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NUCLEAR
Robin Cook quits over Iraq crisis
War or not, Iraq's environment a casualty
US military says to use depleted uranium in Iraq
IAEA Says Iran Uranium Plant Nearly Completed
U.S. exercises called push to war
N.Korea Demands Talks as U.S. Seeks Broad Diplomacy
N. Korea Nuke Program May Spark Arms Race
Drug Problem Cited at Russia Nuke Plants
Ignoring The Unthinkable
High Drops to Be Used to Test Nuclear Waste Shipping Casks
A Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush on the Eve of War
Bush gives Saddam 48 hours to flee
Congress Questions Cost of War-Related Aid
Analysis: Bush feels he doesn't need U.N.
Frantic diplomacy follows Bush ultimatum
Generations of Lies, Generations of Wars
MILITARY
Microwave weapons: the dangers of first use
LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
UK PM faces 'war trial' by wife's law firm
Blair Faces Huge Parliamentary Revolt Over Iraq
Bush Has Audacious Plan to Rebuild Iraq Within Year
War Inc.
Not Iraq, but Anniston, Ala.
Enzyme key to chemical weapon weakness
Ukraine May Send Chemical Unit to Kuwait
The U.S. Is Wading Deeper into Colombia's War
3000 bombs in 48 hours
Soldiers face hazards from past Iraq wars
The Misunderstood Link Between Al-Qaeda and Iraq
Iraqi dissidents turn to sabotage
U.S. seeks surrender of Iraqi leaders
Baghdad Girds for Battle, Rebellion
Saddam vows to take war to world
Effects of Iraq's gas attack linger
U.S. Troops Working With Kurdish Fighters
Russia Says War in Iraq a Mistake and Illegal
Russia Says No Legal Grounds for Force Against Iraq
U.S. does not have a U.N. mandate
U.N. Chief Orders Inspectors to Leave Iraq
Marine Predicts Brief Bombing, Then Land Assault
Military Brings 3-D Advantage to War Preparation
Twelve years on, no answer to the threat of friendly fire casualties
U.S. Carriers in Gulf Hold Pre - War Drills
U.S. Soldiers Call Help Desk, Techs When Gear Fails
Pentagon says Green laws hamper training for war
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Execution rate drops as scrutiny intensifies
Colombia's Coca Cultivation Down in 2002
Marijuana Now Legal in Dutch Pharmacies
FBI Has War Plans To Mobilize Agents Against Terrorists
Political Plums Begin to Ripen at Homeland Agency
Homeland Security Glance
Terror Alert Raised to Orange
Al Qaeda links pose threat in Europe
Old law finds new use against oppressors
OTHER
UK says aviation industry should pay pollution costs
Cases of Killer Pneumonia Spread Around the World
ITALY - Mafia's loss is gain for homeless
ACTIVISTS
American Is Killed By Israeli Bulldozer
Hagelin proposes new U.S. government
On the Mall, Songs of Old Carry Current Plea for Peace
Borne in Effigy
Spain ends Greenpeace blockade of naval base
Global Peace Vigil a wonderful witness of light!!
Anti - War Protesters Raid London Oil Exchange
Protests Planned for Beginning of War
Dozens Arrested in D.C. Anti - War Protest
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Robin Cook quits over Iraq crisis
March 17, 2003
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2857637.stm
Robin Cook profile
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2856293.stm
Robin Cook has resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet as the build-up to war with Iraq gathers pace.
The decision by the Leader of the House of Commons, one of the highest profile figures in the Labour Party, came as the cabinet held an emergency meeting in Downing Street.
The UK, US and Spain have effectively abandoned their efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the stand-off.
They are not putting their draft resolution to a vote in the United Nations Security Council - citing French intransigence.
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said: "There are only two options left - either Saddam goes into exile or he is disarmed by force."
THE LEGALITY OF WAR
Attorney General's verdict
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is set to make a Commons statement about the crisis at about 2200 GMT on Monday.
Amid growing disquiet among Labour backbenchers, Mr Blair will lead a Commons debate on Tuesday ahead of a new vote on his Iraq stance.
Mr Prescott said the prime minister would ask for support if the "last resort" of war was needed, and would be setting out the humanitarian effort to rebuild Iraq.
MPs will also hear on Monday evening a personal statement from former Foreign Secretary Mr Cook.
As he left the government ranks, Mr Cook, who saw Mr Blair before the cabinet, said: "It is with regret I have today resigned from the cabinet.
"I can't accept collective responsibility for the decision to commit Britain now to military action in Iraq without international agreement or domestic support."
Short's questions
There had been speculation that International Development Secretary Clare Short, who has already threatened to resign, might follow Mr Cook onto the back benches on Monday.
But as she left Number 10 with cabinet colleagues, Ms Short ignored questions about whether she was still in the government.
Number 10 says Ms Short does have the prime minister's confidence, but her allies say she is considering her position overnight.
Mr Cook is the first ministerial exit over Iraq policy, and a major blow to Tony Blair as he faces a growing rebellion within his own party.
His departure was called "very honourable" by former cabinet minister Chris Smith.
Mr Smith told BBC News 24: "He is a very senior, formidable, weighty figure and he will be a great loss to the government."
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell was unsurprised by the move.
"It was always likely that Robin Cook, who sought to introduce an ethical dimension into foreign policy, would find the ambiguity of the government's position too much to tolerate," said Mr Campbell.
Conservative shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram pressed Mr Blair to ensure his cabinet spoke with one voice.
"While we understand Robin Cook's reasons for resigning, disunity within the cabinet is a matter of concern at this time," said Mr Ancram.
As the signs of imminent war grew, the Foreign Office advised all Britons in Kuwait, except diplomatic staff, to leave the country. The US has advised UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq.
The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, said legal authority for war came from three previous UN resolutions.
After deploying all his powers of persuasion and expressing his confidence he would win the day both at home and in the world, he has failed
Analysis: Blair's future on line
In an effort to win over sceptics ministers are repeating assurances about the security of Iraq's oil reserves and efforts to resolve the Palestinian crisis.
Ahead of Tuesday's Commons debate, MPs warn they will table an amendment stating there is no moral justification for war without a new resolution.
More Labour MPs than the 122 who voted against the government last time are expected to rebel this time.
Ex-Labour whip Graham Allen and a group of MPs, including former cabinet minister Chris Smith, are drawing up the amendment.
It would make clear their support for British troops but challenge the "moral authority" of war.
The Stop The War Coalition is this Saturday organising a repeat of last month's peace rally, which attracted between 750,000 and two million people.
-------- depleted uranium
War or not, Iraq's environment a casualty
REUTERS UAE:
March 17, 2003
Story by Alister Doyle
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20177/story.htm
DUBAI - Scarred by the 1991 Gulf War and a quarter century of mismanagement under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the environment will suffer whether or not the United States leads a war against Iraq, experts say.
Farming in Kuwait is still struggling after Iraqi forces torched about 700 Kuwaiti oil wells at the end of the Gulf War, creating a toxic black shroud over the region in one of the most destructive acts of ecological sabotage in history.
Temperatures fell, Gulf fisheries collapsed and fresh water supplies were poisoned by fires and giant oil slicks, extending human suffering long after the end of a war in which more than 100,000 people died.
And under Saddam in Iraq, environmentalists widely criticise schemes to drain marshlands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, displacing hundreds of thousands of Marsh Arabs and causing partial desertification.
The environmental impact of any U.S.-led war to rid Iraq of alleged chemical and biological arms can only be guessed at, but 1991 is a worrying precedent. Saddam says Baghdad will not ignite oil wells and has no weapons of mass destruction.
"The environment of Iraq is already cause for serious concern," said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the U.N. Environment Programme, which plans a study of Iraq's battered environment whether there is a war or not.
"Over the last few decades there has been damage to the life support system as a result of the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War and internal projects such as the drainage of parts of the marshlands," he said.
BANDICOOT RAT EXTINCT
The bandicoot rat and a type of smooth-coated otter, once indigenous to the marshlands, are believed to be extinct. Nuttall said that UNEP wanted to halt and reverse the drainage of the marshes.
"The worst thing about war is that it kills people," said Jonathan Lash, head of the Washington-based World Resources Institute, an independent think-tank. "But there is also huge potential for environmental damage."
"In the Gulf War Iraqi forces ignited 600-700 oil wells, creating a column of smoke that could be seen from space," he told Reuters. "Iraq has about 2,000 oil wells, is more densely populated and has more agriculture than Kuwait."
Even so, he said Gulf fisheries had rebounded more quickly than expected since 1991. About 25,000 birds were killed by oil in 1991 and any new war in coming weeks would disrupt migration routes for birds like pelicans and storks.
Collapse of electricity supplies in parts of Iraq after the Gulf War led to deforestration as people felled trees. And disruption of fresh water supplies helped spread diseases.
The U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said that mortality of children under five more than doubled to 131 per 1,000 live births in the five years to 1999. It said that war and U.N. sanctions on Iraq were partly to blame.
And the U.S. military said that it would hit Iraqi tanks in any new war with depleted uranium ammunition, used in the Gulf War to destroy Iraqi armour and said by critics to cause cancer. U.S. defence officials say the uranium is not a health hazard.
----
US military says to use depleted uranium in Iraq
Story by Charles Aldinger
REUTERS USA:
March 17, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20180/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military said last week it will pound Iraqi tanks in any new war with depleted uranium ammunition, used in the 1991 Gulf War to destroy Iraqi armor and said by critics to cause cancer.
Defense officials told reporters the extremely hard M-1A Abrams tank shells and 30 mm rounds fired from A-10 attack jets easily sliced through Iraqi armor and that studies indicated the active uranium debris was not a health hazard.
"It is weapon that we will continue to use if the need is there to attack armor," Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, responsible for providing medical care to U.S. Gulf War veterans, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing as the United States massed troops, tanks, warplanes and ships in the Gulf near Iraq.
The briefing appeared designed to both again deny charges that depleted uranium was a health hazard and to publicly warn Iraq's military that more was headed their way.
Iraq and other critics, including environmental groups, have charged that man-made "DU" ammunition and protective armor draped across U.S. tanks can cause cancer and other ills. But Kilpatrick denied the accusations.
"Why do they (the Iraqis) want it to go away? They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them" in 1991, said Army Col. James Naughton.
"There is no doubt that DU gave us a huge advantage over their tanks. They lost a lot of tanks. Their soldiers can't be really amused at the idea of going out and taking on Abrams again," said Naughton, a depleted uranium expert with the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
Iraqi armored divisions do not have such ammunition.
Naughton said U.S. tanks could stand beyond the range of Iraqi tanks and use the hard projectiles to destroy them. Even in close quarters, he said, Iraqi tank shells barely "scratched" depleted uranium armor on the American tanks.
Despite questions raised over DU use, Kilpatrick said that a study of 90 U.S. Gulf War veterans injured in friendly fire accidents in which the ammunition was involved have showed no cancer of other ill effects from it.
"It is not a nuclear weapon. It just happens to be uranium," he said, adding that depleted uranium was 40 per cent less radioactive than uranium occurring naturally in soil and water.
Depleted uranium, made using centrifuges, is so heavy that the 320 tons used by American forces during the Gulf War would represent a dense cube only about 8 feet (2.5 metres) on a side.
-------- iran
IAEA Says Iran Uranium Plant Nearly Completed
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The chief of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog said on Monday Iran has nearly completed the uranium enrichment plant at the center of U.S. accusations that Tehran wants to develop nuclear weapons and was working on another.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei did not respond to repeated U.S. accusations that Iran's nuclear program was intended to develop the capacity to build nuclear weapons in the text of his comments prepared for the board after an inspection trip to Iran last month.
``My colleagues and I were able to visit a number of facilities -- including a gas centrifuge enrichment pilot plant at Natanz that is nearly ready for operation, and a much larger enrichment facility still under construction at the same site,'' ElBaradei told the agency's board.
The same technology used to enrich uranium to make reactor fuel can be used to make the highly-enriched material required for a nuclear bomb, although Iran has said it only intends to make reactor fuel.
President Bush named Iran as a member of an ``axis of evil'' alongside Iraq and North Korea, who the United States accuse of seeking to develop or harbor nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The claims have appeared amid Washington's preparations to go to war against Iraq over U.S. allegations that Baghdad has weapons of mass destruction.
ElBaradei reiterated his call to Iran to help dispel doubts about its nuclear ambitions by signing up to the IAEA's ``Additional Protocol'' which would allow inspectors freer access to Iran's nuclear sites with little prior warning.
Iran has unveiled details of an ambitious nuclear energy program, from mining uranium ore to managing the spent fuel from atomic reactors.
The Islamic Republic has said it wants to be generating 6,000 MW of electricity from atomic power plants by 2022 to meet the growing energy demand of its 65 million population.
-------- korea
U.S. exercises called push to war
By Jae-suk Yoo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-3481838.htm
SEOUL - North Korea cannot remain "a passive onlooker" while the United States conducts military exercises in the region, the North said yesterday, claiming that Washington is pushing a nuclear crisis toward a second Korean War.
While vowing to counter any military attacks, Pyongyang also said yesterday it wants to avoid war and reiterated its demand for direct talks with Washington.
"The DPRK cannot remain a passive onlooker to the U.S. intensified military moves as they are a dangerous military racket to ignite the second Korean War," North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said yesterday. DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.
The U.S. military said the annual Foal Eagle exercises, which end April 2, are defensive and not related to the political situation on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea blames the war games for heightened tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula. A dispute over North Korea's nuclear programs has been spiraling since October, when the United States said Pyongyang had admitted having a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 agreement.
The United States has gathered an impressive show of force for the exercises, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and six U.S. F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters.
In a separate commentary reported by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, Rodong said: "We do not want the standoff to lead to war and demand to resolve the issue through North Korea-U.S. direct talks."
The United States wants a multilateral approach that would include other regional powers.
Despite the standoff, Washington promised to send 40,000 tons of food immediately to impoverished North Korea as part of its commitment to deliver 100,000 tons of food this year, a U.N. envoy said yesterday in Beijing.
The announcement by Maurice Strong, a Canadian aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, came after warnings by aid agencies that donations have dropped sharply, jeopardizing programs that feed millions of North Koreans.
Mr. Strong, who plans to visit Pyongyang tomorrow to help mediate the standoff, said he had information for North Korea after meeting U.S. officials in Washington last week. He did not give any details.
Rodong said yesterday that U.S. military moves against the nation were in full swing.
"The crisis issue between the DPRK and the U.S. over the nuclear issue is being driven into a tight corner," the paper said in a commentary carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.
--------
N.Korea Demands Talks as U.S. Seeks Broad Diplomacy
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - America's envoy to South Korea said on Monday there was still time for multilateral diplomacy to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis, while the communist North repeated its demand for direct talks with the United States.
U.S. Ambassador Thomas Hubbard said that world efforts to disarm Iraq had been going on for more than a decade whereas multilateral attempts to tackle North Korea's suspected nuclear ambitions had only just begun.
``We are concerned, as I said, about North Korea's nuclear programs,'' Hubbard, a veteran Asia hand, told Seoul business leaders as the row with Pyongyang entered its sixth month.
``We have just begun talking about a multilateral approach and so we think we still have some time to work with North Korea and that by applying a multilateral approach we do have a possibility of resolving that problem peacefully,'' he said.
The ambassador was responding to a question about the U.S. administration's different approach to Pyongyang and Baghdad. Iraq faces imminent war with the United States.
Hours later, North Korean state media repeated Pyongyang's rejection of any formula other than direct one-to-one talks.
``It is not multilateral talks but direct talks between the DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S. that serve as a key to settling the nuclear issue,'' said the Rodong Sinmun daily.
REGIME SURVIVAL
North Korea has taken a series of provocative steps in its campaign for direct talks with Washington. Tensions have been building since October, when U.S. officials said Pyongyang had admitted to a secret program to reprocess uranium for weapons.
Over the last month, North Korea has intercepted a U.S. spy plane patrolling international airspace and test-fired two short-range missiles, while a Japanese report said the North may soon test-fire a longer-range missile that could reach Japan.
Hubbard said most academics and policymakers agreed that North Korea sought the survival of its communist system, security and a recovery for its near-moribund economy.
``I think North Korea, the North Korean leadership, is profoundly wrong if it believes that the road to security and prosperity lies through the development of nuclear weapons,'' he said. He said that would lead to further isolation for the North.
The experts were wrong, insisted the Rodong Sinmun.
``The system of the DPRK has strong ideological, political, economic and military capability,'' said the ruling party daily.
``That is why the DPRK does not seek to get favor from anyone by threatening him. Particularly, it never feels the need to get the security of its system guaranteed,'' it said.
IGNORANCE IS ``GREATEST TRAGEDY''
South Korea President Roh Moo-hyun was quoted as telling defense officials over the weekend to prepare for a ``demonstrative provocation'' by North Korea during annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises this month and next.
The two allies are conducting two sets of war games: a computer-based command training drill called Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration (RSOI), as well as Foal Eagle, field exercises involving mock battles and amphibious landings.
In a plaintive tone in contrast to its normal bellicosity, the Rodong Sinmun said U.S. critics of North Korea failed to understand that Pyongyang's actions were ``aimed at settling the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula and preventing a war.''
``For the U.S., keen to stifle the DPRK, the greatest tragedy is that it knows too little about the DPRK,'' it said.
Hubbard said the dangers of misunderstanding cut both ways.
``There is always a danger that North Korea may misperceive the signals they are receiving from us. Of course it is also a danger that we misperceive what North Korea is seeking and meaning with their actions,'' the U.S. ambassador said.
But he said it was hard to view things any other way than with deep concern when North Korea buzzed the unarmed U.S. spy plane on March 2. Washington lodged a protest over the near miss.
--------
N. Korea Nuke Program May Spark Arms Race
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-Arms-Race.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Suspicious Asian nations bristling with nuclear weapons, each striving for an atomic war chest bigger than their neighbor's -- Washington's latest worry about North Korea reads like a Cold War flashback.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised the specter this weekend, saying a nuclear-armed North Korea could incite neighboring nations to build their own bombs.
Such an Asian arms race could spill over from Tokyo to Beijing and put some of the world's most populous areas in the shadow of atomic weapons. Some could even end up being possessed by previously reluctant powers like South Korea or Taiwan.
Analysts admit that's unlikely to happen soon but warn it could erupt if Pyongyang keeps dabbling with atoms.
``There's a very high likelihood that North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons will trigger an arms race in East Asia,'' said Paik Haksoon, a North Korea expert with the Sejong Institute, a foreign relations think tank outside Seoul.
Cheney's scenario begins with a nervous Japan considering the nuclear option in response to North Korea, and thereby firing the ire of Beijing.
``The idea of a nuclear-armed North Korea with ballistic missiles to deliver those will, I think, probably set off an arms race in that part of the world,'' Cheney said while appearing on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' in Washington.
``And others, perhaps Japan, for example, may be forced to consider whether or not they want to readdress the nuclear question. That's not in China's interest,'' Cheney said.
North Korea's nuclear ambitions have been the focus of an intensifying international standoff since October, when the United States said Pyongyang admitted to having a secret atomic weapons program in violation of a 1994 agreement.
Washington believes North Korea already has one or two nuclear weapons, and the country can process the raw material for several more in a matter of months.
Of particular concern is the possibility of North Korea mounting bombs atop missiles aimed at Seoul or Tokyo. While the North's ability to deliver a warhead this way is in doubt and the accuracy of its missiles suspect, the communist nation shocked the world in 1998 by firing a long-range ballistic missile over Japan into the Pacific Ocean.
Just last month, Japan's Defense Agency admitted that Tokyo considered developing its own nuclear arsenal in 1995 to counter the threat of a nuclear-armed North Korea. But Tokyo ultimately rejected the idea because it might deprive Japan of U.S. military protection and alarm Asian countries.
Paik said a nuclear Japan would likely trigger a domino effect, with China buttressing its own arsenal of an estimated 410 warheads as an insurance policy. Pointing to its nuclear-armed neighbors and the potential increased threat from Beijing, Taiwan would then feel justified in joining the atomic club, he said.
So far, Japan's post-World War II pacifist constitution has kept its overseas striking capability in check, said Toshiyuki Shikata, a former lieutenant general in Japan's Ground Self-Defense Forces and a law professor at Teikyo University in Japan.
Japan has no aircraft carriers, bombers or long-range missiles to project force. And as the only nation attacked by nuclear weapons, by the United States at the end of World War II, there is ingrained abhorrence of possessing atomic bombs.
But building them would not take long.
Japan has approximately 72 tons of plutonium in spent fuel rods from its nuclear power plants, according to 1999 figures of the International Atomic Energy Commission. North Korea, by contrast, is believed to possess no more than 66 pounds.
Both South Korea and Japan have largely relied on the U.S. nuclear umbrella as insurance against attack. But when faced with the verified presence of atomic bombs on the other side of the border, South Korea may consider arming itself, Paik said.
``It is not enough for South Korea to simply rely on the United States,'' he said. ``They may not always be able to deter an attack or protect us.''
For the time being, South Korea is a signatory to an international treaty that prohibits it from making nuclear weapons. But in the 1970s, Seoul had its own atomic program.
