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NUCLEAR
Arcata asks for ban on depleted uranium
Unexploded bombs spark concern
Inspectors discover Iraqi warheads.
Inspectors Find Empty Warheads in an Iraqi Depot
Inspectors Find Weapons Cache
Arms inspectors search scientists' homes, field
U.S. Hastens to Assess Pair of Iraq Findings
White House Calls Discovery of Empty Warheads 'Serious'
Tokyo seen unlikely to build nukes
Cut supply lines that fuel Korea's nuclear dreams
South Korea's President-Elect Rejects Use of Force Against North Korea
South Korea Ready for War, Official Says
North Korea weapons a 'nuclear nightmare'
U.S. Blames N. Korea for Lack of Nuclear Talks
Israel to Receive Anti - Missile System
Russia Criticizes U.K. on Missile Defense
Fire at Nuclear Plant Shuts Down Reactor
Fired Los Alamos Investigators Rehired
Lawmakers seek to limit TIA
U.S. Blames N. Korea for Lack of Nuclear Talks
Warmongering Without Representation
MILITARY
Design of Weapons Simple but Deadly
Car Bomb Kills Four in Colombian City
U.S. Special Forces to Train Colombian Troops
U.S. Plans Interim Military Rule in Postwar Iraq
Iraqi Computer Attacks Feared
Iraq said to be stashing arms
Defiant Saddam Vows to Rout Any U.S. Invasion
Israel Intensifying Efforts to Ward Off Suicide Bombings
Israeli Gadfly Hopes to Separate Religion and State
Turkey, U.S. Near Accord on Deployment
U.S. Official Appeals to NATO for Military Support
Ex-Los Alamos scientist called spy for China
Pentagon Readies Plans to Recruit Civilian Aircraft
Rumsfeld weighs deploying up to four more carriers to Gulf
10,000 Sailors, Marines Leave for Gulf
Brave New Soldier?
Most Back Wartime Media Restrictions
America didn't seem to mind poison gas
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
U.S. Police Officials Visit 'Epicenter of Terrorism'
City law enforcement gears up for rally
U.S. Detains Nearly 1,200 During Registry
Al Qaeda suspects nabbed by use of cave prints
Judge rebukes forest service in spotted owl case
Off Ill. Death Row, To a Rougher Place
Senate Considers Ridge to Head New Homeland Security Dept.
U.S. Expands List of Nations Whose Visitors Must Register
Pentagon Draws Up a 20-to-30-Year Anti-Terror Plan
OTHER
2nd Cancer Is Attributed to Gene Used in French Test
U.N. Report Shows Growing Poverty Among European Gypsies
ACTIVISTS
Uncle Sam Will Be Watching Anti-War Protesters
BOSS HOGTIE
Antiwar Group Reprises 'Daisy' Ad
Stand Up for Peace - All Out on January 18!
Protesting war, groups battle stereotypes too
Vatican encourages Christian activism
Vatican Journal: Oil Drives War Plan
Thousands in Gaza rally to support Iraq
A weekend of protests for a peaceful end to Iraq crisis
Activists Sound Bugle Call on U.S. Peace Campaign
World Protesters Gather on Iraq Conflict
Bolivian Police Use Tear Gas in Protest
Labor is opposing a possible Iraq war
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Arcata asks for ban on depleted uranium
By James Faulk
Friday, January 17, 2003
Eureka Times-Standard
http://www.times-standard.com/Stories/0,1413,127%257E2896%257E1117754,00.html
ARCATA -- Depleted uranium is a weapon of mass destruction regularly used for the last 10 years by the U.S. government.
Such was one of the claims put forth by the City Council this week as it unanimously adopted a resolution demanding a ban on the controversial material, which many say is radioactive.
The main military use for depleted uranium is to penetrate armor. It is 1.7 times denser than lead, and when munitions made with depleted uranium strike a tank, the round penetrates the armor and metal fragments can scatter inside causing damage, fires and injury.
The substance can also be used for armor and has a half life of around 4.5 billion years.
"Ingestion of inhalation of DU causes short- and long-term adverse health affects closely related to complaints of Gulf War veterans whose ailments are called Gulf War Syndrome," says the resolution, passed Wednesday.
Depleted uranium was used in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan, and will likely be used again in any U.S. attack on Iraq.
Posters bearing the images of children reported to be deformed by radiation from depleted uranium were displayed by members of the public.
"It has been reported that residents in Iraq near those 1991 battlefields have shown a 17-fold increase in the rate of deaths from cancer and a five-fold increase in the rate of severe birth defects among Iraqi civilians," it says.
The city asks that its federal and state representatives demand that the president and the Department of Defense ban the use of depleted uranium; destroy all stocks currently on hand; ban the sale of such weapons; provide medical testing for veterans and others suffering from contamination and clean up contamination at battlefields in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Iraq.
----
Unexploded bombs spark concern
By Shakir Al Taee
17/01/2003
Gulf News
http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/print.asp?ArticleID=74194
Twelve years after the U.S.-led coalition launched airstrikes againt Iraq, experts here have not yet been able to defuse the bombs dropped on various parts of the country.
Brigadier Hatem Ali Al Khalaf, Director General of the Iraqi Civil Defence, told Gulf News yesterday that 18 personnel and other experts died and 85 were wounded last year while trying to defuse unexploded bombs.
"The bombs have already killed a huge number of civilians among them 72 officers of the civil defence since the war started in 1991," said Brig. Al Khalaf.
The Iraqi official said that more than 940,000 bombs containing depleted uranium were dropped on Iraq by the allied forces. Such bombs weighed 141,921 tons, almost the equivalent of seven atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima.
Iraqi experts are also still fighting to defuse thousands of unexploded missiles of various kinds and sizes that had been dropped by the allied forces.
"Some missiles the American aircraft recently dropped in southern Iraq bore the phrase 'From America with love', a gesture which Iraqi interpret as a disregard for war laws and ethics," said Brig. Al Khalaf.
Brig. Al Khalaf said that Iraqis are voicing their concern that more of such bombs and missiles would be dropped if the U.S. wages another war. (c) Al Nisr Publishing LLC - Gulf News Online
-------- inspections
Inspectors discover Iraqi warheads.
Will this be the trigger for war?
By David Usborne in New York and Andrew Grice 17
January 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=370061
The Iraqi crisis flared unexpectedly last night after United Nations weapons inspectors revealed they had discovered a dozen empty chemical warheads in a complex of newly built bunkers.
Officials and diplomats said they could not yet reach any definitive conclusions on the warheads although their discovery gave a sudden jolt to the stand-off as the United States continued to press the case against Iraq.
"During the course of their inspection, the team discovered 11 empty 122mm chemical warheads and one warhead that requires further evaluation," a UN spokesman, Hiro Ueki, said in a statement issued in Baghdad. Mr Ueki said the warheads were "in excellent condition".
The warheads could provide the first clear evidence since the UN resumed its inspections of Iraq's alleged programme to develop banned weapons, especially if they show signs of chemical residue. Results from the first tests on them should be known today.
"At the least, it might show that inspections are starting to narrow in'' on something, one UN diplomat said. But the UN office in Baghdad said it did not consider the find to be a "smoking gun".
A US official in Washington said the site was not among those pointed out by American intelligence to the UN inspectors. "A smoking gun would be if you found a big stockpile of chemicals," he said. "This raises lots of questions."
Iraq dismissed the discovery as "a storm in a teacup", saying the empty warheads were old artillery rockets mentioned in Iraq's December declaration to the UN. The chief Iraqi liaison officer to the UN teams, General Hussam Mohammad Amin, said: "There are no chemical or biological agents or weapons of mass destruction or links to weapons of mass destruction. These rockets are expired ... They were in closed wooden boxes ... that we had forgotten about."
The UN said the warheads had not been disclosed by Iraq.
Tony Blair reacted cautiously, to avoid accusations of "bouncing" the inspectors. He may receive more information from Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, when they meet at Chequers today.
Downing Street said: "We note what the spokesman for the UN weapons inspectors has said about their find. We await more information."
Mike O'Brien, a Foreign Office minister, said it was too early to judge the significance of the inspectors' discovery. But he added: "We've always said that Saddam has been concealing things. We'll have to see whether this falls into that particular category, but it's time for Saddam to stop concealing, and start complying with [UN] resolution 1441."
Asked if the find gave Britain and the US a mandate for military action, Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said: "Of course not, nobody is going to make a judgement on the basis of one day's finds."
Hours before the discovery UN inspectors confronted Iraqi scientists at their homes in Baghdad for the first time. The new, more aggressive stance was thought to be on the basis of new intelligence provided by Washington and London.
News of the discovery reached New York just as the UN Security Council was in a meeting, during which America tried to head off a UN report seen as an obstacle to an early decision on war. Earlier, President George Bush said his patience with Iraq was wearing thin. "It's up to Saddam Hussein to do what the entire world has asked him to do," Mr Bush said. "And time is running out. At some point the United States' patience will run out."
Yesterday's unprecedented foray by the UN inspectors to the homes of Iraqi scientists was in the Ghazaliyeh district of Baghdad. Witnesses said Faleh Hassan, a physicist, left his home with the inspectors and accompanied them to a field outside Baghdad where they inspected what appeared to be a man-made mound .
In a response to the discovery of the warheads, Bernard Jenkin, shadow Defence Secretary, said: "If these reports are true, this find justifies the weapons inspections. These warheads, which are in good condition, were not in Saddam's declaration. This constitutes the first part of a material breach of paragraph 4 of [resolution] 1441."
UN resolution the vital paragraph
UN resolution 1441 and the assessment that could trigger war.
"False statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and co-operate fully in the implementation of this resolution, shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations and will be reported to the Council for assessment."
The resolution was adopted unanimously by the 15 members of the UN Security Council on 8 November 2002. It orders Iraq to comply fully with its disarmament obligations or face serious consequences.
----
Inspectors Find Empty Warheads in an Iraqi Depot
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/international/middleeast/17IRAQ.html
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 - United Nations weapons inspectors discovered 11 empty chemical warheads today at an ammunition storage depot in southern Iraq, while another team entered the homes of two Iraqi scientists unannounced, carting away documents.
The inspectors stumbled on the warheads in a bunker at the Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area, about 90 miles southwest of Baghdad. The trove included 11 empty 122-millimeter chemical warheads and "one warhead that requires further evaluation," said Hiro Ueki, the spokesman for the inspectors in Baghdad. He did not elaborate.
He said the warheads were in "excellent condition" but added that they were "similar to ones imported by Iraq during the late 1980's." He noted, however, that they had been found in bunkers that were not constructed until the late 1990's.
Experts on the arms team, as well as intelligence analysts in Washington and other capitals, rushed to determine whether the warheads had been listed in the voluminous weapons declaration Baghdad presented to the United Nations in December.
The team took X-rays of one warhead and collected samples for chemical testing, he said.
Lt. Gen. Hussam Muhammad Amin, the top Iraqi liaison to the weapons teams, expressed "astonishment" over the hubbub about the warheads, saying they were short-range shells imported in the late 1980's. He insisted that they were registered in the declaration.
He said that the boxes containing the munitions were covered with dust, and that the warheads were empty.
"No chemical or biological warheads," he said at a news conference, "just empty rockets which are expired and imported in 1988."
A report issued in 1998 shows that an earlier team of inspectors made a similar discovery at the Ukhaider facility, coming upon 12 155-millimeter shells, filled with mustard gas, by a roadside near the depot.
Although Iraqi officials asserted at the time that the chemical agent was old and deteriorated, the inspectors found that the mustard gas "was still of the highest quality." The 1998 report said Iraq had failed to account for 550 mustard gas shells it said had been "lost" in 1991.
Inspectors went to the Baghdad homes of two scientists, Faleh Hassan, a physicist, and Shaker el-Jibouri, a nuclear scientist who lived next door. The inspections were the first carried out in private homes.
The inspectors spent six hours in the home of Mr. Hassan, and at the end he emerged with them carrying a box of documents and drove away in a United Nations vehicle. The papers were "related to past proscribed activities," Mr. Ueki said.
During the inspection, Demetrius Perricos, director of operations for the weapons teams, had a heated argument with Iraqi officials in front of Mr. Hassan's house. "I'm not happy about all of this," he said.
After the house inspections, the teams drove to a field west of Baghdad, where they and Mr. Hassan briefly examined a mound of earth, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Hassan complained that the inspectors had occupied his home for two hours and looked everywhere, "including into beds and clothes." He said the papers inspectors studied were for "personal research." Waving what he said were his wife's medical X-rays, he complained that she was ill, and he accused inspectors of invading her privacy.
Two more Iraqi scientists that the inspectors asked to interview insisted that government officials be present, General Amin said.
President Bush said again today that time was getting short for the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, to give up prohibited weapons.
"So far the evidence hasn't been very good that he is disarming," Mr. Bush said in a speech in Scranton, Pa. "And time is running out. At some point in time the United States' patience will run out."
The administration has not let up in its pressure on the inspectors to work faster and more aggressively.
In London, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief atomic inspector, said that the inspectors would become more aggressive but that they required more time to do a thorough job. "We still have a bit of work to do, and therefore we are going to ask for at least a few months to be able to complete our job," he said.
In Moscow, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov protested the Bush administration's pressure on the inspectors.
"We are concerned about the mounting pressure on the international inspectors and the heads of inspections teams in Iraq on the part of certain circles in Washington," Mr. Ivanov said. He said that the inspectors "represent dozens of countries," and that Russia is waiting for "objective and highly professional" information from them.
Hans Blix, who heads the chemical and biological weapons team, issued one of his bluntest warnings yet to Iraq, saying that if it does not provide better cooperation, it will face "the other major option, the one that we have seen taking shape in the form of armed action against Iraq."
Up to now Mr. Blix has said he was reluctant to bring Iraqi experts out of the country for interviews, as Washington has insisted, until all the logistical details were worked out, including granting asylum in some foreign country once they left.
Today Mr. Blix changed his message, saying one way Iraq could show better cooperation "would be to let them talk without any minder present," adding, "Another would be to accept that they go abroad, if they want to do so."
In a Security Council meeting here today, the United States stepped back from a confrontation with other nations over how to reconcile timetables for the inspections laid out in two different Council resolutions. The American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, said Washington would handle the dispute "in a way that maintains Council unity on one hand and keeps the pressure on Iraq."
The Council's discussion was about whether the inspectors should follow the steps in Resolution 1441, which set up the current inspections regime, or in Resolution 1284, the December 1999 measure that first established the weapons teams. American officials said they did not agree with a proposal by Mr. Blix to issue a major report at the end of March on the work still to be done, as called for in Resolution 1284.
The Council agreed to leave the debate until after a report by the inspectors scheduled for Jan. 27.
As part of the steady buildup of forces in the Persian Gulf region, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was considering the deployment of three more aircraft carriers within striking distance of Iraq, Pentagon and military officials said today.
The deployment order, which would bring to five the number of aircraft carriers around Iraq should Mr. Bush order the nation to war, had not been signed by late tonight, officials said.
The carrier Harry S. Truman was already sailing in the Mediterranean, and the Constellation was in the Persian Gulf. Draft orders now under consideration would deploy the Theodore Roosevelt from the East Coast, the Abraham Lincoln, which is now in Australia, and the Kitty Hawk, based in Japan.
Officials said that because of tensions with North Korea, the Carl Vinson would sail from the West Coast to fill the Kitty Hawk's position in Asian waters, according to the proposed deployment orders.
The George Washington, based on the East Coast, was told to be ready for speedy deployment.
----
Inspectors Find Weapons Cache
Chemical Warheads Were Not Listed By Iraq in Arms Declaration to U.N.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3668-2003Jan16.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 16 -- U.N. weapons inspectors searching a large ammunition dump in the Iraqi desert today discovered a cache of 11 empty chemical warheads that were not listed in Iraq's final weapons declaration in December, U.N. officials said.
The inspectors found 12 warheads, equipped to deliver chemical agents, in "excellent condition," 11 of them empty and one requiring further testing, a U.N. spokesman said. They were discovered at an army munitions depot about 100 miles south of Baghdad, where the inspectors had gone to examine bunkers constructed in the late 1990s, he added.
Although it involved only a small number of warheads for 122mm rockets, the finding appeared to place Iraq in technical violation of Security Council resolutions barring it from possessing or developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. But the Bush administration's initial reaction was muted, and officials in Washington did not jump on the discovery to reinforce their repeated argument that President Saddam Hussein has been unwilling to relinquish weapons of mass destruction and must be made to do so by force, if necessary.
"This was an important discovery," a U.N. official involved in the inspections said. "This was clearly something they should not have had." But he added that the discovery was not immediately regarded by inspection leaders as "a smoking gun that proves conclusively Iraq is hiding" or producing chemical weapons.
A senior Iraqi official also played down the importance of today's find, saying his government forgot to mention the warheads in its declaration to the Security Council in December. That document was supposed to provide a final and complete accounting of Iraq's arms stockpile.
The official, Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, head of Iraq's weapons-monitoring directorate and the chief liaison to U.N. inspectors, said the chemical shells were overlooked because they were stored in boxes similar to those for conventional 122mm rocket warheads.
"Nobody opened this box," Amin said at a news conference convened less than an hour after the inspectors announced their discovery. "There was no intention to keep them."
Amin said the warheads, which he said were imported in 1986, were too old to be used. "It doesn't represent anything," he said. "It's not dangerous."
Under Security Council resolutions and the cease-fire agreement ending the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq is forbidden to possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Iraq has repeatedly insisted that it no longer possesses any weapons of mass destruction, saying all the chemical and biological arms it produced in the 1980s were destroyed either independently or by earlier groups of U.N. inspectors.
The U.S. government has started in the past week to provide the inspectors with additional intelligence to guide their searches, but today's finding appeared to be unrelated to that information. In a statement, the U.N. Monitoring, Inspection and Verification Commission said its inspectors traveled to the Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area to inspect a large group of bunkers built in the late 1990s. The inspectors had noticed the bunkers when they visited the site Jan. 7 as part of their strategy to scrutinize changes at facilities that have long been associated with Iraq's weapons programs and that were visited by teams of inspectors in the 1990s.
Iraq has acknowledged acquiring a large amount of the type of chemical shells that were identified today; its military used chemical weapons a number of times during the 1980-88 war with Iran. But the warheads, which have corrosion-proof plastic liners and other features that are specific to chemical munitions, were technically banned by resolutions issued by the Security Council after the 1991 Gulf War.
After identifying the warheads, which were stored in an older section of the compound, the inspectors used portable X-ray equipment to conduct a preliminary analysis of one of them, U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki said in a statement. The inspectors also collected samples for chemical testing, he said.
It is highly unusual for the U.N. team to announce the results of an inspection. Since it began visiting sites in Iraq on Nov. 27, officials generally have released only bare-bones information about places they have searched, refraining from mentioning whether any substantive evidence was uncovered. Ueki said he was told to disclose the discovery by his superiors.
The Bush administration has been pressuring the chief U.N. inspector, Hans Blix, to intensify the probe by conducting more intrusive searches and taking Iraqi scientists outside the country for questioning. President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, traveled to U.N. headquarters in New York on Tuesday to urge Blix to heed the U.S. requests.
Blix, who is scheduled to deliver a progress report to the Security Council on Jan. 27, told the council last week that the inspectors had not yet found a "smoking gun." The Bush administration, which is deploying tens of thousands of additional troops to the Persian Gulf region to be ready for a war, has made no secret of its hope that Blix's next report will provide clearer evidence of Iraqi obstruction and noncompliance.
In that light, Amin, the Iraqi weapons-monitoring chief, accused the U.N. inspection commission of distorting the significance of the warheads in response to U.S. pressure, saying he was "astonished" that it had made an announcement.
"You can't imagine the American pressure on this commission, how they want to make this finding a huge finding which is related to the mass destruction weapons -- chemical or biological," he said. "It is neither chemical, neither biological. It is empty warheads. It is small artillery rockets. It is expired rockets and they were forgotten without any intention to use them."
He accused the inspectors and the United States of "looking for a pretext to declare [war] against Iraq."
"It's all about political goals," he said.
As one team of inspectors was searching the munitions depot, another descended on the homes of two nuclear scientists to conduct unannounced interviews, intensifying their efforts to debrief people believed to be connected to past or current weapons programs.
The inspectors arrived at 9 a.m. at the Baghdad homes of a physicist, Faleh Hassan, and his next-door neighbor, Shaker Jibouri, a nuclear scientist. The U.N. personnel had to wait in the street for almost an hour while both men were summoned back from their offices. Once they returned, inspectors questioned both men in their homes and searched the premises. The scientists insisted on having Iraqi officials present.
Journalists observed the arms experts poring over documents at a table set up near Hassan's front door.
After almost six hours, Hassan, the director of a military installation that specializes in laser development, left his house carrying a box of documents and got into a U.N. vehicle with an Iraqi official and two inspectors. The group then drove to a field outside Baghdad where they briefly surveyed the grounds and inspected a small dirt mound.
Iraqi officials said the site was a farm that Hassan sold in 1996. The group then proceeded to U.N. offices here, where they photocopied the documents Hassan was carrying.
Before leaving, the chief U.N. field inspector, Demetrius Perricos, engaged in an unusually animated discussion with the Iraqi officials who accompany the inspectors. It was not clear what the men were talking about, but a reporter said he overheard Perricos saying loudly: "I'm not happy about all of this."
Amin said the inspectors also asked two other Iraqi scientists to come to the U.N. offices for an interview. He said the scientists refused to be interviewed there and demanded that Iraqi officials be present during the questioning.
The issue of interviewing weapons scientists has emerged as a key point of controversy among Iraq, the inspectors and the United States. Blix wants his inspectors to be able, at the very least, to question the scientists in private. The Bush administration wants the inspectors to go even further and take key scientists and their families out of Iraq, saying debriefing sessions in another country would allow them to provide more candid disclosures.
Iraqi officials have said scientists are free to choose whether they want to leave, but the officials have said no one wants to go. U.S. officials have depicted that as tantamount to pressuring the scientists not to go.
Hussein's chief science adviser, Gen. Amir Saadi, denied that scientists were being told what to do. "They're aware what's going on," he said. "They're aware of the purpose behind such insistences."
After the inspectors' visit, a visibly angry Jibouri called the search of his house -- which he said included bedrooms, bathrooms and his study -- "provocative and intrusive."
"They searched everything," he growled. "This is . . . police work."
Saadi sought to put the best spin on things, expressing hope that inspections would continue after Jan. 27 so Iraq's claim that it has no banned weapons can be verified.
----
Arms inspectors search scientists' homes, field
January 17, 2003
AP
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030117-90202212.htm
BAGHDAD - An Iraqi scientist yesterday accompanied U.N. experts to a field outside Baghdad where together they inspected what appeared to be a man-made mound of earth.
The incident - unprecedented since inspectors in Iraq resumed their search for banned nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in November - came after the U.N. experts went through documents outside the scientist's house and had a heated discussion with Iraqi liaison officials.
"I'm not happy about all of this," Dimitri Perricos, a team leader among the U.N. experts, could be heard telling the Iraqis as he got into a vehicle with the scientist - physicist Faleh Hassan, who carried a box stuffed with documents - and an Iraqi official.
The inspections at the Baghdad homes of Mr. Hassan and his next-door neighbor, nuclear scientist Shaker el-Jibouri, were the first at private houses. At 9 a.m., inspectors cordoned off their street in Baghdad's al-Ghazalia neighborhood, then entered the homes.
The experts were later seen going through documents at a table set up near Mr. Hassan's front door and having an animated discussion with Iraqi liaison officials.
At the end of the six-hour visit, the silver-haired Mr. Hassan - a physicist and director of a military installation that specializes in laser development - got into a U.N. car with Mr. Perricos and an Iraqi official.
They drove in a convoy about 10 miles west of Baghdad and stopped at an agricultural area known as al-Salamiyat. There, Mr. Hassan, two inspectors and a liaison officer crossed a footbridge over a canal to a bare field that contained what appeared to be a man-made mound.
The group spent about five minutes looking at the mound before returning to the vehicles and heading back to Baghdad. There, Mr. Hassan along with several Iraqi liaison officers were seen entering a hotel where some inspectors are living, carrying the box the size of a small television set visibly stuffed with documents.
The inspectors, as is usual, did not speak with reporters and it was not clear why they were interested in the mound.
----
U.S. Hastens to Assess Pair of Iraq Findings
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3737-2003Jan16.html
The Bush administration mobilized yesterday to assess two discoveries by U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, trying to determine if either held the seeds of a serious violation of November's Security Council resolution.
Officials reacted cautiously to the announcement in Baghdad that inspectors had uncovered 12 artillery rockets, empty but outfitted to carry chemical weapons. Until more is known about the discovery, administration officials would not comment on its importance.
Iraq's failure to list the munitions in a weapons declaration it gave the U.N. Security Council last month was a violation of Baghdad's international obligations, officials said. But they expressed little expectation that chief inspector Hans Blix would consider it a "material breach" of the resolution that could lead to approval of a military attack.
Administration officials expressed more interest in documents taken from the Baghdad home of an Iraqi physicist, Faleh Hassan. Hassan, who is director of Razi, a military installation that specializes in laser development, demanded copies of the documents and had a brief argument with inspectors before accompanying them to U.N. headquarters. Iraqi officials sat in as Hassan was interviewed; he and the officials were given copies of the Arabic-language documents.
The reports from Baghdad came as the administration stepped up its verbal pressure on Saddam Hussein while continuing military deployments to the region. President Bush said yesterday that "time is running out" for Hussein.
"So far, the evidence hasn't been very good that he is disarming," Bush said. "At some point in time, the United States' patience will run out. In the name of peace, if he does not disarm, I will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm Saddam Hussein."
Barring conclusive discoveries in Iraq, early Security Council agreement on a military attack against Iraq appeared unlikely. With U.S. forces edging toward full deployment under a war plan more than a year in the making, Bush may decide that a more limited "coalition of the willing" is his best option.
In New York yesterday, the United States faced broad Security Council opposition to a proposal to block Blix from scheduling a new report on Iraqi disarmament in late March. The administration, eager to keep day-to-day pressure on Baghdad, wants the 15-member council to suspend Blix's plans to present a list of disarmament obligations Iraq must meet before U.N. sanctions can be suspended.
"We have some questions as to whether . . . March 27 is the right time to outline key remaining disarmament tasks . . . and to talk about an ongoing verification and monitoring regime because we believe that would leave the impression that most of the disarmament tasks had already been accomplished," said John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Negroponte said he would continue to make his case to the council in the coming weeks, but pledged to try to resolve the matter in a way that would "maintain council unity . . . and keep the pressure on Iraq to cooperate."
Blix told the council Tuesday that the March meeting is required under the 1999 resolution that created the inspection agency. The administration believes that all elements of the earlier resolution were superseded by the tough new resolution adopted in November. Its last scheduled date for a formal report from Blix is Jan. 27.
But several council diplomats said Washington's initiative had little hope of succeeding in a body where the majority is eager to avoid a military confrontation and wants the inspections to continue. "My feeling is that the Americans will not get what they want," a senior council member said. "If they had any sense, they would report back to Washington that they aren't going to have their way and drop it."
