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NUCLEAR
Disarmament in Belarus
A Letter From Baghdad
Minister says Czechs should mull small N-plant - paper
White House: France in Minority, but Still an Ally
India Says It Shot Down Pakistani Plane
Former top Iraqi scientist says Iraq has no nukes
On eve of Powell address, Blix warns Baghdad
China Calls on U.N. to Give Inspectors More Time
Iraqi Ambassador Addresses the United Nations
N. Korea Ups Stakes in Crisis as Reactor Restarted
Kim Jong Il at the OK Corral
Koreas open first cross-border road
U.S. promises to hold talks with N. Korea
North Korea Restarts Nuclear Plant
U.S. Official Says North Korea Could Sell Bomb Material
Military Option Colors N. Korea Crisis
U.S. Expresses Concern at North Korean Nuclear Move
U.S. Gets OK to Use British Radar
NASA To Go Nuclear
Nukes-in-Space in Columbia's Wake
Senate Panel Approves Nuclear Arms Treaty
New York Seeks Cooperation on Indian Pt. Emergency Plan
Rep. Kucinich asks nuclear regulators to ban FirstEnergy Corp.
How about if U.S. just lightens up?
French betrayal turns reluctant warrior Powell into a hawk
MILITARY
Iraq's Neighborhood Thick With U.S. Arms
Raytheon, Lockheed to Bid on $1B Project
Europe Debates Whether to Admit God to Union
Americans will be fighting ghosts, say Iraqi exiles
Iraq Arms Civilians As Second Line of Defense Against U.S.
Saddam says U.S. tries to 'control the world'
Hussein Insists Iraq Has No Banned Weapons; Denies Al Qaeda Link
War: Been there, done that
Saddam Dares U.S. to Prove Iraq Has Arms
Israelis Say Arafat Must Pay $10 Million
Kuwait's Northern Half Is Set Aside for Military
U.S. Effort to Link Terrorists To Iraq Focuses on Jordanian
Turkey Declares Intention to Back U.S. War Plans
Top Pentagon adviser says France no longer U.S. ally
Pair say data in spy case is crucial
Powell Plays Tape of Iraqi Officers Discussing Arms
US claim dismissed by Blix
China Calls on U.N. to Give Inspectors More Time
U.N. Files Charges For Timor Abuses
Speech Seen as Strong but Unlikely to Sway Skeptics
Seven more US warships en route to the Gulf
The Coast Guard Belongs at Home
Command center not ready for war, Air Force reports
General accused of abuse of office
Rumsfeld Defends Gen. Franks
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Afghans No. 1 in Opium
Jurors Who Convicted Marijuana Grower Seek New Trial
White House Report Stings Drug Agency on Abilities
FBI: Al - Qaida Still Main Terrorism Threat
ENERGY AND OTHER
LA utility plans to build 120 MW wind facility
Process Turns Wastewater Into Fuel Gases
Wind Powers World Wildlife Fund Headquarters
Stop fueling a national security threat
Hydrogen Cars Remain Decades in the Future Under New Budget
Rival Cloning Bills Introduced in Congress
ACTIVISTS
Protesters chain themselves to British tanks
EU observer: Second hunger strike by nuclear opponents
Peace Team ready to talk after 1 month and 150 interviews in Iraq
Peace activists say oil behind a war with Iraq
IRELAND - Troops to guard U.S. planes at airport
An Environmentalist With No Time for Houseplants
Mandela Would Make U.N. - Backed Iraq Peace Trip
Subject: Two Plowshare Witnesses in Shannon
Jowell in U-turn over war demo
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- belarus
Disarmament in Belarus
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Washington Post; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26895-2003Feb4?language=printer
The Jan. 24 news story "Powell 'Confident' of Allies' Support for War" referred to a White House document titled "What Does Disarmament Look Like?" This document lists states that "have chosen to give up mass destruction weapons and willingly cooperated with the international community to verify their disarmament." Belarus is not on this list, but it should be, because:
• It was the first state to voluntarily reject an opportunity to continue to possess nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union. On Nov. 27, 1996, Belarus completed the transfer of all nuclear weapons from its territory to the Russian Federation.
• It is a party to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It has destroyed 584 tactical nuclear missiles, as well as launchers and auxiliary equipment.
• It is a party to the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, under which it has destroyed 1,773 tanks, 1,341 combat armored vehicles and 130 combat aircraft, almost three times as many armaments as the United States, Britain and France have jointly destroyed under the same treaty.
Belarus's disarmament efforts and its important contribution to strengthening international security should be recognized.
VALENTIN RYBAKOV
Interim Charge d'Affaires
Embassy of the Republic of Belarus
Washington
-------- depleted uranium
A Letter From Baghdad
Wednesday, 5 February 2003,
Scoop Media
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0302/S00043.htm
Press Release: Letter From Baghdad
Dear Friends,
From 3rd- 8th January 2003 a group of NGO representatives and former UN officials was able to meet with cabinet ministers in Baghdad including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Foreign Minister Nagi Sabri and Oil Minister Amer Mohammed Rashid, as well as to talk with doctors, teachers and scientists. We had the opportunity to meet ordinary Iraqis and visit sites recently inspected for weapons of mass destruction. The aim was to contribute to efforts to prevent war and to gather information not available in the western press, particularly with regard to the human situation.
Attached is a brief summary of a very intense series of visits, as well as suggestions responding to the frequent question asked by citizens of western countries "What can we do to help prevent war?"
Please circulate these documents as widely as possible, asking NGOs and individuals to act quickly on the practical suggestions offered. Your help will be very valuable. With warm wishes,
from
Margarita Papandreou, former First Lady of Greece
Scilla Elworthy, Director, Oxford Research Group, UK
Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq
Christian Harleman, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Sweden
Jan Oberg, Director, the Transnational Foundation, Sweden
Zeynep Oral, Winpeace and Peace Initiative, Turkey
Omaima Rawas, peace activist and Vice President of the Syrian Arabic League, Syria
Fotini Sianou, President, Women's Committee, European Trade Union Confederation
NEWS FROM BAGHDAD - a visit to Iraq 3rd - 8th January 2003
including meetings with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Foreign Minister Nagi Sabri and Oil Minister Amer Mohammed Rashid, as well as conversations with ordinary Iraqis in the street and visits to sites.
1. Attitudes of Iraqis today. We experienced an extraordinary mixture of fatalism, faith and defiance in the El-zahrawi tearoom. Watching Saddam Hussein's Army Day speech on television, we talked with people at random, many of whom spoke English. They said that twice now world opinion has predicted that Iraq would collapse - after the Gulf War in 1991, and in 1998 when 350 cruise missiles hit the country - and once again they will survive. Yes, their children are afraid. Yes, the teenagers do not know if it is worth studying seriously or not. No, they will not go to the shelters. They do not talk so much of US or UK aggression but rather of Bush and Blair: until now, they have not resented the people of the countries about to bomb them, nor the civilizations, but the leaders. However that trend seems to be changing with the Iraqis increasingly holding the people of the UK and the US responsible for their countries' policies. In the words of Dr. Hoda Ammash " People here bear every respect for western people and western civilization. We respect your technological advancement, and your values. We know that westerners are being given the opportunity to learn about Arabic civilizations. Yet hatred is being manufactured, by some, to engineer a clash of civilizations."
2. Food reserves. Iraqi households have been given three months' (and now a further two months') food rations in order to get it out of the main storage sites to prevent warehouses being bombed. The food distribution programme, according to Denis Halliday (former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq (1997-98), is one of the most efficient in history, involving 49,000 food distribution agents and minimizing corruption through a system whereby if 100 people complain about an agent, he or she is removed. Iraqis are also stock-piling water but have no suitable large containers. People with gardens are being asked to dig wells.
Under the UN Oil-for-Food Programme only about half the oil revenues can be used for buying food and other necessities for the population of the centre and South of the country; the rest being used for compensation to Kuwait, food for the Iraqi Kurds in the North, and the costs of the UN programme including the UNMOVIC weapons inspections.
Halliday concludes: " The twelve year sanctions regime has become a weapon of mass destruction, built on the massive damage to civilian infrastructure by US bombing and resulting in the deaths of over one million people since 1991, over half of whom are children."
According to UNICEF 25% of Iraqi babies are born weighing 2kgs or less, a key indicator of famine. One million children under 5 suffer acute or chronic malnutrition.
3. Shelters. Everyone we spoke to said they would not use the 34 shelters provided for civilians in Baghdad because of the 1991 bombing of Al-Amarya shelter when 408 out of 422 women and children in the shelter were burned to death.
4. Weapons Inspectors. Dr. Sami Al-Araji, a nuclear engineer and Director General of Planning at the Ministry of Industry, is facilitating the work of the UNMOVIC inspectors. Everywhere we went there was a remarkable willingness to co-operate with the inspections, but patience is being tested. During our visit there was a routine inspection near the University of Baghdad where there are 6 science centres. The inspectors wanted to investigate one of these, but froze the entire complex meaning that nearly 3,000 people could not move for six hours, even though their place of work was not under inspection. This meant that toddlers were left uncollected at nursery schools. Not even the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, there for a visit, was allowed to leave.
A professor of microbiology at the University of Baghdad told us that during 1991-98 inspectors re-examined the university every three weeks, searching minutely. "They enter exam halls where students are doing their finals and search under their chairs." Iraqi people thought the inspections would last 2-3 years, and then they could go back to normal life. It is now 12 years since the inspections started, they are more intense than ever, and there is no end in sight.
We visited the al-Dawrah Foot and Mouth Vaccine Institute which was high on the list in the UK Government dossier (published September 2002) of biological weapons sites. Since 1994 the site has been inspected 60 times, it has been closed since 1995, when all the equipment was destroyed or removed and there were cameras everywhere connected to the former UNSCOM Monitoring Centre in Baghdad. The place was wrecked.
5. Civil and political rights. Since Oct 2002, laws and regulations have been or are being revised as follows:
- 1. Amendments to the constitution to allow for a multi-party system.
- 2. Abolition of special 'security violations' courts which had no rights of appeal
- 3. Abolition of laws requiring cutting off hands of thieves
- 4. Amnesty for political prisoners
- 5. Exiles not linked to intelligence services may now return to Iraq with the right to criticise the government
- 6. Reduction of fee for exit visa from Iraq from $200 to $10.
6. Oil. Current Iraqi production is approx 3 million barrels per day (current world production approx 77 million) but it has the second largest reserves in the world. If controls were lifted, and with infrastructure investment, with its immense reserves of easily extractable oil Iraq has the potential to supply 10% of the world's oil needs, and to continue to do so for at least a century (since less than 1% of reserves are being used up each year). Iraqis are very conscious of the energy needs of the western economies - the US has to import 60% of its oil needs - and know that the main reason for military invasion is to gain control of its vast reserves of oil. Iraqi ministers fear that if the US were to control Iraq's oil production, it would manipulate the economies not only of the Far East, but also of Europe. Iraq takes a long-term view, wants a stable oil price, and would like to adopt normal trading relations rather than be subject to crises, threats and manipulation.
7. Depleted Uranium (DU). Water-borne and air-borne dust from DU shells, used by the US and the UK in the 1991 Gulf war, is spreading over vast areas of Iraq but the government has no way of detecting the direction of the spread because airborne radiation sensing equipment is prohibited. People are developing cancers by consuming meat and milk from animals grazing in polluted areas. Cancers of all kinds are increasing dramatically in Iraq particularly amongst women with breast cancer and leukaemia. Members of our delegation have visited hospitals in Iraq since 1991 and observed that current conditions in the hospitals have worsened. Equipment needed for treatment lies idle because the computerized controls have been removed due to sanctions. There is one nurse for every 16 beds where previously there was one for every two beds. Every child has a mother or grandmother giving full time care. Omar, three years old has a plastino plastoma*, which attacks kidneys and then destroys the brain and nervous system: his head is enlarged to twice normal size, his face swollen unrecognizably out of shape and his eyes blind. His mother sits with him like a madonna, waiting for her child to die. Tiny Aia ('Miracle') was born with a second head, a brain sack attached to the back of her own head, a condition known as meningoceal* and not seen in Iraq before the mid-1990s. Dr. Ahmed Fadeh of the Baghdad Children's Hospital told me there are unlimited cases he simply can't treat because his equipment is worn out or lacks spares, and he has not got the drugs or even the suture thread that he needs because of sanctions.
*this was told to us phonetically in a hurry, we are not sure of the correct spelling
8. Implications for the future. This visit was a shock treatment in learning what it feels like to be an Iraqi. This is an ancient people with a civilization 7000 years old (Iraqis point out that the United States is barely 300 years old), an economy that until the 1980s was a model for the entire Middle East, and with a free health service that was ahead of the National Health Service in the UK. The streets are now rubble-strewn, most of the middle class have left, and people are selling their household goods on street corners in order to survive. The currency has devalued 6000 (six thousand) % in 20 years; in 1981 one dinar bought three US dollars, today one US dollar buys about 2000 dinars. To pay a modest hotel bill for 6 days, you need a pile of dinar notes two meters high. Twelve years of sanctions, which were intended to make the Iraqi people revolt against their leadership, have had the opposite effect giving Saddam Hussein total control over his people through food rationing. Sanctions have simply disabled Iraqi people through hunger and the wholesale disintegration of their infrastructure. Rather than rebel against Saddam Hussein, they feel defiance towards Bush and Blair which their leader can constantly reinforce, since their sense of honour is continuously provoked. The humiliation is very deep and very dangerous. In these circumstances a war and subsequent occupation of Iraq will no doubt fuel the fires of hatred and terror, and consequently the risk of attacks on the West.
For more information see websites: http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk http:// http://www.transnational.org
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Time is short. The UNMOVIC inspectors are due to report on 27th January 2003. Military preparations indicate that an attack may begin in early February. A pre-emptive attack will be a clear-cut violation of the UN Charter and international law. Medical and public health experts in the UK estimate that between 48,000 and 260,000 civilians could be killed in the first 3 months of conflict, and that if WMD are used, there could be up to 4 million dead.
What can be done to move towards a genuine solution of this conflict other than war and occupation?
1.The free press and NGOs must speedily step up their analysis and reporting to challenge disinformation about the realities in Iraq. Please distribute this report to all your media contacts.
2. Whenever you hear a news broadcast on Iraq which does not mention something about ordinary people, call them to ask for some human interest stories. Iraq is not one man, it is 26 million fellow citizens. They have points of views, hopes, fears and dreams like all of us.
3. The European Union has a substantial potential role to play. A consistent well-structured mediation process could be offered, either through key Arab states, or in the form of a meeting between the most senior representatives of the United States and of Iraq to 'explore whether all avenues short of war have been exhausted'. This meeting would need to be announced before 27th January, perhaps to take place mid-February. It would need to take place in a very safe environment and employ state-of-the-art conflict resolution techniques. These moves could be supported by France and by Germany in their chairmanship of the UN Security Council in January and February 2003 respectively. Urge your EU government to support such an initiative, and copy your letter to Prime Minister Costas Simitis of Greece, 15 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, 10674 Athens, mail@primeminister.gr which has the current presidency of the European Union.
4. If you are yourself willing, go to Baghdad to become part of the Civilian Protection that has already begun with contingents from Spain, the US and Austria. 5000 people are needed to stay at civilian sites such as electricity, water and telecommunications facilities to try to prevent them being bombed. Individuals taking this course of action should be aware of the serious risks involved. Contact either Voices in the Wilderness http://www.nonviolence.org or http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org or Dr. Al-Hashimi, President of the Iraqi Organisation for Friendship, Peace and Solidarity in Baghdad, Silm@uruklink.net Fax: + 964 1 537 2933 or + 964 1 8853298.
5. Call your foreign office to ask it you have an embassy in Baghdad. Many governments do not have any representation and thus cannot collect first hand facts and impressions on which to base an independent analysis. Neither Britain nor the US has an embassy in Baghdad, and communications have to go through the Polish embassy.
6. Ask your parliamentary committee for foreign affairs whether they have visited Iraq to see for themselves and if not, why not. Ask them to talk to Iraqi people at all levels.
7. Make it known that the 12-year sanctions regime has had the opposite effect to that intended; it has put Saddam Hussein in total control of the Iraqi people, through the rationing programme.
8. Prime ministers and presidents worldwide need to understand the strength and urgency of public opposition to this proposed attack, so that they will actively support mediation rather than allowing themselves to be bribed or bullied into supporting an attack. See George Monbiot's article 'Act now against war' http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,869807,00.html for ideas on how to get the message across, through non-violent civil disobedience. He suggests disrupting the speeches of ministers, blocking the roads down which they must travel, blockading important public buildings, or airports from which troops take off.
9. Urge your government to support the development of a new security regime for the whole region, honouring UN SC Resolution 687 requiring that the Middle East shall become a zone free of weapons of mass destruction.
-------- europe
Minister says Czechs should mull small N-plant - paper
REUTERS CZECH REPUBLIC:
February 5, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19702/newsDate/5-Feb-2003/story.htm
PRAGUE - The Czech Republic should start considering the construction of a third nuclear power plant to help overcome dwindling coal resources over the next 10 to 20 years, Industry and Trade Minister Jiri Rusnok said in remarks published yesterday.
The business daily Hospodarske Noviny quoted him as saying the Czechs could build up to three, 600 megawatt blocks at a nuclear power plant to enable the small country to avoid having to import energy.
Rusnok's comments reopen a sensitive issue in the region as the Czechs have been strongly criticised for their nuclear orientation by neighbouring Austria and Germany.
"We should prefer domestic energy resources, and I would add nuclear power into it," Rusnok said.
He added he expects a decision on how to sell the country's dominant power house CEZ in 2004 at the earliest - in line with previous government statements - while the state should keep a stake in the coal mine sector until CEZ is sold.
He said CEZ could be sold gradually in small parcels, possibly on public markets.
-------- france
White House: France in Minority, but Still an Ally
Reuters
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
By Randall Mikkelsen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29318-2003Feb5?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France's rejection of an early decision by the United Nations to take military action against Iraq puts it in a minority in Europe, a White House spokesman said on Wednesday.
Spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush intended to "lead" despite the French view, indicating the United States may be preparing to proceed without the support of French President Jacques Chirac.
"The position France takes is a position that is not shared widely, is a minority position in Europe," Fleischer said.
He was responding to Chirac's rejection on Tuesday of an early decision by the U.N. Security Council regarding military action against Iraq for failure to comply with resolutions demanding it disarm.
France, with Russia and China have veto powers on the Security Council and have argued that U.N. weapons inspectors, in Iraq for the past two months, should be given more time to find evidence of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Germany also opposes war, arguing the inspectors need more time.
Fleischer spoke as Secretary of State Colin Powell was addressing the Security Council, trying to convince members that Iraq has failed to meet its obligations and presents a clear threat.
The United States did recently won public support for its position from Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.
The European Union also on Wednesday formally demanded Iraq comply fully with U.N. inspectors or "carry the responsibility for all the consequences."
CHIRAC: DECISION 'LONG WAY OFF'
Chirac, however, said in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair that any conclusion that peaceful attempts to disarm Iraq were not working was "a long way off."
Blair, the United States' key ally and the other nation besides the United States with a council veto, pointed to the scheduled Feb. 14 report by U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq and said, "We will make our judgments then."
Bush has said time was running out and Iraq had "weeks not months" to demonstrate it has disarmed in compliance with U.N. demands.
Said Fleischer, "Ultimately we'll see what the French decide to do. They've made their position known to this point. But as the president engages in consultations, as the president presents the facts and as the president listens, the president will also lead."
He rejected comments by a key U.S. defense adviser, Richard Perle, who reportedly said France was not the U.S. ally it once was. Perle is head of the Defense Department's Policy Review Board, which has an advisory but not policy-making role in the administration.
"The president knows that France is and will always remain an ally of the United States. France is a sovereign nation. France has a right to make decisions independent of the United States and others in the world," Fleischer said.
-------- india / pakistan
February 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Kashmir-India.html
JAMMU, India (AP) -- India claimed its forces shot down an unmanned Pakistani spy plane Wednesday in troubled Kashmir, and Pakistan said the plane was an experimental remote-control flight that crashed because of engine failure.
India said the plane crashed on the Indian side of the Line of Control dividing the Himalayan province between the nuclear rivals. Each side stations hundreds of thousands of troops there, and border skirmishes are frequent.
An Indian army spokesman, Bhanwar Rathore, said anti-aircraft guns shot down the plane and that debris was found in the Mendhar sector, nearly 370 yards inside Indian-controlled Kashmir.
The area is 125 miles north of Jammu, the winter capital of the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir.
A Pakistan government statement from Islamabad said an experimental army remote-piloted vehicle crashed near the Line of Control but that search parties had not found the wreckage.
India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir since independence from Britain in 1947, and both claim the Himalayan region in its entirety.
Pakistan says Indian remote-piloted planes come into its territory 200 times a year. Pakistan claimed to have shot down an unmanned Indian spy plane in its side of Kashmir last week.
-------- iraq
Former top Iraqi scientist says Iraq has no nukes
REUTERS CANADA:
February 5, 2003
Story by Jeffrey Hodgson
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19704/newsDate/5-Feb-2003/story.htm
TORONTO - A former high-level Iraqi nuclear scientist, now living in Canada, said this week there is no way Iraq could possess nuclear weapons and the United States is exaggerating the potential threat for its own purposes.
Dr. Imad Khadduri, who joined the Iraqi nuclear program in 1968 and was part of a team trying to develop a nuclear bomb in the 1980s, said Iraq's weapons program fell into shambles after the Gulf War and could not possibly have been resurrected.
"All we had after the war from that nuclear power program were ruins, memoirs, and reports of what we had done...on the nuclear weapon side I am more than definitely sure nothing has been done," he told Reuters in an interview.
"For (U.S. President George W.) Bush to continue brandishing this image of a superhuman Iraqi nuclear power program is a great fallacious misinformation."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged this week to deliver "compelling" proof to the U.N. Security Council this week that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction from U.N. inspectors who have been combing the country for banned biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
But Khadduri, who left the country in 1998, said while he cannot speak on possible biological or chemical programs, he believes the scientific expertise and resources needed to produce nuclear weapons have been out of Iraq's reach for more than a decade.
The former nuclear scientist, who has spoken in the past to U.N. weapons inspectors, said he decided to speak out publicly after the chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix sharply criticized Iraq last month for not doing enough to comply with inspections.
Khadduri said the combined effect of the Gulf War, economic sanctions and the work of earlier U.N. inspection teams decimated the nuclear program by scattering staff and destroying its infrastructure.
"To re-initiate such a program, it is not a simple project, it's a huge project. There is no management to lead this rejuvenation. The highly qualified management team has simply hibernated," he said.
"Can we hide something as huge an enterprise as a nuclear power program? Look at the establishments deployed in North Korea...it's an impossibility."
U.S., BRITISH TRAINING
The soft-spoken scientist, who now teaches computer science at a Toronto college, said he was not speaking out under any pressure from his home country. Rather, he felt compelled to correct what he says is "misinformation" being put forward about Iraq's nuclear program as the United States amasses and troops and armor in the region.
Khadduri said he was particularly upset by a speech from Bush last year which touched on the nuclear issue.
"He seems to be exaggerating the role of the Iraqi nuclear weapon program for war purposes. I could see that since August clearly and I couldn't contain myself," he said.
Khadduri began work on the program after earning a masters degree in physics from the University of Michigan. He later completed a doctorate in nuclear reactor technology from University of Birmingham in Britain.
At first, the program focused mainly on the use of nuclear energy for power generation. Khadduri said that changed in 1981 after Israeli jets destroyed the country's Osirak nuclear reactor. Among the pilots flying those jets was Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died when the Columbia shuttle broke up over Texas on Saturday.
At that point, he said the program shifted to focus on producing nuclear weapons. At one point Saddam Hussein put his son-in-law Hussein Kamel in charge in order to improve results.
Khadduri said he worked in the mid-level management of the program and had an intimate knowledge of its operation. His work included procuring the technical information needed to build a bomb, as well as maintaining records and reports on its progress.
He said the program gleaned much of its information from research on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan. In a sense he says, the Iraqi scientists were trying to "reinvent the wheel".
But he said the program never got more than "10 or 20 percent" of the way to creating a working nuclear weapon because Iraq could never obtain enough fissionable material.
NUCLEAR KNOWLEDGE ATROPHIES
Khadduri said that after the Gulf War the program was thrown into disarray. He and many of the other key scientists were transferred to work on reconstruction of power stations and oil refineries. Many retired while others emigrated.
The knowledge of the remaining scientists has "rusted" in a country where sanctions prevent the importation of scientific journals. Khadduri said many are depressed and lack motivation as they struggle to feed their families on salaries as low as $15 a month.
He and other Iraqi scientists were briefly jailed by Hussein Kamel after the Gulf War when U.N. weapons inspectors found a cache of technical documents and the scientists were suspected of leaking the location.
Khadduri stayed involved with the Iraqi nuclear program until the late 1990s, contributing to one of the country's last major reports to U.N. inspectors. He later went to work for two U.N. agencies in Iraq, allowing him to earn the money needed to get to Canada.
The scientist said he decided to emigrate, which he did without permission, because he had always planned for his three children to be educated abroad.
----
On eve of Powell address, Blix warns Baghdad it is ''five minutes to midnight''
05-02-2003
Al Bawaba
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=241242&lang=e&dir=news
Warning Iraq that it is "five minutes to midnight," chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix on Tuesday said Baghdad urgently needed to show it was cooperating with inspectors when he visited there this weekend.
