar'
Inside the Ring Notes from the Pentagon
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
January 3, 2003,
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030103-9789688.htm
The CIA and other nonmilitary government agencies have played major roles in the military operations in Afghanistan and continue to play an active role in mop-up.
CIA field officers in particular are known to have a taste for adult beverages. But where can one find a drink in Afghanistan?
We have learned the agency runs a secret bar in the Afghan capital of Kabul. There, weary CIA and other undercover spies and counterterrorism operatives, including FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents, are known to imbibe a much-deserved whiskey or beer.
Journalists in the country are not allowed into the watering hole, called the "Talibar," punning on the name of the ousted Muslim Taliban regime. To reach the bar, one must be invited. Only a select group of U.S. government officials are extended the courtesy.
The tradition in the bar is for those who have finished their tours of duty to sign their names on the wall, along with a few comments about their experience in Afghanistan. The comments are wide-ranging, and of course, classified as secret.
Summer camp
It was once Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's spacious lair on the outskirts of Kandahar. Immense rooms. Courtyards. And his own personal cave a hundred yards away, complete with indoor plumbing.
But after coalition forces toppled the Taliban and sent Mullah Omar into the hills, the much-bombed compound became the nerve center of special-operations troops and CIA officers.
This summer, on any given day, there were Special Forces (Green Berets) and Delta Force (officially known as Combat Action Group) in one area, foreign special-operations troops in another, and CIA officers, their suitcases stuffed with cash, in another part of the sprawling compound.
It is where missions are planned, detainees interrogated and alfresco parties held for returning A-teams. Mullah Omar's home eventually gained the nickname "Camp Gecko," in honor of the ubiquitous lizards that keep everyone company.
The New Zealand Special Air Service troops were especially good. They marched into the mountains for weeks at a time, and always seemed to return fatter, cheerier and with tales of ambushes and enemy dead.
But commando sources tell us the mood at Camp Gecko turned sour in late summer, after an AC-130 gunship fired June 30 on what it believed to be anti-aircraft fire. Afghan civilians were killed.
Since then, our sources say, Task Force 180, the U.S. headquarters at Bagram air base, repeatedly turned down proposed missions (called concept of operations) that called for attacking the enemy. The message from Bagram was, they said, that Afghanistan no longer required a lot of special-operations troops. That the 82nd Airborne soldiers could do the job of hunting down hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda was the attitude at Bagram.
-------- us
Navy vision
Inside the Ring Notes from the Pentagon,
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
January 3, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030103-9789688.htm
Top Pentagon leaders have signed off on a five-page document, "Naval Power 21 A Naval Vision" that sets out nine transformation goals.
They are:
• Acquire mobile targets more quickly and "deliver an increasing persistent and decisive volume of timely fire."
• Integrate Navy and Marine Corps strike fighter units for "the optimum balance of efficiency and warfighting effectiveness."
• Develop unmanned platforms for combat and reconnaissance in the air, on the sea and under the sea.
• Develop new tactics for operating near coastlines, including better anti-mine warfare and better defenses against small boats.
• Extend the reach and mobility of expeditionary land combat forces, such as the Marine Corps forces in Afghanistan, who went hundreds of miles inland to set up air bases in southern Afghanistan.
• Develop defenses against ballistic and cruise missiles.
• "Extend the persistence and staying power of our forward deployed naval force."
• Put intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems into one network that can be shared by forward deployed naval commanders.
• Improve sharing of information in missions planning.
The document was signed by Navy Secretary Gordon England; Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations; and Gen. James Jones, Marine commandant.
New budget
The fiscal 2003 defense budget is only three months old and already there is talk in the Pentagon of asking Congress for a new emergency-spending bill, better known as a supplemental. The reasons: the call-up of more troops for the Persian Gulf, increasing training in the region and likely extending tours for Navy ships. One Army source said his service alone may need $10 billion more. Salaries, weapons, fuel and food will surely drive the bill higher.
•Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough are Pentagon reporters. Mr. Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at bgertz@WashingtonTimes.com. Mr. Scarborough can be reached at 202/636-3208 or by e-mail at rscarborough@WashingtonTimes.com.
----
US troops violated Geneva convention [in Korea in 1952]
British officer shocked by treatment of prisoners as 'oriental cattle'
Owen Bowcott
Friday January 3, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,867898,00.html
US troops guarding communist captives in the Korean War violated the Geneva convention on treating prisoners of war and regarded them as "oriental cattle", a confidential British report concluded.
Marked "secret and guard", the memorandum by a major in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry painted a damning picture of US military incompetence and inhumanity. Held back from public release for 50 years, the study of Koje-Do prison camp was sent to the foreign secretary in late 1952.
When Major DR Bancroft arrived with his unit to help American soldiers on guard duties, he was appalled at what he discovered.