U.N. officials in New York were reluctant to discuss the discovery of new documents and the chemical weapons shells. While waiting for detailed reports from the field, they were "unable to assess the significance of either event," said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for Blix's U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. U.N. sources said examination of the documents and the warheads likely would take several days. Serial numbers on the munitions will be checked to determine whether they are left over from purchases made in the 1980s, as the Iraqis claimed, or were obtained more recently. Chemical tests will also be conducted to determine if the warheads ever held chemical agents.
Iraq possessed tens of thousands of chemical munitions during the 1980s. U.N. inspectors have long been aware of the Ukhaider ammunition storage facility, where the warheads were found yesterday. It had been declared as a weapons site during previous U.N. inspections in the 1990s and warehoused 155mm mustard gas shells and 122mm rockets armed with lethal sarin gas. The weapons were destroyed by the earlier inspectors.
The CIA has said that Iraq never accounted for as many as 15,000 additional such warheads equipped to carry chemical weapons, although it believes a number of them were destroyed. The Iraqi government, which has said it has no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, described yesterday's discovery as too insignificant to put in its declaration.
Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. inspector now with the Institute of Peace, said all shells, rockets or bombs that can deliver chemical or biological payloads are proscribed under U.N. resolutions, whether they contain the toxic materials or not. Tucker called yesterday's find "a technical violation but one that could be part of a larger pattern." He described the find "more as the smell of cordite than a smoking gun."
"I think Blix can make a compelling case that inspections have been gearing up to full force and finally are in a position to be effective," Tucker said. "They should be allowed to continue to see if this may be the tip of an iceberg, but I still don't think this is sufficient."
Blix, who will travel to Iraq this weekend, said yesterday that "the message we want to bring to Baghdad is that the situation is very tense . . . that everybody wants to see a verified, credible disarmament of Iraq." In the face of strong U.S. pressure to intensify inspections, Blix has said Iraq's cooperation has been largely "passive." During a stop in Brussels yesterday, he said Baghdad had "only been opening doors on the ground, and that is not enough. They must give information."
Staff writer Colum Lynch contributed from U.N. headquarters in New York.
--------
White House Calls Discovery of Empty Warheads 'Serious'
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House on Friday called the discovery of chemical warheads in Iraq ``troubling and serious,'' and said the cache had not been declared by Saddam Hussein's government as required by U.N. rules.
Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer stopped short of calling the 12 empty chemical warheads a smoking gun or a violation of an anti-arms U.N. resolution. But U.S. officials hope the finding bolsters their case against Saddam.
American allies expressed less alarm over the discovery, and urged patience from Washington.
French President Jacques Chirac, whose country holds veto power at the United Nations, said he supports giving U.N. inspectors more time to determine whether Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction.
The head of the U.N. nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said it would be worth taking ``a few more months'' to search if that would prevent a war.
And chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix said he still wasn't sure whether the warheads were mentioned in Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration, submitted last month, in which Baghdad was required to account for all components of its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
Iraq said the weapons were listed in the declaration, an assertion firmly disputed by Fleischer.
``The chemical warheads found by the inspectors were not -- not -- on the declared list of weapons that Iraq issued just one month ago,'' he said. ``The fact that Iraq is in possession of undeclared chemical warheads, which the United Nations says are in excellent condition, is troubling and serious.''
He repeated the line when asked if warheads amounted to the long-sought ``smoking gun.''
If Iraq or anybody else claims the warheads were in the declaration, Fleischer said, ``The burden is on them to show the world what page its on.''
In what might be considered a mild rebuke, Fleischer said the United States and Security Council nations -- not weapons inspectors -- will be the final judge of the seriousness of evidence gathered by inspectors.
``Under the U.N. resolution, Saddam Hussein has an obligation to disarm. It has become increasingly clear that he is not doing so,'' Fleischer said.
He also dismissed Saddam Hussein's claim Friday that Iraqi enemies would face ``suicide'' at the gates of his capital if an attack were launched.
``We are much less interested in Saddam Hussein's talking and much more interested in Saddam Hussein's disarming,'' Fleischer said.
Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., says that if Iraq had not declared the warheads, they would be in ``material breach'' of U.N. resolutions -- meaning there could be grounds for use of force.
``That is a big deal,'' Kyl said, adding that it would only be the tip of the iceberg. ``There's a whole lot more we're never likely to find because it's too hard to find in a country as large as Iraq.''
Though Fleischer stopped short of labeling the discovery a ``material breach,'' which Bush and the United Nations could use as justification for war, the press secretary said, ``The fact that they now have been proven to possess undeclared chemical warheads doesn't get them out of material breach.''
He added that Iraq is barred from possessing chemical weapons.
``Iraq's statement here is they forgot that they had these chemical warheads. That's what the general in charge of the program said yesterday, which raises the question of what other memory lapses are they having that have implications for their ability to bring harm to their neighbors and to our allies and to our interests,'' Fleischer said.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.N. inspectors have indicated that Iraq has failed in a number of areas to cooperate fully with Security Council requirements.
``There's no point in continuing forever, going on, if Iraq is not cooperating,'' Boucher said.
The Pentagon continued its war preparations, saying it might dispatch three more aircraft carriers to the region.
By stationing carriers in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, Navy fighter-bombers would be in position to attack from three directions, complicating Iraq's effort to defend its airspace.
The administration believes that a U.N. blessing is not necessary and is prepared to take action without it if circumstances warrant, in concert with like-minded countries.
A potential turning point in the Iraq debate could occur starting Jan. 27, when U.N. inspectors are due to report to the Security Council. But Blix has spoken of a second deadline of March 27, citing an earlier U.N. resolution.
-------- japan
Tokyo seen unlikely to build nukes
By Hiroshi Hiyama
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030117-68468880.htm
TOKYO - Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, is unlikely to join an atomic arms race even if North Korea pushes ahead with developing a nuclear arsenal, analysts said this week.
"Politically, economically, strategically and technologically, there are more reasons for Japan not to possess nuclear weapons than to have a meaningful military nuclear program," said Matake Kamiya, associate professor of international politics at the National Defense Academy of Japan.
"Japan is neither willing, nor interested, nor capable of doing it," said Mr. Kamiya, whose study on the possibility of Japan becoming a nuclear power appears in the current edition of the Washington Quarterly.
Pyongyang's announcement last week that it was pulling out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and indications that it might resume missile tests have once again raised the specter of nuclear escalation.
North Korea's test-firing in 1998 of a ballistic Taepo Dong missile that flew over northeastern Japan into the Pacific Ocean made the island nation uncomfortably aware that it lies within the range of Pyongyang.
But because it is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear weapons, analysts agree that even a buildup on the Korean Peninsula would not change Japan's non-nuclear policy.
Japan adopted in 1971 three non-nuclear principles: "not producing, not possessing and not allowing nuclear weapons into the country."
Polls have consistently revealed the Japanese public's anti-nuclear sentiment, Mr. Kamiya said, adding that any decision to start a nuclear-weapons program would seriously damage the government of the day.
Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang, a China-North Korea expert based at the Strategic Studies Group at Taiwan's Tamkang University, echoed that sentiment.
"Japan developing a nuclear program is a really, really long shot because of the political considerations. Japan does not have the political will, nor the public support for such a move," Mr. Huang said.
Facing nuclear-armed potential enemies is nothing new for Japan, as the Soviet Union and China posed nuclear threats during the Cold War era, Mr. Kamiya noted.
"But even then, there was never any serious discussion in Japan about Japan pursuing its own nuclear weapons," he added.
"Even an acceleration of North Korea's nuclear program would not likely cause Japan to follow suit," Mr. Kamiya argues in his article.
The United States, which has 47,000 troops stationed in Japan, is also unlikely to shift some of its nuclear weapons to Japan.
"No, [Japan] won't let the U.S. have nuclear weapons on [its] turf. Japanese public opinion would not tolerate it, and it is not necessary," said Joseph Cheng, political analyst at Hong Kong's City University.
Possession of nuclear arms by Japan might destabilize security in Northeast Asia and would unnecessarily anger its neighbors, Mr. Kamiya said.
"Such a change would economically hurt Japan, which has become an economic superpower through trade," he said, adding that Japan still relies on imports for most of its energy needs, as well as much of its food.
Japan also is not technologically capable of producing the hundreds of warheads necessary to start an immediate and meaningful nuclear-weapons program, Mr. Kamiya added.
"If Japan had to build one nuclear weapon of any quality, I think it could. But something like that is only good for a terrorist group or a small nation to appear as if they are some sort of a threat," Mr. Kamiya said.
Japan is more likely to work with the United States to develop other military options, Mr. Cheng said.
"There will be a bit of an arms race in that the weapons program of North Korea has provided a very strong reason for Japan to have a military satellite intelligence program and work with the U.S. for a theater missile [defense] program," he said.
In a related development this week, Japan's top defense official arrived in Moscow for talks focusing on the North Korean crisis and a range of disputes, including Moscow's unease over Tokyo's plans to build a missile shield with U.S. help.
But before his departure for talks Tuesday with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Shigeru Ishiba, director-general of Japan's Defense Agency, stuck to a tough military line on a range of issues that continue to divide Moscow and Tokyo.
He defended Japan's right to build a limited missile shield, which Moscow has strenuously opposed. He also played down the odds of Russia and Japan expanding military cooperation.
Mr. Ishiba's visit came on the heels of a historic summit in Moscow last week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that was overshadowed in part by Pyongyang's decision to withdraw from the NPT.
Talks between the two leaders focused on the prickly issue of a formal peace treaty ending World War II that hinges on a demarcation of the Russo-Japanese border in the Pacific.
While they pledged to work toward a peace treaty, their diplomats bickered on the sidelines over Japan's insistence that an agreement depends entirely on Russia ceding four disputed islands in the southern Kuril chain taken by Soviet forces at the end of World War II.
Russian diplomats fumed that no such wording was discussed during the meeting, while analysts noted that almost no progress could be detected on either the diplomatic or trade front in the talks.
"It is obvious that the new Japanese leadership has the same attitude toward Russia as two or three years ago, only perhaps slightly less strict," said Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the Fond Politika research institute.
"The conclusion from Koizumi's visit must be the same as after all other Russia-Japan summits since [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev's visit to Tokyo in 1991; namely, that there is no solution," the United Financial Group investment house said in a research note.
Tensions also could be felt in Moscow as Mr. Ishiba traveled from Tokyo, with the top Japanese defense official telling Itar-Tass news agency that his country would pursue its national-defense interests, even if some of its facets drew Russian protest.
Creating a limited missile-defense system for Japan "is an important goal," Mr. Ishiba insisted.
"It will be a purely defensive system, one without alternatives, and the sole mechanism for defending the livelihood of our people," he said.
"In and of itself, this system does not pose a military threat to other governments and should not lead to an arms race."
Russia is skeptical of limited missile-defense systems of the type now being developed by the United States, although it has proposed helping build one for Europe.
But Japan's participation in such a project, which is still in the planning stages, appears to have drawn particular Russian ire as the two sides jostle for geopolitical influence in East Asia.
•AFP correspondent Dmitry Zaks in Moscow contributed to this report.
-------- korea
Cut supply lines that fuel Korea's nuclear dreams
Friday, January 17, 2003
By MANSOOR IJAZ and R. JAMES WOOLSEY
Los Angeles Times
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?Category=14&ID=80752&r=1
North Korea's curious brand of nuclear brinkmanship and blackmail will become a recurring nightmare for the United States and its allies in the region unless a longer-term policy of pre-emptive containment is implemented to prevent Pyongyang from obtaining the materials to develop nuclear weapons.
The current spate of diplomacy may be useful - perhaps even successful - in managing the short-term fallout from Kim Jong Il's decision to restart his nuclear reactors and pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But such well-intentioned efforts can't quash the North Korean leader's long-term nuclear ambitions.
They also put Washington in the awkward position of being compelled by its friends to engage with a regime whose repudiation of every international norm for state behavior offers no basis for engagement.
As the United States proceeds, it must avoid anything that looks like negotiating with a terrorist regime.
At the other end of the policy spectrum, pre-emptive military solutions such as attacking North Korea's nuclear or missile installations could well cause Pyongyang to retaliate against Japan and South Korea with a blitzkrieg of troops and missiles. And threatening Kim's nonexistent economy with further sanctions is little more than bluster.
A new approach is needed to adequately address the North Korean threat. Japan, Australia and South Korea are currently engaged in diplomacy with Pyongyang. They should, in their talks, insist on the near-term removal of nuclear stockpiles as a prerequisite for food and fuel that would be provided for non-nuclear electricity production. Russian natural gas from deposits near the Korean peninsula could replace any need for nuclear power, while also giving Moscow an incentive to stand firm against North Korean nuclear activities.
At the same time, a U.S.-led al- liance needs to find ways of preventing materials necessary to weapons production from getting to North Korea. This would require firm commitments from China - and, perhaps more important, Pakistan - to stop providing Pyongyang with nuclear components, particularly the gas centrifuges that form the heart of uranium enrichment plants and the ring magnets that are vital to centrifuge function. Bomb designs, particularly the specialized bomb casings needed to house highly radioactive uranium cores and spherical implosion trigger devices needed for detonation, must also be stopped at the source.
Last month's sale by China of 20 tons of tributyl phosphate to North Korean agents demonstrates the magnitude of the problem. This is a key chemical needed to ex- tract plutonium from depleted uranium fuel rods. The Chinese shipment was enough to extract plutonium for four to five bombs from the approximately 8,000 spent fuel rods North Korea has.
Efforts must be directed toward preventing any more such chemicals from reaching North Korean plants. Plutonium reprocessing would allow the North Koreans to miniaturize nuclear cores for missile warheads - or worse, to shape them into small tactical weapons for sale to terrorists on the black market. If Beijing continues to enable Pyongyang's plutonium separation, it must also accept that such cooperation could spark a decision by Japan or South Korea to develop nuclear weapons.
More troubling still is the specter of Pakistani cooperation with North Korea. Islamabad vehemently denies having provided North Korea with any nuclear assistance in the past, but mounting intelligence data and forensic evidence suggest otherwise. And press reports have repeatedly documented how a North Korean missile proliferation company, Changgwang Sinyong Corp., provided missile parts to Pakistan for its Shaheen and Ghauri missiles, although the company has been sanctioned by the U.S. State Department only for its sale of missile components to Yemen and Iran.
Washington should insist, at a minimum, that further U.S. financial aid be tied to verifiable and tangible guarantees that Pakistani nuclear materials, bombmaking and enrichment technology components, and scientists, both active and retired, are not made available to other countries - officially or unofficially.
Pyongyang's nuclear bluff cannot be called until Washington convinces Beijing and Islamabad that nuclear cooperation with North Korea is reckless and cannot be tolerated. Interrupting the supply of nuclear technology, bombmaking materials and extraction chemicals is the best way to curtail North Korea's habitual policy of nuclear blackmail.
Mansoor Ijaz is chairman of a New York-based private equity investment firm.
R. James Woolsey was director of the CIA from 1993 until 1995.
----
KOREAN PENINSULA
South Korea's President-Elect Rejects Use of Force Against North Korea
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/international/asia/17ROH.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Jan. 16 - In a determined defense of engagement with North Korea, President-elect Roh Moo Hyun today all but ruled out the use of force against his isolated neighbor, which he said was seeking a way to open up to the world.
"North Korea wants to escape from its status as a rogue state," Mr. Roh said when asked why he had faith in a conciliatory approach. "I believe once those things are guaranteed, North Korea will abandon its nuclear ambitions."
In his first interview since winning the election last month, Mr. Roh insisted on a peaceful approach even as South Korea's defense minister, Lee Jun, told Parliament that South Korean forces were prepared for a "worst-case scenario" if diplomacy fails to resolve the four-month old nuclear crisis.
Mr. Roh said he would not contemplate a military strike from South Korean territory against the North Korean nuclear complex at Yongbyon - even if North Korea were found to be reprocessing nuclear fuel for bomb production there.
"I don't think we should even go so far as to imagine such a situation," said Mr. Roh, whose approval as president would be required for any military action by South Korean troops or Americans stationed here.
The president-elect also said that South Korea would not develop nuclear weapons in response to North Korean armaments, insisting that "nuclear development will not be permitted in Korea - either North or South."
Mr. Roh did not discuss his views on Korean reunification, a goal that both North and South have embraced. Nor did he offer his views on when, or whether, the 37,000 American troops in South Korea should be withdrawn. But he tried to play down a recent wave of protests against the American forces here, and said that anti-Americanism had no meaningful place in South Korea.
"There are some voices of anti-Americanism in Korea, but the number of those voices is small, and the chances of their leading public opinion is even smaller," he said.
Earlier this week, in a conciliatory change of tone, Mr. Roh visited the United States military headquarters here to demonstrate his gratitude for American sacrifices during the Korean War.
Mr. Roh, a liberal lawyer with a background in the country's labor and democracy movements dating back to the military dictatorships of the 1980's, rejected a common assertion that his candidacy rode a wave of anti-Americanism, allowing him to narrowly defeat the more conservative candidate, Lee Hoi Chang.
"During my campaign, unlike Mr. Lee, I did not participate in any candlelight vigils or sign any petitions," Mr. Roh said. "It is not just that I did not participate, I rejected it. After my election I asked for the candlelight vigils to stop, and my request produced some results."
In recent weeks, concerns have been expressed by both South Koreans and Americans that Mr. Roh's politics, by some accounts more liberal than his predecessor, the departing President Kim Dae Jung, would exacerbate already difficult ties with this country's most important ally, the United States.
Mr. Roh's lack of international experience and his background as a one-term legislator have heightened these anxieties and have prompted some commentators here and abroad to question his preparedness. Others, however, say they have been impressed with his intelligence and self-assuredness. "I don't think we should be nervous about him, although he has far less international experience than presidents of most major nations," said one Western diplomat.
Since October, the Korean Peninsula has been in crisis over North Korea's acknowledgment of a secret program to produce highly enriched uranium, a core ingredient for nuclear weapons. Mr. Kim's government has urged Washington toward dialogue with North Korea.
Mr. Roh vows to keep his country's relationship with the United States strong, while trying to usher North Korea out of its international isolation. "At this point it is too early to say that the South-North relationship has failed," he said. Later, referring to his own background as a labor mediator with a reputation for effectiveness in tough situations, he said, "I have a lot of experience in solving problems."
During his campaign, Mr. Roh criticized the Bush administration's policy toward North Korea as "hard-line," but carefully avoided such judgments today, declining at one point the use of the word "mistake" to characterize American diplomacy. On the contrary, Mr. Roh said he expected to get along well with Mr. Bush, who looked like a "cool guy," by which he meant amiable, on television and had impressed him as being candid and frank.
"I myself like to talk candidly, straightforward," Mr. Roh said. "People can have better dialogue when frank. We are the same age. His birthday is a little earlier than mine. I look forward to meeting him in person and having a frank and candid dialogue with him."
"He may be able to sell himself in Washington a lot better than Kim did," said Michael Breen, author of "The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies," and of a forthcoming biography of Kim Dae Jung. "You look at pictures of Kim at the White House and he is sitting there, dour, looking straight at the wall. By contrast, Roh is positive and personable and looks very comfortable with himself."
Mr. Roh said that there were "a lot of theories and views on the personality" of Kim Jong Il, the reclusive North Korean leader, but that he believed Mr. Kim was sincere in his wish for dialogue. "If you treat someone with mistrust he will come back to you with more mistrust and skepticism," Mr. Roh said. "I think the fundamental thing here is Mr. Kim Jong Il's situation."
"He has to keep his people fed and he has to assure the stability of his own system, and he has to come out to the world," he added. "There are various occasions on which he has made this clear." For evidence, he cited several recent North Korean initiatives to reform the country's economy and open it to foreign investment.
Mr. Roh said he had no communication back channels to North Korea, but defended himself against the charge of naïveté, saying in effect that the source of his faith in dialogue was the lack of anything but utterly terrible alternatives.
"If you say it is foolish to have dialogue with him then we should exercise pressure on Kim Jong Il," Mr. Roh said. "But if he does not bend to pressure, then it means we should go ahead and attack. It all comes down to the fact that we can't have a military attack.
"It is our judgment that we cannot face or embrace war with North Korea. It is such a catastrophic result that I cannot even imagine. We have to handle the North-South relations in such a way that we do not have to face such a situation."
---
South Korea Ready for War, Official Says
By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3415-2003Jan16.html
SEOUL, Jan. 16 -- South Korea is prepared for war in the event that diplomacy fails to defuse an intensifying nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, the country's top defense official said today.
"If the North Korean nuclear problem cannot be solved peacefully and America attacks North Korea, war on the Korean Peninsula will be unavoidable," Defense Minister Lee Jun told parliament. "Our army is prepared for the worst-case scenario."
Jun added that if North Korea follows through on restarting its nuclear reactor and proceeds to build nuclear weapons, the weapons likely would be trained at South Korea. His comments served to underscore that, despite South Korea's "sunshine policy" of reconciliation and engagement, the North remains an enemy dating back to the Korean War in 1950-53.
In Beijing, a top envoy for the Bush administration who is touring Asian capitals in a diplomatic push to defuse the crisis with the North warned that results could be slow in coming. "We're going to have to talk and work together and communicate with other people, including with North Korea, very, very clearly," said Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly. "It's going to be a very slow process to make sure that we achieve this in the right way."
Kelly's comments came a day after North Korea rejected an offer from the Bush administration for agriculture and fuel aid in exchange for the reclusive Communist country abandoning its nuclear weapons programs and again submitting to inspections.
Meanwhile, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, criticized North Korea for withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and said the issue could soon land before the Security Council.
"If there's not much hope for a diplomatic solution, I'd expect the North Korean issue to be referred to the Security Council in the not very distant future," the agency's director, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Moscow.
----
North Korea weapons a 'nuclear nightmare'
By Michele Lerner
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030117-25255995.htm
North Korea's record of weapons proliferation and terrorism has raised fears that its nuclear bombs could fall into the hands of al Qaeda terrorists, weapons specialists and diplomats said.
"A nuclear nightmare - and one that is within the realm of the possible - is the export by North Korea of nuclear material, and even nuclear weapons, to terrorists," said William Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
"Certainly, groups such as al Qaeda must be attracted by the prospect of unsafeguarded nuclear material controlled by an impoverished and isolated regime which already has broken many of its international nonproliferation commitments," Mr. Potter said.
Since North Korea announced its intention on Jan. 10 to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, concern has focused on the possibility that the Stalinist nation would use spent fuel rods from a mothballed reactor to build additional nuclear bombs.
The United States believes North Korea already has two nuclear bombs to complement its massive army, potent ballistic-missile force and stockpile of biological and chemical weapons.
Although there is no hard evidence linking Osama bin Laden's terrorist network to North Korea, Pyongyang has sold missiles and technology to Iran, Pakistan, Yemen and others.
"It's a frightening scenario," said a diplomat with broad experience in Asia. "We know al Qaeda wants these weapons, and we know North Korea desperately needs hard currency."
A CIA report to Congress made public earlier this month identified North Korea as a key supplier of nuclear-, chemical- and biological-weapons materials and missiles to other nations.
The CIA stated that during the last six months of 2001, "North Korea continued to export significant ballistic-missile-related equipment, components, materials and technical expertise to the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.
"Pyongyang attaches high priority to the development and sale of ballistic missiles and equipment, and related technology. Exports of ballistic missiles and related technology are one of the North's major sources of hard currency, which fuel continued missile development and production."
The report made no connection between North Korea and weapons support to terrorist groups.
However, the report said the threat of terrorists using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons "appears to be rising."
The CIA found evidence during the war in Afghanistan of al Qaeda efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.
That intelligence, according to the Congressional Research Service, "influenced the Bush administration to broaden the definition of the war against terrorism to include states like North Korea that potentially could supply weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda."
North Korea's mercurial leader, Kim Jong-il, has in the past used those weapons successfully as bargaining chips with the United States, Japan and South Korea to garner aid to prop up his moribund economy.
For the past decade, Washington and its allies have feared that a miscalculation by Mr. Kim, whose government earlier this week dismissed conciliatory gestures from the Bush administration, might lead to a conflict on the Korean Peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
The North's record on terrorism, which includes the bombing of civilian airliners, assassinations and kidnappings, also makes it an appealing partner for international terrorists in the wake of September 11, analysts say.
In its rhetorical blasts at the United States, officially atheist North Korea last week even borrowed a phrase from Muslim fanatics by vowing to wage a "holy war" against the United States.
North Korea has had links for decades with Japanese Red Army terrorists who regularly traveled between Pyongyang and the Middle East.
While terrorist links conjure up horrific scenarios, defense analysts and diplomats warn that North Korea could act alone out of desperation.
"Even if they dragged a nuclear bomb to the DMZ in an ox cart, the effects could be devastating," said the Asian diplomat, who asked for anonymity.
In December 2001 the National Intelligence Council, an advisory board reporting to the CIA director, determined in a "finding" that North Korea has produced one, possibly two, nuclear bombs.
If it goes ahead with reprocessing fuel rods from its dormant Yongbyon plant, it could produce enough plutonium for four to six more bombs within four months, U.S. officials say.
In addition, North Korea since the 1960s has been working on biological weapons including smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, typhus and other viruses.
"North Korea has a dedicated, national-level effort to achieve a biological-weapons capability and has developed and produced, and may have weaponized, biological weapons," John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told a congressional hearing last year.
Pyongyang also is believed to have the capacity to produce some 4,500 tons of chemical weapons annually, including mustard, phosgene and sarin, which could be delivered across the DMZ by artillery.
North Korea's ballistic-missile arsenal includes hundreds of Scuds and No Dong rockets.
It is developing Taepo Dong-2 missiles that would be capable of reaching the United States, according to a recent CIA National Intelligence Estimate.
Even a conventional war on the Korean Peninsula would be catastrophic.
North Korea's 1.2-million-man army is the world's fourth- or fifth-largest fighting force.
Two-thirds of those soldiers are stationed within 60 miles of the DMZ, along with thousands of Cold War-era tanks and armored personnel carriers.
"Korea remains a place where U.S. forces could almost instantaneously become engaged in a high-intensity war involving significant ground, air and naval forces," the former commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Gen. Thomas A. Schwartz, told a congressional committee last year. "Such a war would cause loss of life numbering in the hundreds of thousands and cause billions of dollars in property destruction."
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, points out that nuclear-weapons programs in Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and the Ukraine were shuttered only after transitions away from military or militaristic governments.
----
U.S. Blames N. Korea for Lack of Nuclear Talks
January 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday blamed North Korea for an impasse over arms talks, saying President Bush had made clear his willingness to discuss Pyongyang's dismantlement of its nuclear programs.
As South Korea's president-elect Roh Moo-hyun urged the United States to open a dialogue with the communist North, Secretary of State Colin Powell reassured Pyongyang that Washington wanted to find a peaceful solution.
``We don't want to escalate any crisis. We don't want war,'' Powell was quoted as saying in an interview with Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. ``We have no unfriendly intentions toward North Korea ... we are seeking to solve the situation diplomatically.''
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Pyongyang had chosen to isolate itself from the international community.
``We have made plain that we will talk to North Korea about dismantlement of their programs,'' he said. ``North Korea has chosen to develop nuclear weapons, to isolate itself from the world and not to talk to the United States.''
Roh said South Korea also needed to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions, but Pyongyang responded that it would talk to no one but the United States and maintained its anti-American bombast even while extending a tiny olive branch.
``The DPRK (North Korea) is fully ready for both dialogue and confrontation,'' Pyongyong's official Korean Central News Agency said. But, it added: ``The U.S. should bear in mind that all the issues can be settled satisfactorily at the dialogue with the DPRK only when the former has a sincere attitude based on good faith.''