Fearful of a nuclear arms race in the region, however, the United States forced then-dictator Park Chung-hee to drop the plan, partly by threatening economic penalties for a nation that was then poor and still recovering from the 1950-53 Korean War.
In 1991, U.S. tactical nuclear weapons were removed from South Korea as part of arms reductions following the Cold War, according to South Korean defense experts. In the same year, the two Koreas signed a joint declaration pledging not to deploy, develop or possess atomic bombs on the peninsula.
Cheney said he would travel to the region next month to stress the need for North Korea's neighbors to help defuse the crisis.
-------- russia
Drug Problem Cited at Russia Nuke Plants
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Dangers.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Drinking and drug abuse make the danger of accidents and theft at Russia's nuclear facilities a severe problem, activists and sociologists warned Monday.
Citing what they called a crisis in Russia's nuclear industry, members of Greenpeace and other groups urged the government to improve safety and security at existing sites instead of building more nuclear reactors.
President Vladimir Putin has stressed the importance of the nuclear sector for defense and power needs. Russia said two years ago it wanted to build 20 new reactors by 2020 and double reliance on nuclear power -- which now accounts for about 14 percent of Russia's electricity.
At a news conference Monday, experts described a nuclear industry beset by alcoholism and drug addiction -- and a leadership that not only fails to address the problem, but aggravates it.
``Every day, every month, every year, we see less and less attention to the human factor,'' upon which ``the safety of our country depends to a decisive degree,'' said Gennady Denisovsky, of the Institute of Sociology at the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences. That inattention is a risky mistake, Denisovsky said.
``A nuclear power plant does not fight alcoholism, it propagates alcoholism,'' said Vladimir Lupandin, also with the Institute of Sociology.
``Alcoholics are advantageous for nuclear power plants -- they are modest and undemanding, they can work where all norms of sanitary safety are violated, and they can be fired at any time,'' he said. He said drug abuse is also a problem because of the high stress at nuclear facilities.
The Nuclear Energy Ministry has defended the industry's safety record as very good and ministry spokesman Nikolai Shingaryov said Monday that alcohol and drug abuse are less prevalent in cities housing nuclear facilities than elsewhere. He said abuse among employees in responsible positions is nonexistent.
Nadezhda Kutepova, director of the Planet of Hopes activist group, said alcoholism is common at Mayak, a nuclear processing plant that was a major Soviet-era weapons facility.
In Ozyorsk, the Ural Mountains city where Mayak is located, ``people sitting with a can of beer on the bus on the way to work, people working with hangovers -- this is the norm.''
She said in 1999, Ozyorsk recorded the highest per capita growth in drug addiction in Russia, and that the drinking problem developed in part because of the Soviet-era teaching that alcohol helps counter radioactive substances.
Last year, 45 cases of drunkenness on the job were recorded at Mayak, and 11 people were fired, Kutepova said. But she believes those statistics -- at a facility where she said workers could drink alcohol on the job during Soviet times -- are the tip of the iceberg.
She said Russia's ``closed cities'' -- communities surrounding plants like Mayak that were part of the Soviet nuclear weapons industry -- should be opened to increase accountability.
``In closed cities ... violations are simply covered up because nobody wants them to get out,'' Kutepova said. ``The majority of people in leadership positions protect their employees when they find them under the influence.''
She said reports of technical problems or safety violations often do not go beyond the fences of facilities.
Sergei Kharitonov, who worked for 27 years at the Leningrad Atomic Power Station near St. Petersburg, said nuclear power plants have similar problems.
Kharitonov, who works with the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, said the Leningrad plant suffers from ``a total lack of a culture of security.''
-------- terrorism
Ignoring The Unthinkable
By Fred Hiatt, e-mail: fredhiatt@washpost.com
Monday, March 17, 2003
Washington Post; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35567-2003Mar16?language=printer
If a terrorist were to detonate a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in Grand Central Station, about half a million people would die immediately -- roughly equivalent to the population of Washington, D.C. Much of Manhattan would be destroyed, and depending on the prevailing winds the rest of the island might have to be evacuated. Hundreds of thousands more would die of burns and exposure to radiation. The direct economic effects would surpass $1 trillion, or one-tenth of the nation's annual economic output. Indirect effects -- if, say, the terrorists threatened to destroy another city -- would be much higher.
It is impossible to predict how U.S. social and political structures would change after such an attack. But if you posit, for a moment, sufficient normalcy to imagine a congressional hearing, you can also imagine questions, as after 9/11, about who had failed to "connect the dots," and why.
In this case, however, such questions would be met by an astonishing response. Officials would have to acknowledge that the dots had been connected long before the attack; that both the danger and the means to eliminate it had been well understood; and that the president and Congress had failed to do what was necessary.
Those are the inescapable conclusions of a new report, "Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials," by Harvard University experts Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier and John P. Holdren. The report was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which is chaired by two politicians who have been trying for more than a decade to focus the nation's attention on this threat: Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who is also chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.).
Nunn noted last week that President Bush has said that keeping weapons of mass destruction from terrorists is "our highest priority." But the report concludes flatly: "It is simply not the case that the U.S. government is doing everything in its power to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States from occurring." And: "Between occasional initiatives, the level of sustained, day-to-day engagement from the highest levels . . . has been very modest (as, indeed, it was in the previous administration, and the one before that)."
On one level, this insufficient response is difficult to comprehend. No one doubts that a nuclear explosion is the most fearsome single terrorist threat. It is also now beyond dispute, based on documents discovered in Afghanistan and other evidence, that al Qaeda, for one, has made serious efforts to acquire a weapon and has demonstrated the organizational skills to deploy it.
It is clear too that the single best defense against such an attack is to prevent nuclear warheads or material from falling into terrorists' hands. Once they have such material, the remaining tasks are daunting but doable: assembling a weapon, smuggling it into the United States, detonating it. Available technologies would be unlikely to detect a weapon as it crossed the border.
But terrorists cannot manufacture the nuclear material they would need; they would have to buy or steal it. The location of such material often is not secret, nor is its condition of storage: highly vulnerable. "The reality," says Bunn, "is that there are hundreds of buildings around the world in scores of countries where the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons are dangerously insecure."
Last year the U.S.-Russian "Project Vinca" succeeded in spiriting bomb-grade material out of an insecure site in Yugoslavia. But that operation required more than a year of planning and an infusion of private funds -- and there are at least 24 other such high-risk sites around the world. In Russia, little more than a third of nuclear material has been secured in cooperative U.S.-Russian programs, and tales of theft, attempted theft and sloppy protection are legion: guards who do not patrol because they have no winter uniforms, security systems shut because of unpaid electricity bills. "Weapons-grade and weapons-usable nuclear materials have been stolen from some Russian institutes," says the CIA. "We assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or magnitude of such thefts."
A focus on Iraq may be seen as a distraction from this threat, or as one essential component of a response; in either case, it is certainly not sufficient. Yet the danger of unsecured nuclear material has not received a fraction of the official attention devoted to the Iraqi threat. And Nunn asserts that, as inadequate as the American response has been, most other nations have done far less.
Why? The authors of the report offer various explanations: bureaucratic resistance, suspicion among nations, the absence of any corporate constituency that profits substantially from such work, the mistaken belief that everything possible is being done or, alternately, that nothing useful can be done.
And then there is the most human of reasons: No one likes to think about the unthinkable.
-------- us nuc waste
High Drops to Be Used to Test Nuclear Waste Shipping Casks
BY JUDY FAHYS - fahys@sltrib.com
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
March 17, 2003
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Mar/03172003/utah/38980.asp?display=print
LAS VEGAS -- The federal government wants people to feel secure about the burly, steel containers used to haul nuclear waste.
So, in a testing program now being designed, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to prove the containers' strength by dropping a 140-ton cask from 270 feet -- the height of a 27-story office building -- onto a thick, reinforced slab.
Then the test team plans to cook the casks in a jet-fuel fire about as hot as the inferno that melted the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Even with a beating like this, the team doubts the container will leak its contents, which remain lethally radioactive for 10,000 years.
But no matter what the NRC learns from these tests, the agency appears unlikely to sway critics.
Even before testing has begun, skeptics are accusing regulators of ignoring crucial questions about the durability of the transport casks. The proposed tests are a public relations stunt intended for showy video clips, critics contend, not safety assurance.
At an unprecedented public workshop last week in Las Vegas, Mike Baughman, representing Lincoln County, Nev., disputed the NRC's stated premise that the cask tests can instill public trust in the transport of high-level nuclear waste.
"Focus on public safety," he urged the test team. "I doubt you are going to win the public over."
The cask tests represent the first time the NRC has asked for public input on a major research program. Nonetheless, the agency faced a hard sell at a meeting in a region of the nation where downwinders, especially residents of Utah and Nevada, still suffer harm done by three decades of atomic-weapons testing by the federal government.
"We're trying to get all the input so we can get it right when we carry it out," said NRC technical adviser Andrew Murphy.
The state of Utah is among outsiders dogging the NRC to make the tests meaningful and aggressive. The reason? Utah roads and railways would be used for about nine of every 10 waste shipments headed to the federal government's proposed underground repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., projected to open in 2010.
Plus, 100 acres of the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, could be home to an above-ground parking lot for the waste. The Goshutes and an electric utility consortium, Private Fuel Storage (PFS), have been working with the NRC for six years to license the site and hope to be taking waste within two years.
The waste would come from 104 commercial reactors at 64 sites in 32 states.
The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group, calculated last year that there could be as many as 2,408 trucks or 448 trains carrying high-level waste through Utah each year, for 38 years, to Yucca Mountain and/or Skull Valley. Four of every five Utah residents, and 520 Utah schools, are within five miles of the shipping routes.
The Skull Valley project encountered a delay last week when the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board told PFS it must address the possibility that the storage containers could be hit by a crashing jet fighter from nearby Hill Air Force Base.
At the NRC public workshop last week, the test team emphasized its cask-durability study is independent of the Utah and Nevada proposals. And the results, the NRC said, won't necessarily affect future shipping container regulations.
The NRC certifies cask designs based on scale-model tests and computer simulations. Of the 16 rail and truck casks the NRC has certified, none has been tested full scale.
Backed by cask manufacturers and the nuclear industry and more than two decades of nuclear waste shipments, the NRC and the nuclear industry insist current cask standards have an unblemished record.
"I have a high confidence level in what we have on the road and the [regulatory] criteria we have in place," said test-panel member Tom Danner of Georgia-based NAC International, a cask supplier.
Such assertions did not sit well with Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality and leader of the state's opposition campaign against the Skull Valley facility.
She said the public deserves a full explanation of the tests.
Nielson also noted the test findings probably will be released too late to be a confidence-building tool in Utah. The utility consortium wants to begin taking waste in Skull Valley within two years -- perhaps before the cask tests have even begun.
"This is absolutely critical information [about the durability of the containers] and the public expects it," she said.
Workshop participants urged the NRC to:
- Test all the cask models that might actually be used, including reused outer transportation shells.
- Find out what it takes to stress the containers to the point that they release their contents.
- Immerse them in water.
- Fly aircraft into the casks.
- Subject the casks to a mock terrorism attack, possibly including nuclear materials.
Yucca Mountain opponent Judy Treichel of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force said the worst-case scenarios do not look far-fetched to many Americans, especially since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Accusing the test team of catering to nuclear industry concerns, she urged them to "do more than an ad campaign."
The NRC and its supporters warned that the number and kinds of tests would be limited.
One reason is the expense, which the NRC puts at $20 million but the state of Nevada estimates to be as high as $70 million. Some casks that might be used in the test cost up to $3.5 million apiece.
In addition, it will be expensive to develop a facility capable of conducting a full-scale study of the casks, including a 30-ton truck model and a 140-ton train model.
Regulators said they expected to pay for the tests with money from the Nuclear Waste Fund, a $13.5 billion account that nuclear-utility ratepayers have been stoking for two decades to help cover the costs of nuclear waste disposal.
"Even a Cadillac or Rolls Royce testing program is not that expensive," said Fred Dilger of Clark County, Nev.'s nuclear waste division.
Another factor, test planners said, is "realism" -- the idea that the focus should be testing for the sort of accidents most likely to occur during high-level waste shipments.
"We can do a lot of testing under extreme conditions and get something to fail," said John Kessler of the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. "I'm just suggesting we do it with a touch of reality."
Exactly what tests will be done and to what casks will be the subject of review over the next few months. The NRC has posted its test proposal on a Web page, http://www.nrc. gov/reading-rm/doc-collec tions/nuregs/staff.
The final of four public workshops is scheduled for Wednesday in Chicago. The public may comment on the cast testing proposal through May 30. A final container-testing protocol is expected by year's end.
-------- us politics
A Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush on the Eve of War
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php
Monday, March 17, 2003
George W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC
Dear Governor Bush:
So today is what you call "the moment of truth," the day that "France and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table." I'm glad to hear that this day has finally arrived. Because, I gotta tell ya, having survived 440 days of your lying and conniving, I wasn't sure if I could take much more. So I'm glad to hear that today is Truth Day, 'cause I got a few truths I would like to share with you:
1. There is virtually NO ONE in America (talk radio nutters and Fox News aside) who is gung-ho to go to war. Trust me on this one. Walk out of the White House and on to any street in America and try to find five people who are PASSIONATE about wanting to kill Iraqis. YOU WON'T FIND THEM! Why? 'Cause NO Iraqis have ever come here and killed any of us! No Iraqi has even threatened to do that. You see, this is how we average Americans think: If a certain so-and-so is not perceived as a threat to our lives, then, believe it or not, we don't want to kill him! Funny how that works!
2. The majority of Americans -- the ones who never elected you -- are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction. We know what the real issues are that affect our daily lives -- and none of them begin with I or end in Q. Here's what threatens us: two and a half million jobs lost since you took office, the stock market having become a cruel joke, no one knowing if their retirement funds are going to be there, gas now costs almost two dollars -- the list goes on and on. Bombing Iraq will not make any of this go away. Only you need to go away for things to improve.
3. As Bill Maher said last week, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein? The whole world is against you, Mr. Bush. Count your fellow Americans among them.
4. The Pope has said this war is wrong, that it is a SIN. The Pope! But even worse, the Dixie Chicks have now come out against you! How bad does it have to get before you realize that you are an army of one on this war? Of course, this is a war you personally won't have to fight. Just like when you went AWOL while the poor were shipped to Vietnam in your place.
5. Of the 535 members of Congress, only ONE (Sen. Johnson of South Dakota) has an enlisted son or daughter in the armed forces! If you really want to stand up for America, please send your twin daughters over to Kuwait right now and let them don their chemical warfare suits. And let's see every member of Congress with a child of military age also sacrifice their kids for this war effort. What's that you say? You don't THINK so? Well, hey, guess what -- we don't think so either!
6. Finally, we love France. Yes, they have pulled some royal screw-ups. Yes, some of them can be pretty damn annoying. But have you forgotten we wouldn't even have this country known as America if it weren't for the French? That it was their help in the Revolutionary War that won it for us? That our greatest thinkers and founding fathers -- Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. -- spent many years in Paris where they refined the concepts that lead to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? That it was France who gave us our Statue of Liberty, a Frenchman who built the Chevrolet, and a pair of French brothers who invented the movies? And now they are doing what only a good friend can do -- tell you the truth about yourself, straight, no b.s. Quit pissing on the French and thank them for getting it right for once. You know, you really should have traveled more (like once) before you took over. Your ignorance of the world has not only made you look stupid, it has painted you into a corner you can't get out of.
Well, cheer up -- there IS good news. If you do go through with this war, more than likely it will be over soon because I'm guessing there aren't a lot of Iraqis willing to lay down their lives to protect Saddam Hussein. After you "win" the war, you will enjoy a huge bump in the popularity polls as everyone loves a winner -- and who doesn't like to see a good ass-whoopin' every now and then (especially when it 's some third world ass!). So try your best to ride this victory all the way to next year's election. Of course, that's still a long ways away, so we'll all get to have a good hardy-har-har while we watch the economy sink even further down the toilet!
But, hey, who knows -- maybe you'll find Osama a few days before the election! See, start thinking like THAT! Keep hope alive! Kill Iraqis -- they got our oil!!
Yours,
Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com <http://www.michaelmoore.com>
----
Bush gives Saddam 48 hours to flee
By Nicholas M. Horrock and Kathy A. Gambrell
UPI White House Reporters
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030317-112225-4739r.htm
WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush Monday gave Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face attack by the nearly 300,000 U.S., British and Australian forces that now ring the desert oil nation.
"It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power," the president said in a nationally televised speech. He said if the Iraqi dictator chose confrontation, "the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it."
In a firm voice, standing at podium in the White House Cross Hall, Bush said "Americans understand the costs of conflict because we have paid them in the past. War has no certainty except the certainty of sacrifice."
But if battle became necessary, Bush said, "the only way to reduce the harm and duration of war is to apply the full force and might of our military, and we are prepared to do so."
It would be the first time in history that the United State has attacked a nation without direct provocation.
The president urged journalists, arms inspectors and humanitarian workers to leave Iraq as soon as possible. Earlier in the day, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered U.N. workers to leave. Bush's deadline would be 48 hours after he completed his remarks, about 4:15 a.m. Thursday Iraqi time. Hostilities would begin after that at a time of the coalition forces' choosing, Bush said.
Bush's father followed a similar path in 1991, giving Iraq until Jan. 15 to abandon Kuwait with coalitions forces beginning hostilities early Jan. 16. The senior Bush spoke to the American people as cruise missiles began landing in Baghdad.
Bush in Monday's speech issued sharp warnings to the Iraqi armed forces. "It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor and protect your country, by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction." He urged military and security forces "not to fight for a dying regime that is not worth your life."
The president said the Iraqi forces should not destroy the country's oil fields, which he said belong to the Iraqi people, or use any of the chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that the Iraq allegedly possesses. "War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say 'I was just following orders,'" Bush said.
The ultimatum came at the end of two days of swiftly moving events. Bush and the leaders of England, Spain and Portugal, blunted by Russian and French veto threats in the U.N. Security Council last week, met in a hurriedly prepared summit in the Azores Sunday. They agreed that March 17 would be the last day of diplomacy in the Iraq crisis.
Monday morning, U.S. and British representatives decided against seeking a vote on the U.N. resolution that they had proposed several weeks ago to try to get Security Council support for force. "The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities," Bush said Monday. "So we will rise to ours."
Bush defended that the legitimacy of using force by saying that he acted under powers given in several U.N. resolutions passed after the first Gulf war ended in 1991 -- 678 and 687 -- and under U.N. Res. 1441, passed unanimously Nov. 8 by the Security Council.
"The danger is clear: using chemical, biological, or one day nuclear weapons, obtained with help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other," Bush said.
"Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety," he said.
Warning that an attack on Iraq could raise dangers elsewhere, Bush announced "Operation Liberty Shield," a comprehensive, national plan that increased security at the nation's borders, inside transportation systems and readies federal response resources in the event of a terrorist attack. Within minutes of his mentioning the effort, the Department of Homeland Security raised the threat level to "high" and began tightening up border locations.
Very quickly, both Democrats and Republicans fell in behind Bush. "Like many Americans, I have raised questions about whether military action at this time is the best way to disarm Saddam Hussein, and whether we have exhausted every other alternative. Sadly, we stand on the brink of war," said Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, House Democratic leader. "If our troops are ordered into action, Americans will support and stand united behind our courageous men and women in uniform who will bear the burden of that action."
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said "If the president decides that force is the only remaining option to disarm Saddam Hussein, Democrats and Republicans will be unanimous in our strong support for our troops and for ensuring that they have all the tools and resources needed to be successful."
Bush met with congressional leaders late Monday as he prepared to deliver his speech.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said it was important to support the president and that leaders were assured during the discussion that Bush would deliver a second speech to the American people to talk about his vision for what happens after the war is over.
"I have been assured -- though I am not satisfied -- that there is a clear plan for after the shooting stops," Biden said.
It was Monday morning when the White House declared that the diplomatic window for dealing with Saddam was officially closed and said he must leave the country to avoid military conflict.
"The United Nations has failed to enforce its own demands. The diplomatic window is now closed," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer announced at the morning briefing.
Former presidential aide Karen Hughes, who helped craft Bush's speech, told reporters that the president would be specific about a deadline for Saddam and that he would summarize the U.N. resolutions Saddam had failed to heed.
It was late afternoon when reaction began filtering down from Capitol Hill. Response from lawmakers to the potential of war had been muted but statements slowly were issued calling for national unity and moral support for the president.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he stood firmly behind the president's authority to confront Saddam and rid Iraq of his oppressive dictatorship.
"There is a proper time and place for vigorous debate, but now is the time for America to speak with one voice," DeLay said.
Speaking out early was Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who said that he too stood behind the president's decision, saying that for 12 years and through 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions Saddam had "flouted the will of the world" by refusing to disclose and destroy his stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
"If military action is necessary, the fault will clearly be Saddam Hussein's. But if the world fails to stand strong and together and recognize that force is necessary to enforce the United Nation resolutions, responsibility for that failure, unfortunately, will be broadly shared."
Secretary of State Colin Powell, at Monday morning news conference in Washington, expressed disappointment that the United States was not able to obtain approval for a new resolution authorizing force against Iraq. But he stressed that whatever action the United States takes is supported by international law.
Powell said that Saddam and his government must go.