There were 80,000 captured men inside Koje-Do. "Control within the compounds had been lost, and it was doubtful whether the US authorities had external control," his memo, released by the public record office, records.
"No compound had been entered by US troops for nearly three months."
The treatment of North Korean prisoners was already a sensitive political issue, even though the war was being fought under the authority of the United Nations.
Major Bancroft found US units had inadvertently supplied inmates with firewood that contained 10-inch nails, and given them petrol to start fires. "Nails were being used to make spears, and petrol was being turned into Molotov cocktails."
On one occasion, he saw an American soldier mistreat a wounded North Korean officer. "The US driver removed the prisoner's hat, stripped it of its badge of rank, and literally flung the prisoner into the ambulance ... this was the first of many occasions I witnessed US troops violating the Geneva convention."
In order to regain control, one compound was stormed. More than a 100 prisoners died, and communist soldiers murdered colleagues who tried to surrender.
Put in charge of one compound, Major Bancroft discovered mail had not been delivered to prisoners for four months. "It became evident that US officers and soldiers ... thought the Chinese and Korean prisoners were oriental cattle who were to be given different treatment to a European." In one case, he saw a prisoners' representative addressed as "You slant-eyed, yellow bastard."
The major noted: "US sentries were found asleep at their posts, and no disciplinary action taken. Over 8,000 prostitutes were in residence in the valleys near the prison, and sentries left their posts to sleep with women in the village.
"All US troops were apt to regard prisoners as cattle and treat them as such. They handled them, including cripples who had been badly wounded, extremely roughly. Asked about the Geneva convention, US troops said: 'Well, these people are savages'. All [US] units were inclined to fire on prisoners at the slightest provocation."
As to the North Koreans' behaviour, Major Bancroft was even more shocked. "Their cruelty is beyond belief. Normal torture was to hang offenders to the ridgepole of a tent by their testicles. Water hoses were put in offenders' mouths so they drowned."
He did, however, believe the communists were better motivated and fitter than their South Korean opponents.
-------- propaganda wars
U.S. Deleted Iraqi-run Florida Chemical Plant from UN Weapons List
Tom Flocco
January 03, 2003
Antiwarmonger.com
http://antiwarmonger.com/article.php?sid=4&PHPSESSID=d008f84c1a01c3ab8785c9c974bbc277
The 8000 page deletion and cover-up - left virtually unreported in the American media - begs the question: What did the U.S. take out of the report? Of key importance is the fact that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (U.S., UK, France, China, and Russia) have access to the complete version, but agreed that the U.S. be allowed to edit the report [8000 pages worth] since "the contents were 'risky' in terms of security on weapons prolferation."
Most recently activated American soldiers are unaware that they will likely be facing the same deadly chemical and biological agents provided illegally to Iraq by their own government just prior to the last Gulf War - and that high-ranking Bush 41 cabinet officials profited from secret investments in these companies manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. (WMD)
This, while war with Saddam Hussein is considered by most to be a foregone conclusion, what with 70% of Congress having already voted to permit the president to order troops into combat in the Middle East.
Members of George Sr.'s cabinet held sizable and conflicting financial positions in Gulf War-related companies linked to a SECRET IRAQI POLICY DOCUMENT which was classified at the time and kept from Congress. Amazingly, however, Congress has continued to allow the now-unclassified document to remain partially redacted.
Moreover, the war-related WMD financial holdings were substantial enough in 1990 to necessitate presidential advisor George W. Bush's father the president to employ a CONFIDENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST WAIVER -- ALSO KEPT SECRET FROM CONGRESS -- in order to absolve his cabinet and others from future legal action should Gulf War military families ever question or litigate the private and undisclosed financial links of high-ranking government officials to Iraq.
Incredibly, a potential tragedy facing American military families will be the outrage that some of the chemicals Saddam will use against Americans in ground combat were actually manufactured by an Iraqi terrorist on United States soil just before the Gulf War at a plant in Boca Raton, Florida.
The Wall Street Journal even provided a MAP SHOWING THE CIRCUITOUS ROUTE THE WMD CHEMICALS AND MANUFACTURING EQUIPMENT TOOK FROM BOCA RATON, FLORIDA TO HOUSTON, TEXAS, THEN TO CHICAGO, THEN BALTIMORE - ALL BEFORE REACHING AQABA, JORDAN AND BEING TRUCKED OVERLAND TO IRAQ.
There is ample evidence that President George H. W. Bush and his advisor George Jr. were quite aware that the Boca Raton plant was in full operation and under the control and supervision of the Iraqi terrorist and chemical engineer for a number of years while CIA operatives were facilitating the chemical transfers directly to Saddam Hussein even just before the Gulf War - chemicals used on American troops only a few months later!
Stories of an administration desperate to quickly employ warfare abroad to divert attention away from stock fraud, a mismanaged economy, and the September 11 investigation cover-up at home are already being reported outside the United States.