But on the eve of Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the U.N. Security Council, Blix again disputed U.S. assertions that Iraq was trying to foil inspectors under their very noses, such as moving equipment before his teams arrived.
"I am pleading for the Iraqis to enter the cooperation on substance, Blix said, adding that "we do not have the same determination on substance as we have on process."
He said there was still time for Iraq to reveal any banned weapons it may have or to give evidence about how they were destroyed. Iraq, he said, needed to "give us hope."
"We all know the situation is serious," Blix said about a U.S. military attack. "I don't think the decision is final. I don't think that the end is there, that the date has been set, but I think that we are moving closer and closer to it."
"And therefore it seems to me that the Iraqi leadership must be well aware of that," Blix said, according to Reuters. "Isn't there five minutes to midnight in your political assessment?" he asked.
The expression derives from a "Doomsday Clock" the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has kept since 1947 to gauge chances of a nuclear war.
Blix said the responses he had seen from Iraqi officials did not indicate Baghdad was prepared to hand over critical information omitted in its12 ,000-page arms declaration submitted on Dec.7 . Iraq, he said, had to assure Security Council members that "it will actively seek and present any items or programs which are proscribed or else if they are not there, to seek and present credible evidence for their absence."
For example, he suggested a commission of inquiry Iraq organized after inspectors discovered a dozen chemical warheads last month be given more power to look for any materials relating to biological weapons also.
It should look around the country and see what is hidden, he said. "Maybe they can give it more power. Maybe they can extend it to biological weapons," said Blix, in charge of accounting for Iraq's chemical, biological and ballistic arms.
On Powell's address, Blix said he assumed the secretary of state would not be indicating sites that the inspectors should visit that he had not revealed earlier.
"It is more likely to be based upon satellite imagery and upon intercepts of telephone conversations or knowledge about Iraqi procurement of technical material or chemicals," Blix said.
But in answer to questions, Blix said he had reports but no evidence of the mobile laboratories as the United States has said. "We have never found one," he said. He also disputed allegations from some U.S. officials that his teams leaked information to Iraq.
"It has been hinted in the media and observed that Iraq has sent people to sites where we are going to go in a couple of days time. There has been some intimation there might have been a leak," Blix said.
"If there were any risk of a leak, then of course we would look at it seriously and see how it could how remedied. But at the present time we do not have the impression that any such leaks have occurred," he said.
Another example he gave was on Iraq's trying to import aluminum tubes, which the United States repeatedly said were for the purpose of enriching uranium. Blix said there were still "differing views" and that the controversy no longer "had the same kind of certitude as at the beginning."
Powell, who has promised to give a "convincing case" that Iraq is flouting UN disarmament resolutions, spent Tuesday rehearsing his speech at a top New York hotel.
But pressing the US case against widespread opposition to an immediate war, the secretary of state also met China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, whose country has urged a political solution to the crisis.
Tang said ahead of the meeting that "China has always supported that the main thing is to keep the peace."
Powell was to meet with Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov before the council meeting on Wednesday morning and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw after.
U.S. President George W. Bush, also seeking to muster support among fellow veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, spoke by telephone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin, but made little apparent progress.
Putin urged continued UN weapons inspections and said their work was the "key" to determining future action on Iraq. Earlier, Russia declared that it would "carefully examine" new US evidence on Iraq's arms program while stressing it had seen nothing to justify military strikes. (Albawaba.com)
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China Calls on U.N. to Give Inspectors More Time
February 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-un-china.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - China's foreign minister told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that it should allow U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq to carry on with their work.
``We should respect the views of the twoagencies and support the continuation of their work,'' Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan told the 15-nation body after hearing Secretary of State Colin Powell present America's case that Iraq has illegal weapons programs and is concealing them from the inspectors.
The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency ``have been working very hard (and) it is their view that now they are not in a position to draw conclusions,'' he said.
In a presentation that included U.S. intelligence from spy satellites, telephone intercepts and Iraqi defectors, Powell argued that Iraq had concealed equipment from its suspected weapons programs to flout the inspectors searching the country for evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear arms banned by Security Council resolutions.
----
Iraqi Ambassador Addresses the United Nations
eMediaMillWorks
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30746-2003Feb5?language=printer
Iraqi Ambassador to the United Nations Muhammad Abdallah Ahmad Shati Duri addresses the United Nations following Powell's speech:
DURI (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): His excellency, President Saddam Hussein, reiterated in his interview granted yesterday to former British minister Tony Benn that Iraq is totally free of weapons of mass destruction, a statement written by numerous Iraqi officials for over a decade.
Mr. Powell could have spared himself, his team and the Security Council the effort by presenting these allegations directly to UNMOVIC and the IAEA, in accordance with the provisions of Paragraph 10 of Security Council resolution 1441. He could've left the inspectors to work in peace and quiet to ascertain without media pressure.
At any rate, the forthcoming visit of Messrs. Blix and ElBaradei on the 8th and 9th of this month will be a further opportunity to verify and ascertain the validity of these allegations. Ongoing inspections have showed that previous allegations and reports from the United States and Britain were false.
Mr. President, Iraq submitted an accurate, comprehensive and updated declaration of 12,000 pages, including detailed information on previous Iraq programs, as well as updated information on Iraqi industries in various fields. The inspectors began their activities intensively in Iraq on November 27th of 2002, with more than 250 of UNMOVIC and IAEA staff, including more than 100 inspectors.
As of February 4th of this year, the inspection teams had conducted 575 inspections all over Iraq, covering 321 sites. The sites indicted (ph) by President Bush in his report of September 12th, 2002, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his report of September 2002, and the U.S. CIA report of October 2002, topped the list of sites inspected by the inspection teams.
Inspectors ascertained that all the allegations made in those reports were not true. This confirms Iraq's declaration that it is free from weapons of mass destruction and that its declaration is truthful and accurate, as documented by the two technical agencies entrusted by the council to undertake that task.
Mr. President, it is well known that inspection teams took samples of water, soil, plants, air, factory remnants, as well as production remnants from vast areas in cities, villages, on highways, farms, factories and universities throughout Iraq, north, south, east and west. Analyses conducted by UNMOVIC and IAEA of these samples concluded the absence of any indication of proscribed chemical, biological or radiological agent, or indeed of any other proscribed activities in any part of Iraq.
Mr. Blix confirmed in his statement to the New York Times on January 30th of this year that the inspectors did not ascertain any of the scenarios alleged by Mr. Colin Powell, that Iraqi officials were moving proscribed material inside or outside Iraq aiming at concealment. He confirmed that he did not find enough reasons to believe that Iraq was sending its scientists outside Iraq to prevent them from being interviewed and that he had no reason to believe that President Bush was correct in his State of the Union address in saying that Iraqi intelligence agents were posing as scientists for the interviews.
We would like to reiterate that Iraq encourages its scientists to submit to interviews requested by UNMOVIC and IAEA.
As for the mobile laboratories alleged by Secretary Powell this morning, Dr. Blix just yesterday stated that UNMOVIC to date had found no proof of the presence of such mobile units.
As regards the U-2 overflights and the controversy that has been raised around them, Iraq does not object to these overflight to conduct inspection activities. Rather, the obstruction is that U.S. and British warplanes impose illegal no-fly zones contrary to Security Council resolutions. It is enough for these warplanes to suspend their flights during U-2 overflights to overcome this obstacle, and Iraq cannot be responsible for these warplanes.
The allegations that trucks leave sites prior to the arrival of inspection teams is a false accusation. Inspections occur suddenly and instantaneously, without prior notification to the Iraqi side. Furthermore, UNMOVIC and IAEA have their own sources for satellite imagery, and they use helicopters as well for surveillance and inspection activities. Therefore, we believe those two agencies are very well informed of what takes place on the ground in Iraq.
It is important for me to remind that programs for weapons of mass destructions are not like an aspirin pill, easily hidden. They require huge production facilities, starting from research and development facilities, to factories, to weaponization, then deployment. Such things cannot be concealed. Inspectors have crisscrossed all of Iraq and have found none of that.
As regards sound recordings, suffice it to say that scientific and technical progress has reached such a level that would allow the fabrication of such allegations and would allow for them to be offered in the way Mr. Powell has presented. It would allow any person, at any time and anywhere, to be recorded.
As for the supposed relationship between Iraq and the Al Qaida organization, I would note what his excellency, President Saddam Hussein, said. I quote: ``If we had a relationship with Al Qaida and we believe in that relationship, we would not be ashamed to admit it. We have no relationship with Al Qaida,'' end of quote.
Mr. President, I would like to refer to a statement by a U.S. official in the New York Times lately, three days ago specifically, and I quote:
``Analysts at the CIA have complained that administration officials have exaggerated reports on WMD in Iraq and particularly its presumed relation with Al Qaida in order to bolster their case for war.''
I would add that Mr. Jack Straw has set aside intelligence report from his own government asserting that there is no relationship between Iraq and Al Qaida.
Mr. Powell's assertion that Iraq used chemical weapons against its own people in particular surprised me. When a CIA official unmasked the truth on the 31st of last month, just a few days ago, in the New York Times, stating that the U.S. administration has known since 1988 that Iraq did not use chemical weapons against its own people, for a simple reason: it does not have the very (inaudible) weapon used in the Halabja incident.
Mr. President, in conclusion, I should like to say that the clear goal behind holding this meeting, behind the presentation of the secretary of state of the United States of false allegations before this council today, is to sell the idea of war and aggression against my country, Iraq, without any legal, moral or political justification. It is an attempt to convince American public opinion first and world public opinion in general to launch a hostile war against Iraq.
In return, Iraq offers security and peace and reiterates on this occasion, before the members of the Security Council, its commitment to continue proactive cooperation with the inspector teams so as to allow them to finish their tasks as soon as possible and verify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction in order to lift the unjust sanctions imposed upon it and ensure respect of its national security and ensure regional security by disarming weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, including the huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in Israel, in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 14 of Security Council resolution 687 of 1991.
Thank you, Mr. President.
-------- korea
N. Korea Ups Stakes in Crisis as Reactor Restarted
Reuters
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
By Paul Eckert
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29713-2003Feb5?language=printer
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea said Wednesday it had restarted and put on a "normal footing" the atomic facilities at the center of its suspected nuclear weapons program.
The move raises the stakes in a crisis Pyongyang said the United States had triggered by threatening the isolated communist state.
"The DPRK (North Korea) is now putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing after their restart," said a statement by the North Korean Foreign Ministry carried on the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
North Korea's latest defiant move came as international attention was focused Secretary of State Colin Powell address to the U.N. Security Council designed to persuade the council and world opinion that U.N. weapons inspectors cannot disarm Iraq and that war may be the only resort.
The late-night statement was issued five days after U.S. officials said American satellite surveillance had shown North Korea was moving fuel rods around the reactor complex at Yongbyon, including possibly some of the 8,000 spent fuel rods that experts consider a key step in building bombs.
But the U.S. officials added that there was no sign that crucial reprocessing of those spent rods had begun -- a step that would enable North Korea to begin bomb-making in weeks, adding to the arsenal of two bombs the West suspects it has already built.
North Korea's statement did not mention the fuel rods, and repeated North Korea's assertion that it had ended the freeze on its nuclear reactor to produce electricity.
"The DPRK government has already solemnly declared that its nuclear activity would be limited to the peaceful purposes including the production of electricity at the present stage," KCNA quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
MILITARY RESEARCH REACTOR
Impoverished North Korea suffers from crippling power shortages, but nuclear experts reject Pyongyang's electricity argument because the reactor at Yongbyon is a small military research reactor with insignificant power generation capacity.
North Korea rejected the International Atomic Energy Agency's plans to refer the nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council next week because it had already quit the IAEA, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the spokesman said.
"The DPRK does not care about whether the UN Security Council discusses the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula or not," the ministry spokesman said.
"But if it wants to handle this issue, it should fairly call into question the responsibility of the U.S. which is chiefly to blame for the outbreak of this issue and for the strained situation."
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in Vienna Monday that the agency's board of governors would meet on February 12 and was likely to hand the nuclear crisis over to the U.N. Security Council. He said the council was not expected to recommend sanctions or military action against North Korea.
ElBaradei was in New York Wednesday for Powell's presentation and an IAEA spokeswoman in Vienna had no immediate comment on North Korea's announcement.
The statement said the United States had triggered the nuclear crisis with President Bush's speech last year branding North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil" and with American plans calling for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against rogue states.
"If the U.N. Security Council responsible for the issue of world peace and security does not call the U.S. wrong-Korean policy to task, this organization will turn out to be partial and the DPRK will, accordingly, not recognize it," it said.
NORTH SEES "WAR HYSTERIA"
The crisis erupted last October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to enriching uranium in violation of a 1994 accord, under which it froze its nuclear program in exchange for two energy-generating reactors and free fuel.
Since December, North Korea has expelled IAEA inspectors, withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted a mothballed nuclear complex capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium and threatened to resume missile tests.
North Korea's state media pounced on comments by U.S. officials that Washington had put ships and planes on standby for a precautionary deployment to the western Pacific to deter any aggression or adventurism by Pyongyang during a war in Iraq.
"The war hysteria of the U.S. imperialists, keen to isolate and stifle the DPRK (North Korea) under the pretext of the nuclear issue, has reached a more reckless phase," the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
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Kim Jong Il at the OK Corral
by Pat Buchanan
February 5, 2003
Eastern Creators Syndicate, Inc.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30884
Is Kim Jong Il seeking a showdown with the U.S. president who told the world he personally "loathes" the North Korean ruler?
Does Kim intend to force Bush into a humiliating retreat from the vaunted Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive strike," as Khrushchev was forced to publicly retreat in the Cuban missile crisis?
What other explanation is there for Kim's brinkmanship?
In recent weeks, North Korea removed U.N. cameras and broke the seals on its nuclear reactor, ordered U.N. inspectors out of the country, and renounced the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Now, satellite photos reveal that North Korean trucks may be transferring spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor to a nearby reprocessing plant. There, the plutonium can be extracted for nuclear weapons.
Within "weeks and months," says Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, North Korea may be producing atom bombs. Nor has Kim tried to hide what he is up to.
He has thrown up an in-your-face challenge to the president who, in last year's State of the Union, declared to the world, "The United States ... will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
Remarkable. Iraq denies it has weapons of mass destruction. U.N. inspectors cannot find any. Yet, Iraq faces invasion. But North Korea brazenly fires up a plant to produce fuel for atom bombs, as President Bush offers repeated assurances he has no plans to attack.
This cannot continue. For if North Korea has decided to build a nuclear arsenal, not only is the Bush Doctrine dead on the Korean peninsula, the balance of power in Asia is imperiled. For if America does nothing, while Pyongyang goes nuclear - despite the president's vow he would not permit it - U.S. credibility, on which all our Asian alliances hinge, will be gravely eroded.
George Bush's America will have been faced down by a tyrant.
As of today, no one knows whether North Korea has perfected an atom bomb it can deliver on target. Kim has never conducted a test. But if North Korea turns out enough fissile material for half a dozen bombs, and Bush does nothing, the option of a U.S. pre-emptive strike vanishes. Put bluntly: If that Yongbyon reprocessing plant is not shut down by Kim, or destroyed by U.S. air power by April, U.S. credibility will be shredded in Asia.
But what is Kim after? Does he want war with America?
This seems improbable. Though North Korea - with its 11,000 artillery tubes on the DMZ, its hundreds of missiles and a handful of atomic bombs - could kills scores of thousands of Koreans, Japanese and Americans, Kim cannot win a second Korean War. Yet, such a war would bring the destruction of his country and the end of his regime.
The more likely answer is that Kim seeks several goals, all of them attainable. The first is security from attack. The second is to force Bush to accord North Korea recognition and respect. The third is a renewal of fuel and aid to keep North Korea alive.
Kim is not a madman. He has seen how, when Red China went nuclear, U.S. threats ceased, Nixon came to pay his respects and Beijing was handed China's seat in the U.N., while Taiwan was expelled. America then abrogated its defense treaty with Taipei and shifted its embassy to Beijing. U.S. investment poured into China, and America escorted Beijing into the World Trade Organization and now permits China to run a trade surplus at our expense of $100 billion a year.
Even George Bush kowtows. When a Chinese MIG crashed into a U.S. surveillance plane in international airspace, Bush and Secretary Colin Powell repeatedly expressed sorrow for the death of the crazed Chinese pilot, and paid to have our plane crated up and shipped home. Kim wants the kind of deal the Chinese got.
Now, with the world watching, he is demanding that the Americans negotiate directly with him, as he moves closer to producing weapons-grade plutonium.
President Bush has very few options. He can bomb the Yongbyon reprocessing plant and risk war. He can seek U.N. sanctions, which Kim says would be a declaration of war. He can refuse to negotiate, as Kim defies his ultimatums and acquires enough fissile material for a dozen bombs.
The president and Powell have apparently decided that the way to win this showdown is to smash Iraq to show Kim what happens to regimes that defy the United States. But even before Baghdad is occupied, Kim may have enough plutonium for half a dozen atom bombs. What do we do if he then says, "OK, come and get 'em."
By the way, who was it that put all that bellicose Axis-of-Evil rhetoric in the president's speeches in the first place?
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Koreas open first cross-border road
By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030205-044133-7448r.htm
SEOUL, South Korea, Feb. 5 (UPI) -- North and South Korea on Wednesday opened a road across their heavily militarized border for an inter-Korean tour project to the North's mountain resort, the first such crossing point since the Korean War.
Despite mounting tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear programs, a South Korean delegation went traveled on the newly built road to test a route across the Cold War frontier to Mount Kumgang.
Some 100 South Koreans, mostly tourism officials, crossed the border on 10 buses. The test trip was led by Chung Mong-hun, a business tycoon who has led business ties between South Korea's Hyundai Group and North Korea.
Hyundai expects overland tourist trips to begin late next week.
"With the opening of the overland route, I expect that more firms can participate in the joint economic projects with the North. I also expect the public supports for the South-North tourism project," Chung said.
The cross-border route is significant as the two Koreas are in a state of technical war since their armed conflict ended in an armistice in 1953. Their border is the world's last Cold War frontier with nearly 2 million troops on both sides.
The tour project has been praised as the symbol for reconciliation between the Cold War rivals initiated by South Korean President Kim Dae-jung who has pushed for his "sunshine policy" of economic cooperation with the North.
"I am happy to see the opening of a road between South and North Korea after many twists and turns. I hope the road will accelerate inter-Korean exchanges and cooperation," presidential spokeswoman Park Sun-sook quoted Kim as saying.
Hyundai launched the cruise tour in 1998 to the North's mountain resort on the east coast. But the project has subsequently run into trouble because of a lack of tourists and Hyundai's financial woes.
High cruise tour costs and long travel time on the ship discouraged South Korean tourists. Hyundai expects overland travel will cut costs and travel time by more than half, making the trip more attractive.
"We expect a steep surge in the demand for cheaper overland sightseeing," said Kim Yoon-kyu, president of Hyundai Asan, which handles North Korean business projects for Hyundai.
The mountain resort is the only place in North Korea where South Koreans are allowed to freely mingle.
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U.S. promises to hold talks with N. Korea
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030205-147680.htm
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage yesterday promised that the United States would hold direct talks with North Korea to try to resolve the standoff over that nation's burgeoning missile and nuclear programs.
"We're going to have to have direct talks with the North Koreans, there's no question about it," Mr. Armitage, the No. 2 man at the State Department, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said the United States is willing to talk "but not negotiate" with Pyongyang.
Senators, meanwhile, told the administration not to become so bogged down in addressing Iraq that they fail to attend to the situation in North Korea.
North Korea yesterday accused the United States of pursuing a "policy of evil," after reports that the United States had put military aircraft and ships on alert that they might be deployed near the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper dismissed U.S. offers of dialogue on the impasse as "a camouflaged peace hoax to cover up its nuclear blackmail" against North Korea.
North Korean state radio said the reported reinforcement proposals showed that the United States was "plotting to boost forces in Japan and South Korea as one link in its scheme to stifle our country through military means."
Mr. Armitage told lawmakers the military alert was a "contingency" to show North Korea that the United States was not preoccupied with Iraq.
"That's a prudent military planning procedure. And that as far as I know, nothing has moved forward. It's an alert to be available to move forward," he said.
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters the alert would allow U.S. forces to be moved and "arranged so that the world understands that in the event someone does think that it's an opportune time because the United States is focused on Iraq, that our force deployments and arrangements ought to lead to the proper conclusion that we are not single-minded, and that that deterrent effect is a healthy thing."
North Korea withdrew from a 1994 agreement that froze its nuclear-arms development after the United States in October presented evidence that it was violating the accord. Since then, it has expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
U.S. officials say spy satellites have detected what could be the movement of 8,000 spent fuel rods at a nuclear facility. Mr. Armitage said yesterday that the rods, if reprocessed, could produce fissile material for four to six nuclear weapons.
North Korea's government in Pyongyang is insisting on a nonaggression treaty to defuse the situation. Mr. Armitage said North Korea had asked only for a pledge of nonaggression, which Mr. Powell was ready to give.
Mr. Armitage predicted that the Senate would not ratify a nonaggression treaty.
"It is our estimation today that there's zero chance of that being possible," he said.
But Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said sentiments could change.
"If the president of the United States said he wanted it, I bet you a million dollars it would change. But that's up to him," he said.
Also yesterday, Chyung Dai-chul, an adviser to South Korea's President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, met with Mr. Powell to tell him that South Korea was in no hurry to see a U.N. debate on North Korea's nuclear programs.
"We also expressed our hope that the United States ... plays a more proactive role in engaging in dialogue with North Korea, but also with an international setting, with a multilateral approach," Mr. Chyung said.
Much of the committee hearing was spent pondering at what point the situation on the Korean Peninsula would qualify as a "crisis."
"The reason I wouldn't label it a crisis - I think we have got some time to work this," Mr. Armitage said. "We've been working it for several months, not 12 years, like in Iraq. It could develop into a crisis, but it's not there now."
He also noted a difference between North Korea's and Iraq's motives for acquiring weapons.
"We know, we think, what [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il wants, at least the experience of our predecessors in the previous administration indicates that he wants some economic benefits and things of that nature, in exchange for these programs," he said.
"It's quite a different situation in Iraq, where we feel that what [Saddam Hussein] wants to do, as I've said, is intimidate, dominate and attack."
He told senators that the administration wanted to make sure that in pursuing direct talks "this thing doesn't rub off entirely on us to come up with a solution" and that officials were waiting for Mr. Roh to form a new government in South Korea.
"It's not going to be, I think, before we get a steady government in the Republic of Korea," Mr. Armitage said. "But there's no question - I spoke to the secretary about it this morning - we're absolutely going to have to talk with them bilaterally. We acknowledge that."
Sen. George Allen, Virginia Republican, told Mr. Armitage he wanted to make sure the administration wouldn't repeat the Clinton administration's 1994 agreement, which he said failed to ban North Korea from selling its ballistic missile technology.
Mr. Armitage said missiles will be part of any future agreement.
"I can assure you that we're not going to let that slip again," he said.
•This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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North Korea Restarts Nuclear Plant
February 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-Nuclear-Facility.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea said Wednesday that it had reactivated its nuclear facilities and is going ahead with their operation ``on a normal footing.''
The communist country will use the facilities to generate electricity ``at the present stage,'' an unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said. His remarks were carried by the official KCNA news agency.
The North's main nuclear facility at Yongbyon has been dormant since a 1994 deal with the United States, but the North announced in December that it would revive it, amid a dispute with Washington. The Yongbyon facility was the center of a suspected nuclear weapons program in the 1990s.
``The DPRK is now putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing after their restart,'' the spokesman said. DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
``The DPRK government has already solemnly declared that its nuclear activity would be limited to the peaceful purposes including the production of electricity at the present stage,'' the spokesman said.
In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said he was unaware of the reports. U.S. officials and nuclear experts say the amount of electricity that North Korea can produce at its nuclear facilities is negligible.
The North Korean spokesman criticized U.S. efforts to bring the nuclear dispute to the U.N. Security Council, saying the standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions is between the North and the United States only.
``If the U.N. Security Council responsible for the issue of world peace and security does not call the U.S. wrong Korean policy to task, this organization will turn out to be partial and the DPRK will, accordingly, not recognize it,'' the spokesman said.
North Korea, which often accuses Washington of plotting to invade it, said in December that it would reactivate a 5-megawatt Soviet-designed reactor that was frozen under a 1994 energy deal with Washington.
The facilities at Yongbyon include a building that stores 8,000 spent fuel rods and a reprocessing laboratory, where the North Koreans can extract weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods.
Last week, U.S. officials said spy satellites have detected covered trucks apparently taking on cargo at the storage facilty where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored. If the rods are processed, enough plutonium can be extracted to make several nuclear weapons, U.S. officials have said.
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NUCLEAR STANDOFF
U.S. Official Says North Korea Could Sell Bomb Material
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/international/asia/05KORE.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 - A senior Bush administration official warned today that North Korea, if allowed to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods, could sell some of that fissile material to terrorists and other enemies of the United States who are seeking to build nuclear weapons.
The official, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, told senators on Capitol Hill that North Korea's recent moves toward restarting a plutonium reprocessing facility could enable the country to build four to six new nuclear weapons within months.
But Mr. Armitage also predicted that North Korea, which is struggling to feed its people, would have sufficient bomb-grade plutonium to sell or trade to "a nonstate actor or a rogue state."