Fleischer welcomed South Korea's willingness to engage the North under the ``sunshine policy'' begun by outgoing President Kim Dae-Jung.
``We continue to support, as President Bush made very clear when the previous South Korean president visited the United States, that we support South Korea's sunshine policy in talking to North Korea,'' he said.
INTERNATIONAL ISSUE
The Bush administration has sought to cast the confrontation with North Korea as an international issue rather than a bilateral problem, enlisting the help of allies in the region like Japan and South Korea, as well China and Russia both of which have a close relationship with Pyongyang.
Adding to a recent flurry of diplomatic activity, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov arrived in Beijing on Friday en route to Pyongyang, saying he was convinced that given time and ``quiet diplomacy,'' the situation could be resolved peacefully.
Bush also has expressed optimism that a peaceful solution can be found. He, too, has repeatedly stressed that the United States has no intention of attacking North Korea.
At the same time, he has threatened to disarm Iraq forcibly if Baghdad refuses to give up its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon has sent ships, planes and thousands of troops to the Gulf region in preparation for a possible war with Iraq.
The crisis on the Korean Peninsula erupted last October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a nuclear weapons program and it escalated as North Korea expelled International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and threatened to resume missile tests.
After initially taking a hard line toward North Korea with some U.S. officials hinting at the possibility of economic sanctions, Bush changed tack on Tuesday, offering to revive a stalled initiative to give impoverished North Korea food and energy aid if it abandoned its pursuit of a nuclear arsenal.
But North Korea accused Washington of trying to trick it into disarming, calling Bush's offer ``pie in the sky.''
-------- missile defense
Israel to Receive Anti - Missile System
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Israel-Missile-Defense.html
BERLIN (AP) -- The German Defense Ministry said Thursday it plans to deliver an anti-missile defense system to Israel at the end of this month.
Two Patriot anti-missile systems will be delivered by ship under a two-year loan agreement signed by officials from the two countries in Berlin on Thursday, a ministry spokesman said on customary condition of anonymity. Israel sought the missile system against any potential attacks should there be war with Iraq.
However, the spokesman said Israel had not repeated a request for armored cars that caused a political row in Berlin.
The German government initially agreed to provide the vehicles after the December request -- but backtracked after officials realized Israel was seeking a troop-carrying version, not one specialized in combating chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Members of Schroeder's center-left government urged the government not to sanction the delivery of the Fuchs vehicles, arguing they could be used for incursions into Palestinian areas and would breach strict limits on weapons exports.
--------
Russia Criticizes U.K. on Missile Defense
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Britain.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- The Russian Foreign Ministry on Friday criticized Britain for letting the United States use a radar facility in northern England as part of its planned missile defense system.
The British government said Wednesday it intends to grant the United States permission to incorporate the Fylingdales air force base in North Yorkshire into its proposed missile defense network.
``This step taken by the British military will hardly strengthen international security and will definitely impede the multilateral process of restriction and reduction of nuclear and other arms,'' the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
``The creation of strategic missile defense is fraught with weaker global stability, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and means of their delivery, and the diversion of resources from counteracting the true threats of the present day, first and foremost international terrorism.''
Bush administration officials say the United States must create defenses in case a hostile country -- such as North Korea -- develops and fires a long-range missile at the United States.
Fylingdales has operated since 1963 as a ballistic missile early-warning radar system.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- michigan
Fire at Nuclear Plant Shuts Down Reactor
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/national/17NUKE.html
BRIDGMAN, Mich., Jan. 16 - A transformer fire at a nuclear plant injured a security officer on Wednesday night and led to the automatic shutdown of one of the plant's two reactors.
The fire at the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant in southwest Michigan also resulted in a brief activation of the site's emergency plan, the plant's owner, the American Electric Power Company, said.
The security officer was treated for smoke inhalation.
When the transformer, which is adjacent to the plant, failed, the plant's operating system automatically shut down the Unit 1 reactor, which was operating at full power.
All safety systems responded appropriately, and the reactor was not damaged, the company said.
-------- new mexico
Fired Los Alamos Investigators Rehired
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Los-Alamos-Firings.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two investigators fired after sounding alarms about missing computers and alleged credit card fraud at Los Alamos National Laboratory were hired Friday to assist in an inquiry of lab practices.
Glenn Walp and Steven Doran were originally hired by the lab to investigate the handling of government property, but were dismissed in November after reporting on alleged misuse of lab credit cards and $2.7 million in missing computers and other equipment.
On Friday, the university hired Walp and Doran to aid University of California Richard Atkinson in investigating the alleged malfeasance. They were also given backpay to last November, when they were terminated by Los Alamos.
``Do I appreciate the gesture? Yes I do. Is this the big payoff? No way,'' said Doran in a phone interview. ``As long as they're willing to continue to work to clean up the national laboratory I am behind them 1,000 percent. The second they discontinue that attitude, I'm history and the battle begins again.''
Doran and Walp met for four hours Friday with senior University of California officials -- including senior vice presidents Bruce Darling and Joseph Mullinix -- providing them with documents they gathered. They plan to continue discussions by phone next week, Doran said.
Doran said university officials appear genuine in their desire to clean up the lab.
The discussions helped the university ``get to the bottom of the allegations regarding improper business practices ... and in resolving the issues'' between Walp and Doran and the university, said a statement by the university on behalf of the school and the two men.
Ken Johnson, spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the conduct at Los Alamos, said the action by the university should send a signal to potential whistleblowers that they can come forward with their stories without fear of being fired.
``This is an important moment in our investigation. I think it sends a clear signal to the university and to the employees at the lab that we are deadly serious about getting to the bottom of this,'' he said. ``Finally someone at U.C. is starting to get it.''
Earlier Friday, members of the House Energy and Commerce committee had urged Atkinson to reinstate Doran and Walp and give them backpay, calling the university's treatment of the two men ``appalling.''
The Energy Department, the FBI and three congressional committees are investigating alleged instances of fraud and mismanagement at the lab that include claims of $2.7 million in lost computers and equipment and $4.9 million in questionable or unaccounted-for credit card purchases that includes one employee who allegedly tried to buy a souped-up Ford Mustang with a lab card.
Lab officials say they've accounted for all but about $260,000 of those credit card buys.
It has become another embarrassing episode for the lab, which was the headquarters for the secret Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II.
In the late-1990s the government bungled its investigation into alleged espionage involving lab scientist Wen Ho Lee. Lee was arrested and later pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling sensitive information.
And in 2000, a set of hard drives with top-secret nuclear information vanished, only to be found later behind a copy machine.
Lab director John Browne resigned last month and four other managers have resigned or been reassigned.
On the Net:
House Energy and Commerce Committee: http://www.house.gov/commerce
Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov
-------- us politics
Lawmakers seek to limit TIA
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030117-28614801.htm
The Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program is under attack on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are threatening to pull funding or kill the data-mining system legislatively.
A proposed amendment to the omnibus spending bill now before the Senate would prohibit the use of funds for research, development, testing and evaluation on the program's technology.
Dubbed a "Big Brother" program by critics, it would create a database of public and private transactions in an effort to identify terrorists. The TIA program was established quietly last year by retired Vice Adm. John Poindexter and angered some Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
"They would be in a position to look at education, travel and medical records, and develop risk profiles for millions of Americans in the quest to examine questionable conduct and certainly suspicious activity that would generate concern for the safety of the American people," said Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat.
"I am of the view the Senate has a special obligation to be vigilant in this area so we do not approve actions or condone actions by this particular office that could compromise the bedrock of this nation, our Constitution," said Mr. Wyden, sponsor of the amendment.
The amendment requires the defense secretary, attorney general and CIA director to submit a report to Congress explaining in detail how funding will be used and the program's effect on privacy and civil liberties.
Sen. Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, yesterday introduced a bill to place a moratorium on data mining in the Defense and Homeland Security departments until it could be reviewed by Congress.
"This unchecked system is a dangerous step that threatens one of the values we are fighting for - freedom," Mr. Feingold said.
A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said the program has been authorized by the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, which already have oversight responsibility.
"The Armed Services Committee has pretty good oversight on that now, so in a general way Congress seems to be well-satisfied," the spokesman said.
Adm. Poindexter has refused interviews regarding the program, but the TIA program issued a statement on its Web site stating it is not creating a "supercomputer" to snoop into private lives.
The project is described as "an experimental prototype system that consists of three parts - language translation technologies, data search and pattern recognition technologies, and advanced collaborative and decision support tools," the statement said.
If the five-year project is successful, "the Department of Homeland Security will consult with Congress to determine whether the TIA system should be implemented for domestic use."
The statement said safeguards are in place to prevent privacy violations against American citizens, but does not say what those safeguards entail.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican and incoming chairman of the Finance Committee, asked the Defense Department inspector general in November to review the program.
"I am at a loss to understand why [Defense] resources are being spent on research for domestic law enforcement," Mr. Grassley said in a letter to Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Grassley said the senator wanted to see the full inspector general's report before deciding if legislation is needed.
However, preliminary findings of the report have been shared with the senator and "nothing so far has alleviated any concerns Mr. Grassley has," the spokeswoman said.
Several civil liberties groups Tuesday wrote to congressional leaders urging that development of the program be stopped.
"TIA would put the details of Americans' daily lives under the scrutiny of government agents, opening the door to a massive domestic surveillance system," the letter said.
The letter was signed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, American Conservative Union, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Center for Democracy and Technology, Center for National Security Studies, Eagle Forum, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation.
----
U.S. Blames N. Korea for Lack of Nuclear Talks
Reuters
Friday, January 17, 2003
By Patricia Wilson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7338-2003Jan17?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday blamed North Korea for an impasse over arms talks, saying President Bush had made clear his willingness to discuss Pyongyang's dismantlement of its nuclear programs.
As South Korea's president-elect Roh Moo-hyun urged the United States to open a dialogue with the communist North, Secretary of State Colin Powell reassured Pyongyang that Washington wanted to find a peaceful solution.
"We don't want to escalate any crisis. We don't want war," Powell was quoted as saying in an interview with Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "We have no unfriendly intentions toward North Korea ... we are seeking to solve the situation diplomatically."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Pyongyang had chosen to isolate itself from the international community.
"We have made plain that we will talk to North Korea about dismantlement of their programs," he said. "North Korea has chosen to develop nuclear weapons, to isolate itself from the world and not to talk to the United States."
Roh said South Korea also needed to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions, but Pyongyang responded that it would talk to no one but the United States and maintained its anti-American bombast even while extending a tiny olive branch.
"The DPRK (North Korea) is fully ready for both dialogue and confrontation," Pyongyong's official Korean Central News Agency said. But, it added: "The U.S. should bear in mind that all the issues can be settled satisfactorily at the dialogue with the DPRK only when the former has a sincere attitude based on good faith."
Fleischer welcomed South Korea's willingness to engage the North under the "sunshine policy" begun by outgoing President Kim Dae-Jung.
"We continue to support, as President Bush made very clear when the previous South Korean president visited the United States, that we support South Korea's sunshine policy in talking to North Korea," he said.
INTERNATIONAL ISSUE
The Bush administration has sought to cast the confrontation with North Korea as an international issue rather than a bilateral problem, enlisting the help of allies in the region like Japan and South Korea, as well China and Russia both of which have a close relationship with Pyongyang.
Adding to a recent flurry of diplomatic activity, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov arrived in Beijing on Friday en route to Pyongyang, saying he was convinced that given time and "quiet diplomacy," the situation could be resolved peacefully.
Bush also has expressed optimism that a peaceful solution can be found. He, too, has repeatedly stressed that the United States has no intention of attacking North Korea.
At the same time, he has threatened to disarm Iraq forcibly if Baghdad refuses to give up its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon has sent ships, planes and thousands of troops to the Gulf region in preparation for a possible war with Iraq.
The crisis on the Korean Peninsula erupted last October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a nuclear weapons program and it escalated as North Korea expelled International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and threatened to resume missile tests.
After initially taking a hard line toward North Korea with some U.S. officials hinting at the possibility of economic sanctions, Bush changed tack on Tuesday, offering to revive a stalled initiative to give impoverished North Korea food and energy aid if it abandoned its pursuit of a nuclear arsenal.
But North Korea accused Washington of trying to trick it into disarming, calling Bush's offer "pie in the sky."
--------
Warmongering Without Representation
Where Are The Guardians Of Liberty In The New War?
Jan 17 2003,
TOMPAINE.com
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7111
Tom Campbell served five terms in the House of Representatives and was a professor of law at Stanford University for 19 years. In 2000, along with more than 30 other members of Congress, he brought a lawsuit against President Bill Clinton for waging war over Kosovo without a congressional declaration.
Editor's Note: This piece first appeared in the San Fransico Chronicle and is reprinted with permission.
No nation at war, including ours, can afford to grant the same civil liberties it grants in peacetime. Some curtailments, appropriate to the conditions of the war, may be permitted. Some rights, however, remain essential.
Congress is the branch of government empowered to trigger such suspension of rights as constitutionally may be suspended. But individual members of Congress of both parties have lacked the courage to do so. Instead, the president has defined which rights the government will suspend and for how long. A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., has upheld the president's authority to send an American citizen to a military prison without conviction of any crime. The president's order set no release date.
The logic applied by the Bush administration is: We are at war because we were attacked. During war, enemy combatants (even American citizens) can be designated by the military, of which the president is commander-in-chief; they may be kept in prison until the war is over, without trial, hearing or access to an attorney. If they are imprisoned overseas, no U.S. court has jurisdiction even to hear the case. The Bush administration relies on two Supreme Court cases from the World War II era for these conclusions.
For America, World War II was over on the day when each treaty of peace with Japan, Germany and their allies was ratified by the U.S. Senate. In the war on terrorism, however, there will be no final day of war, no treaty to ratify. Until the last terrorist possibly related to the Sept. 11 attacks has been caught -- who knows, maybe 50 years from now -- the president's exceptional powers would apply.
The Constitution does, indeed, give the president the right to conduct a war. But the Constitution is a document of balanced powers. Congress is given the right to declare the war first. And, with an amazing degree of prescience, the Constitution also gives Congress the right to set rules about international crimes. When Congress declares war, or defines an international crime, there are consequences for civil liberties at home and abroad. What is critical, however, in preserving the balance of power, is that the president not be empowered to define those consequences all by himself -- with no termination date. Congress has that authority.
Did Congress, in fact, make any such determination? If, following Sept. 11, Congress had passed a standard declaration of war, maybe. Congress could be assumed to know what powers a wartime president would exercise, and to assume they would terminate when the Senate ratified a treaty of peace.
Congress could not have assumed any termination date, however, of the power granted in the resolution that actually passed on Sept. 18. That resolution granted the president authority to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines" were involved in the attacks of Sept. 11. It didn't say anything about what civil liberties could be suspended at home. It provided no means to determine when the period of enhanced, warlike presidential powers would end. The very least requirement of so momentous a decision is that the decision be made explicitly.
Incarcerating Americans without trial is not the only vital civil liberty issue presented by America's war on terrorism. Others include denying foreigners in America the right to see the evidence on which they are arrested and deported. In the 2000 campaign, then-Gov. George W. Bush promised that this practice of the Clinton administration would end -- but Sept. 11 intervened. I fear there are many other civil liberty curtailments that will follow, under this same rubric. A federal court might rule that the president can do what he is doing, but not if Congress sets limits otherwise.
The silence from members of Congress, whose authority has been usurped, and who have ignored their own responsibility on behalf of our rights, is indefensible. Those who favor the president's prosecution of the war on terrorism, and a war on Iraq, should be the foremost to admit the consequences and vote for them. Largely, however, they do not even recognize the issue -- out of fear of being perceived as critical of the president.
Those who do not favor the way the president has pursued the war on terrorism, or who oppose a war on Iraq, are, largely, silent as well. They fear being branded soft on terrorism at the 2004 election.
What is missing is statesmen, for whom the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution comes before their re-election chances. America will lose its liberty, not by act of an aggressor nation, or an international criminal -- but because our elected representatives passively watched it happen.
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-------- MILITARY
-------- chemical weapons
Design of Weapons Simple but Deadly
Rockets, with a 12-mile range, are built to effectively disperse chemical agents on troops, and also intended to sow panic.
By Paul Richter
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 17 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-warheads17jan17,0,2702715.story
WASHINGTON -- The chemical weapons discovered by U.N. inspectors in an Iraqi warehouse Thursday have a simple, durable design and are intended to frighten and demoralize enemy troops as well as kill them.
The 122-millimeter rockets with chemical warheads can carry their deadly agents in gas or liquid form. They are usually fired in volleys of dozens of rockets at a time, to try to ensure that enemy troops are enveloped in a thick concentration of chemicals.
U.S. officials believe that the Iraqis have stores of lethal sarin gas, as well as VX, a heavy liquid that disperses in oily droplets that would cling to troops' skin, clothing and equipment. The Iraqis also know how to use blistering agents, such as mustard gas, and choking agents, such as chlorine gas, said Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Tim Brown, a senior analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area defense consultant, said the chemicals are loaded into a hollow outer casing of the rocket. The explosives are inserted in an inner core, and the fuse is placed in the nose.
The rockets are fired when the operator sets off a propellant charge in the tail. When the warhead reaches a certain altitude or distance toward the target, the fuse sets off the explosives, releasing the chemicals. Stabilizing fins keep the rockets on a straight trajectory. They have a range of up to 12 miles.
The rockets follow a Soviet design that has been widely copied. The basic technology dates to World War II.
It can be tricky to use the weapons effectively. If the chemicals are released at too high an altitude, or in too much wind, they will disperse and do little harm, experts say.
The Iraqis have "weaponized" chemicals in artillery and mortar shells, aerial bombs and grenades. But rockets offer the best way to mount a highly concentrated chemical attack, Brown said, because a rocket launcher can carry as many as 40 rockets.
Unlike conventional rockets and artillery shells, chemical warheads have a relatively thin outer wall. When they explode, they make a low thudding sound that is noticeably different from the loud report of a conventional shell, and is easily identifiable by troops on the battlefield.
Brown said the use of chemical weapons can quickly panic troops on the battlefield, making it difficult for them to carry on and operate their complex weapons and equipment.
The Iraqi army is the most experienced in the world in the use of chemical weapons. Iraq fired thousands of chemical rockets and artillery shells at Iran during their 1980-88 war, inflicting an estimated 50,000 casualties, including untold thousands of deaths, on Iranian troops and civilians.
Saddam Hussein's attack on Iraqi Kurds in the city of Halabja in 1988 is believed to be the biggest single chemical assault on a civilian population in modern times. Five thousand ethnic Kurds died.
The Iraqis didn't attack U.S. troops with chemical weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, yet some U.S. veterans blamed chemical weapons releases for the unexplained ailments that cropped up among veterans after the conflict. About 60,000 U.S. troops have filed claims for injuries from that war.
-------- colombia
Car Bomb Kills Four in Colombian City
Associated Press
Friday, January 17, 2003
Washington Post
World In Brief; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4165-2003Jan16?language=printer
THE AMERICAS
BOGOTA, Colombia -- A car bomb exploded yesterday outside the attorney general's offices in Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city, killing four people and recalling the dark days of a drug war that turned the city into one of the world's deadliest places.
Rebels moving their 38-year insurgency into Colombia's cities are suspected of carrying out the blast, which wounded 32 people. Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio, in Bogota when the bomb went off, said the blast might have been retaliation for mass arrests earlier this week of suspected rebel militias in Medellin.
The car, containing 88 pounds of explosives, blew up just before 8 a.m., collapsing walls, blowing out windows and damaging buildings and cars.
A 3-year-old boy, two employees of the attorney general's office and a cafeteria worker were killed. Red Cross spokeswoman Lina Marcela Campaz said that 32 people were wounded.
--------
U.S. Special Forces to Train Colombian Troops
Fri January 17, 2003
By Ibon Villelabeitia
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2065794
BOGOTA, Colombia - Some 60 U.S. Special Forces members have quietly flown into a lawless Colombian region to train local troops to protect a key oil pipeline from Marxist rebels, U.S. and Colombian officials said on Friday.
The arrival of the U.S. soldiers, who join 10 other American Special Forces already on the ground in the eastern, oil-rich province of Arauca since early December, marks a deeper involvement for Washington in the South American nation's four-decade-old guerrilla war.
The U.S. personnel, who are staying at two military bases in what is one of Colombia's most violent areas, will train a Colombian army brigade to defend the Cano Limon pipeline.
Marxist rebels seeking extortion money bombed the pipeline, which serves an oilfield operated by U.S. firm Occidental Petroleum, 40 times in 2002 and a record 170 times the year before.
The United States has been wary of getting involved in the Andean nation's messy war, which claims thousands of lives a year and pits rebels against right-wing paramilitary outlaws and the state security forces.
Aid was long restricted to the fight against Colombia's massive cocaine industry, but, following the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States authorized Bogota to use American assistance against illegal armed groups it dubs "terrorists."
The training, which is scheduled to begin in two weeks, is part of a proposed $98 million aid package.
"The plan is to start training in two weeks. The U.S. Special Forces will require a lot of equipment so there will be a lot of flights coming to Arauca in the next days," a U.S. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The supplies include surveillance and monitoring hardware as well as materials to deactivate explosives.
Under U.S. law, the official said the Special Forces will not be allowed to engage in combat.
ONE OF COLOMBIA'S MOST DANGEROUS TOWNS
The official said the U.S. personnel, who belong to the U.S. Special Forces 7th Group based in Fort Bragg, N.C., will train Colombian troops in the "detection and interdiction of potential damage to infrastructure.
The 490-mile pipeline is a favorite target of both the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- Latin America's oldest guerrilla army known as FARC -- and the smaller Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, or ELN.
The U.S. soldiers are staying in bases in Arauca and Saravena, towns heavily infiltrated by rebels and declared as "special combat zones" last year by President Alvaro Uribe to rein in violence. Military presence has been stepped up.
Saravena is one of the most violent towns in Colombia, and local troops live in heavily fortified barracks in constant fear of rebel snipers. The guerrillas, who punish local people who fraternize with the security forces, have even targeted the troops' pet dog, police say.
Last week, FARC rebels set off three car bombs in Arauca province, killing 5 civilians and wounding 15.
Under the $2 billion U.S. "Plan Colombia," U.S. Special Forces in 2001 trained three Colombian anti-drug battalions in the south to fight the booming cocaine trade, which is a significant source of funding for illegal armed groups.
Uribe, who took office in August pledging to crack down on illegal armed groups on the right and left, is lobbying for more U.S. military aid, including more intelligence and the resumption of anti-drug interdiction flights. Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid.
Protecting Cano Limon, Colombia's second-largest export pipeline, is a key goal of Uribe, who depends on oil revenues to boost military and social spending. Oil is Colombia's top source of foreign income.
-------- iraq
U.S. Plans Interim Military Rule in Postwar Iraq
By Peter Slevin and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A15
U.S. military commanders will likely rule Iraq for at least several months in the aftermath of a U.S.-led ouster of President Saddam Hussein, according to Bush administration blueprints for Iraq's future that outline a broad and protracted American role in managing the reconstruction of the country.
The administration's plans, which are nearing completion, envision installing a civilian administration within months of a change of government, U.S. officials said. But the officials said that even under the best of circumstances, U.S. forces likely would remain at full strength in Iraq for months after a war ended, with a continued role for thousands of U.S. troops there for years to come.
Iraqis relegated to advisory roles in the immediate postwar period would gradually be given a greater role, but they would not regain control of their country for a year or more, according to current U.S. thinking.
A primary mission for U.S. forces if hostilities broke out would be to protect the country's oil fields and prevent rival factions from settling scores or grabbing territory. During the initial postwar phase, the U.S. military and its partners would concentrate on maintaining stability and searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, officials said.
Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of any land forces to enter Iraq, would be expected to remain as the top military commander on the ground, a senior defense official said.
The plans, which have been under development for months, have yet to be presented to President Bush. Officials emphasized that much remains unknown and much could change, depending on how Hussein's rule ends. But the blueprints reveal that the administration is preparing for what would be a significant, long-term commitment of manpower, money and other resources to governing and rebuilding Iraq, a fractious country of 24 million people in one of the world's most volatile regions.
The administration intends to call for the prosecution of Iraq's top civilian and military leaders for war crimes or other offenses. Decisions about lower-ranking officials would be made later by Iraqis, with some perhaps offered incentives for good behavior. U.S. officials expect that much of the existing Iraqi bureaucracy would continue to manage day-to-day government tasks such as public health and utilities.
Despite months of negotiations with Iraqi exiles in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, the Bush administration does not intend to install a government of opposition figures. Members of the opposition community would be given chances to prove themselves as part of a prospective Iraqi leadership.
The magnitude of the reconstruction task envisioned under the blueprint is arousing concern in the Defense Department, which has no desire to assume control of Iraq as the U.S. military did in Japan and part of Germany in 1945. Adding to the worry is widespread anxiety in the Middle East about the prospect of a dominant U.S. role in governing an Arab country.
"As this gets nearer, the enormity of the prospect of the United States running an Arab country sinks in more and more," said one official from outside the Pentagon, who added that the administration wants to "make sure we do not get tagged as the ultimate neo-colonialist."
On the other hand, many U.S. officials are wary of turning over management of Iraq to the United Nations, which has never undertaken such an ambitious project. Under discussion is the possibility of designating an official from outside the military who would focus on economic and political reconstruction issues. That person, some officials said, should be someone outside the administration who commands international respect.
When conditions are sufficiently calm, international relief agencies would be invited into Iraq to help deal with potential refugee flows and food shortages. As part of what the administration views as a second phase in its postwar blueprint, the United States also would attempt, as soon as possible, to transfer considerable authority to an international civilian leadership, whose makeup and chain of command remains undecided, officials said.
Planners are struggling to balance interests. U.S. officials believe a dominant performance in the early weeks is essential to deter trouble and demonstrate the tangible benefits of ousting Hussein. Some also hope that incorporating civilians early and making a quick transition to an international authority will soften the perception of the U.S. military as an occupying force.
"We would want to internationalize it to the greatest extent possible because there's going to be a lot of work to be done. We want everyone who can make a contribution to be involved," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview. He added that the United Nations and European Union would likely play roles in the aftermath of any conflict. "Even if the military operation was conducted outside of a U.N. mandate, I think the U.N. would want to play a role."
Administration officials said final decisions on the post-Hussein landscape would depend on when and how the Iraqi leader falls -- and whether a credible leader rises in his place, for example, before U.S. troops are on the ground. Top administration officials emphasized that Bush has made no final choices about governing Iraq, in large part because the outcome of the current standoff remains so uncertain.
In one example, although the administration has declared its intention to put Hussein on trial for war crimes, Powell said the Iraqi leader likely would be permitted to leave the country with his sons and family if the move averted war. "Will the international system of jurisprudence follow him?" Powell said. "I'm not prepared to give an answer to that question right now."
If the confrontation leads to war, the administration would bear considerable responsibility for the Iraqi population and the ensuing events.
U.S. planners are paying significant attention to preserving the vast U.N. distribution network of food and medicine under the U.N. oil-for-food program under which revenues from Iraqi oil sales are channeled to food and other basic humanitarian needs. The United Nations has said the program, which reaches an estimated 60 percent of the Iraqi population, would be disrupted if hostilities break out. The administration has begun to ship extra food and humanitarian supplies to the region in case of war.