According to Anu de Monterice's translation of a 12-18-2002 truncated version of the Iraqi weapons dossier in the German periodical Taz (die tageszeitung), there is a huge portion of missing data in Iraq's recently submitted report to the United Nations concerning foreign suppliers of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons arsenal. (de Monterice's translation can be found on Jeff Rense's news website at Rense. com)
The lengths to which the current Bush Administration will go in attempting to keep secret and mislead the American people regarding the true extent of the transfer of WMD to Iraq is best illustrated in a story in the London Sunday Herald. (12- ? - 2002)
The 8000 page deletion and cover-up - left virtually unreported in the American media - begs the question: What did the U.S. take out of the report?
According to a United Nations source in New York, "in effect the U.S. is saying trust us, and there are many who just will not."
"Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the United States," the Sunday Herald reported.
A former UN official is also displeased with the American cover-up, which will prevent Congress from learning the truth even as the president rushes to activate and deploy troops to the Gulf before Congress is able to commence and investigation in January.
Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant general secretary and UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq until 2000, called the deletion of eight thousand pages from Iraq's report "an outrageous attempt by the U.S. to mislead," also according to the Herald.
Of key importance is the fact that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (U.S., UK, France, China, and Russia) have access to the complete version, but agreed that the U.S. be allowed to edit the report [8000 pages worth] since "the contents were 'risky' in terms of security on weapons proliferation."
While it is understandable that government officials would be concerned about "political ramifications" related to personal, private, and undisclosed investments in weapons of mass destruction -- which may ultimately be used yet once more against American troops -- congressional inaction regarding an investigation of such unconscionable acts is more than a disgrace.
However, CONCEALING AN IRAQI CHEMICAL WEAPONS PLANT IN FLORIDA becomes even more outrageous when one considers that a confidential May 31, 1990 billing statement links lawyers from former Bush 41 Secretary of State James Baker's Houston law firm Baker & Botts to telephone conferences, the drawing up of enzyme contracts, and holding secret formulas connected to another lawyer from Iraqi terrorist Ihsan Barbouti's main Houston office of his Boca Raton chemical company.
This, according to Robert Bickel, senior investigator and legal analyst in the Oklahoma City law offices of John Michael Johnston and investigative collaborator with Judicial Watch's chief counsel Larry Klayman, while bringing suit because U.S. Federal agents ignored evidence indicating Iraqi involvement in the aftermath of the April, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building.
Bickel is one of several who are aware of facts relating to U.S. government protection of Ihsan Barbouti, by allowing his terrorist-related chemical and nerve gas plant to operate untouched for years in Florida. Ted Koppel of ABC Nightline, placed some 30 reporters on the story, completing an incredible Nightline expose of the Boca Raton factory in July, 1991.
While American troops wait anxiously for their upcoming orders regarding war in the Gulf, American citizens may want to know more about why an administration already steeped in secrecy and clandestine activity is withholding information which is politically embarrassing - or worse - from its citizens and Congress, not to mention its trusting soldiers.
For how can a president explain that while he was an advisor during his father's administration, both knew about an Iraqi-operated nerve gas plant in Florida, that members of his father's cabinet held financial investments and were linked to lawyers who drew up legal contracts for an Iraqi terrorist, and that CIA operatives then sent the manufacturing equipment and raw materials able to penetrate and break down American gas mask filters -- to Iraq -- which was then used months later on his own soldiers?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards?) WHERE IS CONGRESS? Where are the American people?
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Homeland Office Is Told to Answer Queries on Its Role
Associated Press
Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3466-2003Jan2?language=printer
The Office of Homeland Security lost the first round in a legal fight to keep its activities secret, as a federal judge in Washington ruled it will have to answer questions about its power over other federal agencies.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the office must prove it has no authority other than helping and advising President Bush if it wants to have a lawsuit seeking access to its records dismissed.
The ruling last week favored the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is trying to get Homeland Security records on proposals for a national driver's license and for a "trusted flier" program that relies on biometric information to identify airline passengers.
Kollar-Kotelly said the center "may inquire into the nature of the authority delegated to [the Office of Homeland Security] to determine whether or not it possesses independent authority."
David Sobel, attorney for the privacy group, called the ruling an intermediate victory over Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. "This is about opening a window into the activities of what has been, until now, a very secretive entity," he said.
Homeland Security tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, contending it doesn't have to release records because it is not an agency.
The privacy group said it did not have enough information to prove otherwise and asked for permission to find out how the office exercises its authority. The privacy group has until Feb. 24 to find out whether other agencies receive instructions or directions from Homeland Security. The office will become a federal department on Jan. 24.
Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the office is reviewing the opinion and working with the Justice Department to decide what to do next.
