Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Veterans warn Canadian military at risk of Gulf War Syndrome
First Gulf War left problems unsolved
Iranian nuke research 'advanced'
Forensic Experts Uncovered Forgery on Iraq, an Inspector Says
Iraq Issues U.N. Demands and Destroys More Missiles
Inspectors Speed Up Weapons Hunt in Iraq
U.S. Cites Concern on Iran Nuclear Program
Powell, Rice Reject Talks With N. Korea
N. Korea accuses Washington of planning nuclear attack
Next Question: How to Stop Nuclear Blackmail
'67 Study Discouraged Use of Nuclear Weapons in Vietnam War
A Detour From the War on Terrorism
MILITARY
U.S. Seeks to Avoid Deeper Role in Colombia
Air Defense Units in Southern Iraq Hit Hard
Saddam's Tough to Persuade. Cuba Tried
Israel Kills a Top Hamas Leader; Arafat Picks a Prime Minister
Hamas threatens Israeli leaders after killing of founder
Jordan's King, in Gamble, Lends Hand to the U.S.
Airborne Arsenal Arrives in Kuwait
Iraqi expelled, accused as spy
Interview given by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
Diplomacy Intensifies Ahead of U.N. Vote on Iraq War Approval
Thinking of illegal weapons, troops train for war in Iraq
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military
Just War - or a Just War?
IRAQGATE - The Big One That (Almost) Got Away
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Texas on Pace to Set Record in Executions
Thailand's Drug War Leaves Over 1,000 Dead
C.I.A. Warns U.S. Troops of Attacks in Iraq by Terror Groups
CIA has 2 sons of the 9/11 architect
Bold Tracks of Terrorism's Mastermind
Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World
If a Terror Suspect Won't Talk, Should He Be Made To?
ENERGY AND OTHER
A Car for the Distant Future...
ACTIVISTS
With Passion and a Dash of Pink, Women Protest War
Anti-War Activists Map Their Strategy
Human Shields Wait for OK to Enter Iraq
Reform With an Islamic Slant
In Effort to Keep the Peace, Protesters Declare 'Code Pink'
Reopen America's Street
Hundreds Rally on Both Sides Of a War [in other cities]
Guard says he lost job in T-shirt flap
Thousands rally for and against Iraq war
Washington Loses All Perspective on the War, and We Get to Pay the Price
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Veterans warn Canadian military at risk of Gulf War Syndrome
Sun, 09 Mar 2003 7:50:36
Written by CBC News Online staff
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/03/09/syndrome030309
HALIFAX - As a growing Canadian naval contingent makes its way to the Middle East, military officials say they're taking steps to prevent a repeat of Gulf War Syndrome.
Veterans of other conflicts warn Canadian troops could face exposure to radioactive depleted uranium (DU) during a war in Iraq.
Susan Riordon says her husband Terry died after being exposed to toxic dust released by the explosions of allied shells during the Gulf War. The official cause of Terry Riordon's 1999 death was Gulf War Syndrome. "[Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein told the entire world the political truth - the war will go home with you. That terrifies me," said Susan Riordon.
Louise Richard, a military nurse during the Gulf War, says exposure to radioactive depleted uranium (DU) made her sick. She's worried the cycle will be repeated with a new war in the region.
"My fear out of all this is that we're going back into a war in Iraq. Depleted uranium ammunitions and bombs will be used yet again. Our troops will be affected directly by that again," said Richard.
But the military's chief of staff for medical policy says international experts have concluded DU is not a threat.
Col. Ken Scott says the Defence Department is taking preventative steps, including environmental surveillance on areas where troops will be sent. Troops will also be assessed before and after deployment, said Scott.
The military plans to follow personnel throughout their careers by conducting psychological profiles, taking family and social histories of new recruits and long-term health monitoring.
Scott calls it a preventive health initiative that could help doctors understand what's behind the unexplained illnesses that have affected up to half of all veterans.
----
First Gulf War left problems unsolved
By JOHN WARD
Sun, March 9, 2003
CANOE
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2003/03/09/39880-cp.html
OTTAWA (CP) - More than a decade ago, Canadian sailors, soldiers and flyers went to the Persian Gulf and fought in a conflict that left many problems unsolved and questions unanswered.
They still echo, in Canada and abroad, as a second round looms. The same arguments thrashed out in the runup to the 1991 war are surfacing again in Canadian political debates.
Among echoes from the war: Saddam Hussein remains in power; his alleged arsenal of biological and chemical weapons is again the object of UN inspections; unexplained illnesses, collectively known as Gulf War syndrome continue to plague Canadian, American and British veterans. And a second war looms as Washington insists that Saddam has to go.
Canada's participation in the 1991 conflict was small: three ships, 24 CF-18 fighter-bombers, an aerial tanker and a field hospital that was barely up and running when the fighting stopped.
In all, about 4,000 Canadians served in region during the conflict, although the force never exceeded 2,700 at any one time. It was a bloodless war for them, without a single casualty.
The war cost the Canadian military $682 million and the total tab, including aid donations and other expenses, was close to $1 billion.
The crisis began the night of Aug. 1-2, 1990, when Iraqi forces overran Kuwait in a kind of desert blitzkrieg. Resistance was slight; by noon Aug. 2, Iraq was in possession of the country.
Almost immediately, the UN Security Council approved resolution 660, which condemned the invasion and demanded the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces.
The Kuwait crisis hit in a summer of Canadian discontent. In late June the Meech Lake constitutional process had collapsed in a political muddle that left all sides angry. In July, a dispute over a golf course in Oka, Que., triggered a standoff with armed Mohawk militants. The economy was looking iffy amid rumbles from a world recession.
The government of then-prime minister Brian Mulroney looked to the military for options in the Kuwait situation. With the army gearing up to respond at Oka and the air force requiring bases in the area, the navy looked to be the first response, especially since several vessels were preparing to sail for a major NATO exercise.
On Aug. 6, the Security Council met again and passed resolution 661, calling for economic sanctions against Iraq.
The next day, after talks with the United States, Saudi Arabia formally issued a plea for help to defend against Iraq.
On Aug. 10, after military planners ran a series of options past cabinet, Mulroney formally announced the dispatch of two destroyers and a supply ship.
A mad scramble began in Halifax to beef up the air defence armament on the three ships against what was seen as a dangerous Iraqi threat. Obsolete, but still effective 40-mm Bofors guns were bolted to the decks. Phalanx close-in guns, earmarked for new frigates under construction were hastily hauled from the warehouse and installed. One of the Phalanxes would be a source of constant trouble and finally had to be replaced in the Gulf.
The army even contributed a detachment of anti-air attack soldiers, armed with shoulder-mounted Javelin missiles.
The ships sailed on Aug. 24 - the mission to support the UN embargo, a task that would change drastically over the following months. They entered the Gulf on Sept. 26
Before that, though, Mulroney announced the dispatch of a CF-18 squadron, to protect the naval embargo force. The air force scrambled to find an airport and settled on Doha, Qatar.
On Oct. 8, the first CF-18s touched down at Doha.
The autumn was one of growing political debate as the United States assembled a coalition that would eventually comprise 37 countries with the expressed aim of expelling Saddam from Kuwait.
The Iraqi leader responded to international pressure by declaring Kuwait a province of Iraq and issuing blood-curdling threats about the fate of anyone who dared attack him.
In Canada, the line was drawn between those who wanted to give sanctions more time and those who believed war would be required.
The tone became sharper at the end of November, when the Security Council passed resolution 678, authorizing "all necessary means" to "restore international peace and security." It set a deadline of Jan. 15 for Iraqi compliance.
As the deadline approached, Canadian warships were patrolling the Gulf, while CF-18s flew air patrols overhead. The army was in the process of moving a full field hospital from Petawawa, Ont., to northern Saudi Arabia.
Mulroney was backing Washington and the need for force.
"The UN cannot be allowed to fail at this crucial time in its history," he told the Commons.
He said diplomacy hadn't worked.
"If we want peace, we must defend the fundamental principles for which the United Nations stands. We must stand up for what is right.
"Peace comes to those who are willing to defend it."
Jean Chretien, then Opposition leader, took a peaceful tack.
"We strongly reject the use of force now because the embargo has not been given enough time to work," he told the Commons in January, as the hours ticked down to the UN deadline.
The debate became moot about dinnertime in Ottawa on Jan. 16, (3 a.m. Jan. 17 Iraqi time) when the U.S. unleashed its planes. They hit communications facilities, air defence systems and command centres in a brutally effective opening attack.
"I profoundly regret that it has come to this," Mulroney said in a sombre TV address. "It is with no satisfaction that we take up arms because war is always a tragedy. But the greater tragedy would have been for criminal aggression to go unchecked."
Chretien abandoned his anti-war stance as the firing began: "We are at war and we have to be united because Canadians are fighting right now."
The six-week air war became a video battle. The Iraqi air force tried to duke it out with coalition forces in the early days, but they were shot out of the sky and the survivors fled to Iran.
TV screens were filled with images of laser-guided bombs slicing into skyscrapers and knifing through bridges.
The Canadian CF-18s, unequipped for laser-guided bombs, continued to fly air-defence missions against a vanished threat. The navy eventually took charge of the logistics fleet, an unwieldy collection of tankers, supply ships and waddling merchantmen in the southern Gulf. The destroyers herded the fleet like sheepdogs, while the supply ship became a floating gas station for coalition warships.
The ground war opened on Feb. 23. It lasted 100 hours. It was relatively bloodless for the coalition, but deadly for Iraqi troops, whose equipment was outclassed and who had no air support.
Iraq fired Scud missiles at its neighbours, including Israel, in an effort to break the fragile allied coalition. Saddam threatened the use of weapons of mass destruction, leading to fears that gas or germs might decimate allied forces.
Iraq 's efforts were in vain, as its army collapsed under the threat of being cut off from home by an American left-hook behind them.
In the final hours, with Iraqis fleeing homeward, the CF-18s flew 56 bombing missions, dropping "dumb" bombs on some transport bottlenecks.
On Feb. 27, 1991 a ceasefire went into effect and the aftermath - which continues today - began.
Iraq lost much of its equipment, but many of its troops, including much of the vaunted Republican Guard, lived to fight another day.
Kuwait was a looted wreck. Fleeing Iraqis torched hundreds of oil wells, sending a pall of smoke down the Gulf. It would take a year to snuff all the fires.
The ceasefire left many unsatisfied. Saddam declared victory. The UN maintained economic sanctions to back demands that Saddam scrap his chemical and biological weapons and end efforts to develop nukes. Over the following decade, he would play cat-and-mouse with inspectors, leading to today's crisis, with the United States backing another war to oust him.
The key difference is that the 1990 invasion of Kuwait prompted unusual unanimity among unlikely allies. The Security Council clearly authorized force. The coalition had a narrow, well-defined mandate; to get Iraq out of Kuwait.
Today, the international situation is murkier, alliances are more fragile and the goal is ill-defined. Is the idea to strip Iraq of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons? Or is it to complete unfinished business and topple Saddam? The debate rages.
On the home front, the troops were welcomed home with yellow ribbons and cheers, but the picture turner darker as time went by and Gulf War syndrome surfaced. To this day, no one has satisfactorily defined the vague collection of symptoms and problems that range from restlessness and fatigue to life-threatening organic disorders.
Researchers blame it on a variety of factors. Some say it's post-traumatic stress. Others blame the depleted uranium used in anti-tank shells. Still others point to nerve gas or nerve gas antidotes, or vaccines administered against the threat of anthrax. One school blames it on some unknown fungus.
The syndrome is as unsettled as the Gulf.
-------- iran
Iranian nuke research 'advanced'
Agence France-Presse
March 09, 2003
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6100256%5E1702,00.html
IRANIAN is further along in developing a nuclear enrichment facility than it disclosed to the International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei on a visit last month, Time Magazine has said.
The weekly news magazine, in an advance of its Monday edition, quotes diplomatic sources as saying Iran's nuclear program development is so advanced that it puts the country in "blatant violation" of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory.
International weapons inspectors in Iran late last month were shown a network of sophisticated machinery to enrich uranium, spurring concerns that Tehran is making progress in developing a nuclear weapons program.
The site in question, near the north-western city of Natanz, was visited by ElBaradei, who was in Iran to assess the status of its nuclear program.
During the visit to the Natanz site, inspectors found a small network of centrifuges for enriching uranium and learned that Iran had components to make a significant number of additional centrifuges.
US officials said at the time that Natanz could be part of a long suspected nuclear weapons program, benefitting from Pakistani assistance and far more advanced than similar efforts made by neighbouring Iraq.
Time Magazine quoted its diplomatic sources as saying work on the Natanz plant "is extremely advanced" and involves "hundreds" of gas centrifuges ready to produce enriched uranium and "the parts for a thousand others ready for assembly".
Iran announced last week it intends to activate, under IAEA safeguards, a uranium conversion facility near the city of Isfahan, a step that produces the uranium hexafluoride gas used in the enrichment process, according to Time.
"Sources tell Time the IAEA has concluded that Iran actually introduced uranium hexafluoride gas into some centrifuges at an undisclosed location to test their ability to work," said the magazine. "That would be a blatant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."
The IAEA declined to comment, said Time, and a senior State Department official "said he believed AlBaradei was trying to resolve the issue behind the scenes before going public".
-------- iraq
Forensic Experts Uncovered Forgery on Iraq, an Inspector Says
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/middleeast/09INSP.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 8 - The forgery in a document that purported to show Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger was discovered by forensic experts, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said today.
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's executive director, said the experts found anomalies in the signatures, the letterhead and the format of the document. He told the Security Council on Friday that the forgery had been compared with authentic documents provided by Niger.
In an interview today, he said that any number of groups would have had an interest in planting the document, which he said came to him from several sources. It was quoted in a report from British intelligence services last year as Britain and the United States sought to build their case for disarming Iraq.
Asked whose interest the forgery served, he said: "I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be delighted to malign Iraq."
"It could range from Iraqi dissidents to all sorts of other sources," he added.
But he said the incident was just a "blip."
"In no way do we want to belittle the importance of intelligence," he said. "People have tried to make a big fuss that this document has been forged.
"The intelligence we need we get from different sources. Some sources are reliable, some sources are less reliable. Some sources have political agendas of their own."
Dr. ElBaradei, who told the Security Council on Friday that he did not have evidence that Iraq has a continuing program to develop nuclear weapons, said today that he needed more time and more intelligence information to reach a firm conclusion.
"We have been getting increasing intelligence information in the last three to four weeks," he said. "Some of it is actionable," and produces immediate visits to suspect sites.
"Other things we cannot act on," he added, like a telephone conversation by a person that had been intercepted and taped.
Documents and other intelligence about specifics like the tolerances of industrial tubing are examined by experts, which in the case of the tubing is a group that counts Britons, Americans and Germans among its members, he said.
Dr. ElBaradei made clear that while the inspection process would continue to need updated intelligence, particularly satellite photography, inspectors could not be passive recipients of information and that something akin to police work was required to reach conclusions.
----
Iraq Issues U.N. Demands and Destroys More Missiles
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR with PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/middleeast/09IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, March 8 - Iraq today resumed destroying its short-range Al Samoud 2 missiles and, in a further apparent attempt to exploit the deep divisions among the world's powers over war, issued a defiant list of demands to the United Nations.
Glossing over the negative aspects of the latest report by the weapons inspectors, a government statement issued from a meeting chaired by President Saddam Hussein and editorials in the government-controlled press all reached the same conclusion: that Iraq had been declared sufficiently free of weapons of mass destruction to warrant the cancellation of sanctions imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The sense here was that the strong resistance by France, Russia and Germany to the use of force against Iraq revealed a growing consensus that put the United States and Britain on the defensive.
At the United Nations, diplomats said Britain was more interested than the United States in finding a compromise that might attract more international support for the new resolution the two countries put forward on Friday. It would give Iraq until March 17 to disarm completely as demanded in Resolution 1441, passed unanimously last November.
"There is some room for maneuver," a British diplomat said. "But the Americans have far less patience than we do."
In Washington, Bush administration officials gave no indication that they would entertain any compromise that would extend the deadline beyond March 17.
Both at the United Nations and in Washington, diplomats and Bush administration officials expressed growing concern that if the United States called for a vote on the resolution and lost it, the coalition led by America and Britain would go to war in apparent defiance of the Security Council.
Officials in Washington reported a debate over whether to let the United Nations vote proceed if it appears the United States would lose. They said there was no question that the vote should go ahead if the United States believes it can win at least nine votes, even if France or Russia vetoes the resolution.
"There's no shame in winning the vote and going ahead after a veto," said the official, who insisted on anonymity. "We could easily argue the French are frustrating the will of the Council. The question is whether it is advisable to go ahead even if you are going to lose the vote."
President Bush, in his weekly radio address, took a far harder line than the United Nations weapons inspectors, declaring that Iraq "is still violating the demands of the United Nations by refusing to disarm." He dismissed the destruction of the Al Samoud missiles as "a public show of producing and destroying a few prohibited missiles," and argued anew that American intelligence - which the Bush administration has declined to release - "shows that even as he is destroying these few missiles, he has ordered the continued production of the very same type of missiles."
In Iraq, the government destroyed six of the short-range Al Samoud missiles after a one-day hiatus, bringing the total destroyed under United Nations supervision in the last week to 40 - approximately one-third of Iraq's known stock of the missiles.
In Tampa, Fla., the Central Command said that for the second day in a row its aircraft struck Iraqi positions early this morning in the desert about 230 miles west of Baghdad, a remote area near the Jordanian border. The strike, like an attack in the same region the day before, was aimed at a mobile radar system used to track aircraft and to aim anti-aircraft missiles.
American commanders have long expressed concerns that this largely vacant area might be used by Iraq to fire medium-range surface-to-surface missiles at Israel if war breaks out, as the Iraqi military did in the gulf war 12 years ago.
The Iraqi demands to the United Nations included a call to strip Israel of its weapons of mass destruction and force it to abide by Security Council resolutions requiring its withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. The government statement also said the United States and Britain should officially be branded "liars."
The statement by the Iraqi cabinet said the United States was still trying to use the cover of the Security Council reports to attack Iraq despite the cooperation detailed by the weapons inspectors.
Hans Blix, one of the chief United Nations inspectors, delivered a lengthy report on Friday that included some 30 outstanding questions, mostly about the amount of chemical and biological weapons Iraq has produced and what happened to it all.
The Iraqi statement, carried by the official Iraqi news agency, said that the Bush administration "wants to cover what it wants to do with allegations that Iraq did not implement Security Council resolutions."
"But testimonies on the truthfulness of what we say and the accuracy in implementation come from the concerned specialists led by the committee of Blix and ElBaradei," it said, referring to Mr. Blix and Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who on Friday said his inspectors have so far detected no proof that Iraq is producing nuclear weapons.
Iraq maintains that it dismantled its weapons of mass destruction itself, but in the process also destroyed all the documentation. Although it says that it destroyed the materiel in 1991, it did not even admit to having such weapons programs until 1995.
The destruction of the weapons was apparently undertaken in order to cover all traces of such programs.
In addition to the six Al Samoud missiles destroyed today, the United Nations said three warheads had been destroyed. Mr. Blix had ordered the destruction of all the roughly 100 completed missiles and 20 in various stages of construction because they exceeded the 93-mile limit imposed on Iraq's defensive weapons after the 1991 war.
The editorial in the leading newspaper Babel, owned by Mr. Hussein's son Odai, lashed out at the United States and Britain for pushing for war while other nations were taking a more restrained approach. It said the two countries "insist on swimming against the current."
"It seems members realize that the policies of Britain and the United States are pushing not only the Security Council, but the world toward the abyss," the paper said.
As has been the case when each such report to the United Nations has been issued in recent weeks, Iraqis in general have been tense about the possible outcome and then somewhat relieved when the possible deadline for war was shoved back by a few more days.
Still, with each passing day, preparations for war are visible around the capital, with slightly more armed Interior Ministry troops on the streets and workers filling sandbags around government installations.
"We are all afraid because we expect we could be attacked at any minute," said Raghad Majid, a 23-year-old art student. "They want to attack no matter what."
----
Inspectors Speed Up Weapons Hunt in Iraq
By WILLIAM J. KOLE
Associated Press Writer
Mar 9, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
NEW YORK (AP) -- With war looming in Iraq, U.N. nuclear inspectors are accelerating their hunt for any shred of evidence that Baghdad has an atomic weapons program, the top nuclear inspector said Saturday.
"We've been pushing the gas pedal as much as we can," Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Associated Press before boarding a flight from New York to Vienna, Austria, where the IAEA is based.
"We will continue the work until we're told to stop."
Although ElBaradei told the Security Council on Friday that three months of aggressive inspections have failed to uncover any evidence that Saddam Hussein has revived his nuclear program, ElBaradei told the AP he still hopes for another two or three months to be more certain.
That could be unlikely as the United States continues pressing for military action and building up forces in the Gulf region. But ElBaradei, noting the deep divisions in the council over whether to give inspectors more time or use force to disarm Iraq, said he believed there still was a chance for continued weapons checks. Even if the inspectors pull out, they will seek to return as quickly as possible to continue monitoring Iraqi disarmament, ElBaradei said.
"We'd like to remain in Iraq for a very long time to make sure we didn't miss anything," he said. "Being on the ground is particularly important with a nation like Iraq, which in the past has shown such deceit. There's always a degree of risk and uncertainty."
In whatever time the IAEA has left, its inspectors will press Baghdad to arrange interviews with nuclear scientists outside Iraq, ElBaradei said.
"It's a good test of Iraqi cooperation," he said. "It's an opportunity to show they have nothing to hide. If they have nothing to hide, they should reassure their scientists that they can serve their country" by agreeing to private interviews outside Iraq.
Meanwhile, the chief nuclear inspector said he was monitoring events closely to determine if - and when - his inspectors might have to leave Iraq. U.N. officials said they could begin withdrawing inspectors within 48 hours if war becomes imminent.
Because the inspectors have fanned out across Iraq, they could be among the first to detect signs of an invasion in the making, ElBaradei said.
"If we know there will be an armed operation, it's our duty to alert the council, and it's our responsibility to ensure the safety of our people is intact," he said.
If war erupts, ElBaradei said, the world at least will know there were no signs of a developing nuclear program.
"The fact that we know Iraq does not have nuclear (weapons) is in itself a big relief," he said.
--------
U.S. Cites Concern on Iran Nuclear Program
March 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iran-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two senior U.S. officials expressed concern on Sunday about Iran's nuclear program and said the United States has urged the United Nation's nuclear watchdog agency to take a closer look at it.
Time Magazine, in its latest edition, reported that Iran had moved closer to operation of a plant to enrich uranium than it has previously revealed.
While he did not specifically comment on the Time report, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been surprised by the extent of Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
``Right now, the IAEA is discovering, as a result of information that intelligence made available, that Iran has a far more robust program for the development of nuclear weapons than the IAEA thought,'' Powell told NBC's ``Meet the Press.''
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on ABC's ``This Week'' that the United States had talked to Russia, China and the atomic energy agency ``about the need to get into Iran and to understand what is going on there.''
The comments came as the United States was signaling its readiness to go to war -- with or without the support of the United Nations -- to disarm Iran's neighbor, Iraq.
The United States, Britain and Spain are urging a March 17 ultimatum for Iraqi compliance with U.N. demands that Baghdad give up its suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
But the proposal faces strong opposition from France and other veto-wielding U.N. Security Council members, prompting a final, intense round of diplomacy before this week's vote. Iraq denies it has such weapons.
Iran, which Washington has branded an ``axis of evil'' member along with Iraq and North Korea, last month unveiled plans for an ambitious nuclear energy program. But it has insisted its aims are purely peaceful.
Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran in February and welcomed signs of greater transparency over its nuclear power program.
But ElBaradei urged Iran to sign up for the IAEA's ``Additional Protocol,'' which would allow inspectors freer access to nuclear sites with little prior warning.
Amid the Iraq crisis, Washington and the IAEA have not seen eye-to-eye on evidence surrounding whether Baghdad has revived its nuclear weapons program.
On Friday, ElBaradei shot down allegations Iraq tried to revive its nuclear arms program and said fake documents backed U.S. claims Baghdad had tried to buy uranium to make bombs.
Responding on ``Meet the Press'' to ElBaradei's report about Iraq, Powell said: ``We have to be a little careful about nuclear weapons programs.''
He cited Iran as an example of the difficulty of gauging nuclear weapons programs.
-------- korea
Powell, Rice Reject Talks With N. Korea
By KEN GUGGENHEIM
Associated Press Writer
Mar 9, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NKOREA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Top Bush administration officials said Sunday the time still isn't ripe for one-on-one talks with North Korea, despite concerns that North Korea is moving rapidly to develop new nuclear weapons.
Any lasting solution to the North Korean problem will need the support of Russia, China and other nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, said in separate television interviews. North Korea opposes multilateral talks.
"I think eventually we will be talking to North Korea, but we're not going to simply fall into what I believe is bad practice of saying the only way you can talk to us is directly, when it affects other nations in the region," Powell said on CNN's "Late Edition."
Powell, on Fox News Sunday, said that during his visit to the United Nations last week, he worked with diplomats to develop a multinational approach to North Korea.
Democrats are pressing the Bush administration to begin direct talks immediately. They say that while the administration has been paralyzed by indecision and distracted by Iraq, the threat posed by North Korea has spiraled.
In recent months, North Korea has expelled U.N. monitors, withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and moved to restart a a nuclear reprocessing facility that could produce bombs within months. It is believed to already have one or two bombs.
Most recently, North Korean fighter jets intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane and the Pentagon sent 24 bombers to the region. North Korea on Sunday accused the United States of plotting an atomic attack against it.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential candidate, called for direct talks to ease tensions.
"We now have a huge problem in North Korea which the president is claiming is a regional crisis. I think it's an enormous world crisis, which isn't being paid enough attention to," Dean said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Rice said the United States isn't afraid to talk, "but we need to do so in a way that will bring maximum pressure on North Korea to actually this time not just freeze its weapons of mass destruction, but begin to dismantle them."
Any incentives for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program "will come from the collective weight of the international community, not just from the United States alone," she said on ABC's "This Week."
Powell noted that under a 1994 agreement, North Korea froze its plutonium program, then secretly began a separate uranium enrichment program.
"We can't fall into that trap again of paying them off to stop what they're doing, only to discover that they're doing it again at a later time," he said.
--------
N. Korea accuses Washington of planning nuclear attack
3/9/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-03-09-nkorea-nuclear_x.htm
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea on Sunday accused the United States of plotting an atomic attack against it, continuing the communist North's hostile rhetoric in the standoff over its moves to develop nuclear programs.
Chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei warned that the world must not tolerate the North's ambitions and said in an interview that "all countries must be treated equally."
When asked whether North Korea poses a greater threat than Iraq, ElBaradei told the German weekly newspaper Bild am Sonntag that "in both cases, we are worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons."
"The difference is that, in Iraq, we can now check with a team of highly qualified inspectors whether there is a new nuclear weapons program," said ElBaradei, who heads the Vienna, Austria-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
"In North Korea, IAEA inspectors were forced out of the country in December, and we know that North Korea is in a position to produce weapons-grade plutonium."
The nuclear dispute flared in October when Washington said Pyongyang admitted pursuing a nuclear program.
Washington and its allies cut off oil shipments to the impoverished communist state. The North retaliated by expelling U.N. monitors, moving to reactivate its frozen nuclear facilities and withdrawing from the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In recent months, the isolated North has taken steps to restart its plutonium-productionline at a mothballed reactor, and expelled U.N. inspectors who were monitoring the shutdown reactor.
ElBaradei's agency has sent the dispute to the U.N. Security Council, and while Washington says it wants to settle the dispute diplomatically, it has not ruled out a military option.
North Korea claims the Bush administration is planning pre-emptive strikes on its military bases and nuclear facilities, which U.S. officials believe are being used to make atomic bombs.
On Sunday, its state KCNA news agency said the U.S. Department of Defense mapped out a plan including "not only cruise missile strikes and massive air raids, etc., but the use of tactical nuclear weapons."
The North's "army and people will take every possible self-defensive measure to cope with the U.S. bellicose forces' new war moves," it said.
Tensions between Pyongyang and Washington increased last week after North Korean fighter jets intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
U.S. officials believe Pyongyang may be preparing to test fire another missile soon, following the launch of an anti-ship missile off its east coast late last month.
The Pentagon is deploying 12 B-1 and 12 B-52 bombers to Guam, about 2,000 miles from North Korea in case of conflict in the region.
"These moves indicate that the U.S. Air Force is taking the lead in implementing the U.S. imperialists' strategy to mount a pre-emptive attack on (North Korea)," said Pyongyang's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials demanded that Pyongyang dismantle its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon during unofficial talks in Germany last month, a major Japanese daily said Sunday.
U.S. diplomats also called for Pyongyang to allow U.N. monitors to return to verify that it wasn't enriching uranium for its purported nuclear weapons program during the meetings at the North Korean Embassy in Berlin on Feb. 20-21, the Asahi newspaper reported.
North Korea rejected the demands and the meetings ended in disagreement, the paper said, citing an unidentified former U.S. official who attended the meeting. Pyongyang had proposed a visit by U.S. nuclear inspectors, it said.
U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment Sunday.
-------- terrorism
Next Question: How to Stop Nuclear Blackmail
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/weekinreview/09SANG.html
WASHINGTON - Imagine this scene in the Oval Office three weeks from now. At the daily intelligence briefing, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, opens with some highly unpleasant but hardly unexpected news. The North Koreans have started up their nuclear reprocessor, and will be churning out a bomb's worth of plutonium every month, until summer.
By the time President Bush cleans up in Iraq, Mr. Tenet would likely tell him, North Korea will probably produce enough bomb-grade material to produce five or six weapons that can be added to the one or two the C.I.A. believes the North probably produced in the early 1990's. That is enough, as one of Mr. Bush's top aides says, to "hide three, conduct an underground test of one and offer to sell the rest."
In fact, last month, Mr. Tenet and the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, told Congress that North Korea might not even bother to turn all the plutonium it is likely to produce into warheads.
To achieve its objectives - getting Washington's undivided attention, diplomatic recognition and aid - all North Korea really has to do is hide a few nukes and leave Americans to wonder what they've got, and whether they are offering it to customers like Al Qaeda or Hamas. Call it the virtual nuclear deterrent.
To Mr. Bush's mind, this is why it makes sense to take on Iraq first - before it gets what North Korea already has. Yet if confronting Iraq is the first step in Mr. Bush's war on rogue states with nuclear ambitions, North Korea is the first in his war against nuclear blackmail. And those are very different campaigns.
In Iraq, Mr. Bush vowed to disarm the regime. Even if it takes a war, the big question is how to minimize the casualties, the backlash and the damage to American alliances. In North Korea, the question is whether the country can be disarmed at all, because the president's options range from bad to awful to incredibly dangerous.
Put another way, North Korea may be the far more challenging test of the notion that the United States right now has an opportunity to reorder the world so that it will never again face these kinds of threats.
Successfully facing down North Korea would send a message that the world will not tolerate nuclear blackmail. Failing to do so would send a very different message to rogue states - that if you don't want to be treated like Iraq, get your bomb before facing off against Washington.
"Kim Jong Il thinks that was Saddam's big mistake," said Gary Samore, an expert on nonproliferation in the Clinton administration who is now a scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
So when Mr. Kim flips on that reprocessor, what are Mr. Bush's options?
The first is to ignore the issue - always a favorite choice in Washington. Few in the administration believe Mr. Kim will start a nuclear war, because he values survival. And as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, "You can't eat plutonium."
True, but as Mr. Powell's own deputy pointed out to Congress, North Korea has sold just about everything it has ever developed, including ballistic missiles. No one knows just what a few baseball-sized lumps of plutonium would bring, but it would bring a lot - with plenty left over to perfect those missiles until they can reach Los Angeles. And the exports would be nearly impossible to stop: someone could just walk the plutonium over the Chinese border in an ox-cart, assuming that no starving North Koreans eat the ox first.
Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard scholar who worked on the now-failed 1994 nuclear freeze agreement with the North, points to another problem: If North Korea collapsed, there would be a scramble for the loose nuclear material. "The half-life of Plutonium-239 is 24,400 years," he said. "What is the half-life of the North Korean regime?"
Sooner or later, North Korea's neighbors would see its arsenal as a reason to rethink their own policies.