"I believe that the arms race in North Korea pales next to the possibility of proliferation, which is our major fear, from North Korea - that she would pass on fissile material and other nuclear technology to either transnational actors or to rogue states," Mr. Armitage said.
Mr. Armitage also confirmed to the senators that Pakistan had helped North Korea develop its nuclear weapons program, saying technology transfers between the two countries had gone "both ways."
He declined to provide details, however, saying Pakistan had assured the administration that such transfers had ended.
Administration officials have in the past been willing to acknowledge only in private that North Korea provided missile technology to Pakistan in exchange for assistance in enriching uranium for weapons.
Mr. Armitage's warnings about the threat of North Korean proliferation came just five days after American officials reported that spy satellites over North Korea had detected what appeared to be trucks moving some of the country's stockpile of 8,000 spent fuel rods out of storage at the Yongbyon nuclear complex.
Intelligence officials have concluded that North Korea, which is thought to have one or two nuclear weapons now, could begin producing bomb-grade plutonium from the rods by late March.
The possibility that North Korea could soon begin selling the raw materials for nuclear weapons, while Iraq's ability to produce those materials remains in doubt, prompted questions from both Republican and Democratic senators about why the Bush administration felt the urgent need to use military force to disarm Iraq.
Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, asked whether North Korea's potential capacity to sell raw materials for nuclear bombs to terrorists made it "far more dangerous" than Iraq.
Mr. Armitage replied that "it's quite a different situation in Iraq," saying that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, wanted to "intimidate, dominate and attack" his neighbors.
"We're not quite sure that's the motivation of Kim Jong Il," the North Korean leader, Mr. Armitage said. "I think he wants to use it for economic benefits - sell, barter, whatever."
The Bush administration has said that it is committed to a diplomatic solution to the North Korean crisis and has no plans to attack North Korea.
But on Monday, the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, put 24 long-range bombers on alert for possible deployment to the Pacific. The move appeared to be intended to deter aggressive moves by North Korea in the event American goes to war in Iraq, as well as to give President Bush military options if diplomacy fails.
The commander of United States forces in South Korea also announced today that 2,900 American soldiers might be held past the end of their tours here to ensure that all units remained "at 100 percent" strength.
But the commander, Gen. Leon LaPorte, denied that the move was a device for adding to the 37,000 troops already in Korea. He promised to consult with South Korean military officials if more troops were needed "to ensure deterrence and preserve the peace of the Korean peninsula."
North Korea condemned the Pentagon's moves today, accusing the United States of plotting "to dominate the Korean peninsula." But the harsh oratory was not accompanied by any sign of movement or buildup of North Korean units above the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
Still, North Korea's party newspaper heightened concerns by advising the country's 1.8 million reservists to rally around the North Korean leader. North Korea has approximately 1.1 million full-time troops.
While the Pentagon's moves seemed to leave open the option of military action against North Korea, Mr. Armitage repeatedly emphasized today that the administration was prepared to hold direct, one-on-one talks with North Korea, provided its neighbors - Russia, China, South Korea and Japan - assisted in resolving the crisis.
"We're going to have to have direct talks with the North Koreans, there's no question about it," Mr. Armitage said.
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Military Option Colors N. Korea Crisis
February 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Military-Option.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- During the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1994, U.S. warships were on alert off the coast and American planes prepared to bomb its worrisome nuclear reactor, according to the South Korean president at the time.
The U.S. attack never came, but it could have provoked a fierce counterattack by North Korea, analysts say. Now another U.S. buildup may be on the way and fears of a looming confrontation are on the rise.
Though the United States says it wants a peaceful solution to the latest crisis, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering the dispatch of an aircraft carrier off the Korean Peninsula and adding bombers in Guam, according to U.S. officials.
Washington says the deployments are aimed at discouraging North Korea from making any aggressive moves while the United States is busy with a possible war against Iraq. U.S. officials are trying to get the U.N. Security Council to take up the dispute.
The United States says North Korea has restarted its nuclear weapons program, and it fears that a recently revived nuclear reactor at Yongbyon could be used to produce plutonium for atomic bombs.
U.S. warplanes could bomb flat the Yongbyon complex in a single day. But it's what could happen afterward that worries South Korea and Washington.
``Even if the U.S. uses a pinpoint strike, North Korea would retaliate on a much more massive scale,'' said Paik Hak-soon, of the Seoul-based Sejong Institute think tank. ``It is a very, very dangerous option with a high probably of another Korean War.''
Immediate North Korean retaliation is taken for granted, with artillery rounds pounding the Southern capital of Seoul. Radioactive leaks from the bombed-out reactor could cause poison a wide area.
Casualties in a North Korean counterattack could reach into the hundreds of thousands.
``There are numerous reasons why a strike would be counterproductive, even disastrous,'' said Yu Suk-ryul, a North Korea expert with the Seoul-based, government-funded Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog's board meets next week to review the standoff, which began in October. The meeting raises the likelihood that it will refer the dispute to the U.N. Security Council.
The crisis in the 1990s, by contrast, lasted more than a year and never made it to the Security Council.
That dispute arose over similar concerns about North Korea's nuclear ambitions and the country's refusal to admit U.N. inspectors as required by an international treaty. Former President Jimmy Carter eventually traveled to Pyongyang and paved the way for an accord under which North Korea pledged to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for U.S. aid.
A strike against the North could sour relations with China and Russia, big regional players that do not want Washington flexing its muscle so close to their borders. And it could be an environmental disaster, Yu said, if airborne radioactivity from the blast contaminates parts of the Korean Peninsula -- an outcome more likely if the reactor were working at the time it is bombed.
North Korea could also have nuclear facilities scattered around the country, even underground. In that case, a strike against Yongbyon would be only a partial solution.
More ominous, even a small bombing run has the potential to trigger a peninsula-wide war with nuclear overtones. The United States says North Korea already has one or two atomic bombs. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could be tempted to use them in case of a U.S. attack, although there are doubts about the North's ability to deliver them on missiles.
Even if atomic weapons aren't used, Seoul's 10.4 million people live within easy artillery range of the North Korean border. Within the first hours of an attack, an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 artillery rounds could rain down on Seoul, according to Stephen Oertwig, spokesman for U.S. Forces Korea.
Recalling U.S. plans during the first crisis in 1994, former South Korean President Kim Young-sam said he was told by then-President Bill Clinton in a telephone call that the United States was about to launch an immediate bombardment on the Yongbyon nuclear complex in North Korea. Clinton also said the United States was moving one aircraft carrier and seven other warships up the country's east coast, Kim said.
``Clinton was very determined about it, but I argued to him that such an attack should never take place,'' Kim said.
Analysts say U.S. and South Korean forces would eventually win a war, but at a heavy price. South Korea's economy would be shattered, and tens of thousands of people would likely be killed or injured -- including many of the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in the South.
Would North Korea risk a bloodbath for the sake of one bombed nuclear plant?
``You have to ask Kim Jong Il that one,'' Oertwig said.
--------
U.S. Expresses Concern at North Korean Nuclear Move
February 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday called North Korea's announcement that it had restarted nuclear facilities dangerous and said U.S. forces were ready to confront the ``terrorist regime'' if necessary.
``The situation in North Korea is a dangerous one,'' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. He said U.S. forces could responded if needed despite preparations for possible war with Iraq.
``Our forces are arranged around the world, not in a threatening way, but in a way that demonstrates that we already do in fact have the capability of dealing in more than one theater at a time,'' Rumsfeld said.
In comments to reporters later, Rumsfeld said North Korea had ``been involved in things that are harmful to other countries.''
``It's a regime that is a terrorist regime ... And the fact that they have announced that they are going to breach three or four agreements ... is a worrisome thing,'' he said.
North Korea said on Wednesday it had restarted facilities at the center of its suspected nuclear weapons program, raising the stakes in a crisis it said Washington had triggered by threatening the isolated communist state.
North Korea's announcement came as Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council to persuade the world that U.N. weapons inspectors cannot disarm Iraq and war may be the only resort.
U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said North Korea was ``very far along'' in its nuclear program, limiting U.S. options.
``This is a very strong signal to those who wonder ... why we shouldn't wait on Iraq, to say: Don't wait while problems continue to gather. It does begin to limit your options,'' Rice said on ABC's Nightline program. She said a diplomatic solution remained possible.
U.S. Senate Republicans said North Korea appeared to be taking advantage of the U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and urged fellow Republican President Bush's administration to pay more attention. Two called for sanctions.
The White House called on North Korea to close the facilities. ``All they're doing by threatening to take such steps is to further isolate themselves from the rest of the international community. They know what needs to be done. They need to dismantle their nuclear weapons,'' a senior White House official said.
Rumsfeld said North Korea was developing material that ``in a relatively short period of time'' would let it make six to eight more nuclear weapons in addition to the one or two it probably had. Those could be sold, with ballistic missiles, to ``terrorist states or terrorist organizations,'' he said.
TWO WARS AT A TIME
``We have to be sensitive to the extent that the world thinks that the United States is focused on the problems in Iraq, it is conceivable someone could make a mistake and believe that that's an opportunity for them to ... take an action that they otherwise would have avoided,'' Rumsfeld said.
The United States has said it is willing to talk to North Korea about how it will dismantle its nuclear programs, which include a uranium enrichment plant and a nuclear complex capable of producing plutonium.
But it has also tried to play down the gravity of the dispute and not pressed for immediate Security Council action.
Sen. Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters the Bush administration should talk to Pyongyang now.
``It would not be prudent to wait until the new South Korean president is inaugurated (on Feb. 25), nor do the South Koreans think it would be prudent,'' he said.
An envoy from South Korean President-elect Roh Moo-hyun told the United States on Tuesday that it should work harder for dialogue with North Korea.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who sought the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2000, criticized the Bush administration's approach to North Korea.
``I would immediately ask for sanctions from the United Nations because they are in direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and I would start urging our allies and friends in the region to impose economic sanctions,'' he told reporters.
-------- missile defense
U.S. Gets OK to Use British Radar
February 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Missile-Defense.html
LONDON (AP) -- Britain gave the United States permission Wednesday to incorporate an air force base in northern England into its proposed missile defense network.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon, in a written statement to the House of Commons, said he was ``satisfied that we have been able to take fully into account the views of all interested parties in coming to a decision.''
``I am therefore today replying to the United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, conveying the government's agreement to the U.S. request,'' Hoon said.
The cross-party committee on defense last week said residents living near the Royal Air Force's Fylingdales base were concerned about radiation emissions and other possible health hazards, but have received little information.
Prime Minister Tony Blair had responded that residents had nothing to fear.
``We have played our part in NATO and in the trans-Atlantic alliance for many, many years. Fylingdales has been part of that and, should we engage with the defensive system of the Americans, then I think it will continue to play an important role,'' Blair said.
Fylingdales has operated since 1963 as a ballistic missile early-warning radar system, which together with other radars in the United States and Greenland provides tactical warning and assessment of a missile attack against Britain, North America or western Europe.
Hoon said the British air force would continue to staff the radar, which would keep its early-warning system role, and Britain would have full access to data from the radar.
He said Britain had not committed itself to increased participation in the U.S. missile defense program by agreeing to the United States' request. But he said the decision ``keeps open the prospect of acquiring missile defence capabilities for the U.K., should we desire such protection at some point in the future.''
On the Net:
Ministry of Defense, http://www.mod.gov.uk
Report, http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmsle ct/cmdfence/290-i/29002.htm
-------- space
NASA To Go Nuclear; Spaceflight Initiative Approved
By Leonard David Senior Space Writer
05 February 2002
Space.com
http://space.com/news/nasa_nuclear_020205.html
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO - For the first time in a decade, NASA has been given the go-ahead to say the "N" word - nuclear power for space.
The White House-backed NASA budget for fiscal year 2003 includes a major nuclear systems initiative that sets the stage for faster trip times by spacecraft exploring the solar system and powering human outposts on distant worlds.
That announcement was heralded here at the Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF-2002) meeting, an amalgam of conferences that includes the 19th symposium on space nuclear power and propulsion.
Battling distance and time
In Monday's budget briefing in Washington, D.C., new NASA chief, Sean O'Keefe, declared that the space agency was ready to battle a "distance and time dilemma" that now inhibits the organization's exploration and discovery agenda for the 21st century.
To wrestle with, defeat and conquer that distance and time paradox, O'Keefe said NASA seeks a nuclear power and propulsion capability. Doing so, however, comes at a price - the deferral of the Pluto Kuiper-Belt flyby and Europa orbiter missions, both in NASA's Outer Planets program that is now cancelled. In its place is a new effort that is tagged the "New Frontiers Program."
These spacecraft missions would ostensibly benefit by NASA's new space nuclear power initiative. For instance, a future Pluto probe -- propelled by nuclear electric engines, would permit orbiting that distant planet instead of a quick flyby and relaying data in higher fidelity, O'Keefe said.
Steam engines for space
The space agency's nuclear systems initiative consists of two parts, both of which involve partnering with the Department of Energy, said Edward Weiler, NASA's head of space science during the budget briefing.
On the development side, work on radioisotope generators (RTGs) is to be started up again. "The civilian inventory of RTGs currently is one," Weiler said.
Money is also to be spent on a new technology, specifically on a Stirling Radioisotope Generator (SRG). This device, among its duties, could power robotic Mars rovers, especially for missions of long duration. SRGs are being evaluated as a high-efficiency power source alternative to replace RTGs, like those used on the Viking, Galileo, Cassini, and Voyager spacecraft missions.
Weiler said the nuclear initiative also is gearing up to conduct research in nuclear power and propulsion, such as nuclear fission reactors coupled to ion drive engines.
"For 40 years, NASA has been doing planetary science in the same way. That is, you accelerate for 5 to 10 or 15-minutes and then you stop...and you coast, and you coast, and you coast. Occasionally, Jupiter will be just in the right spot and you can get a little slingshot effect...but it's not always there. That's not the way to do exploration. That's exploring the west by going in covered wagons," Weiler said.
Rather, Weiler added, the space nuclear initiative allows NASA to start development of the steam engine, "so we can get the railroads going out there into the solar system."
"We're now in an environment where we can talk about nuclear initiatives. This is the right thing to do for science and exploration," Weiler said.
Welcomed news
NASA's space nuclear agenda was strongly applauded here at the STAIF-2002 meeting. Experts from such agencies as the Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory, including numbers of "old-timers" in power and propulsion, expressed satisfaction that the space agency is openly embracing space nuclear power again.
This kind of announcement is welcomed news, said Gerald Kulcinski, associate dean for research at the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Kulcinski told SPACE.com that there is an increasing enrollment of students interested in the nuclear industry over the last few years. "We see that accelerating in the next few years, mainly in the area of power production in the United States. This kind of announcement will add to that because there is a particular resonance between space and nuclear that makes students want to go into areas they see as having a future," he said.
"The two fields reinforce each other in a sense. People who are trained for terrestrial fission plants can also apply themselves in space fission," and vice versa, he said.
Piece of the action
Kulcinski said that there is danger in the next 5 to 10 years of losing the corporate history of the past nuclear program in the United States. "If we don't start something soon, you won't have anybody to teach the younger folks. Then the federal government will have to reinvent a lot of this technology all over again," he said.
Roger Lenard, a staff member of Sandia National Laboratory, said that NASA's reactivation of space nuclear power and propulsion is not surprising.
"You come up with a nuclear answer because we continue to discover that operating in space requires power and good propulsion," Lenard said.
"It turns out that nuclear has a piece of that action...at least in the near-term. In the longer-term, there may be breakthrough technologies. And if they come about, we want to exploit them. Right now, we know how to do nuclear fission. It will give us a factor of 10 to 20 improvement in specific impulse. It will give us a factor of a couple million improvement in total energy. We ought to take advantage of that," Lenard said.
Lenard stressed that tapping nuclear fission for space propulsion will mean doing the best job possible with what is technologically available. "You'll get a system that will perform quite well, but it won't be the highest performance system you can have...but it's one you can build in, say, six years. Even though it may not be the highest performance system, it'll beat anything else we've got out there," he said.
In moving out on space nuclear propulsion concepts, Lenard said that dealing with safety and environmental issues is an early, must-do step that helps guide any development program in this arena.
Stay the course
Gary Bennett, an aerospace consultant with a long history in space nuclear power, including NASA work, said the space agency must be prepared "to stay the course" on developing a space reactor program.
Bennett said that NASA must put together not only a technical team but a political team as well. These teams need to work over at least a decade of time and span various administrations.
"I think people need to understand it is big bucks and a long-term commitment," Bennett said. "We need to be realistic going into this. There is no fast, cheap way of doing a space reactor. People need to realize that these things take time to do and they cost money...but they are well worth doing," he said.
Military takeover of space
Outside the STAIF meeting in downtown Albuquerque, protesters of space nuclear power stood on street corners.
Sponsored by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, based in Gainesville, Florida, signs called out: "Star Wars is a bad seed"; "No weapons in space"; "No nuclear rocket"; and "End aerospace corporation welfare".
NASA's O'Keefe is seeking a closer relationship between the space agency and the military, said Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network group.
"The military's taken over the space program and the distinction between civilian and military is being rubbed out," Gagnon told SPACE.com. "The real debate has to be about what kind of seed we're now poised to carry into the heavens. What we see coming out of NASA, the military, and the Department of Energy is this bad seed of war, greed, and environmental degradation," he said.
Gagnon said that space-based laser weapons would be powered by nuclear reactors, orbiting hardware viewed as an element of national missile defense.
"We know that the nuclear rocket that's being developed is going to have military implications. As long as NASA stays in bed with the militarists and the people promoting nuclear power in space, the public support for NASA, which already has its problems, is going to continue to drop. So the people of the world are going to turn on the space program," Gagnon said.
----
Nukes-in-Space in Columbia's Wake
By Karl Grossman,
February 5, 2003
From: "Global Network" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003
(Anybody--including media and organizations--seeking to use or reprint this article, full or in condensed or edited versions, can do so freely. -- Karl Grossman)
The Columbia shuttle disaster came just as NASA was pushing to greatly broaden its program to use nuclear power in space. This includes the development of a nuclear-propelled rocket--a project which NASA spent billions of dollars on in the 1950s and 60s until it was cancelled because of concern of such a nuclear rocket crashing to earth.
Just think if it was a nuclear rocket that came falling down in pieces over Texas or elsewhere on Earth.
The new space nuclear power scheme, called Project Prometheus, is a broadening of the NASA Nuclear Systems Initiative--on which $1 billion is to be spent over five years--that began last year.
However, as the Los Angeles Times reported last month, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is expecting a "very significant" increase in that funding as the Nuclear Systems Initiative becomes Project Prometheus.
In addition to a nuclear-powered rocket, NASA is planning additional plutonium-energized space probe and to put atomic power to other space uses including the launching of planetary rovers with nuclear systems.
Indeed, this May and June NASA is planning to launch two rockets from Florida carrying rovers to be landed on Mars equipped with heaters powered by plutonium. The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power In Space (www.speace4peace.org) has been conducting demonstrations to protest these launches.
NASA's "Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Exploration Rover-2003 Project" says that "the overall chance of an accident occurring" for each launch "is about 1 in 30" and "the overall chance of any accident that releases radioactive materials to the environment is about 1 in 230." People "offsite in the downwind direction...could inhale small quantities of radionuclides," says NASA's statement. An area as far as 60 kilometers from the launch site could be impacted, says NASA.
"These and other NASA space shots involving materials must be cancelled in the wake of the Columbia disaster and safe space energy systems be used instead," declares Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network.
The Nuclear Systems Initiative was described as a "a new element" in NASA's "space science program: by O'Keefe in testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Science last February. Three months earlier, O'Keefe--secretary of Navy under President George H. Bush--was named NASA chief by President George W. Bush.
"Nuclear propulsion greatly increases mission flexibility, enabling new science missions, more in-depth investigations, and greater flexibility in reaching and exploring distant objects," he told the committee.
In the weeks before the Columbia disaster, O'Keefe was stepping up the promotion of nukes in space. "We're talking about doing something on a very aggressive schedule to not only develop the capabilities for nuclear propulsion and power generation but to have a mission using the new technology within this decade," he told the Los Angeles Times in its story published on January 17.
The Nuclear Systems Initiative, or, as it is now to be called, Project Prometheus, would be pushed as scientists in the European Space Agency--ESA, the European counterpart of NASA--and in space industry and at NASA itself have made breakthroughs in developing safer ways of propelling rockets and energizing space probes and planetary landers. This includes solar electric propulsion and the use of "solar sails" and other solar technologies that stress the generation of electricity with new high-efficiency solar cells.
Last month, ESA got set to launch a solar-powered space probe called Rosetta with all its on-board electricity coming from solar cells with record-high 25% efficiency. It was to fly beyond Jupiter to rendezvous with a comet called Wirtanen.
Problems with an ESA rocket caused the mission to be scrubbed. Rosetta is to be, notes ESA, "the first space mission to journey beyond the main asteroid belt and rely solely on solar cells for power generation, rather than traditional radioisotope thermal generators"( the plutonium systems NASA favors for its space probes). It would gather sunlight way out in space. "After a 5.3 billion km space odyssey, Rosetta will make first contact with Wirtanen about 675 million km from the Sun," explained ESA. "At this distance, sunlight is 20 times weaker than on Earth."
NASA has a division--its Photovoltaics and Space Environment Branch headquartered at the John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland--which, like ESA, has been working on space solar energy development. There is no "edge" or limit to solar power, says a scientist at the branch, Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis, on its website. "In the long term, solar arrays won't have to rely on the Sun. We're investigating the concept of using lasers to beam photons to solar arrays. If you make a powerful-enough laser and can aim the beam, there really isn't any edge of sunshine."
Solar energy technologies are being used now to propel spacecraft. NASA's Deep Space 1 probe, launched in 1998, is the first space probe to be propelled with solar electric propulsion, a system through which electricity collected by panels is concentrated and used to accelerate the movement of propellant out a thrust chamber.
There are "solar sails" utilizing ionized particles emitted by the Sun which constitute a force in space. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is considering a launch at the end of the decade of a space probe to Pluto using either solar sails or solar electric propulsion. A space device with solar sails built in Russia for the International Planetary Society was launched in 2001.
In contrast, NASA's renewed emphasis on nuclear power in space "is not only dangerous but politically unwise," says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and author of best-selling books including "Hyperspace." "The only thing that can kill the U.S. space program is a nuclear disaster. The American people will not tolerate a Chernobyl in the sky. That would doom the space program."
"NASA hasn't learned its lesson from its history involving space nuclear power," says Kaku, "and a hallmark of science is that you learn from previous mistakes. NASA doggedly pursues its fantasy of nuclear power in space. We have to save NASA from itself." He cites "alternatives" space nuclear power. "Some of these alternatives may delay the space program a bit. But the planets are not going to go away. What's the rush? I'd rather explore the universe slower than not at all if there is a nuclear disaster."
Dr. Ross McCluney, a former NASA scientist now principal research scientist at the Florida Solar Energy Center, says NASA's push for the use of nuclear power in space is "an example of tunnel vision, focusing too narrowly on what appears to be a good engineering solution but not on the longer-term human and environmental risks and the law of unintended consequences. You think you're in control of everything and then things happen beyond your control. If your project is inherently benign, an unexpected error can be tolerated. But when you have at your project's core something inherently dangerous, then the consequences of unexpected failures can be great."
Jack Dixon, for 30 years an aerospace engineer in the U.S., takes issue with those against nuclear power in space for being critical of it for "politically correct," anti-nuclear reasons. His criticism is cost--what he says is an enormous cost. The solar sail system "may be implemented at about 10% of the cost of nuclear and quickly." It is "simple and relatively low tech."
Yet despite the costs, dangers and the advances in solar energy technologies and other safe forms of power for use in space, NASA would stress nuclear power. In fact, the situation is not so different from how the Bush administration has been pushing to "revive" nuclear power on Earth despite the availability today of safe, clean, economic, renewable energy technologies. And like terrestrial atomic power, space nuclear power has a problematic past.
Early U.S. space satellites were powered by plutonium. The first nuclear satellite was Transit 4A, a navigational satellite launched on June 29, 1961. It was a time when space and nuclear power were seen by some as coupled. Space exploration "in large measure depends upon the common destiny of space and the atom," former U.S. Senator Albert Gore--the father of the former U.S. vice president--declared in a 1962 Senate speech. Importantly, in Gore's home state is Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Oak Ridge and the other U.S. nuclear laboratories then and to this day have promoted the development of space atomic power as a means of expanding their activities, to bring in more work. Gore, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, advocated nuclear-powered rockets and atomic power "for a wide variety of miscellaneous functions in space....Nuclear energy is essential for leadership in space."
Along with the national nuclear laboratories--set up during the World War II atom bomb-building Manhattan Project and thereafter run by the Atomic Energy Commission and now the Department of Energy--the corporations involved in building space nuclear systems have also been active in promoting their use. The Transit 4A's plutonium system was manufactured by General Electric.
Then there was a serious accident involving a plutonium-energized satellite. On April 24, 1964, the GE-built Transit 5BN with a SNAP-9A (SNAP for Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power) system on-board failed to achieve orbit and fell from the sky, disintegrating as it burned in the atmosphere. The 2.1 pounds of Plutonium-238 (an isotope of plutonium 280 times "hotter" with radioactivity than the Plutonium-239 which is used in atomic and hydrogen bombs) in the SNAP-9A dispersed widely over the Earth. A study titled "Emergency Preparedness for Nuclear-Powered Satellites" done by a grouping of European health and radiation protection agencies later reported that "a worldwide soil sampling program carried out in 1970 showed SNAP-9A debris present at all continents and at all latitudes."