"Clearly, we would want to see Saddam Hussein depart, as well as immediate members of his family who are in positions of control and authority over the armed forces of Iraq," he said.
----
Congress Questions Cost of War-Related Aid
Some Lawmakers Skeptical of 'Emergency' Requests for Assistance to Cooperating Nations
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35325-2003Mar16?language=printer
As country after country demands money and military aid from the Bush administration in return for cooperation in the struggle against Iraq and terrorism, the price tag is growing and some in Congress have begun questioning the strategy.
In the run-up to a possible war with Iraq, the United States has been secretly negotiating with Israel, Jordan and Turkey over the terms of their support for U.S. military action. In addition, Egypt is now seeking $4.4 billion in war-related aid, congressional sources said Friday.
"It appears to me that the U.S. is the cow -- the cash cow in this case," Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said in a recent Senate speech. "We are the ones being milked. Where will this all end? How many nations will be promised American economic assistance just for their tacit support?"
In an unusual show of unity, Congress's top Democratic and Republican leaders have urged President Bush to include a multibillion-dollar package of "urgent" military and economic aid for Israel in a war-related emergency spending request being prepared by the White House. Israel, already the top U.S. aid recipient, is seeking $8 billion in U.S. loan guarantees and at least $1 billion to $2 billion in new military aid.
Jordan is seeking more than $1 billion, to compensate for losses resulting from a war-related stoppage of imported Iraqi oil, which it has been receiving at below-market prices.
Least certain are aid packages for Egypt and Turkey. Egypt has asked for as much as $2.2 billion in grants, $1 billion in loan guarantees, and an additional $1.2 billion in debt relief and advanced funding from 2004. The administration has offered Turkey $6 billion in military and economic aid as an incentive to allow U.S. troops to use the country to launch an invasion of northern Iraq. But Turkey's refusal to grant the U.S. request now makes those payments unlikely.
Whether Congress will support these initiatives at a time when fiscal pressures are forcing a freeze -- or possible cuts -- in domestic spending is unclear. The Egyptian request alone is equal to 25 percent of this year's $16.3 billion U.S. foreign aid budget. Even without these war-connected "emergency" requests for cooperating countries, Bush has proposed a 15 percent increase in the regular, non-emergency foreign aid program for 2004, to pay for increases to fight AIDS and poverty abroad.
In a sharp exchange last week, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) cautioned Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that the administration should "make sure the votes are there" in Congress for the Turkish aid package, which would require lawmakers' approval.
"So far we have not been told where that money is going to come from or how it's going to come," said Leahy, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid.
Meanwhile, pro-Armenian House members, who previously backed a resolution that would have blamed Turkey for "genocide" against Armenians in 1915, have been critical of the U.S. offer to Turkey.
Economic and military aid has been a tool of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. This year the United States is providing $2.5 billion to dozens of countries through an "economic support" fund reserved for nations important to U.S. strategic and political interests.
But Leahy warned in a recent speech that the war on terrorism was pushing U.S. foreign policy back to its Cold War model, when billions of dollars in cash and military equipment were channeled to corrupt or undemocratic governments in exchange for their support against the Soviet Union. Citing Pakistan and Uzbekistan, he accused the administration of making "payoffs to governments -- including repressive, corrupt governments -- that agree to go along with us in Iraq and in combating terrorism." Uzbekistan, Leahy said, was an autocratic government that was "showered with a large increase in U.S. foreign aid" after Sept. 11, 2001, to persuade it to assist the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
Leahy complained that Pakistan, which received $200 million from the economic support fund in the recently enacted 2003 foreign aid bill, is ruled by a general "who seized power in a military coup and that is accused of supporting North Korea's nuclear program."
In a vivid example of terrorism's impact on U.S. policy, Bush soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks waived a ban on direct U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan resulting from its 1991-93 war with Armenia. Azerbaijan is strategically located near Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.
The high-level plea to Bush for the Israel aid package was contained in a letter signed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). It cited Israel's "severe economic recession, caused in large part by the campaign of violence and terror being waged against it." The United States "cannot allow" Israel to lose its military edge, Frist and Daschle wrote.
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sent similar letters to Bush.
Congressional support for Israel is broad and deep. The 2003 foreign aid budget gives Israel $2.1 billion in military equipment financing and $600 million in economic support. Congressional sources said any deal with Israel will follow the pattern of 1991, when the United States provided loan guarantees on condition the funds not be used for new settlements in the West Bank.
"I don't think you have an alternative" to the aid, said Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), top Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee. "Israel has been the democratic bulwark in the Middle East, and our policy has been leaning toward them" since the 1950s.
"Israel is in the eye of the Iraq storm," said Rep. Nita M. Lowey (N.Y.), ranking Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid. She called it a "top target" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's "biological and chemical weapons and a key partner in the war on terrorism."
The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbied actively for the high-level congressional support, and the aid package has the backing of Christian evangelicals. Gary Bauer, a prominent conservative who has been organizing a pro-Israel coalition of Jewish and Christian groups, said Israel should be "at the top of the list" for aid.
Some officials who asked not to be identified expressed concern that a new aid package for Israel could increase Arab resentment toward the United States unless it is linked to progress on the stalled Middle East peace process.
"Support for the Israel aid package in the Senate will depend on how it is justified and how it will be paid for. The administration should use this opportunity to fashion our aid in ways that help move the Middle East peace process forward," said a Democratic Senate aide.
Although it is now in limbo, the Turkish aid offer has come under more attack. Supporters of Armenia have questioned the need for such a sizable package. In a letter last month to Powell, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), co-chairman of the House's Armenian Caucus, said Turkey should not require incentives to support a U.S.-led war aimed at ridding Turkey of a dangerous neighbor.
But pro-Turkish lawmakers have formed their own caucus, made up of members who support that country's democracy, close ties to Israel and military purchases from contractors in a number of congressional districts. Two influential former senior House members, Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) and Bob Livingston (R-La.), have been representing Turkish interests in Washington. And Reps. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Edward Whitfield (R-Ky.) headed for Turkey last weekend for meetings with senior Turkish officials in the wake of parliament's rejection of the U.S. request to station troops.
"It would be a great loss if the Turkish-American relationship was destabilized," Wexler said.
----
Analysis: Bush feels he doesn't need U.N.
By Roland Flamini
UPI International Editor
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030317-055105-3439r.htm
WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) -- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is fond of saying that President George W. Bush was ready to "travel the extra mile" to keep the diplomatic effort alive in the Iraq crisis. On Sunday the president journeyed 4,600 miles to and from an island in the mid-Atlantic to bury diplomacy altogether.
Standing with the leaders of Britain and Spain, his closest allies (and the prime minister of Portugal as the summit host) in Terceira, one of the Azores islands, Bush delivered an ultimatum, not to Saddam Hussein but to the U.N. Security Council. The U.N., he said, had until Monday to support U.S.-led armed action if Iraq did not disarm.
"Tomorrow is the day that will determine whether diplomacy can work," Bush said. "Tomorrow is the moment of truth for the world."
But the day became a couple of hours. Iraq crisis diplomacy died at 10 a.m. Monday when Jeremy Greenstock, the British representative to the U.N., announced that the so-called "coalition of the willing" -- would not be seeking a Security Council vote on the coalition's joint draft resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam.
With the resolution withdrawn, Greenstock said, the United States and its allies "reserved the right to take their own steps" to disarm Iraq.
Greenstock blamed France's threat to exercise its council veto for the decision. Shortly afterwards, Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated this charge in his Washington press conference. Because of the French veto, Powell declared, "no purpose would be served by pushing the resolution."
France may have a lot to answer for as a spoiler of U.S. intentions, but some knowledgeable diplomats regard the strategy of pinning the withdrawal of France as disingenuous.
Just about everyone else acknowledges that the United States and its allies were making the best of a diplomatic defeat. The draft resolution never had the nine "yes" votes needed to be adopted by the 15-member council in the first place, and the French threat was more rhetorical than real.
The permanent council members' veto -- the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France being the permanent members -- is there to block a resolution after it has been passed by a show of hands.
The decision not to seek a vote was rooted in a complex series of reasons involving U.S. prestige, Tony Blair's jitters, and the legality of a war on Saddam Hussein.
A "no" vote for the resolution would have raised more questions about the legality of the U.S. military action against Iraq than there are already. But U.S. officials privately maintain that Bush feels there are more important issues than the legal situation. Nor is he overly concerned about securing U.N. backing for the war.
British Prime Minister Blair, however, has to be. His precarious position in his own party, combined with the groundswell of British public opposition to the war, mean that he needs every fig leaf he can get.
The other reason why the Bush administration steered clear of a vote was prudence. The ritual call for a show of hands around the horseshoe-shaped table in the Security Council would have revealed that Mexico and Pakistan were either opposed to the U.S. resolution, or had abstained -- either way a deep embarrassment to Washington.
"It must make the Bush administration very bitter to have failed to win the support of its closest neighbor, President Fox (of Mexico), or (Pakistan's) President Musharraf," a senior European official observed Monday.
It doesn't matter that the bitterness is even-handed. After all, France suffered the humiliation of two former African colonies with which it has a close relationship -- Cameroon and Guinea -- defecting to the United States. A week ago French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin traveled to both countries in a last attempt to persuade them to support the French position.
Both countries ended up supporting Washington.
Throughout the crisis, America's allies also had to contend with mixed signals over Bush's real intentions. The president has periodically arranged his Iraq rhetoric as if he were arranging furniture in a room: First, the couch and two armchairs were moved against the wall; then the big armoire was removed to make more space; and so on.
One claim remained constant throughout: The main goal was to disarm Iraq, but the United States was anxious to avoid going to war to achieve it.
Even in that, as it turned out, the Bush administration was being imaginative with the truth. In the past couple of weeks the Bush administration's real intentions have gradually taken shape, culminating in the event of this weekend, European analysts say.
It became clear that the United States: 1) never intended anything but a war in the spring of 2003, and 2) was determined to remove Saddam one way or another.
Saddam is no more popular in Europe than he is to the Bush administration. But the war has become a focal point for a whole catalog of resentment towards Bush, ranging from the U.S. withdrawal from the global warming agreement to opposition to the International Criminal Court.
So while the Bush administration claims to have broad support for its impending war, many analysts see it as a U.S.-British attack undertaken against the will of the larger European nations, and most Arab countries, without the help of Turkey, and in the face of growing public protest.
When Colin Powell was asked Monday if he thought the U.N. had become irrelevant as a result of its handling of the Iraq crisis -- as Bush and various members of the administration had hinted darkly would be the world body's fate -- his answer was, "The United Nations is an important institution and it will survive. But this was a test the Security Council did not meet. This was a resolution that every person knew that serious consequences would follow."
It was also a test for the Bush administration. The winner will be decided on the battlefields of Baghdad.
----
Frantic diplomacy follows Bush ultimatum
By Eli J. Lake
UPI State Department Correspondent
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030317-044118-3121r.htm
WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) -- The expiration of diplomacy for Iraq Monday prompted a key minister to resign in London, a harsh rebuke in Paris, and a whole lot of telephone diplomacy from Washington.
With the threat of a French veto remaining in the United Nations, the president and his top advisers Monday morning decided not to seek a second Security Council resolution to essentially authorize war with Iraq, prompting his secretary of state to break the news to foreign capitals.
In London, former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook resigned and it is expected that Britain's International Development Minister Clare Short will follow suit as a result of the British, Spanish and U.S. decision to issue a final ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin blasted the decision. He said in a statement, "Despite the will clearly expressed by the international community, the United States, Britain and Spain underlined today their determination to resort to force." He added that the decision was not justified and risked "serious consequences" for the region.
U.S. officials, however, said that they believed they were closer to the nine votes they needed in the Security Council to pass a final resolution stating Iraq had failed to disarm, than the French let on.
"The only people who wanted a vote at the U.N. were the French, and we were not going to give them the photo op," one senior State Department official told reporters. This official described Secretary of State Colin Powell's phone call with de Villepin as "straightforward," adding, "It did not advance the issue in any way."
Speaking to reporters Monday morning, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "We spent a great deal of time overnight and early this morning talking to friends and colleagues around the world about the resolution, and it was our judgment, reached by the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain that no further purpose would be served by pushing this resolution."
President George W. Bush is expected Monday evening to address the nation where he will give Saddam a final ultimatum to leave the country or face a U.S.-led war.
Starting at 7 a.m. Monday morning, Powell gave new meaning to the phrase "working the phones." He had conversations with his counterparts in Britain, Spain, France, Russia, Australia, Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Japan, China, Guinea, Cameroon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, Italy, Chile, Turkey and the Vatican.
He also spoke by phone with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, and the chief diplomat for the European Union, Javier Solana.
A senior State Department said the secretary "explained why we would not seek a vote on a new resolution and thanked those who had worked with us and prepared to join us in the vote."
On Sunday, Bush said with his British, Portuguese and Spanish counterparts in the Azores that there would be 24 hours left to try to get one more resolution in the United Nations.
But by Monday morning, it appeared there was no chance of passage for such a resolution. By nine in the morning, the United States, Spain and Britain had decided not seek a Security Council vote.
Shortly afterwards, Powell instructed the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, to announce the news. But it was actually Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador, who made the announcement.
Powell Monday took a rare opportunity to respond to criticisms that he had not traveled enough to foreign capitals to line up the votes for war. "You do your job by personal contacts, by contact, by travel and by the use of modern technology so that you can get more bang for the time," Powell said.
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Generations of Lies, Generations of Wars
by Christopher Manion,
March 17, 2003
LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/manion/manion19.html
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In 1916 my father was a graduate student in Washington, D.C. On election night, he stood outside the headquarters of the Democrat National Committee, leading a crowd that chanted,
"We want Peace, We don't Want War! We want Wilson, Four Years More!"
Woodrow Wilson had attracted the support of my dad and his friends with his simple boast, "He kept us out of war." When Wilson finally revealed, after his reelection, that he had actually intended to give us "the war to end all wars," my father and his classmates did not dwell on Wilson's prevarications. They dropped out of graduate school, joined the U.S. Army, and went off to the Great War.
Dad came back, thank God, an army captain. He taught history to work his way through Notre Dame law school, and started teaching law there in the early twenties. An avid Democrat in spite of Wilson's lies, he worked for Roosevelt in Indiana during the 1930s. He supported FDR in 1940 because the president had repeatedly promised Americans that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."
In fact, my father had been one of the founders of the America First Committee, "formed to defend America by keeping the United States out of the European war." (Clarence E. Manion, The Conservative American (1966), p. 39).
But the American warhawks have always been able cynically to manipulate the good will of the common people. Much as the majority of Americans might oppose war and the deceit that leads to it, they will fall in line and patriotically "support the troops" once combat is under way. My father's account of the fate of America First after Pearl Harbor illustrates this dependable civic virtue of the American common man:
On December 11, 1941, the America First National Committee met in Chicago and dissolved the organization by formal resolution which read in part: "Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided. No good purpose can now be served by considering what might have been had our objectives been attained. We are at war. Today, though there may be many important subsidiary considerations, the primary objective is victory." That being done, retired General Robert E. Wood, the National Chairman of America First, upon motion, gaveled the organization out of existence and left the meeting to rejoin the nation's armed forces. The United States had a war to win. Subsidiary considerations, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, would have to wait. (Manion, p. 44)
Years later, as an Army ROTC student at Notre Dame, I defended the war in Viet Nam in public debates. Our 1968 yearbook devoted one page to a classmate's attack on the war and one page to my defense of it. He praised Ho Chi Minh and condemned U.S. aggression; I quoted Douglas MacArthur and condemned Johnson's weaseling. Five years earlier, president John F. Kennedy had already authorized the U.S.-engineered murder of President Diem, the democratically elected leader of South Viet Nam, our "ally." Why couldn't I see the trail of deceit? How could I know that LBJ didn't believe in "victory"? I thought we could, and should, win the war, and clearly only victory over communist aggression could justify sending Americans to fight the war. So I supported it.
In 1968 we didn't have Robert Caro to tell us that LBJ was the biggest liar in American politics (Bill Clinton, who finally bested him, graduated from Georgetown that same year). Unfortunately, millions in my generation believed Johnson's lies, and then the lies of Kissinger and Nixon and the rest, and tens of thousands of my generation died because of them.
I had supported the Viet Nam war because I believed it was the only alternative to "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh." But I was wrong. Three years ago this month, my wife and I had dinner at a friend's cabin down the Blue Ridge from us. His neighbor Eugene McCarthy joined us, and surprised me when we were introduced by asking if I was related to the Dean from Notre Dame who used to travel, like professor McCarthy had in the 1940s, speaking on Catholic college campuses. I liked him already.
That night Senator "Be Clean for Gene" McCarthy told us why he had opposed the war in Viet Nam. "Lyndon lied to me, McNamara lied to me. Bobby lied to me. No one would tell me the truth."
Senator McCarthy made it clear to me that there were often more than two sides to arguments about war. I realized that my "support" for the war in Viet Nam had two sources: first, an innate sense of patriotism - call it what you will, love of freedom, support our troops, our guys versus the bad guys, my country, right or wrong. Second, a hatred of communism, and of the domestic American leftists who supported a communist victory in Southeast Asia. Well, Lyndon Johnson had our number. He knew that millions of patriotic Americans would want to believe their government, and would want to defeat communism. So he lied through his teeth. Millions believed him. Millions died.
New arrivals in Washington these days are always cautioned to "seize the moral high ground"; if you frame the issue, you win the debate. Lyndon Johnson framed the issue: if you oppose the war, you're for the commies. Holding my nose, I supported the war.
It was hard for me as a college student to realize that it wasn't unpatriotic to oppose your government, even in war, because it was lying to you. After listening to Gene McCarthy, I realized that there was a price to pay, but you could do it. In fact, it is the truly conservative thing to do when you're being lied to. You need not support either the enemy or your own lying government. If neither one tells the truth, be the Lone Ranger, if you must, but insist on the truth. One precaution, however: taking this position doesn't pay (in fact, it got Socrates killed), while propounding the lies often pays extremely well. I marvel at how, even today, Lyndon Johnson's old enablers like Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers can make millions of dollars a year for spouting ethical incantations over the airwaves and on Capitol Hill. I marvel that lightning doesn't strike them. Indeed, ours must be a merciful God. My faith is strengthened.
So today I listen very carefully to advocates of the war on Iraq. I don't find them persuasive. Their arguments don't parse. They're full of glib assertions, personal attacks, "evidence" stretched to the breaking point, table-pounding, more personal attacks, somber pieties, and hackneyed platitudes. I constantly wonder, do they indulge in such simplistic banalities because they think the American people are incapable of sophisticated discussion? Or do they themselves embrace these sophistries? Either way, there are troubling questions.
Which is, no doubt, why they don't want us to ask them. In fact, suppressing the forbidden questions has been a constant theme since 9-11. "Too late to argue, you navel-contemplators!" "Now is the time for action, not discussion." "You've lost the argument," they harrumph and sneer. But there hasn't been any argument. In fact, we have seen a decided refusal to engage in honest discussion. Congress has refused to consider and debate a Declaration of War. And just last week the State Department and the Defense Department refused to send anyone to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the administration's "democratic" plans for post-war Iraq, even though Chairman Richard Lugar had specifically requested them to.
Discussion is forbidden. We get only endless sloganeering and tub-thumping, tawdry banalities like "axis of evil" and "if you're not with us, you're against us." And, my all-time favorite, "they hate us because we're so good." (It should not be overlooked that many of them were crafted by cynical, self-seeking manipulators looking for a boost in their bureaucratic careers). There is no discussion of the difficulties "democracy" might face in the postwar Middle East, or of our "special relationships" with Britain and Israel that are a centerpiece of our policies. These key issues are worthy of adult discussion, free of name-calling, epithets, and all the rest. Scholars discuss and debate them all the time. But such discussion is not permitted in the political realm.
The warriors have done their best to frame the Iraq issue this way: "this war pits millions of freedom-loving Americans against the Marxist wackos, left-wing weenies, and "Old Europe" has-beens who support terrorism, torture, and throwing babies out of incubators" (oops, that lie was from the last war).
However, we could just as honestly frame it thus: "this war pits millions of freedom-loving and peaceable Americans against a powerful clique of Trotskyite and Straussian academics, and their acolytes in government, who want to use our armed forces to pave the world with made-in-America imperial democracies."
It must be their passion for democracy that prompts them to urge the Turkish military to overthrow Turkey's duly elected democratic government. That government impudently turned down tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars in bribes and still refuses to allow American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. It must be overthrown, in the name of democracy!
Like my father and me, many generations of Americans have supported our wars because they believed the lies the government told them. And there was a downside to disbelief: question the character of Wilson, or FDR, or LBJ, and you were unpatriotic, selfish, and you weren't supporting our troops. "They must have the best information," an old friend (and World War II vet) tells me encouragingly. "They know more than we do, they'll do the right thing." Such well-motivated, unquestioning trust sent hundreds of millions to their death in the twentieth, the bloodiest of centuries. We simply must avoid an instant replay the next time around.
"No one would tell me the truth," says Senator McCarthy. And Solzhenitsyn once said that "the truth will make you free, but falsehood inevitably brings violence in its wake."
There aren't just "two sides" to this issue. There is clearly a place for principled opposition to this war - at least until someone tells the bombers to stop the bombast and tell us the truth.