-------- civil rights
Languishing Civil Rights Agency Gets New Life Under Bloomberg
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/nyregion/03RIGH.html
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has doubled the number of investigators and increased the budget of the city agency responsible for enforcing local civil rights laws, a body that some say was deliberately weakened by former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The agency, the Human Rights Commission, won a slight budget increase from Mr. Bloomberg this fiscal year even as the mayor was cutting most other agencies. The number of investigators and staff lawyers at the agency rose in 2002 to 28 from 11 in 2001. And the mayor appointed Patricia L. Gatling, a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney's office, as the chairwoman, and ordered her to shake things up.
He took symbolic steps as well, inviting Ms. Gatling to join police and fire officials at City Hall when he held a year-end briefing on public safety to show that he views the commission as a law enforcement agency.
The move to bolster the agency is one of several areas in which Mayor Bloomberg, who ran on a platform of building on Mr. Giuliani's legacy, has switched gears on the policies of his predecessor while continually praising him. Since taking office, Mr. Bloomberg has backed away from Mr. Giuliani's deals to use city money to build baseball stadiums and a new stock exchange; given power back to business improvement districts; raised taxes; and allowed the Police Department to shrink.
The commmission was the subject of a scathing report by the New York City Bar Association a month before Mr. Bloomberg took office. The report said that the agency had been subjected to "crippling" budget cuts, especially by the Giuliani administration, and charged that it was unable or unwilling to use its law enforcement powers to fight housing and employment discrimination. The commission has also been criticized by conservatives who say its functions would be better handled by other agencies.
Aides to Mr. Giuliani said that he never tried to weaken the commission. "Mayor Giuliani's commitment to the Human Rights Commission was made manifest with his charter commission, which made it a permanent agency," said Sunny Mindel, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani. "In addition, in looking at the Mayor's Management Reports, it is clear that the commission was successful in clearing its inherited backlog."
But when Ms. Gatling started at the rights commission last February, she said, she found a backlog of about 5,000 cases.
"A lot of these cases were cases that were filed before we even got out of law school," Ms. Gatling, 45, said. So Ms. Gatling, who unlike some of her predecessors had law enforcement background, put her staff to work.
Now there are fewer than a thousand old cases remaining. And the commission has acted on many. It levied a $20,000 fine on a hospital in a 12-year-old case of discrimination based on sexual orientation. It won a $70,000 settlement for an Arab-American who was rejected by a co-op board. And it settled a 13-year-old case against a fertility clinic, that, of all things, discriminated against pregnant workers.
The commission also won a $4,000 settlement in a 15-year-old housing discrimination case. "I just figured nothing was ever going to happen with this," said the complainant, Andrew Burt, 42, who said he and his wife had been denied an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, because he is white and she is black.
The infusion of resources and energy is beginning to transform the agency.
"Anything they're doing is a step forward from where it was in the late 90's," said Craig Gurian, the principal author of the Bar Association report, and a co-author of the city's 1991 human rights law. "In the previous administration there was paralysis."
When Mr. Giuliani took office, he weighed abolishing the commission and giving its functions to other agencies. Before he left office, though, he supported the charter revision that made the commission permanent. During his term, he cut funds to the commission substantially, leaving it more reliant on federal money. The Bar Association found that the number of city-financed positions at the commission fell by 76 percent in the 1990's, to 36 from 152.
Mr. Bloomberg has made the commission a priority from the start. In his inaugural address, he pledged not to "allow any form of bias to drain our energy or divide our communities." Asked about Mr. Bloomberg's commitment to the agency, his press secretary, Edward Skyler, said, "One of the reasons New York City is the world's second home is because the Human Rights Commission has made it clear we have no tolerance for discrimination or bigotry."
The commission, which dates back to 1944, has stepped up its law enforcement arm. But it is also working on its other mission: outreach, teaching new immigrant employers and employees about workers' rights and assembling a database of wheelchair-accessible apartments.
But Mr. Gurian said that the commission still lacked the resources to fulfill its mission. He pointed to census data released in 2001 that showed that New York was one of the 10 most segregated regions in the nation, neighborhood by neighborhood. .
Ms. Gatling said that the agency was already using its power more, using its subpoena power and the threat of subpoenas to get people to respond to its inquiries. And she said that the agency was stepping up its undercover testing to see if landlords, real estate agents or employers are discriminating.
Now the agency is revamping its satellite offices, consolidating some and opening others so that it will have an office in every borough, staffed by lawyers. And now, Ms. Gatling said, the offices will have computers that can communicate with headquarters.
"We used to talk about quality-of-life cases with the Police Department and the D.A.'s office," Ms. Gatling said. "But these are real quality-of-life-cases, because these go to the core of whether or not somebody's going to be able to even go to the grocery store, or live in a neighborhood where they choose."
-------- terrorism
U.S. proposes rules to ID all international travelers
1/3/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-01-03-ins-travelers_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Millions of travelers arriving and departing the United States will have to submit detailed personal information this year under rules proposed by the federal government Friday as part of the war on terrorism.