Long connecting the SNAP-9A accident and an increase of lung cancer on Earth has been Dr. John Gofman, professor emeritus of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, an M.D. and Ph.D. who was involved in isolating plutonium for the Manhattan Project and co-discovered several radioisotopes.
The SNAP-9A accident caused NASA to become a pioneer in developing solar photovoltaic energy technology. And in recent decades, all U.S. satellites have been solar-powered. So is the International Space Station.
But NASA continued to use plutonium-powered systems for a series of space probe missions claiming solar power could not be effectively gathered by space probes beyond the orbit of Mars.
The ill-fated shuttle Challenger was to launch a plutonium-fueled space probe in its next planned mission in 1986. The Ulysses space probe, with 24.2 pounds of plutonium fuel, was to be sent off from Challenger once it achieved orbit for a survey of the Sun.
The most recent NASA nuclear space probe mission was called Cassini. It was launched in 1997 with more plutonium fuel--72.3 pounds--than on any previous space device. NASA conceded the dangers of a Cassini accident in its "Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission." Although its destination was Saturn, Cassini did not have enough power to get it directly there, so NASA devised a "flyby" or "slingshot maneuver" using the Earth. Cassini was to be sent from space hurtling back at Earth and then, just several hundred miles high, whip around Earth to pick up the additional velocity so it could make it to Saturn. The NASA EIS for Cassini said that on this "flyby" if an "inadvertent reentry occurred" and Cassini fell back to Earth, it would break up in the Earth's 75-mile high atmosphere (it had no heat shield) and "5 billion of the...world population...could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure" from the plutonium dust that would rain down. In areas seriously contaminated, NASA said actions would include: "Remove and dispose all vegetation, Remove and dispose topsoil. Relocate animals...Ban future agricultural land uses." And for urban environments, "Demolish some or all structures. Relocate affected population permanently." Dr. Gofman estimated the toll from cancer from such a Cassini accident as 950,000 people dead. Although Cassini did get past the Earth successfully on its 1999 "flyby," six weeks later NASA's Mars Climate Observer, on a pass over Mars, crashed into the Martian atmosphere and disintegrated. The mishap was attributed by NASA to human error--one of its teams calculated the planned altitude of the spacecraft in feet, the other in meters, and it came in too low.
The U.S. nuclear-propelled rocket program began at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s with building of the Kiwi reactor for what became known as the NERVA--for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application--program. Projects Pluto, Rover, Poodle and Orion to build nuclear-powered rockets followed.
Westinghouse was a major contractor in these nuclear rocket efforts. A former Westinghouse president, John W. Simpson, acknowledged in his 1994 book on the history of the company ("Nuclear Power from Underseas to Outer Space") how to get the government contracts, "believe me, we pulled out all the stops--not only technical effort but also marketing and political savvy."
Ground tests of nuclear rocket components were conducted. But no nuclear-propelled rocket ever flew and because of the catastrophe that could result if a nuclear-powered rocket crashed to Earth, the government ended the program ended.
Now in 2003 we would rocket back to the past.
Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, warns that the process of manufacturing space nuclear power systems has had human health costs from the process of manufacturing and building more "will lead to significant numbers of workers and communities being contaminated."
He says: "Serious questions need to be asked: Where will they test the nuclear rocket? How much will it cost? What would be the impacts of a launch accident? These nuclearization of space plans are getting dangerous and out of control."
Also, Gagnon sees a military connection, describing the use of nuclear power in space as "the foot in the door, the Trojan horse, for the militarization of space." Space weapons sought by the military--space-based lasers, hypervelocity guns and particle beams--would require large amounts of power which the military sees as coming from on-board nuclear power systems, thus the close cooperation between the Pentagon and NASA in space nuclear efforts.
Dr. Dave Webb, who had been a scientist in the British space program and is now principal lecturer at the United Kingdom's Leeds Metropolitan University's School of Engineering, and is also Global Network secretary, says, "Star Wars projects like the Space-Based Laser require significant sources of power and it is very useful for the U.S. government to be able to bury some of the costs for the development work in 'civilian' or 'dual use' programs."
This week, the Global Network was leading protests at the 11th Annual Symposium on Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The gathering, organized by the University of New Mexico's Institute for Nuclear Space Power Studies, drew NASA, nuclear industry, academic, government and military space nuclear proponents. Said Gagnon from New Mexico: "We're not saying there shouldn't be any space program. It's a question of what kind of seed do we carry with us out into space."
"Why on Earth," asks Alice Slater, president of the New York-based Global Resource Action Center for the Environment and a Global Network board member, "would any sane person propose to take nuclear poisons to a whole new level?"
"Nuclear power whether in space or on Earth is a risky business," says Sally Light, long-time executive director of the anti-nuclear Nevada Desert Experience and also a Global Board member, "whether in space or on Earth is a risky business. Why is the U.S. blindly plunging ahead with such a potentially disastrous and outmoded concept? We should use solar-powered technologies as they are clean, safe and feasible." The comittment of huge amounts of money to the Nuclear Systems Initiatitive, now Project Prometheus, "is unconscionable. Did the people of Earth have a voice in this? One of the basic principles of democracy is that those affected have a determinative role in the decision-making process. We in the U.S. and people worldwide are faced with a dangerous, high-risk situation being forced on us and on our descendents."
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, is the author of "The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat To Our Plane" (Common Courage Press) and narrator and writer of "Nukes In Space" video documentaries available from EnviroVideo at www.envirovideo.com or 1-800-ECO-TV46.
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 90083
Gainesville, FL 32607
(352) 337-9274
http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspring.com
-------- treaties
Senate Panel Approves Nuclear Arms Treaty
February 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia-Treaty.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday unanimously approved a nuclear arms treaty in which the United States and Russia agree to substantially reduce their long-range nuclear arsenals over the next decade.
The committee chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar, a longtime arms reduction advocate, said the measure would go to the full Senate in the next few weeks. The Senate must ratify any treaty the president negotiates before it can take effect.
The Moscow Treaty that President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin worked out in May 2002 reduces the two countries' stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons to 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads each over the next decade -- a two-thirds reduction.
The White House applauded the Senate action. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a statement that the president hoped for a vote by the full Senate ``at its earliest opportunity.''
The treaty ``recognizes that the U.S.-Russian relationship has turned the corner,'' said Lugar, R-Ind. ``Our countries are no longer mortal enemies engaged in a worldwide Cold War. We are partners in the war against terrorism and we continue to build a strong military and security partnership.''
Lugar said the White House agreed to additions to the treaty that would require the White House to report annually to Congress on progress in the implementation of the treaty and how the Nunn-Lugar program is being used to destroy weapons in Russia.
Since 1991, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, developed by Lugar and former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, has destroyed more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and thousands of missiles and launchers in the former Soviet Union.
Funds for most of the program was held up most of last year by the Bush administration, which contended that Russia was not living up to past treaties.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
New York Seeks Cooperation on Indian Pt. Emergency Plan
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/nyregion/05NUKE.html
In an attempt to resolve an impasse over certifying the emergency plan for the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County, New York State last night suggested a meeting of federal and local officials to discuss their differences.
Edward F. Jacoby Jr., director of the State Emergency Management Office, sent a letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency reiterating the state's position that it cannot sign off on the plan because the four counties surrounding the plant, in Buchanan, have refused to send information the state needs for certification. The certification is normally an annual, routine task.
The counties, Mr. Jacoby noted, said they had acted out of concerns raised by a state-sponsored report last month that said the emergency plan, including designs for evacuating people within a 10-mile radius of the plant, is inadequate to protect the public from a large release of radiation.
On Monday, Joseph F. Picciano, acting regional director of FEMA, sent a letter to Mr. Jacoby asserting that the state should have enough information even without the counties to decide if the plan is current.
FEMA uses the "annual letter of certification," as well as its own information, to determine whether to approve the plan, a condition of the plant's operating license. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, however, has never withdrawn a license over emergency planning issues.
But Mr. Jacoby said the state would not take a stand without the counties' participation. The state normally receives checklists from the counties that confirm that they have completed required training and administrative tasks.
Without taking a position on the adequacy of the plan, he suggested that FEMA meet with officials from the counties and state "to directly address the concerns of both the counties and the state."
A spokeswoman for FEMA said last night that the agency was reviewing the letter and had no comment.
-------- ohio
Rep. Kucinich asks nuclear regulators to ban FirstEnergy Corp. from Davis-Besse
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21316-2003Feb3?language=printer
Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) asked nuclear regulators to take away the authority of FirstEnergy Corp. to operate a nuclear plant near Toledo that was damaged by an acid leak. Kucinich's petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accuses FirstEnergy of admittedly operating the Davis-Besse plant in violation of NRC rules, failing to observe safety standards and withholding information so it could continue operating the plant despite unsafe conditions. FirstEnergy spokesman Richard Wilkins said the petition contains inaccuracies and "draws an erroneous conclusion."
-------- us politics
How about if U.S. just lightens up?
By Robert Robb
Arizona Republic columnist
Feb. 5, 2003
http://www.arizonarepublic.com/opinions/articles/0205robb05.html
What if, instead of war with Iraq, the United States radically altered our relationship with the rest of the world?
Saddam Hussein's ambition, to the extent it can be divined, appears to be to exercise hegemonic influence in the Arab world. Saddam is a threat to the United States because he perceives, correctly, that we are prepared to thwart that ambition.
What if we in the United States were no longer to regard it as our responsibility to thwart whatever ambitions Saddam might have so long as he left us alone? If other Arab countries regarded Saddam as a threat or a menace, they would have to do something about it themselves.
The six countries bordering Iraq (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Kuwait and Jordan) collectively have six times as many people as Iraq and an economy 20 times as large.
In terms of military capabilities, these neighbors spend 30 times as much on their military than does Iraq, have three times as many uniformed military personnel, four times the tanks and other combat vehicles, and four times as many combat aircraft.
If Saddam needs to be contained or deposed, his immediate neighbors have more than ample resources to do the job without the treasury or blood of the United States.
Similarly, what if the United States took the position that a nuclear-armed North Korea was primarily a regional threat and it was up to South Korea, China and Japan to figure out what to do about it?
The United States would be willing to talk directly to North Korea, as it has demanded. But what we'll say is that freedom and democracy are what will improve conditions for the people of North Korea and that its government isn't getting a dime from American taxpayers.
In the post-Cold War world, who exactly is NATO protecting against what? Western Europe faces no security threats requiring the pledge of U.S. money or soldiers.
It's long past time to tell the countries of Western Europe that, even if we no longer get much credit, we were pleased to have rescued them from Hitler and protected them against the Soviet Union, since they were, in essence, our own front line as well.
But those days are over. And now they're on their own.
If requested, perhaps the United States should enter into a new security alliance with the fledging democracies of Eastern Europe. A U.S. security presence could provide some regional stability to allow their democratic governments and market economies to grow deeper roots.
Moreover, it makes sense to involve the Russians in geopolitical and security issues in this region, which will make the former Soviet satellites very nervous. A formal U.S. counterweight could create the conditions for productive engagement.
Britain, Spain and Italy could be invited to have some sort of affiliate relationship in the new alliance, if they wanted.
Meanwhile, France and Germany could form their own security alliance to guard against the threat of American movies and cuisine.
The United States would take a far more relaxed view toward international organizations and conferences.
If other countries wanted to get together to have a goofy conference on racism, we'd just ignore it, rather than working hard to shape its pronouncements and then walking out when they remained unsatisfactory.
And we'd let the United Nations run its course, without trying to shape or influence it much. To the extent it came up with worthwhile programs, we'd participate. The rest we'd ignore.
After all, it's hard to take too seriously an organization whose human rights commission is headed by Libya and whose disarmament conference will soon be chaired by Iraq.
Simply put, the United States would tread much more lightly in world affairs, albeit still independently.
This is not, as commonly alleged, isolationism. We would remain diplomatically and commercially engaged throughout the world, even in countries we currently give the cold shoulder to, such as Cuba and Iran.
We just wouldn't try to manage the world's affairs or be willing to act as the world's security force anymore.
We would return to being what the Founding Fathers intended: a peaceful trading nation. An example of liberty for the world, but defender and protector principally of our own.
Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8472. His column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
----
French betrayal turns reluctant warrior Powell into a hawk
By Toby Harnden in Washington
05/02/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$KEGSEUHHFHQKVQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/02/05/nirq105.xml/
Colin Powell, the famously reluctant warrior, will today become the Bush administration's most powerful proponent of war.
Isolated within the United States government and angered that France and Germany have spurned his patient diplomacy, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the Gulf War will today make the case to the United Nations Security Council for finishing off Saddam Hussein.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Mr Powell, who has long favoured a policy of containing Iraq, suddenly began to sound like Donald Rumsfeld, the first Pentagon chief in many years to give the impression that he relishes the prospect of inflicting enemy casualties. This week, he followed up by declaring: "We will not shrink from war." European diplomats in Washington, who saw Mr Powell as an ally whom they could use to wean President Bush away from war, are in a state of near despair.
Within the Bush administration, Mr Powell's apparent conversion, along with the letter advocating military action signed by Tony Blair and seven other European leaders, is seen as a crucial factor in achieving a second UN Security Council resolution.
Mr Powell's transformation from dove to hawk stems partly from the treatment he received from Dominique de Villepin, his French counterpart, at a UN session on terrorism last week.
Mr Powell was publicly embarrassed when the French foreign minister declared to the world that "nothing justifies envisaging military action against Iraq". Mr Powell was said by aides to be livid and felt that the French minister had betrayed him to curry favour at home.
Equally important, however, has been a clear hardening of the attitude of President Bush.
Some US government sources have suggested that Mr Bush told Mr Powell to "get with the programme" and recognise that war was inevitable. It is perhaps more likely that Mr Powell himself saw the writing was on the wall. "He felt he would have more influence inside the tent than outside it," said one senior European diplomat in Washington. "That's been Powell's pattern over the years. He knew the president had crossed a line so he followed him."
Another explanation is that the White House realises that the respect the American secretary of state has in Europe means that when Mr Powell talks tough his words cannot be dismissed as ideological extremism.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
Iraq's Neighborhood Thick With U.S. Arms
Weapons and Technology Traded for Support
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 5, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26335-2003Feb4.html
Photo, Rumsfeld and Bahrain King:
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I26795-2003Feb04
MANAMA, Bahrain -- For the king, it was a proud moment. Addressing a gathering of military officers a week ago, he announced that Bahrain had acquired U.S. Patriot anti-missile batteries to guard this tiny island nation.
The Patriots now bolstering the arsenal of King Hamad bin Isa Khalifa represent the edge of a wave of arms flowing from the United States to its friends in the Persian Gulf region as another war with Iraq looms. Patriots already have been stationed in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- in addition to Israel -- while Jordan will receive three batteries within weeks.
Beyond the missiles, Iraq's neighbors also are receiving some of the most potent weapons in the U.S. inventory. In the last year, deals have been struck or advanced to provide Middle Eastern governments with F/A-18 warplanes; Harpoon, TOW and Sidewinder missiles; AWACS airborne control planes; and Seahawk, Black Hawk, King Cobra and Apache helicopters. Just last week, Jordan took delivery of six F-16 fighters, the first of 16 on the way.
"We're arming the Middle East to the teeth," said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based organization that tracks U.S. arms sales to foreign countries.
The flow of weapons culminates a drive by the United States to arm its allies in the region after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The pipeline opened wider after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Bush administration is conducting a review of U.S. export policy, to be completed by spring, to further streamline sales to allies and to enhance integration of weapons systems.
While arms sales historically have been used as foreign policy tools, "now what we're seeing is that countries are able to land U.S. technology and arms in exchange for support in the war on terror, and now maybe for the war on Iraq," said Stohl.
The policy is bearing some fruit in the form of access to bases throughout the region. But it has not bought outright support for the Bush administration's campaign against Iraq, nor has it induced Iraq's neighbors to commit troops to the U.S. effort.
Kuwait has already blocked off a quarter of the country for U.S. forces preparing to drive into Iraq. Saudi Arabia, although not permitting ground troops or offensive air operations from its territory, says it will permit overflights and limited use of the control center at Prince Sultan Air Base. Jordan says it will permit a discreet presence of U.S. forces such as search-and-rescue units.
Here in Bahrain, an oil-rich isle in the Gulf known as a getaway for Saudis escaping the strictures of home to spend weekends drinking, dancing and seeing movies, Hamad has spoken out against war and said he seeks a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis.
But over the last decade, Bahrain has received F-16s and AH-1 Cobra helicopters as well as Harpoon, Maverick, Sidewinder, Sparrow, Stinger and TOW missiles from the United States to defend a nation with less than two-thirds the size and population of Fairfax County. And so despite any misgivings, Hamad continues to allow the U.S. 5th Fleet to make Bahrain its home base, even though it would oversee a carrier-based air war against Iraq.
"The general feeling of people here is nobody wants a war in this area," said Nazar Al Baharna, a leading member of the Al Wesaq Islamic Society, a politically influential group. "It could lead to instability and hurt the economy of the place."
Yet Baharna said Bahrainis approve of the king obtaining Patriots to defend the kingdom. Iraq launched two Scud missiles against Bahrain in the first Gulf War, with no serious damage. "In terms of protecting Bahrain, if, God forbid, this war happens, then of course I'm sure the kingdom of Bahrain will take all the necessary measures to protect itself," Baharna said.
Others see such arms transfers more cynically. Ali Fakhro, a former government minister who until recently headed the Bahrain Center for Studies and Research, said the United States has been sending munitions to the Middle East to buy friendship.
"The United States is selling arms to a region where basically there are no conflicts among its members," he said. "At the same time, I don't think America thinks that these armaments will be used against American allies like Israel. So really when it comes to it, this is a farce which can be explained easily."
Because of the long process between first requests and final approvals, it remains too early to judge how much arms sales to Iraq's neighbors have increased lately. A Pentagon spokeswoman said she could not evaluate trends without more research, but noted that such sales typically go through a "detailed process" intended to evaluate them before being endorsed.
A review of government notices, public announcements and data compiled by the Center for Defense Information makes clear that major deals, including some long stalled, have moved forward in the 16 months since the World Trade Center fell and the Bush team began eyeing Iraq.
Oman, which hosts U.S. air units with P-3 surveillance planes and AC-130 gunships at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula, secured a long-awaited $1.2 billion deal to buy 12 F-16 fighters just five weeks after the terrorist attacks. Turkey made a $1.7 billion deal for 50 AH-1Z King Cobra attack helicopters and a $1.5 billion deal for four airborne early warning and control aircraft. It also pursued a $1.5 billion contract for six AWACS aircraft.
Jordan bought Javelin anti-tank missiles, the United Arab Emirates ordered Harpoon and Sidewinder missiles and Saudi Arabia bought TOW and AIM-120 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles.
Among the biggest deals was Kuwait's $2.1 billion purchase of 16 AH-64D Longbow Apache attack helicopters along with 288 Hellfire missiles. Kuwait had been seeking the Apaches since 1994.Washington balked out of concern that it represented excessive firepower for such a diminutive country, but the holdups were resolved last year.
"It could be coincidental that 10 years of negotiations finally culminated in a sale, or it could be that the U.S. accommodated the Kuwaitis as a quid pro quo," said Matthew Schroeder, a research associate at the Federation of American Scientists, a public policy group in Washington.
-------- business
Raytheon, Lockheed to Bid on $1B Project
Reuters
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29409-2003Feb5?language=printer
ARLINGTON, Va. (Reuters) - Raytheon Co. and Lockheed Martin , two top defense contractors, on Wednesday said they would jointly bid for a $1 billion U.S. Navy project involving a system designed to help military aircraft target and kill fast-moving airborne weapons.
Competition for the so-called Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) Block 2 program is expected to begin in the second quarter of this year, with contract award expected in early 2004, the companies said in a joint statement.
Block 1 of the CEC project was valued at $2 billion. The project is aimed at developing a networking system that will detect, target and destroy weapons such as cruise missiles.
CEC gathers data from its platforms and feeds it into the U.S. Navy's Aegis Combat System. Raytheon is the design agent and prime contractor for CEC Block 1. Lockheed Martin is the design agent and prime contractor for the Aegis Weapon System.
For the Block 2 competition, Raytheon will serve as the prime contractor and design agent and will have about 60 percent of the development and design agent work share. Lockheed Martin will be Raytheon's principal subcontractor.
-------- europe
Europe Debates Whether to Admit God to Union
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By THOMAS FULLER,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/international/europe/05EURO.html
BRUSSELS, Feb. 4 - In the colorless conference rooms of the European Union's headquarters here, where discussions often center on farm subsidies and budget deficits, a small group of politicians will meet on Wednesday to discuss God.
The 11 men and 2 women, several of them former prime ministers, will debate whether or not the European Union's future constitution, currently being drafted section-by-section, should include a reference to the divine.
On a continent where church attendance is a fraction of American levels and where invocations of God, common in political speeches in the United States, are rare, the task is a tricky one.
Although most of the European Continent commonly celebrates religious holidays as national days off, references to religion, according to many ardent European secularists, do not belong in classrooms or government offices, much less the highest legal text of the land.
The committee must sift through proposals that describe Europe's "spiritual heritage" and "God as the source of truth." They are then expected to draft a text that will form the basis of Article 2 of the future constitution, a paragraph reserved for a statement of European "values."
The debate is of keen interest to the Roman Catholic Church, which has lobbied for a reference to God, as well as organizations of Jews, Muslims and Protestants, who until now have been more muted in their opinions on the matter.
Supporters of a reference to God include delegates from Poland, Italy, Germany and Slovakia, some of whom have proposed the following text, "The union values include the values of those who believe in God as the source of truth, justice, good and beauty as well as of those who do not share such a belief but respect these universal values arising from other sources."
Opponents of the wording - many of whom say it would make a dangerous distinction between believers and nonbelievers - include delegates from France, the Netherlands, Spain and the Nordic countries.
The "God issue" is described by delegates as one of the most controversial at the convention.
Among some French delegates, a reference to God is seen as a throwback to the past and a breach of the sacred principle of a clear separation of Church and state that keeps religion out of politics.
But in Poland, a heavily Roman Catholic country where the church kept national aspirations alive under the Communist system and the government installed a crucifix in Parliament after that system crumbled, a reference to God in the European constitution would serve as a tribute to the church's role of resistance during Poland's decades as a Soviet satellite.
In Spain, a reference to God evokes the years under Franco, where coins were stamped with the dictator's profile, ringed by the words "Leader of Spain by the grace of God."
"Religion is a private matter," said Ana Palacio, Spain's foreign minister, who is also a member of the presidium. "Our identity is the fight for democracy, for human rights, for the separation between church and state. The only banner that we have is secularism."
Other, more down-to-earth issues debated at the convention have tended to separate countries into camps: small countries against big ones, federalists against confederalists, northern countries against southern ones. But delegates say the God question blurs alliances and defies geographical boundaries.
Debates about God are unfamiliar terrain for the European Union, which came together a half-century ago with the specific priority of cooperating in coal and steel production. Today, delegates who are more accustomed to arguing about milk quotas sometimes find the debate about God uncomfortable.
"I think there's an embarrassment to admitting to religious belief in our modern culture," said John Bruton, a former Irish prime minister and a member of the presidium.
Mr. Bruton said he supported the text that speaks of God as a "source of truth" because it would apply, he said, to the three major monotheistic religions in Europe.
Mr. Bruton and his like-minded colleagues have also backed a clause for the constitution's preamble that says Europeans are "conscious of their history, of the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity and of what Europe owes to its spiritual and moral heritage."
Such a formulation is likely to disappoint the church. Late last year, Pope John Paul II met with Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the former president of France, who heads the commission on the constitution, to lobby for "a clear reference to God and the Christian faith," a Vatican spokesman said.
Mr. Giscard d'Estaing said immediately after the meeting that "we are working toward" the pope's requests. Last week, however, Mr. Giscard d'Estaing said his personal view was that "a reference to God does not seem appropriate."
Other religious groups have been less vociferous and perhaps less organized than the Vatican.
Shimon Samuels, the Paris representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said there was no organized "Jewish lobby" tracking the issue.
The key for European minorities, he said, is that any religious reference in the constitution, "cannot be based upon the atavistic nostalgia of the Christian heritage."
"Religion has its place, but it does not have its place as the lodestar of this convention," he added.
The convention is made up of delegates from the existing 15 members of the European Union, the 10 countries scheduled to join in May 2004 and three other candidates for membership: Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. It began its work last March and is scheduled to produce a draft constitution in June.
One significant hurdle, however, will be making sure that the various translations of the future constitution jibe. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, drawn up in 1999, refers to Europe's "religious" heritage in the German version but the French version only refers to a "spiritual" heritage.
The drafters of the text said the difference was no accident: France and Germany simply did not agree.
-------- iraq
Americans will be fighting ghosts, say Iraqi exiles
February 5 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/04/1044318608314.html
London: President Saddam Hussein has decentralised the Iraqi army in preparation for urban combat and will rely on his son Qusay to co-ordinate a defensive war in the cities, say exiled generals monitoring Iraq.
"The Americans will be fighting ghosts. They will find it very hard to know where the enemy is. Those who are betting that Saddam will be defeated quickly are mistaken," Lieutenant-General Tawfik al-Yassiri said.
"Tens of thousands of elite Iraqi forces have spread underground, above ground, in farms, schools, mosques, churches ... everywhere. They are not in camps or major installations. These units are prepared for city warfare and have the experience for it."