March 17, 2003
Christopher Manion [send him mail - mailto:cm@manionmusic.com] writes from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Microwave weapons: the dangers of first use
Thomas Fuller, International Herald Tribune
Monday, March 17, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/89981.html
KUWAIT CITY Will they use it or not? If the United States decides to attack Iraq, military analysts say a key decision for Washington will be whether to deploy a revolutionary and secretive weapon that is designed to spare human beings but destroy computers and telecommunications equipment.
Variations of the device - which works by sending intense bursts of energy through anything electronic - have undergone advanced field testing by the U.S. military in recent years, and many experts believe the United States now has the capability to use it in combat.
Those who support use of the weapon say it is tailor-made for this looming conflict: The high-powered microwaves emitted by the device do not harm humans and thus could be used against Iraqi defenses in densely populated areas.
If the target is buried underground - as many sensitive Iraqi installations are believed to be - the microwaves can reach the equipment by traveling through electrical cables, telephone lines or even seals or seams in concrete.
But critics say rolling out the weapon for the first time could trigger an arms race not seen since the dawn of the nuclear age. By showing other nations that this highly secretive program has produced a viable and effective weapon, politicians from other countries could be convinced to beef up their own development of such devices.
"There is no doubt that these are the weapons of the future," said Robert Hewson, editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons. "But it's a real Pandora's box technology."
The main danger of using a high-powered microwave weapon, say Hewson and others, is that the United States would be showing its hand in the development of a type of technology that might ultimately be most harmful to itself and other developed, wealthy nations.
The countries most vulnerable to these weapons are not Iraq or North Korea but societies where computer chips are indispensable for daily life. Some analysts have called it the perfect terrorist weapon.
By the same token, in military terms the most vulnerable army to such "chip-frying" weapons is probably that of the United States and not its mainly low-tech adversaries in the world today.
The nightmare scenario for the U.S. military - however unlikely - would be that the weapon would malfunction, fall into unfriendly hands and be taken apart and studied by an unfriendly government or terrorist group.
Skeptics also say there are basic questions about the weapon's side effects. Will the microwaves travel farther than expected and wipe out the electronics in a nearby hospital ward? What about people who have pacemakers? Would their devices stop working? In its current state of development, the device would most likely be delivered by a cruise missile, which also suggests that it is not as benign as advertised.
Three years ago a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Eileen Walling, wrote a report saying that secret research on this new generation of so-called directed energy devices had reached the point of producing "active weapons" for the U.S. military. Walling, a former director of the air force's high power microwave program, argued for an acceleration of research in the field precisely because it could be so effective, both for defensive purposes - causing the electronics of an incoming missile to go haywire, for example - and offensive: taking out an enemy's command and control structure.
"Except for the standard rifle, gun, knife, or grenade," she wrote, "virtually all military equipment contains some electronics." But Walling also warned of the dangers of this technology. There was a long-term threat, she said, that other governments would develop such weapons and thus be potentially able to neutralize virtually every electronics system in the U.S. arsenal.
The "more immediate problem," she said, was "the potential for fratricide or suicide from friendly microwave weapons." In layman's terms, these devices could backfire and destroy the electronics of the army that deploys them.
In the years since Walling's report, the U.S. military is reported to have stepped up testing of the devices.
According to William Arkin, a defense analyst, the U.S. military tested a microwave device last April in Maryland. The weapon's target was a truck with its engine running. When an antenna on the microwave device was switched on, it "fried the truck's ignition and air-fuel mixing system, bringing the hapless vehicle to a halt," Arkin said in an article that appeared in The Los Angeles Times.
The advantage of microwave weapons is that they can destroy or damage electronics whether they are on or off at the time of attack.
Today, even though the United States faces a vastly inferior and under-equipped Iraqi Army, military planners are eager to test the weaponry, defense experts say.
"We know there are certainly people itching to get them out of the labs and try them out as quickly as possible," said Hewson of Jane's.
The U.S. military declined to comment on whether or not the weapon might be used in Iraq. But the U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, seemed to indicate their use was possible when asked last August about the weapons. Rumsfeld said just as unmanned aerial drones had been rushed into operation in Afghanistan, so, too, could microwave devices. The military "may not plan on using something yet," Rumsfeld said. But he, added: "The real world intervenes from time to time, and you reach in there and take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might use it." There are several ways to deliver the high-powered microwaves to a target, including simply pointing a high-powered antenna, mounted on an aircraft or unmanned drone toward the target.
But experts say this technology is not yet perfected. A more likely scenario will be delivery of the weapon via cruise missile.
The energy from the explosion of the missile would serve to power the microwave device. The explosion would also destroy the device thus keeping the technology out of enemy hands. Among other countries believed to be working on directed energy weapons are Britain, China and Russia.
Russian scientists were at one time the leaders in the field because the Soviet Union believed the development of a device that could destroy electronic equipment was the ultimate weapon against the United States.
--------
LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker,
Issue of 2003-03-17
http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030317fa_fact
At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.
The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country's strategic defense policies.
Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme's main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
The letter mentioned the firm's government connections prominently: "Three of Trireme's Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme's principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board." The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme's advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle's who handles matters in Trireme's New York office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and Zuhair.
Perle served as a foreign-policy adviser in George W. Bush's Presidential campaign-he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan-but he chose not to take a senior position in the Administration. In mid-2001, however, he accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board, a then obscure group that had been created by the Defense Department in 1985. Its members (there are around thirty of them) may be outside the government, but they have access to classified information and to senior policymakers, and give advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement. Most of the board's proceedings are confidential.
As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any matter in which he has a financial interest. "One of the general rules is that you don't take advantage of your federal position to help yourself financially in any way," a former government attorney who helped formulate the Code of Conduct told me. The point, the attorney added, is to "protect government processes from actual or apparent conflicts."
Advisory groups like the Defense Policy Board enable knowledgeable people outside government to bring their skills and expertise to bear, in confidence, on key policy issues. Because such experts are often tied to the defense industry, however, there are inevitable conflicts. One board member told me that most members are active in finance and business, and on at least one occasion a member has left a meeting when a military or an intelligence product in which he has an active interest has come under discussion.
Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met most recently on February 27th and 28th, had not been informed of Perle's involvement in Trireme. One board member, upon being told of Trireme and Perle's meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, "Oh, get out of here. He's the chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland security, and I've put people on the board with whom I'm doing that business, I'd be had"-a reference to Gerald Hillman, who had almost no senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a post on the policy board. "Seems to me this is at the edge of or off the ethical charts. I think it would stink to high heaven."
Hillman, a former McKinsey consultant, stunned at least one board member at the February meeting when he raised questions about the validity of Iraq's existing oil contracts. "Hillman said the old contracts are bad news; he said we should kick out the Russians and the French," the board member told me. "This was a serious conversation. We'd become the brokers. Then we'd be selling futures in the Iraqi oil company. I said to myself, 'Oh, man. Don't go down that road.'" Hillman denies making such statements at the meeting.
Larry Noble, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research organization, said of Perle's Trireme involvement, "It's not illegal, but it presents an appearance of a conflict. It's enough to raise questions about the advice he's giving to the Pentagon and why people in business are dealing with him." Noble added, "The question is whether he's trading off his advisory-committee relationship. If it's a selling point for the firm he's involved with, that means he's a closer-the guy you bring in who doesn't have to talk about money, but he's the reason you're doing the deal."
Perle's association with Trireme was not his first exposure to the link between high finance and high-level politics. He was born in New York City, graduated from the University of Southern California in 1964, and spent a decade in Senate-staff jobs before leaving government in 1980, to work for a military-consulting firm. The next year, he was back in government, as Assistant Secretary of Defense. In 1983, he was the subject of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. Perle later acknowledged that he had accepted the fee, but vigorously denied any wrongdoing. He had not recused himself in the matter, he explained, because the fee was for work he had done before he took the Defense Department job. He added, "The ultimate issue, of course, was a question of procurement, and I am not a procurement officer." He was never officially accused of any ethical violations in the matter. Perle served in the Pentagon until 1987 and then became deeply involved in the lobbying and business worlds. Among other corporate commitments, he now serves as a director of a company doing business with the federal government: the Autonomy Corporation, a British firm that recently won a major federal contract in homeland security. When I asked him about that contract, Perle told me that there was no possible conflict, because the contract was obtained through competitive bidding, and "I never talked to anybody about it."
Under Perle's leadership, the policy board has become increasingly influential. He has used it as a bully pulpit, from which to advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the use of preëmptive military action to combat terrorism. Perle had many allies for this approach, such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but there was intense resistance throughout the bureaucracy-most notably at the State Department. Preëmption has since emerged as the overriding idea behind the Administration's foreign policy. One former high-level intelligence official spoke with awe of Perle's ability to "radically change government policy" even though he is a private citizen. "It's an impressive achievement that an outsider can have so much influence, and has even been given an institutional base for his influence."
Perle's authority in the Bush Administration is buttressed by close association, politically and personally, with many important Administration figures, including Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, who is the Pentagon's third-ranking civilian official. In 1989, Feith created International Advisors Incorporated, a lobbying firm whose main client was the government of Turkey. The firm retained Perle as an adviser between 1989 and 1994. Feith got his current position, according to a former high-level Defense Department official, only after Perle personally intervened with Rumsfeld, who was skeptical about him. Feith was directly involved in the strategic planning and conduct of the military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan; he now runs various aspects of the planning of the Iraqi war and its aftermath. He and Perle share the same views on many foreign-policy issues. Both have been calling for Saddam Hussein's removal for years, long before September 11th. They also worked together, in 1996, to prepare a list of policy initiatives for Benjamin Netanyahu, shortly after his election as the Israeli Prime Minister. The suggestions included working toward regime change in Iraq. Feith and Perle were energetic supporters of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial leader of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress, and have struggled with officials at the State Department and the C.I.A. about the future of Iraq.
Perle has also been an outspoken critic of the Saudi government, and Americans who are in its pay. He has often publicly rebuked former American government officials who are connected to research centers and foundations that are funded by the Saudis, and told the National Review last summer, "I think it's a disgrace. They're the people who appear on television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people if it weren't for this community of former diplomats effectively working for this foreign government." In August, the Saudi government was dismayed when the Washington Post revealed that the Defense Policy Board had received a briefing on July 10th from a Rand Corporation analyst named Laurent Murawiec, who depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that the Bush Administration give the Saudi government an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its financial assets in the United States and its oil fields. Murawiec, it was later found, is a former editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, a magazine controlled by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., the perennial Presidential candidate, conspiracy theorist, and felon. According to Time, it was Perle himself who had invited Murawiec to make his presentation.
Perle's hostility to the politics of the Saudi government did not stop him from meeting with potential Saudi investors for Trireme. Khashoggi and Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Trireme's objectives was to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland-security contracts with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it financed. The profits for such contracts could be substantial. Saudi Arabia has spent nearly a billion dollars to survey and demarcate its eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile border with Yemen, and the second stage of that process will require billions more. Trireme apparently turned to Adnan Khashoggi for help.
Last month, I spoke with Khashoggi, who is sixty-seven and is recovering from open-heart surgery, at his penthouse apartment, overlooking the Mediterranean in Cannes. "I was the intermediary," he said. According to Khashoggi, he was first approached by a Trireme official named Christopher Harriman. Khashoggi said that Harriman, an American businessman whom he knew from his jet-set days, when both men were fixtures on the European social scene, sent him the Trireme pitch letter. (Harriman has not answered my calls.) Khashoggi explained that before Christmas he and Harb Zuhair, the Saudi industrialist, had met with Harriman and Gerald Hillman in Paris and had discussed the possibility of a large investment in Trireme.
Zuhair was interested in more than the financial side; he also wanted to share his views on war and peace with someone who had influence with the Bush Administration. Though a Saudi, he had been born in Iraq, and he hoped that a negotiated, "step by step" solution could be found to avoid war. Zuhair recalls telling Harriman and Hillman, "If we have peace, it would be easy to raise a hundred million. We will bring development to the region." Zuhair's hope, Khashoggi told me, was to combine opportunities for peace with opportunities for investment. According to Khashoggi, Hillman and Harriman said that such a meeting could be arranged. Perle emerged, by virtue of his position on the policy board, as a natural catch; he was "the hook," Khashoggi said, for obtaining the investment from Zuhair. Khashoggi said that he agreed to try to assemble potential investors for a private lunch with Perle.
The lunch took place on January 3rd at a seaside restaurant in Marseilles. (Perle has a vacation home in the South of France.) Those who attended the lunch differ about its purpose. According to both Khashoggi and Zuhair, there were two items on the agenda. The first was to give Zuhair a chance to propose a peaceful alternative to war with Iraq; Khashoggi said that he and Perle knew that such an alternative was far-fetched, but Zuhair had recently returned from a visit to Baghdad, and was eager to talk about it. The second, more important item, according to Khashoggi and Zuhair, was to pave the way for Zuhair to put together a group of ten Saudi businessmen who would invest ten million dollars each in Trireme.
"It was normal for us to see Perle," Khashoggi told me. "We in the Middle East are accustomed to politicians who use their offices for whatever business they want. I organized the lunch for the purpose of Harb Zuhair to put his language to Perle. Perle politely listened, and the lunch was over." Zuhair, in a telephone conversation with me, recalled that Perle had made it clear at the lunch that "he was above the money. He said he was more involved in politics, and the business is through the company"-Trireme. Perle, throughout the lunch, "stuck to his idea that 'we have to get rid of Saddam,'" Zuhair said. As of early March, to the knowledge of Zuhair, no Saudi money had yet been invested in Trireme.
In my first telephone conversation with Gerald Hillman, in mid-February, before I knew of the involvement of Khashoggi and Zuhair, he assured me that Trireme had "nothing to do" with the Saudis. "I don't know what you can do with them," he said. "What we saw on September 11th was a grotesque manifestation of their ideology. Americans believe that the Saudis are supporting terrorism. We have no investment from them, or with them." (Last week, he acknowledged that he had met with Khashoggi and Zuhair, but said that the meeting had been arranged by Harriman and that he hadn't known that Zuhair would be there.) Perle, he insisted in February, "is not a financial creature. He doesn't have any desire for financial gain."
Perle, in a series of telephone interviews, acknowledged that he had met with two Saudis at the lunch in Marseilles, but he did not divulge their identities. (At that time, I still didn't know who they were.) "There were two Saudis there," he said. "But there was no discussion of Trireme. It was never mentioned and never discussed." He firmly stated, "The lunch was not about money. It just would never have occurred to me to discuss investments, given the circumstances." Perle added that one of the Saudis had information that Saddam was ready to surrender. "His message was a plea to negotiate with Saddam."
When I asked Perle whether the Saudi businessmen at the lunch were being considered as possible investors in Trireme, he replied, "I don't want Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor, and our European partners said that, through investment banks, they had had Saudis as investors." Both Perle and Hillman stated categorically that there were currently no Saudi investments.
Khashoggi professes to be amused by the activities of Perle and Hillman as members of the policy board. As Khashoggi saw it, Trireme's business potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place. "If there is no war," he told me, "why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent." He commented, "You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence."
When Perle's lunch with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and his connection to Trireme, became known to a few ranking members of the Saudi royal family, they reacted with anger and astonishment. The meeting in Marseilles left Perle, one of the kingdom's most vehement critics, exposed to a ferocious counterattack.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who has served as the Saudi Ambassador to the United States for twenty years, told me that he had got wind of Perle's involvement with Trireme and the lunch in Marseilles. Bandar, who is in his early fifties, is a prominent member of the royal family (his father is the defense minister). He said that he was told that the contacts between Perle and Trireme and the Saudis were purely business, on all sides. After the 1991 Gulf War, Bandar told me, Perle had been involved in an unsuccessful attempt to sell security systems to the Saudi government, "and this company does security systems." (Perle confirmed that he had been on the board of a company that attempted to make such a sale but said he was not directly involved in the project.)
"There is a split personality to Perle," Bandar said. "Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail-'If we get in business, he'll back off on Saudi Arabia'-as I have been informed by participants in the meeting."
As for Perle's meeting with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and the assertion that its purpose was to discuss politics, Bandar said, "There has to be deniability, and a cover story-a possible peace initiative in Iraq-is needed. I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took place."
Zuhair, however, was apparently convinced that, thanks to his discussions with Trireme, he would have a chance to enter into a serious discussion with Perle about peace. A few days after the meeting in Paris, Hillman had sent Khashoggi a twelve-point memorandum, dated December 26, 2002, setting the conditions that Iraq would have to meet. "It is my belief," the memorandum stated, "that if the United States obtained the following results it would not go to war against Iraq." Saddam would have to admit that "Iraq has developed, and possesses, weapons of mass destruction." He then would be allowed to resign and leave Iraq immediately, with his sons and some of his ministers.
Hillman sent Khashoggi a second memorandum a week later, the day before the lunch with Perle in Marseilles. "Following our recent discussions," it said, "we have been thinking about an immediate test to ascertain that Iraq is sincere in its desire to surrender." Five more steps were outlined, and an ambitious final request was made: that Khashoggi and Zuhair arrange a meeting with Prince Nawaf Abdul Aziz, the Saudi intelligence chief, "so that we can assist in Washington."
Both Khashoggi and Zuhair were skeptical of the memorandums. Zuhair found them "absurd," and Khashoggi told me that he thought they were amusing, and almost silly. "This was their thinking?" he recalled asking himself. "There was nothing to react to. While Harb was lobbying for Iraq, they were lobbying for Perle."
In my initial conversation with Hillman, he said, "Richard had nothing to do with the writing of those letters. I informed him of it afterward, and he never said one word, even after I sent them to him. I thought my ideas were pretty clear, but I didn't think Saddam would resign and I didn't think he'd go into exile. I'm positive Richard does not believe that any of those things would happen." Hillman said that he had drafted the memorandums with the help of his daughter, a college student. Perle, for his part, told me, "I didn't write them and didn't supply any content to them. I didn't know about them until after they were drafted."
The views set forth in the memorandums were, indeed, very different from those held by Perle, who has said publicly that Saddam will leave office only if he is forced out, and from those of his fellow hard-liners in the Bush Administration. Given Perle's importance in American decision-making, and the risks of relying on a deal-maker with Adnan Khashoggi's history, questions remain about Hillman's drafting of such an amateurish peace proposal for Zuhair. Prince Bandar's assertion-that the talk of peace was merely a pretext for some hard selling-is difficult to dismiss.
Hillman's proposals, meanwhile, took on an unlikely life of their own. A month after the lunch, the proposals made their way to Al Hayat, a Saudi-owned newspaper published in London. If Perle had ever intended to dissociate himself from them, he did not succeed. The newspaper, in a dispatch headlined "washington offers to avert war in return for an international agreement to exile saddam," characterized Hillman's memorandums as "American" documents and said that the new proposals bore Perle's imprimatur. The paper said that Perle and others had attended a series of "secret meetings" in an effort to avoid the pending war with Iraq, and "a scenario was discussed whereby Saddam Hussein would personally admit that his country was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction and he would agree to stop trying to acquire these weapons while he awaits exile."
A few days later, the Beirut daily Al Safir published Arabic translations of the memorandums themselves, attributing them to Richard Perle. The proposals were said to have been submitted by Perle, and to "outline Washington's future visions of Iraq." Perle's lunch with two Saudi businessmen was now elevated by Al Safir to a series of "recent American-Saudi negotiations" in which "the American side was represented by Richard Perle." The newspaper added, "Publishing these documents is important because they shed light on the story of how war could have been avoided." The documents, of course, did nothing of the kind.
When Perle was asked whether his dealings with Trireme might present the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said that anyone who saw such a conflict would be thinking "maliciously." But Perle, in crisscrossing between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult position-one not uncommon to public men. He is credited with being the intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wants and that many suspect, however unfairly, of being driven by American business interests. There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war. In doing so, he has given ammunition not only to the Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well.
-------- britain
UK PM faces 'war trial' by wife's law firm
Press Trust of India
Monday, March 17, 2003
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=19855
London, March 16: British Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing the embarrassing prospect of being prosecuted for 'war crimes' over the Iraq crisis by his wife's human rights law firm.
The interesting row has intensified on whether Britain's plan to bomb Iraq is legal, as it emerged that Left-wing MPs are backing plans to employ Cherie Blair's law chambers, Matrix, in legal action against the British Government.
She played a key role in setting up the chambers two years ago to specialise in human rights causes. One of her Matrix colleagues told MPs last week that the war against Iraq is illegal under international law.
Now, anti-war campaigners plan to use the firm to force Blair to answer for his actions to the International Criminal Court.
According to a report in The Mail on Sunday, Cherie Blair earns an estimated 250,000 pounds a year from Matrix, which has more than 30 of Britain's top barristers on its books, including NRI Rabinder Singh.
----
Blair Faces Huge Parliamentary Revolt Over Iraq
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-britain.html
LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair looks set to suffer a huge revolt by ruling Labour Party legislators over Iraq on Tuesday as he scrambles to keep his government together and win over a wary public.
The debate takes place as Blair is poised to order British forces to join any U.S.-led war against Iraq and follows a senior minister's resignation over a government decision to abandon efforts to win U.N. Security Council backing for such action. A second minister has said she may follow suit.