The rules proposed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, once they are finalized, seek more information from travelers than under current law and for the first time extend the requirements to U.S. citizens and others previously exempted.
All airlines, cargo flights, cruise ships and other vessels carrying crew or passengers will be affected, with the exception of ferry boats. The information will be sent electronically to the government before a traveler arrives in the United States or departs from it, giving officials a complete manifest of exactly who is on board.
"It's another way to enhance security for travelers," said INS spokeswoman Kimberly Weismann.
The changes were mandated by broad border security legislation that passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law May 14 by President Bush. The law also tightened rules regarding issuance of visas to visitors and students coming to the United States and adding more Border Patrol officers, among other things.
For years, international travelers have been required to fill out forms detailing their arrival and departure from countries around the world. The U.S. government, however, has not previously required its own citizens to submit such forms. Canadians, permanent resident aliens and certain other people were also exempted.
The proposed INS rule would require all passengers arriving or departing, as well as crew members, to provide this information: name; date of birth; citizenship; sex; passport number and country of issuance; country of residence; U.S. visa number and other details of its issuance; address while in the United States; and, where it applies, alien registration number.
The law also gives Attorney General John Ashcroft leeway in proposing further requirements. In the INS rule, Ashcroft has added a proposed "passenger name record" for airlines that will enable the government to better match a departure record with one for an arrival.
Once the information is collected, it will be transmitted to the U.S. government and matched against "the appropriate security databases" prior to the travelers' arrival. Anyone who raises a red flag regarding terrorism or other law enforcement concern could be met by officials when the ship or plane arrives in this country.
That computer system is still being developed, meaning the rules will probably take full effect later this year. The INS estimates they will affect 108 large commercial air carriers and ship lines, as well as more than 14,400 smaller carriers of both kinds. Initial costs to the private sector in complying with the rules are pegged at $166 million.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
U.S. Trying to Save Washington Forest by Cutting It Down
January 3, 2003
New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/national/03FORE.html
LEAVENWORTH, Wash. - In a valley that has known both terrifying wildfire and deep-scarring logging, there is considerable skepticism whenever government officials show up and say they want to start taking out trees.
But that is what happened a few weeks ago, when the Bush administration named the land around the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery here as one of 10 places nationwide where officials plan to test a new policy of trying to save forests by first cutting them down.
"We had people calling us saying, `They aren't going to clearcut the valley are they?' " said Corky Broadeus, a spokeswoman for the hatchery, which was once the world's largest salmon nursery, and is on federal land in the Icicle Creek Valley, just outside the Bavarian-themed village of Leavenworth.
The spectacle of big fish returning to a mountain town of Wiener schnitzel and year-round Christmas lights after swimming past five dams and up 500 miles of the Columbia River is one of the big draws to this valley on the east side of the Cascades. No matter how much maypole dancing is going on above ground, as long as the creek that runs through here is cold and clean, Leavenworth is an excellent place to spawn and die - for salmon.
Without adequate forest cover, though, the creek could warm, harming salmon. But government officials say they have no plans to resume the kind of logging that ripped apart national forests and choked salmon streams in the 1970's and 80's.
Still, even simple thinning of public forests has become too cumbrous and bureaucratic, Bush administration officials say, and they want to show how it can be done by speeding up environmental appeals. The goal is to prevent catastrophic fire in areas where fire has been suppressed for a century, allowing the forest to build up.
Eventually, the administration wants to expand the policy of streamlining the environmental process to as many as 190 million acres of public land at high risk of fires.
The project is part of President Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative," announced in August. After Congress balked at approving the plan, the administration - with several announcements in the last month - has been trying to enact core aspects of the program by giving government land managers more leeway.
By skirting a resistant Congress, the focus of the Bush administration's management of public lands moves out of Washington and into communities such as Leavenworth.
The people who live in this valley are somewhat surprised to be on the initial project list of forests to be thinned. What they want from the federal government is money to enhance the salmon hatchery, opening up the creek to natural spawning.
"They don't have funds to restore the river, but now there's this money to start cutting trees," said Harriett Bullitt, who owns the Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat, which borders land along the hatchery in Icicle Creek where the government wants to thin trees. "It sounds suspicious."
Bush administration officials say fire prevention is the top priority.
"We're trying to expedite our processes in order to prevent catastrophic damage to our forests and rangelands," said Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.
A team will soon start surveying trees to be cut in the small island of green surrounded by steep mountain walls that burned in two epic fires, in 1994 and 2000. The earlier fire burned for three weeks, destroyed 19 homes, and eventually joined two other fires in consuming 181,000 acres.
Typically, before the government may cut a stand of trees, it must solicit public comment and write a report on what impact the logging would have on fish and wildlife. The administration plan would suspend these reports in some cases, and would streamline them in others.