Military commanders expect to handle humanitarian relief operations for several months and will work to clear roads, repair bridges and get water and electricity flowing. In a bid for speedy results, work would begin in some parts of the country even before other regions were under U.S. control, a Pentagon official said.
To guard against the partition of Iraq -- as well as a last-ditch strike by Hussein's forces -- U.S. commanders expect to maintain a show of force in both the Kurdish-dominated north and the Shiite Muslim-populated south. Turkey has expressed particular fear about a possible Kurdish move to create an independent state on Turkey's border, while the Kurds worry that Turkey will sweep into a power vacuum and seize territory.
U.S. officials have assured Turkish authorities that American troops plan to secure the key northern Iraq cities of Mosul and Kirkuk in the event of war. "We're actually optimistic that trouble can be avoided," a senior administration official said. "We've talked at length to both the Turks and the Kurds, and everyone is aware of each other's red lines."
Among the key roles for U.S. forces would be the preservation of Iraq's borders against any sudden claims by neighbors and the defense of the country's oil fields. Oil revenue is considered the primary source of funds for Iraq's reconstruction, and the proceeds of the oil trade are seen as the glue most likely to hold the country's communities together.
Discussions have begun, with no conclusions yet, about who would run the oil business during the early postwar period and who would represent Iraq at meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. A senior State Department official said the administration is committed to an "equal opportunity approach" to the development of Iraq and its oil industry.
As the administration now sees it, the role of Iraqis in governing their country would grow as time passed and institutions became stronger. A consultative committee, composed of Iraqis inside Iraq and returning exiles, would be expected to grow in importance, perhaps yielding to an assembly empowered to draft a constitution and prepare for local and national elections.
----
Iraqi Computer Attacks Feared
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/technology/17HACK.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - Intelligence officials are concerned that a recent rise in electronic attacks against government and military computer networks in the United States may be the work of pro-Iraqi hackers and could signal a "potential crisis" in national security, according to a classified F.B.I. assessment.
The assessment, prepared last week by the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned intelligence officials that the attacks, which have been relatively limited, are likely to grow more widespread and "more dangerous" as tension over a possible war against Iraq grows.
American intelligence analysts say they have long been concerned by the notion that Al Qaeda could use computers to wage terror - disrupting water treatment plants or nuclear facilities, for instance. Experts say the link between Iraq and computer hacking may have been underestimated and poses a growing threat to United States security.
"Iraq is certainly among the places in the world that we think a cyberattack might well be launched from," Representative Robert E. Andrews of New Jersey, a Democrat on the House Armed Service Committee who has been active on cyberwarfare issues, said in an interview.
Mr. Andrews noted that computer attacks were difficult to trace and could be damaging, which he said met Iraq's goals. "A cyberattack really fits Saddam Hussein's paradigm for attacking us," he said.
No one appears to have been arrested in the attacks, and the F.B.I. assessment did not divulge the number of recent hackings or how successful they were. Nor did it disclose how the authorities traced the motive or origin of the attacks, but it blamed "ideologically motivated, pro-Iraq" hackers who have expressed opposition to United States activities in the Middle East and support for Islamic extremists.
There is some skepticism over whether Mr. Hussein's regime has the technical capability or the desire to initiate such attacks.
Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said, "We are concerned about groups sympathetic to Iraq" hacking into government computer systems. But he added that there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein's regime had done so.
"I wouldn't tie this in to a state-run operation," Mr. Johndroe said. "Iraq is more interested in obtaining weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear - than in pursuing the sophisticated skills and equipment necessary for a successful cyberattack."
Officials at Iraq's mission to the United Nations did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Military and F.B.I. officials declined to discuss the Iraq issue specifically. In a statement, the bureau acknowledged that in general, as international tensions increase, cybercrime "often escalates."
"It can be state sponsored or encouraged, or come from domestic organizations or individuals independently," the statement said.
The military said it worked constantly to prevent hacking at the 3 million computers and 10,000 local area networks in its information infrastructure.
"The fact is, we are attacked and we defend on a daily basis," said Tim Madden, a spokesman for Maj. Gen. J. David Bryan, commander of the military's Joint Task Force-Computer Network Operations.
Mr. Madden said, "Less than 2 percent of those attacks are successful in that the intruders gained root-level access."
But American military analysts have become so concerned about the recent increase in activity that last week they raised the alert status on the threat of pro-Iraqi hackers to the level of a "possible crisis," the F.B.I. assessment said. Military officials declined to explain how the threat system works or the reasons any changes might be made.
The assessment said recent computer disruptions have included Web defacements, "denial of service" attacks that can disrupt or paralyze a network, and hacking "probes" and "scans" aimed at testing the vulnerability of a network.
The F.B.I.'s assessment described these recent disruptions as relatively low level. But it warned that as tensions with Iraq escalated, "more dangerous courses of action" by Iraqi-affiliated hackers - including more widespread denial-of-service attacks and the injection of worms or viruses that can damage programs - were "increasingly possible."
The F.B.I. predicted that "hacking activity will continue during the next 90 days and will increase as allied pressure on Iraq mounts."
The report said hacker groups controlled hundreds of automated search robot networks that could be used to attack government systems. And it warned that many powerful, easy-to-use tools were available on public Internet sites.
Michael Vatis, former director of the F.B.I. cybercrime unit, said even relatively unsophisticated hackers could significantly damage systems that control a wide range of national security interests.
Iraq is thought to have been developing an information warfare program in recent years, but it is probably lagging behind more sophisticated countries like China and Russia, said Mr. Vatis, who is now director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth College.
"I would suspect they're at a middling stage," he said. "But even a middling capability can cause serious harm."
Mr. Vatis cautioned that tracing an electronic attack is a notoriously difficult task. In the case of denial-of-service attacks, hackers can hide their identities by penetrating hundreds of computer networks and turning them into "zombies" to use against a target system, he said.
He pointed to an episode in 1998 in which hackers penetrated United States military computers and briefly disrupted troop exercises in the Persian Gulf. The authorities originally suspected Iraqi agents, but they ultimately traced the attack to two California teenagers.
"You can't assume that your military adversary is responsible," Mr. Vatis said.
----
Iraq said to be stashing arms
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030117-907642.htm
The United States believes Iraq has moved prohibited weapons components to private residences, underground facilities and mobile sites to foil intelligence efforts to pinpoint their locations.
Some U.S. officials believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein moved weapons-making machinery and tools to Tikrit, his center of power 90 miles north of Baghdad.
Tikrit, once an isolated provincial town, has seen a building boom, particularly in the past 10 years. Saddam has diverted millions of dollars in oil revenue to erect new houses, government buildings, mosques, a university and hospitals on the banks of the Tigris River.
One official said there are reports that Saddam has hidden or buried critical materials in the neighborhoods of his loyalists in Tikrit.
A U.S. official, however, said the administration has nothing to corroborate the information. "We hear similar things all the time. There are so many rumors coming out of Iraq," the official said.
A U.N. team, directed by Hans Blix, is now inside Iraq searching for weapons prohibited by a series of U.N. resolutions, including No. 1441 passed by the Security Council in December. One U.S. official said in an interview that the team should start aggressive searches in Tikrit.
It was Iraq's refusal to let inspectors visit one of Saddam's most opulent palaces in Tikrit that eventually led the previous U.N. inspections team, Unscom, to leave Iraq in February 1998. President Clinton responded by ordering air strikes for four days on Iraqi military sites, including barracks in Tikrit.
Saddam was born in the village of Auja, just south of Tikrit. Some of his most fanatical followers and troops reside in the city. Many of his top aides in Baghdad call Tikrit home.
U.S. officials speculate that, if the United States invades, Saddam might try to escape to his home province and hide among his loyalists.
Military sources say, the U.S. war plan calls for isolating Tikrit and striking military barracks there. They say to conquer Iraq, the United States or friendly Iraqi troops must control Baghdad, Basra in the south, and Tikrit.
The city of 29,000 - primarily Sunni Muslims - is defended by 4,000 troops, armored vehicles and anti-aircraft artillery. Support for Saddam is so fierce that Tikrit could prove to be the last major piece of real estate to fall to any U.S.-directed coalition. Its importance is one reason the Bush administration is pressing Turkey to allow American ground troops to deploy to bases there in preparation for an invasion of northern Iraq.
U.S. officials say Baghdad runs a concealment program, with personnel dedicated to moving components around the country to avoid detection. Defectors have given firsthand accounts of Iraqis moving materials into private residences.
"We do know that Iraq has designed its programs in a way that they can proceed in an environment of inspections and that they are skilled at denial and deception," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said this week.
The benchmark for judging Saddam's compliance with U.N. disarmament edicts is the 1998 final report of the U.N. inspection team. That team reported huge discrepancies in the weapons components it positively identified as having been produced and Iraq's denial that they ever existed or Iraq's assertion that it destroyed such articles.
Some of the weapons components identified by the United Nations but not found, according to the 1998 report, were four tons of VX nerve gas, 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas, components to make three or four nuclear weapons devices, up to 50 Scud ballistic missiles and 157 bombs filled with germ agents.
Kelly Motz and Gary Milhollin, who run the research project Iraq Watch, said yesterday they believe that the 1998 U.N. report is credible and that Saddam is hiding large stocks of weapons.
"For example, the missiles are probably taken apart in different components and stored separately," Ms. Motz said.
Said Mr. Milhollin, "In general, we are told that much of Iraq's capability is positioned so that it can be moved quickly. There are machines that are waiting to be loaded on trucks wherever they are operating."
----
Defiant Saddam Vows to Rout Any U.S. Invasion
January 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A defiant President Saddam Hussein marked the 12th anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War on Friday with a vow to defeat U.S. troops at the gates of Baghdad.
The Iraqi leader said he had mobilized his army and drawn up a plan to counter any invasion by U.S. forces now massing in the Gulf region.
Saddam's speech, marking the anniversary of the start of the Gulf War that drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, came a day after U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq said they had found empty rocket warheads designed to carry chemical warfare agents.
He said that Western forces he described as ``crows of evil'' were still ``harboring evil'' against Iraq 12 years after the war.
``We have determined and planned to defeat the aggressors. We have mobilized our abilities, including those of the army, people and leadership,'' he said in the text of a televised speech.
``Baghdad, its people and leadership, is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates,'' Saddam said, referring to the Mongol armies who sacked Baghdad, then the capital of the Islamic state and center of civilization in 1258, ending the Abbasid Caliphate.
U.N. weapons chief Hans Blix, due in London Friday as part of a diplomatic tour ending in Baghdad Sunday, said Iraq must prove it has destroyed banned weapons to defuse what he called a ``very dangerous'' situation.
A U.S. official said the discovery of the warheads did not amount to a ``smoking gun'' that could trigger war, while General Hussam Mohammad Amin, the head of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate, dismissed it as a ``storm in a teacup.''
Amin said Iraq had declared the empty weapons casings found Thursday to the United Nations last month. ``These rockets are expired...they were in closed wooden boxes...that we had forgotten about,'' he said.
It was not clear whether the warheads had ever contained banned chemicals, but the experts took samples away for testing.
A new military intervention could be triggered if the inspectors, who renewed their searches Friday, find sufficient evidence that Saddam is breaking vows made after the Gulf War to give up chemical, nuclear and biological ``weapons of mass destruction.''
But the U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the latest discovery did not amount to that: ``A smoking gun would be if you found a big stockpile with chemicals.''
U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki said in Baghdad inspectors had come across the warheads during an inspection of bunkers built in the late 1990s at the Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area, 120 km (75 miles) south of the capital.
``The team discovered 11 empty 122 mm chemical warheads and one warhead that requires further evaluation,'' he said in a statement.
``The warheads were in excellent condition and were similar to ones imported by Iraq during the late 1980s. The team used portable X-ray equipment to conduct preliminary analysis of one of the warheads and collected samples for chemical testing.''
DIPLOMACY INTENSIFIES
Russia, which holds a veto on the U.N. Security Council, stepped up its diplomatic efforts to avoid war by sending Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Saltanov to Baghdad.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush has not made a decision about whether to go to war but called January 27 when Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei are due to brief the U.N. Security Council ``an important date.''
``Beyond that events will dictate timetables,'' he said.
Blix said he was ``almost sure'' diplomats would request another report in February. But EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Blix told him the time for inspections was ``not very long.''
The inspectors returned after a new Security Council resolution, 1441, passed in November, which threatens ``serious consequences'' for non-compliance -- a phrase Washington interprets as meaning war.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Intensifying Efforts to Ward Off Suicide Bombings
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By JOHN KIFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/international/17CND_MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Jan. 17 - The Israeli Army has rounded up scores of Palestinians this week in a stepped-up campaign ahead of elections set for Jan 28.
Beginning on Tuesday, 20 to 30 people a day have been taken into custody, usually in raids looking for a specific suspect, according to reports.
Many of the arrests have been made by a special undercover unit, Duvdevan, whose soldiers dress like Arabs. Some arrests have been made by troops from the Paratroop Brigade and other elite units that have virtually taken over Nablus and other Palestinian cities. Army radio said today that nine suspects were taken into custody overnight in a series of operations in the West Bank.
The arrests appear in part to reflect Israeli worries that Palestinian suicide bombers, who killed 22 in Tel Aviv on Jan. 5, will strike again before the election.
The Islamic militant group Hamas said a would-be Palestinian bomber was killed off the coast of Gaza today, when an Israel naval vessel shelled his small booby-trapped boat, exploding it. The Israeli military also reported the destruction of the small craft, but said it appeared to have been unmanned.
Israeli officials say one factor in the increase in arrests is better intelligence - some of it gleaned from earlier arrests and closer coordination between the army, which has surrounded the Gaza Strip and reoccupied the West Bank, and the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service.
The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported two weeks ago that more than 1,000 Palestinians were in custody. The last time that many Palestinians were being held was 1991, during the previous intifada. Some of the old prison camps have been reopened, but the facilities are strained and the Shin Bet does not have enough interrogators to keep up with the flow of detainees.
This evening, the army briefly lifted curfews so that residents of Nablus, Bethlehem and Hebron who have been confined to their homes could buy provisions.
In today's action at sea, a leaflet issued by Hamas identified the dead bomber as Mahmoud al-Jeemasi, in his 20's. The incident occurred in an area off the northern part of the Gaza Strip, where a Palestinian fishing boat packed with explosives rammed an Israeli naval patrol boat two months ago, killing the bomber and lightly injuring four Israeli crewmen.
In Gaza City, several thousand people gathered for a rally in support of Iraq in the face of a possible American-led war. It was a relatively small turnout by the standard of Gaza rallies. Some chanted a slogan from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missles at Israel: "Our beloved Saddam, strike Tel Aviv."
--------
Israeli Gadfly Hopes to Separate Religion and State
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/international/middleeast/17ISRA.html
TEL AVIV, Jan. 15 - Tommy Lapid, bare-knuckled commentator and crusader against state-subsidized Judaism, has emerged, grinning, as the biggest surprise of this most surprising campaign season - the man who would be kingmaker in Israel.
Opinion polls consistently indicate that Mr. Lapid's minor party, dedicated to cutting the government benefits of religious Jews, is poised to become the third-largest faction in the next Parliament, which could make his a pivotal voice in determining the next governing coalition.
From right, left and center, other Israeli politicians are suddenly gunning for Mr. Lapid in hopes of drawing his party's new support away. It is hard to have a conversation with Labor Party politicians without hearing Mr. Lapid compared to Archie Bunker, their calculated shorthand for an armchair reactionary.
Mr. Lapid, a 71-year-old Holocaust survivor, is enjoying that very much.
"I take it as a compliment," he said today of the comparison to the most famous, if fictional, product of Queens. "I do look like him, and I am - how do you say it - pugnacious."
The new support for Mr. Lapid's Shinui Party arises partly from voters' impatience with the major parties over the stalemate with the Palestinians, the dismal economy, scandal and a clinging malaise. But it also demonstrates that Israel's longstanding contest between secular and religious Jews is intensifying as the debate sharpens over what it means to live in a democratic state that is Jewish.
"You're looking at the rabbi?" Mr. Lapid said, noticing that a visitor's eyes had strayed to the gray-bearded, black-robed puppet on his desk in his bustling headquarters here. He scooped up the puppet, which wore boxing gloves, and, manipulating it, threw a couple of combinations.
"This rabbi - if you don't agree with him, he punches you in the nose," Mr. Lapid explained. He called the religious "a minority that has privileges and no responsibilities," citing exemptions from army service and tax breaks.
"Others have to defend them and others have to work for them, and have to be grateful to them for praying" for Israelis, he said. "My support is partly a revolt of the secular, liberal-minded modern Israeli against this type of ghettoization."
To strictly religious Israelis it is Mr. Lapid who is the intolerant one throwing punches. To them it is Mr. Lapid's vision that endangers Israel.
Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, a member of Parliament and leader of a strictly Orthodox party, called Mr. Lapid's movement "a big danger" and "a tragedy for the people of Israel."
He said Mr. Lapid had created an outlet that legitimized a deep-seated desire of many Israelis. "A lot of the Israelis, they have in the deep of their minds, for probably many years, these feelings to run away from being a part of the chain of the Jewish people," Rabbi Ravitz said. "You know, to be a Jew is not so easy."
The surge behind Mr. Lapid is not just a reflection of antireligious sentiment. In a political system divided along ethnic as well as religious lines, his party appears to be drawing from Israel's elite of Ashkenazim, with roots in Eastern and Central Europe. Further, his party's name, Shinui, or Change, incorporates an inchoate revolt against the status quo.
"Against this mood, a party like that, a person who is a TV product who seems to know what he is saying, appeals to the nonpolitical white-collar professionals," said Itzhak Galnoor, a Hebrew University political scientist. He called Shinui a "destabilizing force," saying it was taking votes from the major parties and scrambling Israel's coalition politics.
Relishing that role, Mr. Lapid leaned back in a swivel chair as he ranged forcefully in an hourlong conversation from Israel's role as a haven for Jews, to what he regards as the political awakening of Israel's bourgeoisie, to his rich career as a writer of successful guides to Europe, a playwright, a radio and television commentator and a newspaper editorialist.
Fond of quoting Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, he seemed an unlikely political celebrity, particularly one with a strong appeal to Israel's young. A boxed chess set was by his right hand. He had neglected to button the third button of his gray shirt.
Opinion polls consistently suggest that in elections to be held on Jan. 28, Shinui could more than double - almost triple, some analysts have predicted - its present six seats in Parliament. This campaign has already produced its share of reversals, but at the moment Shinui looks likely to displace a religious party, Shas, as the third-biggest faction.
It may prove difficult to fit this secularizing party into a governing coalition. In Israel such coalitions traditionally have a religious component, and Mr. Lapid says his party would not join a coalition with religious conservatives.
His hope is to join a unity coalition with the left-of-center Labor Party and the rightist Likud Party to achieve a narrow majority in Parliament and govern without the religious.
That helps explain why Labor announced on Tuesday that it would not join a coalition led by Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister and leader of Likud. Labor wants to quash any hope of such a secular coalition, to win back defectors by making a vote for Shinui look like a vote for Mr. Sharon and presenting itself as the only true opposition voice.
This strategy does not appear to be working, for now. Few Israelis appear to take seriously Labor's pledge not to join a unity government.
With typically acid scorn, Mr. Lapid dismissed Labor's vow. "Government seats are an irresistible magnet as far as the Labor leadership is concerned," he said.
Shinui favors lower taxes, and on the security front Mr. Lapid rules out negotiations with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
He says that as part of a peace agreement Israel should withdraw from most settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and give Palestinians some form of autonomy in Jerusalem. He said Palestinians must give up their demand that Palestinian refugees be repatriated inside Israel.
Mr. Lapid, who was born in a Hungarian-speaking area of Yugoslavia and immigrated at 17, argues that if unchecked, the benefits accorded the religious will eventually cause Israel to collapse.
Precise figures for the subsidies - from state-supported religious schools to tax breaks for large families - are hard to come by. But secular Israelis are particularly galled by the stipends of $40 to $60 a month paid to 100,000 yeshiva students, who are also generally exempt from the military draft.
Asked what an Israel shaped by Shinui would look like, Mr. Lapid smiled and said, "That's very easy: Holland."
When it was pointed out that the Netherlands is not a Jewish state, Mr. Lapid argued that Israel would still retain its Jewish character even if it were purely secular.
Merely by living in Israel as a Jew, speaking Hebrew, defending the state and accepting the Bible as his basic book of history and literature, he said, "I am the most Jewish Jew who has lived in the world in the past 2,000 years - certainly more Jewish than the Israel-hating, Yiddish-speaking Satmars in Williamsburg."
When that argument was recounted to him, Rabbi Ravitz said: "That's baloney. There could be a lot of gentiles that speak Hebrew and live in Israel."
In his column in The Jerusalem Post, Jonathan Rosenblum, the director of Am Echad, an Orthodox media organization, warned that "Lapid is `cool.' And that reflects the degree to which our young are cut off from any sense of themselves as Jews."
Labor Party politicians believe, as one of them put it, that votes worth four to six parliamentary seats that would normally go to Labor are "hidden in the Shinui support."
Labor politicians have begun dredging up quotations from Mr. Lapid that they say reflect biases against Arabs, women and homosexuals.
Mr. Lapid, who calls himself a progressive, says his critics are taking isolated quotations out of context from what he calculates are two to three million words he has published over the years.
He expressed no regrets for exchanging his pen for politics. "All my life I was a dog barking at the caravan," he said. "Now I am one of the camels."
-------- mideast
Turkey, U.S. Near Accord on Deployment
Anti-War Sentiment Likely to Limit Number of Ground Troops to 15,000
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3635-2003Jan16?language=printer
ANKARA, Turkey, Jan. 16 -- Negotiations between Turkish and U.S. officials over placing American ground troops here for a possible war against Iraq are moving toward agreement on a deployment less than one-fourth the size of the force Washington initially had asked Turkey to accept, sources said today.
The sources, who refused to be identified, said Turkey was close to allowing 15,000 U.S. troops to be sent to the southeastern part of the country, where they would open a northern front if the United States takes military action to unseat the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. A force that size, made up of far fewer soldiers than the 80,000 that U.S. officials had asked Turkey to host, might be small enough to avoid enflaming strong anti-war sentiment here yet large enough "to be able to credibly present an offensive threat from the north," a Western diplomat said.
Officials in Turkey, a NATO ally, have not approved the U.S. troop deployment. Public opinion polls indicate that almost 90 percent of Turks oppose a war on the country's southern border, a formidable concern for a government elected on a populist platform just two months ago. In a high-profile quest for peace, Prime Minister Abdullah Gul recently visited each of the countries bordering Iraq, and today invited the leaders of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia to Istanbul next week to issue a joint declaration.
The contents of a declaration would "all be decided together, of course," Gul said. Diplomats said it likely would urge Hussein to make a meaningful gesture of compliance with U.N. demands that he surrender weapons of mass destruction.
"We believe there is still a chance to work toward peace," Gul said.
The unusual Turkish effort to show Hussein a united front in his back yard follows a bluntly worded letter that Gul dispatched to the Iraqi leader last week. Delivered by a state minister who led two planeloads of Turkish businessmen on a trade mission, the letter was "very direct, maybe undiplomatic," Gul said in an interview today. "It told him, okay, here's the last chance. Don't play games."
At the same time, Turkish military planners have resumed detailed cooperation with the Pentagon, ending several weeks of what U.S. officials had termed frustrating delay.
A 150-member U.S. military team is midway through a long-delayed survey of Turkish airports, ports and military bases. The team is deciding what improvements would be needed to accommodate American forces if Turkey authorizes their arrival.
"There will be a northern front," a Western diplomat said. "The difficulty is they're not saying this in public. And these discussions are contingent upon final parliamentary approval."
Officials indicated the Bush administration would go forward with the improvements, expected to cost as much as $300 million, to signal that Washington anticipates Turkey will wave in a U.S. force.
Any such decision, however, must be made publicly.
Turkey's constitution requires its parliament to approve foreign troops on its soil. "Put yourself in our shoes," Gul said. "If you're a democratic country, it's not easy. If we were a closed regime, not democratic, it could have been different."
Yet diplomats and Turkish officials indicated the allies were working toward a formula that would accommodate the U.S. desire for a northern front and at least the most acute Turkish sensitivities.
Those sensitivities center on ground troops. Turkish officials long have signaled they would open Turkish bases to U.S. warplanes, relatively small Special Operations units and search-and-rescue stations. Turkey has hosted U.S. fighter wings at its Incirlik air base since the Cold War and recently voted to renew permission for Operation Northern Watch, under which U.S. and British jets enforce a "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq.
But the prospect of as many as 80,000 land forces was judged too much for the Turkish public to digest, especially given fresh memories of the economic fallout from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The size of the force also fed concerns that the U.S. troops would never leave.
"The Americans need a lot less than they ask for," said one Turkish official. "I think they would be happy to get 12 to 15,000."
A Western diplomat, while declining to confirm specific numbers, indicated that the Pentagon saw room to scale back from what he described as generous early estimates of necessary troop strength. While U.S. forces gather in Kuwait for a possible assault on Baghdad across the desert that dominates southern Iraq, U.S. war planners have called a northern front vital for several reasons. A U.S.-led assault launched from Turkey would secure the oil fields of northern Iraq, protect the Kurdish minority that Hussein has massacred before and force Iraq to defend a second front.
But one Turkish official said Iraqi military power in the north has been overstated. The official said Turkish intelligence indicates the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions stationed in the vital oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk are "at one-third strength."
The specifics of the U.S. force may be hammered out as early as Monday, when Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is due in Ankara.
Also next week, a congressional delegation led by Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) could reassure Turks that Congress is willing to pass legislation that would help Turkey absorb any economic shocks by providing a line of credit worth as much as $14 billion. Similar promises of compensation made before the Gulf War went unfulfilled, Gul noted, fueling skepticism about a new package.
"People don't believe it will happen," the prime minister said.
A crucial outstanding issue is the repeated public pledge by Turkey's government not to sanction a U.S. attack on Iraq without a Security Council resolution that goes beyond the one issued on Nov. 8. The Western diplomat suggested the pledge could be finessed by drawing a distinction between a second resolution as a "position" as opposed to a "condition."
Turkish officials demurred on the question, while noting that military planning is quietly progressing once more.
"What has been achieved recently, even without a resolution," said one Turkish official, "is to harmonize the U.S. requests with the circumstances in Turkey."
-------- nato
U.S. Official Appeals to NATO for Military Support
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4169-2003Jan16.html
STUTTGART, Germany, Jan. 16 -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz appealed to NATO today for military support in the event of war with Iraq, saying the more solidarity alliance members expressed now, the greater the likelihood that war might not be necessary.
"There are a number of ways in which NATO could contribute both during and after a conflict, if there has to be one," Wolfowitz said at a news conference.
Wolfowitz first broached the prospect of NATO assistance during a visit to Brussels last month and plans to discuss a more extensive list of six potential alliance actions when he meets with NATO Secretary General George Robertson in Belgium on Friday. The Pentagon official was in Germany today for the swearing-in of a new commander of U.S. forces in Europe, Marine Gen. James Jones, who is also due to take over as NATO's top commander on Friday.
The U.S. list for NATO includes proposals to send AWACs surveillance planes and Patriot antimissile batteries to help defend Turkey, a NATO member whose bases U.S. officials are hoping to use as launching pads for possible air and land attacks on northern Iraq.