Labour rebels have forecast 150 or more legislators from the ruling party could vote against Blair when he seeks backing for possible war. Last month, 122 Labour legislators, more than one in four, defied Blair's Iraq policy in the first sign of serious dissent.
Support from the opposition Conservatives will deliver parliamentary victory for Blair almost whatever the size of the Labour rebellion, but opposition in his party could have lasting repercussions for his premiership.
Government officials say Blair can ride out the dissent as long as a war is short and does not kill thousands of civilians.
His stance on Iraq has set the centrist Labour leader against a large part of his party in the biggest crisis since taking power in 1997. The wider public is also largely opposed to a war without U.N. backing.
POLL OFFERS BLAIR COMFORT
A new opinion poll published on Tuesday offered some comfort to Blair as President Bush issued an ultimatum to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to give up power within 48 hours or face war.
The ICM survey for the Guardian newspaper showed opposition to war down eight points at 44 percent and support up nine points at 38 percent.
Many Labour rebels believe U.N. arms inspectors should be given more time to see whether they can get Iraq to come clean over any weapons of mass destruction.
Robin Cook, the government's leader in parliament and a former foreign secretary, resigned from the cabinet on Monday, saying he believed it was wrong to go to war without broad international support.
Cook told parliament in a somber statement he had no time for plotters who wanted to use the Iraq crisis to oust Blair, but said he would vote against the government on Tuesday.
He said history would be ``astonished at the diplomatic miscalculation'' that saw a global coalition built after the September 11 attacks on the United States fall apart.
Some members of parliament broke with protocol to applaud him.
International Development Secretary Clare Short said she may also quit government. Her aides said she was reflecting on her position overnight.
She said last week she would resign in the event of a war without U.N. authority, calling Blair reckless.
``The cabinet has decided to ask the house to support Britain's participation in military operations should they be necessary,'' Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a packed parliament on Monday.
``The debate...will be the most important in the house for many years.''
Blair will open Tuesday's debate and press parliament to vote for a motion backing ``all means necessary'' to disarm Iraq -- code for war.
His opponents will float an amendment saying the case for war has not been established.
-------- business
Bush Has Audacious Plan to Rebuild Iraq Within Year
Mon Mar 17, 2003
Wall Street Journal
Neil King Jr. contributed to this report.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=808&ncid=808&e=5&u=/dowjones/20030317/bs_dowjones/200303170030000012
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's audacious plan to rebuild Iraq) envisions a sweeping overhaul of Iraqi society within a year of a war's end, but leaves much of the work to private U.S. companies, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported.
The Bush plan, as detailed in more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents, would sideline United Nations) development agencies and other multilateral organizations that have long directed reconstruction efforts in places such as Afghanistan) and Kosovo. The plan also would leave big nongovernmental organizations largely in the lurch: With more than $1.5 billion in Iraq work being offered to private U.S. companies under the plan, just $50 million is so far earmarked for a small number of groups such as CARE and Save the Children.
Washington is under international pressure to broaden a postwar rebuilding effort, even as it continues to do battle with traditional allies over the merits of launching a war on Iraq. The administration recently has signaled it may seek down the road to give the U.N. and other countries a larger role. President Bush, after a one-hour summit in the Azores Islands, said yesterday that if it comes to war he plans to "quickly seek new Security Council resolutions to encourage broad participation in the process of helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq."
But U.N. officials said they still have no clear indication how the administration might involve the international body, especially if many of the large rebuilding tasks are already farmed out to U.S. companies directly answerable to Washington.
--------
War Inc.
American corporations with close ties to the White House are poised to cash in on Saddam's defeat. French companies need not apply.
By Farhad Manjoo,
March 17, 2003
Slate
As the prospect of war with Iraq comes ever closer, companies with expertise in combating oil-well fires have begun to publicly complain that the U.S government has not been forthcoming with details of the firefighting services it may require in the Middle East.
Their concern is not abstract; many experts think it is likely that Saddam Hussein may duplicate his behavior in Kuwait and destroy Iraqi oil fields in a last-gasp gesture of defiance. So, early in March the Department of Defense finally announced that it had developed a plan to deal with the possibility, and on Thursday the Pentagon posted a toll-free phone number on its Web site to provide "a recorded message ... on the information necessary for firms to be added to the bidders list." After just a few hours, the phone number had been overwhelmed with calls; by the afternoon, a message said that the voice-mailbox was full, and it offered no details on how firms could bid for firefighting contracts.
The overloaded Defense Department bidding line provides a good illustration of the frenzy for war that is building in some sectors of the business community. It's not just the firefighters; many companies see war in Iraq in a favorable light, as a significant source of new business.
Representatives of these firms won't say so in so many words, certainly, and some -- like the firefighters or the construction companies that will rebuild critical infrastructure in Iraq -- convincingly defend their work as necessary to immediately aid civilians and repair a war-ravaged nation. War is hell, but when the fighting is over, somebody's got to make things better. What's so wrong with profiting from the deal in the process?
But even if there's nothing exactly new about making money from war, this particular conflict, a preemptive war of choice, presents the somewhat novel prospect of the U.S. government deciding how war profits will be distributed even before the first sorties are launched. Whether you think Iraq will be "conquered" or "liberated" by American forces, regime change in the country will open up vast new opportunities for commercial interests to do business there, and the Bush administration could have wide latitude in determining which of those interests win out. Already, companies are jockeying for prime positions, and already there are signs that the White House is being nicest to its friends.
On March 10, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had invited a handful of large engineering firms to bid on a $900 million contract for rebuilding Iraq. The Journal described the agency's efforts as "quiet," but "secret" seems a more apt term. In a procedure designed to respond to "urgent circumstances," the agency decided not to put out a public notice soliciting engineering bids and instead approached select firms "with a proven track record," said Ellen Yount, an agency spokeswoman.
All of these firms are American, and many have close ties to present and former government officials. One of the companies is Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Co., the firm that Vice President Dick Cheney ran during the 1990s. (KBR also developed the Pentagon's firefighting plan.) USAID declined to discuss the sort of work it had asked the companies to do, and several of the firms would neither confirm nor deny that they had been contacted by the government regarding Iraqi reconstruction. The others were only slightly less reticent, admitting they were part of the group but refusing to discuss details of USAID's request.
On Wednesday, top U.S. foreign policy experts, working on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations, released a report estimating rebuilding in Iraq to cost up to $20 billion per year for "several years"; it's reasonable to expect, then, that after the war, contracts worth much more than USAID's initial $900 million request will be made available to firms.
The news that some well-connected American firms will be first in line for these billion-dollar deals did not help the Bush administration's case for war internationally. Headlines all over the world questioned the White House's true motives for war. During a session of the British Parliament, one Liberal Democrat member asked Prime Minister Tony Blair why his allies in the U.S. had "pointedly excluded British and foreign firms." Vincent Cable, the M.P., continued, "Is the prime minister not embarrassed to have given such unstinting loyalty to an American president who regards international cooperation with such contempt and war as an opportunity to dish out contracts to his cronies?" Blair dodged the question, but his spokesman told the British press that the prime minister hopes the United Nations, and not the U.S., would head the rebuilding effort.
It's hyperbole to argue that the Bush administration wants to invade Iraq only for the benefit of its friends in the corporate world (though some people no doubt believe that). For some businesses -- most notably the airlines, which fear billions in losses if there is a war -- an invasion will likely be terrible for the balance sheet. But, as in the Gulf War, some companies will make a bundle from an attack, and one doesn't have to be very conspiracy-minded to notice that these are the very same firms that have intimate ties with the Bush administration. Is it unreasonable to think that the high-minded goal of bringing freedom to Iraqis exists, in this White House, alongside many less noble political calculations -- for instance, old-fashioned corporate opportunism? Or, making sure that the spoils of war stay out of the hands of the troublesome French?
In the waning days of the Gulf War, estimates for the cost of rebuilding Kuwait, which had been plundered by Iraq's occupying forces, ranged in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Construction and oil-services firms saw the country as a bonanza. Even before the exiled Kuwaiti government had been fully restored, it was welcoming reconstruction bids from foreign companies. American executives were the most assiduous deal makers, visiting Kuwaiti royals at their base in Taif, Saudi Arabia, and beating European firms to multibillion-dollar deals.
It turned out that Kuwait was a smaller prize than businesses had initially anticipated -- reconstruction cost tens, not hundreds, of billions of dollars. But U.S. firms got the lion's share of the work, with one company, Bechtel Corp., a private, family-owned and very secretive firm based in San Francisco, ending up with the main rebuilding contract, worth an estimated $2.5 billion.
Bechtel has a legendary history of setting its sights on large projects and successfully networking with influential people who can bring those projects to the company. The firm built the Hoover Dam, the subway systems in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., the tunnel under the English Channel, and many U.S. nuclear power plants. In his book "Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story: The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World," the journalist Laton McCartney outlines Bechtel's ties to powerful people, many of them Republicans. Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, was once Bechtel's general counsel; Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, is a former Bechtel president. "Gerald Ford had also lent a hand, as Richard Nixon had before him, and Ronald Reagan after him, by trying to give Bechtel commercial access to the nation's most secret nuclear technology," McCartney writes, citing one example of Bechtel's reach. And Bechtel is no stranger to the current Bush administration. In February, the company's CEO, Riley Bechtel, was named, along with dozens of other executives, to the president's Export Council, a White House trade advisory group.
Not surprisingly, Bechtel was one of the companies selected by USAID to bid for a contract in Iraq. "We are one of the world's leading engineering and construction firms, so if there's infrastructure work to be done in Iraq, we have extensive experience in doing that," Jonathan Marshall, a spokesman for Bechtel, said. But Marshall was wary of Bechtel being seen as pushing for a war. "We do hope for a peaceful resolution here," he said. "If there's work to be done it should be done in an atmosphere of peace and not war. We're not trying to take advantage of anything here."
Parsons, a construction company based in Irvine, Calif., is another of the major firms contacted by USAID. Parsons also did well in Kuwait, landing a contract worth hundreds of millions to expand the country's refining capacity. But when asked what kind of work the company might do in Iraq, Erin Kuhlman, a spokeswoman, said that any Iraq contract would be similar to the rebuilding efforts Parsons headed in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Such a contract would, in Kuhlman's description, have little to do with oil.
"The bulk of the aid money that went to Bosnia and Kosovo was to firms that provided labor and equipment to make repairs," she said. "We went in and we cleared areas for mines, and then we organized construction teams to restore water supplies, rebuild roads, hospitals, schools, all sorts of infrastructure that had been damaged in the war."
Kuhlman added that if American firms get rebuilding contracts in Iraq, they would likely employ Iraqis to do the work. "What we did [in Bosnia and Kosovo] is we were the program managers and we hired local groups," Kuhlman said. "People are saying that all the money is going to be coming to American firms, but in fact that's not the way it works. The money goes to the local firm."
The other main contender for business in Iraq is Kellogg Brown & Root, owned by Halliburton. As the New York Times reported last summer, the war on terrorism has been good to KBR. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the company was selected to build a permanent base for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. KBR was also awarded a 10-year, open-ended contract to provide logistics supplies -- managing everything from dining operations to power generation -- to the Army.
But Halliburton has recently been going through a rough period, too. The company has been dogged by a host of class-action lawsuits seeking damages stemming from asbestos-containing products made by some of its subsidiaries. As part of a $4 billion settlement it reached in 2002, KBR, the unit likely to do work in Iraq, is expected to file for bankruptcy later this year.
The company's proximity to the White House may also not be as much of an asset as one would expect. Last year, when corporate accounting scandals were making headlines, the news that Halliburton was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for alleged accounting improprieties during Cheney's tenure caused much unwanted press for the firm. Now, according to some industry analysts and political experts, the government may be reluctant to award Halliburton a contract precisely because it would appear unseemly.
"It certainly wouldn't be ideal if they gave the first contract to Halliburton," says Bathsheba Crocker, an expert on postwar reconstruction at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. "There are certainly many people out there who already think this is all about the Bush administration getting access to Iraqi oil in the first place."
Still, says Crocker, if Halliburton is indeed passed over in the first round, that won't be the end of the story. "Brown & Root often does work for the government, and I have no doubt there would be enough to go around" in Iraq, she says.
As many academics, pundits and lawmakers have noted during the past year's war debate, ousting Saddam Hussein could turn out to be the easy part of regime change in Iraq -- the difficult part would be rebuilding a nation suffering from two decades of warfare and sanctions.
"It's not going to be cheap," says Patrick Garrett, an associate analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. "There's going to be a cleanup after the military, because some of those things -- say if cluster munitions are used -- could have a long-term effect on the country. But it's not just cleaning up after the war, it's essentially rebuilding the whole country. There will be school reconstruction, roads, and helping to rebuild the economy that was there before the Gulf War, before the sanctions."
But the biggest prize for American firms like Bechtel and Halliburton will be a contract to repair Iraq's oil industry. On March 6, the Pentagon announced that it had "reliable reports" indicating that Saddam Hussein may be planning "to damage or destroy Iraq's oil fields, potentially causing a crisis for both Iraq's people and its neighbors."
The government said that "Iraq has received 24 railroad boxcars full of pentolite explosives" that would be used to blow up the country's oil facilities, similar to what Iraqi forces did to Kuwait's oil industry in their retreat during the Gulf War. The destruction of Kuwaiti fields caused enormous environmental damage -- 5 million barrels of oil were dumped into the sea, an "impact twenty times larger than that of the Exxon Valdez disaster," according to the government. (Seeking to label Saddam Hussein a "terrorist" any way it can, the Pentagon described the Kuwaiti fires as an act of "eco-terrorism," an incorrect use of the term. According to the FBI, "eco-terrorism" is done with the intention of saving the environment, not damaging it.)
Mike Miller, the CEO of Safety Boss, a Canadian oil-well firefighting company that helped fight the Kuwaiti fires, expects that oil fires in Iraq -- which he thinks are very likely to be set -- will be the biggest event his industry has ever seen. Iraq has more oil fields spread out over a larger area than Kuwait, "so it would be much bigger, and cause potentially much more environmental damage," Miller says.
But Miller fears his firm will be shut out of the bid process. "Whoever gets this firefighting contract has got to have a huge political contact," he says, "and we're a little concerned because as a Canadian company we don't have access to the American government. I guess I would say that once the fires start it would be hard to ignore us -- we did have the best record in Kuwait and the world will ask why we're being left out." But so far, he has had little contact with American officials, and he worries that because Canada has been somewhat noncommittal on a war -- officially, the government wants to give Saddam Hussein until the end of March to comply with inspections -- his company will be left out of the initial plans.
Miller's situation raises an interesting question. If the war in Iraq turns out to be an almost entirely American affair, with foreign governments refusing to go along with the effort, and American troops doing much of the fighting, and American taxpayers bearing much of the cost, does the White House have any obligation to see that foreign firms take part in efforts to rebuild Iraq, enjoying a fair shot at the billions that will be spent upgrading the country's oil infrastructure? Some people in government, the kind of people who want to replace the word "French" with "freedom," may have already concluded that once the U.S. military secures the peace in Iraq, U.S. companies would be justified in securing the dollars. But experts warn of obvious political fallout from such shortsightedness.
If the White House is seen as favoring American firms, especially American firms close to the Bush administration, it could serve as just the proof antiwar critics need to conclude that the U.S. is invading Iraq for the basest reasons -- money and oil.
In the Middle East, the United States is vulnerable to the charge that it is an imperialist power; Saddam Hussein's government regularly accuses the Bush administration of seeking to enslave Iraqis. "It is very politically incorrect to do this," a Saudi Arabian contractor recently told the Middle East Economic Digest. "Look at the Gulf war. Bechtel said that because the Saudis had been good to Kuwait it would source everything locally. Then it had everything flown in from Houston. A lot of Saudis remember that, and Bechtel is not flavor of the month here because of that."
Michael Renner, a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, wonders whether the Bush administration might be trying to send some not-so-subtle political cues to governments that are now on the fence in the war. "It seems to me that the way it comes across, whether intended or not, is you're sending a signal that if the rest of the world is not going along with this, your companies aren't going to get all the contracts," he says. "They're saying, 'Anybody out there, if you want to get on the bandwagon, this is a good time.' Maybe we should take George Bush at his word when he says, 'If you're not with us, you're against us.' He may mean that not only in political terms, but also in business terms."
But Renner predicts a huge international outcry to American profiteering from war. "If that's what plays out, if there's a sense that this carries a commercial side to it as well, then given the fact that public opinion is very much up in arms against the current policy, that there's a rather unprecedented groundswell of opinion against this, I wouldn't be surprised if people react very angrily to it."
salon.com
About the writer mailto:fmanjoo@salon.com Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.
-------- chemical weapons
Not Iraq, but Anniston, Ala.
The cache of chemical weapons includes 873,020 pounds of sarin, 1,657,480 pounds of VX nerve agent and 1,976,760 pounds of mustard agent - enough to kill or incapacitate millions.
By CHUCK MURPHY, Staff Writer
St. Petersburg Times
March 16, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/16/Worldandnation/Not_Iraq__but_Annisto.shtml
ANNISTON, Ala. -- They told William Hutchings he would have his building by now.
But when Hutchings and the 550 students, teachers and staff in his school practice what to do if there is an explosion at the Army depot 5 miles away, they pile into a converted music room, not a state-of-the-art shelter.
If there is an accident, the veteran principal declares, "everyone here would die. Everybody'd die."
As Hutchings talks, he paces in the lot where his shelter is supposed to be, behind C.E. Hanna school in Hobson City, just southwest of Anniston.
On the other side of the hill, the Army has stored enough nerve agent and mustard to kill or incapacitate millions. The rockets, artillery shells and mortar rounds are pointed toward the sky, awaiting destruction.
It has been that way for 40 years. But as the United States prepares to attack Iraq, partly over Saddam Hussein's failure to rid his nation of chemical weapons, Anniston is a vivid reminder that the weapons of mass destruction from the 20th century were a lot easier to make than they are to destroy.
Though the United States is required by international treaty to be rid of chemical weapons by 2007, nearly 75 percent of the nation's now-banned arms still exist. It amounts to a nationwide stockpile of 23,415 tons of liquid sarin nerve agent, blister-causing mustard agent, a deadly nerve liquid called VX and variants.
That's 46,830,000 pounds of chemicals. A teaspoon of any of them is enough to kill or maim.
Most of it is stored at eight sites around the country, still in the munitions into which it was loaded at the factory in the 1940s and '50s. It was never used in battle, only in practice. There are hundreds of other "nonstockpile" sites, as the Army refers to them, around the country. Several are in Florida, including the Tampa Bay area.
In Anniston, the more than 600,000 munitions that arrived in trains and trucks in the 1960s have long been the subject of whispers in the town of 24,276 in a county of 112,249. But as the date for their incineration approached last month, the whispers turned to debate.
Today, the residents of Calhoun County agree they want the weapons gone. But they divide sharply over how -- and how quickly -- the destruction should occur.
On one side are those who want the weapons to go away fast -- at least as soon as the Army prepares schools and homes just in case of an accident at the new incinerator at the depot.
On the other are those who have been fighting incineration for a decade. They hope the Army will be forced to scrap its burning plans in favor of what they believe is a safer process of chemical "neutralization" followed by disposal.
'A certain number of casualties'
Brenda Lindell needs pecans for her fruit salad. Once she gets them from her garage she returns to a topic she is passionate about: organophosphates.
"Even the CDC said they didn't know anything about the effects of low-dose, long-term exposure," Lindell said. "Well, if they don't know, then don't make us the guinea pigs!"
Lindell, 50, hardly matches the stereotype of a tree-hugging environmentalist. She is first and foremost a self-described homemaker who first heard about plans to burn the chemical weapons in 1991.
Even then, she fought the urge to battle the Army, preferring to move from Anniston rather than fight.
But she, her husband and their three kids stayed put. And over time, the Army's plans to burn Anniston's 2,254 tons of chemical agent in a big incinerator near town have become her passion.
"When the Army is given a mission, a certain number of casualties is acceptable to them, and they put on blinders and just go," Lindell said. "That's acceptable on a battlefield in war. But this is not a battlefield, and we're not supposed to be at war with our own government."
Over the protest of Lindell and other groups locally and across the country, Westinghouse Anniston (the Army's contractor) built the incinerator and got a permit to operate it.
It's the same technology that has been used in Tooele, Utah, and on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. The Army said the destruction of 9,634 tons of chemicals in those two incinerators went relatively smoothly, with no fatal accidents and only minor glitches.
But those incinerators are, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere, not in the midst of more than 100,000 people like the one in Anniston.
And as Lindell and others are quick to point out, it's too soon to tell whether there will be any long-term damage to people or animals from trace amounts of the organophosphates -- the killers in the nerve agents -- that may have been released during those burns.
The Army is required to insure that incineration produces an exhaust that is 99.9999 percent free of harmful chemicals.
But the other 0.0001 could contain small amounts of toxic dioxins, maybe some heavy metals and, if you believe the dissenters, a little occasional nerve agent.
The Army points to a study from test burns at the Johnston Atoll. It showed that the maximum possible public exposure from cancer-causing agents coming out of the smokestack would be the equivalent of smoking 1.7 to 17 cigarettes per year.
"When you look at the working population on Johnston Island, we have not found any instances of workers having long-term health effects," said Army spokesman Mike Abrams.