General al-Yassiri took part in a 1991 uprising against Saddam and now heads a council of exiled officers, who maintain contact with their former comrades inside Iraq.
Another exiled officer said some of the best trained units in house-to-house fighting are not part of the regular Iraqi army. "They are vicious," he said. "They were trained in Europe and do not wear uniforms."
Saddam's former military aides say secondary systems of communications are in place to help the Iraqi army function under US strikes, including long range walkie-talkies and fibre optics cables that are hard to hit underground. They say the focus of Iraqi defences is Baghdad and that Qusay, Saddam's younger son and most trusted lieutenant, is pivotal in keeping the Iraqi leader in command of his army.
In a region ruled by autocratic leaders reluctant to delegate power, Saddam has placed Qusay completely in charge of units responsible for the security of the regime, the exiled generals say.
"Qusay still takes orders from Saddam. But Saddam will be trusting few people to see him or know where he is during the war," said Lieutenant General Saad al-Obeidi, who was involved in Iraq's psychological warfare in the 1980s.
Saddam, his former aides say, has divided Iraq into three sectors - the north, centre and south - with commanders for each sector delegated almost total power during hostilities.
----
Iraq Arms Civilians As Second Line of Defense Against U.S.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 5, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26394-2003Feb4?language=printer
MOSUL, Iraq, Feb. 4 -- Semira Ahmed, a schoolteacher, keeps her battered AK-47 assault rifle in her bedroom closet, next to her dresses, shoes, jewelry and cosmetics. Abbas Mahmood, a shopkeeper, displays his in the living room, on a shelf with pictures of his children. Mohammed Abdullah, a farmer, totes his wherever he goes, because he wants to be ready "to fight at any time."
From dusty villages to the bustling streets of Baghdad, guns are omnipresent in Iraq. They are, as people here are fond of saying, more common than telephones or cars, and perhaps even portraits of President Saddam Hussein. "Everyone has one," Abdullah said. "And some people have two or three."
Over the past two years, Hussein's government says it has trained 1 million civilians in the basics of armed combat and given many of them firearms to keep at home. With Iraq now facing a possible U.S. military invasion, Iraqi leaders are encouraging -- and counting on -- those people to act as a last line of defense in cities and towns across the country.
Iraqi officials say they expect armed civilians to engage in urban warfare with U.S. troops, firing at them from inside houses and high-rise apartment buildings. The officials express hope that if enough civilians join the fight, the Americans, despite air superiority and technologically advanced equipment, will be forced to retreat.
Whether legions of ordinary people will take up arms to defend Hussein's government remains one of the biggest uncertainties of a war between the United States and Iraq. Although U.S. commanders and Western military analysts expect relatively few civilians to put up a fight, the Iraqi leadership says it is confident of just the opposite.
To display their preparations, authorities summoned tens of thousands of weapon-wielding civilians, from schoolgirls to gray-haired retirees, to march this morning down a wide boulevard in Mosul, 230 miles north of Baghdad. It was Iraq's largest display of force in months.
Menacing at moments, comedic at others, the parade featured pot-bellied, middle-aged men waving rocket-propelled grenade launchers, women in heels brandishing AK-47s, ethnic Kurds in traditional dress, workmen in blue boiler suits and a dozen men clad in the white shrouds worn by aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers.
Although the parade appeared designed for foreign consumption, diplomats and analysts said such events have an important domestic purpose: dissuading people who might be thinking of participating in dissent when the war begins by reminding them that their neighbors may be armed and loyal to the government. The parade also may have been intended to send a message to Iraqi Kurds living in an autonomous region whose southern border is less than an hour's drive away.
"We know the Americans are there right now with the Kurds," said one participant. "If either of them try to invade, we will be waiting for them."
Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Hussein's ruling Revolutionary Command Council, saluted from a reviewing stand as the marchers shouted belligerent slogans. "Bush, Bush, hear us carefully! We love Saddam Hussein!" one group screamed. Others opted for the zippier "No peace, no surrender!"
"I wish the Americans would come here," growled Faris Zubaidi, a 42-year-old businessman who was leading a unit of 96 men with grenade launchers. "We will show them our bravery. We will show them we can fight. And we will fight until we win or die."
Zubaidi, who was in the army during Iraq's 1980-88 war with neighboring Iran, said he decided to join the civilian militia when it was formed almost two years ago. Named the Al-Quds Army -- after the Arabic name for Jerusalem -- the militia was assembled on Hussein's orders, in theory to prepare for an invasion of Israel.
At the time, the Al-Quds Army was regarded as a way for Hussein to channel anger among Iraqis at Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and to curry favor among Arabs in neighboring countries. It was coupled with payments of as much as $25,000 to the families of Palestinians killed in the struggle against Israeli occupation, including suicide bombers.
But as the threat of another war with the United States becomes imminent, the militia has made homeland defense its primary role. New training sessions have been scheduled and scores of government employees have been encouraged to participate.
Although the government has not provided a breakdown of militia members -- "They come from all walks of life," a local official said today -- conversations with several participants in the parade suggested a significant proportion are civil servants. The militia members said they did not receive a regular stipend but some said they got $40 for the two months during which they trained.
The government reports that the militia has 7 million members. Western analysts place the figure at closer to 1 million. How many would fight U.S. invaders is anyone's guess. One Baghdad resident who boasted of having an AK-47 and a revolver at home said he had no plans to use them in the event of a U.S. attack.
"It will be too dangerous," said the man, a shopkeeper, who did not want his name published. "People will be firing in every direction. I would be crazy to join in."
What will he do with his guns? "I'll keep them hidden at home," he said. "And I'll stay at home, too."
Others said they intend to fight, but they hinted that their primary motivation would be to try to keep Americans out of Iraq instead of defending Hussein, casting their role as protectors of Iraq's sovereignty and natural resources.
"This is our country," said Ali Ahmed, a teacher marching with a contingent of men in olive-green uniforms. "What right do the Americans have to come here? What do they really want? It's not about weapons of mass destruction. I think they want our oil."
But the message organizers tried to convey today was that everyone loves Hussein. Many marchers wore photocopied pictures of the president on their chests. Others put on colorful stickers with his image. Large portraits of him were placed on the back of pickup trucks that brought up the rear, along with flatbed delivery vehicles mounted with antiaircraft guns.
The large-scale distribution of weapons began during the war with Iran, when the government gave Iraqi-made AK-47s to decommissioned soldiers, members of the ruling Baath Party and tribal leaders. But it has dramatically escalated in recent months. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said last month that officials had handed out "hundreds of thousands of weapons" since the Bush administration began deploying additional forces to the Persian Gulf.
One group largely left out of the gun distribution has been Shiite Muslims, who make up about 55 percent of the population but whose allegiance has been questioned by Hussein and other top leaders, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims. In 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, Shiites rebelled against government forces in several southern cities. Today, some Shiites still are quietly loyal to a large opposition group based in Iran, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader has vowed to send fighters into Iraq to oppose Hussein if U.S. forces invade.
----
Saddam says U.S. tries to 'control the world'
By Barry Renfrew
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030205-14983271.htm
LONDON - Saddam Hussein claimed in a rare interview with a Westerner broadcast yesterday that the United States wants to conquer Iraq so it can "control the world" and insisted his regime does not have weapons of mass destruction.
A retired British lawmaker and peace activist, Tony Benn, conducted the 40-minute interview, in which the Iraqi leader spoke slowly in precise, careful tones, his voice at times falling very low, as he sipped from a cup of Arabic coffee in what appeared to be a room in one of his palaces.
Saddam accused Washington of fabricating false claims as a pretext to seize Iraq's oil fields. He said Iraq does not want war and is willing to work with U.N. weapons inspectors if they have no ulterior purpose.
"Iraq has no interest in war. No Iraqi official or ordinary citizens have expressed a wish to go to war," he said in the interview Sunday in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
"If the intention [of inspections] is to confirm that Iraq is free of biological and chemical and nuclear weapons, then they can do so. These weapons are not some aspirin pill someone can hide in his pocket. These are weapons of mass destruction, so it's simple to determine if Iraq has them or not," he said.
Saddam, dressed in a dark suit, sat across a table from Mr. Benn in a gilded chair in front of a curtain and a white, black and red Iraqi flag with three green stars. Occasionally he turned a pen in his hands, lining it up precisely on a green book on the table before him.
Analysts who have watched Saddam for years said he showed no sign of strain, despite the current confrontation with Washington.
Saddam also insisted his regime has no ties with al Qaeda. "If we had a relationship with al Qaeda, and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it," the Iraqi leader told Mr. Benn, who traveled to Baghdad in a bid to stop a war.
Saddam has not given an interview to a foreign television journalist in 12 years, according to Mr. Benn. He said during the interview that Saddam had declined his offer to see the questions beforehand.
Although his portraits and statues are everywhere, the Iraqi leader hardly ever appears in public, and until the past month he hadn't been seen much on tightly controlled Iraqi state television. But lately Saddam's picture has been dominating the airwaves, usually in excerpts of him meeting with officers and aides.
During the interview, Saddam claimed that Washington was intent on seizing Iraq's oil fields so that it could exert a stranglehold on the rest of the world and dictate to other powers, including China, Russia, Germany, France and Japan. He said Israel was inspiring U.S. hostility to Iraq.
"If you want to control the world, you must control oil, and one of the most important requirements for controlling oil is to destroy Iraq," he said. "One of the main reasons for the aggression that the American administration is engaged in is to control the world."
An Iraqi TV cameraman filmed the interview, which Mr. Benn conducted for a new outlet called Arab Television, a yet-to-be-started Arab TV station with administrative offices in London.
Saddam said no nation - even one with the power of the United States - could tell the world what to do. "If this person chooses to stay on this planet and ignore the rest of the world, then the least we can say is that this person is lacking in wisdom," he added.
---
Hussein Insists Iraq Has No Banned Weapons; Denies Al Qaeda Link
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24887-2003Feb4?language=printer
LONDON, Feb. 4--Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, insisting he is seeking to avoid war with the United States, today denied he had any connection to the al Qaeda terrorist network or that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
"If we had a relationship with al Qaeda and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it," Hussein said, in his first televised interview since the latest Gulf crisis began. "Therefore I would like to tell you directly and also through you to anyone who is interested to know that we have no relationship with al Qaeda."
"There is only one truth and therefore I tell you as I have said on many occasions before that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever. We challenge anyone who claims that we have to bring forward any evidence and present it to public opinion."
The videotaped interview, broadcast here this evening on Channel 4 television, was conducted by Tony Benn, a left-wing British politician and author and retired member of the House of Commons, who said he went to Baghdad in a last-ditch effort to prevent war between the West and Iraq.
"When Iraq objects to the conduct of those implementing the Security Council resolutions, that doesn't mean that Iraq wishes to push things to confrontation," the Iraqi leader told Benn. "Iraq has no interest in war. No Iraqi official or ordinary citizen has expressed a wish to go to war.
"The question should be directed at the other side. Are they looking for a pretext so they could justify war against Iraq? If the purpose was to make sure that Iraq is free of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, then they can do that. These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket. These are weapons of mass destruction and it is easy to work out if Iraq has them or not. We have said many times before and we say it again today that Iraq is free of such weapons."
"Most Iraqi officials have been in power for over 34 years and have experience of dealing with the outside world," said the Iraqi leader. "Every fair-minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something, they are trustworthy."
Hussein, wearing a dark gray suit, appeared relaxed in the 30-minute interview, which was recorded over the weekend in Baghdad. The Iraqi leader sat in an ornate, gilt armchair, with an Iraqi flag to his right. Although he had not seen the questions in advance, his responses seemed well-rehearsed and he spoke in a slow, deliberate pace.
"Make sure I look smart," he told the camera men with a smile as the session began.
But his smile vanished when he spoke about the United States and Britain, suggesting that the Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to disarm itself of all weapons of mass destruction had no basis in international law.
"If we look at the representatives of two superpowers -- America and Britain -- and look at their conduct and their language, we would notice that they are more motivated by war than their responsibility for peace," he said. "And when they talk about peace, all they do is accuse others they wish to destroy in the name of peace. They claim they are looking after the interests of their people. You know as well as I do that this is not the truth. Yes, the world would respect this principle if it was genuinely applied. It's not about power but it is about right and wrong."
When Benn asked if the conflict was about oil, Hussein was quick to agree and to blame Israel--which he referred to as "the Zionist entity"--as a factor in U.S. hostility against Iraq. "It seems that the authorities in the U.S. are motivated by aggression that has been evident for more than a decade against the region," he said. The first factor is the role of those influential people in the decision taken by the president of the United States based on sympathy with the Zionist entity that was created at the expense of Palestine and its people and their humanity."
"These people," said Hussein, apparently referring to Jews, "force the hand of the American administration by claiming that the Arabs pose a danger to Israel, without remembering their obligation to God and how the Palestinian people were driven out of their homeland. . . . Those people and others have been telling the various U.S. administrations, especially the current one, that if you want to control the world you need to control the oil. Therefore the destruction of Iraq is a pre-requisite to controlling oil."
American hostility to Iraq, he said, is based on the Bush administration's "wish to control the world and spread its hegemony."
----
War: Been there, done that
By G.G. LaBelle
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030205-13983928.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In a park near the Tigris River, twin monumental sculptures - with swords crossing high overhead, gripped in fists said to be modeled on Saddam Hussein's hands - commemorate the long, bitter conflict that the Iraqi leader proclaimed the Qadissiya War.
Saddam, who often identifies his deeds with the epic past, took the name from a famous 7th century victory of Arab Muslims over a Persian army. But Saddam's Qadissiya - the 1980-88 war against Iran, the Persia of today - had no such decisive outcome.
It was bloody and ruinous, undermining Iraq's once-vibrant economy and setting the country on a path of conflict with former friends, both in the region and in faraway Washington.
Begun with an Iraqi thrust into Iran in September 1980, the war dragged on for eight years before sputtering out in stalemate. Popular support, grounded in ancient enmity, withered as tens of thousands of coffins arrived from the battlefields.
Oil earnings that had built a modern Iraq were shunted into armaments. After the conflict ended, huge war debts to then-allies such as Kuwait helped set the stage for Iraq's invasion of its smaller neighbor - and for the economic devastation suffered by the Iraqi people to this day.
Ali Abdel Amir, a reserve officer in the war, said the conflict aggravated the split between Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority and the Sunni Muslims who dominate politics. Iran is predominantly Shi'ite.
Saddam tried to silence anger at the mounting death toll by giving free cars and houses to families who lost fathers, sons and brothers. But such gestures did little to quell anti-war feeling.
"How can a man be silent before this tragedy?" asked Mr. Abdel Amir, who now lives in Jordan and is editor of Al-Massala magazine, published by Iraqi writers in exile.
More than 1 million people died on both sides of the conflict. In Baghdad, bitterness grew as more and more black banners were draped across house fronts to mourn the war dead. One devastating banner recorded a family's loss of "the eighth and last son" to the conflict.
At the war's start, some Iraqi officials promised victory in a month. Iran was thought to be in chaos just a year after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution and the purges to rid the army of the last vestiges of the Shah of Iran's rule.
Iraq, by contrast, was flush with oil money. It had built the best universities and hospitals in the Arab world. Its arts were thriving. Older parts of Baghdad had been torn down and replaced by elevated highways and modern apartment buildings with the occasional Moorish touch - all put up by Japanese, South Korean and European contractors reaping profits from the 1970s oil boom.
The ostensible causes of the war were border disputes that went back centuries, especially where to draw the border in the Shatt al-Arab, the estuary that divides the countries in the south and is Iraq's only outlet to the sea.
Saddam was also fighting against Iran's pledge to spread Islamic revolution across the world. His Ba'ath party prided itself on its secularism. He won backing from nervous monarchies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - and from the United States, whose diplomats had been held hostage by Iranian radicals for 444 days inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Saddam also envisioned a greater role for himself in the Arab world after Egypt, the traditional regional power, had been isolated for its 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
To ensure popular backing for the war, Iraq's government used its oil earnings to flood the country with European luxury goods unknown to most Iraqis. One woman recalls that her first taste of Camembert cheese came at the start of the Iran-Iraq war.
Saddam underestimated the Iranian resistance, typified by young zealots pouring across mine fields to attack Iraqi troops who had occupied their land. There would be no quick victory.
"After three or four months, even the leaders of troops in the field realized the war may take longer," said Mr. Abdel Amir, the reserve officer.
Before long the homefront was suffering too, since even oil-rich Iraq could not afford both guns and butter. Funds for development and imported Western goods were slashed. Civil service jobs were cut.
Mr. Abdel Amir recalled desertions increasing. "A few soldiers, then hundreds, then even thousands ran away from the battlefront," he said. Many were Shi'ites from the south who felt they had little stake in fighting for Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime.
In 1984, Iranian forces briefly advanced across the highway from Baghdad to Basra in southern Iraq. Basra, once a playground for Kuwaitis escaping their strict religious state, was blacked out at night, its main buildings protected by sandbags.
At a cavernous, back-alley Basra nightclub, a young Shi'ite drafted into the army was being given a last fling by friends. The reed-thin young man, perhaps 18 or 19, was in tears as a chubby Egyptian bar girl translated his problem: "He doesn't want to die."
The fears were not limited to the Shi'ites in the south. In Baghdad, a middle-aged professional explained in a whispered conversation how Saddam's regime was forcing men to go to the front as part of a popular militia.
"If I am an old man, even then they can tell me I have to go into the People's Army. I have to sign a paper saying it is of my own free will. I cannot explain that I am old or I have the only income for my family. I must sign; if I do not, then my family is finished."
With progress in the war faltering, Washington provided Iraq with intelligence and poured billions of dollars into arms and economic aid.
"Iraqis realized they needed a big and strong friend and they found that in the United States," said Mr. Abdel Amir.
For eight years, fierce campaigns did not move the front very deep into either country. Missiles rained on Iraqi and Iranian cities. Iran attacked ships in the Persian Gulf, and the United States was drawn deeper into the conflict, sending Navy warships to protect Kuwaiti tankers temporarily flying American flags.
On July 20, 1987, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 598 demanding a cease-fire. Iraq was agreeable, but Iran refused.
The demand of Ayatollah Khomeini for ending the war sounds familiar in 2003 - he wanted the ouster and trial of Saddam Hussein.
The battles raged on. Iraq's forces, which had used mustard gas on Iranian soldiers, used it on minority Kurds in Iraq who rebelled in the north in March 1988. Starting that April, Iraq began recapturing lands Iran had seized after driving Iraqi invaders from its own territory.
Iran was wearing down. Convinced by his generals that Iran could not win, Khomeini accepted Resolution 598 nearly a year after it was adopted.
The war officially ended under the U.N. cease-fire on Aug. 20, 1988. Neither side gained land. The only result was death and destruction.
In Iraq, weary soldiers returned from the front to find few jobs available. Saddam desperately needed money to pump up the economy and demanded that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia forgive debts incurred during the war.
When the answer was no, Saddam accused Kuwait of stealing Iraq's oil through wells drilled under the two countries' border. Summoning the past again - saying Kuwait was historically an Iraqi province - he invaded the country on Aug. 2, 1990.
That brought on the Gulf war in which the United States led an international coalition to drive its former ally from Kuwait. It brought U.N. sanctions limiting Iraq's oil income. The sanctions, the Security Council ruled, could not be ended until Iraq gave up its weapons of mass destruction.
Today, the United States is threatening a new war on Iraq, accusing Saddam of continuing to hide chemical and biological weapons. A dozen years after the Kuwaiti invasion, Iraq's 24 million people still are living under U.N. economic sanctions.
----
Saddam Dares U.S. to Prove Iraq Has Arms
By HAMZA HENDAWI
Associated Press Writer
Feb 5, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.N. inspectors revisited the main site of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program Wednesday, just hours before Secretary of State Colin Powell's appearance at the U.N. Security Council to offer evidence of Iraqi attempts to hide banned weapons.
Iraq says the United States' evidence is fabricated, and President Saddam Hussein, in a rare television interview broadcast Tuesday, said Washington's claims that Iraq has chemical, biological and nuclear weapons were a pretext to seize Iraq's oil fields.
He also said Iraq is willing to work with the inspectors to avert a war.
"If the intention (of inspections) is to confirm that Iraq is free of biological and chemical and nuclear weapons, then they can do so," he said in the interview with retired British lawmaker Tony Benn. "These weapons are not some aspirin pill someone can hide in his pocket. These are weapons of mass destruction, so it's simple to determine if Iraq has them or not."
On Tuesday, U.N. inspectors searching for those weapons found an empty chemical warhead during one of a dozen surprise inspections at the al-Taji ammunition depot, just north of Baghdad. It was the 17th empty chemical warhead found over the past month.
In remarks published Wednesday in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said the number of banned weapons found in Iraq "raises many questions, that remain open, and that may indicate that some things still exist. This can't be ruled out."
Back on the road Wednesday, the inspectors searched the storage facilities at the Al-Tuwaitha complex, the heart of Iraq's former nuclear program south of Baghdad. They also paid surprise visits to a food research center in Baghdad, a dairy company west of the capital and the Laser Institute at Baghdad University.
They also inspected the Al-Mutassem factory, which produces small rockets, and an unspecified site at the Al-Karama complex, which manufactures missile components and guidance systems, according to the Information Ministry.
The inspectors visited a company called Al-Noaman, for which no details were available except that it is run by the country's state agency in charge of military industries.
Visits to sites such as dairies and breweries aim to inspect how dual-use materials are being used.
In Saddam's interview, he rejected U.S. accusations that his country has a tie to al-Qaida, the terror network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
"If we had a relationship with al-Qaida, and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it," he said.
A British intelligence document, leaked to the British Broadcasting Corp., also said Saddam had no "current links" to al-Qaida.
The BBC said the Defense Intelligence Staff report alleged there had been contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida in the past, but that any "fledgling relationship foundered, due to mistrust and incompatible ideology," between the Islamic fundamentalist bin Laden and Saddam's secular Baath Party.
Responding to the report in Parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair asserted that Iraq does have some links with al-Qaida, but that they are not the basis of his support for possible military action.
Saddam's interview was taped in Baghdad on Sunday and broadcast around the world, presenting the Iraqi case before Powell's appearance before a skeptical Security Council.
The United States and Britain are trying to convince Russia, France, Germany, China - all permanent council members wielding veto power - and others of the need for quick military action if the Iraqis refuse to cooperate fully in the search for their alleged banned weapons.
On Tuesday, Blair failed to persuade French President Jacques Chirac that time was running out for further inspections. Chirac insisted the inspectors be given all the time they want to determine if Iraq is holding illegal weapons.
In hundreds of inspections since November, the U.N. arms controllers have yet to find a major violation of the U.N. resolutions barring Iraq from having chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The U.N. resolutions were adopted after Iraq's defeat by a U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War.
But the United States and Britain insist that Saddam has not complied and threaten to use force to disarm Iraq.
Tens of thousands of U.S. troops are massing in the Gulf and a third U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, has now moved within striking distance of Baghdad.
Poland's ambassador to Iraq and the head of the Polish Embassy section that has represented U.S. interests in Baghdad since the 1990s have been summoned to neighboring Jordan for consultations, Poland's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday. An Iraqi guard at the embassy said the diplomats left for Jordan early Wednesday.
The Security Council session falls only days before chief U.N. inspectors, Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei travel to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi officials about unresolved issues to facilitate inspections, including a U.N. plan to use American U-2 reconnaissance planes to overfly Iraq.
In New York, Blix appealed to Iraq to mend its ways, warning that it is "five minutes to midnight" and pleading with Baghdad to show that it is actively cooperating during his visit this weekend by producing evidence about its banned weapons programs.
"I don't think that the end is there - that a date has been set for an armed action," Blix said. "But I think that we're moving closer and closer to it, and therefore it seems to me that the Iraqi leadership must be well aware of that."
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Say Arafat Must Pay $10 Million
Reuters;
World In Brief
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Washington Post; Page A20
JERUSALEM -- An Israeli court has ordered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to pay more than $10 million in damages to Israel's main bus company for losses caused by Palestinian suicide bombings, a spokesman said.
Arafat, who has denied Israeli accusations of responsibility for attacks during the 28-month Palestinian uprising, presented no defense in the civil lawsuit, and it was unclear how he could be forced to pay the damage award.
-------- mideast
Kuwait's Northern Half Is Set Aside for Military
Security Measures Also Planned as War Looms
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26336-2003Feb4?language=printer
KUWAIT CITY, Feb. 4 -- Kuwait announced plans tonight to close off the northern half of the country in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq, with the new restrictions set to take effect Feb. 15, the day heightened security measures are implemented in the rest of the nation.
The restrictions were described as a step to protect Kuwaiti citizens living in the area. The decision to make the sandy desert south of the Iraqi border a military reservation also clears the zone for the continued buildup of U.S. ground forces and, possibly, for staging an attack on Iraq.
The chief Defense Ministry spokesman, Col. Yusuf Mulla, said Kuwait had no choice but to place the area "under armed forces' control" to help the army train for defending the country and to aid the U.S. ground forces. Senior Kuwaiti officials said in recent days that U.S. personnel here are expected to number at least 80,000 by next week.
The area will be used for "training and mass exercises, including with allied forces," said one official.
Most of northern Kuwait is a sparsely populated desert, with little civilian population. One-quarter of the country -- the north and northwest -- was already closed off by the government last fall so U.S. troops could use it exclusively.