Other measures would include employing NATO naval forces to guard approaches to the Mediterranean Sea, through which U.S. warships and cargo vessels pass on their way to the Persian Gulf, and enlisting NATO troops to help guard bases in Europe and possibly elsewhere.
The United States has asked alliance authorities to look at substituting NATO forces for U.S. troops that might be redeployed from peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and elsewhere.
The Bush administration has been slow to approach NATO about lending its military weight to an operation against Iraq, recognizing the reluctance of some alliance members to support such an action. Most of the measures on the U.S. wish list could actually be accomplished without NATO backing, by drawing contributions from individual allies.
But the prospect of NATO again being sidelined in an important military operation, as it was in Afghanistan, has renewed concerns on both sides of the Atlantic about the alliance's relevance in the age of terrorism. The U.S. initiative appears intended not only to dispel such concerns but also to send a political signal to Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, of greater international unity against him.
Even so, a senior administration official who briefed reporters here said many of the discussions with allies have been conducted between the United States and individual NATO members, rather than within the alliance as a whole.
One potential stumbling block may be Germany, whose chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, remains opposed to sending his country's forces into Iraq. German officials have offered to help provide protection for U.S. bases in Germany and also have indicated willingness to allow the use of German bases and airspace for U.S. military aircraft engaged in a war, according to U.S. officials here.
But the Germans have been reluctant to let their personnel be used on NATO's AWACs aircraft or ships in a war with Iraq. They also have so far rejected a U.S. request that an invasion force be allowed to take into Iraq some German equipment already in Kuwait City, according to a senior diplomat. The equipment would be used to detect chemical and biological warfare agents.
Turkey also continues to balk at hosting large numbers of U.S. ground forces, although it has indicated that it would allow the United States to use Turkish air bases to strike Iraq if the United Nations backs the use of force.
-------- spies
Ex-Los Alamos scientist called spy for China
January 17, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030117-69476482.htm
A former Energy Department intelligence chief charges in his new book that fired Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee provided sensitive weapons data to China during unreported meetings with nuclear-weapons scientists.
The FBI, however, mishandled the counterespionage investigation of Mr. Lee because the nuclear weapons designer and his wife worked as FBI informants, according to the book by Notra Trulock, Energy intelligence director from 1994 to 1998.
Mr. Lee was the U.S. government's chief suspect in the compromise of W-88 warhead secrets to China. He pleaded guilty in September 2001 to one count of mishandling classified information, including computer codes used to design nuclear weapons. He was never charged with espionage and denied giving data to communist China.
Mr. Trulock's book, "Code Name Kindred Spirit," also discloses that a Justice Department report on the Lee case concluded that electronic surveillance of Mr. Lee should have been carried out based on evidence that he and his wife were spies for China.
A surveillance application to a secret federal court "established probable cause to believe that Wen Ho Lee was an agent of a foreign power, that is to say, a United States person currently engaged in clandestine intelligence activities for, or on behalf of, the [People´s Republic of China] and that his wife Sylvia Lee, aided, abetted or conspired in such activities," the book states, quoting a report by Justice Department official Randy Bellows.
Mr. Trulock stated that during trips to China in 1986 and 1988, "Lee had indeed been asked by Chinese scientists for classified information about U.S. nuclear warhead designs."
"He would later claim that he refused to discuss classified information, but he admitted helping the PRC with some problems in computer coding," Mr. Trulock wrote.
"Both times he had helped the Chinese fix problems with their hydrodynamic codes using information from the classified nuclear weapons codes he was working on at Los Alamos," he said. "Both times, he knew that the Chinese scientists asking for the assistance on computer codes worked in the nuclear weapons program [and that] the assistance he was providing would be useful to the PRC's nuclear weapons program."
During the 1988 visit to Beijing, Mr. Lee met Hu Side, the head of China's program to build small nuclear warheads, in a hotel room and was asked questions about the W-88 warhead, Mr. Trulock stated.
After returning to Los Alamos, N.M., however, Mr. Lee "omitted Hu from his trip reports and debriefings and he denied that the Chinese had asked him for any classified information," Mr. Trulock said.
The book outlines new details on the Wen Ho Lee case and Chinese espionage against U.S. nuclear-weapons facilities, which U.S. intelligence agencies concluded had led to the compromise of the most secret details of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The book also says that the FBI bungled the counterintelligence investigation of Mr. Lee and his wife, and suggests the mishandling was done deliberately to prevent the disclosure of the fact that Mr. Lee and his wife supplied information to the FBI on Chinese nuclear scientists from 1985 to 1991.
The FBI paid for Mrs. Lee's travel to China with her husband, and helped pay entertainment expenses when the couple hosted visits to the United States by Chinese nuclear scientists.
Mr. Lee is a Taiwan-born scientist who worked in Los Alamos' X Division, the section that designed U.S. nuclear weapons.
Since his 2001 plea bargain, Mr. Lee has said he was a victim of racism and his supporters have sought a presidential pardon.
Additionally, Mr. Trulock reveals that the FBI conducted a counterintelligence probe of Lee for providing documents to Taiwan and meeting improperly with Taiwanese intelligence agents. The FBI probe was closed in 1984 and no action was taken against Mr. Lee.
Security officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory recommended in 1984 that Mr. Lee be removed from the laboratory's sensitive program to build the W-88 small nuclear warhead, but the director, Don Kerr, allowed Lee to keep his job.
Mr. Trulock's book also reveals the decades-long effort by foreign governments, including China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan to gather valuable data on U.S. nuclear weapons from the Energy Department facilities.
The effort increased during the Clinton administration due to the pro-China policies of Bill Clinton and his advisers, Mr. Trulock said.
-------- us
Pentagon Readies Plans to Recruit Civilian Aircraft
Planes would be used to ferry troops to Persian Gulf. Industry officials say they are more worried about a war's effect on business.
By Esther Schrader and James F. Peltz
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
January 17 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-milair17jan17,0,620394.story
WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is drafting plans to commandeer dozens of civilian airliners to ferry troops to the Persian Gulf. It would be just the second time the military has exercised such powers since gaining the authority during the Korean War.
Pentagon officials say the buildup of soldiers, aviators and naval forces in preparation for a possible war with Iraq has begun to stretch resources for transporting troops and equipment.
The woeful condition of the airline industry has raised questions about the economic impact of such a call-up. But industry officials and analysts say privately that they are more worried about the effect of a war on commercial air travel than about the costs of activating the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF).
Indeed, with more than 900 aircraft in mothballs because of the slump in air travel, the industry has plenty of excess capacity to meet the Pentagon's needs.
"Overarching everything is that, if there's a war, I think the airlines feel they'll be seriously harmed, based on their experience of the Gulf War," when business among domestic airlines declined 8%, said one airline industry observer who is closely monitoring the negotiations between the airlines and the Pentagon.
"The American public post- 9/11 is very jittery about flying. Doing government work takes up a small bit of excess capacity, but overall a war is very, very bad for the airlines."
Airline and military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say that no decision has been made to call up aircraft.
But a senior Defense official acknowledged this week that such a call-up is "part of the plan" as the buildup of forces and equipment around Iraq gains speed. Two of the nation's largest carriers confirmed that they are in negotiations with the Department of Defense about putting the program in motion.
"We have had discussions with the Department of Defense about it, in anticipation that at some point, given the way things are going, a call-up could occur," one airline industry official said. "CRAF is a program that is relied on when the bell goes off."
The civilian air fleet was created in 1951 as a way to boost airlift capacity during times of crisis. Under the program, airlines agree to loan planes and crews to the military in wartime for a fee and the promise of government business in peacetime.
The program ferried more than 400,000 troops to the Persian Gulf in 1991 -- the only time it has been implemented. But as air carriers' financial condition has worsened, the Pentagon has had trouble coaxing carriers to stay in the program.
The Pentagon initiated a review of the program in April, and industry groups have been lobbying hard to do away with it. Airlines have no choice, once enrolled in the program, but to provide the planes the military requests. Virtually every major domestic carrier -- 33 in all -- is enrolled in the program, which has long been considered as much a patriotic duty as a business proposition.
The government pays the airlines predetermined fees based on the carriers' costs of flying the missions, plus a negotiated rate of return. But planes can be called up by the military without being immediately used, and airlines are not compensated while their planes are grounded. The airlines were paid $1.2 billion for their role in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Since then, as the industry's condition has worsened, the program has been in trouble. American Airlines pulled out and had to be coaxed back in, according to the National Defense Transportation Assn., an industry group.
Meanwhile, the military's use of civilian airplane charters has skyrocketed. Ninety percent of U.S. troops deployed around the world in the last five years have been flown to their assignments on commercial charters. In fiscal year 2002, the Pentagon spent $1.4 billion on charters, mostly to move troops in support of the war on terrorism, more than double the previous year's cost.
But the charters are not always available in the quantities the Pentagon wants. Under CRAF, airlines must deliver the planes and crews to military staging points on 24 hours' notice.
There are three stages of call-up under the program. Under Stage 1, 78 planes are obligated to military service. That rises to 291 aircraft in Stage 2 and as many as 929 in Stage 3 -- roughly one-fifth of the commercial passenger and cargo fleet of about 4,700 planes. The Persian Gulf campaign reached Stage 2.
"When CRAF is needed, it is there, and we will rely heavily on it," said a senior Defense official. "But you really don't want to call it up unless you have to because it disrupts the airlines."
The airlines, facing a deep travel slump caused by the weak economy and disruption from the terrorist attacks, are in dire financial straits. With the industry losing billions of dollars, the airlines have slashed the size of their operations, mothballed hundreds of jets and laid off thousands of workers. The military is chiefly interested in wide-bodied planes, such as 747s, 767s and DC-10s, which can fit large numbers of troops and can be retrofitted relatively easily to carry heavy cargo. Each airline makes its own arrangement with the Air Force. As the airline industry has changed and 747s have been gradually pulled out of fleets in exchange for smaller craft, Defense officials have worried that the airlines might not be prepared to meet the military's needs.
Even so, there are 927 planes from more than 30 airlines, air cargo operators and charter services currently enrolled, the General Accounting Office said in a report Dec. 30.
The airlines "can respond to an emergency or a war within the required number of aircraft and crews and within the required timeframe," according to the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.
Its report was in response to concerns voiced by Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), who chairs the military readiness subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. He asked the GAO to review the program amid fears that the airline industry's severe woes might leave it unable to meet its needs.
Although the Pentagon manages the missions from the Air Force's Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, the carriers use their own employees to fly, maintain and fuel the airplanes. During peacetime, the airlines in the program are allowed to bid for Defense Department business as an incentive to keep them under contract in the program.
If CRAF is activated, it wouldn't help the airlines' financial condition to have some of their planes carrying troops and cargo instead of commercial passengers, but it probably wouldn't be an enormous detriment, airline officials said privately.
It is not a simple matter of choosing from the hundreds of idled jetliners now parked in the California desert. It's doubtful that the Pentagon would want to wait for planes to be taken out of mothballs, airline officials said. But if needed, the idle aircraft could be used to replace those grabbed by the Pentagon.
The larger industry concern is a war itself. If fighting breaks out, the airlines fear that travel -- especially international travel -- would weaken further and that fuel prices would soar, making it even more difficult for the airlines to rebound.
Schrader reported from Washington and Peltz from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.
----
Rumsfeld weighs deploying up to four more carriers to Gulf: officials
Friday January 17, 2002
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030117/1/36l0q.html
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld weighed whether to deploy as many as four additional US aircraft carriers to the Gulf in the next phase of a massive US buildup, a US defense official said.
The carriers were part of a raft of new deployment orders before the secretary, the official said, adding that Rumsfeld could delay a decision.
"It's on his table," the official said Thursday on condition of anonymity.
A second US defense official, also speaking anonymously, said Rumsfeld was reviewing a series of new deployment orders that could include the carriers, but had not signed any yet.
The aircraft carrier USS Constellation is now in the Gulf, and the carrier USS Harry Truman is in the eastern Mediterranean.
But the navy has ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln to stay put in the western Pacific and has put two other aircraft carriers, the USS Kitty Hawk in Japan and the USS George Washington on the US East Coast, on alert to deploy within 96 hours. The USS Theodore Roosevelt is training in the Caribbean.
Massing that many aircraft carrier battle groups in the Gulf region would give US forces the air and naval firepower needed for a major US offensive against Iraq, according to analysts.
Rumsfeld may opt not to deploy them all at once, parceling them out instead to ratchet up the pressure on Iraq.
Each carrier has as many as 85 aircraft, including squadrons of F-18 fighters, F-14 fighters and EA-6B electronic jamming planes.
Additionally the carriers travel with other warships, including guided missile cruisers, destroyers, frigates and submarines, many of them equipped to fire Tomahwak cruise missiles.
US amphibious tasks forces, each with two helicopter carriers and thousands of Marines, have been leaving from the US east and west coast as part a massive buildup of military forces in the region.
Rumsfeld signed deployment orders a week ago to send 62,000 troops to the region over the next several weeks, which will raise the total force levels to more than 150,000.
The United States this week formally requested NATO support in the event of war with Iraq, including Patriot missile batteries to protect Turkey from attack and AWACS radar surveillance aircraft.
Some 800 US Marines have deployed in Israel with Patriot anti-missile batteries for an exercise, Pentagon officials confirmed.
The US Air Force said Thursday it had cancelled a major air combat exercise, "Red Flag", in Nevada this month because the lead unit, the 4th Fighter Wing, had been ordered to the Gulf.
The move is expected to free up 24 units and 2,800 personnel from all four military services, the air force said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were in Germany Thursday for the change of command at the US European Command.
Friday, they both will go to NATO military hadquarters in Mons, Belgium to watch US Marine General Jim Jones assume command as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, replacing Air Force General Joseph Ralston.
Both men were expected to meet on the sidelines with NATO and allied officials.
Myers then travels to Italy and Turkey, a reluctant but necessary ally if the United States is to launch an offensive in northern Iraq.
The deployments come amid an intensifying diplomatic struggle as Washington and the United Nations wrestle over how long UN inspections to disarm Iraq should continue.
"So far the evidence hasn't been very good that he is disarming," President George Bush said, referring to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"And time is running out," Bush said. "At some point in time, the United States' patience will run out. In the name of peace, if he does not disarm, I will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm Saddam Hussein."
----
10,000 Sailors, Marines Leave for Gulf
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Troop-Deployment.html
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A seven-ship armada carrying 10,000 sailors and Marines set sail Friday from the San Diego naval station for possible duty in a war with Iraq.
``It's sad. It's really sad, but they're going to come back and we're going to be here waiting for them when they do,'' said Debra Akins, of San Leandro, who was on hand to see off her 19-year-old son, Marine Lance Cpl. Omari Taylor.
Some 60,000 U.S. troops are already in the Gulf region and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has signed orders for an additional 67,000 to go over the next few weeks. The size of the U.S. force arrayed against Iraq could reach 250,000.
Earlier in the week, Marines at Camp Pendleton had a similar round of emotional goodbyes when they boarded buses for San Diego in preparation for Friday's departure.
Terri Vargas, 32, of Saginaw, Mich., said she had lost count of how many times her husband, Staff Sgt. Adrian Vargas, 31, has left home.
``This is his job. It's either like it or get out, and I'm not going to get out,'' she said.
--------
Brave New Soldier?
They're known as "go pills," and the US military should seriously consider putting a stop to them.
January 17, 2003
Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0117/p10s01-comv.html
In the Gulf War, most Air Force pilots took these amphetamines in hopes of combating fatigue on long missions - despite warnings of possible side effects, such as addiction, depression, and aggression. Between sorties, pilots were offered sedatives, dubbed "no-go pills," to induce sleep.
As it turns out, two American pilots facing possible court-martial for mistakenly bombing Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan last year were also "go-pill" users. Four Canadians were killed, the first battlefield losses for their country since the Korean War. If convicted, the pilots could get up to 64 years in prison.
In a hearing this week, lawyers for the two men used the defense that the use of the pills - issued by the Air Force - may have impaired the pilots' judgment. Military authorities argue the pilots simply disobeyed proper military procedure, including an order to "hold fire."
One of the pilots, Maj. Harry Schmidt, dropped a 500-pound bomb after spotting tracer fire from the ground that he claims indicated a possible attack. But it turned out the Canadian soldiers were simply engaging in a nighttime military exercise.
If the stimulants are shown to have had a role in this tragedy, it should alert the US to reconsider the use of medicine for mental and physical enhancement of soldiers' performance.
Military reliance on stimulants has a long history. It goes back at least 60 years, and if you count coffee, further than that. Today, pilots are regularly issued these pills, and take them if they feel they need them.
This chemical approach to creating better warriors also has a purpose far more revolutionary than keeping airmen like Major Schmidt awake and focused (the major, with his buddy, was working a 20-hour day on that tragic sortie).
According to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military sees a bright future in chemically enhanced soldiers. One goal is "continuous assisted performance" of combatants for up to seven days.
A DARPA document states, "In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a 21st-century revolution in military affairs that results in operational dominance across the whole range of potential US military employments."
This drive to engineer a type of human that can perform like a machine may be medically possible, but it's rushing ahead without much public debate about the ethical or health questions it poses.
The pilots' trial shows the danger of letting the Pentagon go further in this "brave new world" of medical tinkering.
Just as human cloning raises questions of bizarre possibilities about new types of human life, so must the Pentagon realize the danger of drug enhancement in possibly harming soldiers and many innocents.
Perhaps the high-profile case of these two American pilots can serve to remind the military that it is best to stick with technological improvements of their equipment, rather than of their soldiers.
-------- propaganda wars
Most Back Wartime Media Restrictions
Poll Finds Support for Military Secrecy
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4044-2003Jan16?language=printer
Two-thirds of the public believes the government should have the right to stop the media from disclosing military secrets, according to an ABC News poll released yesterday.
Fifty-six percent of those surveyed also say news organizations are more obliged to support the government in wartime than to question the military's handling of the war.
The poll, done for a "Nightline" town meeting airing tonight, reflects the widespread view that press freedoms, including the First Amendment ban on prior restraint, should give way to Pentagon preferences in wartime. The findings, which mirror those during the Persian Gulf War, come at a time of widespread leaks about the Bush administration's plans for a possible war with Iraq.
Such surveys could bolster the administration's efforts to tightly restrict the flow of information about military action.
"Whether the public supports everything the press does, it is our free press that distinguishes us from any other country on the planet," said John McWethy, ABC's Pentagon correspondent. "In time of war, it gets a heck of a lot tougher for reporters to do their jobs. There are more restrictions, especially with this administration, on difficult-to-find information."
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said she doesn't see a conflict between military secrecy and robust coverage, which her department hopes to foster by assigning reporters to travel with combat units.
"Information about military operations can do grave damage to the mission and put people's lives at risk," Clarke said. "I think the press understands the need for operational secrecy and not putting people's lives at risk."
Overall, the ABC poll says, six in 10 Americans say the government's ability to keep wartime secrets is more important than a free press; 34 percent disagree. Even in peacetime, 28 percent say the government should have the right to control what information is reported.
But journalists received high marks for their coverage of the current buildup against Iraq. Thirteen percent say the media have been too supportive of the Bush administration, 17 percent say they have been too critical and 61 percent say "about right."
The findings track partisan lines. While 65 percent of Republicans say the government's ability to keep wartime secrets is essential, only 47 percent of independents and 38 percent of Democrats agree. Similarly, 44 percent of Republicans say the media should be more questioning than supportive of government, compared to 60 percent of independents and 67 percent of Democrats.
The poll results have a 3 percentage point margin of error.
--------
America didn't seem to mind poison gas
Joost R. Hiltermann
IHT
Friday, January 17, 2003
Halabja
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=83625
AMMAN, Jordan In calling for regime change in Iraq, George W. Bush has accused Saddam Hussein of being a man who gassed his own people. Bush is right, of course. The public record shows that Saddam's regime repeatedly spread poisonous gases on Kurdish villages in 1987 and 1988 in an attempt to put down a persistent rebellion.
The biggest such attack was against Halabja in March 1988. According to local organizations providing relief to the survivors, some 6,800 Kurds were killed, the vast majority of them civilians.
It is a good thing that Bush has highlighted these atrocities by a regime that is more brutal than most. Yet it is cynical to use them as a justification for American plans to terminate the regime. By any measure, the American record on Halabja is shameful.
Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.
This was at a time when Iraq was launching what proved to be the final battles of the war against Iran. Its wholesale use of poison gas against Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish towns, and its threat to place chemical warheads on the missiles it was lobbing at Tehran, brought Iran to its knees.
Iraq had also just embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign, called the Anfal, against its rebellious Kurds. In this effort, too, the regime's resort to chemical weapons gave it a decisive edge, enabling the systematic killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children.
The deliberate American prevarication on Halabja was the logical, although probably undesired, outcome of a pronounced six-year tilt toward Iraq, seen as a bulwark against the perceived threat posed by Iran's zealous brand of politicized Islam. The United States began the tilt after Iraq, the aggressor in the war, was expelled from Iranian territory by a resurgent Iran, which then decided to pursue its own, fruitless version of regime change in Baghdad. There was little love for what virtually all of Washington recognized as an unsavory regime, but Iraq was considered the lesser evil. Sealed by National Security Decision Directive 114 in 1983, the tilt included billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Iraq.
Sensing correctly that it had carte blanche, Saddam's regime escalated its resort to gas warfare, graduating to ever more lethal agents. Because of the strong Western animus against Iran, few paid heed. Then came Halabja.
Unfortunately for Iraq's sponsors, Iran rushed Western reporters to the blighted town. The horrifying scenes they filmed were presented on prime time television a few days later. Soon Ted Koppel could be seen putting the Iraqi ambassador's feet to the fire on Nightline.
In response, the United States launched the "Iran too" gambit. The story was cooked up in the Pentagon, interviews with the principals show. A newly declassified State Department document demonstrates that U.S. diplomats received instructions to press this line with U.S. allies, and to decline to discuss the details.
It took seven weeks for the UN Security Council to censure the Halabja attack. Even then, its choice of neutral language (condemning the "continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq," and calling on "both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons") diffused the effect of its belated move. Iraq proceeded to step up its use of gas until the end of the war and even afterward, during the final stage of the Anfal campaign, to devastating effect. When I visited Halabja last spring, the town, razed by successive Iranian and Iraqi occupiers, had been rebuilt, but the physical and psychological wounds remained.
Some of those who engineered the tilt today are back in power in the Bush administration.
They have yet to account for their judgment that it was Iran, not Iraq, that posed the primary threat to the Gulf; for building up Iraq so that it thought it could invade Kuwait and get away with it; for encouraging Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs by giving the regime a de facto green light on chemical weapons use; and for turning a blind eye to Iraq's worst atrocities, and then lying about it.
The writer is preparing a book on U.S. policy toward Iraq, with partial support from the Open Society Institute and the MacArthur Foundation.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
U.S. Police Officials Visit 'Epicenter of Terrorism'
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3353-2003Jan16?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Jan. 16 -- Israel has been struggling in recent years to defend itself against suicide bombings that have killed scores of people on buses, in restaurants and in other crowded public places. So this week 33 senior law enforcement officials from the United States and Canada -- including D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer and top FBI officials -- came here to learn how authorities deal with the violence and the public's reaction to it.
"It is the epicenter of terrorism, and we're learning how to apply what the Israelis have learned, based on their experiences," said Van. A. Harp, head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, who is among those attending a four-day law enforcement conference. The conference ended today.
"To me, it has magnified the need for leadership and cooperation and partnership, and the importance of getting information out -- not only so law enforcement can react quickly and effectively, but so the community can, too," Harp said.
For Shlomo Aharonishky, Israeli National Police inspector general and host of the conference, those are some of the main elements of good anti-terrorist police work. "I call your civilian population a strategic asset in the fight against terror," he said. In Israel, he said, public awareness and cooperation are critical tools in thwarting attacks.
Last year, more than 350 Israelis died in 1,776 incidents categorized by Israeli authorities as terrorism, he said. During the same period, about 1,000 Palestinians died in Israeli military operations and other killings, according to monitoring groups.
"Citizens have to feel that they're partners," Aharonishky said. "That gives them the motivation to live a regular life and maybe even stop the next terror attack."
On a visit to Jerusalem, during which the group met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Gainer compared the complexity of the terrorist threat in Washington to that in Jerusalem. In Washington, Gainer said, "we draw a lot of diverse groups, too, and that raises the pressure on an open society. And we also have concerns whether we could be the target of suicide bombers."
Gainer said he was impressed that Israelis get on with their lives, despite the daily threat of attacks. Under similar circumstances, "I'm not sure we're ready for that," he said.
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, said that during the recent sniper attacks in the Washington area, "we had that sense of fear. . . . For 20 days, we felt what it was like to live here in Jerusalem."
This week's conference grew out of a trip Aharonishky made to Washington last spring, arranged with help from Wexler's group. During that trip, Aharonishky talked to U.S. authorities about the need for versatile police forces that are able to deal with terrorism investigations and intelligence gathering, as well as more traditional police activities.
Then, on May 7, Aharonishky was sharing a platform with Ramsey, who was giving a speech, when Aharonishky's beeper went off, alerting him to a suicide bombing in a pool hall in Israel that killed 15 people, according to Wexler. "At that point," Wexler said, Aharonishky "looked at us and said: 'You need to come to Israel. I'd like to show you what we're up against.' "
In some U.S. communities, questions have been raised about the attendance of their police officials at the conference. Critics worry that participation could indicate a leaning in favor of Israel in the 28-month-old Palestinian uprising against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ramsey said the concern was unfounded. "That had absolutely nothing to do with it," Ramsey said. "We're here to learn."
Gainer agreed. "This is . . . police getting together, trying to analyze the best way to prevent and respond to terrorism," he said.
Another topic discussed during the conference was the importance of good communication and cooperation between police agencies. As Aharonishky put it: "Terrorism has no borders, and neither should the police who deal with it."
----
City law enforcement gears up for rally
By Julia Duin and H.J. Brier
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030117-1319084.htm
The troops are massing - not for war but for a "No War on Iraq" march in the District slated to begin 11 a.m. tomorrow on the National Mall.
Organizers say they are hoping thousands of anti-war activists will show up in subfreezing weather for the protest, which will feature two hours of speeches followed by a 16-block walk to the Navy Yard in Southeast.
D.C. law-enforcement agencies will increase manpower and close streets where demonstrators plan to march.
Third and Fourth streets from Independence Avenue SW to Pennsylvania Avenue NW will be closed tomorrow from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and parking will be restricted tomorrow from noon to 4 p.m. on streets along the parade route, according to D.C. police.
"We're treating this like any other protest," said Officer Anthony O'Leary, a D.C. police spokesman.
U.S. Park Police, U.S. Capitol Police and the Secret Service also will provide law enforcement as demonstrators march near property under each agency's jurisdiction.
"We're expecting a peaceful demonstration," said Sgt. Scott Fear, a U.S. Park Police spokesman. "In the past, this group demonstrated peacefully."
All U.S. Park Police officers are working 12-hour shifts, and days off and leave were canceled, Sgt. Fear said.
The one flash point in the day may come when marchers encounter a detachment of Vietnam War veterans posted along the parade route by the Marine barracks at Eighth and I streets SE.