The opponents don't buy it.
Craig Williams is one of those opponents. Williams, who heads a consortium of incineration opponent organizations called the Chemical Weapons Working Group, complains that the test burn data doesn't take into account the potential burps and hiccups that occur when an incinerator is really up and running. The data also doesn't take into account the long-term exposure to even low doses of those chemicals if incineration goes on for eight to 12 years.
The Johnston Island incineration lasted 10 years, but was usually conducted so that the plume from the incinerator blew out over the ocean, not toward the island's housing.
And finally, Williams charges, the Army hasn't accounted for Anniston's uniquely polluted population. The town is already among the most troubled in America. An abandoned factory on one side of town is awash in PCBs, and some residents already test positive for exposure to the cancer-causing agent.
"If you know that you've got a community already overburdened with toxic chemicals, it is unconscionable to look at that (data) in a vacuum and declare that these are safe levels," Williams said.
Eli and the gorilla
A decade ago, James "Eli" Henderson believed in the Army.
He spent 25 years working as a civilian at the Anniston depot. For 10 of those years, he checked the chemical weapons every day for "leakers."
But after initially supporting the idea of a quick incineration of the depot's chemical munitions, Henderson had a change of heart.
"We discovered that the VX (nerve agent) is 10 times more deadly than they told us and that the GB (sarin) is five times more deadly," Henderson said. "And we couldn't get any help."
Henderson is a plain-spoken Democrat who was first elected to the Calhoun County Commission in 1994 (one of his bumper stickers read: Eli. 'Nuff Said). And he turned that ability to rally the public against the Army, the Federal Emergency Management Authority and just about anyone else in government who was pushing the incineration plan.
"I just began to raise hell," Henderson said.
It's not that he opposes incineration, though he says Lindell and her supporters "just might be right." Instead, he wants to make sure the county's residents are protected just in case the Army's safeguards fail.
But in January, with the February start of burning looming on the calendar, little of the promised protection had arrived, with the exception of a few "Shelter In Place" kits (a roll of duct tape, a pair of scissors and plastic sheeting to keep the chemicals out of your house).
So Henderson and others on the commission turned to their senior U.S. senator, Richard Shelby.
After hearings last year, Shelby wrote to Army Secretary Thomas White to complain about "the obvious safety shortfalls." photo C.E. Hanna Elementary students Michael Roberts, left, Sierra Worthan, Carley Herren, Miranda Luker and Paige McCord, all 11, play recorders. Hanna is about 5 miles from the disposal facility.
Shelby, a Republican, got immediate attention.
"He was our 800-pound gorilla," Henderson said.
Though the Army maintains that it is nearly impossible for a plume of nerve or mustard gas to travel off the confines of the depot, Army officials declared that they would not begin burning until after Shelby and the County Commission were satisfied that safety plans were in place.
Almost immediately, FEMA gave the county $14-million to buy 20,000 chemical protection hoods for adults and another 2,000 for children and 750 for babies (all at $225 each) living in the "pink zone" closest to the incinerator.
Another 40,000 shelter-in-place kits were purchased at $22.34 each, despite complaints that duct tape and plastic would be no match for sarin or VX if a cloud moves off base. Residents in the pink zone also will get $365 recirculating air filters to put in one room of their homes, where they would wait out the crisis if it comes.
All of it will be distributed soon. And Shelby might not be done yet.
On Friday, Shelby's spokesperson said he was considering asking the Army to perform a study of the cost and benefits of switching the incinerator over to neutralization technology. That would allow the chemicals to be mixed, like baking soda with vinegar, to make the poison inert. It could then be diluted and disposed of. The Army is planning to use that technology at four other stockpile sites.
The Army's new director of the chemical demilitarization program told the Anniston Star recently that the agency would be willing to consider alternatives if they furthered the goal of safely disposing of the stockpile.
Still waiting at C.E. Hanna
In the meantime, FEMA has finished paying for a new state-of-the-art Calhoun County emergency management bunker in Jacksonville, 12 miles north of Anniston. There are 106 special sirens scattered around the county to blast a warning if the chemicals start to drift.
FEMA also has put special pressurization engines in the schools closest to the incinerator, so the air pressure in a large room at each school could be increased in the event of a chemical release so that no agent could get inside.
But while those schools are protected, Hutchings is still waiting.
On Thursday, Janet Shelby of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that C.E. Hanna School is still slated to get a new metal building with a pressurization engine.
"It will be done by October," Shelby said.
That's when the Army is hoping to start the burning 5 miles away. And that's when Army workers will reach into the "igloos" where the weapons are stored and begin withdrawing pallets of rockets and shells stacked together for 40 years.
In the worst case, one of the 77,000 M-55 rockets filled with sarin or VX would tip over, hit the ground and launch back into the igloo, igniting several thousand others and sending a cloud of deadly sarin toward the sky and out past the fence.
The sirens would go off and the fourth- and fifth-graders at C.E. Hanna would run to their new shelter before Hutchings, 63, turned on the pressurization machine.
But, first, he needs his building. And he is tired of waiting.
"You've got some people fighting over money like blind dogs in a meat house," Hutchings said. "But they're not doing anything for the common people." photo Anniston provides home shelter kits to residents. Shelter in Place
The home shelter kits provided to protect Anniston, Ala. residents from exposure to chemical nerve agents contain items that could be found at most hardware stores
1. A 10' X 25' roll of plastic sheeting
2. A roll of duct tape
3. A pair of scissors
4. A video explaining how to trim the plastic to fit windows and doors
The "Shelter in Place" kit also contains written instructions residents are to follow if they hear the chemical warning siren. Here they are:
1. Move inside immediately
2. Close all windows and doors
3. Turn off all ventilation systems
4. Go into and seal a room
5. Turn on the radio
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Enzyme key to chemical weapon weakness
Vulnerable mice help explain nerve-gas action.
17 March 2003
NATURE HELEN R. PILCHER
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030310/030310-14.html
The delayed effects of nerve poisons used in chemical warfare depend on a key molecule, new research with mice shows1.
The same mechanism in humans could mean that some people are genetically more susceptible to the delayed effects of nerve agents.
"You only need a low level of the toxin to get the effects," says biologist Carolee Barlow from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Understanding how the nerve agents work could help researchers to develop new antidotes.
Nerve agents called organophosphates cause the delayed poisoning. Organophosphate weapons such as sarin and VX are thought to have been used in Iraq during the Gulf War. Their latent effects have been implicated as a cause of the mysterious and controversial Gulf War syndrome suffered by veterans of the 1991 conflict.
Organophosphates are more commonly used as pesticides, so they often cause accidental poisoning. Within hours of exposure to high doses of organophosphates, victims suffer seizures and paralysis, after which breathing stops. Without medical intervention, most victims die.
About a week later, survivors go on to develop a second wave of symptoms: the result of the chemical destroying nerves, causing severe and irreversible paralysis.
Now Barlow's team find that mice with low levels of an enzyme called NTE are more sensitive to the effects of organophosphates. They were less mobile, had seizures and were twice as likely to die than normal animals.
What NTE does is far from clear, explains team member Christopher Winrow. But organophosphates may block its activity, causing the longer-term paralytic effects.
Humans also have a gene for NTE, suggesting we also have the same enzyme. If so, drugs to boost NTE levels might be used in advance of a nerve-gas attack, Winrow speculates.
In the short-term, however, the team's vulnerable mice should prove to be a valuable research tool. So far, chickens, which succumb to pesticide poisoning easily, have been used to study poisoning. But parallels between us and mice, our fellow mammals, are easier to draw.
Although more than 30,000 human cases of organophosphate-related paralysis have been studied, "there is no cure other than to avoid exposure", says David Ray, a toxicologist at the University of Nottingham, UK. References
Winrow, C.J. et al. Loss of neuropathy target esterase in mice links organophosphate exposure to hyperactivity. Nature Genetics, published online, doi:10.1038/ng1131 (2003).
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Ukraine May Send Chemical Unit to Kuwait
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Iraq-Kuwait.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma on Monday asked lawmakers to quickly approve sending the country's anti-chemical weapons battalion to Kuwait to help neutralize the effects of a potential Iraqi attack, an official said.
Kuchma offered last month to deploy the force in a bid to repair ties with the U.S., badly strained by allegations that Kuchma approved the sale of radar systems to Baghdad in 2000.
The force needs approval from Ukraine's parliament to mobilize. The U.S. has indicated it is ready to help fund the mission, which could cost up to $1 million a month, if lawmakers give the go-ahead.
Kuchma sent a letter seeking parliament's approval to dispatch the 531-man force, known as the 19th Army Battalion, to Kuwait, said Oleksandr Zadorozhnyi, Kuchma's representative in parliament, the Interfax news agency reported. The troops will be used to decontaminate areas where chemical, bacteriological or nuclear weapons might be used, the report said.
Parliament's National Security and Defense Committee could discuss the request as early as Wednesday and it could go to a full vote by Thursday, said committee chairman Hryhoriy Kryuchkov.
-------- colombia
The U.S. Is Wading Deeper into Colombia's War
MARCH 17, 2003
Business Week
By Geri Smith in Mexico City, with Suzanne Timmons in Bogotá and Paul Magnusson in Washington
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_11/c3824081_mz015.htm
It has been a rough year so far for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. On Feb. 7, the 15,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) detonated a car bomb at a Bogotá social club frequented by the country's political and business elite, killing 35. Then, on Feb. 13, FARC captured three Americans after their single-engine plane crashed. They were under contract with the U.S. government to carry out a survey of Colombian coca fields. Another American and a Colombian were shot dead at the scene.
These incidents are a direct response to Uribe's hard-line policies toward Colombia's rebel groups, which have been fighting the government for 40 years. But the new wave of violence is only stiffening the resolve of the President, elected overwhelmingly last year on a law-and-order platform. Uribe has an ace in the hole: the U.S.'s increasingly firm support. President George W. Bush, who phoned Uribe to discuss the hostage crisis on Mar. 3, sees him as Colombia's best hope for battling terrorism and the drug trade. Nearly all of the 500 tons of cocaine that enters the U.S. each year come from guerrilla-controlled regions in Colombia.
Under Bush, the U.S. is wading deeper into the Colombian conflict than ever before. Since Washington's "Plan Colombia" antinarcotics program began in 2000, the U.S. has given Colombia $1.9 billion in aid, making the country the third largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. This year, $651 million has been earmarked for Colombia. What's key is the lack of conditions attached to it: Before, U.S. money could only support the fight against the production and trade of coca. Now, Congress is allowing U.S. aid to be spent on training Colombian soldiers and police to fight insurgents. Since the September 11 attacks in the U.S., Washington has been ever more willing to help other nations fight their homegrown terrorists. Nearly 400 U.S. military personnel are currently in Colombia. Congress has authorized the deployment of 400 more civilians under U.S. government contract to chart coca plantations and report on rebel movements.
The cooperation is starting to bear fruit. The U.S. estimates that Colombian coca leaf production fell by 15% in 2002. And in December, the country's main paramilitary group, the 11,000-strong United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, agreed to a temporary cease-fire. In a Feb. 27 briefing to Congress, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Curtis Struble said: "We are making a difference, but the situation clearly requires sustained engagement." To prevent excesses by the military, the U.S. Congress has added human rights protections to its aid appropriation legislation. Still, some fear the U.S. will wander into a quagmire. "No one has really considered how big a job we're taking on," says Adam Isacson, an analyst at Washington's Center for International Policy.
Uribe is sure to apply more pressure. The 50-year-old former governor of Antioquia province stands in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Andres Pastrana, who acceded to a FARC demand for the creation of a demilitarized zone as a precondition for talks. Uribe rejected a similar rebel demand. Instead, he has signed off on an expanded U.S.-funded coca fumigation program. And he's moving ahead to recruit civilians as paid tipsters on guerrilla activities.
Just seven months into his term, Uribe has a long way to go. But 68% of Colombians back him so far. "For the first time in 40 years, there is a broad consensus that the guerrillas are illegitimate and must be fought and defeated," says Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogotá. Fought and defeated, that is, with Washington's full-fledged support.
-------- iraq
3000 bombs in 48 hours
By Jonathon Carr-Brown and Peter Almond
March 17, 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6138463%255E401,00.html
AMERICAN commanders have promised war as it has never been seen before. The aim, they say, is to shock the Iraqis into defeat.
If war is declared this week, planes and armoured units will tear across Iraq in a 48-hour blitzkrieg.
Cruise missiles will be launched from ships and submarines, British Tornado fighters will fire bunker-buster missiles, and electronic bombs will disrupt communications.
Harlan Ullman, a former US Navy pilot who co-wrote the book Shock and Awe, says it will be nothing like the last Gulf War, when reporters in Baghdad watched cruise missiles skim above the streets.
"I don't think anyone will be venturing outside during this attack," Ullman said.
"During the last Gulf War the allies launched 325 cruise and precision-guided bombs on the first day of a 40-day air campaign; now they are talking about 3000 in 48 hours."
The aim of the onslaught is to achieve "rapid dominance" psychologically and militarily. Ullman added: "The idea is to replicate the shock and awe created by a nuclear bomb, but using conventional weapons."
In 1991 only 10 per cent of the bombs were precision-guided. This time, more than 90 per cent will be guided by lasers homing in to beacons positioned by special forces.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said recently: "If asked to go into conflict in Iraq, what you'd like to do is have it be a short conflict. The best way to do that would be to have such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on the end was inevitable."
At the disposal of the supreme allied commander, General Tommy Franks, are the most sophisticated planes and most lethal payloads in existence.
The B2 stealth bomber carries JDAM (joint direct attack munition) precision-guided bombs. The F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter can drop GBU-28 bunker-busters; B-52s carry air-launched cruise missiles and JDAMs.
F-15Es launching new joint air-to-surface stand-off missiles (JASSM) and RAF Tornados unleashing Storm Shadow missiles will swarm into Iraqi airspace within minutes of General Franks giving the order to invade. Targets have been chosen to lessen destruction of infrastructure but maximise destruction of Saddam Hussein's machine.
B-52s and B2 stealth bombers will attack the bases of the elite Republican Guard and government offices. The US says their bombs are accurate to within centimetres and can be launched through cloud and storms. Just ahead of the US and British strike bombers will be up to 250 cruise missiles fired from US and British ships in the Gulf and Mediterranean.
Dozens of fighter-bombers will swoop on air defence sites to ensure total domination of the skies. Others will hunt for Iraq's remaining 300 aircraft.
US Delta Force teams are likely to be dropped into Baghdad if intelligence identifies Hussein's hideout. If he cannot be found they will work to capture key military and political figures.
Blackout bombs will pitch large areas into darkness without destroying power stations, and E-bombs dropped on military centres will fuse every computer within a 300m area.
Targets not likely to be bombed are suspected sites of weapons of mass destruction because President George W. Bush wants evidence intact. Also spared will be civil radio stations, bridges, railway stations, roads and most regular army units.
The SAS and US rangers will hunt 30 or so mobile Scud missile launchers aided by hundreds of unmanned aircraft equipped with spy cameras and missiles.
Airborne units will be flown by helicopter deep inside Iraq to cut fibre-optic cables and destroy communications between Hussein's commanders. Others will seize air bases in the Western Desert to provide refuelling stations for Apache attack helicopters.
By dawn, Iraq's military and political infrastructure is likely to have been shattered, say analysts. Leaders will have disappeared, entire military units will have been obliterated, power supplies will have shut down, but the visible damage will be surprisingly small.
At dawn hundreds of helicopters will appear as entire brigades are dropped deep into Iraq, the first mass ground operations, to take the oilfields.
With Turkey still refusing to admit US troops, General Franks is believed to be planning a two-pronged armoured thrust into Iraq from the south.
The first will loop from the west around the southern port of Basra, cutting off Iraq's second city. The second will start its left hook on Baghdad at the same time, speeding across the Western Desert to the outskirts of Baghdad within three days.
If Hussein has not capitulated, the political imperative to minimise civilian casualties will have to be put aside for street to street fighting.
From The Sunday Times
The Australian
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Soldiers face hazards from past Iraq wars
By Guy Taylor
March 17, 2003
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030317-10854401.htm
FORT HOOD, Texas - U.S. soldiers invading Iraq could head onto a battlefield littered with land mines and unexploded bombs - some dropped by American warplanes.
Iraqi forces have planted millions of mines during various conflicts over the past 20 years, and military officials say an estimated 20 percent of bombs dropped by U.S. planes hit the ground without exploding.
"If you drop 1,000 bombs, up to 200 of those actually may not explode," said Sgt. 1st Class Gary E. Rhiner, a member of a combat engineer battalion standing ready at Fort Hood to deploy to the Middle East with the Army's 4th Infantry Division.
"There are numerous reasons why [the bombs] don't go off," he said. "Not everything is reliable, and that includes not only ours but also the Iraqi bombs."
Soldiers are given a thorough education on the dangers of unexploded ordnance. Additionally, specially trained Explosive Ordinance Disposal units accompany forces deployed to the region.
Each unit is "kind of like the bomb squad in a police department ... trained to identify all the military explosives or civilian explosives out there," Sgt. Rhiner said.
Infantry troops are taught to "keep hands off" unexploded bombs, said Sgt. Rhiner, who last week briefed about three dozen journalists on the dangers of land mines and other unexploded ordnance.
The journalists are waiting near Fort Hood to deploy with the 4th Infantry Division. The 4th Infantry is made up of about 20,000 troops originally bound for southern Turkey to open a northern front against Iraq in case of war.
While the 4th Infantry's heavy equipment sits on ships outside Turkey, the Turkish parliament has not given approval for U.S. troops to enter the country. Should permission be granted this week, troops most likely will scramble to fly into Turkey and eventually may head south toward Baghdad through the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where the land mine problem is significant.
As many as 2,500 people have been killed by mines in the Kurdish region since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Mines caused 81 of the 1,364 total U.S. casualties, published reports said.
Iraq's has refused since 1991 to cooperate with the United Nations in calculating the size of the land mine problem.
"We fully anticipate that from the time we cross the border [into Iraq], we're going to hit mines," Sgt. Rhiner said.
With detection tactics sometimes rudimentary, troops are taught to avoid areas that are known to be or show indications of having been mined.
They are trained to look for fresh patches of pavement on roads, pieces of wood or other debris on a road, signs placed on trees, posts or stakes, tire tracks that stop unexplainably, an unkept yard or field, or areas simply avoided by local civilians.
When troops do encounter land mines, which can be expected particularly around enemy military posts, the first step is to mark the area with signs. Next, a disposal unit is called in to identify the precise type of explosive found and either blow it up in place or attempt to remove it.
But in war, things don't always go as planned. The situation can be complicated in the open battlefield by unexploded bombs.
Perhaps the most dangerous ones are the individual bomblets packed into cluster bombs dropped by American and allied planes during the Persian Gulf war. Because of their small size, they easily can go unnoticed. Tens of thousands of such bombs were dropped in the 1991 Gulf war.
"One of the reasons [the threat] is so serious is that soldiers have a natural curiosity," Sgt. Rhiner said. "We're just afraid they'll pick something up or touch something they're not supposed to or, God forbid, try to collect some type of war trophy."
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The Misunderstood Link Between Al-Qaeda and Iraq
by Ahmad Faruqui
March 17, 2003,
Media Monitors Network
http://www.mediamonitors.net/ahmadfaruqui6.html
Arguing that there is a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, the Bush administration convinced Congress last October about the need to invade Iraq as an act of self-defense. A slender majority of Americans now believe Iraq was behind the terrorist acts of 9/11, and would most likely support such a war, with or without UN approval. Unfortunately, like a mirage in the desert, this link is an illusion. There is a real link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but it is very different.
It is a fact of history that the US decision to prosecute the Gulf War in 1991 spawned al-Qaeda. From the very beginning, Osama bin Laden's refrain has been that western forces on Arab soil have compromised Arab sovereignty and polluted Islam's holy lands. Al-Qaeda played on these grievances to recruit young Arabs to its cause. By pointing out the pro-Israeli bias in American foreign policy, Osama gave his message a grassroots appeal on the Arab street. Through the clever use of historical symbols, he has sought to position himself as a modern-day Salahuddin who would wrest control of Jerusalem for the Muslims. Contrary to the image portrayed in the US media, Osama has not mounted an attack on American freedoms. It is a comment on the depth of anti-American sentiment in the region that Osama has been able to call his violent campaign of terror against civilian Americans a jihad, even though Muslim clerics have said that such a terrorist campaign cannot be interpreted as a jihad under Islamic law.
It is useful to recall that the Gulf War was waged by the US to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It had UN support, and the forces that went in to fight the armies of Saddam Hussein comprised a large coalition of forces drawn from several Muslim and Arab nations, in addition to the US, Britain and Australia. Even then al-Qaeda was able to portray that war as a crusade, giving credence to Samuel Huntington's theory about an inevitable clash of civilizations.
This new war has proven profoundly unpopular around the globe. It has been opposed by the 116 nations who belong to the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of the Islamic Council and the Arab League, in addition to several key European nations. It appears unlikely that the UN Security Council will support the war. Prosecuting such a war would breach the UN Charter, according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, stripping it of even the veneer of legitimacy.