The new order effectively doubles the amount of Kuwait's land available solely for military use. Those who live in the restricted zone will be allowed to remain in their homes, Mulla said, but will be required to register with the authorities and obtain special identification to travel from the area.
The announcement was the latest indication of war planning in this tiny emirate, which was invaded by Iraq in 1990 and has been a staunch U.S. ally since the United States led a coalition that liberated Kuwait from the Iraqis in 1991. In recent days, the Kuwaiti government has stepped up security in Kuwait City and other towns, sending 4,000 armed police and national guardsmen into the streets, setting up new checkpoints and checking documents.
More security measures are planned to take effect along with the new military zone. In the event of war, senior government officials have said in recent interviews they plan to implement their own version of martial law, allowing them to detain suspects indefinitely, censor the media and close off other areas of the country as needed.
The officials have said they fear sabotage or military retaliation by Iraq if Kuwait is used to launch a U.S.-led attack. The recent shooting by an alleged al Qaeda sympathizer of two U.S. civilian military contractors, one of whom was killed , has also raised concerns about the safety of the estimated 8,000 Americans living here.
The Kuwaiti military is not planning to participate in any offensive operation against Iraq, but will focus on protecting its borders and responding to any attacks inside the country. The military, which has undergone an extensive rearmament and rebuilding program since being destroyed during the Iraqi invasion, is also helping to guard U.S. facilities and troop movements.
Mulla said advance notice of the military restrictions was given not only because of the possible timing of a U.S. military operation but also to allow the many Kuwaiti families who are camping out in the desert during a school holiday to leave. "We don't want to ruin their vacation," he said.
----
U.S. Effort to Link Terrorists To Iraq Focuses on Jordanian
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 5, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26604-2003Feb4?language=printer
Abu Musab Zarqawi, a 36-year-old, Jordanian-born Palestinian terrorist, has become the focus of the Bush administration's allegations of a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presents his case against Saddam Hussein before the United Nations Security Council this morning, "one small section on terrorists" will contain intelligence on links between the Iraqi leader and terrorists and will feature Zarqawi, according to a senior administration official.
On Oct. 20, 2002, President Bush gave a major speech in Cincinnati outlining the Iraqi threat. His example of high-level contacts between Iraqi and al Qaeda leaders was "one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks." He was referring to Zarqawi, according to background information provided by White House officials.
U.S. intelligence officials have said up to now that they had no direct evidence that Zarqawi met with Iraqi leaders, but last October when that question was raised, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that it was "unrealistic" to assume that Iraqi authorities did not know of Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad.
In his State of the Union speech last month, Bush said "evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody" reveals that "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda." That reference, too, was to Zarqawi, officials said.
Last Thursday, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage was asked for evidence "about direct connections between Saddam and al Qaeda." He replied by describing a person "resident in Baghdad" who "apparently orchestrated" the killing of Laurence Foley, a U.S. diplomat who was shot in Amman, Jordan, on Oct. 28. That, too, was a reference to Zarqawi.
On Dec. 3, two suspects in the Foley killing were arrested by Jordanian police. Jordanian officials said the two, one a Jordanian and the other a Libyan, confessed to killing Foley and belonging to al Qaeda. According to a senior administration official, the two said they were "followers" of Zarqawi. Jordanian sources told reporters in Amman that the two said Zarqawi supplied them with guns, explosives and money to carry out attacks on embassies and foreign diplomats.
Before the senators, Armitage implied that Saddam through Zarqawi was involved in the Foley killing by talking about "our belief that if Saddam Hussein can pass them [weapons of mass destruction] to people who will do us ill without being caught, he will do it."
Armitage added that Zarqawi "will be part of the information that Secretary Powell is going to impart in some more detail."
Zarqawi "is a significant bad guy in the al Qaeda network," a senior intelligence official said recently. But the Jordanian appears to be the only individual named so far to make the link to Iraq after more than a year of major investigations in which "a good deal of attention has been paid to what extent a connection may exist between al Qaeda and Iraq," another administration official said yesterday.
Zarqawi, who was trained in Afghanistan when the fight was still against the Russians, emerged in 1999 when he was linked to a foiled attempt by al Qaeda to bomb the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman as part of a millennium bombing plot. He was eventually convicted in absentia and placed on Jordan's most-wanted list.
In 2001 he reportedly was wounded in the leg in Afghanistan while fighting against U.S. and Northern Alliance forces and sought sanctuary in Iran. By that time, U.S. intelligence began describing him as an expert in chemical and biological weapons.
In March 2002, Israeli and U.S. intelligence sources described meetings in Lebanon at which al Qaeda leaders talked with representatives of the Islamic Resistance Movement and Hezbollah, two groups that carried out terrorist operations against Israel. Israeli sources have identified Zarqawi as an al Qaeda leader who was in Iran under the protection of Iranian security forces.
In June, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Iran of being "a haven for some terrorists leaving Afghanistan." U.S. officials cited Zarqawi as an example of the people Rumsfeld said were being permitted to stay in Iran.
In August 2002, Jordan learned that Zarqawi was in Baghdad, where his wounded leg was amputated and replaced with an artificial one, according to U.S. intelligence sources. When Jordan asked Baghdad to turn Zarqawi over as a wanted criminal, the al Qaeda leader left the country, the official said. U.S. intelligence does not know where he went, sources said.
Since that time, Zarqawi has been identified by Kurds in Northern Iraq as someone who had met with the Ansar el-Islam terrorist groups in that area that were developing biological weapons such as ricin. In January, after the arrests in London of suspected terrorists also turned up traces of ricin, investigators said there appeared to be links to Zarqawi.
The chief of the German Federal Intelligence Service's terrorism section in November described Zarqawi as "a man to take note of if it concerns Germany and Europe."
--------
Turkey Declares Intention to Back U.S. War Plans
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/international/middleeast/05cnd-turkey.html
ISTANBUL, Feb. 5 - Turkey's prime minister said today that his government would ask parliament later this month to allow American troops to use the country in event of a war with Iraq, marking the first time the government has publicly declared its intentions to back American war plans.
The prime minister, Abdullah Gul, told a gathering of Turkish reporters that his government had all but given up on diplomatic efforts to disarm Iraq and had decided to join the United States in its plans to confront Iraq by military means, according to a transcript of the meeting.
"We believe that in line with our national interests, we should act together with our strategic ally, the United States," Mr. Gul told the reporters during a meeting in the Turkish capital of Ankara. "It was a very hard decision, we had sleepless nights, but there was nothing left to be done for a peaceful solution."
Mr. Gul said he would ask parliament on Feb. 18 to pass a resolution granting the Turkish government broad authority to allow American troops to use bases in the country to attack Iraq. Mr. Gul spoke on the eve of a parliamentary vote on whether to allow American engineers to begin refurbishing Turkish bases for possible use by American troops.
A senior member of Mr. Gul's Justice and Development Party, which maintains a comfortable majority in the 547-seat national assembly, said they were confident that both resolutions would pass without difficulty. Turkish public opinion is running overwhelmingly against the country's involvement in a war with Iraq, but Turkish leaders said they believe the country would support the decision.
"We have spoken to our party members, and we don't expect any problems," a senior member of the Justice and Development Party said.
Assuming Mr. Gul has the votes to approve the resolutions, Mr. Gul's statements today appear to set the stage for the arrival of thousands of American troops for a possible military campaign against Iraq. The American government has been pressing Turkey's leaders for months to grant to allow tens of thousands of American troops to use bases in Turkey, which shares a 150-mile-long frontier with Iraq.
American military commanders want to use Turkey to launch an attack into northern Iraq, arguing that such a campaign, by occupying Iraqi forces in the region, would speed an American victory in the south.
In recent days, American officials have expressed impatience with the Turkish government, and they said they were on the verge of cutting Turkey out of their plans. Mr. Gul's statements came after a diplomatic blitz by American officials this week; on Tuesday, Mr. Gul spoke at length by telephone with Vice President Dick Cheney.
As a secular Muslim democracy, a member of NATO, and Iraq's neighbor, Turkey occupies a unique place in the crisis over Iraq. Turkish leaders have privately told American officials that they had long wanted to support the United States, and that they ultimately would, but that they were restrained by Turkish popular revulsion against a war.
Turkish leaders and the Turkish people have said that they did not want to repeat of the experience of the Gulf War in 1991, when Turkey was flooded with more than a half million Iraqi refugees and harmed a collapse of trade along the Iraqi border.
Still, opposition to the war has been mostly muted here. There have been relatively few public demonstrations, and even fewer that have drawn sizable crowds. Many Turks say they would like nothing more than to see Saddam Hussein ousted from Iraq, and in recent days, there was a growing chorus among Turkish journalists and business leaders that Turkey was running the risk of seriously damaging its half-century-old alliance with the United States.
"War is bad," said Ilnur Cevik, editor of the Turkish Daily News wrote in a column this week. "War is cruel. Yet when it is at your doorstep and it becomes inevitable, you have to take the necessary steps to ride out the ordeal with minimum damage."
-------- nato
Top Pentagon adviser says France no longer U.S. ally
By Martin Walker
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030205-93650994.htm
France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance" the head of the Pentagon's top advisory board said in Washington yesterday.
Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board, condemned French and German policy on Iraq in the strongest terms at a public seminar organized by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials.
Mr. Perle is not an official of the Bush administration. But his position as the Pentagon's senior civilian adviser gives his harsh remarks a quasi-official character.
While dismissing Germany's refusal to support military action against Iraq as an aberration by "a discredited chancellor," Mr. Perle warned that France's attitude was more dangerous and more serious.
"France is no longer the ally it once was," Mr. Perle said. He went on to accuse French President Jacques Chirac of believing "deep in his soul that Saddam Hussein is preferable to any likely successor."
France has insisted it will oppose any military action against Iraq without a second resolution by the U.N. Security Council, where it holds veto power.
"It is now reasonable to ask whether the United States should now or on any other occasion subordinate vital national interests to a show of hands by nations who do not share our interests," Mr. Perle said.
"I have long thought that there were forces in France intent on reducing the American role in the world. That is more troubling than the stance of a German chancellor, who has been largely rejected by his own people," Mr. Perle said, referring to the sharp electoral defeat suffered by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's party in state elections Sunday.
-------- spies
Pair say data in spy case is crucial
By Arlo Wagner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030205-73181870.htm
An Air Force general and a CIA official testified yesterday that top-secret information reportedly accessed by espionage suspect Brian Patrick Regan would be invaluable to "our adversaries" in Iraq, Iran and China.
Both Maj. Gen. David Deptula and Dennis D. Fitzgerald, a CIA official for more than 25 years, referred to top-secret documents and photographs as they testified in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.
"One of the reasons we have accrued a record of flying 200-plus sorties [over Iraq] without a loss has to do with keeping information that was in possession of the defendant away from the adversary," said Gen. Deptula, who has been in charge of surveillance flights in the no-fly zone over Iraq since he planned the air attacks for the Gulf war 12 years ago.
America's satellites can show drug operations, military installations, surface-to-air missiles, clues of terrorists and even natural disasters such as earthquakes, said Mr. Fitzgerald, an expert on the satellite system and deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly.
Both officials said they had no knowledge of the involvement of Sgt. Regan, a retired Air Force master sergeant. They testified instead about the necessity for the top-secret materials, which were displayed on television screens only for the jury and court officials.
"I'm not allowed to read Number Four aloud," said defense attorney Jonathan Shapiro as he projected a document for Gen. Deptula to identify.
Previous witnesses testified that the materials, which were admitted as evidence, were found on the hard drives of Sgt. Regan's Gateway and Toshiba computers.
Sgt. Regan was cleared for top-secret information when he was assigned in 1998 by the Air Force to the National Reconnaissance Office. He retired in 2000 and went to work for TRW Inc., which became a part of Northrop Grumman, and returned to a similar job at National Reconnaissance.
The FBI had him under surveillance for several months before he was arrested Aug. 23, 2001, at Washington Dulles International Airport. Witnesses said he had notes about two Iraqi geo-coordinates in his possession and had an airline ticket to Switzerland.
Gen. Deptula said the satellite visions "are a veritable blueprint of the Iraqi air-defense system."
Questioned by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Haynes, Gen. Deptula said Iraqi President "Saddam Hussein has offered a reward to ... anyone who shoots down a coalition aircraft."
American and coalition pilots' lives are being saved by satellite and other surveillance information about Iraqi military equipment and sites, he said.
"I would be surprised if the adversary is fully aware of the capability of the system," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "If they know they are vulnerable to detection that way, they would make changes to avoid detection."
Cross-examined by Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Fitzgerald acknowledged that much information is publicized, such as the launching of spy satellites. He also agreed that amateur astronomers with telescopes around the world spot and watch the satellites.
Sgt. Regan is on trial on three counts of attempted espionage and one count of illegally gathering national security information. Sgt. Regan, 40, a father of four, lived in Bowie. If convicted, he could be sentenced to death, the first such sentence since spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953.
-------- un
Powell Plays Tape of Iraqi Officers Discussing Arms
Reuters
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
By Arshad Mohammed
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29400-2003Feb5?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday played what he said was an audio tape of Iraqi officers discussing the possibility that they had "forbidden" ammunition and "modified" vehicles and what to say if U.N. weapons inspectors found them.
In a presentation that included U.S. intelligence from spy satellites, telephone intercepts and Iraqi defectors, Powell argued that Iraq had concealed equipment from its suspected weapons programs to flout the U.N. inspectors searching the country for evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear arms.
He argued that Iraq is in "further material breach" of U.N. resolutions demanding that it disarm and he said it was now in danger of suffering "serious consequences," diplomatic code for the possibility of a U.S.-led military invasion.
Speaking with U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet sitting behind him, Powell's presentation was designed to persuade a skeptical Security Council and world opinion that U.N. weapons inspectors cannot disarm Iraq and that war may be the only resort.
As Powell spoke, another country that Washington accuses of pursuing a weapons of mass destruction program, North Korea, sounded a defiant note on plans to bring its four-month-old impasse with Washington over its nuclear intentions to the U.N. Security Council, threatening to ignore its findings.
'WE EVACUATED EVERYTHING'
"We have this modified vehicle ... What do we say if one of them sees it?" says an Iraqi colonel in one audiotape.
"You didn't get a modified ... you don't have a modified," replies an incredulous general. "I'll come to see you in the morning. I'm worried. You all have something left."
"We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left," the junior officer replies.
"This effort to hide things from the inspectors is not one or two isolated events, quite the contrary. This is part and parcel of a policy of evasion and deception that goes back 12 years, a policy set at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime," Powell said.
"I believe that Iraq is now in further material breach of its obligations," he later added. "I believe this conclusion is irrefutable and undeniable. Iraq has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences."
While none of the U.N. Security Council's members believe Iraq has offered its unstinting cooperation to the U.N. weapons inspectors searching the country for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, many believe they deserve more time.
That view clashes with President Bush's stand that Baghdad has weeks, not months, to bow to the will of the United Nations and give up its suspected arms or face a U.S.-led military campaign.
'CHEAP SATELLITE PICTURES'
Iraq, which denies it has such weapons, blasted Powell's address in advance through government newspaper al-Jumhouriya, which said: "What Powell is going to present will be cheap satellite pictures and vague recorded conversations."
There was no sign from the major powers most skeptical of using force -- France and Germany -- that they were shifting their positions ahead of Powell's remarks.
"We will not take part in any military action," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who chaired the Security Council meeting, told German reporters before Powell spoke.
Saying France would listen to Powell carefully, French European Affairs Minister Noelle Lenoir emphasized allowing the inspectors to work. "It will be up to the inspectors to take into account any new elements and draw the consequences by going, if necessary, to verify them on the ground," Lenoir told the National Assembly in Paris.
The U.S. military continued to build up its forces this week as the Pentagon deployed the F-117A Stealth fighters that bombed Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War and the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier set sail toward the Middle East.
In another sign the region is bracing for war, Kuwait said it would close the northern half of the country bordering Iraq from Feb. 15 to step up training to defend against any attack and would close its airspace if war broke out.
Russia, China and France, which have veto power in the council, along with a majority of other council members, are still jittery about a war that might spark additional acts of terrorism and popular uprisings throughout the Middle East.
While Powell has played down expectations for his speech, saying earlier this week he would not present a "smoking gun," or incontrovertible proof, U.S. officials clearly hope he may sway public opinion much as former U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson did by displaying aerial photos of Soviet missiles at the United Nations during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
INTERNATIONAL LEGITIMACY
Depending on the evidence he presents, nations such as France, Russia and China will have to decide whether to back a resolution Britain is pushing to authorize the use of force and thereby give any U.S.-led invasion international legitimacy.
Iraqi officials said U.N. arms inspectors, who returned to Iraq in November after a four-year absence, visited at least nine more sites in Iraq on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia said it feared a U.S.-led war would transform Iraq into another Afghanistan with rival ethnic and religious factions fighting for power and international aide agencies predicted a war would send thousands of refugees flooding into Iran, Turkey and Jordan and create a humanitarian crisis among civilians already suffering malnourishment and disease.
"We saw what has happened in Lebanon during the civil war and all the terrorist networks that were entrenched in Lebanon. The situation would be multiplied in Iraq," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said, referring the 1975-90 civil war during which Islamist groups bombed U.S. and Western targets.
International aid agencies said a war would send thousands of refugees flooding into Iran, Turkey and Jordan and create a humanitarian crisis among civilians already suffering malnourishment and disease.
----
US claim dismissed by Blix
Dan Plesch in New York
Wednesday February 5, 2003
The UK Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,889135,00.html
The chief UN weapons inspector yesterday dismissed what has been billed as a central claim of the speech the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, will make today to the UN security council.
Hans Blix said there was no evidence of mobile biological weapons laboratories or of Iraq trying to foil inspectors by moving equipment before his teams arrived.
In a series of leaks or previews, the state department has said Mr Powell will allege that Iraq moved mobile biological weapons laboratories ahead of an inspection. Dr Blix said he had already inspected two alleged mobile labs and found nothing: "Two food-testing trucks have been inspected and nothing has been found."
Dr Blix said that the problem of bio-weapons laboratories on trucks had been around for a while and that he had received tips from the US that led him to inspect trucks in Iraq. The Iraqis claimed that the trucks were used to inspect the quality of food production.
He also contested the theory that the Iraqis knew in advance what sites were to be inspected. He added that they expected to be bugged "by several nations" and took great care not to say anything Iraqis could overhear.
He said he assumed the US secretary of state would not be indicating sites that the inspectors should visit that he had not told them about. "It is more likely to be based upon satellite imagery and upon intercepts of telephone conversations or knowledge about Iraqi procurement of technical material or chemicals," he said.
Dr Blix is travelling to Baghdad for further meetings with Iraqi officials before reporting to the security council on February 14 and March 1.
He said the choice for the UN was between continued containment and invasion. Both strategies had problems, but an invasion required 250,000 troops and over $100bn while for containment the numbers were 250 inspectors and $80m.
----
China Calls on U.N. to Give Inspectors More Time
Reuters
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29404-2003Feb5?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - China's foreign minister told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that it should allow U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq to carry on with their work.
"We should respect the views of the two (U.N. inspection) agencies and support the continuation of their work," Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan told the 15-nation body after hearing Secretary of State Colin Powell present America's case that Iraq has illegal weapons programs and is concealing them from the inspectors.
The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency "have been working very hard (and) it is their view that now they are not in a position to draw conclusions," he said.
In a presentation that included U.S. intelligence from spy satellites, telephone intercepts and Iraqi defectors, Powell argued that Iraq had concealed equipment from its suspected weapons programs to flout the inspectors searching the country for evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear arms banned by Security Council resolutions.
----
U.N. Files Charges For Timor Abuses
Associated Press World In Brief
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Washington Post; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26807-2003Feb4?language=printer
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- The United Nations indicted 32 people, including 15 Indonesian soldiers, on allegations that they tortured and killed East Timorese during the country's bloody split from Indonesia in 1999.
The U.N. Special Crimes Unit accused them of crimes against humanity for taking part in the violence. Four officers and Joao Tavares, the head of a pro-Indonesian umbrella militia group, were among those charged for crimes allegedly committed at the time of a U.N.-sponsored independence referendum in 1999.
"This is the most important [indictment] filed yet," said Eric MacDonald, a prosecutor with the serious crimes unit. "You have the leader of all the militias in East Timor being charged and a military commander indicted. These are not minor offenders."
----
Speech Seen as Strong but Unlikely to Sway Skeptics
February 5, 2003
BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/international/06REACT.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation on Iraq to the Security Council today produced no smoking gun, but considerable and compelling smoke, in the view of some analysts and others who follow Iraq and arms issues.
Whether it ultimately would help budge the most important members of Mr. Powell's audience today - France, Russia and China, all permanent members and veto-holders on the council, and all skeptical up to now of the use of force - remained unclear, however.
Immediately afterward, France called for a doubling or tripling of United Nations inspectors in Iraq, though Mr. Powell had labored to depict inspections as a pointless deferral of urgently needed action. China said inspections should be pursued so long as there was the "slightest hope" of avoiding war. Russia, too, called for more inspections. Britain was the sole permanent member to strongly endorse the American position.
Richard W. Murphy, who was assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs in the Reagan administration, called Mr. Powell's evidence "strong and persuasive," but predicted that those members of the Security Council who are skeptical of military action against Iraq "will not move to support us on the basis of today's session."
He said he thought that if those skeptics shifted at all, it would be after Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the United Nations agency that monitors nuclear programs, next address the Security Council on Feb. 14.
But Mr. Murphy said Mr. Powell's impact at home should be strong.
"I believe he will have carried his American audience further toward supporting military action versus Iraq,"he said.
James Phillips, a resident fellow at the Heritage Foundation, agreed. "I thought it was a very strong, persuasive speech, a damning indictment," he said. "But it remains to be seen," added Mr. Phillips, who specializes in the Middle East and terrorism, "whether the Security Council will follow through with a conviction" in the form of a new resolution to authorize use of force.
Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that while he thought Mr. Powell had made a "fairly convincing case of Iraqi misbehavior," many people had already made up their minds against war. "Some people are never going to be convinced," he said.
In the Arab world, he suggested, reaction would be colored by a "perception that the United States has an outrageous double standard - that Israel is just as aggressive as Iraq, that it has more prohibited weapons than Iraq, but that the U.S. not only doesn't attack Israel but gives it billions in aid."
Rick Barton, a former deputy high commissioner for refugees at the United Nations, said of Mr. Powell's presentation, "the evidence is fresh, and it does strengthen the argument" against Iraq. But as a specialist in the reconstruction of countries after conflicts - he is now working on a study about Iraq's future - Mr. Barton suggested that Mr. Powell could have done more to "capture the imagination of people who have not made up their minds."
This could have been done, he said, if Mr. Powell had argued strongly that a change of regimes in Baghdad could bring long-term benefits to the Iraqi people, and to their region.
"It does leave people wondering about the sincerity of the U.S. commitment to change," Mr. Barton said. It leaves the "U.S. posture being more bombastic and more militaristic," he said, "a real concern to key allies, and clearly to many people in the Arab world who are probably sympathetic to U.S. ideals."
Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a senior aide to Yasir Arafat, told Reuters that the Powell speech launched "a new phase for U.S. control over the world." He also questioned Powell's interpretation of evidence.
But the quality of the evidence, and particularly the audiotapes of what Mr. Powell described as Iraqi officers discussing the concealment of banned weapons, was among the more compelling aspects of the speech, several analysts said.
"You realize how much of an almost everyday occurrence it is for these guys to deal with chemical weapons," said Mr. Phillips. "It's part of their standard operating procedure, which is chilling."
Particularly striking, Mr. Phillips said, was evidence on purported activities of al Qaeda in Iraq and the activities there of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a man Mr. Powell called a "collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenant."
Mr. Alterman said that "the evidence that the Iraqis are trying not to comply but rather to sanitize things in advance of inspections" was a clear "attack on French logic" about the importance of continuing inspections.
Barthelemy Courmont, an analyst with the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris, said that the presentation was "very strong" in public relations terms. But while the evidence appeared damning, he said, listeners had to take it on Powell's word that the activities depicted were in fact illicit.
"These are damning proofs for activities whose nature is not known," Mr. Courmont told Reuters. "Just because there are trucks around a site doesn't mean they're transporting warheads."
Mr. Murphy, who was an ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia, and others suggested that the secretary of state's most telling point to the skeptics might have been his warning - one made previously by President George W. Bush - that the Security Council risked irrelevance if it permitted Iraq to flout its resolutions.
"That was really the heart of what he was talking about" Mr. Alterman said.
The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, said after an early-morning preview of Mr. Powell's presentation at the White House that he was unsure the Security Council would be won over. But he said that he was persuaded.
He told reporters as he left the White House, "If I had this evidence, before a jury that was an unbiased jury, I could get a conviction."
-------- us
Seven more US warships en route to the Gulf
February 5 2003
AP
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/04/1044318609353.html
Seven US warships passed through the Suez Canal today heading to the Gulf to join the US military buildup in preparation for a possible attack on Iraq.
The seven amphibious ships, based in Norfolk, Virginia, carry more than 4,750 sailors and 7,000 Marines from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. They are the USS Kearsarge, Bataan, Saipan, Ponce, Gunston Hall, Ashland and Portland.
In Washington, defence officials said yesterday that the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the Navy's newest Nimitz-class carriers with more than 5,000 sailors and naval aviators aboard, had re-entered the Arabian Sea over the weekend.