A spokesman for the detachment, Marines and Other Veterans Engaging Un-American Traitors (MOVEOUT), says they have heard that the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terrorist group, will be carried in the march. It is a bright yellow banner with the group's name spelled out in large, red Arabic script.
"That will be carried right past the [Marine] commandant's residence," spokesman Joe Kernodle said. "If you don't think that is provocative, consider the blood of 233 Marines shed while they were sleeping," referring to the April 1983 truck bombing at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
"We have begged the police to have sufficient people down there to prepare for the worst," he said.
Before the march, protesters will assemble at 11 a.m. on the west side of the Capitol for two hours of music and speeches mostly from former Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney, Georgia Democrat; former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark; singer Patti Smith; songwriter and former Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic; Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit; and actors Mike Farrell and Jessica Lange.
The event, sponsored by New York-based Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), also will feature representatives from Muslim and Palestinian groups, labor organizations and pro-choice groups.
ANSWER spokesman Tony Murphy did not return repeated calls for comment but did tell Agence France-Presse, "The vast majority of people in the United States don't want a war, they want money spent on education and human needs and not weapons of mass destruction."
At a late afternoon rally near one of the Navy Yard gates at Sixth and I streets SE, speakers posing as a "people's weapons inspections team" - mirroring U.N. weapons inspectors now in Baghdad -will demand that all U.S. weapons of mass destruction be eliminated. The Navy Yard is a former shipbuilding site on the Anacostia River now housing a museum, as well as administrative offices for 11,000 Navy personnel.
An opposing rally, sponsored by MOVEOUT, will be held at 9 a.m. at Constitution Gardens at 21st Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Mr. Kernodle noted that instead of reacting to an ongoing war, as Vietnam War-era protesters did, anti-war demonstrators today are trying to pre-empt it.
"The protests in the 1960s took years to reach this point, but here they are flying out of the shoot in top gear," he said. "A lot of the left realizes that because of the overwhelming technology, this isn't going to last very long. So, if they want to get their two cents in, they have to do it now."
----
U.S. Detains Nearly 1,200 During Registry
From News Services and Staff Reports
Friday, January 17, 2003
Washington Post; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3840-2003Jan16.html
U.S. officials said yesterday that they had detained nearly 1,200 men during a special registration program for foreign visitors from 20 mostly Middle Eastern nations, nearly twice as many as they had previously acknowledged.
The 1,169 men detained, almost all for immigration violations, were among thousands of foreign nationals who heeded deadlines in December and January to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Some were held for just a few hours, released and ordered to appear for deportation hearings. Others were held overnight, and about 170 are still in custody, a senior Justice Department official said.
The statistics were released as the government added five countries -- Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Kuwait -- to the list of 20 whose male citizens, 16 and older, must register and be fingerprinted.
Because widespread fear and confusion about the program dampened turnout before separate registration deadlines last month and last week, the government also is giving thousands of men from 18 other nations another chance to register. Those men, from nations that include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Morocco and Yemen, will be allowed to enroll between Jan. 27 and Feb. 7.
The government says the registrations are a way to track tens of thousands of visitors from countries that the United States has designated sponsors of terrorism or that are believed to harbor large numbers of members of al Qaeda.
----
Al Qaeda suspects nabbed by use of cave prints
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030117-311448.htm
Two al Qaeda suspects were taken into custody as they tried to enter the United States after their fingerprints were matched with ones lifted by U.S. military officials from documents found in caves in Afghanistan, law-enforcement authorities said yesterday.
The two men are among 330 aliens apprehended at the border since September as presumed law-enforcement threats, as part of a federal program known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System - a fingerprinting system that matches foreign visitors against databases of known criminals and terrorists.
The unidentified men are of Middle Eastern descent. It was not clear yesterday where the men were detained or where they are being held.
The U.S. military, during risky and often time-consuming searches, destroyed scores of al Qaeda and Taliban caves, confiscated tons of arms and ammunition, and found dossiers with photographs, papers containing the fingerprints of various individuals, computers, tape recordings, instruction manuals and receipts.
American soldiers, assisted by federal law-enforcement authorities, lifted what was described at the time as "a great number" of latent fingerprints from papers found in the caves, and others seized in abandoned hideouts and training camps for al Qaeda and Taliban members. The prints were added to the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System for screening incoming aliens.
Thousands of al Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas disappeared from Afghanistan after the Taliban regime collapsed in November 2001. They abandoned a number of training camps, which yielded significant intelligence about the activities of al Qaeda and the terrorism network's founder, Osama bin Laden.
Fingerprints taken from the hundreds of detainees at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also have been added to the computer database to prevent others from using their identities to enter the United States, the authorities said.
Those detained by immigration officials at the border under the program also include wanted criminals, aliens who committed more-serious felonies in the United States in the past, aliens with fraudulent documents, persons who were deported and were attempting to re-enter the country illegally, and others who had previously violated U.S. immigration laws.
One alien, identified as a Tunisian national, was held after his fingerprints identified him as having been convicted of multiple drug-trafficking offenses, one federal law-enforcement official said. Another detainee was a Dominican Republic national who had been convicted of aggravated assault and burglary and been deported on a prior visit to the United States.
Attorney General John Ashcroft implemented the first phase of the Immigration and Naturalization Service program on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, establishing fingerprint checkpoints using state-of-the-art digital technology at all ports of entry.
"This system will expand substantially America's scrutiny of those foreign visitors who may present an elevated national security risk. And it will provide a vital line of defense in the war against terrorism," Mr. Ashcroft said at the time.
Congress required in the USA Patriot Act that the Justice Department develop the entry-exit system to provide greater protection against terrorist attacks.
A total of 54,000 visitors from 148 countries have been checked through the program, the authorities said.
U.S. law has long required that aliens who stay in the United States for more than 30 days be registered and fingerprinted.
However, such requirements have been suspended for decades with respect to most visiting foreign nationals.
The Justice Department has since vigorously reinstituted a program requiring male visitors 16 years and older from 18 countries, most of them predominantly Muslim, to register with the INS.
The domestic registration program, law-enforcement authorities said, has resulted in the apprehension of 15 felons illegally in the United States, including an Iranian national thrice convicted three times of assault with a deadly weapon and twice on grand theft.
-------- courts
Judge rebukes forest service in spotted owl case
Friday, January 17, 2003
By Beth DeFalco,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2003/01/01172003/ap_49375.asp
PHOENIX - A judge has ordered two federal agencies to reconsider how much land to protect as habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl after saying the agencies' current plan was insufficient.
U.S. District Judge David Bury harshly criticized the Forest Service's "extreme reluctance" to comply with court orders and said the Fish and Wildlife Service illegally withheld information from the public and peer reviewers.
In 2000, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed designating 13.5 million acres (5.4 million hectares) of critical owl habitat in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. However, a final designation in February 2001 deleted 8.9 million of those acres (5.4 million hectares), including all 11 national forests in Arizona and New Mexico.
The Forest Service argued in court that adequate management plans already exist on those federal and tribal lands, so they should not be designated critical habitats.
The ruling could result in the 13.5 million acres (5.4 million hectares) being designated as protected habitat for the owl species. Bury ordered the agencies to develop a new habitat plan within six months. His ruling Monday came in a lawsuit by three environmental groups.
Elizabeth Slown, Southwest regional spokeswoman for Fish and Wildlife, said meeting Bury's six-month deadline would be difficult. She said the agency has 10 business days to decide whether to appeal.
Forest Service spokesman Jim Payne said Thursday that it would be premature to comment on the lawsuit's meaning.
Environmentalists say the 8.9 million deleted acres (3.56 million deleted hectares) - stretching from Flagstaff through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest and into the Gila National Forest in New Mexico - are the best owl territory.
"The Endangered Species Act was not designed just to provide life support to animals but to recover the species so that protections of the act are no longer necessary," said Brian Segee, public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs.
The Mexican spotted owl was listed as threatened in 1993. At that time, the total estimated population was 2,160 owls.
-------- death penalty
Off Ill. Death Row, To a Rougher Place Inmates' Isolation Also Meant Safety
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3742-2003Jan16.html
CHICAGO, Jan. 16 -- Shortly after outgoing Gov. George Ryan's dramatic announcement Saturday that he would spare the lives of 167 inmates on Illinois's death row, Andre Jones, a convicted double-murderer who has faced a death sentence since 1980, telephoned his friend Jack Nordgaard, a retired Lutheran pastor who has been visiting condemned prisoners in the state for 20 years. Jones, 46, a short, slightly built man whose hair has begun to gray, was frightened.
"He said he doesn't know if he can do the rest of his life off of death row in a maximum-security institution," Nordgaard said. "It's just because you're always watching your back."
The convicted murderers whose sentences were commuted last weekend are no longer facing death, but for many of them, day-to-day life will be much rougher, and possibly more violent, according to people familiar with conditions in the state's prisons.
Isolated from each other and from the general prison population, Illinois's death row inmates have led a life at once more restricted, but also more physically secure, settled and sedate than that of thousands of other maximum-security prisoners.
On death row they have been confined behind bars 23 hours a day, deprived of work and educational programs and shackled hand and foot when ushered to meet visitors.
But they also have their own cells, meals delivered by guards, and reasonably good access to art supplies, reading material and telephones. Many are ministered to regularly by an array of churches, religious groups and organizations opposed to the death penalty. And virtually all enjoy the comfort of knowing that prison enemies cannot easily knife, beat, rape or intimidate them. Much of that will now be lost as they face life terms without parole in overcrowded, hellishly hot prisons.
"There is a kind of security in death row which is uncommon," Nordgaard said. "I mean, they'll have their lives, but those new lives are in a maximum-security prison, which I wouldn't want to be in for 24 hours, to tell you the truth."
The state's prison officials, caught off-guard by Ryan's blanket clemency, say it will take at least a month before they determine what to do with the inmates.
Many of the 94 formerly condemned men held at the 132-year-old Pontiac prison, 80 miles south of Chicago, are likely to be transferred to another institution, because Pontiac lacks facilities for ordinary maximum-security prisoners. But other death row inmates, such as the 59 at the 125-year-old Menard prison in the state's southern tip, could conceivably stay put -- but have to make room for cellmates in the 4-foot-by-11-foot chambers each has had to himself until now.
That would probably mean tighter restrictions on documents, books and other personal effects, which are generally limited in regular maximum-security units to one small box that fits underneath a bunk. On death row, inmates are allowed two boxes.
"Don't make the assumption the [death row] cells will be emptied out and we're putting these places in mothballs{ndash}maybe it'll create more space in the prison system," said Brian Fairchild, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections.
He acknowledged that for many of the inmates, transferring off death row may be an ordeal. "Look at it from an inmate's perspective," he said. "The best thing that can happen for an inmate is not to have a cellmate . . . all of a sudden having one after 10 or 15 years may be a big change."
In recent days, Fairchild said, prison authorities have doubled the number of psychiatrists and psychologists on duty in death row; they are on the alert for mood swings and to prevent suicides.
Fairchild said he expected some death row inmates, fearing for their lives once they are integrated into the general prison population, to seek protective custody. He also said all of them would undergo an orientation to prepare for life in the general prison population, much as brand-new prisoners do.
Illinois's death row inmates, about two-thirds of whom are black, have existed in a kind of suspended animation since Ryan, a Republican, imposed a moratorium on all executions in the state three years ago.
The moratorium jammed the wheels of capital punishment, which were already turning slowly; the average condemned prisoner has spent at least 10 years on death row. And the blanket commutation seemed to halt the process altogether, at least for now.
While many prosecutors say they will continue to seek the death penalty for the most heinous murders, some also acknowledge that the system is broken and discredited and needs fundamental legislative reforms. Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), who was inaugurated Monday, said he will extend Illinois's moratorium on executions for the time being even as he criticized Ryan's commutations as wrong-headed.
For many of the inmates transferring from death row to a regular maximum-security regime, daily routines are about to change substantially. Rather than eating all their meals alone in their cells, they will take lunch and dinner in cafeterias with scores of other prisoners. Telephones will no longer be brought to their cells when they need to make a call; they'll have to line up for pay phones like other prisoners, sometimes for long waits.
However, many of them will have a good deal more freedom of movement. If maximum-security prisoners are well behaved, they may be eligible for work details that allow them to move around the prison, and GED courses in which they could work toward a high school diploma. When they receive visitors, they will not have to wear handcuffs and leg shackles.
A few of the inmates, possibly including three whose sentences were reduced to 40 years to match those of their co-defendants, could eventually be transferred to units where they would enjoy even greater liberty, said prison spokesman Fairchild. Conceivably, those three may at some point be eligible for parole if they have already served substantial portions of their 40-year sentences.
"The ability to hold a job is very important to many of them," said Tricia Teater, who has worked with death row inmates for years in her capacity as a Buddhist chaplain. "It's a way to contribute and stay active mentally and physically."
However, circumstances for some inmates may not change appreciably -- particularly those involved in scrapes with guards and other disciplinary incidents. They may be kept in what are known as "segregation units" at Pontiac and elsewhere, strictly regimented places where inmates are allowed no more liberty than on death row. And for all of the inmates, there will be the grim physical discomforts of life behind bars; Illinois's maximum-security institutions, lacking air conditioning, are often sweltering in the summer.
"Many of these people have become extremely contemplative -- you're facing the hangman's noose and you're sitting there all day," said Aviva Futorian who has made frequent visits to condemned prisons as an activist with the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. "A lot of them have found they have a mind, have learned to read and write . . . They become more mental where they used to be, many of them, totally physical. Now they're going back to this physical world and that's causing a lot of anxiety. It's going to be dangerous for a lot them."
-------- homeland security
Senate Considers Ridge to Head New Homeland Security Dept.
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Homeland-Security-Ridge.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's choice to lead the Homeland Security Department told senators that the new agency in charge of improving defenses against terror will face a ``hate-filled, remorseless enemy.''
``We are only at the beginning of what will be a long struggle to protect our nation from terrorism,'' Tom Ridge said in prepared remarks to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Friday, as he neared Senate confirmation.
Ridge said terrorism threatens ``the foundations of our nation.''
``We face a hate-filled, remorseless enemy that takes many forms, has many places to hide and is often invisible,'' said Ridge, nominated to lead a department that represents the largest federal reorganization since the Defense Department was set up in 1947.
``I know you appreciate the enormity of the task ahead of you,'' said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, top Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, who joined other senators in stressing that Ridge will be responsible for assuring that his new department will have the resources and the proper direction to reduce the terrorist threat.
Lieberman, D-Conn., said that since Sept. 11 the administration's response to the threat of terrorism has been ``too weak, its vision has been too blurry and its willingness to confront the status quo, including with resources, has been too limited.''
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in her first assignment as the new chairman of the committee, praised Ridge, the president's current chief adviser on domestic security, as ``an extraordinary leader'' up to meeting the extraordinary challenge.
She asked Ridge not to overlook the 2 million state and local officials around the country on the front line of the war on terrorism, noting that the legislation creating the agency ``offers no assurance that the new department will coordinate and communicate effectively with state and local first responders.''
Aides said only a one-day hearing was expected, and a vote to send the nomination to the full Senate could come Friday afternoon.
The former Pennsylvania governor was named by Bush in November when he signed the legislation creating the department. It will combine nearly two dozen agencies with 170,000 employees in an attempt to better coordinate anti-terrorism efforts at home.
Folded into the department will be the Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the General Services Administration's federal protective services.
During the hearing, Ridge was questioned closely about concerns that the new department will restrict the civil liberties and invade the privacy of Americans, and erode the worker rights of civil servants in the new agency.
``Any new data-mining techniques or programs to enhance information sharing and collecting must and will respect the civil rights and civil liberties guaranteed to the American people under our Constitution,'' Ridge said.
He added that while the department will have some flexibility in hiring, firing and disciplining workers, the ``perpetual support of these men and women'' was key to the smooth functioning of the agency.
Ridge also rejected arguments that the nation was just as unsafe today as it was before Sept. 11, 2001, saying airports were more secure, border agents more vigilant, the Customs Service more aggressive in monitoring trade, and the CIA and FBI doing far better in sharing information.
``America is a safer place today,'' he said.
Ridge, 57, winner of a Bronze Star for valor in the Vietnam War, was elected to Congress in 1982 and served for 12 years. He was elected governor in 1994. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush asked Ridge to head the new White House Office of Homeland Security.
In that job, Ridge won praise for improving communication between Washington and local governments. He got mixed reviews for devising of a color-coded national warning system to help Americans understand the seriousness of terrorist threats.
On the Net:
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee: http://govt-aff.senate.gov/
-------- immigration
U.S. Expands List of Nations Whose Visitors Must Register
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By NICK MADIGAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/politics/17IMMI.html
The Justice Department yesterday expanded a registration program for visitors, most of them from Muslim and Arab nations, to include men from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Kuwait.
At the same time, officials said men from 18 of the 20 nations already on the list who failed to meet previous registration deadlines would have extra time to report to Immigration and Naturalization Service offices around the country.
The program was instituted by Attorney General John Ashcroft to track visitors to the United States, many of whom overstay their visas and fail to inform the immigration service of their whereabouts. But the program has prompted criticism that it unfairly singles out men 16 and older of specific nationalities who in many cases are in the process of applying for residency or citizenship. Hundreds of registrants have been arrested since the program began on Dec. 16, with most released to await hearings before immigration judges.
Dr. William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A., said yesterday that he was "deeply disturbed" that the government "once again is targeting individuals on the basis of citizenship, gender and nationality." He said the registration program might "violate United Nations and international treaties to which the U.S. is party."
But an immigration official in Los Angeles said the Justice Department planned to include in the program visitors from all nations by 2005 and not just those considered a security threat.
"Eventually, everyone will have to comply," the official said.
A registration deadline for men from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen has been extended to Feb. 7, while Pakistanis and Saudi Arabians have until Feb. 21 to register. The deadline for visitors from the five nations added yesterday is March 28.
Visitors from those nations who fail to register are subject to deportation. Typically, the registration process entails submitting to fingerprinting, a criminal background check and questions on finances and employment.
-------- terrorism
THE MILITARY
Pentagon Draws Up a 20-to-30-Year Anti-Terror Plan
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/politics/17STRA.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - The nation's top military officer has approved and sent to the armed services and the Pentagon's worldwide commands a comprehensive plan to combat terror that includes confronting countries that sponsor terrorism, senior defense officials say.
Taking on state sponsors of terror could involve military force or the threat of force, administration officials said. But that would not necessarily mean a direct attack, officials said. For example, a military offensive to defeat Iraq, which some American intelligence officials say has some links to Al Qaeda, could send a strong message to Iran and Syria to stop backing Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based guerrilla group that is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department.
The 150-page classified document, called the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism, provides the first long-term, strategic framework for the military on how to carry out its portion of the campaign against terror, according to officials familiar with the plan. It is meant to complement similar counterterrorism strategies developed by the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies.
Approved in October by Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the document outlines an approach that aims to disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, and confront countries and organizations that sponsor or support terrorism. The plan also describes a long-term goal of creating a global environment that would be hostile to terrorism, the officials said.
The purpose of the document is not to lay out specific battle plans or prescribe future operations. Instead, officials said, the document lays down the principles to guide commanders around the world who are responsible for that planning.
"It tries to step back from day-to-day tactical operations," General Myers said, when asked about the plan in a recent interview. "It will eventually result in operational and tactical decisions." He declined to give details.
The document was prepared last summer by top aides on the military's Joint Staff, officers who work for General Myers. It was approved by the Joint Chiefs and by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who made some minor changes , military officials said. They would not describe the changes Mr. Rumsfeld made.
General Myers, a four-star Air Force officer, is the principal military adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld and President Bush, and is responsible for providing strategic direction to the American armed forces. Any final decision to use military action, however, ultimately rests with Mr. Bush, the commander in chief.
The drafting of the document was coordinated with the National Security Council, and White House officials said the plan's guidelines were consistent with the broad goals enunciated in Mr. Bush's National Security Strategy, announced last September.
Mr. Bush's directive shifted American military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing weapons of mass destruction.
The new plan also addresses the military's heightened role in homeland security. Warplanes have flown periodic air patrols over American cities since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Last October, the Pentagon formally created the new United States Northern Command in Colorado to coordinate the military's response to homeland security.
Military and administration officials declined to discuss the document in detail. But some officials familiar or involved with the drafting of the document explained its main themes in general terms.
The document's framework identifies three basic stages that build on one another, a senior defense official said.
The first stage is to attack the most immediate threat, Al Qaeda. "Overall, the campaign against terrorism is to drain the pool," the official said. "How do you do that on a global basis? You pick your fights. You go after the most dangerous threat first, Al Qaeda. You deny them safe haven elsewhere."
The military offensive against Al Qaeda began in Afghanistan in October 2001, and continues today largely as an intelligence and law enforcement operation around the world.
Some senior American officials, however, have singled out Hezbollah as the "A Team" of terrorism, considering it more menacing than Al Qaeda. Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who formerly headed the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested last year that Hezbollah should be dealt with before Baghdad because it is the most dangerous terrorist group on earth.
Applying pressure to Hezbollah's patrons, Iran and Syria, would likely be more effective than trying to attack Hezbollah itself, terrorist experts say.
That leads to the second stage, which involves organizing for a sustained campaign against terror, including putting pressure on countries that support terrorist activities. "You don't attack everyone at once, and you don't necessarily use military force in each case," the defense officials said.
The third stage aims to build a long-term, antiterrorist global environment to discredit terrorism worldwide. This would presumably involve combating the propaganda of terrorist groups and their supporters, as well as addressing the economic or political conditions that foster terrorist activities.
"The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," the senior defense official said, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- genetics
2nd Cancer Is Attributed to Gene Used in French Test
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By ANDREW POLLACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/health/17GENE.html
The second case of a leukemia-like disease in a gene therapy patient in France appears to have the same basic cause as the first one, a scientist investigating the incident said yesterday.
In both cases, it appears the gene inserted into the boys' cells to cure their disease accidentally landed on or near a cancer-causing gene and switched it on, said the scientist, Dr. Christof von Kalle of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, who is collaborating with the French researchers.
Dr. von Kalle said his preliminary assessment, which is still to be verified, suggested that the problem might be restricted to the particular gene therapy regimen in France. "This is something that is so specific and unique I would say it would not have been possible to predict this," he said.
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday suspended 27 clinical trials of gene therapy after learning of the second case of leukemia. The halt was another setback to the fledgling field of gene therapy because the French experiment, in which 9 of 11 boys were essentially cured of a fatal immune deficiency, had been considered the first unequivocal success for the technique.
But three years after their treatment, two of those nine boys have developed uncontrolled growth of blood cells characteristic of leukemia. They are responding to chemotherapy, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In both cases, the gene inserted into the boys' blood-forming stem cells landed on or near an oncogene, or cancer-promoting gene, called LMO-2, which can spur childhood leukemia. In the first case the gene landed inside LMO-2 and the second landed near enough to turn on the gene, Dr. von Kalle said.
The gene therapy used viruses to carry the therapeutic cells into the children's blood-forming stem cells. The virus lands at random on the cell's DNA. So scientists have long known there was a risk that the virus could land on a cancer-spurring gene, but it was thought that the chances of its happening were small.
Dr. von Kalle said the chance of a virus landing on LMO-2 was about 1 in 100,000. But since each child was given about one million cells, the probability is very high that a child received at least one cell in which the virus landed on the gene. That makes it important to monitor the other children closely, he said.
But Dr. von Kalle said scientists believed that turning on just one oncogene would not be a problem because it usually requires multiple genetic changes to turn a cell cancerous.
"There's no human cancer model where you can see that one gene got turned on and it gave you a cancer," he said.
Dr. von Kalle's hypothesis is that a second genetic change came from the therapeutic gene itself. The gene put into the French children was designed to spur growth of infection-fighting blood cells, since the boys suffered from a lack of such cells, meaning they would be killed by infections. It is possible that the therapeutic gene combined with the activated oncogene to cause a surge of such blood cells, Dr. von Kalle said.
If this hypothesis is confirmed, it would indicate that gene therapy treatments in which the inserted gene is not a growth-promoting one would not face the same risk, he said.
-------- poverty
U.N. Report Shows Growing Poverty Among European Gypsies
January 17, 2003
New York Times
By PETER S. GREEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/international/europe/17GYPS.html
PRAGUE, Jan. 16 - Poverty has worsened for millions of Gypsies across Central and Eastern Europe since Communism collapsed a decade ago, and many now live in conditions resembling those of poor sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said in a report published today.
The report, by the United Nations Development Program, studied the Gypsies, or Roma, as they prefer to be called in Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria. Unless action is taken before these countries join the wealthy European Union, the Gypsies may become a permanent underclass, the report said.
It found that many often go hungry, one in six is "constantly starving," and one in five families did not send their children to school because they lacked decent clothing. Only a third of the Gypsies surveyed had completed high school or vocational school.
"By measures ranging from literacy to infant mortality to basic nutrition, most of the region's Gypsies endure living conditions closer to those in sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe," said the report, titled "Avoiding the Dependency Trap."
According to the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, there are between six million and eight million Gypsies across Europe, the majority in former Communist states.
Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are among eight former Communist countries that have been invited to join the European Union next year. The United Nations report said that they must move quickly to help Gypsies obtain better education, jobs and a higher living standard in order to protect these countries' own chances of economic success inside the union.
"If postponed, the cost of finding solutions for marginalized groups will be immeasurably higher and will have few chances of success," the report said. Keeping Gypsies marginalized, the report said, will strengthen the hand of nationalist and xenophobic political forces.
The report blames the Gypsies' problems partly on their own communities and partly on what it called the failed systems of education, labor and economic and social development often imposed on them.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Uncle Sam Will Be Watching Anti-War Protesters
Police To Use Surveillance Cameras
NBC,
January 17, 2003
http://www.nbc4.com/news/1916230/detail.html
WASHINGTON -- Police in Washington, D.C. plan to deploy surveillence cameras during massive anti-war protests planned for this weekend. Authorities said extra cameras will be added to the existing network of 14 lenses. The cameras will be situated at Farragut Square, Malcom X Park, Dupont Circle, the Marine Barracks as well as 8th and Eye Streets, Southeast.
They'll also be keeping an eye on the crowd along the protest route from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Navy Yard.
And, when the anti-war demonstrators take to the streets, they'll be marching beside police officers.
Organizers of the major protests have met with D.C. police, U.S. Park Police and the Secret Service.
Many of the events are officially permitted near the U.S. Capitol, the White House and the Washington Navy Yard. Even acts of civil disobedience have been tailored to fit the region's unique security concerns.
Sgt. Scott Fear of the U.S. Park Police said Sunday's demonstration outside the White House will involve people committed to breaking the law as a political statement.
Fear said police plan to make arrests when that happens.
Brian Becker, a protest organizer, said this weekend will mark the beginning of large and ongoing protests against what he calls "a war for big oil."
Becker and other activists plan to lead tens of thousands of demonstrators in the march from the National Mall to the Washington Navy Yard.
Although a group identified as International ANSWER has a permit for up to 30,000 demonstrators, organizers said hundreds of thousands will protest in the District and in cities around the world.
Members of the anti-war movement plan additional demonstrations on Sunday and in the weeks ahead. The week of Feb. 13, students on college and high school campuses are expected to gear up for two weeks of protests.
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BOSS HOGTIE
by Jason Cherkism
Jan. 17-23, 2003
Washington City Paper
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/cover/print_cover0117.html
Hundreds of people wandered into Pershing Park on the morning of Sept. 27 - activists looking for a protest, nurses in town for a conference, lawyers headed to work, and a cyclist training for a race. And there was Chief Charles Ramsey with his troops, ready to arrest them all.