Critics of the plan say President Bush is using fire prevention as a way to resume large-scale logging and get around environmental laws.
"It all looks like arcane regulation, but what it adds up to is maximum discretion with minimum public accountability," said Jay Watson, a West Coast official with the Wilderness Society. "This administration believes the pendulum has swung too far for conservation. But they are fighting majority sentiment trying to go back the other way."
Mr. Watson pointed to a Forest Service survey of 7,069 people, published in September, which showed majority support for wilderness, and little support for logging and snowmobile access to public land, which the administration also favors.
Some Fish and Wildlife Service biologists here are concerned that the thinning plan might strip the valley of some of its remaining tree cover.
"I told them I don't see any need here to take out trees close to the river, which is great wildlife habitat," said Julie Collins, a federal biologist.
But federal officials say they plan to take out only small trees, and will do so judiciously. The intent is to prevent more fire in a sliver of land surrounded by high mountain walls.
"You've got slopes in there that are just steeper than a cow's face," said Pam Ensley, a regional fire director with Fish and Wildlife. "By streamlining the environmental assessment process, we can do this fire prevention work more quickly."
Ms. Bullitt, whose family is a major contributor to environmental causes, says she doubts the government is interested only in fire prevention.
"They want to get a little foot in the door, and then go much bigger," Ms. Bullitt said.
Leavenworth used to be a railroad and logging town, then went nearly bust before resurrecting itself as a year-round tourist center. Signs are printed in German and English, a testament to the old country visitors who want to see what the new country knockoff looks like.
The hatchery dates to 1939, when completion of Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River blocked off 1,200 miles of spawning habitat for one of the world's great salmon runs. To make up for the lost fish, the government created a series of hatcheries on the eastern slope of the Cascades.
The idea was to hatch fish from eggs in cement ponds on Icicle Creek, which flows into a part of the Columbia that was not blocked by Grand Coulee. Some years, the salmon returns have been anemic.
But in recent years, large numbers of chinook, or king salmon, have made their way to the Icicle, providing fish for this community and for Indians who still net the fish from platforms, in the traditional way.
By removing some of the barriers to more water just above the hatchery, biologists say they can reopen the creek to natural spawning of salmon, steelhead and bull trout. But now that the money to open the channel appears uncertain, community leaders have stepped in, offering to raise $300,000 and do it themselves.
They say the government is welcome to thin some trees around the river, so long as it does not harm the creek that nourishes a run of fish that may be better known in Germany than it is in the United States.
-------- health
Study: Nicotine May Enable Cancer
Chemical Activates Enzyme That Makes Cells Vulnerable
Associated Press
Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3461-2003Jan2?language=printer
Nicotine makes smoking addictive and is bad for the heart, but 60 other cigarette chemicals are blamed for causing cancer. Now some biochemists say nicotine might help set the stage for those chemicals to do their dirty work.
Certain tobacco chemicals trigger cellular genetic damage.
Damaged cells are supposed to commit suicide; if they do not, the damage accumulates enough to turn cancerous. Nicotine activates an enzyme reaction that inhibits cellular suicide, according to new research by scientists at the National Cancer Institute.
Nicotine starts activating the enzyme, called Akt, within minutes, while cancer-causing genetic damage takes hours to begin, NCI researchers report in yesterday's Journal of Clinical Investigation. That suggests nicotine -- along with other chemicals that also block cell suicide -- may make cells more vulnerable to the cancer-causers.
"Nicotine is not a carcinogen, and we're not trying to make that argument," said Phillip Dennis, the study leader. But "it may have a permissive effect" for cancer formation.
Scientists discovered nicotine may block cell suicide 10 years ago, said nicotine expert Neal Benowitz of the University of California at San Francisco. But the new research uncovers the enzyme involved.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Venezuela Police Fire Tear Gas at Protest
January 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Venezuela-Strike.html
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Police and soldiers fired tear gas at protesters on Friday to keep supporters and opponents of President Hugo Chavez from clashing outside Caracas' main military base.
Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition-led march to urge the military to support a 5-week-old strike against Chavez that has crippled Venezuela's economy and virtually dried up gasoline supplies.
Waving red, yellow and blue Venezuelan flags, the crowds headed to a plaza outside a Caracas army base, where they demanded the release of a dissident officer, National Guard Gen. Carlos Alfonso Martinez.
Police separated marchers and hundreds of Chavez supporters, some of whom launched powerful fireworks at officers and threw rocks at opposition protesters from surrounding hillsides. A white cloud of tear gas engulfed tree-lined avenues outside the base.
Martinez, one of about 100 officers who revolted last fall, was arrested Dec. 30. A judge ordered his release, but he remains under house arrest. His attorneys have urged the Supreme Court to force his release.
``We are ready to wait as long as necessary,'' said marcher Miguel Angel Urbano, 49.