The Lincoln joined two other carriers, the USS Constellation and the USS Harry S. Truman, and brought the number of American forces in the Gulf region close to 100,000. The seven amphibious ships will help push the figure further toward the approximately 180,000 forces expected within a few weeks.
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The Coast Guard Belongs at Home
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Washington Post; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26896-2003Feb4?language=printer
The Bush administration's decision to send eight Coast Guard patrol ships to the Persian Gulf [news story, Jan. 30] comes at the expense of our security at home.
The 110-foot Island Class patrol ship is the workhorse of the Coast Guard, yet only 35 were stationed on the East Coast -- including Puerto Rico -- before eight were sent to the Middle East. The Coast Guard has only 49 Island Class ships in its fleet.
At a time when the United States is under threat of terrorist attack and is being inundated by illegal immigrants and illegal drugs, it seems foolhardy to reduce by nearly 25 percent the Coast Guard's capabilities on the East Coast with this class of vessel.
Because the deployment of these assets is likely to be protracted and the lead time for ship construction is significant, we can expect that for at least the rest of 2003 the East Coast will be underserved by the Coast Guard just when we urgently need our coastal waters protected. Calling up additional reserves to "fill the gap," as the Coast Guard is considering, would not provide a substitute, as it is the vessels that are in short supply.
The Coast Guard is now properly part of the new Department of Homeland Security. We need it in our home waters to protect us.
STUART MACKIERNAN
McLean
----
Command center not ready for war, Air Force reports
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030205-24379510.htm
A state-of-the-art command center in the Persian Gulf is beset by "significant confusion" and not ready to conduct an air war against Iraq, a confidential Air Force report said over the summer.
"There is significant confusion about roles, responsibilities and chain of command throughout key areas within the [Combined Air Operation Center]," the report said of the 1-year-old center. "It is difficult for the operators to know who to take direction from and who they talk to to get things done."
The report added, "The organization is not currently poised to smoothly transition to a MTW." MTW is a major theater war, such as the one planned against Iraq.
Gen. John Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, ordered the report after problems arose in coordinating air operations over Afghanistan from the CAOC at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Gen. Jumper's orders for the investigative team were to determine what the CAOC needed in the way of personnel and organization to run a much larger war.
The thick report compiled by a panel of senior officers does not bode well for the CAOC's ability to direct complex air operations against Iraq involving hundreds of Air Force, Navy and coalition aircraft in synchronized attacks. It said the center is kept busy by various operations.
"The differing dynamics of these operations have led to a somewhat ad hoc organization optimized for none, and not well suited to expand to an MTW-size conflict," the report said.
Various staffs, it said, "are all mixed into one operation, creating unclear lines of command authority and supervisory responsibilities."
Saudi Arabia has given the Bush administration permission to use the Prince Sultan center to command air operations. The overall war would be commanded from a new post in Qatar. The air campaign would be a major war component, and its success could determine whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein falls quickly.
"There are concerns that the current confusion with authority will impact decision timelines," the officers wrote to Gen. Jumper and other top Air Force generals.
"During a major conflict with more targets, the need for clear lines of command will be even more imperative," said the "official use only" report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. ABC News reported on portions of the report Jan. 23.
The general approved the report in July and ordered a continued investigation. "I expect strong focus across the Air Force in support of their continued efforts," the general said in a signed memorandum.
An Air Force spokesman yesterday said Gen. Jumper is considering the team's recommended actions.
The panel also found that intelligence reports were "excessively distributed" within the Combined Air Operations Center. This practice, it said, is "hindering coordination and unity of effort during execution. There is no single coordinator ..."
Finding a cultural problem within the Air Force hierarchy, the report also said that the service's "corporate structure" has the wrong view of the air command attached to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which oversees operations in the Gulf region.
The corporate Air Force does not view the air command, located at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., as primarily war fighters, resulting in sporadic manning schedules that rely on temporary personnel. "This culture has led to lessons relearned continuously in the staff," the report said.
"Manpower is just one example of how we have not been able to adequately provide all the resources [Central Command] needs to do its job as a warfighting command."
----
General accused of abuse of office
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 5, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030205-18899032.htm
Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who would command a U.S.-led war in Iraq, is under investigation over accusations of abuses of his office relating to his wife, defense officials said yesterday.
The Defense Department declined to give details. But officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said the Office of the Inspector General has been looking into charges that Gen. Franks allowed his wife, Cathy, to attend classified briefings, gave her a military bodyguard to which she was not entitled, and may not have properly reimbursed the government for all of her travel when she accompanied him on official trips.
The charges were not expected to derail Gen. Franks' career, and it was not clear what, if any, disciplinary action might follow, if they proved true.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a statement praising Gen. Franks' performance as a soldier and commander and pointing out his importance in the war on terror and any upcoming campaign.
"Investigations such as this are not unusual and properly are required whenever the Office of the Inspector General is made aware of an allegation," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Without commenting on the merits of the investigation, which is not yet before me, I want to emphasize that General Franks has my full trust, respect and confidence."
Some questioned the appropriateness of Mr. Rumsfeld's comments, coming in the midst of the investigation from the man who would ultimately decide if any action needed to be taken.
"It's completely inappropriate," said Charles Gittins, a lawyer who frequently represents military clients.
Referring to the accusations, he said Mrs. Franks might have attended briefings, but it's unlikely that secrets were compromised.
"But for a general officer - he knows better," Mr. Gittins said of Gen. Franks.
"It's unheard of," said Eugene Fidell, a Washington expert on military issues. "Nobody thinks Mrs. Franks conveyed information to ... an unfriendly government, she's not on the telephone with al Qaeda. But it's the integrity of the system, and the appearance of it is certainly disturbing because a spouse doesn't have any business" to be present at such meetings.
Gen. Franks issued a brief statement that he was cooperating with the inquiry.
"It would not be appropriate to comment on the investigation until it is complete," the statement said.
Cautioning against drawing any conclusions from the charges, one Pentagon official said it may turn out that Mrs. Franks was assigned a bodyguard on the basis of some intelligence that indicated a possible threat to the family.
Mr. Fidell said others have had their careers destroyed for lesser offenses, but also noted that Gen. Franks is a valued figure.
"It's a time when we don't need to be executing skilled generals, skilled commanders," he said. "But many people who have been penalized, reprimanded, or otherwise ... because they lost a page in a classified publication, for example, will be watching this with interest and possibly" some malicious pleasure.
The 57-year-old Texas native is highly decorated for his service, including in Vietnam and the 1991 Persian Gulf war, with five Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts and two Distinguished Service Awards.
Mrs. Franks told the Tampa Tribune in November that her husband "felt it was important for me to travel with him and for people he meets - always the leaders of their countries - to see an American family."
----
Rumsfeld Defends Gen. Franks
Central Command Chief Probed by Inspector General
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 5, 2003; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26275-2003Feb4?language=printer
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday defended his strong support for his Middle East commander, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who is under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general. But Rumsfeld insisted that he has not prejudged the results of the inquiry, which is still underway.
"There isn't a chance in the world that it will have any possible interference with his role as the combatant commander in the Central Command," the U.S. military headquarters for Middle Eastern operations, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon press conference.
"I have discussed it with" Franks, Rumsfeld continued. "He just informed me that there was an inspector general case, and listed one or two of the allegations."
Officials with the office of the Defense Department's inspector general have been investigating since late last summer several allegations that Franks may have abused his office by improperly extending to his wife some of the perquisites of his office. They also have been investigating whether he may have violated security regulations by permitting her to listen to highly classified briefings.
The inspector general tentatively has concluded that there is evidence to support some of those allegations, defense sources said Monday.
A spokesman for Franks did not have any comment yesterday. On Monday Franks issued a brief statement confirming the existence of the inquiry but declined to comment on it.
As defense secretary, Rumsfeld is the official who must decide how to act upon the inspector general's finding. Rumsfeld said that he was speaking out on behalf of Franks because he felt that the leak disclosing the investigation was unfair to Franks.
"I think I did exactly the right thing," he said to reporters quizzing him about the legality of his statements.
Rumsfeld's support for Franks raised some eyebrows among specialists in military law.
"It troubles me," said David Sheldon, a Washington lawyer specializing in military law. "It appears that there is a massive prejudging going on in terms of outcome."
To avoid appearing to prejudge the matter, Eugene R. Fidell, another Washington lawyer, said, "circumspection is preferable."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
------- drug war
Afghans No. 1 in Opium
February 5, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/international/asia/05AFGH.html
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 4 - Afghanistan was the world's largest source of illicit opium in 2002, according to a United Nations report released on Monday, which estimates that opium revenues amounted to $1.2 billion in that country while the average daily wage was only $2 per day.
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, says this drug economy has been built up by two decades of internal conflict, and can only be dismantled by "the instruments of democracy, the rule of law and development."
The report calls for international support to the Afghan government in providing its farmers with viable alternatives to opium.
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Jurors Who Convicted Marijuana Grower Seek New Trial
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By DEAN E. MURPHY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/national/05POT.html
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 4 - In an unusual show of solidarity with the man they convicted last week, five jurors in the trial of a medicinal marijuana advocate issued a public apology to him today and demanded that the judge grant him a new trial.
The jurors said they had been unaware that the defendant, Ed Rosenthal, was growing marijuana for medicinal purposes, allowed since 1996 under California state law, when they convicted him on three federal counts of cultivation and conspiracy. He is to be sentenced in June and faces a minimum of five years in prison.
"I'm sorry doesn't begin to cover it," said one of the jurors, Marney Craig, a property manager in Novato. "It's the most horrible mistake I've ever made in my entire life. And I don't think that I personally will ever recover from this."
The judge in the case, Judge Charles R. Breyer of Federal District Court, had barred Mr. Rosenthal's defense from mentioning the state law because he was indicted under federal law, which does not allow the growing of marijuana for any purpose.
When he was arrested last February, Mr. Rosenthal was cultivating starter plants in a warehouse that were to be distributed to seriously ill patients by medical marijuana clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mr. Rosenthal, who lives in Oakland, was acting in his official capacity as "an officer of the city" under Oakland's medical marijuana ordinance, Oakland officials said.
In a statement read outside the federal courthouse here, the five jurors, joined by an alternate, said they would not have voted to convict Mr. Rosenthal if they had been allowed to consider the California law. The group said they represented the views of at least two others who had served on the 12-member panel.
"In good faith, we as jury members allowed ourselves to be blindfolded to weigh the evidence before us," the statement said. "But in this trial, the prosecution was allowed to put all of the evidence and testimony on one of the scales, while the defense was not allowed to put its evidence and testimony on the other scale. Therefore we were not allowed as a jury to properly weigh the case."
One by one, the jurors stepped up to a lectern and apologized to Mr. Rosenthal, his wife, Jane Klein, and their daughter, Justine, who stood nearby.
"We as a jury truly were kept in the dark," said Charles Sackett of Sebastopol, who was the jury foreman. "I never want to see this happen again."
In a striking demonstration of how deep the divide remains between federal and California laws on medicinal uses of marijuana, the jurors were joined by the San Francisco district attorney and two members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Eight other states allow the sick and dying to smoke or grow marijuana with a doctor's recommendation.
"This is really a travesty," Matt Gonzalez, the board's president, said of the court's decision to exclude the state law from Mr. Rosenthal's defense. The jurors "have been violated by this court," Mr. Gonzalez said.
Before holding the news conference, the jurors attended a hearing during which the United States attorney's office asked that Mr. Rosenthal's bail be revoked. Judge Breyer, ruled, however, that Mr. Rosenthal was not likely to flee and let him remain free on $200,000 bond pending his sentencing.
Though none of the jurors made their feelings known to the judge at the hearing, where the five of them and the alternate sat at the front of the courtroom, Mr. Sackett said he was certain their presence helped persuade the judge to allow Mr. Rosenthal to remain free.
"We did not say a word," Mr. Sackett said. "We were not disrespectful. We just wanted to make a statement."
Mr. Rosenthal's lawyers said they had filed a motion to have the indictment against Mr. Rosenthal dismissed. If that fails, they said, they will file a motion for a new trial. If that should also fail, the lawyers said, they will appeal the verdict to the United States Court of Appeals.
--------
White House Report Stings Drug Agency on Abilities
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/politics/05DEA.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 - In an unusually harsh critique of an agency with a strong global reputation, the White House has questioned the ability of the Drug Enforcement Administration to stem the flow of narcotics and is threatening to give the agency its smallest budget increase in 15 years.
The agency "is unable to demonstrate progress in reducing the availability of illegal drugs in the United States," the Office of Management and Budget wrote in an assessment released this week as part of the budget plan. The agency lacks clear long-term strategies and goals, its managers are not held accountable for problems, and its financial controls do not comply with federal standards, the review found.
The findings raise uncertainties for the agency at a time when Washington expects it to enlarge its antidrug role. That is because the F.B.I. is moving 400 agents off drug cases to terrorism, and the drug agency is being asked to pick up the slack.
Officials at the agency and its parent, the Justice Department, said the agency was working to address many of the concerns in the report. They said the report was more a reflection of the agency's failure to communicate its successes than its ability to fight drug trafficking.
"It's not that we're doing things wrong or we've been ineffective," a spokesman, Will Glaspy, said. "It's more that we just need to do a better job of defining our accomplishments."
Officials at the agency pointed to a growing number of seizures for some types of drugs along with the reduced purity of street drugs as evidence of their success in squeezing suppliers out of business.
Critics say that drug purity has increased and that drugs have become easier to buy than ever before. President Bush acknowledged in his report on drug strategy for 2002 that use among young people was at "unacceptably high levels" and that "in recent years we have lost ground" in reducing illegal use.
The report on the agency was one of 234 that the Office of Management and Budget completed for 20 percent of the programs and agencies as it tries for the first time to assign standards and criteria to budget review.
Officials stressed that the criticisms were not uncommon. Like the agency, half the programs reviewed received overall ratings of "results not demonstrated."
Still, the severity of the report on the drug agency caught law enforcement officials off guard because of the agency's prominence, size and generally solid reputation in fighting trafficking. Unlike sister agencies like the F.B.I. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the drug agency has largely avoided major scandals and calls for reform from members of Congress. It has enjoyed generally strong support on Capitol Hill, and its former director, Asa Hutchinson, who left last week to join the Homeland Security Department, was popular among conservatives in Congress.
With that support, the agency has seen its budget more than double since 1995, according to the Justice Department. But in the White House budget released on Monday, the financing is to remain essentially flat at $1.56 billion.
Its growth of less than 1 percent is dwarfed by increases in financing at other law enforcement agencies of 10 percent or more. Mr. Glaspy said it represented the smallest increase for the agency since 1988.
The performance assessments for the drug agency and other bureaus "were one factor, but clearly not the only factor in funding decisions," said Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House on the budget.
The overarching concern in financing law enforcement, officials said, is the need to make counterterrorism the top priority. The Bush administration has sought to link drug use to the threat of terrorism, and other Justice Department drug enforcement programs received proposed increases of up to 10 percent in the budget. But the drug agency will be asked to scale back spending in areas like community enforcement even as it seeks to add agents on the street, officials said.
"When you're fighting a war against terrorism, there is not an infinite amount of money to go around," an official at the Justice Department said. "We are putting significant funds into the war against drugs. But we have to be realistic as to what we can afford."
Critics said the critique of the agency was long overdue and could start a debate about how the war on drugs is working.
"The emperor has no clothes," said Eric F. Sterling, the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Silver Spring, Md., and a specialist on drug enforcement. The White House report "should really shake up our national revelry with drug enforcement and generate a major re-evaluation of our antidrug efforts."
Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group in New York that promotes alternative policies, said he was "pleasantly surprised" by the findings.
"Typically," Mr. Nadelmann said, "the D.E.A. has gotten a pretty free ride. Nobody was really held to account for the issue of reducing overall drug use. But this suggests some measure of seriousness about actually putting in a set of real criteria."
-------- terrorism
FBI: Al - Qaida Still Main Terrorism Threat
February 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Threat.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Al-Qaida is weakened and scattered but remains the top threat to commit terrorist attacks in the United States, the FBI says in a first-of-its-kind national assessment for Congress.
The study also says there are other Muslim extremist groups engaged in a ``jihad,'' or holy war, against the United States and other Western countries. Some of them provide ``varying degrees of support'' to al-Qaida, according to the report, which a government official described Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
The FBI assessment comes amid heightened concern about potential terrorist attacks timed to coincide with the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage Muslims make to Mecca. The three-day holy period begins Sunday.
Recent intelligence, coupled with the Muslim holy days, could lead to an increase in the nation's terrorism alert system, according to U.S. government officials speaking on condition of anonymity. It now stands at yellow, or elevated, which is the middle tier in a five-color system.
Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said the threat level is evaluated daily and there are no immediate plans to raise the threat level.
``We remain concerned about the continued al-Qaida activity overseas as well as al-Qaida sympathizers here in the United States,'' he said. ``Should additional information and analysis develop requiring the threat level to be raised, we will keep the American public informed as always.''
The government official declined to discuss whether the FBI assessment describes a greater danger of terrorism if the United States goes to war with Iraq. But German Interior Minister Otto Schily, his country's top counterterrorism official, told reporters Wednesday that such a war would inflame Muslim extremists worldwide and increase the terror threat.
``If a war takes place, the emotions will intensify,'' said Schily, who met this week with Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. ``It's a matter of concern. You can't exclude repercussions.''
The FBI assessment, most of which is classified, will be delivered to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees next week by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Originally promised in 2000, a version was completed just a day before the Sept. 11 terror attacks and has since been rewritten amid criticism from Capitol Hill for the delay.
The central conclusion is that ``al-Qaida led by Osama bin Laden remains, for the foreseeable future, the most serious threat against the United States.''
The report cites various U.S. intelligence sources as evidence that al-Qaida operatives around the world continue to discuss large-scale strikes against the United States. Al-Qaida continues to be actively attempting to acquire chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons, the report adds.
Even though al-Qaida has been driven from its refuge in Afghanistan, the report says the organization remains viable. It cites the October nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia, that killed nearly 200 and November attacks on a resort and airliner in Kenya as evidence the network is still capable of inflicting great destruction.
The Kenyan attacks occurred nearly simultaneously. A vehicle packed with explosives plowed into a hotel, killing 15 people. Minutes earlier, unidentified assailants fired two missiles at an Arkia Airlines Boeing 757, narrowly missing the charter aircraft as it was taking off from Mombasa airport with Israeli tourists returning to Tel Aviv.
Schily told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that the ``strength of al-Qaida groups is as high as it was before Sept. 11, maybe also a little bit more than before.''
``The threat has dimensions that are really dangerous,'' he said.
The FBI assessment concludes that al-Qaida or its sympathizers are mostly likely to mount smaller-scale attacks, perhaps on an individual basis, and that so-called ``soft targets'' such as the Bali nightclub could be hit because they are difficult to protect.
The assessment also details actions the FBI is taking to improve its counterterrorism efforts, such as enhancing its intelligence analysis abilities, focusing more agents on fighting terrorism and upgrading its computer capabilities.
Associated Press writer Ron Fournier contributed to this report.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
LA utility plans to build 120 MW wind facility
REUTERS USA:
February 5, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19703/newsDate/5-Feb-2003/story.htm
LOS ANGELES - The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility, is planning to build a 120 megawatt wind power facility, the city's mayor Jim Hahn said.
The Pine Tree Wind project, to be constructed in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, is scheduled to begin operation in July 2004. It would supply enough power for more than 100,000 households, Hahn said in a statement.
The LADWP's board of commissioners will consider the $162 million project at its board meeting yesterday and it must also receive the backing of the city council. The project would be constructed by Wind Turbine Prometheus LLC.
Hahn said the project would be the largest municipally owned wind plant in the U.S.
The largest wind facility in the U.S. is FPL Energy's 300 MW Stateline Wind Energy Center on the Washington-Oregon border. FPL Energy is a unit of Juno Beach, Florida-based FPL Group Inc. (FPL.N).
----
Process Turns Wastewater Into Fuel Gases
STATE COLLEGE, Pennsylvania,
February 5, 2003
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2003/2003-02-05-09.asp#anchor4
Wastewater from food production companies can be used to create hydrogen gas, a valuable source of energy, according to Penn State environmental engineers.
In laboratory tests, the researchers have shown that wastewater from a Pennsylvania confectioner, apple processor, and potato chip maker can produce hydrogen gas worth $80,000 a year or more. Steven Van Ginkel, doctoral candidate, and Dr. Sang-Eun Oh, postdoctoral researcher in environmental engineering, conducted the tests.
"In addition to hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel and industrial feedstock, methane, the main component of natural gas, can be generated from the wastewaters," Van Ginkel said. "Over 10 billion BTUs of energy from methane could be produced every year at a single one of these food processing plants."
"By extracting hydrogen and methane from their wastewaters, these plants can also reap significant savings by not needing to aerate," Van Ginkel added. "Aeration makes up 20 to 80 percent of wastewater treatment costs."
The researchers presented the Penn State team's findings in a poster, "Turning Pennsylvania's Waste Into Energy," today at Penn State's Hydrogen Day, a special event for industry and government representatives. His co-authors are Dr. Oh and Dr. Bruce Logan, director of the Penn State Hydrogen Energy Center and the Kappe professor of environmental engineering.
In the tests, Van Ginkel and Oh added hydrogen producing bacteria to samples of wastewater from the Pennsylvania food processors. The bacteria were obtained from ordinary soil collected at Penn State and then heat treated to kill all bacteria except those that produce spores.
Spores are a dormant, heat resistant, bacterial form adapted to survive in unfavorable environments, but able to begin growing again in favorable conditions.
"The spores contain bacteria that can produce hydrogen and once they are introduced into the wastewater, they eat the food in the water and produce hydrogen in a normal fermentation process," Van Ginkel explained. Keeping the wastewater slightly acid helps to prevent any methane producing bacteria from growing and consuming hydrogen, he said.
After only a day of fermentation in oxygen free or anaerobic conditions, the hydrogen producing bacteria fill the headspace in the fermentation flasks with biogas containing 60 percent hydrogen and 40 percent carbon dioxide.
In the second stage of the process, the acidity in the wastewater is changed, and methane producing bacteria are added. The bacteria eat the leftovers, grow and generate methane.
The solid material or sludge left over from fermentation is only one-fourth to one-fifth the volume left by typical aerobic treatment processes.
"Using this continuous fermentation process, we can strip nearly all of the energy out of the wastewater in forms that people can use now," Van Ginkel said. "While this approach has high capital costs at the outset, our calculations show that it could pay off well both environmentally and financially for some food processors in the long run."
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation Biogeochemical Research Initiation Education grant.
----
Wind Powers World Wildlife Fund Headquarters
WASHINGTON, DC,
February 5, 2003
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2003/2003-02-05-09.asp#anchor7
The World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Washington DC headquarters will soon derive 10 percent of its annual power needs from wind energy.
The environmental group's headquarters is in a 235,759 square foot facility with eight floors plus a two level parking garage, housing several businesses in addition to WWF's U.S. operations.
"Wind energy is an important part of the solution to global warming," said David Sandalow, executive vice president of WWF. "Like us, millions of Americans are eager to buy clean energy and be part of the solution."
The use of clean renewable energy resources helps reduce carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gas emissions that cause global warming and release other toxic pollutants. The WWF's commitment to renewable energy is in keeping with its efforts to combat global warming through its Climate Change Program.
The wind energy used by WWF will be produced by The Mountaineer Wind Energy Center, the largest wind power project east of the Mississippi River. The output from Mountaineer, located on Backbone Mountain in West Virginia, is marketed by Community Energy, Inc. and delivered in the DC metro area through Washington Gas Energy Services.
----
Stop fueling a national security threat
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
February 5, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030205-69320720.htm#5
While Tom Bray calls President Bush's proposed commitment to development of hydrogen-powered vehicle technology "a dubious use of government's research dollars" ("Energy independence fantasies," Commentary, Monday), the fact remains that American dependence on foreign oil is an ongoing and growing national security threat. Most of Mr. Bray's attention is focused on the environmental debate surrounding vehicle fuel efficiency and pollution, giving short shrift to important national security implications.
Roughly 55 percent of the oil consumed every day in America is imported. More important, oil-derived fuels provide virtually all fuel for the transportation sector. A major disruption of our foreign oil supplies would cripple our economy and detract from our military's operational capabilities. (To provide some perspective, the two oil shocks of the 1970s cost the U.S. economy more than $1.5 trillion.)
Mr. Bush's research dollars are in the right place. The steppingstone, however, to a hydrogen economy is through making better use of natural gas - an abundant domestic resource. Natural gas can be used in conventional combustion engines with minor modifications. With existing natural gas pipelines reaching most American communities, natural gas fueling stations can be developed efficiently.
Currently, nearly a million natural gas vehicles operate worldwide, with more than 75,000 in America alone. Expanding the use of these vehicles is the most viable near-term solution to reducing our foreign oil dependence by using existing technology.
Following widespread acceptance of natural gas vehicles, the transition can readily be made to hydrogen power, which builds upon natural gas technology.
HEIDI BONNETT
Research assistant National Defense Council Foundation Alexandria
--------
ENERGY RESEARCH
Hydrogen Cars Remain Decades in the Future Under New Budget
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/politics/05FUEL.html
DETROIT, Feb. 4 - The Bush administration plan to spur development of hydrogen cars does not envision mass production until 2020. The plan also says there will not be enough research and installations like fueling stations to decide whether the technology is commercially viable until 2015.
Details of the initiatives were laid out in the 2004 budget, which was released yesterday and included $273 million for research into hydrogen fuel cells, as well as in material from the Energy Department.