On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld surprised the South Koreans by talking about pulling out most of the 37,000 American troops in the country, where they have been increasingly unwelcome. If that happened, could the United States dissuade South Korea, Taiwan and even Japan from seeking their own nuclear deterrents?
Then there is option No. 2: turning up the heat a notch on the North. This is where the administration is now focused, and it has compiled a list of ways to meet every escalation from North Korea with an escalation from Washington. The ideas range from cutting off the cash sent to North Korea by Koreans in Japan, to ending South Korean investment in the North, to sealing off aid and fuel from China, to intercepting outbound North Korean ships, particularly those bearing missiles.
Mr. Bush has warmed to this option because, in his words, it avoids "rewarding bad behavior." The North has said sanctions would mean war, but it could be bluffing. The administration's problem is that tightening the noose requires the help of North Korea's neighbors - as Mr. Bush said at his news conference Thursday. None of them wants to see a nuclear North Korea, he said. That is right, but those nations' interests are not America's.
The new South Korean government wants to steam ahead with investment, family exchanges and modest trade. Its interest is preventing a collapse of the North Korean regime, which the South would have to pay for. And one day, the South assumes, it will inherit all that is built in the North, perhaps including that nuclear arsenal.
The Chinese fear collapse, too, because even more starving refugees would cross their border than do now. And the Japanese are consumed with the fate of their nationals who were kidnapped by North Korean agents, a few of whom the North released last year.
To Mr. Bush, however, blackmail is blackmail, and so he refuses even to sit down and talk to the North Koreans. Talks, his aides say, would only lead to pressure for concessions - diplomatic recognition, an agreement to "freeze" rather than dismantle nuclear activity. The president refuses to go that route.
So it sent a chill through the air when Mr. Bush suggested last week, for the first time, that if his options "don't work diplomatically, they'll have to work militarily." The North Koreans denounced the statement, saying it proves that after Baghdad, they are next. The White House rushed out to say military options are not on the table now. But no one said the North Korean prediction of the post-Iraq future was wrong.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
'67 Study Discouraged Use of Nuclear Weapons in Vietnam War
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63433-2003Mar8?language=printer
A secret 1967 government study on the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War that was declassified and released yesterday found that the political cost of using such devices far outweighed its military benefits.
"The use of tactical nuclear weapons [TNW] in Southeast Asia would offer the U.S. no decisive military advantage if the use remained unilateral," say the four scientists who carried out the study. And "the political effects of U.S. first use of TNW in Vietnam would be uniformly bad and could be catastrophic."
Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and one of the study participants, said recently that the study concluded "that the United States offers any likely adversary much better targets for nuclear weapons than these adversaries offer to the United States."
Relating the study to today's events, Dyson said, "This is even more true in the fight against terrorism than it was in Vietnam," and "the danger of terrorist use of nuclear weapons will remain serious for the foreseeable future, no matter what we do in Iraq."
Peter Hayes, executive director of the Nautilus Institute, a California research group that got the study declassified, said yesterday, "We hope there are advisers in the current government with the wisdom and courage of these scientists, willing to stand up and speak the truth about nuclear weapons." Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recently knocked down rumors the Pentagon was preparing to use nuclear weapons in Iraq.
The study was undertaken after nuclear scientists working on governmental scientific analyses as part of the so-called Jason Group heard informal remarks by senior military officers about possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.
The 36-year-old study also disclosed the United States was trying to develop a "research earth borer," an air-dropped nuclear bomb that could dig into the ground to a certain depth before exploding.
Designed to create a crater twice the size of a surface burst, the earth borer was described as "a useful weapon for dealing with the deep Viet Cong tunnel systems" that were resistant to conventional bombing.
The United States has a low-yield earth-penetrating bomb in its current nuclear arsenal and is seeking to develop a high-yield "robust earth penetrator" designed to go after deeply buried nuclear or missile production facilities such as those North Korea has in hills and mountains.
Dyson said "the adversary could easily counter their effectiveness by digging a little deeper underground."
-------- us politics
A Detour From the War on Terrorism
By Gary Hart
Sunday, March 9, 2003
Washington Post; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59650-2003Mar7?language=printer
The urgent necessity to disband terrorist networks abroad and to secure the American homeland has been replaced by the Bush administration's puzzling preoccupation with Saddam Hussein. He has become George Bush's White Whale, an obsession that has cost us international solidarity in eradicating terrorism, the goodwill of tens of millions of people worldwide and the role of benign democratic world leader.
While deploying divisions to the Middle East our government has not been training and equipping police, fire and emergency health responders in the United States. While splitting the United Nations and NATO, our government has not made our vulnerable ports safer. While paying tens of billions of (deficit) tax dollars to Turkey, Yemen and other countries for basing rights in the Middle East, our president is not preparing the United States to respond to the terrorist attacks the CIA has predicted will most probably occur as a response to our preemptive invasion of a sovereign Arab nation. It is difficult to imagine that the president seriously believes an invasion of Iraq will reduce the terrorist threat to the United States.
What is worse, our president does not trust his own people. He does not trust us enough to tell us which other nations will provide combat forces and in what numbers, how long our military will remain in the volatile Middle East or how much the long-term military enterprise will cost in deficit tax dollars. Most disturbing, our president does not trust us enough to tell us the casualty estimates for our sons and daughters and for Iraqi civilians. The Pentagon has produced low, medium and high risk estimates. The president simply chooses not to disclose them for the justifiable fear that public support for war with Iraq will erode.
Given the pattern of public deception in Vietnam, we should have learned to demand candor and respect for our judgment from our elected officials. Instead, we are now tacitly permitted to believe war in Iraq will resemble Gulf War I and Afghanistan -- quick, relatively bloodless and successful. We must pray that it will be. But prayers are no substitute for a leader who trusts us enough to be honest about the risks of war.
Obsession with Hussein has caused the president to neglect the probable consequences of the Iraqi war -- attacks on the United States. We are not sufficiently prepared for the next terrorist attacks -- attacks very likely to be precipitated by massive U.S. military invasion -- and probable long-term occupation, of an Islamic nation in the most volatile region on Earth. "America Still Unprepared, Still at Risk," reported the Council on Foreign Relations task force I co-chaired with Warren Rudman last fall. To leave one's own camp exposed and vulnerable when an attack is made invites counterattack; it is not the hallmark of prudent leadership.
What is our strategic objective in Iraq -- disarmament, regime change, to mount a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world or all of the above? Once again, the target changes, and presidential candor is missing. It is cynical in the extreme to assume the American people should not be told that we intend to conduct a political revolution among 1.1 billion people spread from Gibraltar to eastern Indonesia.
The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush. And as a visionary, George W. Bush is no Woodrow Wilson. I find nothing in the writings of America's founders, including those of the expansive Alexander Hamilton, that suggests our national purpose should be the remaking of the world in our own image. In fact, most founders, and the prudent leaders since, have believed we should focus on perfecting our own democracy as an example to the world.
But if you are up for preemptive war against nations that do not meet the historic standard of representing an imminent and unavoidable threat, then you are pretty much up for anything.
Iraq is a detour from the war on terrorism. Hussein mysteriously morphed into Osama bin Laden, or vice-versa. But at least we have the advantage -- for the moment -- of knowing what country Hussein is in. Instead of wondering how many Americans will be sacrificed to urban warfare in Baghdad, we should be concerned with equipping and training police and firefighters in Baltimore, Dallas and Denver. Right now, first things are being put second and third as our leaders obsess about an isolated Iraq.
The war on terrorism is too serious to become the vehicle for settling old scores, either abroad or between neo-hawks and traditionalists in the administration. It is also too serious to become an excuse -- a kind of foreign policy Trojan horse -- to experiment with the new doctrine of preemption to replace containment. And if we really do intend to bring democracy to the Arab world at the point of a bayonet, the American people deserve the candid accounting we have not been given.
The writer is a former Democratic senator from Colorado. He was co-chairman, with former senator Warren Rudman, of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century.
-------- MILITARY
-------- colombia
U.S. Seeks to Avoid Deeper Role in Colombia
Involvement Likely To Decline After Hunt Ends for Americans
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63201-2003Mar8?language=printer
FLORENCIA, Colombia -- One day last month, a U.S.-registered Cessna Caravan radioed a mayday call to report engine trouble as it approached this town from Bogota, the capital 240 miles to the north. Minutes later, the plane carrying four Americans and a Colombian army sergeant, who were embarking on an intelligence mission, crashed in the jungle.
The Colombian sergeant and one of the Americans were killed by rebel gunfire immediately after the Feb. 13 plane crash. Since then, thousands of Colombian forces have searched for the three surviving Americans, apparently now in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerrilla group designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
The United States sent 150 U.S. military and civilian officials to Colombia after the crash. The number of U.S. military personnel in Colombia is now 411, the highest number ever stationed there.
But the increased U.S. participation in Colombia's decades-old guerrilla war is likely to last only as long as the Americans are missing, U.S. officials say.
The Bush administration has made it clear that the country will have to shoulder more of the military and financial burden of fighting its guerrilla war. U.S. officials have used the words "exit strategy" and "endgame" during recent visits here to describe Washington's desire to do less in Colombia even as President Alvaro Uribe seeks more U.S. help.
"We're not looking to put more people in here," said Marc Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, during a news conference Wednesday in Bogota. "This is a Colombian problem that the Colombians will have to solve." 'Colombianization' of War Effort
Uribe's government contends that Washington should view Colombia's guerrilla insurgency as part of the larger war on terrorism. So far, Uribe's appeal has not worked, largely because the primary U.S. goal in Colombia is to fight drug trafficking. Even though peace in Colombia remains elusive, the United States contends it is making progress toward eradicating coca cultivation. Colombia exports 90 percent of the cocaine reaching U.S. shores, and revenue from the illicit trade provides much of the financing for the 18,000-member FARC. Drug money also funds the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary force that works alongside the military in many regions.
"You have a government here willing to go all the way, and in the next four years you could really make a difference in this war," Vice President Francisco Santos said in a recent interview. "This alliance must really show itself now because to date it has not been fighting to win, and that's not to say we aren't very thankful for the help that has come."
At the urging of the U.S. Congress, Uribe has taken politically painful steps that will make it easier for Washington to leave Colombia's war. Colombian officials describe the process as the "Colombianization" of the war effort, and recognize it could mean significantly less U.S. help here within the next three years. Uribe has imposed new taxes intended to raise more than $1 billion this year for the war effort, a longtime Congressional demand. He has outlined plans to add 35,000 soldiers to the ranks, established a civilian intelligence network, and deployed the first contingent of "peasant" soldiers in the countryside.
In exchange, the U.S. Congress included $93 million in its 2003 aid package for a new program to train as many as 800 Colombian soldiers to protect a vital oil pipeline. In 2001, guerrilla attacks on the 500-mile Ca?o Limon pipeline, operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum and the state oil company Ecopetrol, cost the Colombian government $500 million in lost revenue. The loss equaled U.S. aid to Colombia that year -- money Washington wants Colombia to spend on the war effort.
A $1.3 billion U.S. anti-narcotics package doubled the U.S. commitment to this country when it was approved by Congress in 2000, despite concerns about the military's poor human rights record. The Bush administration plans to send an additional $1 billion in military assistance over the next two years. So far, the United States has paid for more than 80 transport helicopters plus programs to train a new anti-narcotics brigade, provide instruction for pilots and prepare elite forces to hunt down guerrilla and paramilitary leaders. The military equipment and training have helped stop the guerrillas from operating in large columns, as they did with devastating effect in the mid-1990s. But the aid has failed to turn the war in the government's favor.
A far smaller percentage of the aid has funded community courts, built rural highways, expanded protection programs for journalists and human rights workers, and a program to coax coca farmers to shift to other crops. Many Colombians and some U.S. lawmakers say the military tilt of the aid package underestimates the social roots of a war that has lasted for generations.
Mindful of those concerns, Congress tied every dollar of Colombian military aid to a specific program or piece of equipment. "I think many of those debates [over U.S. military involvement in a Latin American civil war] have been won now," said Luis Alberto Moreno, the Colombian ambassador to Washington. "But this package still operates on the golden rule -- he who puts in the gold makes the rules."
The American killed by rebels near Florencia was Thomas J. Janis, one of a number of civilian contractors who often experience ground fire as they fly reconnaissance or pilot herbicide-spraying planes over guerrilla-protected coca fields. The body of Janis, 56, a pilot and decorated Army veteran, was found near the Cessna's wreckage with a fatal gunshot to the head. Investigators said he was either shot in an escape attempt or in a futile effort to hold off the guerrillas.
Janis was one of the former military men working for Reston-based DynCorp and California Microwave Systems, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. He was under contract to the U.S. Southern Command, which in turn assigned him to work for the U.S. Embassy. The FARC says it considers such civilian operatives mercenaries and thus fair targets. It took responsibility for seizing the survivors, describing them as prisoners of war.
The dead Colombian was Sgt. Luis Alcides Cruz, who worked with Colombian military intelligence. Colombian officials said rules required that a Colombian national accompany intelligence flights. He was found dead alongside Janis, with a bullet wound to the chest. Authorities said the men were killed after the crew managed to set the spy plane on fire to keep its equipment out of rebel hands. Coca Cultivation Drops
The Cessna's mission was to photograph coca fields for subsequent herbicide spraying operations. A U.S.-trained anti-drug brigade based 15 miles southeast of here at Larandia carries out the aerial eradication program in this region.
The U.S. government says it has succeeded in eradicating some of the coca crop, although there are complaints that the herbicides are also killing food crops, thereby punishing peasant farmers. The CIA reported last week that coca cultivation dropped 15 percent last year, the first decline after a decade of skyrocketing growth. Several state governors in southern Colombia challenged the report, saying it did not include new cultivation sprouting up in other zones.
Uribe's government has been pursuing the U.S. crop eradication program with enthusiasm. In the three months following his Aug. 7 inauguration, 115,000 acres of coca were sprayed in Putumayo province alone -- more than half the national total for the previous year. Critics note the program has pushed thousands of farmers out of the province, strangled the local economy, and encouraged new coca cultivation in the Amazon jungle.
By comparison, former President Andres Pastrana was occasionally reluctant to follow the spraying program as aggressively as U.S. officials demanded.
Gonzalo de Francisco, Pastrana's national security adviser, said the United States applied constant pressure to accelerate the pace of coca spraying, viewing it as cheaper than "alternative development" and crop substitution. Pastrana instead focused on reaching a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas. "It was not so much a case of a clash of interest, but the fact that our interests did not fit into the same box," De Francisco said. "It was a balance, and I believe by the end much of it had been resolved." Wiping Out Livelihoods
Luis Carlos Ledezma, 42, traveled to Putumayo in 2001 from the province of Valle del Cauca with his wife and four children to pick coca. But the spraying program wiped out the 40-acre coca plantation where he worked along with acres of intermingled food crops.
Today, Ledezma stoops in the dirt, planting palm seedlings under a thatched roof to guard against errant spraying. Ledezma and his family tried to make ends meet on his wife's $18 weekly pay as a maid. He has gone weeks without a salary.
"Send our regards to the United States," Ledezma said. "And see if they might send us all a visa."
The FARC has taken advantage of the resentment created by the spraying to attract new recruits. FARC leaders say the herbicide spraying violates Colombian sovereignty. But U.S. officials contend the spraying is hurting the guerrillas.
A reduction of 350 metric tons in cocaine exports this year -- a 35 percent decrease -- has deprived the rebels of millions in revenue, officials said. The plan this year calls for eradication of 440,000 acres of coca crops, a figure that accounts for replanted acreage. That would leave about 80,000 acres of coca throughout the country.
But some Colombians say even that level of eradication will not change the dynamics of the guerrilla war.
"I'd prefer that the FARC had more money and fewer people supporting them," said Sen. Antonio Navarro Wolff, a former leader of the demobilized M-19 guerrilla movement. "The FARC may need millions of people to win the war, but they only need thousands to keep it going. These policies give them that and more."
Uribe has failed to link Colombia's guerrilla battles with the Bush administration's global war on terrorism. Colombia's three armed groups are classified as terrorist organizations by the United States, although none are considered to have the "global reach" of al Qaeda and other groups higher on the administration's target list.
"If a deployment is being made because of Iraq, why isn't something similar being thought of to finally solve the problem of drugs and effectively control the Atlantic and Pacific oceans so the traffic of cocaine is stopped between California and Colombia?" Uribe said recently.
But U.S. officials have been signaling to Colombian officials to prepare for the day when the war will again be all theirs to fight.
"We've got requirements, Colombians have requirements, but our goal is to help Colombians defend themselves," a U.S. official said. "What will remain the basis . . . is having Colombians doing this job for Colombians."
Officials have been saying, mostly in private, that Washington will consider its Colombia policy successful once coca cultivation falls beneath 100,000 acres -- something it intends to accomplish by the end of this year -- and the guerrillas are sent back to the distant southern jungles and plains that were once their principal domain.
Colombian officials disagree with that definition of success.
"If someone thinks that by taking coca away you solve our problems, they're crazy," Santos said. "An exit strategy now is a disaster strategy. The only sure thing is that without U.S. help we will not win."
-------- iraq
Air Defense Units in Southern Iraq Hit Hard
U.S. 'No-Fly' Patrols Have Struck All Fixed Sites, Commander Says
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62692-2003Mar8?language=printer
The commander of U.S. air forces in the Persian Gulf region said yesterday that several months of intensified U.S. airstrikes had hit all fixed air defenses in southern Iraq known to American officials. But he added that mobile antiaircraft guns and missiles remained a threat to U.S. pilots.
"We've killed what we know is there," Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley said. "But they have a lot of depth in mobile systems that they can continue to roll into the south. The mobile systems are the ones I worry about the most."
The arrival of hundreds of additional Air Force and Navy carrier-based aircraft in the region in the past two months has enabled the United States to more than double the number of sorties over southern Iraq. This in turn has led to wider and more frequent coverage of the southern "no-fly" zone, Moseley said.
More than 400 U.S. planes are now operating from about 30 locations in the gulf and elsewhere, according to other officials. In the past month, U.S. pilots have struck from seven to 14 targets in Iraq a week.
But Moseley said patrols are still not being flown 24 hours a day, and Iraqi forces continue to shoot at U.S. aircraft. Since passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 in early November, which gave Iraq one more chance to disarm, Iraqi forces have fired more than 200 antiaircraft artillery shells and more than 100 missiles at U.S. and British warplanes patrolling the southern zone, Moseley said.
"They're moving stuff around, they're enhancing the no-fly zone and they're a continual threat to my pilots and crews," he said. "Sometimes they shoot at us 10 or 11 or 12 times during an operation."
As commander of the 9th Air Force and the air component commander for the U.S. Central Command, Moseley would direct the air campaign in a war against Iraq. His remarks in a telephone interview were intended to portray the intensification of U.S. airstrikes against Iraq as still essentially an enforcement action prompted by a rise in Iraqi attacks in violation of U.N. resolutions.
But the increasingly aggressive U.S. targeting in the southern and northern no-fly zones established a decade ago has been widely seen as reflecting an American plan for the systematic destruction of Iraqi air defenses and, more recently, surface-to-surface missiles in a fashion that would ease the way for an invasion. The surge in sorties, which now number well in the hundreds daily -- and reached a record 1,000 one day last week -- has transformed what was once a limited patrolling operation into a broader, more intense prelude to a possible full-scale war.
The first sign of the widened campaign came in September when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed that he had directed commanders to focus retaliatory strikes not just on Iraqi radar and missile systems, but also on air defense communications centers, command posts and cable relay sites to eliminate all elements of Iraq's air defense network in the no-fly zones.
Lately, the strikes have widened further to include surface-to-surface missiles, which Iraq has moved into the southern zone within range of Kuwait, the key staging area for the bulk of U.S. ground forces massing in the region. Such weapons, which include Ababil-100 missiles, Frog-7 rockets and Astros-2 multiple rocket launchers, have also been shifted north of Baghdad presumably to attack U.S. or Kurdish forces coming from that direction, according to defense officials.
As with the airstrikes on weapons and facilities related to air defense, the U.S. justification for hitting the surface-to-surface weapons is enforcement of U.N. resolutions prohibiting Iraq from enhancing its military capabilities in ways that would threaten Kurds in the north or Shiites and the neighboring countries of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the south.
But Iraq does not recognize the zones. Nor does the United Nations, whose resolutions have not called for enforcement patrols.
Further, the vast majority of airstrikes have continued to occur in the southern no-fly zone out of deference to Turkey, which, while allowing U.S. and British aircraft to fly out of its territory to patrol the northern zone, has imposed much narrower limits on the kinds of targets it will allow. Even in the north, though, the target set has appeared to widen lately. The last set of attacks, reported on Feb. 27, went against three types of air defense communication sites: fiber optic, cable and microwave.
While defense officials have generally declined to provide exact estimates of the amount of damage done by the airstrikes over the years, they have acknowledged that much of Iraq's air defense network has remained intact, because many of its radars and antiaircraft weapons have been kept out of the no-fly zones and concentrated in the central part of the country.
Additionally, the Iraqis have shown considerable skill in repairing damaged weapons and facilities. But Moseley said the point of the strikes has not been to destroy all Iraqi military assets in the no-fly zones, just those considered threats to pilots or neighboring states. He also refused to link the rise in U.S. strikes to preparations for a possible war.
"The intent is to enforce the zone," the general said. "So we've been very disciplined and proportional in the responses."
----
Saddam's Tough to Persuade. Cuba Tried
By Alcibíades Hidalgo
Sunday, March 9, 2003
Washington Post; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59731-2003Mar7?language=printer
In the fall of 1990, the author was part of a high-level Cuban diplomatic delegation sent by Fidel Castro to Baghdad on the eve of the Persian Gulf War to try to persuade Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. His memories of a tense afternoon spent in Hussein's company offer some insight into the Iraqi leader's mind on the eve of a possible second Gulf War.
Saddam Hussein raised his right hand to interrupt a long explanation by the chief of Cuban military intelligence. Both men were poised over a large map of the Arabian peninsula, on which was marked in great detail the growing deployment of American and allied military forces, a land armada that would inflict lethal punishment on Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. "I have received various reports quite similar to yours," Saddam said. "I get them from my ambassador to the United Nations. They almost always end up there," he said, raising his voice and pointing to a grand marble wastebasket in a corner of the huge room.
His remark -- the first he had made in almost two hours, after patiently listening to visitors at his Al Qadissiya Palace -- seemed intended largely for the benefit of the Iraqi military leaders who sat in their finest dress uniforms along one side of a huge table. On the other side was our delegation, sent by Fidel Castro in an attempt to convince his Baghdad ally that a war in the Persian Gulf would be disastrous for Iraq. We Cubans sensed it would be a tough afternoon.
The meeting took place in November 1990, three months after Iraq had applied overwhelming military force against its smaller, independent neighbor. The scenario was troublingly similar to Cuba's worst fears about its own powerful neighbor to the north. It was necessary for us to take a strong position.
Cuba's foreign ministry at first counseled silence: The Kuwaitis offered no tangible benefits to Cuba. Saddam was a long-standing friend with whom Cuba shared many positions. But in the Central Committee of the Communist Party some of us argued for the opposite: The outright act of aggression was irreconcilable with international law. Cuba's interests would be better served by maintaining our distance from Saddam's latest adventure.
Castro agreed. At the time Cuba was a member of the U.N. Security Council, and in that capacity it voted in favor of Resolution 660, condemning Iraq's actions. That moment constituted the height of Cuban opposition to Iraq during the crisis. Subsequently, Cuba's U.N. delegation -- under direct orders from Fidel -- would work on behalf of Iraq within the Security Council, but those efforts did not win Saddam's forgiveness for our initial condemnation.
The idea of a direct appeal to the Iraqi dictator had come from Castro. The mission required enormous discretion. It would be headed by the vice president of the Cuban Council of Ministers, José Ramón Fernández, who was a key figure during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Rodrigo Alvarez Cambras, an orthopedic surgeon who years before had removed a tumor from Saddam Hussein's spinal cord, was included. His presence would underscore the friendly, almost intimate, nature of the mission.
In my own case, besides being the acting head of the foreign relations section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, I was familiar with Iraq and its leader thanks to a long tour in the Middle East with the Cuban news agency. Col. Jaime Salas, the acting chief of military intelligence, was designated to brief Saddam on intelligence concerning the allied deployment. Bodyguards, assistants, translators and the deputy foreign minister in charge of Arab states filled out the delegation.
The heaviest load was to be carried by Col. Salas. The Soviet military, which was kept fully informed on the mission's activities, provided us with detailed descriptions of the allied forces and equipment en route to the region, including information on new weaponry. At the Soviet base in Torrens, on the outskirts of Havana (known as Lourdes to Americans), electronic intelligence had been culled from command centers throughout the United States, to which was added information sent by Moscow.
Fidel and some of us quickly drafted a cordial, four-page message to Saddam. It listed the reasons the Iraqi leader should not give Washington the opportunity to begin a period of world domination. It suggested that he accept mediation by friendly forces, namely Cuba and the other non-aligned members of the Security Council: Colombia, Malaysia and Yemen. These four would provide diplomatic cover for Iraq by suggesting in the council that Iraq withdraw immediately from Kuwait. That way, Saddam could agree to a "Third-World solution." Iraq's outstanding territorial demands with Kuwait could remain on the table to be resolved later. With that, the Cuban leader said, Iraqi honor, a key concept, would be saved. The document was then sent to a Cuban expert in Soviet matters to produce the version most acceptable to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Fidel spoke to us of the personal risks we were about to undertake. He regarded us, he said, as soldiers on the way to war. Unusually, he embraced each of us.
We flew from Havana to Madrid and then to Amman, where the Cuban ambassador advised us that Saddam's private jet was waiting to take us to Baghdad. To fly in a plane that obviously figured in the center of so many radar screens was not necessarily the best option, but there was no possibility of rejecting the amiable offer of our host. Not for nothing had Fidel taken leave of us as if bidding goodbye to soldiers off to war.
Happily, the short flight to Saddam International Airport passed without incident. We were taken to a protocol house reserved by the Cuban mission and began our wait. The next day, an Iraqi attempt to obtain an advance version of Fidel's message to Saddam met with a stone wall. Fidel's letter would be handed over only to the person to whom it was addressed.
Finally, after three days, we received an urgent message that the meeting would take place the next day. The convoy left at noon for an unknown destination: It proved to be the president's favorite palace, Radwaniyah, also known as Al Qadissiya. Saddam did not make us wait long. We were sitting in an anteroom when he suddenly appeared with a half-dozen of his highest-ranking military commanders, all heavily decorated, like him, with campaign ribbons. With a grim expression, the Iraqi dictator greeted Fernández, who introduced the delegation, some of whom had already met Saddam. Instead of responding similarly, Saddam simply indicated his staff's presence with a vague gesture and invited us to sit along one side of the table.
Fernández spoke first, at the invitation of our host. We were motivated, he explained through a translator, by the proven friendship between Iraq and Cuba, between Saddam and Fidel. We were deeply concerned about the possible damage that the Iraqi government would sustain and troubled by the benefits the United States would accrue through the demonstration of its military power. Fidel's translated message was finally handed over to Saddam, who read it slowly, without comment, save an occasional mumble to himself and some movements of his head.
After Fernández's long speech, the Iraqi betrayed his impatience. Then it was my turn: A diplomatic solution was still possible, I said. Foreign envoys were arriving almost daily in Baghdad, most prominently the Soviets -- who were desperate to avoid publicly abandoning an Arab ally. The U.S.S.R. was in a position to launch a last-minute initiative in the Security Council, which China and several other permanent members were expected to join. I added that those most anxious to reach an honorable solution were the council members from the Third World. I stated what Fidel had said in his letter: All Iraq had to do was to announce its withdrawal from Kuwait. Territorial claims could be advanced on another day. The favorable disposition of U.N. Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a close friend of Havana's, was key. Cuba was in a position to assure Saddam that if he made the proper announcement, war could be avoided. My recital of diplomatic options inspired no response.
Next, Col. Salas went to a blackboard where he had affixed maps, tables, photographs and charts that illustrated the deployment of the allied troops. He explained in detail the characteristics of those formations, some of them the object of long-term study by Cuba. His listing of powerful weapons, many of them to be used in combat for the first time, was especially compelling. Salas spoke of Tomahawk missiles of various throw-weights that could be launched from the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf; of Apache anti-tank helicopters; of B-52 Stratofortresses; of new F-117A Stealth planes, invisible to radar; of AWACS command systems that would simultaneously guide hundreds of planes during aerial combat; of Patriot missiles several times more accurate than the Iraqis' Scuds; of Abrams tanks equipped with 120-millimeter gun sights; of new GPS spatial systems; of pilotless airplanes and other forms of guided aerial attackers. This war, he said, would be devastating.
Saddam listened impassively as Salas next described the disadvantageous balance of forces -- an Iraqi army of fewer than a million men, 7,000 tanks and many fewer artillery pieces. Saddam brought the presentation to an end when our colonel began to describe the enemy's manifest air superiority . The Iraqi launched into a crude harangue on the colonial injustices that had created the state of Kuwait, which he called the true cause of the present crisis. He condemned Arab ingratitude toward the only Arab nation that had fought Persian expansion in the Gulf. Iraq, he said, had been cheated out of its oil and now, isolated and alone, was forced to face a new Western crusade. He referred to the ingratitude of other fair-weather friends, to Iraq's refusal to bend to the pressures of its enemies, to the ineptitude of the U.N. and betrayal by the communist countries. He evoked the memory of Saladin, a native of his home region, and the formidable lesson that the Iraqi people, determined to prevail, would teach any aggressor.
"You can go tell Comrade Fidel Castro," he said, "that I appreciate his concern." Then, raising his voice, he said, "If the soldiers of the United States invade Iraq we will smash them like this" -- and he stamped on the carpet with his polished military boots.
Saddam shook hands with each of us unsmilingly. Fernández took his leave by embracing Saddam, Arab-style. Saddam asked him to convey his greetings to Castro.
On Nov. 12, 1990, Cuba's official daily newspaper, Granma, announced the return of our delegation, even though its existence had not been a matter of public knowledge. When Fidel received us that day he showed no interest in listening to an account of our trip. He asked only that Fernández reenact Saddam's display of how he planned to crush the American forces.
Alcibíades Hidalgo, a journalist and editor, was Cuban first vice minister of foreign relations and permanent representative to the United Nations. He sought asylum in the United States last summer. This piece was translated by Mark Falcoff.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Kills a Top Hamas Leader; Arafat Picks a Prime Minister
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By JAMES BENNET with GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/09MIDE.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, March 8 - With missiles launched from helicopters, Israel killed a top leader of Hamas and his three bodyguards in Gaza City today, shortly before Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, nominated a critic of the Palestinians' armed uprising to a new post of prime minister.
Hamas vowed to avenge the killing, calling the target, Ibrahim al-Makadmah, a purely political leader. But Israeli security officials described him as "one of the central characters in the planning, approval and executing of the terrorist operations of Hamas in the Gaza Strip."
In Ramallah, Mr. Arafat nominated Mahmoud Abbas, his deputy in the Palestine Liberation Organization, taking a step toward meeting the demands for change from Palestinian reformers as well as from the Bush administration and Israel. But the announcement touched off an internal debate over how much power Mr. Arafat would cede to Mr. Abbas.
Today's events reflected the growing struggles on two fronts of this conflict - a new rush of violence on the one hand and, on the other, a halting search for diplomatic avenues. Israel took the rare step of permitting a number of Palestinian leaders, including some from Gaza, to cross army checkpoints to reach Ramallah for Mr. Arafat's announcement, made in a speech the P.L.O.'s central council.
Mr. Arafat said he hoped for immediate action on a "road map" toward peace and a Palestinian state that was drawn up by the so-called diplomatic quartet of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. But and the Bush administration has now rebuffed its diplomatic partners and put the plan on hold until after the crisis in Iraq is resolved, administration officials said.
Nonetheless, a Western diplomat called Mr. Arafat's decision to appoint Mr. Abbas "a profoundly good thing."
The P.L.O.'s central council approved Mr. Abbas's nomination tonight. But Mr. Abbas, who is 67 and is also known as Abu Mazen, has said he would not accept the post of prime minister unless it came with significant authority. The Palestinian legislature is expected to being debating a definition of the new post on Monday.
In his speech, Mr. Arafat affirmed his stated desire for a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel, saying he sought a Palestinian state, with its capital in Jerusalem, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in 1967. He also urged all Palestinian factions to embrace a one-year truce initiative proposed by Egypt to protect Palestinians from "the mad plans of the Israeli government."