About 300 Chavez supporters rallied at a nearby subway station and cheered when a gasoline truck drove by. The strike has virtually shut down the oil industry and created severe gasoline shortages.
``I'm supporting the honest (oil) workers and my president, Hugo Chavez Frias, who is taking us out of poverty,'' said Carmen Chacon, 60.
Opposition leaders blame Chavez's leftist policies for a deep recession and accuse him of trying to accumulate too much power. They want him to resign or hold a nonbinding referendum on his rule, which he says would be unconstitutional.
So far, Venezuela's military has backed Chavez. Only the 100 officers who were stripped of their commands after a brief April coup have joined the opposition.
Chavez said he would support diplomatic efforts by a ``Group of Nation Friends'' to help resolve the crisis, which has contributed to a rise in global oil prices.
``This has to be the way out,'' Chavez said Thursday in Brasilia, Brazil, where he attended the inauguration of Brazil's new president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. ``There is no other way.'' Chavez returned to Venezuela later Thursday.
Opposition legislator Alejandro Armas said the opposition had already sought international help in mediating the dispute.
The idea drew support from opposition labor leader Manuel Cova, secretary general of the 1 million-member Venezuelan Workers Confederation. ``Whatever international initiative leading to an electoral solution is welcome,'' he said.
Negotiations being mediated by the Organization of American States have made little progress. In Washington, the State Department urged both sides to show ``maximum flexibility.''
Chavez didn't elaborate on which nations would be asked to join, but said the group would include European and Latin American countries as well members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Chavez was expected to propose cuts to the nation's $25 billion budget for 2003 -- a move that analysts said could weaken his support among the poor, his base of power.
``If (Chavez) has no resources to finance his social plans, then it will be difficult to maintain a lot of his loyalty,'' said Francisco Vivancos, an economics professor at the Central University of Venezuela. He estimated the strike has cost the economy $5.6 billion.
The 33-day-old strike has helped to push oil prices above $30 per barrel. Venezuela is the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
In response to the strike, troops have commandeered gasoline delivery trucks, and are guarding oil installations.
Chavez said Thursday that Venezuela's oil industry is recovering and will reach full capacity in 45 days. Oil executives scoffed at the claim.
The president said Venezuela is producing 800,000 barrels of crude a day, up from 200,000 barrels at the low point of the strike. He said that the state oil monopoly will return to full capacity of 3 million barrels a day within 45 days.
Independent analysts said there had been little change in production.
``We don't see any evidence that production is increasing, and no one in the industry would accept the higher figures since exports are still almost zero,'' said John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation Inc. in New York.
Associated Press writer Harold Olmos in Brazil contributed to this report.
--------
Demonstrators in Pakistan Protest Against Iraq War
January 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-US-Protest.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Thousands of demonstrators marched in cities throughout Pakistan on Friday to protest a potential U.S.-led war against Iraq, prompting tight security around the U.S. Embassy and other sensitive sites.
In all, fewer than 12,000 protesters showed up across this Muslim nation of 145 million, and most shopkeepers ignored calls to close for the day.
The government called the poor turnout a sign that Pakistanis may be tiring of harangues and restrictive laws from religious conservatives.
``I think people are disappointed the way the (religious coalition) Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal has behaved,'' Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said, referring to the religious group that called the protest.
The party governs one of Pakistan's four provinces, where -- in the name of Islamic purity -- it has cracked down on movie houses, burned videos and ordered all buses to stop at Islamic prayer times.
In the biggest showing, about 7,000 people gathered outside the Madni Masjid mosque -- the largest mosque in the Western city of Peshawar -- chanting ``Down with America,'' and ``Long Live Saddam Hussein.'' Friday is the Muslim day of prayer.
In the central city of Multan, some 1,500 demonstrators gathered, some burning an effigy of President Bush and chanting slogans against Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has thrown his nation's support behind the U.S. war on terror in neighboring Afghanistan.
``We will destroy America if it attacks Iraq,'' said Salim Chohan, a local cleric in Multan. Another cleric, Qari Abdul Ghafoor, accused Musharraf of being ``an agent of Jews and America.''
In the capital, Islamabad, about 400 people rallied outside the Red Mosque -- the site of pro-Taliban protests in the past -- some carrying banners that read ``Yankees: Don't Spread Hatred in the Muslim World'' and ``Stop the Holocaust Against Muslims.''
Several dozen police stood nearby with anti-riot shields and sticks; traffic was diverted and two fire trucks were parked at the edge of the crowd, but the protesters remained mostly calm. Demonstrations, each involving about 1,000 people, were also held in the southern port city of Karachi, the eastern city of Lahore, and the southwestern town of Quetta.
``We are nobody's slaves. We are slaves of Islam. We will fight, until America and its stooges are expelled from Pakistan,'' cleric Noor Mohammed, a member of the recently elected national assembly, told the crowd in Quetta.