The proposals include research on whether nuclear and coal power could be used to create hydrogen, a strategy that environmental groups say would undermine the benefits of hydrogen cars. But more money would go to renewable energy.
Fuel cells generate electricity through a chemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen, and many automakers see the technology as an eventual replacement for the internal combustion engine. Cars that run on fuel cells would have water vapor as the sole tailpipe emission. The overall emissions would be dictated by how the hydrogen was produced.
President Bush will offer further details of the plan on Thursday in a speech at the National Building Museum in Washington. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will give a speech here on Friday on the policy.
The administration plans to spend $1.7 billion over five years on two projects, the FreedomCar, to explore making the technology work in cars, and FreedomFuel, which will study how to produce, store and deliver hydrogen. The military is also researching fuel cells.
Among the goals would be a demonstration fleet of fuel cell vehicles. Last year, Toyota and Honda set up such fleets in California. Next year, $19.6 million would be spent on possibly using onboard re-formers to strip hydrogen from gasoline and $28 million would go to research cheaper and more efficient fuel cells.
Money would be earmarked to research internal combustion engines fueled by hydrogen instead of gasoline, a technology that BMW and Ford have explored.
The administration has tried to court environmental groups by briefing them about its initiatives, but the groups are increasingly skeptical.
"They need another zero on the end of their figures if they are serious about realizing the promise of fuel cell vehicles," said David Friedman, a senior expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The 2020 production target would send effects of the program far into the future, Mr. Friedman said. "The average lifetime for a car is 15 years," he added. "So that's 30 years before this program will significantly effect our oil dependence."
-------- genetics
Rival Cloning Bills Introduced in Congress
February 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-politics-cloning.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A debate over cloning returned to Congress on Wednesday with the introduction of a bill in the Senate that would outlaw any use of cloning technology to make human embryos, while promoting its use for medical research.
The bill, backed by a diverse group of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, is a direct rival to one offered last week by a separate coalition that would ban all use of cloning technology involving human embryos.
The bills closely resembled competing bills that never progressed to a Senate vote in 2002. The House passed a comprehensive anti-cloning bill in 2001.
As they often did last year, each group held news conferences on Wednesday to put forward their views.
The less restrictive bill, sponsored by senators such as Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy, bans any use of cloning technology to make a human baby.
But the bill, backed by many scientists including a coalition of 40 Nobel prizewinners, as well as patient advocacy groups, would allow the use of nuclear transfer technology to make very early embryos ty Landrieu and others a week ago, would ban alls exciting research to proceed and to ensure tha Re, a White House spokesman said on Wednesday. Spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush intended to 'lead' despite the French view, indicating the United States may be preparing to proceed without the support of French President Jacques Chirac.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters chain themselves to British tanks
REUTERS UK:
February 5, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19698/newsDate/5-Feb-2003/story.htm
LONDON - Anti-war protesters chained themselves to British tanks and stopped them being loaded onto military ships bound for the Gulf yesterday.
The Greenpeace activists broke into a military dock at Southampton, southern England, in a bid to obstruct a stream of military hardware destined for use in a possible Iraqi war.
"The risks are worth it if we can stop war in Iraq," Helen Wallace told Reuters while chained to a tank lined up on the quayside. "I'm prepared to stay here for as long as it takes."
For six days last week, Greenpeace blockaded military ships with their vessel Rainbow Warrior in southern England before police boarded the ship and towed it away.
----
EU observer: Second hunger strike by nuclear opponents
Written by Mihaela Gherghisan
Edited by Andrew Beatty
05.02.2003
<http://www.EUobserver.com/>
Press Articles Ceskenoviny
<http://www.ceskenoviny.cz/view-id.php4?id=20030204E02134>
Radio Prague <http://www.radio.cz/en/news#2>
In spite of the Melk protocol, the protestors ask for further bilateral negotiations on the issue. (Photo: These Tides)
Austrian opponents of the Czech Temelin nuclear power station intend to hold a second symbolic hunger strike on Friday to protest against the plant. This follows an initial strike at the beginning of January.
Temelin, situated in south Bohemia 60 kilometres from the borders of Austria and Bavaria, is sharply criticised by Austria for safety reasons. Opponents say that the plant that has been in operations since 2000 is unsafe and should be shut down.
The hunger strike will begin outside the Environment Ministry in Vienna on Friday when 20 protestors will arrive in the town with the wooden caravan which served as a venue of the first demonstrative hunger strike. This Friday, too, the activists have vowed to take liquid food in the caravan.
The activists are planning to gradually move the protest caravan elsewhere, including to Temelin, with the time and place of the actions yet to be specified. The hunger strike in Vienna is foreseen to last six hours, starting from 9 a.m.
International expert report demanded
----
Peace Team ready to talk after 1 month and 150 interviews in Iraq
PRESS RELEASE - Lund, Sweden,
February 5, 2003
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003
From: TFF Sweden <TFF@transnational.org>
Christian Harleman and Jan Oberg recently returned from their second two-week fact-finding mission to Iraq.
They are available for interviews and viewpoints on any current issue related to the crisis, including Sec of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council today.
Jan Oberg oberg@transnational.org, +46 (0)46 14 59 09.
Christian Harleman ch.harleman@crido.pp.se, +46 (0)8 755 99 54.
This time they interviewed six categories of people:
1) High-level Iraqis
Among the high-level Iraqis they met with were deputy prime-minister Tariq Aziz, scholars at the Beit Al-Hikme Research Institute, leaders of the Baath Party, the Deputy speaker of the National Assembly, General Ameer Al- Saadi (counterpart of Mr. Hans Blix), officials and ambassadors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the deputy minister of health, the Archbishop of Basrah and the Women's Federation in Basrah.
2) Iraqis in the street and Iraqi civil society
Citizens in cafés, bazaars, shops. Art galleries. The Iraq Museum. Mosques, hospitals, etc.
3) Embassies
Diplomats at the embassies of Norway, France and Russia.
4) The United Nations
The United Nations Iraq-Kuweit Observation Mission, UNIKOM, at the border with Kuweit and high-level reps of UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), UNOCHI (UN Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq), WFP (United Nations World Food Program), UNDP (UN Development Program).
5) Humanitarian organisations
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), and CARE.
6) Peace movements
Voices in the Wilderness and the Iraq Peace team, Magarita Papandreou and peace delegation, TFF Associate Scilla Ellworthy of the Oxford Research Group, and former UN humanitarian co-ordinator Denis Haliday.
"We have now conducted some 150 interviews with many and different people in this welcoming and kind country. We have listened in order to learn," says Jan Oberg.
"We believe that we begin to understand a little of Iraq's immense complexities and of the way the Iraqis see the world. We have seen first-hand the suffering of the people. Iraq is 25 million human beings like you and I and not only Saddam Hussein."
"There is a huge diference between the perceptions we now have and the image presented in the mainstream media back home. And we will be happy to share them with anyone interested."
TFF Associate Scilla Ellworthy http://www.transnational.org/tff/people/s_elworthy.html
- has also just returned from Baghdad. See her report and proposals here http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/1programmes-conflict-baghdad.htm and here http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2003/Elworthy_IraqLetter.html
Another TFF Associate working for a peaceful solution to the conflict is Hans von Sponeck http://www.transnational.org/tff/people/hc_vonsponeck.html More about his mission soon.
----
Peace activists say oil behind a war with Iraq
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
By Tom Doggett,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-02-05/s_2516.asp
WASHINGTON -- Peace activists Tuesday protested any military action against Iraq in demonstrations at more than 100 gasoline stations in the United States and England to emphasize their belief that war was aimed at taking control of Baghdad's vast oil reserves.
The demonstrators chanted, "No war for oil" and accused President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of being more interested in taking over Iraq's oil rather than eliminating its alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The protesters criticized the Bush administration for not doing enough to reduce the United States' dependence on foreign oil. The United States imports half of its oil to meet its daily crude consumption of almost 20 million barrels a day.
"The surest way for the U.S. to sustain its overwhelming dependence on foreign oil is to control the 67 percent of the world's proven oil reserves that lie below the sands of the Gulf," said consumer activist Ralph Nader, a former Green Party presidential candidate.
Iraq's oil reserves of 112 billion barrels are the world's biggest after Saudi Arabia. "It is not credible that there would be such a strong push for war in Iraq if there were no oil in Iraq," Nader said.
Protest organizers argued that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power, but they preferred a coup over war.
The Bush administration has said that oil would not be a factor in a possible war with Iraq. The Pentagon has said U.S. troops would likely secure Iraq's biggest oil fields in the event of military action to protect the fields from sabotage by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
In the United States, protest sites included cities such as San Francisco, Boston, and Miami and smaller centers like Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Burlington, Vt.; and Warrenton, Va. The British protests were held in London, Birmingham, and Oxford. Activists also demonstrated outside the Washington headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute, the trade group that represents major oil companies.
----
IRELAND - Troops to guard U.S. planes at airport
World Scene
February 5, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030205-98185660.htm
DUBLIN - Ireland yesterday prepared to send armed troops to protect U.S. military aircraft using Shannon International Airport as a stopover after peace protesters caused more than $500,000 in damage to a U.S. Navy plane in two separate attacks, the most recent being earlier this week. The Irish government said it was sending 120 troops to Shannon, in the southwest of traditionally neutral Ireland, to back up police security.
----
PUBLIC LIVES
An Environmentalist With No Time for Houseplants
February 5, 2003
New York Times
By ROBIN FINN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/nyregion/05PROF.html
HOLED up in the 400-square-foot East Village cubbyhole that passes for his urban retreat, Alex Matthiessen, the gaunt, tousled executive director of the environmentalist group Riverkeeper, is making urgent notations on a computer as he barks instructions meant for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of Riverkeeper's board and its chief counsel, into a cellphone.
He apologizes for turning his back - this bit of antinuclear Indian Point business can't wait - and gestures toward a battered black sofa. It's either that or a battered black chair: no creature comforts in sight. Even the stereo components are crunched in a utilitarian steel structure; Mr. Matthiessen, despite being an advocate for the great unspoiled outdoors, is a glass-and-chrome kind of guy indoors.
Besides dead roses, the coffee table displays a book for frequent speechmakers like him, "Speak Up With Confidence," and a boxed copy of "Men's Lives," a tome by his father, Peter Matthiessen, that chronicles the salt-of-the-earth locals from Mr. Matthiessen's home turf, the Hamptons.
He's running late after zooming back to the city from his weekend place, an old sea captain's house in Sag Harbor he says he leveraged his life to buy. East Fifth Street is not nirvana, though the clamor sounded good after two years of going stir crazy in Cold Spring, N.Y., near Riverkeeper headquarters; he lived there when he took the job after the split between Mr. Kennedy and Robert H. Boyle, Riverkeeper's founder, in 2000. But things are ticking along so smoothly now at Riverkeeper that, in addition to battling General Electric and Exxon over pollution, it is demanding closure of the Indian Point complex, in Buchanan, N.Y.
"We've kind of become famous for our role in David-and-Goliath-type cases and thought the implications of this fight were worth taking on," says Mr. Matthiessen, who seems to be making it a personal mission to discredit Indian Point's emergency evacuation plan, convince New Yorkers that they can live without the 2,000 megawatts the plant provides, and apply enough pressure in Washington so that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission pulls the plug on Indian Point.
From the looks of those empty pots on his windowsill, it appears that both of Mr. Matthiessen's city houseplants have long since expired, not from radiation, but from neglect. When you are entrusted with the care of "big nature," as he puts it, little touches of a personal nature are compromised. Can't he find time to water his own plants? Not since Riverkeeper, perennially sparring with Indian Point over its decimation of the Hudson River's fish, joined the controversy over the possibility of a terrorist attack there.
"I certainly would not have described myself as a nuclear activist, and Riverkeeper never meant to be and is not today an antinuclear organization," says Mr. Matthiessen, 38, whose sartorial arsenal consists of business suits, not "No Nukes" T-shirts.
"Riverkeeper's mission is twofold," he adds. "Protect the ecological integrity of the Hudson River and the watershed, and safeguard the drinking-water supply of New York City and Westchester. And there's no doubt that a catastrophic accident at Indian Point would devastate the two issues we dedicate ourselves to. It's a different ball of wax to go after the whole nuclear industry, but we regard Indian Point as a special case given its proximity to New York City." Twenty million people live within 50 miles of the plant.
Last month, a state-commissioned report termed the evacuation plan inadequate, bolstering Riverkeeper's claims. But it also chided advocacy groups for stirring up the public's fears. (Mr. Matthiessen insists that Riverkeeper is " meticulous about sticking to the facts.")
Last week the state refused to certify the plan, foisting the decision onto federal agencies, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency questioned the refusal. Should FEMA withdraw its certification, after review, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could close the plant. "This issue has gained a momentum where you've got people in Washington scrambling: they know they don't have the facts on their side. They're in denial of the realities of the post-9/11 world if they don't acknowledge they have these essential sitting ducks in nuclear reactors."
MR. MATTHIESSEN has done his time in Washington. Before Riverkeeper, he was at the Department of the Interior during the Clinton years. Before that, he spent a year in Jakarta, Indonesia, as a macroeconomic policy analyst for the Harvard Institute for International Development. (He earned a master's from Harvard in 1995.) He got his start in environmental advocacy in San Francisco as a grass-roots director for the Rainforest Action Network, but his passion for the environment came earlier.
He recalls being about 8 and biking with his father near their home in Sagaponack, N.Y., shortly after his mother died of uterine cancer. They found a sea gull trapped in the discarded plastic packaging of a six-pack, and tried to free it but couldn't. "I grew up in a beautiful place, but I think I also got to see the flip side of the beauty of nature, and how man jeopardizes the natural habitat of these animals. That left a mark on me."
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Mandela Would Make U.N. - Backed Iraq Peace Trip
February 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-mandela.html
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) - South Africa's former president Nelson Mandela said Wednesday he was willing to go to Iraq to help avert a war, but only if the United Nations approved.
Mandela also defended his personal attack on President Bush last week when he said Bush had no foresight and could not think properly as a U.S.-led war looms against Iraq.
Mandela, a statesman respected the world over for his fight against apartheid, said he has tried to contact Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by telephone to urge him to cooperate with U.N. arms inspectors. He said Baghdad wants him to visit Iraq.
``If Iraq wants me to go there, they must get the permission of (U.N. Secretary-General) Kofi Annan. Then I will go,'' Mandela told reporters at his home in Johannesburg.
``But I won't go on my own just because I have been invited by Iraq,'' he added.
The 84-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate has accused Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of running roughshod over the United Nations in their bid to oust the Iraqi leader.
``I am criticizing Bush and Tony Blair for acting outside the United Nations. I am not going to do what they are doing and go to Iraq without the authority of the United Nations,'' he said.
He said he did not regret his criticism of Bush, which was condemned by some U.S. newspapers but drew little official reaction in Washington.
``I said that because I felt that way. I don't have to repeat it. I'm not changing a word, not even a comma in what I said,'' Mandela said.
Mandela was skeptical of evidence to be presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations later on Wednesday aimed at convincing a doubting world that war may be needed to ensure Iraq disarms.
``We are going to listen toHans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei (head of the nuclear arms teams). We are going to listen to them and them alone. We are not going to listen to the United States of America,'' he said.
South Africa, which has taken a staunch anti-war line, said Monday it would send a government envoy to Iraq to urge cooperation with arms inspectors looking for weapons of mass destruction.
South Africa's cabinet Wednesday repeated its opposition to any unilateral action against Iraq, which it said would ``encourage global anarchy.''
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Subject: Two Plowshare Witnesses in Shannon
From: "Jonah House" <disarmnow@erols.com>
To: <disarmnow@erols.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003
It came to our attention that in the past week and a half there have been two plowshares actions at Shannon Airport. Shannon, as the first article shows, is being used as a stopping point for US military headed for the Gulf. Support needs and status for Mary Kelly is unclear. The links provided may be fruitful for such information soon. Lets hope this type of resistance continues as this administration continues to push for war with the certain civilian casualties and the use of depleted uranium possibly even nuclear warheads.
Sending prayers of peace- Gary, Susan and Liz
US Plane Disarmed at Shannon
Peace Activist vs. Military Jet
Mary Kelly entered the airport January 28 and succeeded in damaging the nose of the plane with a hatchet before she was apprehended. Mary said that she felt compelled to act after the statement last weekend from the Transport Minister that he was allowing the transport of munitions through Shannon and because the Gardai were not doing their job, investigating and preventing illegal military use of Shannon, properly.
Shannon has been the focus of much protest recently as it is being used a staging post by US military planes en route to the Middle East. This opposition has taken many forms, including a number of marches (the latest was attended by over 2000 people) and the establishment of a permanent Peace Camp at the airport. The Peace Camp said today that while Mary's action was not planned by the Camp as a group, they "fully understood why she felt she had to do it" and "offer her our full support".
A previous attempt to directly disarm a US Navy Hercules Aircraft was made in September last year when peace activist Eoin Dubsky entered Shannon and sprayed the windscreen of the plane. His case is came before the courts in December[1] and a verdict is expected in February.
Further Information can be found at:
http://www.indymedia.ie (front page, main story) http://www.shannonpeacecamp.org http://refuelingpeace.org
And Again
An Siochain Naomh Brid - Pit Stop Ploughshares
ACTION DESCRIPTION
In the early hours of Monday 03 February, five members of the Catholic Worker movement cut their way into Shannon Airport. The peace activists poured blood on the runway that has been servicing U.S. military flights, troop and munition deployments to U.S. military bases in Kuwait and Qatar.
They constructed a shrine on the runway to Iraqi children killed and threatened by U.S./British bombardment and sanctions. The shrine consisted of copies of the Bible and Quran, rosary and Muslim prayer beads, flowers, photographs of Iraqi children and Brigid's crosses. They then began to take up the runway, working on its edge with a mallet.
The activists approached the hanger housing the US Navy plane under repair (from previous plowshares action above). They painted "Pit stop of death" on the hanger's roller door, and began the dismantling of the hanger. Others entered the hanger to disarm the repaired US warplane.
The five activists were arrested by Gardai. They refuse to co-operate with bail conditions, have initiated a fast for peace and a call for mass nonviolent resistance to Irish complicity in the forthcoming war on Iraq.
They are likely to be moved to Limerick Prison. The acts of witness will continue in and out of prison.
STATEMENT OF FAITH
We come to Shannon Airport to carry out an act of life-affirming disarmament in a place of preparations for slaughter.
Like the railway tracks that ran to the town of Auschwitz, the runway at Shannon has been militarized for service on an assembly line of death. The train tracks at Auschwitz brought people to their deaths, the runway at Shannon brings death to the people. The Irish Government acts in contravention of the Irish Constitution, International Law and divine mandate to service U.S. military aircraft, troop and munition deployments.
The U.S./British war on the Iraqi people, and for Iraqi resources, has been long and varied. The U.S./U.K. military has claimed over 2 million Iraqi lives
- in their financial and military support for the Saddam Hussein regime in the '70's and '80's
- in their hi tech bombing campaign of 1991
- in the 12 years of crippling sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people
- and now their plans to conquer and occupy Iraq US/UK weapons manufacturers also continue to fuel the daily grind of death and destruction inflicted on the Palestinian people.
Group Statement
We come to Shannon Airport around the Feast of St. Brigid, to disarm and disable the war machine. We hope to begin to take up the runway and ground military aircraft. We hope to be joined in this act of disarmament by those who encounter us. Citizens, police and soldiers wielding hammers brought down the Berlin Wall; we hope all will pitch in to take up this runway and ground planes servicing the war machine. We find this easier to envision than the further slaughter of Iraqi children that U.S. British and Irish governments wish us to consider.
We act inspired by Brigid and Irish traditions of healing and peacemaking. We carry out Christ's commandment to "love our enemies" by nonviolently resisting the slaughter of their children. We attempt to enflesh the prophesy of Isaiah Ch 2 and Micah Ch 4 "to beat swords into ploughshares".
We respond to the call of the prophets of Modern America. Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, who encourages us "to fill the jails with nonviolent resistance to war"; Martin Luther King, who warns us that we are confronted by "a choice between nonviolence and nonexistence". Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who observes: "We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course continues, because the waging of war, by its nature is total - but the waging of peace, by our cowardice is partial."
- Deirdre Clancy (32) is an editor, writer and feminist activist with an interest in faith-based resistance to various structures of social control. She regards war as part of parcel of the system which demeans women; legalizes corruption of many different forms; discriminates against, locks up and labels the so-called "mentally ill", without questioning the sanity of the military-industrial system in which we are all complicit.
- Karen Fallon (30) is a Glaswegian-Irish peace activist. She is a scientist and a Trident Ploughshares pledger. She has lived at the Faslane Peace Camp for the past two years.
- Damien Moran (22) is from the Irish midlands. He spent three months in Haiti recently doing voluntary development work. A qualified geography and English teacher, he is currently studying theology and anthropology as a seminarian in Dublin.
- Nuin Dunlop (31) is an American of Irish-Scots-East Band Cherokee-Dutch descent. She has been working for several years in community service; in the Catholic Worker, hospital chaplaincy, and with the marginalized. She is a Catholic anarchist. Her activism stems from the belief that the Creator breaths life through everyone: War is the most serious violation of life. Born in the nation with the more weapons of mass destruction than any other, she is moved to respond to the current US-led assaults on life.
- Ciaron O'Reilly (42) is an Irish Australian. He is presently working at a homeless shelter in Dublin and is long time Catholic Worker and nonviolent resister. He was a member of the "ANZUS Ploughshares" which disarmed a B-52 Bomber in upstate New York during the 1991 Gulf War. He was also a member of the "Jabiluka Ploughshares" that disabled uranium mining equipment in the Northern Territory of Australia in 1998.
- (Co-conspirator) Caoimhe Butterly (24) was born in Ireland but spent most of her childhood in Canada and Africa. After finishing school, she moved to the New York Catholic Worker to work with the homeless. She has since spent three years working in refugee communities in Chiapas and Guatemala. For the past year, she has lived and worked as a solidarity activist in Palestine. In November she was shot by the Israeli military.
Ways of support for Pit-Stop Plowshares
- Write to the above prisoners c/- Shannon Peace House - 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.
- Donate to the Ploughshares Defense Fund by making checks payable to "Peace and Reconciliation" c/o Ploughshares, 134 Phibsborough Rd. Dublin 7 Ireland.
- Join the Catholic Worker activists in their prison fast and prayers for peace.
- Vigil publicly at Shannon Airport, U.S./British Embassies, Aer Rianta, Irish Government offices involved in war preparations.
- Gather with friends in communities of nonviolent resistance ... sit in, speak out, blockade.
- Offer solidarity to those traveling into the war zones of Iraq and Palestine to bear nonviolent witness.
- Offer solidarity to those in front of the courts and in jail for bearing nonviolent resistance to the war machine at home. See www.nonviolence.org/nukeresister/ and www.gn.apc.org/peacenews
MEDIA CONTACTS for Pit-Stop Plowshares
Petria Malone - 0509 51321 (immediate)
Dave Donnellan - 087 9184552 (upon release)
Email - pitstop_ploughshares@hotmail.com
(For plowshares history see http://www.plowsharesactions.org/)
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Jowell in U-turn over war demo
By Graham Tibbetts
05/02/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$KEGSEUHHFHQKVQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/02/05/ndemo05.xml/
Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, was forced into an embarrassing climbdown yesterday as she overturned her decision to ban a demonstration against war with Iraq from Hyde Park.
The minister had initially refused to allow the Stop The War rally from meeting at the park on Feb 15, fearing that the expected crowd of up to 500,000 protesters would reduce the turf to a quagmire, and sought alternative venues.
However, after Trafalgar Square and the Mall were ruled out, Miss Jowell bowed to the wishes of the campaign organisers.
In a statement, she said: "I have agreed that Hyde Park should be the venue for the Stop The War rally. This follows several days of intensive work by my department to find a better venue for the rally. Everyone agrees that Hyde Park is far from ideal for an event at this time of year.
"The right of protesters to organise and take part in peaceful marches and rallies has never been questioned. The issue has only ever been to find a venue that is as safe as possible for those taking part."
She stressed that in originally refusing permission for the rally in Hyde Park, she had been acting on advice from the Royal Parks, Scotland Yard and Westminster City Council.
Miss Jowell said: "Alternative venues included Trafalgar Square, which is the normal venue for winter rallies, and the Mall. The Mayor has ruled out Trafalgar Square and the Metropolitan Police advise against holding the rally in the Mall."
Between 100,000 and 500,000 demonstrators are expected to take part in the rally, which will round off a march through London against a possible war in Iraq.
Only last week a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: "The fact is no rallies of any size are allowed in the royal parks at this time of year.
"As anybody with a garden knows, the grass is completely waterlogged and if you have 100,000 people milling about it will become a swamp."
However, Miss Jowell revealed that she was having second thoughts about Hyde Park two days ago when a spokesman said: "If all else fails, we will look again at Hyde Park, but would very much like to find an alternative."
The organisers of the rally, the Stop The War Coalition, welcomed the minster's change of heart. John Rees, of STWC, said: "Freedom of speech in this instance was only defended by the actions of the people."
But there was less enthusiasm from the Royal Parks, the agency which runs Hyde Park on behalf of the secretary of state. A spokesman said: "Our concern has always been for people's safety and we will be working closely with the organisers, police and Westminster City Council to make sure the rally is as safe as possible.
"When you factor in early nightfall and poor ground conditions it means people could slip and slide, which increases our concerns."
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