Aggressive pursuit of either goal would put Mr. Arafat on a collision course with Hamas, the militant Islamic group that rejects any negotiated settlement with Israel that does not end the state's existence. But the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismisses the stated positions of Mr. Arafat, regarding him as a terrorist bent on Israel's destruction.
The Bush administration has also worked to isolate Mr. Arafat and, unlike many other governments, did not send senior diplomats to his speech today.
Israel says that because Mr. Arafat will not crack down on Hamas, it has to do the work itself.
Mr. Makadmah and his guards were killed when two helicopters unleashed at least four missiles at his white Mitsubishi sedan, which was passing through a quiet residential neighborhood in Gaza City. The car was reduced to a charred metal skeleton. Bloodstains covered the street and the second-story walls of a cinder-block apartment building a few paces away.
Six bystanders were slightly wounded, Palestinians said. A large crowd quickly surrounded the car, with some men angrily denouncing Israel while others picked through the smoldering wreckage for body parts.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the helicopter attack.
The security officials said he had been linked to attacks that killed 28 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
But Hamas insisted that Mr. Makadmah had become a strictly political figure in recent years, and said it would strike back at Israeli politicians. Within hours of his death, Hamas began putting up posters that read in part, "All military choices are open now, and at the top of the list are the Israeli political leaders."
Hamas militants have long since gone underground, fearful of Israeli raids. But senior Hamas political leaders have taken a remarkably casual attitude toward their own safety. Mr. Makadmah, a practicing dentist, was believed to be on his way to the clinic where he worked at Islamic University when his car was struck.
Since a Hamas bombing that blew up a tank and killed four soldiers on Feb. 15, the Israeli army has carried out a fierce campaign against the group in Gaza, not sparing senior leaders.
As Israeli forces wage their campaign, killing dozens in Gaza, including civilians, Hamas has repeatedly vowed retaliation. On Wednesday, a Hamas suicide bomber killed 15 people aboard a bus in the Israeli city of Haifa, and on Friday night Hamas gunmen shot dead a Jewish couple in a West Bank settlement.
Hamas has also been firing crude rockets at Israeli targets across the fence that surrounds Gaza. In what it calls a campaign to stop the rocket fire, Israel on Thursday began seizing swaths of northern Gaza, establishing tank positions in the town of Beit Lahiya and near the Jabiliya refugee camp.
Israeli forces in Beit Lahiya shot dead one Palestinian and wounded 10 today, officials at Shifa Hospital in Gaza said. Israeli security aides said Palestinian youths threw stones and firebombs at troops throughout the day. At one point, soldiers fired and hit a youth who had thrown a firebomb, the sources said.
Since last summer, in what it says is a campaign against terrorism, Israel has seized territory in the West Bank that was ceded to Palestinian control under the Oslo accords.
Mr. Abbas, who signed the Oslo accords on behalf of the Palestinians, is said by knowledgeable Palestinians and diplomats to regard the uprising as a disaster for his people's national aspirations. But that attitude, together with a retiring nature, have left him without much popular following.
Diplomats who have pressed for the appointment of a strong prime minister said Mr. Abbas's fate, if he accepts the new post, is partly in Israel's hands. They say that within days of his appointment, Israel should move to ease restrictions on Palestinians to enhance Mr. Abbas's credibility in the street, and to enable him to consolidate a power base.
Mr. Abbas does have a base in the top ranks of Mr. Arafat's faction, Fatah, a fact that appears to have concerned the Palestinian leader. Earlier this week, Mr. Arafat floated the idea of appointing an official from outside Fatah, a suggestion that the faction's leaders rejected as an attempt to pick someone wholly dependent on Mr. Arafat for his authority.
An adviser to Mr. Arafat said after the speech that he expected him to remain pre-eminent. "Arafat doesn't delegate powers," the adviser said. "He authorizes missions."
Mr. Arafat and Mr. Abbas have often clashed, and some officials who deal with both men say they do not particularly like each other. That accounted for the grins on some faces of delegates here when Mr. Arafat, in announcing Mr. Abbas's appointment, referred to him as "my beloved brother."
"This is going to be an uphill battle," said Ziad Abu Amr, a reformer in the legislature, adding in reference to Mr. Arafat, "I don't think the president is going to easily relinquish some of his powers, and probably he will view the appointment, which was forced upon him, with anxiety."
But the two men go back decades in the same struggle, having founded Fatah together. Palestinian reformers say it is important that they reach a private understanding over Mr. Abbas's new role.
The announcement today was eased by a meeting Friday night that appeared to reconcile the two men, diplomats said.
Some Palestinians here said the new prime minister should focus on internal reforms, including separation of powers and discipline of the security services; others said he should direct his attention to relations with the United States and Israel. In both cases, hopes were high, although several people pointed to potential obstacles from Israel or Mr. Arafat.
"I think Abu Mazen will face a real examination in these days," said Nabil Amr, another legislator who has been pushing for a prime minister.
----
Hamas threatens Israeli leaders after killing of founder
By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem
09 March 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=385257
The Israeli military yesterday assassinated one of the founders of Hamas, the most powerful Palestinian militant group. Israeli helicopters fired several rockets at Ibrahim Maqadmeh's car as he travelled through a residential area of the Gaza Strip, cutting him and three bodyguards to pieces.
Hamas responded yesterday by openly threatening for the first time to target directly Israeli government ministers and members of parliament. The violence is spinning out of control here once again, even as the world waits for a probable American attack on Iraq.
The Mitsubishi in which Maqadmeh was driving, near the Gaza Strip's Sheikh Ridwan cemetery, was a mangled wreck yesterday. A witness who gave his name as Abu Shadan said: "When I got to the road I saw burnt bodies, with all their limbs cut off. It was difficult to recognise them but we found the ID card of one of the bodyguards." The three dead bodyguards were all Hamas militants. Several bystanders were injured, according to the Palestinian police.
The attack came at the end of a bloody week, in which at least 36 people have died on both sides. Fifteen people - 14 Israelis and one American - were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber on an Israeli bus packed with students. A heavily pregnant Palestinian woman was crushed to death in her home during an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, and a Palestinian fireman was killed, apparently by an Israeli tank shell, as he tried to put out a burning building after another incursion.
Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, one of the leaders of Hamas' political wing, who acts as a spokesman for the organisation, described the death of Maqadmeh as "a big loss for Hamas". Trained as a dentist, Maqadmeh quickly became involved in Islamist militant groups. He was arrested and imprisoned, twice by the Israelis, once by the Palestinian Authority, and co-founded Hamas from inside an Israeli prison cell.
Maqadmeh once led the armed wing of an earlier militant group, but at the time of his death he was acting as a recruiter for Hamas - and presumably for its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The Israelis accused him of involvement in many militant attacks.
The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades yesterday released a statement saying it had "informed all its cells that all military options are open" and to target Israel's "political leaders". Although it is probable that Hamas has targeted Israeli government ministers before, this is the first time it has publicly declared it will do so. Dr Rantisi said Israeli MPs would also be targets.
The assassination comes after Hamas claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing on the bus full of students in Haifa on Wednesday and for an attack on the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Araba, next to Hebron, on Friday night. Two Palestinian militants got into the settlement disguised as Jewish religious students and opened fire, killing a husband and wife.
In one incursion after another into the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army in recent weeks, Palestinian civilians have been killed. On Monday, Nuha Maqadmeh, nine months pregnant, was crushed to death after Israeli soldiers failed to evacuate her from her home when they dynamited the house next door. Instead the family were ordered to stay inside.
On Thursday, Naji abu Jalili, a Palestinian fireman, was killed as he tried to put out a fire. Television footage appeared to show that an Israeli tank fired a shell at Jalili and a large crowd of civilians watching him. Seven others died, among them at least one child.
The Israeli incursions have targeted Hamas. On Monday, the Israeli army said it had captured a Hamas political leader and a senior member of the armed wing. But the movement's reaction yesterday showed that the latest action was considerably more significant.
As the violence raged, the PLO central council met yesterday to talk about the appointment of a Palestinian prime minister - and Yasser Arafat recited a poem he had written in honour of international women's day. Mahmoud Abbas, the candidate nominated by Mr Arafat, has said he will not accept unless he is granted real power. There will be no decision before tomorrow, when the Palestinian parliament is expected to meet.
-------- mideast
Jordan's King, in Gamble, Lends Hand to the U.S.
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/middleeast/09JORD.html
AMMAN, Jordan, March 8 - At his palace in the hills above this capital, King Abdullah II has been studying military maps of Baghdad.
As a former Jordanian Special Forces commander, the 41-year-old king has been anticipating an American attack on Iraq by calculating the hard choices facing Saddam Hussein. In addition to confronting besieging American troops, Jordanian officers believe, Mr. Hussein may face domestic uprisings - most likely among the two million Shiite Muslims in Saddam City, a Baghdad district that is a suppressed cauldron of opposition to Mr. Hussein and his Sunni Muslim elite.
Among Arab leaders, few other than Saddam Hussein have a deeper interest in the outcome of an Iraq war than Abdullah does. Sixty percent of Jordan's five million people are Palestinians, many of them refugees bitter toward the United States for its support of Israel. Jordan also depends on a thriving trade with Iraq, its eastern neighbor, including cheap oil at savings of nearly $500 million a year, about equal to American aid to Jordan.
About 400,000 Iraqis are in Jordan. Most are fugitives from Mr. Hussein's terror, but some are secret police agents who, Jordanian intelligence officials say, may foment trouble. Jordan's eastern border with Iraq is open desert, allowing Iraqis virtually unhindered passage. A tide of Iraqi refugees flooding into Jordan to escape a war would be another major headache.
Yet Abdullah, the affable product of American schooling, is engaged in a big gamble.
In the face of overwhelming opposition to a war among his own people, the king has quietly assented to stationing American and British Special Forces in Jordan's eastern desert. Some units, Western diplomats say, are already operating deep inside Iraq, scouting targets. In addition, Abdullah has welcomed hundreds of American troops staffing three Patriot missile batteries that will seek to shoot down any Iraqi missiles launched against Jordan - or, more likely, Israel.
He has also agreed to allow coalition aircraft to fly over Jordan to support the war effort, although Jordanian officials say no combat missions will be allowed. "There will be no offensive missions flown from the west," one official said.
Although the cooperation has been masked, it is an open secret in the streets of Amman and in the teeming Palestinian refugee camps where anti-American feelings run high. Travelers on the 250-mile route from Amman to Ruweished, near Iraq, have reported sightings of uniformed American soldiers traveling the highway in unmarked vehicles, and others have reported heavy American equipment being unloaded at Aqaba, Jordan's Red Sea port.
Groups of trim, hardened, close-cropped Americans in civilian clothing checking into Amman's hotels on furlough are a common sight. Some are on military duty, others veterans working for private companies under Pentagon contracts. Asked what they have been doing in the desert, they offer wry smiles. "Let's just say that Saddam Hussein is in for a few surprises," said one.
Jordanian officials say that Abdullah, told by President Bush at the White House last summer that he would not be dissuaded from military action to topple Mr. Hussein, chose to limit Jordan's losses. "The king asked the president, `Can I change your mind?' and the president told him bluntly, `No,' " one Jordanian official said. "From that point on, we began preparing for war, and trying to minimize the political and economic costs."
In a poll conducted in January by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, 98 percent of the respondents foresaw "adverse repercussions" for Jordan from a war; 88 percent opposed any support for American forces. Jordanian commanders are preparing for unrest if a war comes, with orders to crack down hard if protests turn violent.
For months, the American-educated technocrats Abdullah favors for his cabinet have been seeking to cushion Jordan against the economic fallout from a war. Aided by beneficial trade deals with Israel and the United States, currency reserves have risen to more than $3 billion, a record, and oil reserves have been built up. Saudi Arabia, prodded by the United States, has agreed to make up for any cutoff of Iraqi oil if war comes.
Jordanian officials say that Abdullah has shown a pragmatism that many contrast with the attitude of his father, King Hussein, who leaned toward Saddam Hussein before the gulf war in 1991. American aid to Jordan was suspended, and King Hussein was personally shunned, at least until he supported new Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts after the Oslo accords of 1992.
Jordanian officials say that Abdullah thinks his stand will be vindicated if a war goes according to American estimates. After talks with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, America's war commander, the officials believe Iraqi forces could be defeated in as little as a week, with American and British troops greeted by Iraqis as liberators. "Who then, in the Arab world, will be more Catholic than the pope - or more royalist than the king?" one official said.
For Abdullah, who took the throne four years ago after King Hussein's death from cancer, the personal ironies run deep. Two weeks before his death, King Hussein abruptly switched the succession from his brother, Prince Hassan, to Abdullah, his oldest son. To Jordanians, King Hussein is an icon, a survivor of repeated turmoil during his 46-year reign, who guided Jordan from postcolonial fragility to a model in the Arab world for tolerance and adaptability.
But his father's handling of the 1990 crisis over Iraq has been a caution to King Abdullah. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, King Hussein described it as Iraq's reaction to Kuwaiti provocations over disputed oil fields. He urged the United States to leave the issue to Arab mediation, led by himself. He described Mr. Hussein as "a friend and a new phenomenon in Arab politics."
As war loomed in 1990, King Hussein eased the strain by roaring through his palace grounds on a BMW motorcycle, and he complained of sleepless nights. Abdullah, though, strikes visitors as calm. He tells guests with a smile that he reserves his motorcycle outings to breaks at a royal villa at Aqaba. His 32-year-old wife, Queen Rania, daughter of a Palestinian doctor driven from Kuwait after the Iraqi occupation, places her arm on the king's and says: "My husband is a practical man. He gives us confidence."
Nor is there much inclination, these days, to draw veils over the realities of Saddam Hussein's rule. Palace officials tell grim stories, dating from King Hussein's time, of fishing outings with Saddam Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay, that featured hand grenades instead of rods. "They're thugs," a palace aide said.
Abdullah's approach has won support from many in Jordan's ruling elite, who say he has understood an opinion shift here. In 1990, Saddam Hussein was widely popular for his hostility to Israel and the United States. But while the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation stirs stronger feelings than ever, Mr. Hussein's appeal has dwindled, partly because satellite television now brings many Jordanians tales of his violent repression in Iraq.
In Palestinian refugee camps like Baqaa, outside Amman, Mr. Hussein's name still brings murmurs of approval, but many Jordanians grimace at his name.
Consequently, Abdullah's allies contend, a quick war to overthrow Mr. Hussein is unlikely to cause a major popular upheaval.
"If it's quick and surgical - if Saddam is removed in seven days -nothing will happen; we'll be able to manage," said George Hawatmeh, editor of Jordan's principal Arab-language newspaper, Al Rai, published by a government-owned trust. "But if it drags on for two months, four months, or, God help us, six months, there'll be a snowball effect, in Jordan and across the Arab world. How will anybody contain that?"
Still, many Jordanians, including some with links to the palace, say Abdullah may be veering too close to the United States for his own good. Some critics say privately that the king, as the son of an English colonel's daughter, Princess Muna, has the practicality of his English blood, but the liabilities, too, of not being fully attuned to Arab sensibilities.
The critics cite Abdullah's years at boarding schools in Massachusetts, and his early military training in Britain. In 1983, he spent six months training with the American military at Fort Knox. These experiences left him with an easy familiarity with American popular culture, critics say, but a shallower sense of Arab culture.
In the common nostalgia, King Hussein never lost touch with popular opinion, and he balanced Arab political imperatives with pro-Western instincts. Abdullah, an impatient modernizer, the critics say, alienated important constituencies even before war loomed, including moderate Islamists and some tribal leaders.
Abdullah came to the throne with calls for a move toward fuller democracy, but the rising conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and America's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, roused popular feelings that prompted him to reverse course. Parliament was suspended and elections postponed. Permits were required for protests, and few were granted. Tighter press controls were imposed. More than 120 new laws have been passed by royal decree.
Unions and professional associations, a powerful pro-Islamist force under King Hussein, were barred from political activities. This week they struck back in a joint statement warning Jordanians that any cooperation with American troops here would betray Islam.
Last Oct. 28, an American diplomat, Laurence Foley, was shot to death outside his Amman home by men American and Jordanian investigators have linked to Al Qaeda. A few days later, the government cracked down on Islamic militants in Maan, a tribal stronghold 140 miles south of Amman, bringing violence that killed six people.
Maan still feels like an armed camp. Armored military vehicles idle at street corners and angry residents offer tours of the pock-holed masonry. Saddam Hussein, in these streets, is a hero.
Suleiman Muhammad al-Khatab, a 54-year-old Bedouin leader, said anything that undermined Mr. Hussein would backfire. "If King Abdullah supports a war, we will oppose him to the utmost," he said.
"To us, Saddam Hussein is a real man, a real leader and symbol of the Arab nation."
----
Airborne Arsenal Arrives in Kuwait
Readiness Soars as Better Weather Permits Gunship Unloading
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63211-2003Mar8?language=printer
KUWAIT CITY, March 8 -- The wind died, the skies cleared and, just before dawn today, the weather-delayed USNS Dahl berthed with the last critical U.S. Army weapons needed to attack Iraq.
By noon the first of 72 helicopters belonging to the 101st Airborne Division had been hoisted from the hold and moved to a dockside parking lot. Army mechanics in white hard hats swarmed over the initial Apache attack helicopter, stripping away protective plastic and reattaching rotor blades that were removed two weeks ago, before the voyage from Jacksonville, Fla.
The helicopters will fly from the port to camps in the Kuwaiti outback over the next two days, to be joined by 96 others from the USNS Bob Hope, which is expected early Monday. With most of its helicopters ready to launch deep strikes hundreds of miles inside Iraqi territory, the 101st will be ready for war, according to senior officers. The division is the final major component of a U.S. ground attack force that includes the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, complemented by Special Forces, an enormous air armada, British troops and other units. The 101st is the Army's only "air assault" division, with a capacity to move a brigade of roughly 4,500 combat soldiers 100 miles by helicopter in six hours -- even as the Apaches strike even farther behind enemy lines.
"If we do what we think we're going to do, there will never have been a military campaign that has moved that far, that fast," one senior Army officer said today.
The division's Apaches, equivalent to nearly half of the Army's attack helicopters in Kuwait, are considered vital to any ground attack. The new Longbow model has a fire-control radar system capable of detecting in less than a second more than 1,000 potential targets spread over several miles, sorting them into categories such as wheeled or tracked vehicles, and prioritizing them instantly for purposes of destruction by the helicopter's 16 Hellfire missiles. "If you don't do a 'human interrupt,' the Longbow will automatically kill those targets in order of priority," said Brig. Gen. Edward J. Sinclair, an Apache pilot and assistant commander of the 101st. Target data can also be e-mailed from one Longbow to another.
Today, however, the task at hand involved simply getting the division's equipment off the Dahl, which was delayed a day when high seas prevented Kuwaiti tugs from escorting the 950-foot ship to berths 18 and 19. No sooner had the great slab of the stern ramp been lowered than 1,859 tons of cargo began pouring from the holds. Two huge yellow gantry cranes lifted ammunition crates onto the docks -- everything from Hellfires and rockets to rifle rounds -- while Humvees and fuel trucks, hospital generators and radio equipment, rolled down the ramp.
"We can do one aircraft about every 12 minutes, from the time we hook them up [to a crane] to the time we lower them to the ground," said Lt. Col. Joe Dunaway, commander of the division's aviation maintenance battalion. "If you're living right, it all works."
Today, at least, the 1,000 soldiers, dockworkers and contractors working the Dahl were living right. On C deck, a Pakistani driver behind the wheel of a Humvee pulled a trailer loaded with 32 helicopter blades -- enough for eight Apaches -- down the ramp to the 33-acre helicopter assembly yard. Moments later a commander's Humvee followed, bound for the 327th Infantry Regiment.
As vehicles and helicopters left the ship, up on the 01 deck cooks prepared lunch to the lyrics of a 1967 Buffalo Springfield song on the galley tape player: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."
As if prompted by the flashback, the ship's captain, Bradford Collins, pointed to a plaque noting that the vessel was named for Larry G. Dahl, an Army quartermaster specialist, who on Feb. 23, 1971, threw himself on a grenade near An Khe, South Vietnam, saving his comrades at the sacrifice of his own life. Killed at age 21, Dahl was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Collins pointed to a rubbing of Dahl's name from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and added, "I'm very proud of him."
-------- spies
Iraqi expelled, accused as spy
From combined dispatches
March 9, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030309-4464678.htm
SYDNEY, Australia - The Australian government has ordered an Iraqi diplomat it believes is an active intelligence officer to leave the country by Wednesday, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday.
"We have reason to believe that he's associated with the Iraqi intelligence agency, and he is assessed by our agency as an Iraqi intelligence officer. His activities are incompatible with his status of a diplomat," Mr. Downer told reporters in Adelaide.
Iraq's charge d'affaires in Australia flatly denied the Canberra-based attache, Helal Ibrahim Aaref, was a spy. He said the Australian government had not produced any evidence to back up its claim.
"I am deeply hurt, shocked and surprised. We are their guests but to say he's a spy, no, it's unacceptable for us," Saad al-Samarai told Reuters news agency.
Mr. Samarai said Mr. Aaref, in his 40s, would leave the country within the next couple of days.
Australia is a staunch ally of the U.S. hard-line on Iraq and has sent 2,000 troops to join a U.S. and British military buildup in the Persian Gulf, although Prime Minister John Howard said no decision has been made to commit the troops to war without United Nations support.
The government said it was taking action against the diplomat, who arrived in Australia late last year, based on information from the Australian Security Intelligence Organization spy agency.
U.S. officials say Washington has identified 300 Iraqis in 60 countries - some operating as diplomats - whom it wants expelled, arguing they could attack U.S. interests.
Iraq yesterday denounced the U.S. request, calling it "a frantic campaign" by the CIA. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement that all its diplomats abide by the laws of the countries they visit.
On Wednesday, the United States ordered two U.N.-based Iraqi diplomats to leave the country. The State Department said they were "engaged in activities outside the scope of their official function."
On Friday, the German Foreign Ministry confirmed that Washington has asked Germany to expel suspected Iraqi agents and that Berlin was considering the request.
The ministry declined to detail the number or identity of the Iraqis involved but told the Associated Press there were six Iraqi diplomats in Germany. Germany has opposed military action against Baghdad. Sweden also has reported receiving a similar request from Washington.
Also on Friday, Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase confirmed that Iraqi diplomats in his country, which is hosting several thousand U.S. troops, were under secret service observation, but he denied he had ordered the surveillance under pressure from the United States.
"Our secret services are attentively surveying the movements of personnel from the Iraqi Embassy in Bucharest, and in certain cases, there have been problems," he told journalists in Stockholm.
-------- un
Interview given by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos
March 9, 2003
Ottawa, Ontario
http://pm.gc.ca/default.asp?Language=E&Page=newsroom&Sub=newsreleases&Doc=thisweek.20030309_e.htm
STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. Prime Minister, thank you very much for having us in your home.
JEAN CHRÉTIEN: My pleasure to be with you.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The divide in the United Nations seems deeper than ever this weekend. How can it be bridged?
CHRÉTIEN: I don't know if it can be bridged because we're quite late in the process, but there was some movement of sorts last week, because, you know the Americans, the Brits and the Spaniards decided to have a deadline, something that we had recommended, the Canadians, two or three weeks ago.
And the French said that 120 days is too much. So, I was..., you know I had recommended the end of March, so we're talking of days. And I..., I don't know what would happen, you know, it's kind of sad because, you know, they have done very well with 1441.
Now the question is a question of interpretation of what's going on there. And for me, I'm not..., I don't know all the facts, but I know that we made some progress in the position we have presented to the United Nations in a speech by my ambassador on the 19th, two weeks ago, but we have worked on that before.
You know it was the series of deadlines on four different items that was to be terminated at the end of March and of the four items that were on the agenda two things..., where we have made a lot of progress. In the case of the missiles, it was one of the points that we had made. You know, they are destroying them today, still they destroyed some more, the last few days, they stopped for one day only and the inspector responsible, El Baradei, said that the nuclear issue is almost resolved now.
So, we were left with the biological and the chemical. And all that is happening, you know, people don't say that often, but I say that all the time in Canada, it is because the Americans and the British have moved a lot of troops there. You know it is for me what is moving Saddam to comply otherwise he wouldn't have complied. Will he comply completely? It's a question of interpretation.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You've been talking to a lot of members of the Security Council.
CHRÉTIEN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Many of these Mexico, Chilli who are still undecided, still in the middle. What are you hearing from them and what do you believe they need in order to support a resolution?
CHRÉTIEN: But..., they need..., they all agreed that, you know, there's a limit, you know we cannot wait forever and everybody has this view, clearly at this moment that Saddam has to disarm, you know the question, and the resolution 1441 is about disarmament and that it's a question of more days.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What is reasonable?
CHRÉTIEN: You know in politics it's the people who judge you about, are you reasonable yes or no. And it is a question of how do you interpret the facts that you have in front of you. For me, you know, I think that..., you know we should give credit to the president and to Mr. Blair. The movement of troops there has really created the situation. In my judgement, it has been won. You know the president has won. I have no doubt about it. He won.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What do you mean by that?
CHRÉTIEN: I mean that you know, he has created a situation where Saddam cannot do anything anymore. He has troops at the door and inspectors on the ground. Planes flying over and he cannot do anything, and he started to destroy missiles, there's no nuclear danger there, we..., so, he has to destroy the..., What's happened, we don't know exactly what's left. But again, he has moved.
And when I say you know, it's because the Americans moved strong troops there, otherwise probably nothing would have happened.
You know, you know the Americans have won I say that in Canada all the time. You guys, you won the Cold War, without one tank, one missile and losing one life. (Inaudible)..., USSR.
And there's the same thing in Iraq, in my judgement. You're winning it big. In my view, you probably have won this time. But the question is, I'm talking in terms of disarmament. The question of a regime..., change of regime is something else.
But, yesterday or Friday, Mr. Straw was clear. He said the British are there to..., the elimination of the armament of massive destruction.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Not regime change?
CHRÉTIEN: He didn't, he said no it's not their policy a regime change. So, there's a confusion there. He said disarmament of regime..., change of regime. And this is not the debate at the UN. So, I've concentrated on that and I thought that there is a way to bridge, probably it's too late, but the Americans and the Brits and the Spaniards moved yesterday, Friday. And but they need probably to move more, that is the impression I have. But when you're in a situation like that you don't..., you know perhaps it's the definite date, the 17th of March, perhaps a couple of more weeks could help, I don't know.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So, if the Prime Minister..., the President of Chili, came to President Bush and President Fox in Mexico and some of these other nations came to President Bush and said, we need another week, we need two more weeks, give us till the end of March, do you think that's something President Bush would accept?
CHRÉTIEN: I don't know, I cannot..., I cannot pass a judgement on that. But I know that they..., these people face a difficult political problem at home with that. You know, the public opinion is strongly opposed and some like Fox, you know he's the president, but the congress is not on his side, so he has to..., same thing in Chili and these people have to live with the political reality at home. But they..., what I suggested, on the 19th of February, they were all very much interested. Some days ago, all the (inaudible)..., my ambassador at the embassy of Mexico, in New York, to look at the Canadian Paper. And..., but there's more there is there. But they seemed to be buying at that moment.
But, you know, I'm not at the Security Council and I cannot pretend that I would be a bridge. But I've talked with all of them and they..., everybody..., you know it was amazing..., everybody wants Saddam to disarm. No doubt about it. He's a terrible man and so on and we have to take away anything dangerous in his hands. And there was..., that was the agreement after the end of the war in 1991, the cease fire, and some conditions that he has not respected. No doubt about it.
But, for me it's..., you know, there is..., (inaudible) could solve the problem, because effectively it's won.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say America has won. You know, given that and as America's closest neighbour and friend, what advice would you give President Bush now?
CHRÉTIEN: Well, for me I..., he knows of my paper..., he called me and we discussed that and my ambassador in New York has talked with your ambassador there and so on, you know. The problem is for him he thinks, probably he's afraid that he has been dragging to..., delays and delays and delays to just to postpone a decision. And if he had a date in mind and he has decided, like he seemed to say to the nation when he appeared on TV Thursday night, last week, there's not much I can tell him.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You think he's going to go?
CHRÉTIEN: I'm not sure, you know, for me I think peace can be preserved there, if he could move, but I really don't know how far he's advanced in his planning and his decision making.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But he..., the president does seem to have..., indicated at least that he is ready to go to whether or not the UN approves. In your judgement, what would be the consequences of a military action without the UN umbrella?
CHRÉTIEN: Well, it would be quite bad because, you know the Americans are the only super power now. And everybody..., you have to really be realistic about it, that makes some people nervous. You know, while I'm not complaining I have great relations with the United States and with the president and I have no problem. But some do not want to take your word, you know, too easily, they want to ask questions and they are afraid to have only one super power, that it's dangerous for them.
STEPHANOPOULOS: That seems to be the French position.
CHRÉTIEN: Yes, and others. And the UN can indeed be useful to the United States. You know, take for example when the father of George..., George Senior went to war in 1990, he had a resolution at the UN. And I remember very well, that was the position of Canada. My predecessor Mr. Mulroney said, Canada will be with you and you need a resolution at the UN and we'll be with you.
I said the same thing a year ago to President George W., that..., you know the same position.
STEPHANOPOULOS: (Inaudible) having a UN resolution, if Canada will not (inaudible)..., forces?
CHRÉTIEN: Right now you know we're in the middle of this because we have 1441 and we don't know what will happen, so it's purely a hypothetical question. But it is the position that I've stated since the beginning and remains the position of the Canadian government.
But at that time, you know, that was..., when you went to Kosovo, for example, there we did have a resolution, but I mean, the Russians opposed, and being, you know because it was Serbia and question of the same religion and so on, people considered that as special veto, everybody was one in agreement, but we went there anyway under the NATO umbrella and it worked because we went there to stop the genocide and we succeeded.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But your position now is that Canada will fight in Iraq only if there is a UN resolution?
CHRÉTIEN: It has been the position of Canada since the first day and it was the position of Canada in 1990, so..., but I'm not confronted with that. And at this time there is no request from us because we're moving quite a big number of troops..., we have three ships in the Gulf at this moment there and in the summer we have to go and replace some troops in Kabul, in Afghanistan, because they think that Canadians are the proper group to be there at this time.
So, this is where we stand on the question of Iraq, you know they have their troops there at this moment and we have ships there that are useful, but...,
STEPHANOPOULOS: You talk about the consequences for the United Nations, if the United States goes forward without the United Nations, what is your concerns specifically? Will it be more difficult, for example, for the United Nations to come together and reach a unified position on North Korea?
CHRÉTIEN: It might because the President (inaudible)..., try do the same thing. That is one of the concerns that a lot of people have, you know. China might say, well we have a problem somewhere and you know, we don't like the regime and we're going to change the regime. It's why it's dangerous. You know, everybody will take that as a pretext.
Because there is a notion in the United States that I find a bit surprising. They say we went to Kosovo to change the regime. Not true at all. We went to stop the genocide. There was no change of regime there. The regime was changed there by a vote in Serbia, when Milosevic lost the election. But it was..., the war was terminated before and he was still the president when the election came, he was defeated by his own people. That was the perfect solution.
Probably the reason was the fact that we stopped the genocide in Kosovo (inaudible)..., you know, made him very unpopular with his own people, but even there he contested the elections. But...,
STEPHANOPOULOS: So when I talk of regime change, it's dangerous talk?
CHRÉTIEN: It's something that I'm not very comfortable with and I said that in Canada and I said that to everybody, because where do you stop? You know, if it's okay that we do that there, why not elsewhere?
And you know, the British position with..., as expressed on Friday by..., or Thursday by the minister of foreign affairs was very clear on that, that they are going to Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein and force him to destroy his armament of mass destruction.
STEPHANOPOULOS: There's some difference between the United States and Canada, but do you feel it's a serious difference? What kind of affect do you believe it will have on United States-Canadian relations?
CHRÉTIEN: Oh, not much. We've always been very close with the Americans. We went with them in Kosovo and we were in Bosnia, we're still there and so on. We've always been peacekeepers. Canada is always willing to get involved in peacekeeping and you know, you remember at one time when the Americans went into Haiti, when they wanted to get out they needed somebody and President Clinton asked me to send..., if I could not go and replace the Americans, because the country did not want anymore to have Americans there and it was easier for us, because it was convenient we sent some francophone soldiers there to replace the Americans and it was the type of people that they needed at that time.