The coming war would to be fought largely with US troops, with assistance from Australian and British troops. Neither Arab armies, nor any third world armies, are likely be in the "coalition of the willing," belying the allegation that Iraq poses a threat to its neighbors. A just-released survey by Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland shows that less than ten percent of the Arab population supports a war against Iraq, and very few people believe that the war would help bring democracy to the region.
President Bush has expressed a hope that this war would lead to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, finds much that is troubling in this assertion: "The president's bellicose rhetoric and his intention to invade an Arab country and dismantle its regime by force, however despicable that regime may be, while pretending to ignore the Palestinian tragedy provides a platform for unrest throughout the region."[1] In retrospect, the war will be seen as a colonial war of the 19th-century genre. Historians are likely to call it "a war to end all peace," an appellation they have used to capture the strategic myopia of the First World War.
Once hostilities commence, it is likely that Iraqi civilian casualties will occur on a large scale. According to published accounts, the US will fire more than 3,000 cruise missiles on Iraq within the first 48 hours, an amount that exceeds the entire number that was fired in the Gulf War. More casualties will occur as US forces fight their way into Baghdad, fueling resentment on the Arab street. The incoming prime minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, worries that "a war against Iraq would be seen in the Islamic world as unfair, and if it causes Muslims to join the extremists," then moderate Muslim governments would be threatened everywhere.
In other words, the war would succeed in accomplishing the very opposite of what President Bush has sought to achieve.[2] The US president has made a virtue of regime change, and has compared the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after the Second World War with what he is about to undertake in Iraq. However, 21 contemporary historians from Europe and North America have termed this concept "a pick-and-mix history of regime change." In a letter to the Financial Times, they say that Iraq cannot be compared with either post-war Germany and Japan, since it differs from them in its endowment of natural resources, borders, institutions, religion, political culture and ethnicity.
The US is making rapid strides against al-Qaeda. As a result of Pakistani cooperation, it has apprehended or killed many of its key leaders and appears to be rapidly closing in on the top two. With the capture of the third man, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the organization may have lost its operational capability to mount "spectacular" acts of terrorism. However, all of this will come to naught if the US invades Iraq.
It is likely that this war will add new credibility to grievances about loss of Arab sovereignty. It will complicate the resolution of the Palestinian problem, leading to a rise in anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world. In a fulfillment of the law of unintended consequences, this war may spawn a second-generation of terrorists even more determined than al-Qaeda to evict US forces from the Middle East, thus defeating the very purposes for which it is about to be fought.
Speaking at Tufts University last week, Bush Sr. said that any military action against Iraq should be backed by international unity. He said the case against Iraq this time was weaker than in 1991, and urged his son to build bridges with France and Germany, rather than to bear grudges.[3] Instead of listening to the neo-conservatives in the administration, Bush Jr. should take a few moments to reflect on his father's advice. Not only would this be a patriotic thing to do, it would also be very Christian. And it may well lead to a safer America.
Notes:
1. "Peace in the Middle East cannot wait," Financial Times, March 11, 2003.
2. John Burton, "Iraq war 'risks alienating moderate Muslims,'" Financial Times, March 12, 2003.
3. Chris Smith, "Question Blair's policy, not his leadership," Financial Times, March 12, 2003.
The author is an economist in Palo Alto, California. He lived in Pakistan during the 1965 and 1971 wars. He has written on Pakistan's Strategic Myopia in the RUSI Journal, and reviewed Mazari's book, Journey to Disillusionment for International Affairs. He has authored "Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan." He is a Fellow of the American Institute of International Studies in California.
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Iraqi dissidents turn to sabotage
By Con Coughlin
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-24999690.htm
LONDON - Open acts of defiance by opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime have intensified in the past week, with saboteurs carrying out attacks against Iraq's railway system and protesters openly calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator.
The most blatant act of sabotage took place 20 miles south of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where members of the Iraqi opposition blew up a stretch of track on the Mosul-Baghdad railway, causing the derailment of a train.
"Until recently such acts of open defiance were very rare and were dealt with harshly," a Foreign Office official commented yesterday. "But as Saddam concentrates his energies on trying to protect his regime from attack, Iraqi opposition groups are becoming more audacious in their attacks."
Before fleeing back to their base in Kurdistan, the saboteurs left piles of leaflets by the side of the track urging the Iraqi soldiers who were sent to investigate the explosion to join the "international alliance to liberate Iraq" from "Saddam the criminal." In a separate incident, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a train illegally transporting fuel from Baghdad to Syria.
The only area where Saddam can rely with confidence on the loyalty of his security forces is in the Ba'ath Party's heartland around Baghdad. In an attempt to reassert his authority, Saddam issued a directive last week ordering Iraqi officials not to give up their positions and flee the country.
To set an example, members of Saddam's security forces arrested a civil servant in the al-Hurriyya suburb of Baghdad on suspicion of preparing to leave the country. The official was tied to a pole in the street and passers-by were ordered to watch as his tongue was cut out and he was left to bleed to death.
Demonstrations are reported to have taken place in Kirkuk, where an estimated crowd of 20,000 marched on the Ba'ath Party's office demanding Saddam's overthrow. Three posters of the Iraqi leader were torn down, and a grenade was thrown at the government building. One senior Ba'ath official was reported killed.
There were unconfirmed reports that another demonstration by Iraqi Shi'ites in the holy city of Kerbala last weekend was violently suppressed after the intervention of militiamen loyal to Saddam.
The escalation in attacks by Iraqi opposition groups has been accompanied by widespread acts of anti-Saddam vandalism. Posters of the Iraqi president, which adorn every public building, are being openly defaced and vandalized throughout the country.
Until recently, anyone caught carrying out such acts would have received a death sentence. But the mounting acts of open defiance against Saddam's regime is indicative of the growing confidence being displayed by the main Iraqi opposition groups.
----
U.S. seeks surrender of Iraqi leaders
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030317-26230830.htm
The U.S. government has secretly contacted a majority of Iraqi Republican Guard commanders to persuade them to surrender or refrain from fighting once the allied march toward Baghdad begins, a U.S. official says.
The United States has received "pretty good" feedback. But American forces will not know for sure of any surrenders until the shooting starts.
"We know who the leaders are," says the official. "It's not that tough to get in touch with them. E-mail. Cell phones. Any way that is possible and plausible."
Analysts have talked frequently about how the planned invasion of Iraq will be different from Operation Desert Storm during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, when the main objective was to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait, not to conquer Baghdad.
One big difference is the way the U.S. military is attempting to communicate with Iraq's military beforehand to negotiate surrender or even to persuade commanders to turn on the country's leader, Saddam Hussein. There were no such efforts in 1991, Gulf war veterans say.
The communications are made in two ways: secret messages and psychological warfare, in which aircraft drop leaflets and mount propaganda radio broadcasts.
"There is some preliminary information that the [psychological warfare] campaign is having some early successes, especially at changing minds in the Iraqi regular army, which is the farthest down the food chain in the Iraqi security hierarchy," says a military officer at the Pentagon.
Iraq's ground forces are divided along a three-tier structure.
There is the regular army - a poorly equipped force of about 160,000 that is not expected to put up much resistance. The Pentagon expects the great majority of these soldiers to retreat or surrender, as they did at the start of the Desert Storm ground invasion. The regular army is Iraq's first line of defense against 140,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers in Kuwait.
The second layer is the Republican Guards, Saddam's best-trained, conventional ground forces totaling six divisions, or about 60,000 soldiers. They are armed with Soviet T-72 tanks, armored personnel carriers and shoulder-fired missiles.
Vice President Richard B. Cheney said on "Meet the Press" yesterday that the military does not expect much of a struggle from the regular army or the Republican Guard.
The greatest resistance, he said, would be with the new Special Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, which closely guard Saddam's regime. "My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely, as well, to want to avoid conflict with U.S. forces and are likely to step aside," Mr. Cheney said.
He added: "I don't want to convey to the American people the idea that this is a cost-free operation. Nobody can say that. I do think there's no doubt about the outcome. There's no question about who is going to prevail if there is military action."
Asked how Iraqi units will know to signal if they do not wish to fight, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week:
"They are being communicated with privately at the present time. They will be communicated with in a more public way. And they will receive instructions so that they can behave in a way that will be seen and understood as being nonthreatening. And they will be not considered combatants, and they will be handled in a way that they are no longer part of the problem."
The U.S. official, who asked not to be named but is involved in war planning, says one estimate is that about a third of the Republican Guard units will surrender, a third will fight briefly and then quit, and the remainder will extend the fight for several days until they are destroyed.
If Iraqi commanders do not signal surrender, by, for example, keeping the gun barrels of their tanks pointed toward the ground, then "we'll attack."
Iraq's third defensive layer is the relatively new Special Republican Guard, consisting of about 12,000 to 15,000 troops. Saddam created the corps in the mid-1990s to shore up his, and the city's, security. The U.S. planners think that some of these units will conclude that the war is lost and turn on Saddam.
Officials say the siege of Baghdad is likely to turn out to be the most important development of the war. War plans call for sending Marines and Army units from Kuwait, south of Iraq, and from the country's west and north, to ring the capital and force a surrender.
The U.S. official says the city can be encircled in four days, as Navy and Air Force strike aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles destroy key military targets.
"How long we will surround Baghdad is anybody's guess," the official says. Gen. Tommy Franks, who will command the assault, wants to avoid the confusion of urban combat.
Another U.S. official says the key objective is to seal off Saddam's power bases - Baghdad and his hometown of Tikrit, which is protected by some of his most loyal commanders. Other cities, such as the port of Basra, may fall on their own once Iraqis see the tide of battle going against Saddam.
"I think from the intelligence I've seen I think it's way too early to tell whether there's going to be a fight for Baghdad or not," Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, said earlier this month. "If the regime cedes the rest of the country then in many people's view it's no longer a regime. They're lost before things even started."
•Audrey Hudson contributed to this report.
----
Baghdad Girds for Battle, Rebellion
Troops, Party Cadres Intensify Defenses
By Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35355-2003Mar16?language=printer
BAGHDAD, March 16 -- Fearing that a U.S.-led invasion may be only days away, Iraqi authorities stepped up defensive preparations in and around Baghdad today, emptying government ministries of documents and equipment, assigning Baath Party cadres to police neighborhoods and deploying more elite troops across the city.
The measures appear to be an attempt by the Iraqi government to weather an intense bombing campaign and confront U.S. ground forces at the city's edge. If that fails and American units push into the city, or if U.S. commanders opt to airdrop soldiers directly into Baghdad, the government here hopes to mount an aggressive, block-by-block resistance.
The government's strategy also appears aimed at preventing internal rebellion during a U.S. attack -- and in the days leading up to it. Officials from President Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party have spread word that the city will soon be under a 24-hour curfew and that people will not be able to leave their homes without special permission.
But crucial questions remain unanswered: Will the army around Baghdad resist a U.S. invasion, and will Iraqis -- elite troops, popular militias and well-armed residents -- defend the capital? In its planning and rhetoric, the government appears to be counting on both.
As a strategy, the government envisions successive rings of defense around the capital, analysts and diplomats say. Those defenses will rely on the regular army and elite Republican Guard divisions.
"The defense of Baghdad is going to begin long before you get to the outskirts of Baghdad," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
People who have traveled outside Baghdad recently have reported seeing large concentrations of military equipment in the desert near the city, including Soviet-era battle tanks, artillery pieces and antiaircraft guns. Some of the armaments are half-buried in the sand while others are sitting in the open.
Rows of trenches ringing the city have been made deeper and wider to impede U.S. military vehicles. Diplomats and others here say they believe that some of the trenches may be filled with oil and set on fire.
Soldiers have been digging pits near bridges and other sensitive installations. These also appear designed to be filled with oil, perhaps in the belief that clouds of thick, black smoke will interfere with laser-guided bombs. But unlike during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, many U.S. bombs now use geographic-positioning technology and not lasers for guidance, making them impervious to smoke.
Notably absent from public view are antiaircraft guns, leading to speculation that they have been placed high atop buildings or hidden around the city.
But other defensive measures are visible across the capital. Sandbags have appeared at intersections and outside ministries and government offices. Ditches line some streets. Masking tape, applied in the shape of an X, covers the windows of hotels and stores.
The government has installed generators at more than 100 water pumping stations across the country, including Baghdad's two facilities, according to aid officials. Hospitals have stocked up on supplies, though aid officials noted that equipment to handle war casualties was in short supply. And at the Information Ministry and other government buildings, workers have been emptying offices of computer equipment, filing cabinets and documents.
Realizing that it will have to confront a far better-equipped invading force, the Iraqi government regards urban warfare as its best -- and perhaps only -- chance of survival. It is depending on tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, armed only with Kalashnikovs, sniping at U.S. soldiers from houses and apartment buildings.
"The Americans are underestimating the Iraqis," a senior Iraqi official said. "We may not have helicopters and fighter planes, but we don't need them to win. . . . All we need are our guns."
Iraqi television broadcast footage today from a meeting Hussein held with senior military commanders in which he told them they would survive a U.S. attack in the same way his forces did in 1991, when President Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, ordered U.S. troops to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait.
"As the father has tried and failed, the son will try and fail because you are in the right," Hussein told his top commanders. He vowed that Iraq would mount a "great confrontation" if invaded.
"When the enemy opens the war on a large scale it should realize that the battle between us will be waged wherever there is sky, earth and water anywhere in the world," he said as leaders of the United States, Britain and Spain met in the Azores islands and declared Monday a final day of diplomacy to resolve the crisis.
It is uncertain, however, just how aggressively soldiers and civilians would fight. Many here say they intend to mount an intense resistance, fighting not so much for Hussein but because they chafe at the idea of foreigners occupying Iraq. Yet many others quietly dismiss the notion that Iraqis will put up a strong fight, insisting that much of the country's demoralized army will opt to surrender, while most civilians will choose simply to stay at home. But still others here predict that throngs of Iraqis might rise up and challenge the government themselves.
Perhaps mindful of that, the government's defensive strategy in Baghdad also appears aimed at quelling any internal uprising.
In Saddam City, a sprawling, largely Shiite Muslim slum that has experienced unrest in the past, the shape of that strategy has begun to emerge. At least two sandbag emplacements have gone up at every intersection, where fetid sewage washes up against the curb. Others sit at the entrances to trash-strewn alleys and outside Health Ministry clinics and Baath Party offices.
The government has turned to the Baath Party to enforce order in Saddam City and elsewhere. One aid official said a party supervisor was designated for each neighborhood -- and at times, each block -- with the authority to handle requests for food or medical help from residents. The supervisor is said to drill weekly with groups of four or five members.
But some residents have pointed to the experience of the Gulf War, when as many as one-third of the party's civil defense functionaries deserted their posts at the peak of the five-week U.S. air assault.
The fear of a power vacuum has chilled many in Baghdad, and some in the city darkly speculate that prisoners released under a broad government-ordered amnesty last October will exploit chaos and anarchy that could last weeks, even months. That anxiety seems to weigh heavier on residents than the potential destruction of a U.S. attack.
"They definitely don't rely on the people in the Baath Party to hold the crowds," one resident said. "They're going to do it themselves. Everyone has their own weapons, small weapons, but enough to defend their own street and neighborhood."
Over the weekend, he said, he purchased 16 magazines for his two automatic rifles, which he taught his wife how to fire. The cost of ammunition, he said, has gone up fourfold in recent weeks. He said he expects he may have to use the weapons.
"In my neighborhood, it's up to me and the boys in the neighborhood to keep the peace, to make sure it's safe and to make sure there's no looting, no chaos. Anything that affects my street is going to affect my house, definitely."
He then quoted an Iraqi proverb: "If you are going to die, then die in your house."
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Saddam vows to take war to world
March 17, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-93585646.htm
BAGHDAD - Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein warned yesterday that if Iraq is attacked, it will take the war anywhere in the world, "wherever there is sky, land or water."
U.N. weapons inspectors flew most of their helicopters out of Iraq; Germany advised its citizens to leave the country immediately and said it would shut down its embassy in Baghdad.
Residents of the Iraqi capital lined up for gasoline and snapped up canned food and bottled water. People mobbed pharmacies to buy antibiotics and tranquilizers. Workers sandbagged fighting positions outside government buildings.
Saddam also divided the country into four military zones.
The military zoning announced overnight by the ruling Revolution Command Council (RCC) headed by Saddam was intended as a "means to rebuff and destroy any aggression if the villains carried it out," the state news agency INA said.
The move came as British, Spanish and U.S. leaders gathered in the Azores for an emergency summit on the Iraq crisis.
Despite the news of efforts to bolster its military defenses, Iraq said it was preparing to hand the United Nations a new report on anthrax.
It also offered documents on mobile labs that the United States and Britain charge are used to produce chemical and biological agents and destroyed two more of its banned Al-Samoud 2 missiles yesterday.
"The [anthrax] report will be given to the U.N. in two days," presumably tomorrow, a Baghdad-based diplomat who requested anonymity said. Iraq has said it destroyed its anthrax stocks in 1991.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix received a 25-page letter from Iraq Friday containing a report on the VX chemical agents it also says it destroyed 12 years ago.
This was followed yesterday by pictures and videotapes of mobile laboratories that Baghdad said are strictly for civilian purposes, the U.N. arms inspectors' spokesman in Baghdad, Hiro Ueki, told reporters.
As war appeared increasingly likely, Iraq's military carve-up put the central region around Baghdad and Saddam's hometown of Tikrit under the command of his younger son, Qusay, who heads the elite Republican Guard.
The northern region, including areas under the control of Kurdish rebels, was placed in the hands of Iraq's No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim, while Saddam's cousin Ali Hasan al-Majid was put in charge of the overwhelmingly Shi'ite Muslim southern zone, including the provinces of Basra, Dhi Qar and Muthanna.
The other, mainly Shi'ite, zone of Furat al-Awsat, south of the capital, was placed under the command of RCC member Mizban Khader Hadi, who was also entrusted with control of the border guards.
The military zones will take "direct" orders from Saddam, who is also RCC secretary-general and commander in chief of the armed forces.
The zones were granted broad powers, but recourse to the "air force, surface-to-surface missiles and the anti-aircraft defenses" remains in the hands of the Iraqi president.
There was no immediate response to Iraq's invitation to chief U.N. weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei on Saturday to come to Baghdad and discuss new evidence of its accelerated disarmament.
"We're studying the contents of it and discussing it," Mr. Blix told CNN.
But in a sign of the mounting problems that the U.S. military buildup on Iraq's borders is causing for the U.N. mission, the world body confirmed it had been forced to withdraw five out of eight helicopters used by its arms experts for surprise inspections and aerial surveillance.
Insurers were no longer prepared to cover the aircraft, U.N. officials said.
----
Effects of Iraq's gas attack linger
March 17, 2003
(Agence France-Presse)
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-28631116.htm
NICOSIA, Cyprus - About 5,000 Kurds, mostly women and children, perished 15 years ago yesterday a few minutes after Iraqi fighter jets spread poison gas over Halabja in Iraq's Kurdistan region.
Iraq, which was at war with Iran at the time, became angry with the Kurds after fighters from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, with the help of Iran, took over Halabja - an agricultural town of about 40,000, 155 miles from Baghdad but seven miles from the Iranian border.
The Iraqi army started by bombing the Halabja area with artillery and fighter planes, which led the Kurdish fighters to retreat to the surrounding hills, leaving women and children in town.
In the afternoon of March 16, 1988, Iraqi jets swooped over the town dropping chemical bombs in a raid that lasted about five hours, Kurdish eyewitnesses said.
This was to be the largest gas attack on civilians, analysts said. About 5,000 were killed, 75 percent of them women and children, and more than 7,000 were injured, according to Kurdish estimates.
"Even today, people are still dying of cancer and leukemia, suffering from asthma and sterility and miscarriages. The impact of this attack will be felt for many generations," a Kurdish physician said recently.
At the time, word of what took place at Halabja became known quickly to the outside world as Kurdish fighters coming down from the surrounding hills alerted foreign journalists and photographers.
The world was awakened by images of dozens of Kurds lying lifeless in front of their homes, many with blood pouring out of their noses as they attempted to flee the attacks.
The Iraqis had used a deadly cocktail of mustard gas, and nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX, according to testimony given to the Senate by Dr. Christine Gosden, a genetics specialist at the University of Liverpool, who visited Halabja in 1998.
"The occurrences of genetic mutations and carcinogenesis in this population appear comparable with those who were one to two kilometers from ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and show that the chemicals used in the attack have a general effect on the body similar to that of ionizing radiation," Dr. Gosden said.
It was not the first time Iraq used its arsenal of chemical weapons. An estimated 20,000 Iranian soldiers were killed in Iraqi chemical attacks from 1983 to 1988, said a statement by the State Department on the 10th anniversary of the Halabja attack.
"The only way to ensure that the Saddam Hussein regime will never again be able to possess or use weapons of mass destruction, against the Iraqi people or anyone else, is for U.N. weapons inspectors to have immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to inspect any site in Iraq," the State Department said.
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U.S. Troops Working With Kurdish Fighters
Groups May Help Special Forces Plan Airstrikes for Advance Into Northern Iraq
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35295-2003Mar16.html
IRBIL, Iraq, March 16 -- U.S. Special Forces troops are working with Kurdish military units with the aim of penetrating Iraqi-held territory once an American invasion begins, spotting targets for U.S. airstrikes and laying the groundwork for seizing Kirkuk, a strategic oil city in northern Iraq, Kurdish officials say. The deployment marks the first known instance of American forces blending with Kurdish units, which are based in a haven beyond the control of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government. Several dozen U.S. troops are already stationed in the Kurdish zones, largely invisible to the public, the officials say. More will begin arriving in the next few days, one Kurdish official said. The precise identity of the U.S. forces could not be determined.