By 2:25 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28, lawyer Julie Abbate had arrived at D.C. Superior Court under the close watch of U.S. marshals. Once in the building, Abbate says, she was put up against a wall and patted down. The officers then told her to pull down her green slacks and underwear, squat, and cough. "I thought they were kidding," Abbate says. "They weren't." She felt stupid. "Every order I obeyed-even 'Take off your fucking pants and cough.'" Orders to take off your pants and cough are standard operating procedure for processing an arrestee in D.C.
But standard procedure took on a new meaning in the mass sweep that corralled Abbate and more than 400 other innocent people in Pershing Park on Friday, Sept. 27. It was the first day of a protest that was supposed to shut the city down, spread the gospel of anti-globalization, and plead for a U.S. foreign policy based on peace and love.
Many bystanders, such as Abbate, wandered into the fray, unaware of the police department's protocol for handling civil demonstrations. She ended up being arrested that morning in Pershing Park, at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The charge was failure to obey a police order, the same rap applied to her fellow arrestees. She spent five hours handcuffed on a bus. Eventually, she was hogtied wrist-to-ankle on the floor of the police academy's gym. That lasted for another 12 hours.
On Saturday morning at 5 a.m., Abbate was transferred to central booking downtown. She and other Pershing Park arrestees crammed into a cell consisting of cement floors, one bench, and one toilet. They had to form a "pee wall" to prevent officers from watching them go to the bathroom. Officers took their time processing them; some even threatened to leave them in custody through the weekend.
"That's what you get," taunted the officers, according to the 36-year-old Abbate.
Eight hours later, they were transferred to Superior Court, where they went through the squat-and-cough routine. They were moved to a cell that became so crowded that arrestees had to stand on the toilet to make room. "It was exhausting, infuriating, bewildering, maddening," Abbate says. "It made me feel really, really helpless."
Police Chief Charles Ramsey viewed the treatment of Abbate and her cellmates as something of a coup. As the whole drama at Pershing Park unfolded that Friday morning, Ramsey looked on from the middle of 15th Street. He leaned against a standard-issue riot baton he used for a cane as his troops rounded up the 400-odd arrestees. The arrests were choreographed so well, all he had to do was wait.
One man, maybe two, hollered questions at Ramsey. Why are those demonstrators being detained? What did they do wrong? These were easy questions to ignore, especially if you were accompanied by an entourage of blue.
Metrobuses 8733 and 8734, two of many filled with Pershing Park arrestees, were shoving off to muted applause from activists. Soon the riot cops trotted away, two by two. Then the bike cops left, with their supervisor shouting, "Thanks to everybody!" Ramsey started back to his cruiser.
Ramsey shuffled against his makeshift cane down Pennsylvania Avenue. He took his time, turning back once to see that everything was quiet. On this day, downtown was his living room, where cops could double-park, set out rolls of police tape, form pop-up police lines, and arrest 400 people without dirtying a uniform.
At a late-afternoon victory lap before the media, Ramsey took to the bouquet of microphones assembled in front of police headquarters and rattled off the one statistic that mattered-the number of arrests for the day: 649. He praised his force for performing "very well." There was already a buzz about Pershing Park-something about arbitrary arrests. "We gave warnings," Ramsey said, Mayor Anthony A. Williams smiling behind him. "We followed everything by the book!"
"Remember, they had no business being in the street," Ramsey continued, playing offense. "There was no parade. You can't just take over Pennsylvania Avenue. You just can't take over 15th Street. For the last four months, these folks been talking about shutting down the city. When they do something like that and they fail to move, I can only presume that's what they intended to do. And that happens to be illegal. And we took the action that was appropriate." Ramsey added that those arrested would be processed promptly.
As video footage and first-person accounts show, the park events constitute one of the most serious collective violations of civil rights in this city since the Vietnam War era-or at least since the last major anti-globalization demonstrations, in April 2000. Protesters and bystanders, nurses on their way to a convention, lawyers on their way to work, a woman training for a bike race-all rounded up, seized without warning, without orders given, and arrested en masse. They were then tied up like farm animals for hours.
The next day, in the Washington Post, Ramsey described the scene at Pershing Park this way: "Ain't it a thing of beauty. To see our folks up there ready to go."
No one is calling that day a thing of beauty anymore. No one is even calling the arrests worth pursuing. The D.C. Office of the Corporation Counsel, the city agency charged with pursuing the Pershing Park cases, declined to prosecute a single demonstrator caught up in the police's dragnet. "We no-papered everything in Pershing Park," explains Peter Lavallee, the Corporation Counsel's communications director. "We did not feel in the cases that came from Pershing Park-that the witness statements and the evidence that we had [presented] probable cause that a crime was committed and/or that a specific individual committed a crime."
Protesters at the park were charged with failure to obey a lawful police order. The problem, as one city official familiar with the cases notes, was with the order. "It's not clear whether orders were given at Pershing Park," the official explains.
The media-savvy Ramsey, the one cop who could explain the Pershing Park arrests, isn't fielding questions on the specific events that took place. And with good reason:
• So far, two lawsuits have been filed on behalf of arrestees. One of the lawsuits filed counts 22 plaintiffs.
• The D.C. Council's Committee on the Judiciary has held a hearing to air the perspectives of the arrestees, including Abbate. Councilmember Kathy Patterson has strong-armed the mayor and the police into conducting an internal investigation. That report is still pending.
• The independent Office of Citizen Complaint Review has received four civilian complaints, each of which is currently being investigated.
Mass protests, of course, are routine in Washington; large anti-war demonstrations are planned for this weekend. Asked if he would do another Pershing Park, Ramsey doesn't hesitate in responding, "We probably will," he says, smiling. "We probably will."
Jeri Wohlberg didn't belong in Pershing Park. A registered nurse from Burlington, Vt., she had come to the District for a nursing conference-the State of the Science Congress at the J.W. Marriott, located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the park.
As she was waiting to learn about hospice care that morning, Wohlberg saw all these young faces milled about, clustering together like popular kids at high-school lunch. Sitting on benches, under trees, strewn among the greenery, they all seemed to contain a certain energy, a secret knowledge she didn't have.
After about 20 minutes in the park, Wohlberg, 28, bumped into two of her nursing colleagues. They had seen the protests on television in their Marriott hotel rooms and in the Marriott gym. They'd looked out the window and seen the activists. The activists didn't look dangerous.
Kind of weird that they all were there. All had ended up in the park after workouts, bagels, and coffee. It was about 8:45 a.m. All three wanted to see some authentic radicals give speeches, holler chants, and do all the things that anti-globalist radicals are supposed to do.
Instead, they got to watch semi-bored kids gathered here and there, drumming, dancing, gabbing, passing out fliers and pamphlets. Tons of press had glommed onto anyone holding a banner. And the kids used up a lot of the media attention taking pictures of themselves. The nurses found it hard not to be a little bored, too.
"I expected people to be a little more organized," Wohlberg says. "I just kinda hung out and watched what was going on."
Wohlberg's friend Sally Norton, a registered nurse and assistant professor at the University of Rochester, felt the same. "We had hoped there was a speaker," she says. "It looked just like a peaceful demonstration in a park."
Pretty soon, all three nurses decided to leave. Norton, 41, wanted to attend that conference session on hospice care.
The nurses walked to the edge of the park, only to come up against a wall of riot-geared police. Wohlberg says they watched a young woman pleading with police to let her leave. The woman turned to the three nurses and announced, "They won't let us leave," Wohlberg remembers.
"What do you mean they won't let us leave?" Wohlberg asked.
"Maybe you can try, because you don't look like us," the woman replied. Wohlberg was wearing black dress slacks, a light blue silk sweater, and black dress shoes. She carried her conference tote bag and conference badge.
Wohlberg took the woman's advice and explained to the officer her situation-that they had to go to a nursing conference, that they'd like to leave.
"'I'm sorry, but no one's permitted to leave,'" Wohlberg remembers the cop saying.
"We're not part of this protest," Wohlberg pleaded. It was no use.
Still, the three nurses decided to try another flank of cops. They sought out officers who looked sympathetic, open to the idea of waving them through. One cop was polite. One cop said nothing, a stone. One cop said no one could leave. One cop said they would be given the opportunity to disperse-be patient, he said, and wait for the order. "We kept asking," Norton remembers. "But we kept getting either we couldn't leave or we had to wait."
They showed the officers their conference tote bags. They pointed to the Marriott.
They met up with another bystander who wanted to leave. All four then met up with a supervisor. The police official told them that they would get a chance to leave soon.
When?
"'I can't tell you when that time is going to be,'" Wohlberg remembers the supervisor saying. "'But at some point you'll be allowed to leave if you want to.'"
It was just past 9 a.m.
Laury Saligman, 34, was among the first people arrested. She had spent the morning with her boyfriend, training for a bike race the next day, the Tour of Prince George's County, an elite women's road race sponsored by the county's police department. It was the last race of the season.
Saligman and her boyfriend had cycled some 20 miles through the city and had ended up behind the Marriott. It was 8:15 a.m. They stopped and watched as the activists gathered on the block, along with the police with full riot gear, masks, and night sticks.
"What if they have pepper spray?" Saligman asked her boyfriend. They decided to leave.
"We got on our bikes," Saligman says. "We started to leave the area. [The police] were starting to form a line at that point. And one of the cops stuck his arm out and pushed me down."
Saligman's bike tumbled down, and because her shoes were clipped into the pedals, she went down, too. "I hit the ground pretty hard," she says. "The officer grabbed me by the collar and lifted me up and dragged me. He threw my bike in the road."
The officer placed Saligman in metal handcuffs and then put her in a squad car. She pleaded with him to let her go, telling him that she was just on her way home, that she had to go to work, that she lives here. Her boyfriend made the same plea and escaped arrest. But it didn't work for Saligman. In the squad car, "I felt like I had run out of air," she says.
A half-block up, demonstrators were oblivious to the police. They chanted as drummers pounded on everything from cafeteria trays to bike baskets. They shook tambourines and baby rattles. There were maybe 30 activists doing their best Fela Kuti impressions. When the drumming stopped, one activist hushed everyone and told them all to look around.
Unless they wanted mass arrests, they should start leaving, the activist advised. Everyone drifted away. "Go forward!" one activist shouted.
An activist on the outer edge of the park was telling stories about what he had witnessed up at Vermont and K, where a Citibank window had been smashed. Legal observers were arrested. Media reps-including a photographer from U.S. News & World Report-had been arrested, too.
Another activist heard the officers bark down their line: "Secure the perimeter!"
One man met up with a wall of cops and asked how people could get out.
"Don't care!" the cop shouted. The man asked again. "Don't care!" the cop shouted again. "Don't care, sir!"
Two other activists were told by an officer, according to one complaint filed in federal court, that they "were not allowed to leave because their bikes were displaying 'propaganda.' The officer told them that they could leave if they removed the propaganda, which consisted in part of a sign displaying a women's symbol." They complied, the complaint states, and the officer then ripped up the materials and told them they still couldn't leave.
The activists, Casey Legler and Samantha Young, then approached a lieutenant and asked to leave again. He refused, saying, "At this point in time, ma'am, we are just following orders."
The three nurses, who had resigned themselves to waiting for officers to tell them when they could leave, ended up toward the front of the growing crowd. There, they ran into John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace in the United States.
Passacantando, riding his bike to work, had stopped to check out the demonstrations in the park and gotten caught up, too. He had called his assistant to tell her he would be "15 or 20 minutes late." He saw the lines of cops start to push their way through the park, ordering the crowd to move in tighter and tighter.
"You would see people falling over backwards to try and stay out of their way," Passacantando says. "People with bicycles stumbling. There was that much space to go to. This wound the tension way up. You could feel the tension in the crowd."
Alexis Baden-Mayer, 28, stood on the edge of the sidewalk surrounding the park, holding a banner. She was with her dad, Joe Mayer, as the police started closing in. Baden-Mayer was worried that her 69-year-old father, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, would get hit with a baton. She pleaded with the cops, in tears, to stop pushing.
They stood maybe five minutes, they say, before the cops marched up to them and told them to get in the park. Then they decided to leave. Mayer, a lawyer, had a meeting to go to anyway, and his daughter had to teach three ballet classes that afternoon. Both didn't want to get arrested.
"Get back in the park," the officer told them. Mayer thought, These guys are misinterpreting their instructions.
The nurses sensed a spike in the tension. They asked Passacantando: "What's going on?"
"I have no idea, but they won't let us move," Passacantando told them. "Stay here with me." It was about 10 a.m. Wohlberg could see the Metrobuses pulling up along Pennsylvania Avenue. She knew from watching on the gym's television earlier that this meant people would soon be arrested and be placed on those buses.
The cops started to push on all sides of the crowd.
"The police were swinging, and they had panicked," Passacantando remembers. "They were hitting people standing there. I saw them hit several people. One officer came up to me with a baton raised. I had my hands down. I said, 'Hey! Hey! What are you doing?' The officer said, 'You don't want to fight?' I said, 'God no. None of us do.'" The officer relaxed.
Passacantando told the nurses to just do what the officers said. Mostly that meant waiting, bunched in good and tight. From inside the crowd, you could hear the rev of portable generators and the snap of bolt cutters. The police were freeing bikes from their locks throughout the park. This was a bad sign.
Cell phones were passed around. People called 911, as if that would help matters. Passacantando called the Greenpeace lawyer. Baden-Mayer called the director of her ballet school, embarrassed, to say she won't be teaching the 3- to 7-year-olds that afternoon.
There were chants: "I have the right to leave this park peacefully!" and "I am a peaceful protester." And then there was nothing but quiet.
The Pershing Park crowd huddled against each other, shoulder to shoulder. They were surrounded by two rows of riot-geared cops standing stock-straight and clutching batons. Beyond these cops bunched bike cops, and beyond the bike cops were cops swaying on horseback.
The cops closed in tight. At this point, at about 10:30, there was no uncertainty: They would all be arrested shortly. One protester threw up a peace symbol. Another held up a makeshift sign that read, "Help!" And that was it. Everything conspired to keep them silent.
The nurses still waited. "The order never came," Norton remembers. "I heard no orders to disperse. I heard no orders to leave. That was what we were trying to do. The only orders I heard was when the perimeter was tightening, they were yelling, 'Move in, move in.' And I did that."
When Wohlberg was cuffed, she told the officer: "I don't want to get hurt." The kid next to her had just been smacked on the shoulder and side with a baton. Along the way to the Metrobus, she told officers her story for the umpteenth time-she was a nurse, a bystander, innocent. She got on the bus.
"I was pissed. I was really upset. I was really mad," Wohlberg says. Crazy thoughts ran through her mind: I will not be allowed to practice nursing ever again.
The Mayers were some of the last to be cuffed and bused. Baden-Mayer had tucked her purse under her coat. The officers herding people onto the buses thought this was hilarious.
"It looks like she's got a third boob!" Baden-Mayer remembers them shouting. When she boarded the bus, she found that her dad had saved her a seat.
First the officers told the Mayers it would cost them $100 to be released. They were held on those buses long into the afternoon, waiting in the police-academy parking lot in Blue Plains. They were at the mercy of whatever the cops said. If your cuffs were too tight, if you had to pee, it was up to the officers to do something. If you didn't pay the fine, you wouldn't be released until Monday, the officers said.
Baden-Mayer knew this was all bullshit. Sitting on that bus, she started telling people that they didn't have to pay the fine. They could ask for a citation and then be released. The citation would grant them their day in court. They could fight these arrests.
An officer brought a fellow cop with a new story back to the bus. "'The computers are down,'" Baden-Mayer remembers the officer telling them. "'And we're not going to be able to issue any citations. We need the computers for that.'"
If they wanted to post and forfeit, the officer said he could do that. "'We can do that paperwork by hand,'" he said. The fine, the officers said, had been reduced to $50.
A lot of people on the bus believed the officers. Still, they would have to remain in the vehicle for hours until they could do anything about their situation.
Wohlberg and the other nurses, sitting on another bus, were also told that the computers were down. And later, the officers announced that they had run out of film for lineup shots. They had to get more Polaroid cameras, they said, according to Wohlberg. It took the officers hours to return with cameras.
The officers then told Wohlberg she had to post and forfeit, that she couldn't get a trial date because she was from out of state. "We were not allowed a trial date," she says.
The nurses were joined by Abbate, who was thinking about the plane she had to catch to Michigan for her brother's 16th birthday that night. Abbate had tried to leave the park several times and been rebuffed. Now she had to listen to the officers' lame excuses about why the process was taking so long, why she couldn't get a citation. As an attorney for Neighborhood Legal Services' Northeast office, and someone with a healthy respect for officers, she thought the whole situation was a series of humiliations.
Abbate had $46. She borrowed another four from one of the nurses, who had all decided to pay the fine.
She says she was told that she had to come up with the cash, even if she wanted a citation. Once inside, Abbate argued the point with two officers behind a computer that she wanted that citation. But, she says, they insisted that she had to pay. Finally, another officer approached and agreed with the lawyer.
By 4 p.m., they had all been transferred to the academy's gym. Abbate was put in the citation line, placed on a mat and cuffed wrist to ankle-hogtied. One plastic cuff for your wrist. One plastic cuff for your ankle. And one cuff in between. Three loops, with roughly 8 inches between your ankle and wrist.
"There was no way you could flatten your leg out or stand up," Abbate recalls. "You could lay on your side in the fetal position, but then you couldn't feel anything....The only comfortable position was the fetal position on your side or sitting up with your legs bent and back leaning forward and your hand between your legs. It wasn't the cuffs that hurt-it was the position. It was just really, really uncomfortable. Try sitting cross-legged for 12 hours at a time. It didn't seem like anybody was comfortable doing it."
All of the arrestees were tied and left on mats. Jeff Barham, 29, a legal observer arrested at Vermont and K, remembers three police officials posing in front of the hogtied crowd for pictures. They acted, Barham says, "like they were at the zoo."
Most of the arrestees sat hunched over well into the morning hours. Mayer remembers one arthritic knee tightening. "If I can't move to get the blood going in one knee, I can barely walk," he says. "Almost every time I asked to go to the toilet, the first few steps, I could barely make it....It just stiffened me up."
The nurses, Saligman, and Passacantando all were placed together. Wohlberg says that through the night her back, neck, arms, and legs all hurt. She felt nauseated and had a throbbing headache. They counted the minutes and waited for their release, not sure when it would come. No officers were giving out any information.
Saligman was released just after 6:30 p.m. By 2:15 a.m., the nurses and Passacantando were finally released.
After getting out, Norton was greeted by activists from Food Not Bombs, who were passing out peanut-butter-and-apple sandwiches. With a lift from Passacantando, the nurses made it back to their hotel sometime after 3 a.m.
The Mayers were released with citations Saturday afternoon. In mid-October, they appeared in Superior Court and were told their cases had been no-papered.
Abbate had to go through a few more ordeals to gain release. She waited in the holding cell until 9 p.m. She got word that the city's attorneys had declined to prosecute her. She left Superior Court with her girlfriend and two lawyer buddies.
"It was surreal to walk out of this courthouse," Abbate says. "I practice law in that courthouse. I felt kind of ashamed as a lawyer to come in that way and to leave out of arraignment court. It was disorienting to see regular people again. It was a weird feeling, walking out and seeing this vigil across the street."
The curtain of police officers, the mass arrests, the hogtying, and the no-papering-it's become a paradigm for Ramsey and his department. Ever since the anti-globalist movement came here in April 2000, Ramsey's treatment of protesters has padded his image as a law-and-order cop, even as his detectives have continued to botch investigations of real crimes citywide.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney and co-founder of the D.C.-based Partnership for Civil Justice, says, "Under Chief Ramsey, we have seen the police repeatedly deploy pop-up police lines, police lines with full riot gear surrounding peaceful demonstrators. They detain them...and they deprive them of their ability to engage in their First Amendment speech."
Mark Goldstone, the chair of the Demonstration Support Committee of the D.C. chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, calls this the "Ramsey Plan."
The plan starts with the police hyping up the potential for violence. In this case, Ramsey stated repeatedly in the press that the protests were a good cover for terrorists, that commuters should stay away from downtown. Production notes for a police-department training video titled "Police Tactics and Issues" identified priorities for handling demonstrators. One of the bullet points hints at the strategy for Pershing Park: "locking up troublemakers on the first night." Others include "sleep deprivation tactics," the chief doing public relations, and "re-building the lines, how a crowd gets mad." Nothing in the notes, however, suggests a reason for arresting hundreds of people who are guilty of nothing more than being in a park.
Ramsey & Co. justify their preventive policing strategies by pointing to violence at previous anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle and Prague. And this year, officials even added Sept. 11 to the scare rhetoric, arguing that the terrorists could come disguised as protesters. "Lots of things happen a country away that do come to the United States," says Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, the city's deputy mayor for public safety. "We have to be prepared in this day and age for anything."
But as Sept. 27 dawned, few people would have mistaken the protesters for al Qaeda. They didn't have the numbers, they weren't shutting down intersections, and they weren't even making much noise. McDonald's and the rest of American capitalism would survive.
The most ominous development was a plume of bikers parading around the city to promote eco-friendly travel. Capital Police Chief Terrance Gainer, in an interview with local filmmaker Barry R. Student early that morning in front of Union Station, said that there had been some fear early on that the protests would turn violent. "It doesn't look like it," he declared on film.
Gainer, now, recalls the scene as peaceful. "There were protesters in [Pershing Park]-that was relatively calm, kids taking pictures," he says. "I don't recall any rocks or bottles being thrown around. They were behaving themselves."
"I can't say I heard an order," says Peter G. LaPorte, the director of D.C.'s Emergency Management Agency, who was also at Pershing Park, walking along the police lines.
LaPorte describes the scene as something less than criminal. "Stalemate. Nothing was going on" until the protesters were arrested, he says. He's not sure why the cops did what they did: "I could not make that leap. I'm not a cop."
One Park Police official, who refused to be identified for this story, says he didn't hear any order. "I was with our chief. Just because I didn't hear an order doesn't mean they didn't give it 10 times," he explains. "I was an official on the scene. They could have given a warning 10 times."
When describing the scene at Pershing Park, a high-ranking city official, who wishes to remain anonymous citing the pending litigation, terms it a "huge money loss for the city."
Gainer concedes that it is possible Pershing Park could have gone down better. "If there were innocent people, I hope they were ultimately freed....I think there's lessons to be learned. No. 1, if you are going to have large protests, you are going to need to act within the permit. If the police are giving orders, you have to follow the orders. If you are the police, you have to accommodate. And make sure you communicate what you expect of the protesters."
Still, Mayor Williams won't concede as much. "I think it's clear we had a safe city and an open city," Williams says. When asked how he feels about nurses saying they were on their way to a conference when they were arrested, the mayor says he's not sure he believes their allegations. "Any allegations always trouble you," he says. "I happen to believe there isn't a basis. Everybody comes into a situation with their own views and beliefs. That's my view. I'll let you know if there's a change."
Williams is still awaiting the results of the police department's internal investigation on the matter. According to Councilmember Patterson, the mayor promised her in writing that the report would be on her desk on Nov. 12. She's still waiting.
"It seems the mayor doesn't speak for his own administration," Patterson says. "If the mayor makes a commitment to another elected official and [his] people don't abide by him, it undercuts the mayor's commitments. It should be a priority for the mayor. He made a commitment to me in writing. That should be a concern for the mayor."
Patterson's main concern is the hogtying of arrestees at the academy. The department's general orders declare that "Members shall not attach handcuffs to leg restraints in such a fashion that forces the legs and hands to be close to one another (i.e. hog-tying), or place a person in a prone position, lying face down."
However, police officials-as well as Williams staffers-have argued that the arrestees were shackled in a less cumbersome way, which does not qualify as hogtying. Inspector Stanly Wigenton, the current head of the Internal Affairs Division, has already made up his mind on that point. "What we found so far-that's not considered hogtying," he says. "I can say that no one was hogtied."
Wigenton bases his judgment on the configuration of the wrist-to-ankle restraints. The apparatus used by police that day included an extra cuff between the wrist and ankle cuffs. "There was a lot of room in between," he says. "The one in the middle was extremely loose. There's a lot of flex room there."
Patterson says that if the department insists on splitting hairs over the issue, she will draft legislation to ban all forms of wrist-to-ankle restraints. "I do not understand how this can ever be a defensible option given the explicit language in the Metropolitan Police Department orders," wrote Patterson in a Dec. 5 letter to Ramsey.
Kellems says that there might be extenuating circumstances for the unusual shackling technique. The general orders do not list such circumstances.
Abbate doesn't remember the flex room cited by the police department. But she does remember Internal Affairs investigators trying to convince her that the cuffs were loose enough that she could have stood up. "There was absolutely no way that you could," she says.
According to Passacantando, a handful of arrestees who tried to walk with the restraints on subsequently had both wrists cuffed to their ankles. Mayer notes that he saw people who tried to move get dragged back to their original places. And Wohlberg says that some people had their restraints tightened so much that their wrists and ankles touched.
Whatever the outcome of the police's investigation, Ramsey continues supporting his troops. "I think our officers handled these situations well," he says.
As for the report, Ramsey says not to look for it anytime soon-if ever. The report will not be made public, says the chief. "Not as long as there's litigation pending," he explains. CP
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Antiwar Group Reprises 'Daisy' Ad
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/politics/17DAIS.html
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 16 (AP) - Revisiting a jarring television commercial from the cold war era, a grass-roots antiwar group has remade the 1964 "Daisy" advertisement, warning that a war against Iraq could spark nuclear Armageddon.
Like the original, the 30-second advertisement by the Internet-based group MoveOn.org depicts a girl plucking petals from a daisy, along with a missile launch countdown and a nuclear mushroom cloud.
The original was produced by President Johnson's campaign to paint his Republican foe, Barry Goldwater, as an extremist who might lead the United States into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It drew such negative reaction that it was pulled after only one showing.
MoveOn.org showed its version to the news media on Wednesday and began showing it today. It includes scenes of military escalation before the mushroom cloud appears. Then the screen goes black, with a warning that a war might end quickly, or it might spread to other countries and end with "the unthinkable."
It ends with the message, "Maybe that's why the overwhelming majority of Americans say to President Bush: Let the inspections work."
MoveOn.org's leaders said they hoped to make a point about nuclear war.
"We wanted to run an ad that would highlight that very real possibility and help encourage a national discussion," said Eli Pariser, the group's international campaign director.
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Stand Up for Peace - All Out on January 18!
by Justin Raimondo
January 17, 2003
Antiwar.com
In cities and small towns across the country, on the East Coast and in the West, Americans are standing up to the War Party and standing up for peace. Around the world, January 18 is the big day, with rallies scheduled for Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and dozens of locations in between. (See the organizations listed on http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ for details in your location.)
United for Peace (excellent listing of antiwar actions nationwide) http://www.unitedforpeace.org/
People of all sorts are coalescing this Saturday in what promises to be one of the biggest outpourings of antiwar sentiment since the Vietnam war. Middle-class folks as well as college students, Republican businessmen as well as labor unionists who usually vote Democratic, libertarian techno-geeks who sometimes vote Libertarian but usually don't bother - they're all coming together tomorrow in the same general vicinity.