So, whenever we..., generally speaking we have absolutely no problems there. You know, the position is clear since a year with the president about what Canada will do.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you imagine Canada being part of a future peacekeeping force in Iraq?
CHRÉTIEN: I think we're always somewhere, you know, we're very strong on that. Always..., because you know we have to be ready for that. Canadians are always willing. You know, when we talk..., probably the biggest problem that we all face collectively is Palestine and Israel, where we should..., the international community move there and solve..., only the Americans can do that.
(Inaudible)..., Cyprus, you remember what happened in Cyprus 40 years ago, something like that, Canada was there for about 28 years. You know where the international community came and said this is Cyprus North and South. The Greek are in the South and in the North was the Turks. And we just built a wall there and the Canadian soldiers and others were there at that time.
But you remember in those days, it was always..., I should be (inaudible)..., on the news every night with some killing here and there. And the community of nations went there and imposed the peace.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you feel now that war is inevitable in Iraq?
CHRÉTIEN: For me it's never inevitable. You know, if Saddam Hussein was smart he would make a move over the weekend. You know, he has made a move on missiles. I don't know why he's not just, come-on guys and look at this like it was done in South Africa. But I think he's crazy too.
Unfortunately I don't think that he is..., you know he's acting in..., he attacked his own people with biological instruments and so on..., So he's not..., does not seem to be very rational about that. It is his own people who will pay the price. You know, it's not..., I think the Americans are much too strong for them. It's not a real match. And why does he come and take anything that we have, I mean..., You know, Blix says that he's making progress. I don't know why it's taking so much time. But in fact, he's trapped and he cannot move. Two hundred and fifty thousand American and British soldiers waiting there. I'm telling you that if I were in his..., you know, in his boots I would be shaking.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. Prime Minister, thank you very much.
CHRÉTIEN: My pleasure to be with you Sir.
----
Diplomacy Intensifies Ahead of U.N. Vote on Iraq War Approval
March 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The diplomatic battle dividing the West intensified on Sunday as each side tried to woo wavering Security Council members into its camp before a U.N. vote on war in Iraq.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States had a ``strong chance'' of getting nine or 10 states in the 15-member Council to vote for a U.S.-backed draft resolution setting a March 17 deadline for Iraq to disarm.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Washington's closest ally, lobbied foreign leaders by phone on Sunday, among them Chinese President Jiang Zemin, China's official media said.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was about to embark on a whistle-stop tour of Guinea, Cameroon and Angola, ``swing voters'' in the Security Council, in the hope of persuading them to reject the U.S. draft.
A defeat of the resolution alone is unlikely to avert war. Washington says it will lead a ``coalition of the willing'' into Iraq without U.N. approval if necessary, and more than 200,000 U.S. and British troops are in the region, ready to strike.
But U.N. authorization would be of huge value to governments of U.S. allies in placating public misgivings -- especially in Britain, whose deployment of 45,000 troops is by far the biggest after the Pentagon's.
Most Britons would support war if it had U.N. backing but only 15 percent would do so without, a poll indicated on Sunday. Newspapers said Blair faced a huge anti-war revolt among members of parliament in his Labour Party.
One government aide has resigned and more are said to be threatening to do the same if no U.N. mandate is given for war.
A Security Council resolution needs a minimum nine votes for adoption and there must be no veto by any of the five permanent members: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.
Russia and China join France in opposing any resolution implicitly or explicitly authorizing war. But U.S. and British officials say a vetoed majority would be a moral victory.
``I think we have...a strong chance...that we might get the nine or 10 votes needed for passage of the resolution, and we'll see if somebody wants to veto it,'' Powell said on Sunday.
The United States so far has the declared support of only Britain, Spain and Bulgaria. Half-a-dozen members seem to oppose it, instead wanting arms inspectors to have more time in Iraq.
An Iraqi official surprised a news conference in Baghdad on Sunday by saying chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix might visit Baghdad on the deadline day.
``I don't know really, but he might, he might visit us on the 17th of this month,'' General Hussam Mohammad Amin said without elaborating. A delegation of Arab foreign ministers will go to Baghdad within two days for talks aimed at averting war.
U.S. CASH TEMPTING
U.S. promises of economic aid to impoverished swing vote states may yet prove more tempting than political argument.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Sunday backed France's call for heads of state to attend the vote. Powell has said he sees no need for President Bush to be there.
The vote could come on Tuesday or later. Driving the diplomatic pace is the military's desire to attack before soaring early summer temperatures in the Gulf make fighting in chemical and biological protection suits especially arduous.
But analysts say U.S. commanders may delay war until April 1 as Turkey's reluctance to be a conduit for Western forces means they must plan another way to occupy northern Iraq -- and because early April offers a moonless sky for aerial bombing.
U.N. military observers on the Iraq-Kuwait border said they were withdrawing some staff to Kuwait City for their own safety.
Gates wide enough to allow a column of tanks to pass are being installed in the fence between Kuwait and Iraq. While Kuwait is the main launch pad for a ground invasion, Iraq's Arab neighbors are quietly playing roles they prefer not to advertise to publics strongly opposed to war.
American and British special forces are already mounting missions in western Iraq, using eastern Jordan as a base. Jordan has allowed an Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord, to set up its main base on its soil.
Saudi Arabia said it was allowing U.S. troops to use airfields near the Iraq border, but only for defense or to prepare for a flood of refugees.
NO SAUDI REFUGE FOR SADDAM
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Saudi Arabia would not shelter Iraqi President Saddam Hussein if he chose exile to avert invasion.
Up to 800,000 people gathered in Indonesia's second city Surabaya on Sunday to pray for peace. Thousands protested against war in Damascus.
Albania, one of Europe's smallest and poorest nations, offered to send commandos to the Gulf. The Muslim country is grateful for the U.S.-led intervention that saved fellow Albanians in neighboring Kosovo in 1999.
Iraq scrapped more banned missiles on Sunday in a process Bush has dismissed as a ``willful charade,'' accusing it of covertly making more al-Samouds.
Baghdad on Sunday accused the United States of mounting a campaign to get some 60 countries to expel Iraqi diplomats on the ``baseless and unfounded'' grounds that they threatened American interests and diplomatic institutions.
Washington has asked the German government to expel a number of Iraqi diplomats, the German Foreign Ministry said earlier.
World oil prices have risen sharply in recent days because of fears that war will disrupt supplies. But on the Baghdad stock exchange, shares and turnover have soared this year.
Brokers said prices were boosted by a belief that shares would hold up better than the Iraqi dinar in the case of war -- and an unspoken hope that, however damaging the conflict, it could pave the way to a lifting of sanctions after 12 years.
-------- us
Thinking of illegal weapons, troops train for war in Iraq
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 9, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030309-13656169.htm
KILLEEN, Texas - Troops with the Army's 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood trained in their Nuclear, Biological and Chemical suits this week to be better prepared when the division deploys to the Middle East.
While the 4th Infantry's tanks, helicopters and other heavy equipment are sitting on cargo ships in the Mediterranean Sea outside the Turkish port of Iskenderun, its troops remain at Fort Hood, awaiting orders to ship out.
If sent to southeastern Turkey and eventually south, toward Baghdad, the division, about 20,000 troops, will travel through the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
In 1988, the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces gassed an estimated 5,000 people to death in the Kurdish town of Halabja.
"We're taking [the threat of chemical weapons] more seriously," said Staff Sgt. Juan Francis, of the 4th Infantry's chemical unit.
About three dozen journalists who arrived at Fort Hood this week with expectations of traveling into Iraq with the 4th Infantry also received extensive hands-on training on how to wear and operate the protective gear.
The gear includes a gas mask, rubber gloves and boots, and a hooded, full-body suit capable of resisting nuclear, biological and chemical, or NBC, agents.
Troops and journalists are trained to don gas masks in nine seconds or less and secure the NBC gloves, boots and hooded suits in eight minutes in the event of an attack.
The training exercises gave journalists here more experience with the NBC gear than was provided during the weeklong "media boot camps" orchestrated by the Pentagon for more than 250 journalists since November.
But the 4th Infantry Division insists the additional training for journalists is protocol and hasn't been prompted by the prospect that reporters may join troops entering areas where chemical weapons have been used.
"Everybody that deploys with us, including civilian contractors, gets trained on NBC gear," said Sgt. 1st Class Robert Wolz, a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf war and member of the 4th Infantry's chemical unit.
"To me, it's bad business not to train everybody that goes with us to the same level of proficiency that we have with this equipment," he said.
Sgt. Wolz added that the typical 4th Infantry soldiers gets a lot of training in NBC gear that and this week's exercises at Fort Hood served mainly as a refresher, to ensure the troops don't make mistakes if required to fight in the gear.
Military officials have suggested that reporters and troops expect to be wearing at least a portion of the gear for most of their time in or around Iraq.
Sgt. Wolz said that for the duration of the 100-hour-long ground war in 1991, he and other soldiers fought in Mission Oriented Protective Posture level two, meaning they wore their hooded NBC suits and rubber boots but carried their gas masks and gloves.
The highest protective posture is level four, during which soldiers wear all the NBC equipment. On a typical deployment, troops carry protective posture suits in freeze-locked packages.
Sgt. Wolz said the 4th Infantry Division, the Army's only "digitized" division, is equipped with technology to almost instantaneously alert troops positioned across a battlefield of wind direction and where a gas can be expected to spread in the event of an attack.
Journalists, wary that traveling with a division will mean exposure to a heightened threat of chemical or biological weapons, said the extra practice was invaluable.
"I was really glad to go through some more training that specifically used the Army's equipment because you only get one shot at doing it right," said Erik Campos, 31, a photographer with Knight Ridder Newspapers.
Mr. Campos, who previously took part in a privately run hostile-environment training course, said he's concerned chemical weapons will be used in the Kurdish area of Northern Iraq.
"You really just don't know if these weapons are going to be used again," he said. "Sometimes lightning does strike twice."
--------
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military
by Dana Priest
March 9, 2003
http://booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1718
BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Dana Priest, what is "The Mission"?
DANA PRIEST, AUTHOR, "THE MISSION: WAGING WAR AND KEEPING PEACE WITH AMERICA`S MILITARY: "The mission" is what the military is called upon to do today all around the world, which is a lot bigger than just fighting wars. They`re asked to relieve humanitarian suffering. They`re asked to rebuild nations. They`re asked to train militaries who are unprofessional and often brutal, militaries that we normally wouldn`t have much contact with. But especially in the war against terrorism, the special force, in particular, have been asked to go out and try to professionalize some of these militaries.
They actually do a whole other range of things, a lot of things that diplomats really should be doing, especially at the higher levels, at the four-star level. And so a lot of people in the military, when they saw that they were being asked to do a lot of these things in the last decade, they called it "mission creep." One could call it "mission leap," it`s so big. And I just call it "the mission" because that has become what the military really does these days, a whole range of things.
LAMB: What`s the background of this book?
PRIEST: Well, the background is I was a Pentagon reporter for "The Washington Post" for eight years, and a couple years into the job, I one day happened to be in a military briefing for some Army generals on an entirely different subject. And I noticed the deployments around the world of Army forces and the little deployments of special forces, things I`d never heard about before. So I started in inquire, What are they doing? And after I peeled the onion back on that one, I found that the special forces at that time were in 125 countries, something we didn`t know much about at all, including countries where the U.S. Congress had said we need to cut off relations -- Pakistan, Colombia and Indonesia, in particular. And the special forces had found their way around that in a sort of loophole of legislation that they and their bosses at the office of the secretary of defense had created. So they were out there in the world, doing all these things. I wrote a big story about that.
And then I just kept going. I kept saying, Well, what else is the military doing out there? And in Europe, I found that they were sending hundreds of officers to help the former Soviet bloc states reform their militaries. And then I just kept going and going. And of course, we had peacekeeping and that sort of thing coming along, where you went -- where I could go to Bosnia and look at what the troops were doing.
And it really became a story that I thought was not in Washington, so a lot of us who cover the Pentagon, you wouldn`t be able to see it from Washington. But when you added the thousands of pieces of the puzzle together, you got actually a very big transformation of the U.S. military and what its role is. At the same time, you had the secretary of defense and the president, who had given the military an official new role, which was to shape -- they called it -- to shape the environment. And being good soldiers, that`s what they did.
And at the highest levels, that`s what they did. The commanders-in-chiefs, the regional commanders-in-chiefs, called the CINCs -- they took that mission and they said, you know, Let`s -- let`s take this seriously and find out in our region where we can engage people. And they did that with hundreds of exercises, lots of humanitarian relief. They sent dozens and dozens and dozens of mid-level officers to do bilateral relations.
At the same time, you had our diplomatic corps, which was suffering quite a bit. Not only did it suffer budget cuts but terrible morale problems, a lot of accountability problems. Who are the -- how good are they? You had a Congress that really wasn`t interested in funding them. So you had this imbalance of resources that began to grow. And the military took on many of the jobs that the State Department had, and they still have that today.
LAMB: You go to chapter 16, and it`s way into your book, and it`s kind of a jolt. It`s called "Dishonoring Merita." Who was she? And why did -- who dishonored her?
PRIEST: Merita was a 12-year-old Albanian girl in Kosovo. And to set up her story -- this is the story of what you get when you send infantry troops to a place to do nation-building. Now, people in the administration don`t like the word nation-building because they say, We don`t send the military to do that. We send the military to create safe and secure environments. They...
LAMB: This is her right here, by the way.
PRIEST: They make sure that people aren`t shooting at each other anymore, cut down on crime, that sort of thing. So they had sent the 82nd Airborne to Kosovo right after the war...
LAMB: What year?
PRIEST: In 1999. And they had been there for quite a while. And I look at one particular town in Kosovo to really get to the bottom of what is it like? What do these troops do? What do they think about it? How do they perform? How do they figure out actually which is -- how do they figure out how to do deal with a whole plethora of problems that they weren`t expecting.
So in this case, this was one particular unit that had given its men a special task, to go and try to find the bad guys. In order to make this safe and secure environment, they wanted to go -- they figured it out. They figured out that the bad guys were actually organized crime, Albanians who used to be in the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, who we were allied with during the Kosovo war. And those same people had become the underground political apparatus that really controlled Kosovo.
So these troops, they figured that out, and they said, We got to go stop that. And so they -- they tried to do that by becoming policemen, in a way. In that same unit -- so we see that in Kosovo, they`re acting not as soldiers, they`re acting as cops, gumshoes, detectives. And then part of the story that leads up to Merita, we see that they abuse that power. They start pushing people around for no reason. I mean, these are very young 19-year-olds, in some cases. Lieutenants start interrogating people in very inappropriate ways because they`re so frustrated. They see this violence all around them, and they see these people being killed. They want to stop it. They figured, This is my mission, and I want to succeed.
LAMB: Before you get to Merita, just a couple of things. Kosovo is located where?
PRIEST: Well, in the former Yugoslavia, down near the bottom, south of -- well, to the east of Bosnia. And it`s a province of Yugoslavia, and the -- and Slobodan Milosevic had -- which is in the Balkans, east of Italy. Slobodan Milosevic had wanted to clear out all the Albanians who live there and basically make it a Serb-held and run province. And the Albanians wanted actually independence. They were tired of suffering, and really suffering under Milosevic. They couldn`t go to schools, even. They had to have underground schools.
So this -- this led to the air war of 1999, when we -- when we did go in and stop the ethnic cleansing that had been going on there for quite some time and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Albanians.
LAMB: How many people live there?
PRIEST: Right now, I think it`s about a million. It`s not that big. It`s the size of Los Angeles County. So it`s not a large -- what we did when we went in as the United States -- actually, it was NATO went in, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It divided it into sectors. The British, the French, the Germans and the Americans each have a sector. The Americans wanted the most peaceful sector because they really didn`t -- they did the war, they figured. They didn`t want to have to do the peace, which is the hardest part. And we can get back to that later because it applies to today. So they took what they thought was the quietest sector, but it had these big hiccups in it, like Vitina, the town where Merita lives.
And to get back to that -- they sent in 82nd Airborne, people who are trained to jump out of airplanes, seize airfields and keep them for larger forces who move in during war. So these young soldiers, however, are told to go make it safe and secure. They figure out the problem. They start to figure out who are the instigators. They start to go after the instigators. They make some really clumsy mistakes, bad interrogations, roughing up people.
They also are convinced that the Albanian population is really the problem, and the -- and by that time, there are very few Serbs there, and the Albanians, who are trying, actually, to kill them or to intimidate them in really horrible ways. So they take and get an affinity for the minority. I mean, if you remember during the war, the Serbs were the enemy. And when the troops get to Kosovo, they think the Serbs are the enemy. And then their world turns all the way upside down.
Not only are they given all these missions -- be the mayor, be the principal, be the water carrier, but -- you know, make sure the electricity works -- but your enemy is no longer your enemy. Actually, it`s the reverse. And so for them, it`s quite disorienting. But they do become protective of the small Serb population that is still there.
LAMB: How many times have you been there?
PRIEST: I`ve been there four times.
LAMB: To Vitina?
PRIEST: To Vitina I`ve been three, yes, over a course of years.
LAMB: How long does it take to get there from here? And how do you get there?
PRIEST: Well, let`s see. I have been there -- you go to Macedonia, fly to Macedonia. And in one case, you -- I drove there. In most cases, I drove there. And you go up the Kacanik Defile, which is a narrow road with very tall, steep hills on it. It`s basically one lane, although it`s really two lanes. And it`s the main supply route in, so you`re there with a huge number of trucks.
LAMB: Do you go by yourself?
PRIEST: No. By the time you get -- I arranged a lot of the trips that I took -- because I wanted to be with the military -- you can`t just walk up to a base in Kosovo and say, I`m here to do some work on my book. You have to prearrange everything ahead of time. They have to take it up the chain of command. They want to know what you`re doing. And then if they approve it, then they`ll -- they`re very helpful in trying to get you into places easily.
So the times that I went to Kosovo, I went -- I got myself to Macedonia. Then I would take -- then the military would meet me at their base in Macedonia, and then we would go in their vehicle, which had a sticker, so they got some special access. They could move ahead of some of the trucks. We would go into Kosovo. In one case, I flew in on a Black Hawk helicopter. The military was very proactive when it comes to moving press into places where they think they`re not getting much coverage and they`d really like to. And so you can often hitch rides on airplanes or helicopters that are going somewhere, if you make -- you know, in advance. So that`s -- that`s...
LAMB: So when you got there -- now, when was the last time you were there?
PRIEST: It was in 2000.
LAMB: How many 82nd Airborne troops were on the ground there in Vitina, in that immediate area?
PRIEST: There was just one company, I think, several hundred -- actually, less than that. There was several hundred troops. There were several hundred troops in Vitina itself. They had spread out. They all had different geographic areas to cover. So at any one time during the day, if you were up in a helicopter, you know, you could see many dozens of patrols, either stationary patrols at checkpoints or people moving around in vehicles, checking out things or meeting with the U.N., who is supposed to administer Kosovo now under a U.N. resolution.
LAMB: you mention the U.N. because a lot of your book also talks about the differences between the British and the French and all...
PRIEST: Yes.
LAMB: ... but also in this area, the U.N. police.
PRIEST: Right. Well, you know, the U.N. are supposed to administer Kosovo. Kosovo doesn`t have a political status that`s defined yet. It`s neither independent from Serbia nor really an integrated part. And the -- and NATO pretty much punted on that question, it figured it would be so divisive. So what it did is put the U.N. in charge. The U.N. has their own administrators there. And many people think that the U.N. has a peacekeeping force. In fact, the U.N. -- it`s like pick-up basketball. You know, whenever there`s a big crisis, the U.N. asks its countries to donate peacekeepers, and they cobble them together and put them together as a peacekeeping force. And then they have to try to work well together.
So in this case, they have not only -- they have U.N. police, and the U.N. police are often from countries where the police practices, I would say, are not so professional and where some of these people came here because they were the brother of someone important and they knew they`d get a good-paying job if they became police officers in Kosovo. So they have no police training. And they barely speak a common language, which is English, but many of them don`t really speak English well. They don`t want to be -- they don`t want to get in trouble there. They don`t want to put themselves at risk because it`s Kosovo. It doesn`t really mean much to them, other than a job. So you have the people who are supposed to be making sure that things are running right, who are supposed to be doing this detective work to find the bad guys, not wanting to do that at all because it`s not safe, for one thing, and secondly, they`re not organized in any way. They`ve never worked together. They speak five different languages. They can barely understand each other at some points.
LAMB: You say there were 50 different countries that had U.N. policemen there?
PRIEST: Right.
LAMB: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) people assigned, and that they made as much as $75,000 a year to do that.
PRIEST: The Americans did, yes. It`s different in every country. But it`s a very well-paying job for people from any country. In fact, some countries, like Pakistan -- one of the reasons you`ll find a big contingent of Pakistan police is because it`s a great-paying job for them.
LAMB: Go back to Merita.
PRIEST: Right. So...
LAMB: Eleven years old.
PRIEST: Right. So what happens with Merita is, in this one campaign of 82nd Airborne, who are trying to do this detective work and this sort of thing, you have a staff sergeant who is out of control. And no one above him recognizes it, as they should have.
LAMB: His name?
PRIEST: His name is Frank Ronghi. And he has become the de facto leader of his platoon mainly because of the -- some quirks of his -- the senior NCO in the -- in the platoon was not around, and he was replaced by a younger guy, and the lieutenant who was in charge was very new. He`d never commanded before -- straight out of West Point. So this guy, this big, burly weight-lifter, charismatic, singer -- he`s not only charming everyone in his platoon, but he`s also intimidating them. And he becomes the de facto leader.
And he goes off on his own, it turns out, which is not allowed, and has relations with women, slips away to drink, all sorts of things. He starts to talk in very strange ways, calling himself "Nympho Man," saying that the girls of Kosovo are really getting to him.
And then one day, when he goes into these big yellow apartment buildings at the corner of Kosovo, which are an ethnic flashpoint because both Albanians and Serbs live there, he goes there and he meets Merita in the staircase as she`s going up. And he drags her into the basement, and he rapes her and kills her. And then he takes her body and puts it in some U.N. flour sacks, gets a buddy, who isn`t sure what`s going on, to drive him to a secluded location in the woods and buries her there.
That is such a tragedy in and of itself, it causes -- you know, people feel so guilty that that has happened. They feel so remorseful. But it also becomes the reason -- it also becomes a part of the blackmail that the Albanian criminal network uses against the U.S. peacekeepers, who are known as KFOR, Kosovo Force. And the leaders of the Albanian community -- thugs, really, most of them, hard-line political activists who want an independent Kosovo -- they used this to blackmail or try to blackmail KFOR. And they say, you know, We won`t make a big deal about this if you release one of our leaders, who they happened to have arrested the day before on a tip from an informant, who said that this -- this person was a big troublemaker in town.
LAMB: What`s his name?
PRIEST: His name is Javit Hassani (ph). And he turns out to be, actually, a very big deal. He`s a Macedonian Albanian who funded a lot of the resistance -- liberation movement in Macedonia and Kosovo. So he`s -- he`s actually, you know, probably the equivalent of a three-star general, but they don`t know that. So they`ve arrested him, and that -- that, in and of itself, has caused a big uproar within Vitina, and later elsewhere, both in Macedonia and all throughout Kosovo. But they have no clue who he is, really. And they -- but they did arrest him.
So her murder, then -- they try to use this as a blackmail against the troops. Just release him, and we won`t say anything bad about that. But of course, they don`t release him because they`re not going to be blackmailed like that. So these troops have created, you know, an international incident by arresting him, first of all, then this terrible case of the murder creates another reason for these Albanians to go after KFOR. And it evolves into an international incident.
LAMB: When was Merita killed?
PRIEST: She was killed in the spring of -- sorry, in the winter of 1999.
LAMB: And how much of this was public, at the time?
PRIEST: It came out as a crime story -- it`s such an aberration to have a soldier kill someone like this, and people were wondering, would this spark some kind of big reaction or not. And it did spark a localized reaction, but not a large one. So we all reported on it at the time. But we didn`t actually do much in-depth look back and what -- about -- on this unit, which is the unit that I -- happened to be the one company that I had visited many months before, to do a story about peacekeeping, to see for myself what is this.
And that`s where I learned, Oh, my goodness! This is not anything I had thought of before. In fact, when I did it -- and I tried very much -- my way of doing this is try to be sort of the fly on the wall, hang out with people for a long time, so that they kind of forget you`re there, and just don`t have them point things out to you, just have them be themselves and record that, as I -- best I can.
LAMB: Where is Ronghi today?
PRIEST: He`s in Leavenworth, lives in a little cell, just uniform cell, doesn`t see daylight, doesn`t go outside much. He`s -- it`s life in prison without the possibility of parole.
LAMB: And you refer in your book to the Army document -- what is it, 15-6?
PRIEST: Yes.
LAMB: And it`s 600-some pages? Do I remember that correctly?
PRIEST: Right.
LAMB: Who did that investigation? When was that available to you?
PRIEST: Well, after the murder, the Army leadership and the leadership of the Defense Department, said, How could this have happened? So they asked the Army to look into that, and they did their standard 15-6 criminal investigation. And they had, you know, many people involved in it. They took dozens of statements from people who were there. And they weren`t just looking at -- actually, they weren`t at all looking at the murder. That was a criminal case. They were looking at the command climate, the unit climate, this sort of thing, to find out, you know, again, how could this have happened.
And so they produced this giant document. It`s very rough. IT`s not even numbered. I went and numbered all those pages in order to use them in my research and came up with the number you just cited. So they -- they -- as a result -- the testimony was all under oath, and lots of detail in there. And that allowed me to really get further down into the -- to this unit and figure out what had gone on. And then I went back and interviewed a lot of the people who were interviewed, and some of the main commanders of the unit themselves, to figure out, you know -- give -- to flush out the details of what they were trying to do and what happened.
LAMB: What`s this picture?
PRIEST: That is Lieutenant Colonel Michael Ellerbee (ph). And he was the commander of the 3rd battalion of the 504th Infantry regiment, which is the unit that I followed. So he has -- he is the commander of the company that I looked at, Alpha Company. And there he is, talking to two elderly Serb women. Actually, one`s a man and a -- and a woman.
Ellerbee (ph) is this very dynamic battalion commander. He wears his Baretta tucked into his flak jacket right up in front, not behind or in -- down here in a holster. He`s -- I say there that he is not -- the identity crisis that was afflicting the Army at the time passed over Michael Ellerbee (ph). He knew what it -- he figured out quickly what it would take in Kosovo to do the mission that they were asked to do, to really create a safe and secure environment.
He knew it meant taking risks, which the Army, the big Army, was not necessarily behind him on that. He knew it meant delegating responsibility to his lieutenants, who he trusted, and he did delegated it actually to his captains, who delegated it to his lieutenants. And so he did that, and he -- he gave them the go-ahead to do some of the things -- to do the investigations themselves. And he was -- he was the commander who was supposed to be monitoring the whole situation, as well.
LAMB: Who is Captain Kevin Lambert (ph), there on the left, in the front?
PRIEST: Captain Lambert (ph) is the commander of Alpha Company, A Company, which is the company that had Vitina as its space. And so he was in charge of -- also of all these investigations that were going on in Vitina by his lieutenants and their men. And in that picture, Kevin Lambert (ph) is meeting also with Serbs. They regularly held town meetings to figure out what the problems were, who was stealing wood from whom, who was extorting taxes from whom, you know, why market day was so chaotic and why Serbs were not allowed into market day and how you could make them safe and how you could get Serb children to school, whether it was a good idea to integrate Serb children into the Albanian -- majority-Albanian schools, and then also to make sure that everybody stayed safe. And there were -- while they were there, there were many incidents of bombs and killings of single Serbs, and that sort of thing, which they were determined to stop.
LAMB: You point out that -- I think both Kevin Lambert (ph) and Lieutenant Colonel Ellerbee (ph)...
PRIEST: Right.
LAMB: ... were reprimanded later on?
PRIEST: Right. Both of them received letters of reprimand, and their files contain some of the particulars about the case, so that each time they go for promotion, the promotion board has available to it the record. The question that the 15-6 addressed was, Whose responsibility should this be for the murder? I mean, not in a criminal sense, but how could this happen? And they found that Lieutenant Colonel Ellerbee`s (ph) command climate was partially responsible.
But to tell you the truth, they did it in a way that was slightly disingenuous because he had created for his men a task list of things that they needed to do. One of them was neutralize the KLA, render them combat-ineffective -- very, you know, military language for a police action. And he gave them the authority to do that. And the 15-6 investigator said that this was out of the larger commanders` intent, that no one knew about this, that this was beyond what he was supposed to be doing.
Well, I found out later -- well, and during my interviews -- that, in fact, generals much -- one-stars and two-stars and three-stars who had come to visit were all briefed on this task by Ellerbee (ph). So they can`t claim that they did not know. In fact, people started coming -- VIPs started coming to Vitina because they thought this was an example of a unit that was really proactive, had made friends with the Serbs, had made, you know, at least a peace with the Albanians. And Ellerbee (ph) was such a dynamic commander, and Captain Lambert (ph) was also, and these were models.
So they wanted to have it both ways. On the one hand, he said the higher-ups didn`t know. On the other hand, later another investigation which the Army conducted to see if their promotions were appropriate, found that, in fact, the higher-up commanders actually did know about this.
LAMB: How long did the Americans stay there, the 82nd Airborne, in Vitina?
PRIEST: The rotation is six months.
LAMB: They still there?
PRIEST: No. They rotated out. They came back again because they only rotate a certain number of divisions. The 101st came back -- came after them, and I went back a year later to see if anything had changed. The murder had happened. The Army had responded. They had said they`d do peacekeeping differently, they`d train their troops differently. And they do do training now that they didn`t do before. But the surprising thing to me when I came back was none of the troops had known much about the murder. Most of them hadn`t even heard about it. So they weren`t -- if they were supposed to learn lessons from that unit, they weren`t because they didn`t really know much about it.
But the same problems haunted that unit, which was -- I`ll give you my favorite example, and the scene of all the scenes in the book and in my reporting, that still stick in my head so much is -- the troops were put de facto in charge of evicting Albanians from Serb homes. The Albanians would find vacant Serb homes. They`d come in and they`d move in, as a way of moving out the Serbs. The U.N. was supposed to be in charge, and they were supposed to go and kick the squatters out. But of course, the U.N. didn`t want to do that because people don`t like to get kicked out of their homes.
So they either wouldn`t do it, and the -- and the Serb population would be up in arms all the time, or they would push KFOR into the situation where they had to do it.
LAMB: Americans.
PRIEST: Americans, the American troops. So this was what happened in front of me. This one Serb elderly man whose home had been taken over by Albanians had made a friendship with the Americans and...
LAMB: What was his name?
PRIEST: His name was -- I`m going to blank on it -- Male (ph).
LAMB: Male (ph), yes.
PRIEST: He was actually a town drunk. And the troops, though, really liked him because he was a Serb, and he would wander the streets and he didn`t care. He was brave, you know, and they gave him a certain respect because of that. Here`s this guy that could be killed. In fact, his friend, another farmer, had been shot and killed several weeks before I got there, in his field.
So anyway, Malay wants his house back and he`s making a lot of noise about it and he`s been to the U.N. many times and they`ve taken reports from him and he`s given them proof and all this but they don`t want to do anything so he`s made this friendship with the new captain from the 101st Darrell Driver (ph).
And, when I was there, he had come to a meeting and he was about to complain again and Captain Driver (ph) said look we`ll take care of this. I promise you and they make like a pact. So, that night the troops go there and they find that there indeed are these squatters here and they give them an hour to leave and the squatters happen to be a husband and wife, three little kids and a cousin, and we go up to the house.
LAMB: You`re with them?
PRIEST: Yes, I`m with them and we have our translator and big guys, you know, at the door. The kids come to the door first. They`re like five and seven and they look up at this GI and there was like, you know, Christmas. I got my GI Joe right here and they had smiles on their face and wow, you know, they`re really happy.
The GI who knows that he`s there to evict them he`s ramrod straight. He says to me, he whispers kind of out of the side of his mouth, he says I hate this part of the job. The kids they really get to you because he knows he`s going to turn into kind of an ogre in front of them.
To make a long story short they tell them they have to leave. The wife says we`re not leaving. It`s cold. It is. It`s freezing cold. I had a down jacket on, you know. I`m shivering and this goes on for about an hour and then they finally say look no more. We`re going to come in and we`re going to take you away if you don`t find a house immediately.