The demonstrations were a result of a Dec. 21 call by hard-line Islamic leaders who won unprecedented support in recent nationwide elections. The religious leaders also called for shops to shutter their windows in allegiance, but it appeared that many were staying open.
Supporters say the marches are just a taste of the anger that an attack on Saddam's regime would cause in Pakistan, a deeply conservative Muslim country but a crucial ally in the U.S.-led war on terror.
``The American attack on Iraq will be an attack on the Islamic world,'' said Fazl-ur Rahman, a one-time candidate for prime minister and a leader of the Islamist coalition, called the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal. ``If today we cannot stop America from attacking Iraq, then tomorrow they will attack Iran, and then it could be Pakistan.''
At the Peshawar rally, Rahman called on supporters to ``become a great wall against America if Bush carries out an attack on Iraq.'' He told the emotionally charged participants of the rally. He called America ``an international terrorist.''
There have been a series of terrorist attacks on Westerners and Pakistani Christians since Musharraf's decision to side with the United States in its efforts to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and some fear the anger will intensify if America wages war on another Muslim country.
The U.S. Embassy said it was monitoring events, but was not unduly concerned.
``We're watching events closely,'' said spokesman Terry White. ``But it's not accurate to say we're behind-the-barricades afraid. ... We've been security conscious for months.''
Pakistan's government, which on Jan. 1 took over a seat on the U.N. Security Council, has been reluctant to discuss it's position on Iraq. But Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali urged his countrymen not to waste their energy defending Saddam's regime.
Even before Friday's protests got under way, tensions were heightened after a rogue Pakistani border guard shot a U.S. soldier. That prompted troops to call in an airstrike along the border.
The shooter is in custody of Pakistani authorities and the U.S. soldier, who underwent surgery at a U.S. military hospital in Germany, should be returned to his home soon, officials said. He has not been identified.
The U.S. military says the entire clash took place on Afghan soil, but Pakistan's government says only that it is investigating to see if the Americans crossed over into its territory.
---------
Davos Forum Seeks Accommodation With Peaceful Protesters
January 3, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/international/europe/03SWIS.html
ZURICH, Jan. 2 - The theme of the World Economic Forum this year is trust, and the Swiss police say they will try to maintain that spirit with the protesters who have planned demonstrations against globalization during the meeting in Davos at the end of the month.
After a year's hiatus in which the annual forum was held in New York, Davos's 13,000 villagers are bracing for its return, anxious to avoid the tear gas and destruction that marred the 2000 and 2001 events.
This year, protesters have been granted a permit to demonstrate on the Saturday two days after the Jan. 23 start of the weeklong meeting. In addition, some globalization opponents have been invited to take part in the forum, a gathering of people deemed by the forum organizer, Klaus Schwab, to be the world's most influential.
But Switzerland's federal police are denying entry to more than 100 protesters known for violence at past gatherings. They will also be checking the papers of all arriving demonstrators.
"We are not against people who want to peacefully express their opinions, which I think is the majority of the protesters," said Daniele Bersier, press spokeswoman for the federal police.
In a statement, the Oltner Bündnis, organizers of the Saturday demonstration, vehemently rejected the police measures as "massively shrinking our freedom of movement and an attempt to criminalize our entire (antiwar, antiglobalization) movement."
Andreas Missbach, a member of the Berne Declaration, which manages the Public Eye on Davos, a four-day parallel conference that also takes place in the village, said the more accessible Davos was to peaceful protesters, the less likely a demonstration would turn violent.
In 2000, protesters smashed the windows of a MacDonald's restaurant and set bonfires in the village. The next year, in what was widely criticized as an overreaction, the police denied protesters access to Davos. The few hundred who managed to get in were sprayed with water cannons.
Furious demonstrators in Zurich and other Swiss towns vented their rage that year by smashing windows, burning cars and spray-painting buildings. The riot police countered with rubber pellets, tear gas and water cannons.
Last year, Davos was relieved when Mr. Schwab switched venues to New York, partly as a show of solidarity as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.
This year not everyone in Davos is pleased at the forum's return.
"I am not particularly happy about it," said Alexandra Bossi, the third generation to run the sporting goods store Paarsenn Sport in the village. "From a business point of view, W.E.F. is bad for us."
In the early days of the forum, 30 years ago, participants brought their spouses, who spent the week shopping and skiing. Nowadays, Mrs. Bossi said, spouses do not come, and participants don't have time to shop.
The talk among business owners now is whether to stay open on the day of the protest. The manager of a bakery in the middle of the village said he had not yet decided, but called it a hopeful sign that demonstrators and police officials were communicating in advance. Mrs. Bossi, too, expressed hope that the protest would remain nonviolent.
"The demonstrators have a right to give their opinions," she said. "Unfortunately, there are those few who feel a need to be destructive."
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