Opposition to this senseless war of conquest in Iraq is burgeoning, here and internationally, in spite of some rather clumsy efforts to tamp it down. The shrike-like cries of our war-birds are being drowned out by a chorus of voices that cry out: Not in Our Name!
Antiwar.com has made some criticisms of the left-wing leadership of the antiwar movement, especially the ANSWER coalition, and we stand by every word of it. But January 18 is a day to put polemics on the shelf, and unite behind a common goal: stopping this rotten war before it starts. If you don't like the placards they're handing out at the rally site, then bring your own banners, put out your own message, stock up on plenty of bottled water and maybe a box lunch - and let your voice be heard.
War is not "inevitable." We are not the helpless pawns of our rulers. This Saturday, let's show them that they can't manipulate us with simplistic slogans and relentless fear-mongering.
All out on January 18!
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Protesting war, groups battle stereotypes too
By Karen Brandon, Tribune national correspondent.
Tribune staff reporter Gary Washburn in Chicago and Tribune news services contributed to this report
January 17, 2003,
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-0301170399jan17,1,2088615.story
David Cortright is a seasoned anti-war activist who pulled together Win Without War, a new assemblage of disparate interest groups, to oppose a military invasion of Iraq. But he is battling more than the prospect of imminent war.
The Vietnam veteran from Goshen, Ind., is also fighting the stereotypical image of the protester as an aging hippie in a tie-dyed T-shirt, out on the fringe of the political left, considered unpatriotic in some circles, and opposed to war on any grounds.
"The traditional interpretation of peace rallies is that they are somewhat fringe, that they are representing just the pacifist communities," he said. "We want to convey the message that the concern about a war against Iraq is very broad and reaches out to mainstream organizations."
As the anti-war movement prepares for weekend rallies in Washington, where it hopes to hold its biggest protest yet, organizers are trying to expand the reach and redefine the perception of the movement.
Thus far, the protesters have featured a supporting cast including pacifists such as the Quakers, anti-globalization forces and fringe political groups such as the Freedom Socialist Party. But the movement that will be marching in the nation's capital, and took to the airwaves Thursday with an anti-war ad campaign, includes a complex cast of other organizations that are not on the edges of American society.
The National Council of Churches, representing 36 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, is opposed to invading Iraq and is holding a peace vigil at the National Cathedral and a march to the White House on Monday. Members of the Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows will also be represented.
Several prominent Republicans and party donors who oppose a war paid for an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal this week that read, "Let's be clear; We supported the Gulf War. We supported our intervention in Afghanistan. We accept the logic of a just war. But Mr. President, your war on Iraq does not pass the test."
Cortright'sorganization and others are trying to appeal to people who don't see themselves attending peace rallies, putting bumper stickers on their cars or even calling themselves activists.
"One shouldn't just look to the streets," said Erik Gustafson, 32, an Army and gulf war veteran and director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a human-rights organization in Washington, and an opponent of an Iraq invasion. "That's like using the 1960s lens to measure opposition to the war."
Still, observers say the broad coalition faces enormous challenges. No war has begun, and Thursday's revelation that weapons inspectors discovered empty warheads for chemical weapons in Iraq may change the view of some who might have opposed military intervention.
Most, though not all, national polls show support for military action. There is no draft "breathing its hot breath down on the necks of young men," as Joyce Appleby, a University of California-Los Angeles professor emeritus of history, put it. And the movement is trying to organize a generation for whom war protests are familiar only through history books.
At the same time, Appleby said, steps taken by the current movement suggest its leaders have learned from the past.
"This movement is less in-your-face, less angry," said Appleby, past president of the American Historical Association. "It's much more thoughtful, and has swept up all kinds of groups."
Cortright said the issues raised by the prospect of military action with Iraq have made an anti-war campaign appeal to a broad array of people.
The movement, for instance, has attracted support from the National Organization for Women, which is concerned about the military budget taking away from domestic priorities; the NAACP, which is concerned about the effect on minorities; and the Sierra Club, which is concerned about the environmental repercussions. On Saturday, more than 100 trade unionists from 60 unions and the Central Labor Councils meeting in Chicago passed a unanimous resolution opposing "unprovoked war with Iraq."
On Thursday, the Chicago City Council overwhelmingly approved a resolution opposing a pre-emptive strike unless it can be proved that Iraq poses "a real and imminent" threat to the U.S. The lone "no" in a 45-1 vote was Ald. James Balcer (11th), a decorated Vietnam War veteran who said he agreed with "95 percent" of what the resolution contained.
For the wide range of groups opposing an invasion of Iraq, the chief concerns include the unprecedented policy of opening a pre-emptive war, the possibility that the United States would take action unilaterally or with limited international support, and the lack of widespread evidence uncovered thus far by UN inspectors.
As the situation unfolds, one challenge may be in simply holding together disparate organizations with widely varying, and sometimes opposing, political aims that so far have created not one cohesive coalition but at least three--Win Without War, International Act Now to Stop War & Racism (ANSWER), and United for Peace.
Bill Massey, 68, represents the old school of peace advocates. The retired mailroom worker has helped arrange for 10 buses to take Chicago-area residents to the nation's capital for this weekend's protests, two more buses than were needed for the October rally there that attracted an estimated 100,000 people. That crowd was believed to be the largest anti-war protest since the Vietnam era.
John "Jack" Shanahan, an 80-year-old retired vice admiral who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, represents a voice in the new peace movement. "I'm opposed to unilateral military intervention," he said. A registered Republican who lives in Ormond Beach, Fla., Shanahan said: "America does not have its priorities in the proper order. We're neglecting our domestic problems."
Eli Pariser, 22, international campaigns director for MoveOn.org, an online network whose aim is to attract people back into politics, is mindful of the hurdles ahead. "The challenge we have now is making sure our democracy works," said Pariser, whose group has more than 650,000 subscribers to its e-mail list nationwide.
The organization has collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions to oppose war before the inspection process is finished and organized thousands of members to meet with congressional leaders next week. It also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the provocative ad campaign that began airing Thursday in major markets, including Chicago.
The ads, urging President Bush to "let the inspections work," show a little girl counting daisy petals only to have her image replaced by a nuclear explosion. It is a remake of a controversial commercial during Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater.
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Vatican encourages Christian activism
By Larry Witham
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030117-221271.htm
The Vatican yesterday urged Catholics worldwide to be active in politics, arguing that democracies must recognize God-given human nature and that denial of Christian activism was "a form of intolerant secularism."
In its release of "doctrinal notes" on participation in politics, the Vatican portrayed the growth of democracy as bedeviled by moral relativism and secularism.
"A kind of cultural relativism exists today, evident in the conceptualization and defense of an ethical pluralism, which sanctions the decadence and disintegration of reason and the principles of natural moral law," said the document, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the church's doctrinal overseer.
The document, approved by Pope John Paul II, cheered the spread of democracy, but argued that "natural law" should be followed not only by Catholics, but by anyone using reason and thinking about the common good.
Natural-law theory argues that God or nature has designed mankind in a fashion that mandates human rights, respectful relationships and such institutions as marriage.
The Vatican said the world of politics and the state are separate from the church, but that democracy must be "based on a correct understanding of the human person" and that Christians have the duty of "infusing the temporal order" with those values.
The notes emphasized that Catholics may choose the appropriate political party to achieve general ends, such as order, peace, respect for life, equality and justice, but argued that many legislators are following demands for irresponsible freedoms.
"Lawmakers maintain that they are respecting this freedom of choice by enacting laws which ignore the principle of natural ethics and yield to ephemeral cultural and moral trends," said the notes, addressed to bishops, Catholic lawmakers and lay voters.
Some see the notes as timed for the June completion of a founding document for the European Union, early drafts of which have been quite secular in outlook. The Vatican has urged that it mention God or Europe's Christian heritage.
In the United States, debates on abortion, war, the death penalty, policy toward the poor, and homosexual "families" are likely to heat up.
The 108th Congress has 151 Catholics - 24 in the Senate and 127 in the House. They make up 28 percent of Congress, matching the Catholic population.
Albert Menendez of Americans for Religious Liberty said the Catholic notion of natural law, which is recognized by some Christian groups but few secularists, is problematic in politics.
"No one knows what natural law is, where it comes from or how it applies in every situation," Mr. Menendez said. "In any secular country, how do you make such a concept superior to its constitution?"
The U.S. Constitution does not mention God, but the Declaration of Independence speaks of the "self-evident truth" about the Creator as the source of inalienable rights, which some call a natural-law argument.
American voter turnout was 51 percent in 2000 and 36 percent in 2002, and "Catholics were not much different," said John White, a political scientist at Catholic University.
He said the natural-law issue for Catholics was debated publicly in the 1980s, when Democratic candidates such as Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro said Catholic teachings on abortion were personal, not mandated for the general public.
"I don't think there is such a thing as a Catholic vote," Mr. White said. While a natural-law argument is unlikely to guarantee certain policy votes, he said, Catholics and others who attend church most often side with the pro-life stance.
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Vatican Journal: Oil Drives War Plan
Reuters
January 17, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-vatican17jan17,0,6351978.story
VATICAN CITY -- A Vatican-sanctioned journal Thursday attacked the United States' justification for a possible war in Iraq, saying it was motivated by economics and would spark a wave of terrorism and more trouble in the Middle East.
The views of the Jesuit-run journal Civilta Cattolica are significant because its articles are approved by the Vatican's Secretariat of State and reflect Vatican opinion.
The journal suggested that oil was an ulterior motive for a war.
An editorial rebutted the reasons given by the U.S. to justify a possible war against Iraq and said they were often contradictory.
"One can foresee the destabilization of the entire Middle East because the more politicized Islamic masses, which already harbor a deep hate for the West, will see it as an act of war against Islam and against Arab and Muslim countries," it said.
"The gravest consequence of a war against Iraq, however, would be a flare-up of terrorism against the United States and against allied Western countries."
The editorial appeared four days after Pope John Paul II put the Vatican on a diplomatic collision course with Washington by saying war would be a "defeat for humanity."
Civilta Cattolica said that while it was "probable" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, "there is no certain and documented evidence about how much there is and about Saddam Hussein's ability to use them."
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Thousands in Gaza rally to support Iraq
Associated Press
1/17/2003
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-01-17-palestinians-iraq_x.htm
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Thousands of Palestinians toting pictures of Saddam Hussein marched in support of the Iraqi leader Friday as Israelis lined up for gas masks, fearing attack on their cities if the United States goes to war with Iraq.
Also Friday, the Islamic militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for a botched attack with a booby-trapped raft. An Israeli navy gunship fired on the dinghy, causing a large explosion off northern Gaza. Hamas did not say what the attacker's target was, but several Jewish settlements are near the shore in that area.
In Gaza City, about 3,500 Palestinians filled narrow streets with fluttering Iraqi flags and pictures of Saddam. Some chanted together, "Our beloved Saddam, strike Tel Aviv," reviving an old slogan from the 1991 Gulf War.
Flanked by three guards hefting submachine guns, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader, told reporters that the march was evidence of strong Palestinian support for Iraq.
"The Palestinian people and Iraqi people are in the same trench of resistance against the aggression and against injustice," he said.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who backed Iraq in 1991, has withheld public support for Saddam. Palestinian police officers did not try to break up Friday's rally.
At a rally in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, militants urged Arabs to volunteer to help defend Iraq from any attack.
"We call upon all nationalist and Islamist forces to immediately call for opening the doors to recruit volunteers to defend Iraq and its people," Salah el-Youssef, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Front, a pro-Iraqi group, told the gathering of about 500 people in the Ein el-Hilweh camp.
In Jerusalem's largest shopping mall, dozens of Israelis lined up to get gas masks, with fears of war revived by Thursday's discovery of empty chemical warheads near Baghdad. Most of Israel's 6.6 million people have received gas masks from the military over the years.
Israel's Defense Ministry is to award a contract in the next few weeks for production of an improved gas mask with a battery-operated air pump and a more comfortable fit, especially for people with beards, ministry spokeswoman Rachel said.
The first of the new masks, which Israel has been working for years to develop, will be ready by late spring, she said.
Last month, a Defense Ministry expert, Esther Crasser, told an Israeli newspaper, that only one-third of the type of gas masks distributed in recent years are effective.
Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital, which has a staff well-drilled in treating victims of Palestinian suicide bomb attacks, is preparing to take in several hundred victims of chemical and biological weapons attacks. The hospital said it could treat Israelis wounded at home as well as American soldiers injured in Iraq.
The hospital, one of the best-equipped in the Middle East, is updating computer systems to handle registration of patients with foreign passports, spokeswoman Yael Bossem-Levy said.
In particular, the hospital staff is readying to treat burns and lung injuries in case they receive soldiers hurt by chemical or biological weapons, she said. The hospital did not receive a specific request from the Americans to take in wounded soldiers, she said.
Israel this week went into a higher stage of alert, code-named "Red Hail."
Hundreds of American soldiers are in place in southern Israel for joint maneuvers to prepare anti-missile defenses in case Iraq strikes Israeli cities as it did in 1991. At the time, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel.
Preliminary exercises have begun and a live-fire drill is planned, involving two anti-missile systems, the American-made Patriot and the Arrow, developed by Israel and the United States. U.S. soldiers have brought Patriot anti-missile batteries with them and are to remain in Israel until the end of any war on Iraq.
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A weekend of protests for a peaceful end to Iraq crisis
1/17/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-01-17-anti-war_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Fearing war could start in weeks, protesters are massing in Washington and cities around the country to press for a peaceful way out of the crisis with Iraq and an end to America's own weapons of mass destruction.
The weekend demonstrations coincide with America's military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and a time of remembrance for the nonviolent struggle embodied by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Even as U.S. military personnel ship out, protesters are packing Washington-bound buses and organizing local marches and vigils from Tampa, to San Francisco.
"We are attacking a poor country that has enough problems," said Al Svitesic, a retired pile driver and World War II veteran who will be rallying in Pittsburgh next week. "It is unjust."
The largest crowds are expected in the nation's capital, where President Bush and many in Congress are united on the move toward war and protest leaders hope they can draw tens of thousands, at least, to march in dissent.
Police said Friday they will be ready for trouble but don't expect much. They've been in close touch with demonstrators.
"They say it's going to be peaceful and our hopes and goals are not to make arrests," said Sgt. Joe Gentile, speaking for the force. "We've met with the organizers. They don't plan any civil disobedience."
Nonviolent civil disobedience was pledged by other demonstrators in a smaller rally planned Sunday outside the White House. Gentile said a "few arrests" were likely in that event.
President Bush is going to the Camp David retreat in Maryland for the weekend.
The organization International Answer planned the national rally Saturday in Washington and one in San Francisco, exhorting war opponents everywhere to "stop the Bush administration from threatening and killing the people of the world who are not our enemy."
Polls suggest Americans are not in step with the anti-war movement but also are not sold on Bush's arguments for war.
In a Pew Research Center survey out Thursday, 53% of respondents said Bush has not explained the stakes that justify using military force against Iraq. Yet 76% said they would support war if nuclear, biological or chemical weapons were uncovered.
The protesters' focus is on America's weapons of mass destruction, not the ones inspectors are looking for in Iraq in a possible prelude to conflict.
The sense that war is close spurred the determination of many activists to get to Washington, despite snowy weather en route followed by a weekend of subfreezing temperatures in the capital.
Gerald Rudolph, director of a South Carolina group that sent one busload to the last large Washington rally, in October, said about twice as many people were going from his area this time.
"It's starting to reach visibility," he said of the anti-war movement. "Should we go to war, I think it'll just explode at that point." He leads the Carolina Peace Resource Center.
Nearly 500 people from Wisconsin signed up for bus travel to Washington. So did several hundred from upstate New York.
Ambitious weekend rallies were planned in Phoenix, in Portland, Ore., and in Tampa, where protesters planned to gather outside the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, the arm of the Pentagon that would direct the Iraq war. In Pittsburgh, activists were hoping to draw several thousand to Jan. 24-26 protests.
In San Francisco, the Internet-based group MoveOn.org released a TV commercial Thursday that depicts a girl plucking petals from a daisy and shows a nuclear mushroom cloud. The ad, being shown in 12 cities, re-creates the ominous "Daisy" campaign commercial of 1964 that President Johnson used against Republican opponent Barry Goldwater.
In a lighter but perhaps equally eye-popping tactic, protesters in the organization Baring Witness said they might take their clothes off and march down San Francisco's Market Street.
They specialize in naked resistance, having disrobed in various remote locations and forming to spell "peace" and "no war" and to depict the peace symbol.
Organizers of the national rally invoked King, particularly his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 4, 1967, in the leadup to the long weekend marking the civil rights leader's birthday.
In that speech, King said the Vietnam conflict convinced him he could not speak against the violence coming from the ghettos "without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."
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Activists Sound Bugle Call on U.S. Peace Campaign
January 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-protest.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Peace activists are urging opponents of a U.S.-led war against Iraq to come out in massive numbers for weekend demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, saying time may be running out to stop an attack.
Thousands of people are expected to join the Saturday demonstrations, timed to coincide with anti-war protests in countries like France, Germany and Russia, as well as the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend in the United States.
The Bush administration, which is building up a major military force in the Gulf area, has said the release of a U.N. Iraq weapons inspections report on Jan. 27 will be an ``important date'' in deciding how to act against Baghdad.
``Looking at the speed at which Washington is sending weapons and troops to the Middle East, they might seem unstoppable,'' said Tony Murphy, spokesman for International ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism), a coalition group planning the weekend protests.
``But we actually feel they are rushing because they are worried about the breadth and scope of the anti-war movement, and they are afraid if they wait too long that movement will catch up to them,'' he said.
Brian Becker, another International ANSWER spokesman, said: ``We believe the trigger for this war will be the January 27 United Nations report to the Security Council.''
The United States alleges that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is shielding weapons of mass destruction and has threatened to disarm him by force if necessary.
Activists from more than 200 cities in 45 states are planning to charter buses or drive in convoys of cars to attend the twin Saturday protests, organizers said.
ACTIVISTS HOPEFUL
Though U.S. anti-war protests have drawn fewer people than those in Europe, American peace activists said they were optimistic their movement was gaining momentum.
``I'm feeling really excited and hopeful,'' said United for Peace Co-Chair Andrea Buffa, fresh from an anti-war seminar at the University of Michigan.
``The students are really intent to do something. The energy from that made me feel like there is going to be a strong turnout this weekend.''
Women in Northern California spelling out the words ``No War'' and ``Peace'' with their nude bodies have helped draw attention to grass-roots anti-war activities springing up across the United States.
The group, called Baring Witness, is planning a ``major'' protest action at Saturday's anti-war rally in San Francisco, said its 72-year-old leader Donna Sheehan.
Demonstrators in San Francisco will meet on Saturday to march across town and then hold a rally at City Hall.
In Washington, protesters plan to gather at Capitol Hill and march to the Navy Yard downtown, where they say they will demand the right to check for weapons of mass destruction, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Iraqi arms inspections.
TELEVISION WARNING
An Internet activist group, MoveOn.org, began airing a television advertisement in U.S. cities on Thursday in order to help turn the public against war in Iraq, showing the financial strength of the peace movement.
Their 30-second spot, a remake of former Democratic President Lyndon Johnson's ``Daisy'' election ad of 1964, begins with a young girl picking petals from a daisy and ends with the mushroom-shaped cloud of a nuclear explosion.
``War with Iraq,'' a narrator says. ``Maybe it will end quickly. Maybe not. Maybe it will spread. Maybe extremists will take over countries with nuclear weapons.''
MoveOn.org said the ad was slated to air for five days in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and eight other U.S. cities.
Also on Thursday, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution opposing a pre-emptive U.S. military attack on Iraq, following similar resolutions passed in San Francisco, Baltimore and Detroit.
Buffa said Americans were increasingly doubtful about the need to attacking Iraq.
``The issue of North Korea has really made it clear for a lot of people that there are alternatives to war,'' she said. ``If we can negotiate with North Korea, why can't we negotiate with Iraq? A lot of people can see the contradiction in that.''
President Bush has said he does not intend to use military force in a dispute over North Korea's suspected nuclear program and has held out the possibility of economic help and better relations if Pyongyang ends the program.
Murphy said comments this week by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that arms inspectors faced no ``arbitrary timescale'' in Iraq had heartened activists at a critical time.
``We can see that our actions are having an effect.wouldn't have said that unless there was mass anger and organizing, and people on the streets in England,'' he said.
``People in large numbers absolutely can change the course of history. I think we are seeing that right now ... It's not too late to stop the war.''
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World Protesters Gather on Iraq Conflict
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Protests-World.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Protesters turned out Friday in Bahrain and the Gaza Strip to rally against a possible war against Iraq, while demonstrators planned to take to the streets in several European cities.
Protests on Saturday in Brussels and the German cities of Hamburg and Cologne were to coincide with similar demonstrations across the United States.
German demonstrators also planned to gather in front of the European headquarters of the U.S. Army in Heidelberg.
The demonstrations come as Saddam proclaimed Friday Iraq is ready for war with the United States. His words added to an atmosphere of urgency that followed the discovery of 12 empty chemical warheads in Iraq.
U.N. weapons inspectors were trying to determine if the discovery represented a violation of U.N. resolutions, a possible trigger for war.
Meanwhile, 3,500 Palestinians marched Friday in support of Saddam in Gaza City, filling the narrow streets with fluttering Iraqi flags and pictures of the Iraqi leader. Some chanted, ``Our beloved Saddam, strike Tel Aviv,'' reviving a slogan from the 1991 Gulf War.
``The Palestinian people and Iraqi people are in the same trench of resistance against the aggression and against injustice,'' said Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader.
In the Bahraini capital of Manama, more than 1,500 citizens waving placards and banners marched saying ``No!'' to war with Iraq and calling on their pro-Western leadership to expel U.S. forces from the kingdom.
The small Persian Gulf state is home to the U.S. 5th fleet and hosts about 1,000 U.S. military personnel who would be among the forces used in any American-led attack on Iraq.
Around 100 anti-war campaigners held a public meeting to mark the 12th anniversary of the U.S. airstrikes that began the 1991 Gulf War.
The organizers of the gathering, lobby group Voices in the Wilderness, said that war on Iraq would be illegal, immoral and counter productive.
``It is illegal because under current circumstances there is no U.N. mandate for war. It is immoral because hundreds and thousands of innocent people will die,'' said group spokesman Gabriel Carlyle. ``It is counter productive because it's only going to make the problems of terrorism worse.''
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Bolivian Police Use Tear Gas in Protest
January 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Bolivia-Coca-Protests.html
COCHABAMBA, Bolivia (AP) -- Security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse scores of protesters Friday in the fifth straight day of demonstrations against a coca eradication program.
Prostesters since Monday have shut down the main highway linking this key central city to Santa Cruz, 200 miles to the east, by heaping boulders and logs along the roadway.
That action continued Friday as thousands turned out to oppose a U.S.-sponsored, government plan to destroy illegal coca crops -- the base ingredient used to make cocaine.
Helmeted police chased demonstrators through the streets, firing tear gas into crowds gathered behind barricades of garbage cans and burning tires.
Doctor Eduardo Arnez said he treated three young men for shotgun wounds. He claimed that police fired the weapons.
Evo Morales, a Bolivian congressman and leader of the country's coca farmers, has led the protests, which began intermittently after talks between the government and his group collapsed in December.
In addition, organizers say thousands of Bolivians angered by the government's decision to sign a hemispheric free trade agreement have also taken to the streets.
Since the latest round of protests erupted Monday, the independent Permanent Assembly of Human Rights for Bolivia says security forces have shot and killed five protesters. The government has not confirmed the number of casualties.
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Labor is opposing a possible Iraq war
Leaders of unions that backed the conflicts in Vietnam and the Gulf say they distrust Bush.
By Jane M. Von Bergen
Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Fri, Jan. 17, 2003
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/4966024.htm
In a growing movement, labor leaders - representing some of the same unions that had firmly backed the U.S. government in conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War to the Gulf war - are lining up to oppose the possible war against Iraq.
Labor leaders express distrust of President Bush's motives in pursuing the conflict, and say they lack convincing proof of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. They also say the President's war push is being used to distract the American public and workers from the nation's economic woes, including mounting unemployment and a crisis in health care.
"There's a lot of feeling that Bush's bravado is covering up things he doesn't know how to deal with: the economy, the people that don't have work," said Patrick Eiding, an asbestos worker and president of the Philadelphia Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, which passed an antiwar resolution on Jan. 8.
Antiwar resolutions passed around the nation so far represent the views of an estimated two million rank-and-file members, labor's antiwar activists say.
"It's a landmark change," said Steven Frasier, a labor scholar and editor of the New Labor Forum, a journal sponsored by Queens College in New York. While there have always been left-leaning labor leaders, the current antiwar movement is attracting a broader range of support, he said.
Frasier and other experts said today's labor leaders came of age during the Vietnam War - as protesters or participants - and many still harbor strong feelings about how the United States handled that war.
The labor movement has also shifted left as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, who was elected in 1995, has reached out to social activists and students who had been alienated by conservative labor leaders such as George Meany, who led the AFL-CIO until his death in 1980, experts said.
On the other hand, it could just be politics as usual.
Given labor's animosity toward Bush, "if there's a way to embarrass the President, they'll find it," Victor Kamber, a Washington labor consultant, said.
He said the war issue never came up at a national meeting yesterday of the Building Trades Council. Typically, building trades unions tend to be more conservative.
Eiding, the Central Labor Council president, and others are careful to say that labor backs the women and men in the armed services. And they say if they were convinced of a need for a war, labor leaders would support the country's war efforts unequivocally.
Last night, the 4,000-member Philadelphia Area American Postal Workers Union passed an antiwar resolution.
Last week, the local branch of the Coalition of Labor Union Women passed its antiwar resolution, its president, Kathy Black, said. Its national officers council passed a similar resolution Jan. 10. Black's group is among those organizing a local "town meeting" on Feb. 8 to discuss labor's role in the war.
On Dec. 20, the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 in Plymouth Meeting, which represents 26,000 retail and health-care workers, passed an antiwar resolution.
Tomorrow, a labor contingent will march in the National Protest Against the War in Washington, with the 250,000-member Service Employees International Union in New York sending 12 buses, said Gene Bruskin, a union official and a coordinator of U.S. Labor Against the War.
The group held an organizing meeting last weekend in Chicago that attracted 125 labor leaders from around the nation. It was hosted by the 20,500 members of International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705. In November, the local passed an antiwar resolution, 402-1.
President Jerry Zero said the resolution came up at the last minute, when a part-time warehouse worker handed him a draft just before the meeting.
"We've got truck drivers and UPS people who are pretty conservative," Zero said. But the people who stood up to support the resolution talked about relatives who had died in Vietnam, and friends and brothers still suffering from the after-effects of Desert Storm, he said.
The resolution passed by Philadelphia's Central Labor Council urges the Bush administration to "continue to abide by and work through the resolution of the U.N. Security Council, and we oppose an invasion without U.N. Security Council approval."
The Central Labor Council represents 115,000 unionized workers in Philadelphia, including Teamsters, autoworkers, electricians, bakers, retail clerks and health-care staffers.
Among those who strongly backed the Philadelphia resolution was Patrick Gillespie, head of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council.
At the meeting, Gillespie said he did not want another nation-damaging conflict between the "hippies and the hard hats."
If there is any lesson to be learned from Vietnam, it is that "we were manipulated by our leaders," he said in an interview yesterday. "That's what I see happening now."
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