And they actually handcuff the wife who`s resisting in front of the kids and it`s a - you know it`s a little tussle. The kids are screaming. The soldiers are, you know, doing their thing. They throw her down on the ground, put their knees on top of her, double cuff her with the flex cuff plastic.
The kids are screaming, you know. Some of the soldiers are trying to help the kids with their shoes and now the kids they`ve all transformed. The American soldiers were their friends and now, you know, they`re completely disoriented because they`ve got their mother down on the round roughing her up a little bit and it`s all because, you know, they in a sense, they`re not trained to deal with this sort of thing, evicting people from their house.
You know that`s a police action for sure and a very delicate one as you can imagine and they`ve done it in the best way they can. They`d like the U.N. to do it. They promise over and over to the people of the town. They try to convince them that the U.N. is in charge and they won`t even listen to them.
In fact, in the meetings they`ll say you tell us the U.N. is in charge but they don`t do anything. You guys have the weapons and the organization and the money so they are going to no matter what anybody says be dependent on the military to carry out - to carry out some of these things.
LAMB: So what do you as a reporter - first of all does the army like the fact that when this is going on you`re standing there?
PRIEST: That is a case where the fly on the wall worked. You know I had been walking around with the same platoon for a number of days. Yes, they forget you`re there, not antagonistic, and it just evolves. I had taken a little camera with me that was - that I tried to be as low profile as I could and I took a couple, and I was taking pictures just for myself so that I would remember. When you write a 300 and something page book and you`ve got a lot to remember and I wanted to remember the scene so I took pictures and that really helped me later. I could recall kids` faces and that sort of thing.
But to answer your question they pretty much forgot about it. They were so wrapped up in the scene that was evolving in front of them. One of the funny things that happened after that incident is the mother is the one that`s resisting. You know she`s got the kids here.
She`s saying no way are you taking my kids at night and the father meanwhile is behind the house with the captain cutting the deal because no one really likes to have this happen, to throw the kids out at by now it`s like ten o`clock at night, very cold.
So, even though they`ve handcuffed the mother, they`ve done this in front of the kids. There`s lots of screaming and commotion. Pretty soon the father and the captain walk back in. They said OK we have a deal. They`ve agreed to come out of the house at ten o`clock tomorrow, ten tomorrow morning.
So, they un-handcuff the woman and, you know, they end up staying there for the night and then another equally bizarre scene happens the next day when they finally convince the U.N. to come to the house to evict them and the U.N. people come there.
There`s a man from Pakistan. There`s a man from Ghana and they barely understand each other`s English and they are clueless why they`re even there to tell you the truth. They just, they don`t understand who`s complaining about it. They don`t understand who these Albanians are.
So, they take them and move them all down to the police station at one point and then they take the Serb whose house it was, bring him down to the police station and they`re interrogating everybody even though the Albanians had agreed to leave and the soldiers just are throwing up their hands saying, you know, how can they - how can they act like this and not know what`s going on?
LAMB: How much did we spend on this Kosovo war? How much did we - how much of our activities made the difference over there, the bombing and all that compared to the other countries?
PRIEST: Well, 99.9 percent of the war, it was an American air war.
LAMB: Done through NATO though.
PRIEST: Done through NATO, sure, and there were some nations that participated in the air war flying but the U.S. carried the vast majority of the burden.
LAMB: If you take this as a microcosm, you had NATO, U.N., now the American forces in there, what about this mission? You write, this is the title of your book "The Mission." How much of it - are there people here in this town, Washington, D.C., in the government that say we should never be involved in something like this?
PRIEST: Well they are but, you know, those people are usually the same people who don`t have a better alternative. I mean we shouldn`t have - usually you hear we shouldn`t have the military doing nation building and yet they`re the same people, I`m speaking now of Congress, who supported the air war, funded afterwards the peacekeeping mission because you can`t just walk away. Everybody realizes that.
The reason why they went to Kosovo in part, not only was there the humanitarian question but it was on NATO`s edge and they thought instability in the Balkans would bring instability throughout Europe and so they had agreed that they needed to make this a stable place and they couldn`t do it just with the status quo.
So, you have to make good on your promise. You can`t now if you`ve done the war, you`ve achieved that end. In order to achieve the lasting peace you have to do something and the something that the U.S. government has is the military. It doesn`t have any other alternative.
The alternatives that it has are very weak and that`s sort of the larger point in the book, which is why should it be the military or nobody? And, these many years after the Balkan peacekeeping first started, Bosnia was the first case where long term nation building, peacekeeping was going on since 1995. We still don`t have an alternative.
We`re still in the situation where people say this military shouldn`t be doing this. They should be fighting wars. At the same time there`s no one else to send and the U.N. and the U.N. organization is not funded or organized properly and the U.N. is a reflection of all of these countries.
So there is a widespread frustration not only in the U.S. government but in the world community that militaries shouldn`t do nation building but there`s no one else to do it and there has not been the political leadership to build another apparatus that could take that on and that`s the problem.
LAMB: Before we go on to some of the rest of the book, you dedicated to Bill, Nicky, and Haley (ph).
PRIEST: Yes.
LAMB: For their curiosity, patience, and humor. Who are they?
PRIEST: Well, Bill is my husband and Haley (ph) and Nick are my two children and they - they were curious. Haley (ph) was six so she had lots of questions about writing a book and every day she would say are you done?
And she wrote many books while I was writing my book. She would come up in the study and start her own and she would always be proud that she was done. Why wasn`t I done? So, they were also curious about where I went and what I did.
LAMB: How old is Nick?
PRIEST: He`s 11 now. He was 9-10. I went away quite a bit to do the book because I traveled quite a lot and they were, you know, curious about where I was going, and because we were not a military family we were like many American families, the majority who don`t know much about the military culture.
So, it was a real challenge for me to explain to them that on most of these trips, you know, they weren`t dangerous. I was going with military who are doing peaceful things rather than war type things.
LAMB: And what does Bill do for a living?
PRIEST: He`s the executive director of a foreign policy research center in Washington.
LAMB: There`s a lot more in this book. We just kind of touched the surface on this and so folks tuning in listening to this give us an overview. I know you went to Nigeria and Indonesia and Afghanistan. Give us an overview of what else you tried to accomplish in the book.
PRIEST: OK. The general theme is that the military has gotten so much responsibility. We have ceded so much responsibility to the military for various reasons I talked about before, no one else, the State Department is not really there, that sort of thing.
But I tried to do it using examples that people could relate to and that there were various levels of command and that sort of thing. So, the first part of it talks about he regional commanders and chiefs, and in 2000 I traveled with the four who were - at that point we divided the world into four parts and each part had a four-star either admiral or general who was in charge of it and all military operations in that region.
LAMB: And those four men were?
PRIEST: Marine General Anthony Zinni who had the Central Command, the area that Tommy Franks now has in Iraq and the Middle East area; Army General Wesley Clark who had the European Command and part of Africa, but also dual-hatted as all European CINCs are as the SAC here, the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, the military head of NATO.
Then there was also Admiral Dennis Blair who was in charge of the Pacific Command. I went with him to Indonesia and East Timor; and then finally, Marine General Charles Wilhelm who had the Southern Command in Central and Latin America.
And, I traveled with each one of them. Zinni`s trip was the longest. It was two weeks long. We went to Central Asia. We went to Bahrain.
LAMB: You by - were there any other reporters with him?
PRIEST: No. In fact, this was the - this was quite fun. None of them had ever taken reporters with them. I mean part of the story is that no one really paid much attention to what the CINCs did here in Washington among the Press Corps.
But as I discovered on other stories and which led me to this, the CINCs had an enormous amount of power, an enormous amount of resources compared to anybody else.
So, I spent months trying to work myself into their trips and, in fact, finally was able to do that and was the only reporter on all the trips and I traveled with the staff. They have their own airplanes. They travel with about 35 people including, you know, communicators, refuelers, medics, staff aides, you name it in the group and I was just part of what they did every day.
LAMB: You make an interesting point in your book about the fact that these gentlemen that succeeded Anthony Zinni does not talk to the press very often.
PRIEST: Yes.
LAMB: And Anthony Zinni did and does. It seems that`s a very important point in your book in this town. So, Anthony Zinni is all over this book but Tommy Franks is nowhere.
PRIEST: Well, that`s true and they did have different philosophies. Zinni, his philosophy was we`re part of the United States. The public should know what we`re doing. To the greatest extent we can, we should tell them what we`re doing.
A good example of that is when he commanded the pull out of troops from Somalia and there were many people from the press there. Militaries often conflicted about how to treat those press people in the middle of a military operation and Zinni`s attitude was I`m going to take them into my operation center.
I`m going to brief them beforehand on what we`re going to do tomorrow. If they promise not to use it, because if they break - you know obviously you can`t tell anybody beforehand what the military is going to do or you might spoil it and get people hurt.
And he said anybody that breaks that promise, you`re out of here and you`re in Somalia and you got to figure out how you get yourself home. So, he had a way of building trust with the press. Of course everybody went along with that. You know we try to do our jobs the best we can too and not endanger anybody.
But he also was very candid about the military and he once went up on Capitol Hill, told members of Congress that he didn`t actually think it was a good idea to have - to fund a small group of people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That was not the administration`s line and the administration actually under Clinton muzzled him for that.
So, even though he was a proponent of speaking to the press, in the last two years he was, in his position he was not allowed to speak to the press. I caught him at the end of his tenure when he was about to retire and I think he really wanted to share what it was that his world had become. Here are these four-star generals trained in combat operations and here they`d become these four-star diplomats and not...
LAMB: Did he like that?
PRIEST: I think he did because he`s very gregarious and he respected and really learned to appreciate the people in his region but he also felt tremendously frustrated with the lack of support from Washington.
LAMB: By the way, one of the things - a couple of statistics you have in your book I wanted to ask you about because they`re relevant right now is that since 1973 you say that the Gulfies, meaning the Gulf, Persian Gulf countries, have purchased $125 billion worth of weaponry.
PRIEST: Yes.
LAMB: From this country?
PRIEST: Right, from this country.
LAMB: And a further figure you have in there that there`s been $82 billion purchased by the Saudis just in the last 16 years.
PRIEST: Right.
LAMB: What do those figures say to you?
PRIEST: Well, it`s a way to tell you that our relationship with the Middle East is largely a military relationship, a one-dimensional relationship. Unlike everywhere else in the world where our stated goal is to promote democracy, in the Middle East that has not been our stated goal.
In fact, I`ve been in seminars, in briefing rooms where the goal - that goal, which appears on all of the briefing charts has been excised. So, we`ve never had the same sort of standards and the same goals in that region and we`ve had, like I said, a military relationship. The commander-in-chief being the main military person was responsible for carrying out that relationship in the area.
LAMB: You also say that there are 33, at least at the time you wrote you book, classified war plans.
PRIEST: Right.
LAMB: How many - I mean is that something everybody knows about or is that something you found?
PRIEST: I think it`s - people, you know, on the joint staff and other reporters that have been around a long time know about that, yes.
LAMB: What does that mean, 33 classified war plans, to do what? Where?
PRIEST: You know it`s for every sort of possibility, everything from the implosion of North Korea to destabilization in Somalia. It`s whatever - it`s what the U.S. would do if it had to go to war. Those war plans are really basic bare bones contingency plans that when you`re in a time of actually thinking about going to war with a country you take those out and change them quite a bit.
LAMB: Let me shift back to another person that you write about, Rick Turcott.
PRIEST: Yes.
LAMB: Because you talked about his early in our discussion here about the Special Forces. Who was he or who is he?
PRIEST: Right. He is the senior NCO, non-commissioned officer, on an A team which is the unit, working unit, of Special Forces. It`s 12-man teams, the units that they work in.
LAMB: Why do you write about him?
PRIEST: Well, I was trying in the Special Forces chapters to describe the culture of the Special Forces and Turcott seemed to me to be a quintessential team leader because he`d been in the Special Forces for 20 some years, had been to 70 countries.
He had the kind of machoism and determination and rule over his A team that I had heard existed, I had read existed, and there he was in front of me trying to organize his men both, you know, what they would do every day but also that`s in Kosovo where they were and they had the mission, partly an intelligence mission, trying to figure out where the bad guys were and were they going to come after U.S. troops and that sort of thing.
LAMB: What are some of the subgroups on Special Forces, like the Navy SEALS?
PRIEST: Oh, OK. Yes, the Special Operations Forces is an umbrella or is an umbrella term that encompasses - you have the Navy SEALS. You have the Air Force Special Operations units which are a whole variety of fixed wing but also helicopters that are only flown under, you know, special circumstances.
And then you have the Army Special Forces, otherwise we know them as the Green Berets. You also have the 75th Ranger Regiment which are really the combat, larger combat force, and then you have the Civil Affairs and the Psychological Operations Unit.
LAMB: You say that we have 46,000 people under arms in the Special Operations.
PRIEST: Operations.
LAMB: Four billion dollar a year budget in 2000 and it`s going up all the time. How many different countries in the world do we have A teams and Special Forces groups and Navy SEALS working, doing things?
PRIEST: Well, I think it`s still about 120. Actually, it`s probably more than that because after 9/11 there were more teams that went out. There were larger training missions in places where they were a little bit reticent to do things before, like Central Asia.
There`s always this tension in the policy arena about where you send Special Forces. Do you send them into places where the human rights record is not very good? And, there`s great debate about that and after 9/11 a lot of that debate fell by the wayside and we ended up sending troops to places like Uzbekistan where they would go once in a while but now they`re going to be there in a much more routine way and in Georgia to deal with the - potentially with the terrorist problem up in (unintelligible).
LAMB: What do they do all over the world like this and how classified are they, their activities?
PRIEST: Well, part of what they do is training. That`s a large part. They interact with the Special Forces of that country or, in the case of Nigeria where I went, they were actually training peacekeepers.
However, you know, as we know from Afghanistan they also, one of their main missions is to liaison with foreign rebel forces, so there are Special Forces, the ones in Afghanistan, to meet up with the Northern Alliance warlords and troops and to help call in air strikes with their help against the Taliban. So, they also have that combat role.
There`s various degrees of secrecy. The A teams that I wrote about are the White. We call them the White Special Forces. They are not secret, although many of their missions are secret.
The other group below them that sometimes we talk about is the Delta Force and that is a clandestine unit who the Army, I don`t know recently what their attitude about this was, but for all the time I covered it the Army never would admit that they even had a Delta Force.
Delta Force would do missions that are secret and they had the original counterterrorism mission or either they would do hostage rescue under terrorist circumstances or they were supposed to also help the interruption or apprehension of weapons of mass destruction material and components that would go places, things like that.
LAMB: What are the kind of things as you write in your book - by the way how long did it take you to write it once you got into that part of it?
PRIEST: A year and a half.
LAMB: So, you took off from "The Washington Post" during that time?
PRIEST: Yes, I did.
LAMB: What did you keep saying to yourself you wanted others to learn?
PRIEST: You know I had this fundamental belief that Americans don`t know what their military does, a very simple thing, and when I would talk - and I would test it with my friends and their friends and I would test it everywhere I went because like most book authors, I think, I was obsessed with the book during the period of time I was writing it.
And, a lot of people had the notion that our military, this is pre 9/11, wasn`t doing much. Well, they were - to the contrary. The military is saying we`re overtaxed. We`re in all these countries. We`re doing all these things. We`re out in the Middle East, you know. We`re in Central America in the drug war. They want us to, you know, help out with insurgence in Asia.
So, they were all over the place and I just wanted to give Americans who fund, who support and whose history is here because of the American military a better sense of what they actually do.
LAMB: Can you give me an idea of something you tell friends about the military that they never know about?
PRIEST: Well, many of them when I said the military is training in Nigeria, the military trains in Indonesia, you know there`s not a war in Nigeria. There`s not a war in Indonesia. What? You know what are they doing there?
LAMB: Do they understand the commander-in-chiefs, the CINCs?
PRIEST: No, no, not at all. I mean, you know, even people in the military don`t really know much about what the CINCs do unless they`ve worked on the CINC staff. The military is so large and it`s so divided among its different components, not only the services but depending on the unit that you`re in, your life is that unit and what it does.
LAMB: How many CINCs are there?
PRIEST: Well, there`s five now because Donald Rumsfeld has created a fifth (UNINTELLIGIBLE) I call them which is the Northern Command.
LAMB: And who do they answer to?
PRIEST: By law they answer to the defense secretary and a dual chain up to the president. In practice they have answered much more to the secretary of defense through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
LAMB: So, for instance, if you`re a marine general and you`re in charge of the Central Command, you don`t have to answer to the commandant of the Marine Corps?
PRIEST: Not at all. No. In fact...
LAMB: He has nothing to say about what you do?
PRIEST: Not at all. In fact, in operations the CINCs are - the CINCS are into and plan and organize and are responsible for carrying out the operations. The service chiefs, who are in fact better known to most Americans, are really managers of their services.
They are responsible for making sure they get enough people to join and stay, they`re properly trained, and that they have the right kind of weapons, not only now but in the future. So, they`ve become really managers. A lot of them don`t like it but that is really the case.
LAMB: What about the secretaries of the services?
PRIEST: Well, the secretaries of the services really do not have anything to do with operations. They too, they are the overseers of the managers of the services so people who have the most hand in the operations. When you`re deployed, of course, an army unit that goes to Kosovo, that`s a different matter....
LAMB: How many years have you been at "The Washington Post"?
PRIEST: Seventeen now.
LAMB: And, this book experience compared to daily journalism, what did you think of writing a book?
PRIEST: It`s the best thing I`ve ever done.
LAMB: Why?
PRIEST: It really challenges you. You really realize how as a reporter what you do is very superficial. That`s the frustrating part.
...
LAMB: Here`s the cover of the book. It`s called "The Mission." Our guest is "Washington Post" reporter Dana Priest. Thank you very much.
-------- propaganda wars
[Sorry, Jimmy, but there are those who believe no war is just.]
Just War - or a Just War?
By JIMMY CARTER
March 9, 2003
NY Times editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/09CART.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
ATLANTA - Profound changes have been taking place in American foreign policy, reversing consistent bipartisan commitments that for more than two centuries have earned our nation greatness. These commitments have been predicated on basic religious principles, respect for international law, and alliances that resulted in wise decisions and mutual restraint. Our apparent determination to launch a war against Iraq, without international support, is a violation of these premises.
As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.
For a war to be just, it must meet several clearly defined criteria.
The war can be waged only as a last resort, with all nonviolent options exhausted. In the case of Iraq, it is obvious that clear alternatives to war exist. These options - previously proposed by our own leaders and approved by the United Nations - were outlined again by the Security Council on Friday. But now, with our own national security not directly threatened and despite the overwhelming opposition of most people and governments in the world, the United States seems determined to carry out military and diplomatic action that is almost unprecedented in the history of civilized nations. The first stage of our widely publicized war plan is to launch 3,000 bombs and missiles on a relatively defenseless Iraqi population within the first few hours of an invasion, with the purpose of so damaging and demoralizing the people that they will change their obnoxious leader, who will most likely be hidden and safe during the bombardment.
The war's weapons must discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Extensive aerial bombardment, even with precise accuracy, inevitably results in "collateral damage." Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of American forces in the Persian Gulf, has expressed concern about many of the military targets being near hospitals, schools, mosques and private homes.
Its violence must be proportional to the injury we have suffered. Despite Saddam Hussein's other serious crimes, American efforts to tie Iraq to the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been unconvincing.
The attackers must have legitimate authority sanctioned by the society they profess to represent. The unanimous vote of approval in the Security Council to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction can still be honored, but our announced goals are now to achieve regime change and to establish a Pax Americana in the region, perhaps occupying the ethnically divided country for as long as a decade. For these objectives, we do not have international authority. Other members of the Security Council have so far resisted the enormous economic and political influence that is being exerted from Washington, and we are faced with the possibility of either a failure to get the necessary votes or else a veto from Russia, France and China. Although Turkey may still be enticed into helping us by enormous financial rewards and partial future control of the Kurds and oil in northern Iraq, its democratic Parliament has at least added its voice to the worldwide expressions of concern.
The peace it establishes must be a clear improvement over what exists. Although there are visions of peace and democracy in Iraq, it is quite possible that the aftermath of a military invasion will destabilize the region and prompt terrorists to further jeopardize our security at home. Also, by defying overwhelming world opposition, the United States will undermine the United Nations as a viable institution for world peace.
What about America's world standing if we don't go to war after such a great deployment of military forces in the region? The heartfelt sympathy and friendship offered to America after the 9/11 attacks, even from formerly antagonistic regimes, has been largely dissipated; increasingly unilateral and domineering policies have brought international trust in our country to its lowest level in memory. American stature will surely decline further if we launch a war in clear defiance of the United Nations. But to use the presence and threat of our military power to force Iraq's compliance with all United Nations resolutions - with war as a final option - will enhance our status as a champion of peace and justice.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is chairman of the Carter Center in Atlanta and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
----
IRAQGATE - The Big One That (Almost) Got Away Who Chased it -- and Who Didn't
by Russ W. Baker
March/April 1993
Columbia Journalism Review
http://www.cjr.org/year/93/2/iraqgate.asp
Baker, a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, is a free-lance writer who regularly contributes to The Village Voice. Research assistance was provided by Julie Asher in Washington and Daniel Eisenberg in New York.
ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."
Is this accurate? Just about every reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that, with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.
Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage? Certainly, if you watched Nightline or read the London Financial Times or the Los Angeles Times, you saw this monster grow. But if you studied the news columns of The Washington Post or, especially, The New York Times, you practically missed the whole thing. Those two papers were very slow to come to the story and, when they finally did get to it, their pieces all too frequently were boring, complicated,and short of the analysis readers required to fathom just what was going on. More to the point, they often ignored revelations by competitors.
The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.
Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don't appear to be getting any better telling them. In the interest of learning from our mistakes, this reporter examined several hundred articles and television transcripts on Iraqgate and spoke to dozens of reporters, experts, and generally well-informed news consumers.
Before evaluating the coverage, let's summarize the Iraqgate story itself:
ARMING SADDAM
The United States and its European allies have laws and policies designed to prevent arms and military technology from getting into the hands of developing countries, especially where there is a likelihood of their reckless deployment. If these controls were aimed at anyone, certainly they were aimed at the highly repressive, swaggering Iraqi regime, with its history of threatening both its neighbors and its citizens.
Still, when Saddam went to war against Iran, becoming the world's chief practitioner of chemical warfare, U.S. realpolitikers dubbed him the lesser of two evils, and the one less likely to disrupt the oil flow. The essence of Iraqgate is that secret efforts to support him became the order of the day, both during his long war with Iran and afterward.
Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology -- ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We've learned by now that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
And we've learned that the obscure Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $ 5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $ 2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.
All of this was not yet clear in August 1989, when FBI agents raided U.S. branches of BNL, hitting the jackpot in Atlanta. The branch manager in that city, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq -- some of which, according to the indictment, were used to purchase arms and weapons technology. Yet three months after the raid, White House officials went right on backing Saddam, approving $ 1 billion more in U.S. government loan guarantees for farm exports to Iraq, even though it was becoming clear that the country was beating plowshares into swords.
At the time, inquiring minds wondered whether Drogoul could possibly have acted alone in such a mammoth operation, as the U.S. government alleged. Was there a formal, secret plan to arm Iraq? And did the U.S. government engage in a massive coverup when evidence of such a plan began to emerge?
In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case. And that the lead investigator lacked the basic financial know-how to handle such an investigation, and made an extraordinarily feeble effort to get to the bottom of things. More damningly, we know know that mid-level staffers at the commerce department altered Iraqi export licenses to obscure the exported materials' military function -- before sending the documents on to Congress, which was investigating the affair.
Eventually, it would turn out that elements of the U.S. government almost certainly knew that Drogoul was funneling U.S.-backed loans -- intended for the purchase of agricultural products, machinery, trucks, and other U.S. goods -- into dual-use technology and outright military technology. And that the British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the center of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta. (Precision equipment supplied by Matrix Churchill was reportedly a target this January when the Western allies renewed their attack on Iraq).
It would later be alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close U.S. ally as well as BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions. It looked to some like an international coalition. As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, "Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator."
Safire had been on the case since 1989, turning out slashing op-ed pieces. But readers of the Times's news pages must have wondered where Safire's body-blows were coming from, since the news columns contained almost nothing about Iraqgate for the longest time.
THE COVERAGE
Not everyone was slow to spot trouble. The coverage might be said to have begun in 1987, when Alan Friedman, a correspondent in Italy for the London Financial Times who was writing a book -- Agnelli: Fiat, and the Network of Italian Power -- learned of a European-based arms-procurement network that had gathered equipment for Iraq. In the book, published in 1988, he explored a five-year-old joint Argentine-Egyptian-Iraqi effort to build a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, code-named CONDOR 2. Friedman's claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon were shrugged off by colleagues in the press.
In August 1989, while working in Milan, Friedman noticed a four-line press release from Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. "Irregularities," it seemed, had been uncovered at BNL's Atlanta branch. (Later, Friedman would learn that this was the bank's way of acknowledging something troubling that had just transpired, unnoticed by the press: the FBI raids on BNL's U.S. branches.) Shortly thereafter, a London tipster told Friedman to look at a seemingly unrelated story -- the possible role of a British company, Matrix Churchill, in secretly arming Iraq. When Friedman phoned a source in Rome and mentioned both firms, he was told to get on a plane and come down for a little chat. It lasted all night.
Beginning in September 1989, a Financial Times team, reporting from Milan, Baghdad, and London, laid out the first charges that BNL, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed loans, was funding Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons work. Led by Friedman, who relocated to New York City in early 1990, the reporters went on to produce about 300 articles over three years, painting a compelling portrait of a massive -- and seemingly coordinated -- international effort to aid Iraq. For the next two and a half years, the Financial Times provided the only continuous newspaper reportage on the subject.
The London paper tied CONDOR 2 to BNL Atlanta -- which had just been publicly identified as the source of $ 3 billion in unauthorized loans to Iraq. And in one 1989 article it warned that the BNL story was more than just another dull tale of banking malfeasance: "The CONDOR story raises questions about the effectiveness of the commitment of Western governments to preventing military technology transfer." It pointed out that, while U.S. intelligence had long bragged about aggressively monitoring the transfer of military technology, Washington had fallen down on the job. The paper noted that if government sleuths had been serious about stopping the arms flow, they could have followed either the money trail or the technology trail. "In each case, they appear to have slipped up," it concluded.
The Financial Times extensively quoted top former officials at the International Monetary Fund, the Pentagon, and elsewhere, who expressed alarm over Export-Import Bank loan guarantees to Iraq. Some asserted that Washington had, as one of them put it, "allowed and abetted the development and stockpiling of a major chemical warfare capability" in Iraq. Among the companies shipping militarily useful technology under the eye of the government, according to the Financial Times, were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix Churchill, through its Ohio branch.
The most striking thing about the paper's revelations is that they were published before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times, who deserves a lot of credit for his own reporting on Iraqgate, nevertheless says the Financial Times was without question the early leader on the story. "Events subsequent have shown inmost cases they were on the money," he says.
By early 1990 the Financial Times was no longer alone. Representative Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee (who also had noticed the four-line BNL press release back in 1989), began a long, lonely crusade to expose the affair. Soon he would be entering related documents into the Congressional Record in late-night speeches before an empty chamber. Attorney General Thornburgh even wrote to him, demanding that he stop looking into BNL in the interests of "national security." He didn't. Meanwhile, many reporters, accepting the administration's line that it was shocked -- shocked! -- to discover the BNL subterfuge, treated Gonzalez as a crank.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the debate began in the U.S. over an appropriate response. But only a handful of reporters bothered to ask where he had acquired the military muscle for the invasion. One who did, Thomas L. Flannery of the Intelligencer Journal, a 45,000-circulation paper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, warned in November: "If U.S. and Iraqi troops engage in combat in the Persian Gulf, weapons technology developed in Lancaster and indirectly sold to Iraq will probably be used against U.S. forces. . . . And aiding in this . . . technology transfer was the Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose U.S. operations in Ohio were recently linked to a sophisticated Iraqi weapons procurement network." Flannery, who wrote in impressive string of stories identifying Pennsylvania companies that supplied Iraq, had been hired by the Financial Times as an occasional stringer the year before.
Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990, issue. Under the headline GULFGATE: HOW THE U.S. SECRETLY ARMED IRAQ, Waas pulled together a massive amount of information, ranging from senior White House officials' accounts that George Bush was a behind-the-scenes advocate of a pro-Iraq tilt, to an accounting of U.S. trade with Iraq that had a potential military application. "That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert decision to arm Iraq," Waas wrote, "is the most serious consequence of a U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the advice and consent of the American public."
The gulf war began shortly after, on January 16, 1991, and the media went wild. But when it ended six weeks later, most Americans knew little more about the war's root causes then they did before.
There would, however, be more to the story. Within hours after hostilities ceased on February 27 -- and nine-teen months after the FBI had raided BNL -- the government indicted Drogoul, painting him as a lone-wolf financier of the Iraqi war machine. He was charged with defrauding his Rome employers of billions of dollars.
Nightline, which had been looking at Iraqgate for some time, hooked up with the Financial Times in an unusual and productive arrangement. On May 2, 1991, the team reported the secret minutes of the President's National Advisory Council, at which, despite earlier reports of abuses, an undersecretary of state declared that terminating Iraqi loans would be "contrary to the president's intentions."
Nightline/Financial Times also cited intelligence reports that Iraq was using U.S. government farm credits to procure military technology. On July 3, 1991, the Financial Times reported that a Florida company run by an Iraqi national had produced cyanide -- some of which went to Iraq for use in chemical weapons -- and had shipped it via a CIA contractor.
In another unusual and productive partnership, Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times teamed up with The Village Voice's Murray Waas. The Times published the first of their three-part series on February 23, 1992. "Classified documents obtained by the Times show . . . a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by Bush -- both as President and as Vice-President -- to support and placate the Iraqi dictator," the paper reported. It cited a top-secret National Security decision directive signed by President Bush in 1989, ordering closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $ 1 billion in new aid. Although the directive had been briefly described in other publications, the Times put it in context. Assistance from Washington was critical for Iraq, Frantz and Waas pointed out, since international bankers had cut off virtually all loans to Baghdad because Iraq was falling behind on repayments -- precisely because it was busily pouring millions into arms purchases.
And it emphasized the striking fact -- buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece -- that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loan guarantees to Iraq.
"Nobody responded to that [February 1992] series," says Frantz. "That week, Gonzalez went onto the house floor to deliver another speech, and nobody followed that either." The Los Angeles Times went on to publish 100 articles exploring the history of U.S.-Iraq relations before and after the war. The reportage was, admirably, light on anonymous sources and heavy on information from internal documents, shared with the paper by government employees troubled by what they had seen.
Still, the top national papers ignored most of the Financial Times/Nightline and Los Angeles Times revelations. In fact, when in March an obscure Italian newspaper reported Drogoul's claim that both the Italian and U.S. governments had known and approved of his lending operation, only the Financial Times picked up the story.
Things began to heat up last June when, in an abrupt turnabout, the feds suddenly agreed to drop 287 of 347 charges against Drogoul in return for a guilty plea and pledge of cooperation. Drogoul, who had asked for an opportunity to explain his actions fully, suddenly decided to go mute. A troubled Judge Marvin Shoob, presiding over Drogoul's case, wrote to the head of the House Judiciary Committee: "[Drogoul] decided not to provide a statement until sentencing, after debriefing over a two-month period by the government."
By July, five other congressional committees had joined Gonzalez's banking panel in launching probes into various aspects of the Iraqgate affair, and Democrats were demanding that an independent prosecutor be named to investigate it.
Since Drogoul had made a deal, the fall sentencing hearings were expected to be brief. But they turned into a major show when, in October, Drogoul's lawyer suddenly began introducing new evidence that the head office of the Italian-government-owned bank had known all along what Drogoul was up to. He also produced testimony suggesting that figures with ties to U.S. intelligence may have been involved. The prosecution quickly asked to withdraw its plea bargain, and agreed to a trial (which had the net effect of postponing public airing of the affair until after the November election).
Earlier, The Village Voice's Robert Hennelly had assembeled a massive timeline documenting a pro-Saddam U.S. tilt dating back a full decade. He concluded: "At worst, that support was a frightening exercise in capitalistic opportunism (we made money both supporting and attacking Hussein). . . ."
THE PACK JOINS IN
Drogoul's plea bargain and sentencing hearing provided a perfect new peg, and everyone finally jumped in. With the Financial Times far in the lead and the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal -- got into Iraqgate late, leaving beat reporters struggling to untangle the story's many complex international strands.
The Journal set the pace. Chiefly through reporter John Fialka, the paper made up for its late awakening by demystifying technicalities through striking headlines and crystal-clear prose. Despite a small general news hole, the Journal constantly found space for explanatory Iraqgate pieces.
The Post's early coverage had a protective tone. In July, reporter John Goshko wrote about Bush administration actions that "unwittingly bolstered" Iraq's military. And he asserted: "The record suggests that Bush . . . Baker and other senior foreign policy advisers were not paying much attention to Iraq. . . ."
The Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, whose Iraqgate coverage included the Drogoul hearing, produced several exclusives from Washington sources. Yet the paper did not significantly advance the story. "It was a story with high political content, and a paucity of hard evidence to back up charges of conspiracy," Smith says. "Some papers allowed themselves to be manipulated, acting almost as agents of the Democratic opposition. Some people made this a crusade."
The New York Times, meanwhile, shifted into high gear -- and promptly crashed into a pile of charges and countercharges. To cover BNL and the Drogoul sentencing, the Times brought in Elaine Sciolino, the national security correspondent, who had returned to daily reporting after writing a book about Iraq. She had other credentials that might have been helpful: she had served as Newsweek's Rome bureau chief before coming to the Times, and had covered intelligence matters for years.
She came in cold, and her sudden coverage was almost without context, since, aside from columnist William Safire, the newspaper had failed to follow up on the massive amount of evidence already gathered by others in the greater Iraqgate story. When much of the Financial Times's early scoop material resurfaced during the trial, the Times reported some of it -- without noting who had originally unearthed it. Safire, on the other hand, cited the Financial Times often in his early crusade to rise above his paper's seeming indifference to the larger scandal. During Drogoul's hearings, the Times brought in Martin Tolchin, an old Washington hand. He had covered the Neil Bush S&L affair, and seemed adept at telling this story clearly, but he made only a cameo appearance.
THE FOOL ON THE HILL
The Times largely ignored Representative Gonzalez, meanwhile, as he made his allegations and entered supporting documents into the Congressional Record. Sciolino got around to a close look at the man making the charges on July 3. Her piece, headed ECCENTRIC STILL BUT OBSCURE NO MORE, cast Gonzalez as something of a buffoon, and included charges that his disclosure of sensitive information was a threat to national security -- without explaining why it would be. The piece could almost be read as a justification for the Times's failure to follow Gonzalez's earlier charges.
The Journal, which regularly reported Gonzalez's steady flow of documents and pronouncements, was far more charitable in Fialka's July 31 profile of the congressman. Headed LONER GONZALEZ TOILS TO EXPOSE WHITE HOUSE ROLE IN AIDING IRAQ IN YEARS LEADING UP TO GULF WAR, it presented a tough, uncorruptible maverick.
WHAT THEY MISSED
Many incendiary allegations reported by the Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Atlanta Constitution (covering the Drogoul hearing in its home town) were simply ignored by The New York Times, and sometimes by The Washington Post, as well. A few of many examples, all from 1992:
Intelligence Connections?
On October 3, the Journal reported Drogoul's assertion that the director general of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Production had told him "We are all in this together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government works very closely with the intelligence service of the Iraq government." Three weeks later, the Journal reported that Gonzalez "produced a phone-book-sized packet of documents" showing the involvement of U.S. exporting firms. The documents mentioned one, RD&D International of Vienna, Virginia -- which designed parts for Iraq's howitzers and was financed through BNL -- that was run by a man with reputed connections to U.S. intelligence. The Times and the Post missed the first story and failed to follow up on the second.
Quayle involvement?
On three separate occasions it was reported (first by Representative Gonzalez, then by The Atlanta Constitution, and finally by the Journal) that BNL bankers claimed that companies seeking Iraqi business had come to the Atlanta branch at the urging of Vice-President Dan Quayle. One such corporation was owned by a man with close personal and business ties to the Quayle family; he built a brass refinery that recycled spent Iraqi artillery shells. Neither the Times nor the Post reported this.
Scuds and Superguns?
September 16: the Journal, in a piece headed IRAQ FUNDED SCUDS WITH MONEY GAINED FRAUDULENTLY IN U.S., INVESTIGATOR SAYS, recounted prosecution testimony that Drogoul had toured an Iraqi military facility, was shown a drawing of a missile, and was told that it had been financed through BNL Atlanta. The Atlanta Constitution reported this, as did the Los Angeles Times, whose lead stated: "Loans from an Italian bank branch here paid for improving Iraqi Scud missiles like the one that killed 28 Americans in the Persian Gulf War, a top federal investigator testified Tuesday." The Times and Post didn't report the story.
How high does it go?
September 23: The Constitution reported that Judge Shoob, complaining in open court about the prosecution's failure to call BNL officials to testify, actually sought to call his own witness. The Journal quoted Shoob: "I've read all the secret documents, and I can't believe [Drogoul] was the sole actor or principal actor in the enterprise." The Times and Post were AWOL on this story.
A question of bribery?
Even when the Times raised startling facts, it often failed to follow up on itself. On October 17 the newspaper noted that the CIA had "uncovered a document suggesting the possible payoff of government officials in the United States and Italy in the elaborate bank-fraud case." Readers of the Times never learned more about this development.
DON'T FOLLOW ME, I'M LOST
In other cases, the Big Two -- but particularly The New York Times -- simply muddled matters.
In October, it was revealed that the CIA had withheld from Congress -- and possibly from prosecutors -- crucial documents showing what the government knew about BNL. The Justice department blamed the CIA the CIA blamed the Justice department; and Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, got angry at everyone.
Sciolino did her most energetic work covering this turf battle, often using unnamed sources, which made it difficult to discern whose agenda was being advanced. And although the Times finally started producing exclusives in its coverage of this matter, its daily revelations over the finger-pointing were hard to follow and did little to foster understanding of the bigger story. (In the end, evidence suggested that the CIA had withheld the documents at the request of Justice. If so, in retrospect, the story was the collusion, not the feud.)
Readers' comprehension suffered when this complex story was reported as a he said-she said exercise. Here's Sciolino on October 11, writing about the intergovernmental feud: "The unusual finger-pointing over the case came after reports that CIA officials had disclosed to Congress on Thursday that, at the urging of the Justice Department, they had deliberately withheld information about the bank fraud from federal prosecutors in Atlanta. . . . CIA and Justice Department officials denied those reports today. . . . But their denials came amid a new disclosure by lawmakers that the Justice Department also had withheld information that the CIA wanted to make public. . . . The CIA, the Justice Department, and the Bush Administration have all denied wrongdoing in the case. . . . In a sharply worded statement today, the CIA denied that its officials had told the Senate Committee that it had deliberately withheld information from Federal prosecutors in Atlanta at the urging of the Justice Department."
Wording like this, one television producer who has followed Iraqgate observed, "makes The New York Times responsible for gross public apathy."
Dean Baquet, who had earned a reputation as a formidable investigative reporter during his years with the Chicago Tribune, worked to advance the story on several occasions, especially covering Matrix Churchill developments in a separate trial in London. But he was only sporadically assigned to the story.
On October 18, Sciolino and Baquet wrote an overview piece, a belated effort to advance the story, although they appeared hesitant to state what, for others, had been all but proven long ago. Notice the qualifiers: "Some Congressional Democrats say the recent revelations are only a tiny part of a two-pronged Government-wide cover-up; to protect and conceal its dealings with Mr. Hussein, and to accommodate the Italian government. Even more ominously, these critics, without any real proof, have begun to suggest that the administration knew about the loans all along."
Six congressional committees was hardly "some" Democrats; the revelations were hardly "recent"; the evidence of administration knowledge was, by now, fairly overwhelming. As even the national-security minded columnist Jim Hoagland, writing a week earlier in The Washington Post, put it, "That Bush is tolerating a coverup on Iraq conducted by others on his behalf can no longer be seriously doubted. That Bush has lied about his knowledge of shipments of U.S. arms to Iraq can no longer be seriously disputed."
On November 2, Representative Gonzalez announced that the Agriculture department, which had approved BNL loans, had learned back in 1990 for the CIA that BNL Rome was involved in the alleged Atlanta fraud. This revelation not only challenged the government's assertion that Drogoul had acted alone, but also implied that a coverup was under way.
Gonzalez's disclosure represented another news peg. The Journal covered the disclosure in a piece headed FARM AGENCY KNEW SCOPE OF BNL FRAUD. Working from the same material that same day, the Times, in a story headed 1990 LETTER ADDS NEW QUESTIONS ON CIA ROLE IN IRAQ BANK CASE, chose to emphasize the CIA-Justice turf battle, obscuring the main point: that the Agriculture department was in the BNL loop. (And while the Journal cited Gonzalez in the second paragraph, the Times waited until they very last sentence to credit the congressman.)
Times deputy national editor Philip Taubman, who was deputy bureau chief in Washington until late last year and supervised much of the reporting on Iraqgate (except when it was assigned to the paper's business or foreign desk), sees the Times's heavy coverage of the CIA-Justice fight as a plus. "I don't think it's inside baseball when two major branches of government are involved in a donnybrook, both accusing each other of malfeasance," he says.
Many reporters from other newspapers criticize the Time's coverage of Iraqgate, and much of its coverage in general, for a bias toward authority, an unwillingness to challenge power. Taubman, however, sees his newspaper as properly cautious. "I think it's off base to suggest that our coverage was somehow deficient because we attempted to lay out what charges were confirmed and which might still fall short of being confirmed," he says. "We try in all our stories to make clear what we don't know, as well as what we know. And in a complicated story of this type I think it's good journalism to clue the reader in where inflammatory accusations are not yet, and may never be, confirmable or provable."
Sciolino, who recently moved on to become the paper's chief diplomatic correspondent, admits that coming in late to such a complicated story was tough. "I couldn't summarize the story in one sentence," she says. "That's what made it so difficult to explain -- to an editor, to people at a cocktail party. It's even more complicated than Iran-contra."
In retrospect, she says, "I think our paper could have done a better job, especially in the beginning. One spinoff could be to look at the whole arms procurement network around the world, how independent arms dealers, banks, and governments who own weapons-production facilities promote arms proliferation." Yet, Sciolino adds, arms proliferation "is not a sexy story."
She praises the Los Angeles Times for putting two people on the story, and for treating it as an investigation rather than as a beat story. She says her paper was hobbled because the story affected several sections of the paper -- foreign, national, and business -- and was parceled out to them. So no one editor was in charge of coordinating coverage.
LESSONS
With Dragoul's new trial set for October, there is still time for news organizations to wise up. Some things everyone agrees on: besides exploring the proliferation of weapons into unstable or dangerous hands, a serious Iraqgate investigation would look at the power of America's largest corporations to sway foreign policy in ways that help them make sales. The Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and others did explore this, but there was little follow-up. One exception was the Journal, which led an October 12 piece this way: "In the unfolding drama of how the U.S. financed and supplied Saddam Hussein's Iraq, there's more than a walk-on part for corporate America." The Journal's John Fialka cited a list of major U.S. corporations that "saw Iraq as a gusher of business -- so long as credits were wrung out of government agencies such as the Agriculture department, Commodity Credit Corp., and the Export-Import Bank."
Serious coverage would also examine geopolitical arrangements between countries like the U.S. and Italy, the place of banks in global scandals, and the role of American and foreign intelligence agencies in secretly carrying out policies that the American people have not endorsed. And to do this it would also seem necessary to report this story with some distance from partisan sources, whether Robert Gates or Henry Gonzalez, and not just count on leaks alone.
As it was, for a long time reporters couldn't even count on partisan political warfare to generate scoops. In Congress, both parties had repeatedly backed legislation authorizing farm credits to Iraq -- despite warnings from Kurdish representatives that the funds would end up being used against them, in the form of poison gas. With no one to hand the story to the media on a platter, unraveling it required following hunches, and spending time and money -- serious investigative reporting that roams far afield from the constraints of the conventional beat.
For ABC, which broke plenty of stories in concert with London's Financial Times, only to watch them sink, covering Iraqgate has been a sobering experience. "It's been very frustrating for us," says Gordon Platt, a Nightline producer. "We'd put it on the air, but there would be no follow-up by the other press. We'd expect the Times or Post would pick up on it. But until this last summer, they didn't."
As for why much of the press fears this kind of story, perhaps Ted Koppel put it best. "There's a good reason why we in the media are so partial to a nice, torrid sex scandal," he said as he opened yet another Nightline Iraqgate report last July. "It is, among other things, so easy to explain and so easy to understand. Nothing at all, in other words, like allegations of a government coverup, which tend to be not at all easy to explain, and even more difficult to understand."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- death penalty
Texas on Pace to Set Record in Executions
March 9, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/national/09TEXA.html
LIVINGSTON, Tex., March 8 (AP) - Delma Banks, a convicted killer, could become a historical footnote Wednesday night when he is scheduled to die by injection. Mr. Banks is in line to become the 300th Texas prisoner executed since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982.
"That would be a nice round number," said Michael Dewayne Johnson, who was scheduled to be No. 300 until he and another inmate received temporary reprieves last month.
Texas executed 9 men in January and February and is on pace to break its 2000 record of 40 executions.
"They're killing people every day almost, every week," said Mr. Johnson, who was convicted of the fatal shooting of a gas station attendant in 1995. "It's not shocking any more. Most people don't even know unless they're involved. There's just a vague mention of it in the paper."
The Texas total is more than one-third of all the executions in the nation since 1976, when the death penalty resumed under a ruling by the United States Supreme Court.
The pace in Texas has accelerated in recent years.
Almost 13 years passed between Charlie Brooks, execution No. 1, and Harold Lane, No. 100, in 1995. It took more than four years for Texas to get to No. 200, Earl Heiselbetz, in January 2000.
Now it will take slightly more than three years to reach the 300th execution.
The pace is fueled mostly by changes in appeals procedures since the mid-1990's that have imposed stricter deadlines and allow appeals to be considered simultaneously in state and federal courts.
Texas juries continue to show little reluctance to impose the death penalty. Eight men were sent to death row in January and February.
A bill pending in the Texas Legislature would let juries impose life without parole. Juries now choose between execution and a life sentence, but someone sentenced to life can be eligible for parole after 40 years.
Another bill would put a moratorium on the death penalty and order a study of the whole issue. Gov. Rick Perry opposes the bill.
-------- drug war
Thailand's Drug War Leaves Over 1,000 Dead
Brutal Campaign Draws Concern Of Rights Groups
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63210-2003Mar8?language=printer
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- When Thailand's prime minister launched a campaign Feb. 1 to eradicate drugs from his country within three months, skeptics predicted the effort would prove no more successful than his earlier pledges to eliminate pollution and untangle Bangkok's notorious traffic jams.
But within days, the seriousness of the initiative became brutally clear. Police reported at least 300 drug-related slayings over the first two weeks, and by March 1, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced that 1,100 people had been killed during the offensive.
Government officials say most of the killings have been the result of violence among rival drug gangs panicked by the crackdown. Police acknowledge responsibility for only about 30 of the deaths, saying these were largely self-defense shootings.
Human rights activists, however, suspect that many of the killings have been carried out by Thai security forces and allied gunmen as they try to meet Thaksin's quota for reducing the number of drug producers and dealers on a government list of suspects.
"According to our research, most of them are killed by the police, because they want to meet the target," said Somchai Homlaor, secretary general of Forum Asia, a human rights group. "They think if the drug dealers are brought to court, they will be released again. A better way to solve the drug problem is to kill them."
His group reported it has uncovered at least three cases in which drugs were planted on victims before their bodies were turned over to the coroner.
U.N. special human rights envoy Asma Jahangir recently added her "deep concern" to the mounting criticism, issuing a statement citing "allegations of excessive use of force resulting in extrajudicial executions."
Increasingly nervous about Thailand's international reputation, the Foreign Ministry called diplomats from more than 50 countries to a briefing Monday to make the government's case. "It's necessary for the government to take decisive action to deal with the drug problem," Foreign Ministry spokesman Sihasak Pheungketkaew said after the session. "We are not insensitive to the concerns of the international community, but we want the international community to see our side of the story."
Drug use has ravaged Thailand, where the government estimates 5 percent of the population uses methamphetamines produced in the jungles just over the border in Burma and known locally as "yaa baa" or crazy medicine. This makes Thailand the world's largest consumer of the drug, according to the United Nations' International Narcotics Control Board.
While vowing to continue the sweep, Sihasak said Foreign Ministry officials had reassured the diplomats that police were under strict instructions to abide by the law. "The campaign does not mean we will condone excessive use of force or weapons by the authorities," he said.
Admitting that police have made some mistakes in waging the anti-drug war, Thaksin has guaranteed that all killings will be investigated. He also announced he would establish two committees to monitor the police and protect informants and witnesses.
But he also has evinced continuing resentment of foreign criticism. He was quoted last month by the Nation newspaper in Bangkok as saying Thailand should "do away with the thinking of foreigners" about human rights.
Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Matha, speaking to reporters on the eve of the crackdown, set the tone for police operations against suspected drug traffickers. "They will be put behind bars or even vanish without a trace. Who cares? They are destroying our country," he said.
Based on public opinion polls, most Thais agree. A survey conducted in the third week of February by the Suan Dusit Institute showed that more than 90 percent of respondents backed Thaksin's campaign. It remains unclear, however, whether this resounding support will weather continuing disclosures about excessive violence.
Thai media widely reported the death last month of a 9-year-old boy who was shot as police tried to arrest his parents, suspected drug dealers. He was gunned down in the back seat of a car driven by his mother as she fled the police. Though authorities initially blamed the shooting on unknown assailants, three police officers have been arrested in connection with the boy's death.
Other victims include a pregnant woman, a 1-year-old boy killed in a shooting that injured his mother, and a 75-year-old grandmother suspected of peddling methamphetamines, according to press reports. The government has not named the assailants in these cases.
-------- terrorism
C.I.A. Warns U.S. Troops of Attacks in Iraq by Terror Groups
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/middleeast/09TERR.html
WASHINGTON, March 8 - The Central Intelligence Agency has warned that terrorists based in Iraq are planning attacks against American and allied forces inside the country after any invasion, government counterterrorism officials say.
The agency's previously undisclosed assessment has circulated among senior Bush administration officials. It describes both the risks of terror attacks on American forces inside Iraq if an invasion occurs and the danger of similar attacks on troops already massing in the region.
The assessment goes beyond the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's military forces, predicting for the first time that groups that the Bush administration has said are given haven by Mr. Hussein's government may become engaged in the war, even if Iraq's military is defeated and the government overthrown. The administration has said that terrorists operating inside Iraq are affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that they are either tolerated by the Baghdad government or are based in parts of the country where the government exercises little control.
The conclusions are based on recently collected intelligence in the form of intercepted communications, "glimpses" of four to eight midlevel Qaeda operatives said to have been spotted in Iraq and an analysis of the organization's prior tactics, according to administration officials.
"The Al Qaeda network is intent on attacking U.S. interests throughout Iraq, as are other extremist Islamic groups," said one official who has read the C.I.A. threat assessment.
The assessment is just one part of the array of intelligence being gathered by government agencies as part of the continuing campaign against terrorism, and is particularly important to the military right now as the United States and Britain gather their forces for a possible attack on Iraq.
It suggests that terrorist fighters may blend in with the Iraqi civilian population to get close enough to conduct strikes against allied troops during an invasion, officials said. Or they may attack American forces trying to stabilize Iraq after a war.
Terrorists might employ conventional explosives, or they might use unspecified "toxins," according to one official, quoting from the assessment.
It is thought the attacks are being planned as "independent terrorist operations," conducted by individuals or small groups rather than controlled by Iraqi military planners, one official said.
Presenting evidence to prove a direct connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been one of the most contentious aspects of the Bush administration's efforts to make its case for disarming Mr. Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction. But this assessment appears to have been prepared in order to help the military remain on guard, rather than to support the case for military action.
Even so, its disclosure could strengthen the administration's case that the campaign against terrorism is inextricably linked to the goal of unseating the Iraqi leader.
Critics of the administration's stance on Iraq have questioned its assertion that the Baghdad government has tolerated or even supported the Qaeda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden.
A map accompanying the C.I.A. assessment states that a cell of up to two dozen Qaeda operatives had been set up in Baghdad, echoing a charge made by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his speech on Feb. 5 at the United Nations.
The C.I.A. document identifies four Qaeda followers in Baghdad, described by one official as "second- or third-tier leaders." American officials who discussed the assessment declined to name those Qaeda lieutenants.
Smaller cells also are believed to be operating in Mosul and Erbil, in northern Iraq, according to the analysis.
The C.I.A. report said those cells were organized by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a poisons expert and terror recruiter who in recent weeks has been identified by Mr. Powell and other administration officials as an important link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. With the recent capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations, other lieutenants - including Mr. Zarqawi - could assume a larger role, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.
In his presentation to the United Nations last month, Mr. Powell said Mr. Zarqawi began recruiting terrorists shortly after he arrived in Baghdad last May. Mr. Powell said that nearly two dozen militants joined Mr. Zarqawi and established a base of operations there, and that 116 suspected terrorists linked to Mr. Zarqawi had been arrested in Europe in recent weeks.
Officials in Germany, who investigated Mr. Zarqawi for more than a year, have agreed he is a terrorist, but dispute that he has a connection to Al Qaeda.
In Iraq, the C.I.A. threat assessment says, the Qaeda cells had organized freely, "but it doesn't make a big deal of Al Qaeda and Saddam," said one official who has read the analysis. "There's a confluence of interests, to be sure," the official said. "And that's dead Americans."
The threat assessment also cites intelligence reports indicating that in northern Iraq, including Kurdish areas only nominally under Mr. Hussein's control, 100 to 200 Qaeda operatives are believed to be working, along with 450 to 700 members of the extremist Islamic group Ansar al-Islam.
Intelligence officials said that some of the Qaeda followers in northern Iraq had fled there from the war in Afghanistan, and were not thought to be under the control of Mr. Zarqawi. Instead, they have established themselves as a loosely organized but separate force - further complicating efforts to predict their actions.
The executive summary of the report said its information was gathered by the C.I.A.; the National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic intelligence gathering; and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which provides surveillance.
One official familiar with the report said it appeared that as the military buildup around Iraq had accelerated, so had planning by Al Qaeda for attacks - which might explain a recent surge in communications by the terror network, and increased opportunities for listening in.
"In their rush to plan, they've made some mistakes," said one official.
Another said, "Intercepts have a way of being particularly solid."
----
CIA has 2 sons of the 9/11 architect
By Olga Craig
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
March 9, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030309-11894916.htm
KUWAIT CITY - Two young sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being held by the CIA to force their father to talk, interrogators said yesterday.
Yousef al-Khalid, 9, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, 7, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided an apartment in Karachi where their father had been hiding.
He fled just hours before the raid, but his two young sons, along with another senior al Qaeda member, were found cowering behind a clothes closet in the apartment.
The boys have been held by the Pakistani authorities, but this weekend they were flown to America, where they will be questioned about their father.
CIA interrogators confirmed last night that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.
"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times, and they are given the best of care."
Their father, Mohammed, 37, is being interrogated at the Bagram U.S. military base in Afghanistan. He is being held in solitary confinement and subjected to "stress and duress" interrogations.
He has been told that his sons are being held and is being encouraged to divulge future attacks against the West and talk about the location of Osama bin Laden, officials said.
"He has said very little so far," one CIA official said yesterday. "He sits in a trancelike state and recites verses from the Koran. But while he may claim to be a devout Muslim, we know he is fond of the Western-style fast life.
"His sons are important to him. The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him."
The Kuwaiti-born Mohammed named his older son after Ramzi Yousef, his nephew, who was convicted of masterminding the 1993 attack on New York's World Trade Center. After the attack, Yousef fled to the Philippines with his uncle.
When bomb-making chemicals set fire to their Manila apartment, Yousef fled to Pakistan, where he was captured in an Islamabad hotel room in 1995.
Mohammed was in the next room and, audaciously, gave an eyewitness account of the arrest to a reporter. By the time the Pakistani authorities found out his true identity, he had fled the country.
He was eventually arrested March 1 in a house in Rawalpindi, two miles from the home of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Among the items found in the house was a photograph of a smiling Mohammed with his arms around his two sons.
Known as "the Engineer," he is suspected of being the mastermind of the Oct. 12, 2002, Bali bombings in Indonesia that killed more than 180 people, and the man who slashed the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in January 2002.
Little is known of his sons' mother, who is thought to be Pakistani. "We have no evidence that suggests she has anything to do with al Qaeda," a Pakistani intelligence source said yesterday.
"All we know is that she is the sister of an al Qaeda member that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed met at a Pakistan college, the University of Dawa al Jihad, in the late 1980s."
The college, considered a premier Islamic military academy, is said to have been a breeding ground for terrorists where bomb making was among the subjects on its unofficial curriculum.
----
[Note that the CIA figures early in Mohammed's story: "[T]he CIA () teamed with the Pakistani government to outfit and fund the Islamic guerrillas known as mujaheddin". I wonder if the CIA brought Mohammed and bin Laden together. - et]
Bold Tracks of Terrorism's Mastermind
Khalid Sheik Mohammed Carried Al Qaeda's Hope for Revenge, Renewal
By Peter Finn and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A01
KARACHI, Pakistan -- On the eve of his capture last weekend, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al Qaeda's deadliest operator, took a commercial flight from the Pakistani city of Quetta to Islamabad, the capital, according to Pakistani investigators. Even with the breath of his enemy on his neck, Mohammed couldn't tolerate an arduous trek by car. With signature audacity, he hopped a plane.
The self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was apparently convinced that the groomed man with a receding hairline pictured on FBI wanted posters bore no resemblance to the overweight, tangle-haired man he had become. But Mohammed had been under 24-hour surveillance for several days, according to Pakistani intelligence sources, and as he made the 430-mile flight to Islamabad, four agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency sat elsewhere on the plane.
A circle was closing.
Five times between Sept. 10, 2002, and Feb. 13, Pakistani authorities, working with the CIA and the FBI, had come within a hair of Mohammed. His ability to vanish when the police were at his door had even drawn some grudging admiration from his pursuers.
"Khalid can disappear just about better than anybody," said a U.S intelligence official in an interview before his capture. "He just drops off the face of the Earth."
For years, Mohammed was a glimmer -- one name among many who flitted in the shadows as al Qaeda grew more and more lethal. But when he was finally captured on March 1 in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, rousted from bed at 3 a.m. with a hint of contempt still on his lips despite his disheveled appearance, Mohammed had become a quarry of inestimable importance.
Mohammed resided at the center of the al Qaeda web. From his longtime base in Karachi, a sprawling city of 14 million people, he made real the violent visions of a terrorist leadership that lay across the border in Afghanistan. The carnage visited on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was directed by his then-invisible hand. After al Qaeda's leadership was killed or dispersed, Mohammed, although on the run, became the repository for the group's hopes for renewal and revenge.
Investigators have tied him to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the bombings that killed more than 180 people in Bali, the fire-bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia and multiple failed conspiracies, including a dirty-bomb attack on an American city and the bombing of U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia. He also exploited old links with Pakistani extremist groups, which predate his late entry into al Qaeda in 1997, to spawn attacks on Westerners in Karachi, according to U.S. and Pakistani investigators.
Mohammed, who is now in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, is believed to have knowledge of most current al Qaeda operations and of the cells it has scattered around the globe. His interrogation could lead to the arrest of al Qaeda operatives in Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, Europe and perhaps the United States. In short, it could break the back of al Qaeda.
Many Guises
The known shards of Mohammed's life never quite seemed to fit together. In North Carolina, where he attended college, he was reluctant to shake the hand of a woman. In the Philippines, while planning to kill the pope and blow American airliners out of the sky, he was a bon vivant who liked to wear tuxedos and flatter the ladies; he once rented a helicopter to impress a woman. Charming and funny among friends, he was elsewhere cold-blooded to the point of wielding the blade himself when Pearl was murdered, according to investigators.
The son of a mosque leader, Mohammed was born to expatriate Pakistani parents in 1965 in Fahaheel, a burgeoning beachfront enclave south of Kuwait City where many immigrants settled hoping to share in the emirate's oil boom. By some accounts, his father, Sheik Mohammed Ali, first worked as a trader, as did many fellow immigrants from Pakistan's Baluchistan province. But by the time Khalid was born, the youngest of four sons and one daughter, his father was a respected elder preacher in a ramshackle neighborhood of single-story dwellings.
As a teenager, Mohammed attended a strict Pakistani school for boys and, according to acquaintances, also became active in the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential and sometimes militant Islamic organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s. His oldest brother, Zahid Sheik, who attended Kuwait University in the 1980s, was a local leader of the brotherhood.
The family's Pakistani roots meant they were shut out of Kuwaiti citizenship. There wasn't much of a future in Kuwait for an ambitious foreign boy. He was determined to get out. In December 1982, the 17-year-old Mohammed obtained a Pakistani passport. Within a year, he had been accepted by a college in the United States.
Mohammed, characteristically, left a faint impression during the three years he spent pursuing an engineering degree at two North Carolina campuses in the mid-1980s; even the FBI's "Most Wanted" photographs barely stirred recollections among his former professors.
In January 1984, he joined the ranks of international students streaming to Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school tucked in a remote corner of northeastern North Carolina. Struggling to boost enrollment, the school had begun aggressively recruiting foreign students in the 1970s, promoting its small size, safe environment and absence of the standard English proficiency requirements.
By the mid-'80s, international students accounted for nearly 30 percent of Chowan students. They were so much a part of campus life that Mohammed drew scant notice.
Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, taught him chemistry. With prodding from a dog-eared grade book, Faile recalled him as "a B-type student." "To me, he wasn't unusually radical," Faile said. "I didn't notice anything different about him."
After one semester, Mohammed transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he earned a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering in December 1986.
Fellow students knew him as a reserved, religious conservative, affable in company but guarded in his political beliefs. Although there had been some baiting of foreigners on campus, especially after the 1979 Iranian revolution, it was less frequent by the time Mohammed arrived, former students said. "We were treated, as students, with respect," said Sami Zitawi, 42, a Kuwaiti native and former classmate of Mohammed's who lives in Greensboro. "If there is any reason for hatred, it is not from that experience."
Call of Jihad
The 1980s were the years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the idea that jihad against the infidel invader was a duty swept through the consciousness of many young Muslim men. Volunteers from all over the Muslim world streamed to Peshawar, a Pakistani city close to the Afghan border that served as a staging area for the Islamic resistance. Other foes of the Soviet Union were there too -- including the CIA, which teamed with the Pakistani government to outfit and fund the Islamic guerrillas known as mujaheddin.
Much of Mohammed's family heard the call. His eldest brother, Zahid, was regional manager for a Kuwaiti charity, the Committee for Islamic Appeal, based in Peshawar. Two other brothers, Abed and Aref, volunteered to fight the Soviets and both would die. His sister's son, Ramzi Yousef, visited in 1988 from college in Britain, and returned permanently in 1991. Mohammed was inevitably drawn to the struggle and took a job teaching at a school founded by an Afghan warlord called the University of Dawa al Jihad, translated as Convert and Struggle.
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and the country imploded into civil war, the undercurrent of hostility toward the West that had coursed beneath the CIA-mujaheddin alliance began to bubble up. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia unleashed suppressed hatred of the United States among people like bin Laden.
And out of Peshawar came the vanguard of a movement that would eventually bring into existence something called al Qaeda. Yousef, Mohammed's nephew, was among its first unaligned adherents. In 1992, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Egyptian cleric now in prison in the United States, recruited Yousef because he wished to topple the "civilized pillars" -- the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Mohammed transferred some money to Yousef while his nephew was in the United States carrying out the 1993 bombing, but Mohammed was not integral to the operation and would remain subordinate to Yousef, according to FBI officials who have profiled the pair.
Yousef escaped from New York and in 1994 he was back in Pakistan introducing Mohammed to associates who noted Mohammed's interest in aviation, according to the interrogation in the Philippines of a captured associate of the two. By then, Yousef and Mohammed were living in Karachi. Adopting a Saudi name, Munir Madni, Mohammed set up Mohammed Trading. The company imported holy water from Mecca to generate funds that were distributed to a Sunni Muslim organization allegedly responsible for the killing of at least 2,000 Shiite Muslims in Pakistan since 1994, Pakistani police and intelligence officials said.
But Yousef had much grander ambitions than sectarian murder: transnational terrorism under the rubric of what he called the Liberation Army. Yousef, according to the interrogation of Abdul Hakim Murad, one of his accomplices, was "dreaming that someday the Liberation Army will become an independent and structured organization."
The mystique that now surrounds Mohammed overshadows Yousef, a smart and capable terrorist and Mohammed's superior in 1995. Investigators admired the sophistication of Yousef's bomb-making, and the investigation of the 1995 plot in the Philippines to kill Pope John Paul II revealed that he also envisioned using planes as missiles and spoke of hiding explosives in shoes, a technique employed by British al Qaeda loyalist Richard Reid in his unsuccessful attempt to bring down an American airliner over the Atlantic in December 2001.
The Manila plot was foiled when the apartment in which the conspirators lived caught fire. But the principals slipped away, and Mohammed, who called himself Abdul Majid or Abu Salem or Salem Ali in Manila, was barely noticed. So little attention did Mohammed warrant that when Yousef was arrested at a guesthouse in Islamabad in February 1995, Mohammed was in the room next door, unnoticed, Pakistani officials said. Yousef is now serving a life sentence in the United States.
"There were so many unasked questions at the time because we didn't know the importance of Mohammed," said Col. Rudolfo Mendoza, who led the Philippine investigation. "I am not alone in making the mistake. My friends from the American Embassy made the mistake also."
Yousef's female acquaintances in Manila told police they had the impression Mohammed was a "sheik from Saudi," Mendoza said. They described him as "refined in manner" and intelligent. Yousef and Mohammed frequented nightclubs and karaoke bars in Malate and in Quezon City, in metro Manila. "Though he womanized and spent time at dive resorts, there is no evidence that he drank alcohol," said Zachary Abuza, an expert on terrorism in Southeast Asia who teaches at Simmons College in Boston. "I think we have to look at some of his 'playboy' lifestyle as part of his cover."
Almost Captured
After Yousef's capture in Islamabad, Mohammed fled to Qatar in 1996. The FBI soon learned of his presence there, and the Clinton administration sought to arrange an operation to arrest Mohammed and fly him to prison in the United States. When the CIA reported that it did not have the necessary officers or agents in Qatar, a Pentagon plan involving U.S. Special Forces was put before a meeting of the National Security Council's Deputies Committee, a panel of officials just below Cabinet rank, according to former officials involved in the discussions.
At the time, however, Bahrain and Qatar had been feuding over disputed islands in the Persian Gulf.
Because the Pentagon plan involved sending a small attack force by helicopter from Bahrain into Qatar, administration officials feared the Qataris might mistake the U.S operation for a Bahraini attack. Officials decided that the risk of triggering a war between the two countries -- and of scuttling an important defense basing agreement being negotiated with Qatar -- was too great, the former officials said.
As a result, the administration asked Qatar's foreign minister to have Mohammed turned over to the United States. According to former officials of the U.S. and Qatari governments, the foreign minister informed Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalida Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family and an Islamic fundamentalist who allowed Mohammed and a group of Arabs traveling with him to stay at his large farm outside Doha.
Thani, sources said, tipped off Mohammed and his group and helped them flee. The FBI and U.S. diplomats protested, but they lost their chance to get Mohammed.
In 1997, Mohammed swore allegiance to bin Laden and al Qaeda, according to U.S. investigators. He already had ties to the group. An organization run by bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, was one of the primary funding mechanisms for the 1995 plot to kill the pope.
Mohammed's fluency in Arabic, English and Urdu, as well as his technical education, made him a major asset. Although he had been indicted in the United States in 1996 for the Manila plot, and despite the attempt to nab him in Qatar, he remained a little-known figure to U.S. authorities.
"To be honest, it wasn't until recently that any of us even realized he was part of al Qaeda," a U.S. intelligence official said in an interview last year. "The big problem nailing him down is that the informants that we relied on, especially before 9/11, were mujaheddin. They'd been in Afghanistan, in Sudan, back in Afghanistan. Khalid was never a part of any of that."
What role, if any, he played in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 remains the subject of debate. But because of his experience in the country, the United States was Mohammed's primary focus, according to investigators.
In an interview with al-Jazeera television, broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mohammed said planning for them began in 1999. "The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc, and to be a big slap for America on American soil," Mohammed said.
Over two years, mostly from Karachi, he orchestrated the attacks. With plans and operatives in place, Mohammed, in the weeks before Sept. 11, had moved on, planning new atrocities.
In July 2001, a Canadian citizen, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, met with bin Laden, who sent him to Karachi to meet Mohammed. For two weeks, according to a Canadian intelligence report, Mohammed gave Jabarah "advice on how to prepare himself for [al Qaeda] missions."
In early September, Jabarah was given $10,000 for expenses and warned to leave Pakistan before Sept. 11. He was to act as a liaison between al Qaeda and Southeast Asian Islamic militants for a planned bombing campaign against U.S. and Israeli interests in the Philippines and Singapore, according to the Canadian report. The plot was broken up, but in the coming months Mohammed, moving between Karachi and Quetta, furiously tried to orchestrate further attacks.
In April 2002, for instance, he took a call from the driver of a truck three hours before it blew up outside a synagogue in Tunisia, killing 19 people, according to German intelligence sources. He met with Jose Padilla, now in U.S. custody, about setting off a dirty bomb in the United States. And he killed Daniel Pearl, some Pakistani investigators believe.
Mohammed was nearly captured on Sept. 10, 2002, when Ramzi Binalshibh, a key member of al Qaeda's Hamburg cell, was picked up, and again the next day when two of Mohammed's young sons were arrested at an apartment following a shoot-out. "Even when we caught Ramzi Binalshibh in Karachi on Sept. 10, we had actually gone to capture Khalid Sheik Mohammed," said a Pakistani intelligence official, who said that a subsequent raid in Karachi on Sept. 11, 2002, was also aimed at Mohammed.
Four months after Binalshibh's arrest, U.S. and Pakistani officials received information that Mohammed and some other al Qaeda suspects were hiding in a residence owned by a senior leader of Pakistan's most organized religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, on the outskirts of Karachi. When Pakistani and U.S. officials raided that house, on Jan. 10 this year, they captured two al Qaeda suspects, but Mohammed didn't show up for a scheduled visit. "It was a big frustration," said a Pakistani official. "We were almost certain of getting him."
Ten days later, Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agents raided an apartment near Karachi's main shopping district and arrested two Jordanian citizens who had been in contact with Mohammed. He eluded investigators again.
Mohammed narrowly escaped arrest one last time on Feb. 13 in Quetta. A raid on a two-story house in the downtown section of the city netted the son of Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric.
Although they missed Mohammed, U.S. communications specialists soon traced him to another part of the city.
On Mohammed's flight to Islamabad on Feb. 28, four Pakistani intelligence officers were also on board, intelligence sources said. It was the endgame.
Finn reported from Berlin. Staff writers Susan Schmidt, Dan Eggen and Steve Coll in Washington, Liz Clarke in Greensboro and Richard Leiby in Kuwait, and correspondent Ellen Nakashima in Manila contributed to this report.
-------- torture
Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/09DETA.html
This article was reported by Raymond Bonner, Don Van Natta Jr. and Amy Waldman and written by Mr. Van Natta.
CAIRO, March 8 - The capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed provides American authorities with their best opportunity yet to prevent attacks by Al Qaeda and track down Osama bin Laden. But the detention also presents a tactical and moral challenge when it comes to the interrogation techniques used to obtain vital information.
Senior American officials said physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed, regarded as the operations chief of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.
American officials acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mr. Mohammed. Painkillers were withheld from Mr. Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan.
But the urgency of obtaining information about potential attacks and the opaque nature of the way interrogations are carried out can blur the line between accepted and unaccepted actions, several American officials said.
Routine techniques include covering suspects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time and forcing them to stand or kneel in uncomfortable positions in extreme cold or heat, American and other officials familiar with interrogations said. Questioners may also feign friendship and respect to elicit information. In some cases, American officials said, women are used as interrogators to try to humiliate men unaccustomed to dealing with women in positions of authority.
Interrogations of important Qaeda operatives like Mr. Mohammed occur at isolated locations outside the jurisdiction of American law. Some places have been kept secret, but American officials acknowledged that the C.I.A. has interrogation centers at the United States air base at Bagram in Afghanistan and at a base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspect in the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks, were initially taken to a secret C.I.A. installation in Thailand but have since been moved, American officials said.
Intelligence officials also acknowledged that some suspects had been turned over to security services in countries known to employ torture. There have also been isolated, if persistent, reports of beatings in some American-operated centers. American military officials in Afghanistan are investigating the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram in December.
American officials have guarded the interrogation results. But George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said in December that suspects interrogated overseas had produced important information.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have said that American techniques adhere to international accords that ban the use of torture and that "all appropriate measures" are employed in interrogations.
Rights advocates and lawyers for prisoners' rights have accused the United States of quietly embracing torture as an acceptable means of getting information in the global antiterrorism campaign. "They don't have a policy on torture," said Holly Burkhalter, the United States director of Physicians for Human Rights, one of five groups pressing the Pentagon for assurances detainees are not being tortured. "There is no specific policy that eschews torture."
Critics also assert that transferring Qaeda suspects to countries where torture is believed common - like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia - violates American law and the 1984 international convention against torture, which bans such transfers.
Some American and other officials subscribe to a view held by a number of outside experts, that physical coercion is largely ineffective. The officials say the most effective interrogation methods involve a mix of psychological disorientation, physical deprivation and ingratiating acts, all of which can take weeks or months.
"Pain alone will often make people numb and unresponsive," said Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "You have to engage people to get into their minds and learn what is there."
About 3,000 Qaeda and Taliban suspects have been detained since the fall of 2001. Some have since been freed. The largest known group, about 650, is being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. American officials said the detainees at Guantánamo and similar military-run centers were not regarded as having valuable information.
Senior Qaeda members, however, are interrogated by specially trained C.I.A. officers and interpreters. F.B.I. agents submit questions but do not generally take part, American officials said.
Starving the Senses
Deprivation And Black Hoods
Omar al-Faruq, a confidant of Mr. bin Laden and one of Al Qaeda's senior operatives in Southeast Asia, was captured last June by Indonesian agents acting on a tip from the C.I.A. Agents familiar with the case said a black hood was dropped over his head and he was loaded onto a C.I.A. aircraft. When he arrived at his destination several hours later, the hood was removed. On the wall in front of him were the seals of the New York City Police and Fire Departments, a Western official said.
It was, said a former senior C.I.A. officer who took part in similar sessions, a mind game called false flag, intended to leave the captive disoriented, isolated and vulnerable. Sometimes the décor is faked to make it seem as though the suspect has been taken to a country with a reputation for brutal interrogation.
In this case, officials said, Mr. Faruq was in the C.I.A. interrogation center at the Bagram air base. American officials were convinced that he knew a lot about pending attacks and the Qaeda network in Southeast Asia, which Mr. bin Laden sent him to set up in 1998.
The details of the interrogation are unknown, though one intelligence official briefed on the sessions said Mr. Faruq initially provided useless scraps of information.
What is known is that the questioning was prolonged, extending day and night for weeks. It is likely, experts say, that the proceedings followed a pattern, with Mr. Faruq left naked most of the time, his hands and feet bound. While international law requires prisoners to be allowed eight hours' sleep a day, interrogators do not necessarily let them sleep for eight consecutive hours.
Mr. Faruq may also have been hooked up to sensors, then asked questions to which interrogators knew the answers, so they could gauge his truthfulness, officials said.
The Western intelligence official described Mr. Faruq's interrogation as "not quite torture, but about as close as you can get." The official said that over a three-month period, the suspect was fed very little, while being subjected to sleep and light deprivation, prolonged isolation and room temperatures that varied from 100 degrees to 10 degrees. In the end he began to cooperate.
Mr. Faruq began to tell of plans to drive explosives-laden trucks into American diplomatic centers. A day later, embassies in Indonesia and more than a dozen other countries in Southeast Asia were closed, officials said. He also provided detailed information about people involved in those operations and other plots, writing out lengthy descriptions. He held out longer than Mr. Zubaydah, who American officials said began to cooperate after two months of interrogation.
American intelligence knows a great deal about Mr. Mohammed, who has been sought since the mid-1990's. That knowledge, an expert said, can provide leverage. "The important thing is to construct the suspect's personal history and learn about the person before you interrogate them," a European counterterrorism official said. "Shock is a great technique. When we can show someone that we already know a lot about them, including intimate personal details, they are shocked and more likely to start talking."
The Centers
Details Emerge From the Shadows
The secret C.I.A. center at Bagram where Mr. Faruq probably remains is near the two-story detention center where lower-level suspects are being held. Both sites are off limits, even to most military personnel. The only descriptions of life inside have come from released detainees.
American officials at the base say that all detainees are treated according to international law and are held under humane conditions. Still, the Americans expressed reluctance to describe details of the conditions because, as Col. Roger King, spokesman for the American-led force in Afghanistan, put it: "Every detail we give you about how we run the facility provides information to the enemy about how to be more successful in resisting if captured."
But he did provide some information that both complemented and contradicted the descriptions given by former detainees.
In a typical prison, where punishment is the aim, routine governs life. At Bagram, where eliciting information is the goal, the opposite is true. Disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life.
To that end, the building - an unremarkable hangar - is lighted 24 hours a day, making sleep almost impossible, said Muhammad Shah, an Afghan farmer who was held there for 18 days.
Colonel King said it was legitimate to use lights, noise and vision restriction, and to alter, without warning, the time between meals, to blur a detainee's sense of time. He said sleep deprivation was "probably within the lexicon."
Prisoners are watched, moved and, according to some, manhandled by military police officials. Most detainees live on the hangar's bottom floor, a large area divided with wire mesh into group cells holding 8 to 10 prisoners each. Some are kept on the top floor in isolation cells.
Former detainees have given disparate accounts of their treatment, with the harshest tales, predictably, emerging from the isolation cells. Those who have probably been subjected to the most thorough interrogations, and the greatest duress, have probably not been released.
Colonel King said that an American military pathologist had determined that the deaths of two prisoners in December were homicides and that the circumstances were still under investigation.
Two former prisoners said they had been forced to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled in the isolation cells.
One said he was kept naked except when he was taken to interrogation room or the bathroom.
Mr. Shah, who was never in an isolation cell, said neither his hands nor feet were ever tied, but he had seen prisoners with chains around their ankles.
Colonel King said that the building was heated and that the prisoners were fed a balanced diet under which most gained weight. Mr. Shah said he had received plentiful food - bread, biscuits, rice and meat - three times a day.
The center holds fewer than 100 people, so detainees are regularly released or transported elsewhere to make room for more. Most probably spend two to three months there, Colonel King said.
Mr. Shah said his interrogators used the threat of moving him to Guantánamo Bay to try to force cooperation, warning him conditions there would not be as pleasant.
Guantánamo Bay
Order Obscures Signs of Distress
At Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, American military officials said the population, now relatively steady at about 650, was sorted into varying categories of dangerousness, a change from the early days when prisoners were treated equally, each isolated in an individual cell.
This month the military command opened a new medium-security section called Camp Four where selected prisoners live in dormitory-style housing, congregate, shower regularly, play board games and are able to write more frequent letters to family members. About 20 prisoners moved in this week, and when construction is completed as many as 200 prisoners could be housed there.
"This is designed to house people who are deemed to be less of a security risk," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman at the base.
But underlying the superficial orderliness are signs of deep psychological distress among the population. There have been 20 reported suicide attempts involving the prisoners, an extraordinarily high number compared with other prison populations, said Dr. Terry Kupers, an Oakland psychiatrist who is an authority on mental health in prisons.
Except for those who are recently promoted to Camp Four, the regime for most prisoners has been isolation in single cells. They are permitted out of the cells twice a week, for 15 minutes each time, to shower and exercise in the yard. They are not permitted to have physical contact with one another.
Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said guards were trained to recognize signs of deep depression and had managed to prevent any suicides.
Foreign Soil
Many Definitions Of `Acceptable'
Far less is known about the conditions for the suspected Qaeda members who have been turned over to foreign governments, either after the United States finished with them or as part of the interrogation procedure. Even the numbers and locations are a mystery.
American and foreign intelligence officials have acknowledged that suspects have been sent to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In addition, Moroccan intelligence officials have questioned suspects and shared information with their American counterparts.
In one case in Morocco, lawyers for three Saudis and seven Moroccans accused of plotting to blow up American and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar last summer said their clients were tortured. Moroccan officials denied that physical torture was used but acknowledged using sleep and light deprivation and serial teams of interrogators until the suspects broke.
"I am allowed to use all means in my possession," a senior Moroccan intelligence official said. "You have to fight all his resistance at all levels and show him that he is wrong, that his ideology is wrong and is not connected to religion. We break them, yes."
In Cairo, leaders of several human rights organizations and attorneys who represent prisoners said torture by the Egyptian government's internal security force had become routine. They also said they believed that the United States had sent a handful of Qaeda suspects to Egypt for harsh interrogations and torture by Egyptian officials.
"In the past, the United States harshly criticized Egypt when there was human rights violations, but now, for America, it is security first - security, before human rights," said Muhammad Zarei, a lawyer who had been director of the Cario-based Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners.
Egyptian officials denied that any Qaeda members or terror suspects had been moved to Egypt. An Egyptian government spokesman, Nabil Osman, blamed rogue officers for abuses and said there was no systematic policy of torture.
"Any terrorist will claim torture - that's the easiest thing," Mr. Osman said. "Claims of torture are universal. Human rights organizations make their living on these claims. Their job is not to talk about the human rights of the victim but of the human rights of the terrorist or those in jail."
Mr. Osman declined to say whether Egypt had assisted with interrogations of Qaeda suspects at the request of the Americans. He would say only that both governments had cooperated in sharing information about terrorists and potential terrorist activities.
"We are providing them with a wealth of information," he said.
He said many of Egypt's antiterrorism initiatives, like military tribunals, had been imitated by the Untied States. "We set the model," he said, "for combating terrorism."
---------
TORTURE, TOUGH OR LITE
If a Terror Suspect Won't Talk, Should He Be Made To?
March 9, 2003
The New York Times
By PETER MAASS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/weekinreview/09MAAS.html
KUWAIT - The Philippine police knew they had an unusual case when they arrested Abdul Hakim Murad on Jan. 6, 1995. After Mr. Murad accidentally set a small fire in his Manila apartment, the police reportedly found gallons of sulfuric acid and nitric acid, as well as beakers, filters, funnels and fuses. A week before Pope John Paul II was to visit Manila, they had uncovered a bomb-making factory.
In many countries, terrorism suspects like Mr. Murad rarely receive the local equivalent of the Miranda rights; instead, they are tortured. Perhaps the authorities are trying to get sensitive information, perhaps they are trying to dispense extra-legal punishment. The methods vary, from gentler tactics, occasionally referred to as "torture lite," like sleep deprivation, to hard torture, like the administration of electric shocks. If a prisoner happens to die, this can be explained away as a suicide or "a sharp drop in blood pressure," as the Egyptian authorities have described the demise of prisoners who were brutalized to death.
Mr. Murad, a Pakistani, was not a talker. Although a computer in his apartment contained information about his plans, he resisted requests to give details of what he was doing. His interrogators reportedly beat him so badly that most of his ribs were broken; they extinguished cigarettes on his genitals; they made him sit on ice cubes; they forced water down his throat so that he nearly drowned.
This went on for several weeks. In the end, he provided names, dates and places behind a Qaeda plan to blow up 11 commercial airliners and fly another one into the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also confessed to a plot to assassinate the pope.
Mr. Murad's case has been used, in some quarters, to justify torture. Without violent pressure, terrorists might never talk, and then their plans will proceed and civilians will die. This thinking is receiving renewed attention after the arrest, in Pakistan, of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations and the operational mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
After his capture last week, Mr. Mohammed was handed to the United States and taken out of Pakistan, though it is not known where he is being held or how he is being interrogated. United States officials have said that Mr. Mohammed, or any other terrorist suspect, would not be tortured. But if he prefers not to talk, should he be made to?
The easy answer, in these times of war and fear, is yes. But relieving a suspect of his fingernails is not always the best way to get him to talk, and if he does talk, he may not tell the truth. A suspect who wants to avoid the unkindness of having his teeth extracted with a set of dirty pliers may say whatever he thinks his torturers want to hear.
Beyond that, many terrorism experts believe that in the long run torture is a losing strategy. Pain and humiliation will turn some innocent suspects into real terrorists and turn real terrorists into more-determined monsters.
James Ron, a professor of conflict studies at McGill University in Canada, is the author of a lengthy report on torture in Israel. He met with Israeli officials and soldiers, as well as Palestinian detainees who said their interrogators made it known that they had detailed information about terrorist groups. Mr. Ron believes this intelligence was gathered largely by the use of physical and economic coercion, but at a significant and counterproductive cost.
"Most studies show that torture is hugely degrading and humiliating, in addition to being painful," Mr. Ron said. "Some people get destroyed in the process and curl up in a ball and go away, but some people fight back. If you're doing this to just 10 people it's perhaps not a security threat, but if it's the F.B.I. and all its allies across the world, then it's a big deal. A large chunk of the people who are being interrogated aren't militants, they just might know someone who is. If they weren't committed anti-Americans now, they would be after this process."
Another reason brute force may not work well is simple: many terrorists have been through it before. No small number of Al Qaeda members have done jail time in Middle Eastern countries that practice torture. And most terrorists are steeped in cultures of deception; they know how to divulge bad information in a manner that might seem convincing.
In fact, in its apparent success, Mr. Murad's interrogation shows torture's limitations. Mr. Murad may have nearly died, but he didn't crack until a new team of interrogators told him falsely that they were from the Mossad and would be taking him to Israel. Mr. Murad, who feared Jews as much as he hated them, quickly spilled the beans.
Thus, the real lesson. Prospects for gaining useful information are enhanced when interrogators apply psychological pressure, which includes lies, false promises and threats. "It is not the violence that is the core solution but the psychological techniques," said a prominent terrorism expert. "You've got to engage in this psychological game. Not just pain but wearing him down physically and spiritually."
For example, Mr. Mohammed's two sons, 7 and 9, are reported to be in custody in Pakistan; threats against them, serious or not, might be far more persuasive than threats against Mr. Mohammed himself.
Although it may be less offensive to our moral sensitivities, "torture lite" may be no less illegal than its harder cousin. The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified in 1994, defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."
But what qualifies as severe pain or suffering? A hood over the head? Putting a suspect in an uncomfortable position for a long time?
It depends on whom you ask. After it was reported in December that prisoners in American custody in Afghanistan were exposed to "stress and duress" interrogation techniques, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, sent a letter to President Bush. "Torture is never permissible against anyone, whether in times of peace or of war," Mr. Roth wrote.
His letter also noted that news reports have said the United States is handing over some suspects to countries like Egypt and Jordan, where torture is routine and brutal.
Human rights advocates are not the only ones disturbed by this strategy. "Such a practice of vicarious torture is imbued with an obvious hypocrisy that prevents the sending state - such as the United States - from having clean hands," said an article in the summer edition of Parameters, a respected quarterly published by the United States Army War College. "Moreover, obtaining human intelligence from foreign governments is fraught with its own downside risk: such intelligence, filtered through a foreign government, may contain information tainted by that governments biases or hidden policy objectives."
THE White House has not officially said whether it hands over terrorist suspects to other countries for questioning, nor does it detail the techniques used by American interrogators, though it says all international laws are followed. In a sign of unease, the Pentagon now refers to its interrogators as "human intelligence collectors."
The line between legitimate interrogation and outlawed torture is ill defined, and the reluctance of governments to disclose what they are doing intensifies this murkiness. It is nearly impossible to know whether, in a fetid basement cell in Cairo or Amman or Islamabad or Kabul, a suspected terrorist is having his limbs broken to safeguard against terrorism. And it is just as hard to know whether such deeds, if they are occurring, will enhance long-term national security or fuel a desire for retribution against America.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
A Car for the Distant Future...
By Peter Behr
Sunday, March 9, 2003
Washington Post; Page B02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59736-2003Mar7?language=printer
As a future cure-all for our reliance on Persian Gulf oil and the threat of global warming, the hydrogen car sounds great.
This technological marvel would be powered by electricity flowing from onboard fuel cells filled with hydrogen, the "forever fuel" that surrounds us in the planet's boundless atmosphere, oceans and streams. Hydrogen-powered cars could create true energy independence. And the cars' exhaust pipes would discharge harmless, sputtering drops of water, not smog-producing chemicals or greenhouse gases.
If only it were that simple. President Bush, in pledging during his State of the Union message to make the hydrogen car a national goal, has committed $1.7 billion over the next five years for research on car technology and fuel distribution. But Bush skipped over the devilish details. And these details are not mere drops in a tailpipe.
Eventually, it might be possible to extract ample supplies of hydrogen from water. But if the nation made a significant move toward hydrogen vehicles over the next 10 years or so, it would have to extract hydrogen largely from coal and natural gas. If the energy industry had to mass-produce hydrogen today, the result would be more greenhouse gas emissions, not less. Even in the longer run, mass-producing enough hydrogen for the nation's automobiles could not be done only using "clean" energy such as solar or wind power. The volume of energy needed would require new coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear plants, each with its own issues.
Delivering the hydrogen to consumers would be another hurdle, requiring new fleets of trucks, new storage tanks and reconfigurations in the vast pipeline network. Then there would be the cost of overhauling service stations where drivers "fill 'er up." Last week, Shell announced that it would retrofit a gasoline station in the Washington area to add a hydrogen pump to supply six experimental General Motors vehicles. The cost: $2 million for one station with two nozzles, a couple of compressors and an underground tank able to store hydrogen at 425 degrees below zero. If oil companies were to retrofit all stations, the cost per station would drop. But there are about 180,000 service stations in the United States. Estimates, largely guesswork, for adapting all of them run around $100 billion.
Mechanics and motorists would also need training to handle utterly new machines. Although hydrogen is potentially safer to use than gasoline, it is invisible, odorless and more prone to leaking than the natural gas used to heat homes or the gasoline in fuel tanks. Chemists haven't figured out how to give it an artificial odor.
The list of infrastructure challenges goes on and on. The administration's own hydrogen blueprint describes the transition from today's gasoline-powered internal combustion engines to hydrogen vehicles as a tectonic industrial transformation, on the scale of the conversion of U.S. homes from natural gas lighting to electricity a century ago.
None of this means building a hydrogen car is impossible. The fancy technology is not as far off as it sounds. A handful of experimental hydrogen cars are on the road already in Japan, Germany and the United States. By the end of this decade, engineers expect to have designed fuel cells capable of powering a family car with the speed and acceleration we're used to, and to have found safe ways to refuel hydrogen cars. Shell hopes to open its Washington-area pilot project pumping hydrogen for the half a dozen experimental GM cars by October.
But the biggest obstacles aren't technological. They are the more mundane issues of remaking an industry and infrastructure it has taken a century to construct. If the country wants to make a dent in its fuel consumption during the next 10 years, there are more obvious roads to travel.
The details help explain why what Bush called "a crucial step" toward protecting the environment has been met with applause by the car and energy industries, and ambivalence or protest by environmental groups.
The industries see the Bush plan as allowing them to preserve current vehicle technology while giving them money to pursue the difficult challenges of a new one. Companies need not make any commitments or meet any targets in return. Meanwhile, some environmental activists see a Trojan horse. "While government subsidies for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries exceeded $6 billion in fiscal year 2002, the Bush plan proposes only $300 million a year for hydrogen technology and even less for developing renewable sources," hydrogen advocate Jeremy Rifkin wrote recently. It is no wonder, he added, that environmentalists suspect that the hydrogen scenario is a ruse to produce a new market for the energy industry.
Some environmentalists demand that Bush mandate the use of solar and wind power to generate energy to mass-produce hydrogen for the nation's future cars. Renewable energy must play a growing role, but, given today's energy technologies, if we're going to have hydrogen cars by 2010, we need to start with existing fuels like natural gas, as called for in Bush's plan.
Bush's single-mindedness about a hydrogen car -- which he calls the Freedom Car -- risks making the perfect the enemy of the good, experts say. While hydrogen car technology is a worthy dream, hybrid car technology -- combining gasoline and battery power -- exists right now and could slash fuel emissions over the next 10 to 20 years while hydrogen cars are stuck in low gear.
As for the hydrogen cars, the president's plan sets no strict deadlines or requirements. It is up to auto and energy companies to set their own speed limit, while consumers will have the final say in whether to switch to hydrogen cars or stick with what they already know and love.
"We start from the premise that if they [companies] build it, they [consumers] will come," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in an interview. If the administration forces a hydrogen strategy on automakers, energy firms and the public, the initiative could fail, he adds. "If it isn't market-driven, its chance for success will be minimal."
The administration's leave-it-to-industry policy follows from the president's acute distaste for "made in Washington" attempts to dictate policy to business and consumers. "In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation," Bush said in his State of the Union speech.
But is that the way to frame the choice? Yes, environmental progress needs innovation. But does government have a role to play in innovation or will the marketplace provide enough incentives for people to come up with the advances we need?
Bush must believe, on some level, that government does have a role, otherwise he wouldn't propose handing out $1.7 billion for auto, battery and oil companies to work on a hydrogen car. They would do it on their own. Besides, government has spurred innovations before. The Pentagon came up with the Internet. Other government programs have had spinoffs, in the materials business, for example.
Hybrid cars are another case of innovation spurred by government. Hybrids are starting to catch on, but not because consumers demanded them or Detroit was eager to build them. Toyota and Honda pioneered the technology in order to have cars that would meet California's tough air quality regulations. Now that the Japanese are grabbing market share, U.S. automakers are following.
So the question isn't whether government can encourage innovation, but how.
Bush's hostility to "command-and-control" regulation from Washington sounds true to Republican aversion to big government. But is his idea of subsidizing hydrogen car research true to those values? Bush is fine-tuning corporate incentives and favoring one technology, hydrogen, over others.
One way to encourage innovation would be for government to set a goal -- and target dates -- for reducing emissions and let companies and consumers figure out the most appealing ways to get there. The administration and Congress could require automakers to introduce significant improvements in average fuel economy of new car fleets. That would speed the manufacture and marketing of the hybrid cars that are now being offered in limited quantities by automakers. It could also provide incentives for makers of hydrogen cars. Government wouldn't be making choices about technology. But it would be correcting for some of the social costs (pollution) and federal expenses (military costs of protecting Middle East oil fields) that aren't included in the price of gasoline.
Government could also create demand by purchasing hybrids or hydrogen vehicles for its own fleets of buses, cars and trucks. Instead, last week the administration proposed to scrap as "unnecessary" a mandate directing localities and private fleets to boost their use of alternative fuel vehicles by 2010.
If the goals of energy independence and control of greenhouse gases are important enough to demand the sea changes in industrial practices and consumer choices that hydrogen cars would require, then innovation in general ought to be getting a push from Washington. Besides, what may appear to be competing technologies could be mutually reinforcing ones. Federal policies could create smaller, manageable steps toward the more distant hydrogen future by encouraging hybrid cars now, according to experts such as Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center in Irvine, Calif. The hybrids use systems of electric propulsion and controls -- the same technology that hydrogen vehicles will require. Boosting hybrid sales will speed development of these systems, drive down their cost and make consumers more comfortable with new kinds of cars.
There aren't compelling business reasons for Detroit to rush to replace the internal combustion engine or for utilities to invest in clean coal, wind power or acres of prairie grass that can be harvested as renewable fuel. But if it is in the public interest to move that way, then that is a Washington responsibility.
Peter Behr covers energy issues for The Washington Post.
-------- ACTIVISTS
THE OPPOSITION
With Passion and a Dash of Pink, Women Protest War
March 9, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/national/09PROT.html
WASHINGTON, March 8 - Several thousand protesters, most of them women, rallied near the White House today to protest the Bush administration's policy on Iraq. About 25 people were arrested, the authorities and the demonstration's organizers said.
The protesters, many wearing pink as a symbol of opposition among women to a war, carried placards and sang and chanted slogans in a low-key demonstration organized by a group called Code Pink, a play on the national color-coded security alert system.
Most of the protesters listened to speeches at a rally some distance from the White House, with relatively few making the march to President Bush's residence. Among the protesters were family members of victims from the Sept. 11 attacks, along with some relatives of military members who have gone overseas in preparation for a possible war.
The police did not immediately name those who were arrested. Andrea Buffa, an organizer of the march, said that among those arrested were several well-known writers, including Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, Maxine Hong Kingston and Susan Griffin, as well as Amy Goodman, a host on Pacifica Radio.
The protest was linked to International Women's Day, an annual commemoration of women's rights, and was one of many events held today around the nation and world to denounce the prospect of a war in Iraq.
As they approached the White House, the demonstrators were heckled by counterdemonstrators, including some who supported the administration's policy of ousting the government of Saddam Hussein and others there to voice opposition to abortion.
The arrests took place on the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs in front of the White House, which has been closed to traffic for several years and is a common venue for protests.
The United States Park Police, which controls permits for protests in the park across the street from the White House, said that those arrested had violated restrictions on using the sidewalk, and that they were likely to be released quickly.
----
Anti-War Activists Map Their Strategy
By JEFF DONN
Associated Press Writer
Mar 9, 2003 6:55 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ANTI_WAR_MOVEMENT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BOSTON (AP) -- They have marched and chanted, hoping to use persuasion to prevent war. If that fails, though, activists are readying a more aggressive strategy of sit-ins and social disruptions, meant to restore peace in Iraq.
Protest sit-ins, especially at federal buildings, defense recruiting offices and military bases, have been mapped out for dozens of cities in the first day or two of any war, anti-war organizers say. Some also foresee widespread walkouts at schools and workplaces. A smaller number talk of blocking roads and bridges.
"Once war happens, there will be civil disobedience. It's bringing to a higher level what people have been doing," said coordinator Bal Pinguel at the American Friends Service Committee, an arm of the pacifist Quaker church.
The peace movement that has taken shape in the United States and around the world uses organizing technology - including the Internet and e-mail - that was not available the last time such large-scale domestic anti-war activism took place, in the Vietnam War era.
On Saturday, demonstrators gathered by the hundreds in cities across the nation, an increasingly common sight as the conflict looms closer. In Washington, police and organizers estimated between 4,000 and 10,000 demonstrators turned out in conjunction with International Women's Day; by late afternoon, 25 people were arrested on charges of crossing a police line in front of the White House. Advertisement
The event was organized by the group CodePink, whose name protests the government's terror alert system. "The White House is definitely afraid of women in pink and the power of love," said CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.
Once spearheaded largely by leftist students, hippies and draft-card burners, the peace movement is now taking on more support from the mainstream: labor unions, war veterans, middle-aged professionals, and teenagers born years after the last draft. Almost 100,000 backers have donated to Peace Action, one of the biggest anti-war groups, over the past six months, coordinators say.
Still, despite its broader reach, it is unclear if the highly decentralized peace movement can marshal protests that can disrupt the war effort or win public sympathy. Some peace activists themselves harbor doubts that they can prevent a war against Iraq.
"There's a good chance we won't be able to stop it," said Kate Pearson, a Chicago organizer at Not in Our Name.
In a counter effort, rallies to support President Bush and U.S. troops in a possible war also are being held across the country, and anger at the anti-war movement sometimes is apparent. Echoing a slogan from the 1960s, one placard at an Orlando, Fla., rally read: "America - Love It or Leave It."
Peace activists have mounted mass rallies in major cities reminiscent of the Vietnam era, but they have also held smaller community vigils and discussion groups, and traditional contact-your-congressmen drives.
In January and again in February, peace groups coordinated demonstrations in cities around the world. Hundreds of thousands of protesters unfurled signs and rallied in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, London, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Cairo and other cities.
On Wednesday, thousands of students around the United States walked out of classes. Some Americans have taken quiet, personal actions too.
Anti-war members of the clergy have slipped into Iraq - without U.S. government permission mandated by American sanctions law - or visited European countries to lobby and pray with the local religious communities. Anti-war American doctors have gone to Iraq to evaluate the dangers that war poses for civilians there.
Picking up on domestic anxieties, some anti-war activists have argued that conflict might foster more terrorism that endangers American civilians on their own turf. "It's almost certainly going to guarantee not only more violence in the Middle East, but will almost guarantee another calamitous attack on U.S. soil," said Scott Lynch, a spokesman for Peace Action.
The White House has argued that disarming Iraq is part of its war on terrorism and will disrupt that government's links with terrorist groups.
The peace movement has also embraced a particularly influential contingent of supporters: veterans of the war with Iraq 12 years ago.
"Sept. 11 was nothing compared to the destruction that we visited on Iraq 12 years ago and even more so for what will probably happen this time," said Charles Sheehan-Miles, a decorated tank crewman in the 1991 Persian Gulf War who now wants peace.
President Bush has acknowledged the swelling protests, though they have not changed his mind.
After February's protests, he said he would not decide policy "based upon a focus group." At a White House news conference Thursday, he addressed protesters directly. "I recognize there are people who don't like war. I don't like war," Bush said. But he said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein must be deposed to disarm Iraq and keep the United States safe, and that might only be accomplished with force.
For his part, Doug Dixon, an activist who has joined counter-demonstrations to back the drive toward war, shrugs off the peace movement as "pretty irrelevant." Dixon, a Houston-based member of the conservative grass-roots group Free Republic, believes the anti-war movement is encouraging Saddam Hussein.
"I'm certain he's watching," Dixon said.
Outside of Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., on Saturday, about 250 people rallied in support of American troops and the Bush administration, while 50 anti-war protesters gathered across the street, police Capt. Sonny Leeper said.
"We're starting to see more 'support the flag' people at these things," Leeper said. "They're starting to gain in numbers. ... It seems like they're getting more organized."
On the Net
http://www.peace-action.org/
http://www.notinourname.net/
http://www.freerepublic.com/
http://www.rallyforamerica.org/
EDITOR'S NOTE - Jeff Donn is the AP's Boston-based Northeast writer.
----
Human Shields Wait for OK to Enter Iraq
By SHAFIKA MATTAR
Associated Press Writer
Mar 9, 2003 3:22 PM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_HUMAN_SHIELDS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Anti-war activists were waiting Sunday for visas to enter Iraq, where they say they want to be "human shields" against a possible U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein.
Some 10 members of the Chicago-based peace activist group Voices in the Wilderness, along with six Spaniards, were in the Jordanian capital Amman preparing to drive across the border into Iraq.
The activists said they wanted to stay with Iraqi families inside their homes to deter attacks if a war begins.
They hope to join dozens of others from around the world in Baghdad offering to station themselves at strategic locations such as power plants, water purification facilities and archaeological sites.
"I am going to Iraq because I want a better world for my children and my grandchildren," Canadian writer Zahira Houfani, a member of Voices in The Wilderness, told The Associated Press.
"I miss my youngest grandchild ... but my presence with the Iraqi children and my conscience are stronger than my family obligations," said 50-year-old Houfani, who called a war on Iraq "unjust and criminal."
Group member Shane Claiborne, 27, from Philadelphia, said: "We pledge to do all we can to be the voices for our brothers and sisters in Iraq."
The Spaniards were not with the Chicago-based group. Two of them said they arrived in Jordan about two weeks ago to enter Iraq and demonstrate the differences between their government's support for military action and Spanish public opposition.
Spain has joined America and Britain in proposing to deliver an ultimatum to Saddam demanding he give up his suspected banned weapons by March 17 or face war. Iraq denies it has weapons of mass destruction.
"I hope the Spanish presence in Iraq will force our government to retract from its support of the U.S.-led war against the innocent, helpless people of Iraq," said one of the Spaniards, who asked to be identified only as Sandiego, a 45-year-old meteorologist.
U.S. officials say it is a war crime to use civilians as human shields and that there is no way to guarantee their safety.
----
Reform With an Islamic Slant
Saudi Pro-Democracy Movement Poses Dilemma for U.S.
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63188-2003Mar8?language=printer
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- When Saudi democracy activists circulated a petition recently calling for an elected national assembly, an independent judiciary and a crackdown on corruption, they received support from some unexpected quarters.
Most of the 104 intellectuals, former government officials and university professors who signed the document -- a rare challenge to the royal family -- were Islamic traditionalists and conservatives. Although some self-described liberals also put their names on the petition, it was largely shunned by the pro-Western Saudis cultivated by the U.S. Embassy here as the most progressive elements in the kingdom.
The fledgling reform movement in Saudi Arabia, a pivotal U.S. ally that boasts a quarter of the world's proven oil reserves, illustrates a dilemma confronting the Bush administration as it advocates the spread of American-style political freedoms in the Middle East. Political analysts here say that free elections in Saudi Arabia would likely be won by Islamic fundamentalists hostile to the United States, creating the risk of an upsurge of anti-Americanism along the lines of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.
"I don't think the U.S. will like the outcome of democracy here," said Abdul Hai, one of several political science professors at Riyadh's King Saud University who signed the reform petition. "But let the Islamists and the traditionalists come to power. If they fail, others will take their place."
Like many of his fellow signatories, Hai is deeply skeptical of the Bush administration's calls for democratic change in Arab countries and believes that "nothing good" will come of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. "U.S. policy has always worked against democracy in this part of the world," he said. "It has always supported the ruling elites."
Such views put Hai at odds with his boss, Mishary Nuaim, who chairs the political science department and is closely aligned with Saudi Arabia's westernized ruling elite. Nuaim said he refused to sign the petition because he fears that "this kind of democratic change could have adverse effects. If you had a free election in Saudi Arabia, you would likely end up with a parliament dominated by conservatives, tribal leaders and minor religious figures, with very limited secular representation."
The call for a freely elected assembly goes well beyond a vaguely worded proposal for "internal reform and enhanced political participation" throughout the Arab world advanced a year ago by the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Abdullah. While Abdullah has expressed sympathy for calls for liberalization in the kingdom, and even met with some signatories of the reform petition, he has stopped short of endorsing anything that would dilute the power of the ruling House of Saud.
The excitement surrounding the National Reform Document, which began circulating here in January, first by hand and later on the Internet, is reminiscent of the political ferment that swept through Saudi Arabia between 1990 and 1992, around the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. At that time, liberals and conservatives circulated separate petitions criticizing some government policies and calling for greater political freedoms.
The royal family responded to the first set of petitions with a mixture of repression and minor concessions. The government arrested dozens of dissidents, particularly members of Islamic groups dismayed by the decision to allow thousands of U.S. troops to remain in the kingdom. It also established a consultative council, known as the Shura, made up of representatives selected by the king.
This time around, authorities have adopted a softer, subtler approach. When Abdullah met with several dozen signatories of the petition at the end of January, he struck a conciliatory tone, according to people who were present. He urged them to be patient, arguing that the government should be given time to introduce its own political reforms.
Subsequently, however, authorities blocked an Internet site, www.tuwaa.com, where Saudis were able to express their support for the goals of the reform document. According to Hai, several thousand people signed the petition via the Internet before the site was taken down last month. While government-controlled newspapers have alluded to the petition, they have yet to publish its contents.
In contrast to the petitions that circulated a decade ago, which expressed the ideas of different political and religious factions, the new reform document was designed to attract both liberals and fundamentalists. The principal demand, couched in a tone of respect toward the royal family, is for a series of political reforms, beginning with a directly elected Shura.
While most of the demands would appear unobjectionable in the West, some westernized Saudis fear they could strengthen the position of Islamic fundamentalists. In the Saudi context, a Saudi human rights activist argued, calling for the independence of the judiciary is tantamount to giving more power to the religious police and clerics who are responsible for enforcing Islamic law.
Although the Bush administration has called for democratic reforms throughout the Middle East, there has been a gap between rhetoric and practice. Last week, at the same time that Bush was outlining his vision of a liberated Iraq inspiring forces of democracy throughout the region, U.S. diplomats here were assuring Saudi intellectuals that they do not see a postwar Iraq as a model for Saudi Arabia.
Despite its fabulous oil wealth, Saudi Arabia is confronting increasingly severe economic problems, which have undermined the social contract between Saudis and the House of Saud that has monopolized political power in the country for seven decades. The problems include rising unemployment, estimated at 10 to 15 percent of the Saudi workforce, and an ever-increasing government debt, now running at 100 percent of gross domestic product, compared to around 35 percent in most Western countries.
In addition to its economic woes, the royal family is also on the defensive because of complaints about corruption and close ties with the United States. Random interviews suggest an overwhelming majority of Saudis oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The government is engaged in an endless political juggling act, balancing pressures from Washington for a crackdown on Islamic charities suspected of funding terrorist groups against the demands of conservatives for stricter religious discipline.
"They are trying to please everybody at once," said a prominent Saudi intellectual, citing a recent campaign by the religious police to enforce Islamic dress codes in public places. "The government doesn't want the [religious police] to grumble too much about Saudi support for U.S. policies in Iraq, so they keep them happy by letting them chase women instead."
The squabbles are reflected in the political science department of King Saud University, where, according to Nuaim, a "cold war" is underway between pro-Western and pro-Islamic academics. Many of the academics who signed the National Reform Document are hostile to the United States, he said, and others are "naive."
But Hai, who was educated at the University of Denver and describes himself as liberal, said he signed the reform document because he believes greater political accountability is the only way to tackle the problems facing Saudi Arabia, including massive corruption and overspending on the military, much of it for equipment from the United States.
"You have to start somewhere," said Hai, noting that Saudi academics have been deprived of their traditional right to elect their department heads. "Let's start with university professors, and move on from there."
----
In Effort to Keep the Peace, Protesters Declare 'Code Pink'
By Sylvia Moreno and Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63504-2003Mar8?language=printer
Chanting "Bush says Code Red; we say Code Pink" and "Peace, not war!" thousands of women marched through downtown Washington yesterday to the Ellipse to protest the looming prospect of war with Iraq.
About 25 protesters were arrested without incident late in the afternoon for refusing to leave the pedestrian mall in front of the White House after U.S. Park Police closed the area to demonstrators.
The march was timed to coincide with International Women's Day and began with a morning rally at Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcolm X Park, in Northwest Washington. Similar rallies were held yesterday in 50 cities, from Anchorage to Honolulu. Washington's event was sponsored by CodePink Women for Peace, an organization whose name was inspired by the government's color-coded terror alert system and that has held daily vigils against the war in front of the White House since Nov. 18. The rally featured speakers ranging from authors Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston to singer Michelle Shocked and nuclear disarmament activist Helen Caldicott.
"The best substitute for war is intelligence, and we have it . . . and we have good hearts," said Walker, wearing a pink stole, a pink top and pink elastic bands in her dreadlocks. "We have to believe we have good hearts, that we don't have to murder to change minds."
If code pink was the mantra of the day, the color also lent a festive theme to the accessories worn by much of the crowd, from pink boas to Day-Glo pink wigs and pink silky slips to pink duct tape and stuffed pink bunnies. There were the Raging Grannies from Rochester, N.Y.; Women in Black-D.C.; the Goo Goo Dolls Fans for Peace; Women and Children for Peace; Grandmothers for Peace; Black Voices for Peace; D.C. Asians for Peace and Justice; and the Takoma Park Kids for Peace.
"I'm half-Palestinian, and I don't want another war in the Middle East," said 10-year-old Gabriella Smith, a fifth-grader at Piney Branch Elementary School who organized Takoma Park Kids for Peace. She and some of her classmates have been holding a 90-minute vigil every Friday afternoon since Feb. 14 in front of the Takoma Park municipal building and will continue, she said, "until the war's done."
The rally and march came on the heels of President Bush's news conference Thursday night in which he said he would seek the U.N. Security Council's approval next week of a proposal by the United States, Britain and Spain to go to war against Iraq if President Saddam Hussein does not disarm by March 17. But Bush indicated that regardless of the outcome of the U.N. vote, he was prepared to take military action against Hussein, who is suspected of possessing banned weapons of mass destruction.
CodePink spokeswoman Medea Benjamin, who is on leave as the director of Global Exchange in San Francisco to run CodePink, called the event a "celebration of life."
"Let's celebrate the beautiful world community we have, and let's find ways of dealing with each other that don't include killing each other," she said.
Benjamin said that she and 14 other American women visited Iraq for 10 days in February on a "people-to-people" mission. They spoke to Iraqi women who, she said, did not understand why the Bush administration was threatening to invade their country or was seemingly obsessed with Hussein.
"They said they were being terrorized by George Bush and they said, 'We are not a threat to you. Saddam Hussein is our problem,' " Benjamin said. "We were there to show the women of Iraq that we know when bombs fall, they don't fall on dictators. They fall on innocent women and children. And we told them we don't want to see any of their children killed because we feel about their children like we do our own."
The Rev. Graylan Hagler, pastor of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Northwest Washington and the sole male speaker at the rally, said he believed his perspective was an important part of the event.
"Black people and people of color are always locked out of the debate in this country and particularly in the international arena," said Hagler, who also spoke later in the day to several religious groups that held an interfaith peace walk that began at the Washington National Cathedral and ended at the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue NW.
"We have always been involved in the military, as a hope for jobs and for benefits to go to school, and then we are used as cannon fodder in a war that has no beneficial effect on our standing in this society," he said.
March organizers had been denied a permit to march directly in front of the White House. Instead, police told organizers earlier in the day that a few groups of 25 protesters each would be allowed to march in front of the White House on the Pennsylvania Avenue pedestrian mall. But when Benjamin, the CodePink spokeswoman, and several of the rally speakers, arrived at the 17th Street entrance to the area, they were rebuffed by police.
"Go get 'em, girls!" someone yelled from the crowd as the small grouped talked about what to do. The women sat down on the sidewalk and chanted, "We're putting our bodies on the line to stop this war while there's still time;" then stood up and, after a few minutes, were allowed into the pedestrian mall by D.C. and Park police.
They entered a little after 3 p.m., but Park Police later closed Lafayette Square and the surrounding area to stop additional protesters from entering the area in front of the White House. About two dozen protesters -- including Benjamin, Walker and Kingston -- who stayed on the pedestrian mall, were asked by police to leave. They did not.
Shortly before 5 p.m., Park Police officers began arresting members of the group. One by one, the women were put in plastic handcuffs, while others continued to chant and sing, "Peace, Shalom, Shalom" and waved a banner that read, "Code Pink: Women for Peace," according to Rick Hind, a legislative director for Greenpeace who was a few feet from the women, behind a barricade.
Sgt. Scott Fear, a Park Police spokesman, said the women were charged with "being in a closed, restricted area" and would be released within a few hours. Most of those arrested were still being processed about 9:30 p.m., Park Police said.
Meanwhile, protesters who had been waiting all afternoon to walk in front of the White House expressed their disgust and frustration.
"Why would you deliberately impede the exercise of constitutional rights by a group of grandmothers wearing pink?" asked Nancy Skougor, 61, a D.C. resident and former political science professor. "What are they afraid of?"
Staff writer Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
----
Reopen America's Street
Sunday, March 9, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59540-2003Mar7?language=printer
In 1995 the Secret Service closed Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. It was a big mistake, because the fortress-like White House already provides good protection against car bombs.
In 1996 the National Park Service wanted to make the closing permanent and put in grass, but fortunately that proposal died.
In 2000 the Park Service was back with a plan to put VIP parking under the closed portion of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets NW. Again, this proposal didn't go forward.
Now it's 2003, and the feds are asking for $6.1 million in the current budget to test and develop a $15 million construction plan to make the avenue closing more permanent. This time the plan is to break up the pavement and put in gravel [Style, March 1].
This latest idea goes back to misguided thinking behind the original decision to close the avenue -- a decision precipitated by the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. But the situations are not analogous.
The Oklahoma City bomb was in a truck parked 10 feet from the federal building. The White House is 350 feet from Pennsylvania Avenue. Blast pressure decreases roughly with the square of the distance. This means that pressure on the White House would be far less than one-thousandth of the pressure to which the Murrah Building was exposed. The buildings also are not comparable. The White House was rebuilt for security in the '50s with heavy steel girders, 660 tons of steel reinforced concrete and walls roughly a foot thick. By contrast, most of the walls in the Oklahoma City building were quarter-inch glass.
Because stress decreases with wall thickness, stresses at the White House would be a factor of several thousand less than at Oklahoma City if they were subjected to the same pressure. When the effects of distance and wall thickness are combined, the White House is safer from bomb blasts than the Oklahoma City building by a factor of several million. What's more, trucks aren't even allowed within a three-block radius of the White House. Assuming that the White House windows are laminated tempered glass, the president's house probably wouldn't even suffer a broken window from a car bomb.
Pennsylvania Avenue should be reopened now. Citizens who want to speak against the plan to keep it closed should make their views known at the 12:30 p.m. Wednesday meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission at 401 9th St. NW, Suite 500.
-- Robert L. Hershey
is president of the D.C. Society of Professional Engineers.
----
Hundreds Rally on Both Sides Of a War [in other cities]
Associated Press
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page C07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62949-2003Mar8.html
Hundreds of people rallied yesterday in cities around the nation for and against a possible war with Iraq. But leaders of one group, demonstrating in biker boots and chaps, insisted they were not taking sides.
"This isn't pro-war, this isn't antiwar. It's just 100 percent support for the troops," said Amy Miller, an employee of Cycle Source Magazine, a national motorcycling publication that helped sponsor a rally in Pittsburgh's Point State Park.
The crowd, estimated by police at 1,500 and by organizers at 2,500, waved flags, sang anthems and mixed in red, white and blue with all the leather.
Robert Bootay, 53, joined in support of his son, Army Spec. Glen Bootay, who is in Kuwait with the 3rd Infantry Division.
"They're a little disheartened with some of the [antiwar] reaction they're seeing through the media, but they're ready," Bootay said.
In spite of windy, cold weather, a crowd estimated at 5,000 by organizer KFAB radio attended a rally in Omaha, where former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) urged them to support U.S. troops.
"If it becomes necessary for our commander in chief to order our sons and daughters into war, my belief is that America will come together as one nation and honor the commitment that our sons and daughters are making for us," said Kerrey, a former governor and Vietnam veteran who is president of New School University in New York.
"No one is here today because they like war," he added.
Nearly 300 people lined a neighborhood street in Columbus, Ohio, in an antiwar demonstration. Organizer Mira Molnar said she started it by knocking on neighbors' doors.
"What started with nine families five weeks ago turned into 150 people the next week and it has grown ever since," she said as the demonstrators waved signs, chanted antiwar slogans and urged passing motorists to honk in a show of support.
----
Guard says he lost job in T-shirt flap
Guilderland -- Security officer reports Crossgates owner fired him after arrest of protester
By BRUCE A. SCRUTON, Staff writer
Saturday, March 8, 2003
http://www.timesunion.com/aspstories/storyprint.asp?storyID=113433
The security officer at Crossgates Mall who signed a trespassing complaint against a war protester was fired Friday.
Robert Williams said he was called into the mall security office about four hours into his shift and told he was fired because of Monday's incident and for signing the complaint against Steve Downs, 60, of Selkirk.
Downs' arrest brought Crossgates national notoriety and sparked a protest march against the facility's policies. He was arrested for trespassing when mall officials told him to leave or remove an anti-war T-shirt he had purchased there.
On Wednesday, amid a protest over Downs' arrest, officials from Pyramid Management Group, which operates the mall, said they would drop the charge against Downs.
Williams, who has worked in security at the mall for more than nine years, said he signed the complaint on the orders of his boss, assistant director of security Fred Tallman. Those orders came after Tallman told the Guilderland police officer working the case that he (Tallman) was too busy to come to the police station and that Williams represented the company and should sign.
"I just followed directions of management of that mall to the letter," Williams said Friday evening. "And I get fired for doing my job."
Mall officials did not return phone calls Friday evening seeking comment. Guilderland Police Chief James Murley also did not respond to a request for comment.
Williams said it was Tallman who made the decision on Monday to have Downs arrested if he and his son, Roger Downs, 31, refused to take off T-shirts that bore peace slogans.
Williams said security had received a call from Macy's security that there had been a confrontation with two men wearing anti-war T-shirts. Williams said he spotted the men near the food court and that about the same time, a Guilderland police officer showed up. "We had not called them (town police), but the two of us talked to them," he said.
Over a period of time, it became clear, Williams said, that the elder Downs was not going to take off the T-shirt or leave the mall. Williams said he received orders over the mall's radio that if they refused, they were to be charged with trespassing.
When Steve Downs was taken to the police substation in the mall, the paperwork was written up. Tallman was contacted by the officer, Williams said, and told the officer to have Williams sign the complaint because "he represents the company so he can sign."
News of the arrest sparked a protest Wednesday by anti-war demonstrators, most of whom wore T-shirts. Mall officials did not meet with the protesters but announced later that day that they would drop charges against Downs.
Williams has been honored by the town for his service at the mall and on two occasions, after leaving for other work that fell through, the mall rehired him for security posts.
"My work record speaks for itself," Williams said in his own defense. "And I've already been told they're not going to pay unemployment so I shouldn't even file."
He said that after he was fired, he was handed paperwork, known as "write-ups," to sign, but he refused. The write-ups were in relation to Monday's incident.
Williams said he had been verbally reprimanded this week over a Saturday incident in which he tried keep out a man who previously had been banned from the mall. He said there also was a court order banning him from the mall.
But Williams was told to let the man in because he had been hired as a maintenance worker. "Because of that, I was just going to follow orders," he said about the Monday arrest.
"I guess that when it comes down to it," he added, "It's the people who sign the paperwork who get the blame, not the people who told you to do it."
-------
Thousands rally for and against Iraq war
3/9/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-03-08-antiwar-rallies_x.htm
Thousands of people rallied Saturday in cities around the nation in support of, and against, a possible war with Iraq. But leaders of at least one group, demonstrating in biker boots and chaps, insisted they weren't taking sides.
"This isn't pro-war, this isn't anti-war. It's just 100% support for the troops," said Amy Miller, an employee of Cycle Source Magazine, a national motorcycling publication that helped sponsor a rally in Pittsburgh's Point State Park. The crowd, estimated by police at 1,500 and by organizers at 2,500, waved flags, sang anthems and mixed in red, white and blue with all the leather.
Robert Bootay, 53, joined in support of his son, Spec. Glen Bootay, who is in Kuwait with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division.
"They're a little disheartened with some of the (anti-war) reaction they're seeing though the media - but they're ready," Bootay said.
In Washington, several thousand people rallied at a park not far from the White House as part of International Women's Day. The event was organized by the group CodePink, which took its name as a protest against the government's color-coded terror alert system.
District of Columbia police and organizers estimated the crowd at between 4,000 and 10,000 people. Later in the afternoon, 25 protesters were arrested on charges of crossing a police line in front of the White House.
"We gave them three warnings, we gave them an opportunity to leave," said Sgt. Scott Fear, a spokesman for the United States Park Police. He said the arrests were handled calmly, and the protesters were expected to be processed and released within hours.
Demonstrators believed they were within the law, said Jodie Evans, a co-founder of Code Pink. "The White House is definitely afraid of women in pink and the power of love," she said.
In Fayetteville, N.C., home of Fort Bragg, where 20,000 troops have been deployed for a possible war with Iraq, police estimated 1,000 gathered to show support for U.S. soldiers overseas.
"My heroes wear camouflage," read one handmade poster in the crowd.
No arrests were made in Los Angeles, where authorities estimated more than 600 anti-war demonstrators converged on the federal building, including a group led by actor Danny Glover.
"Women are most affected by war," Glover said, also acknowledging International Women's Day. "It is the real caregivers of this mother Earth who are most devastated."
Joining them on federal grounds were four women followers of the Raelian sect who stripped down to their thong underwear as a sign of opposition to war. The sect believes life on Earth was created by space aliens and claims to have produced human clones.
"Whenever everybody undresses, the ego goes away and then we can make decisions," said Nadine Gary. "Imagine President Bush nude addressing the state of the union. Imagine Saddam Hussein nude."
In Dallas, hundreds of Kurdish Americans rallied to support Bush's push to disarm Iraq and called for the ouster of Saddam Hussein. "Saddam is an evil guy," Bakh Dargali said. "I mean, you have to take him out. I know war is bad, but we have no other choice."
Demonstrators chanted "Life, Life for Kurdistan" on the 12th anniversary of the Kurdish revolt that created their autonomous enclave in northern Iraq. Saddam's attempts to crush the March 1991 uprising created a refugee crisis that displaced millions.
In spite of windy, cold weather, a crowd estimated at 5,000 by organizer KFAB radio attended a rally in Omaha, where former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey urged them to support U.S. troops.
"If it becomes necessary for our commander in chief to order our sons and daughters into war, my belief is that America will come together as one nation and honor the commitment that our sons and daughters are making for us," said Kerrey, a former governor and Vietnam veteran who now is president of New School University in New York.
"No one is here today because they like war," he added.
-------
Washington Loses All Perspective on the War, and We Get to Pay the Price
Steve Lopez - POINTS WEST
March 9, 2003
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/la-me-lopez9mar09,0,1052655.column
WASHINGTON -- My hotel is just across from the White House, almost close enough to be thrown to the ground by John Ashcroft's boys should I misbehave.
Yes, it's quite tense here. Cabbies listen to NPR. That's how tense.
One of them, dropping me off on Capitol Hill, turned down the volume and asked if I thought Turkey could be persuaded to reconsider allowing U.S. troops on its soil.
War in Iraq is not a possibility in Washington, it's an inevitability. President Bush erased all doubt Thursday night during a "news conference" that was as surreal as everything else in this town.
All the reporters were dressed alike and they all asked essentially the same polite question when the president called on them from a prepared list. Nobody here seems to notice any of this.
"Did anxiety get relieved tonight?" Larry King asked on TV after the news conference.
"Possibly not," said Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.
Thanks, guys.
We're headed into uncharted waters with a captain whose international experience until two years ago consisted of a trip to Mexico. The education president mispronounced "nuclear" 75 times Thursday night while saying every breathing organism on the planet could be against this war and he doesn't care.
My anxiety was not relieved. In fact, I broke out in hives. How can you ever relax in a town where a cab ride feels like a segment on C-SPAN2?
Sure, this city has good reason to be concerned after getting hit on Sept. 11. But they've lost all perspective, and we're paying the price.
When the White House commits to paying billions to Turkey for the right to put troops on its soil, but cities are left begging for scraps to pay for basic emergency services, something's wrong.
If you can believe it, they've still got the "No Child Left Behind" signs up at the headquarters of the underfunded and now-forgotten Education Department.
Friends who live here ask me if it's different in Los Angeles. No, I say. It's different here. This whole town is a bunker.
A colleague told me his pre-kindergarten daughter was asked to form a sentence with punctuation and responded: "Is Osama bin Laden dead or alive?"
In California I used to think this war made no sense at all, but now that I'm in Washington I understand it perfectly.
We might be a bit aloof in the Golden State. Just a touch. But when it's all war and terrorism all the time, as it is here, the nerves get jangled and you begin feeling as though you've got a bull's-eye painted on your back. The natural response is to take up arms, strike up a conversation about Tommy Franks at a local bar, or plot your escape.
"Georgetown socialite and Post writer Sally Quinn has been on a chem/bio-terrorism freak-out dating back to Sept. 11," the City Paper here reported, and she goes so far as to encourage Washingtonians to stock inflatable kayaks for evacuation on local waterways.
They need factories here. They need an industry -- any industry other than government -- with honest jobs, so people can talk about normal, everyday things. Like the Oscars.
Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti was in Washington for a few days to panhandle on Washington Mall, begging for help with budget problems back home. He'd have had better luck if he represented Turkey.
When I met him, Garcetti had already struck out at several meetings and was literally tossing pennies into a fountain, as if it were a wishing well.
"The first words out of their mouths are about the war effort and homeland security," said a forlorn Garcetti, who politely tells members of the California delegation here that shafting schools and job-training creates its own kind of homeland insecurity.
So do Code Orange alerts. The last one cost L.A. $4.2 million.
Yeah, what about the rest of us? These folks are so obsessed with their own worries they've forgotten Al Qaeda was going to celebrate the millennium by blowing up LAX.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), a war hawk, was sympathetic to Garcetti's pleas and promised to keep up the fight. But she told him to be realistic. "Money's not growing on any trees," she said.
Unless it's to fund the war.
As an aside, Harman told us she had to take a detour on her way to the office. A man and his companion were arrested in the Capitol after getting through security with jars of liquid and a putty-like substance duct-taped to their bodies.
Probably just a nut-job, Harman said. But it might also have been a security test.
You never know, and maybe it's impossible to be overprepared.
"The government needs to tell the public that everyone should have an N95 mask [which costs $1] with them at all times," the Post's Sally Quinn wrote. "The government should indicate that there are easy-to-use, family-friendly gas masks available that could save lives."
If you're staying across from the White House, shouldn't they offer them at the hotel?
"Perhaps people could be advised to have bicycles for evacuation," Quinn went on, "or, for those who live near water, inflatable kayaks."
Let's hope those who go paddling on the Potomac remember to leave no child behind.
Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.