In interviews with several Kurdish officials over the past few weeks, the outlines of cooperation with the U.S. forces have become clear, despite repeated public assertions that armed Kurdish forces were meant to confine themselves to the autonomous zone. Kurdish officials have long expressed their desire for a military link with the Americans.
The joint work is taking place both in the zone ruled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, and with its sometime rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Kurdish officials said. Planning began a year ago, one Kurdish official said.
"We are willing to cooperate with anyone who is going to bring democracy to Iraq," said Masrur Barzani, who heads the KDP's intelligence department.
The Special Forces troops have joined Kurdish units that will lead them into areas around Kirkuk that were once populated largely by Kurds, the officials said. "That is what is happening," said a high-ranking Kurdish military official. The Iraqi government has driven tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians from the region over the years.
The Kurds lack the technology to call in U.S. airstrikes, Kurdish officials said. "The Americans have the technology and the training. We have the numbers and the morale, and we know the area," said Azad Miran, chief of KDP military operations. "Spotting is vital. It has to happen."
Kurdish leaders have pledged to the United States to keep their forces from entering Kirkuk, a city of 1 million residents -- about half of them Kurds -- 150 miles north of Baghdad. "It is in our interest to coordinate with our friends," Barzani said.
A Kurdish move into Kirkuk would upset Turkey, which fears that the growth of Kurdish influence in post-Hussein Iraq would reawaken nationalist aspirations among its own large Kurdish minority.
The Iraqi Kurds are seeking to cement the autonomy they have had since a failed uprising against Baghdad a dozen years ago. After Iraqi forces put down the revolt, the United States and Britain guaranteed the security of a broad swath of northern Iraq by patrolling the skies with fighter jets. The Turks also claim Kirkuk on historical grounds and have threatened to occupy it themselves if Kurdish forces move in.
U.S.-Kurdish cooperation is going ahead despite Turkey's reluctance to reach agreement with Washington over joining the anti-Hussein drive. Talks among Turkish officials, Kurdish representatives and U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad are scheduled to get underway in Ankara on Monday. The Bush administration had planned to send 60,000 troops into northern Iraq, but Turkey has withheld permission for the troops to pass through its territory.
If Turkey intervenes in northern Iraq, Kurdish cooperation with the United States will be disrupted, say the Kurds, who have threatened to take up arms against the Turks. "Having Turkish troops in Kurdistan means war. It would be a major war," KDP leader Massoud Barzani predicted in an interview.
War fever has begun to grip the 31/2 million Kurds in the north. The economic situation in the Kurdish region is dire, and the prolonged advance toward war has dried up commerce. The city of Irbil shelters 100,000 Kurdish refugees from the Kirkuk area, and they are eager to go home.
Kurdish military forces, known as pesh merga, or "those who face death," have been mustered at bases throughout the region. KDP forces plan to occupy towns and villages in a large arc from a point near Mosul in the north to areas south of Kirkuk that were once home to Kurdish civilians. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan troops would move from the eastern side of the Kurdish autonomous zone. Pesh merga commanders expect U.S. air power to destroy fixed Iraqi positions and artillery that could threaten Kurdish towns in the zone.
Commanders predict that Arab settlers brought to the region by the Hussein government will flee if war breaks out. The pesh merga will not enter traditionally Arab villages, and it is unclear who will take Arab towns near Mosul.
Iraqi troops in Mosul and Kirkuk are under the command of Izzat Ibrahim Douri, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and one of Hussein's top deputies. He led Iraqi troops that put down the 1991 uprising in Kirkuk. Kurdish officials predicted that Iraqi forces defending the countryside and outskirts of both cities would fold quickly. The areas south of the frontier between Kurdish and Iraqi territory are manned by regular Iraqi troops from the First and Fifth Army Corps. A mechanized and armored Iraqi Republican Guard division has withdrawn from Mosul, officials say. Another Republican Guard division remains in Kirkuk, but one Kurdish official said he expected that unit to withdraw toward Baghdad if bombs begin to fall.
"The Iraqis will try to draw the Americans deep into Iraq and inflict casualties," the official said.
If Turkey maintains its refusal to let U.S. forces enter northern Iraq from its territory, the bulk of Americans assaulting Kirkuk would come from western Iraq, the Kurds say. Kurdish officials have also predicted that clandestine Kurdish forces in Kirkuk would revolt, complicating the Iraqi defense.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia Says War in Iraq a Mistake and Illegal
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-russia.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia called for last-minute attempts to solve the Iraq crisis peacefully on Monday, saying any resort to force would be both a mistake and illegal.
Russia has aligned itself with France and Germany in calling for further U.N. arms inspections to ensure that Iraq is free of what the United States says are illegal weapons. Like France, a fellow permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, it has threatened to veto any new resolution endorsing military action.
President Vladimir Putin, speaking before the United States and Britain said they would no longer seek a vote for a new resolution endorsing force, said any approach other than peaceful disarmament would be a mistake.
``We would like to resolve it through political and diplomatic means,'' he told reporters. ``I am convinced that any other solution would be a mistake.''
Putin, who has made infrequent statements at home on the crisis, said war ``will not only bring about human casualties but also destabilize the international community in general.
``There are 20 million Muslims living in Russia. We cannot afford not to consider their opinion and we fully share their alarm,'' he added.
Both Washington and Britain say military action now against Iraq would be legal.
But Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, speaking after the abandonment of Washington's bid to seek U.N. endorsement for war, said existing U.N. Security Council resolutions gave no one any legal right to launch a strike on Iraq.
``We believe the use of force against Iraq, especially with reference to previous resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, has no grounds, including legal grounds,'' Ivanov told reporters.
NO ENDORSEMENT FROM CURRENT RESOLUTION
Ivanov said resolution 1441 of last November, under which U.N. weapons inspections were resumed, gave no endorsement.
``Resolution 1441, to which so many references are made, does not give anyone the right to use force automatically,'' he said.
That resolution, approved unanimously, spoke of ``serious consequences'' if Iraq failed to comply with demands to disarm.
Ivanov said the resolution contained a clause obliging Security Council members, if necessary, to meet immediately to ensure Iraq's strict implementation of its terms.
There was still a chance, he said, for diplomacy to succeed.
The Foreign Ministry said no decision had been made on whether Ivanov would fly to New York to press an 11th hour case. France, Germany and Russia called at the weekend for a Tuesday meeting of ministers of Security Council members.
Georgy Mamedov, a deputy foreign minister, said Russia would do its best to minimize differences with Washington.
``Russia will not launch an anti-American campaign, but will try its utmost to return the situation to a proper legal basis,'' Mamedov was quoted as telling Itar-Tass news agency.
``We will not gloat over a tragic mistake by the United States or start a noisy campaign. Our relations are too important for international peace to hold them hostage to differences over the Iraq problem.''
--------
Russia Says No Legal Grounds for Force Against Iraq
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-russia-ivanov.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Monday existing U.N. Security Council resolutions gave no one any legal right to launch a strike on Iraq.
``We believe the use of force against Iraq, especially with reference to previous resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, has no grounds, including legal grounds,'' Ivanov told reporters.
He was speaking after Britain and the United States said at the United Nations that they would no longer seek a vote for a second resolution endorsing the use of force against Iraq.
Both countries say military action now against Iraq would be legal.
Ivanov said U.N. Security resolution 1441, under which U.N. inspectors have been searching for suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, gave no authorization for an attack.
``Resolution 1441, to which so many references are made, does not give anyone the right to use force automatically,'' he said.
That resolution, approved unanimously last November, spoke of ``serious consequences'' if Iraq failed to comply with demands to disarm.
But Ivanov said the resolution contained a clause obliging Security Council members, if necessary, to meet immediately to ensure Iraq's strict implementation of its terms.
Russia, aligned in the Iraq crisis with France and Germany, has consistently said the inspectors' work has been producing results and should be allowed to continue.
Like France, Russia had pledged to use its veto as a permanent Security Council member to block any resolution which would endorse the use of force against Iraq.
-------- un
U.S. does not have a U.N. mandate
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
March 17, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030317-88203288.htm#3
I would like to respond to Friday's editorial "Before it's too late," which asserted that an American invasion of Iraq would be legal under international law and that the United States "already has a U.N.-sanctioned legal right to commence war on Iraq." To the contrary, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 is not self-executing, and does not authorize the United States or any other country to launch a war against Iraq. Resolution 1441 gave Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations."
But, it did not say anything about other countries using force against Iraq. The only mention Resolution 1441 made of other countries ("member states" in U.N. lingo), was to request that member states help the inspectors by telling them what we know. As to what would happen if Iraq failed to take advantage of this "final opportunity," the resolution said only that the Security Council would convene immediately upon receipt of the inspectors' reports, "in order to consider the situation." This resolution shows the Security Council's intent to meet again to decide what to do. It is explicitly not self-executing, and does not authorize the use of military force.
The Security Council knows how to authorize force when it wants to. Resolution 678, issued on Nov. 29, 1990, included the following language: "authorizes member states" ... "to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660" (which required Iraq to leave Kuwait) "unless Iraq on or before 15 January 1991 fully implements" previous resolutions requiring it to withdraw from Kuwait.
Resolution 678 was an authorization to go to war. Resolution 1441 is no such thing.
Neither is it correct to say that this country may legally invade Iraq in the exercise of our right of self-defense. Yes, there is a right to preempt an attack, but this right only applies when an attack is so imminent there is no time to get the Security Council to act first. Iraq is not about to attack us. The only reasons we have to view Iraq as a threat are that Iraq invaded Kuwait - 12 years ago - and that Iraq has dangerous weapons. If this was enough to open the door to starting a war, virtually every country in the world could attack any other country and call it self-defense.
An attack on another country that is not on behalf of the Security Council and is not in self-defense is a violation of the U.N. Charter, a document this country took the lead in creating and that we are legally bound to follow. Attacking Iraq without a Security Council decision authorizing such an attack would put us in the same category as Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. That would be a sad day for America, and a sad day for the world.
STEVEN BEEN
Tallahassee, Fla.
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U.N. Chief Orders Inspectors to Leave Iraq
State Dept. Pulls Nonessential Personnel From Region
Monday, March 17, 2003
Washington Post; 12:57 PM
UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced Monday he will order U.N. weapons inspectors and humanitarian staff to leave Iraq.
Annan made the announcement after telling a closed Security Council meeting of his plans. He did not say when the evacuations would begin.
"I have just informed the council that we will withdraw the UNMOVIC and atomic agency inspectors. We will withdraw the U.N. humanitarian workers," Annan said.
According to U.N. officials, a total of 156 U.N. inspectors and support staff are in Iraq from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is in charge of nuclear inspections, and the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, which inspects chemical, biological and long-range missiles.
The United Nations also has 99 international staff members working on humanitarian programs in northern Iraq and 95 international staffers in Baghdad and the rest of the country, the officials said.
Despite the expected withdrawal of U.N. staff, Annan made clear the world body will not abandon Iraq.
"This does not mean that should war come to Iraq that the U.N. will sit back and not to do anything to help the Iraqi situation," Annan said.
The United States advised U.N. weapons inspectors to begin pulling out of Baghdad Sunday night, the U.N. nuclear agency chief said Monday.
"Late last night ... I was advised by the U.S. government to pull out our inspectors from Baghdad," Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the IAEA's board of governors.
In other signs that war could be imminent, the U.S. State Department on Sunday night ordered nonessential personnel and all family members to leave Israel, Kuwait and Syria in a precautionary move.
Germany closed its embassy in Baghdad on Monday after calling on its citizens to leave Iraq "immediately," and Britain advised all its citizens except diplomatic staff to leave Kuwait as soon as possible, citing a potential threat from war in neighboring Iraq.
U.N. officials have said the inspectors and support staff still in Iraq could be evacuated in as little as 48 hours.
Most of the teams' helicopters have left Iraq because their insurance was canceled, chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix said, and the personnel level was low because of a scheduled rotation home.
The teams, which returned to Iraq on Nov. 27 after a nearly four-year absence, drew up contingency plans to evacuate even before their redeployment.
"A lot depends on the Iraqis," a senior U.N. inspector told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. "If they let us use aircraft to get out, we could be gone in 48 hours or even less. If they won't let us fly out, we would have to drive to a border, and that could mean an eight-hour journey across hot desert. It would take longer, but we would get out."
Also Monday, U.N. observers monitoring the border between Kuwait and Iraq pulled out of the demilitarized zone on the frontier, a U.N. spokesman said.
"Everyone has pulled out," said a spokesman for the U.N. Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission (UNIKOM). "Nobody at all from UNIKOM is left in there."
Inspectors have experience in getting out of Iraq in a hurry: In December 1998, they pulled out on the eve of U.S.-British airstrikes amid allegations that Baghdad was not cooperating with the teams.
There have been some concerns that the Iraqis might hold the inspectors as human shields in case of a conflict. But Iraq's foreign minister appeared to play down those fears in a live television interview on the al-Arabiya Arabic satellite channel Sunday night.
"The inspectors came by a decision of the Security Council, which decides on their departure," Naji Sabri said.
ElBaradei told the nuclear agency's 35-nation governing board Monday that he was worried about the safety of the teams, yet still held out hope that war could be averted. "Naturally the safety of our staff remains our primary consideration at this difficult time," he said. "I earnestly hope - even at this late hour - that a peaceful resolution of the issue can be achieved, and that the world can be spared a war."
ElBaradei, who has been monitoring the situation day to day, also confirmed that he and Blix had received an invitation from Baghdad "to visit Iraq with a view toward accelerating the implementation of our respective mandates." He did not say whether he or Blix had accepted.
"I should note that in recent weeks, possibly as a result of increasing pressure by the international community, Iraq has been more forthcoming in its cooperation with the IAEA," he said, adding that inspectors still have found no evidence that Saddam Hussein has revived his nuclear program.
But with the United States, Britain and Spain making clear that Monday would be the final day for diplomatic efforts to avert a conflict, it appeared that the inspectors were running out of time and could begin withdrawing at any moment.
-------- us
Marine Predicts Brief Bombing, Then Land Assault
In Kuwait, Commander Tells Fighters War May Be 'Just a Few Days Away'
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34992-2003Mar16?language=printer
CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait, March 16 -- The top Marine commander in the region predicted today that war was "just a few days away" and suggested that it would begin with a three- or four-day bombing campaign intended to wipe out half the Iraqi defenders at the border before U.S. and British land forces are sent in.
Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who commands more than 85,000 Marines and British troops poised to attack, said his force would target Iraq's 51st Mechanized Division with 130 fighter jets and about 75 attack helicopters, then rush in on the ground to seize southern Iraq.
His eve-of-war sendoff speech to thousands of Marines gathered here at their main desert headquarters offered fresh details about the projected opening phase of the war, estimating that bombing would go on at least 72 hours before a full-fledged invasion.
The "road-to-war brief," as it was called, complete with flyovers by fighter jets and attack helicopters, reinforced for troops in the field that war appeared imminent. Some units have packed up and moved out of their camps, received ammunition and sent off what they thought could be their final letters home before hostilities.
Conway told the Marines that he did not know exactly when war would start. "But I'll tell you this," he said. "I believe in my heart it's just a few days away."
The start of war this week would leave U.S. military commanders with just a single major land front, as Turkey continues to balk at allowing its bases to be used to attack Iraq from the north. Hedging against the prospect that they will be barred from using Turkish airspace as well, U.S. commanders have started to move ships from the eastern Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea so they can fire cruise missiles over Saudi territory at Iraq.
Unlike the 1991 war, when U.S. warplanes bombed Iraq for 38 days before ground troops went in, the Pentagon this time plans a shorter aerial attack. Some officials have hinted that the air and ground wars could even start almost simultaneously.
But some ground commanders have pushed for as much time as possible for the air attack to weaken Iraqi defenses and demoralize their soldiers before U.S. troops go in. Conway said today: "We reach out 72 to 96 hours in advance of those ground troops and knock hell out of things with the 3rd Marine Air Wing, the biggest and most powerful in the world. We take those [Iraqi] formations down to about 50 percent and then turn them over to the attacking troops. It's not a fair fight. We didn't intend for it to be."
At his disposal for the air assault will be 70 AV-8B Harrier ground attack planes, 60 F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bombers, 58 AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters and 15 to 20 British helicopters. According to military planners, such an air armada could sustain about 420 sorties, or attack missions, per day and, for a short period, even surge to as many as 672 sorties per day.
In keeping with the spirit of a prewar pep talk, Conway talked tough for his young Marines, many of them teenagers facing combat for the first time. He noted that the Marines have "the reputation of being the baddest sons of bitches in the valley. I gotta tell you, when Abdul in the 51st Mechanized Division north of the border heard that he was taking on the 1st Marine Division followed by the 1st UK Division, he said something like, 'Ana felaka beluchi,' which is Arabic for, 'Ain't that a bitch!' "
Just a moment or two later, with split-second timing, two Harriers roared over the makeshift coliseum where Conway addressed the troops from the bed of a seven-ton truck, followed by four Cobras buzzing the cheering audience.
The troops took Conway's talk as a sign that they were about to go to war. "I don't take nothing as a game anymore," said Marine Cpl. Raymond Moore, 21, from Cleveland. "But for certain people, it's slapping them in the face." Trained to be stoic, few admitted much fear. "We worry, but we want it to start and get it finished so we can get the heck home," said Lance Cpl. Gary Huggins, 20, from New York.
Conway told his troops not to worry about peace protests at home, pointing to a poll showing that 71 percent of Americans want to get the Iraq situation resolved now. "When we invade Iraq," he added, "that'll go up to 91 percent. And you know how I feel about it? Piss on everybody else."
But the 55-year-old general, who took over the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in November, was careful to caution his young fighters that they would be fighting to remove the "megalomaniac" President Saddam Hussein, not "to lay waste to this place."
Many Iraqis will not even want to fight, he told the Marines. If they surrender, he ordered, "bring 'em in, give 'em a cup of coffee, give 'em a cigarette, all right? Pat 'em on their skinny ass and send them to the rear. But we gotta be able to make the distinction, okay? We want to tell these people we're not here to occupy their country. We're here to get rid of this guy and turn it back over to them as soon as we can."
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Military Brings 3-D Advantage to War Preparation
Advanced Training Technologies Allow Pilots, Soldiers to Rehearse Missions
By David McGuire, Staff Writer
washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 17, 2003
TechNews.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37829-2003Mar17.html
Hurtling over hostile, unfamiliar landscapes at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour, today's combat pilots have just seconds to identify their targets.
"When you're going a mile every six seconds you don't really have a lot of time. You need to rapidly figure out: That's where the target area is, that's where the friendlies are, and that's where I'm going to put my weapon. That's all the time you have," said Joe, a U.S. Marine Corps aviator preparing for conflict with Iraq.
The last time the United States waged a major military campaign in the Persian Gulf region, pilots prepared for missions by studying detailed photos and maps. But in the 12 years since Desert Storm, the Pentagon has invested tens of millions of dollars in new technologies that let pilots actually "pre-fly" combat missions in a three-dimensional environment.
One of these systems is Topscene, developed by the U.S. Navy using technology from Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics Inc. Pilots use Topscene to explore vast computer models of enemy environments to familiarize themselves with the quirks of the landscape -- training that can help undermine the enemy's home-field advantage.
Joe, a major assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 11, is a weapons and sensors officer on an F/A-18D Hornet fighter-bomber. He first used Topscene in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and now oversees the sole Topscene system at his airbase in the Persian Gulf region. Marine officials asked that his last name and the exact location of his base not be identified.
"For us, the big advantage is it allows us to very rapidly assimilate a situation on the ground," he said. "In Afghanistan, if we knew where the friendlies were, then we weren't worried about dropping our weapons."
To the uninitiated eye, Topscene and other 3-D modeling systems resemble advanced computer games. A fully equipped Topscene rack contains two screens, a computer about the size of a standard computer desktop monitor and a set of flight controls similar to those in combat aircraft. Before he flies a mission, Joe can sit down at the machine and "fly" over a nearly photo-realistic 3-D map of his bombing run.
The program recreates an "out-the-window view" similar to what Joe would see from the cockpit, and mimics his planned airspeed and altitude. By rehearsing missions this way, he develops a mental image of his target, reducing the chance that he'll later fail to identify it on his breakneck combat approach.
In 1992, the Navy had two Topscene "racks," each of them powered by four refrigerator-sized computers housed on aircraft carriers. The Navy now has more than 300 Topscene systems -- with some versions running on laptops.
Every aircraft carrier in the Navy fleet now carries a Topscene rack with flight controls and interchangeable hard drives containing 3-D models of various global "hot spots." Exchange one shoe box-sized hard drive for another, and a pilot can leap from Afghanistan to Iraq without leaving the squadron briefing room.
The man in charge of the Pentagon's Topscene program knows how important it is for combat pilots to be as prepared as possible for combat missions. As a B-52 bombardier in Vietnam, Alan Herod and his comrades had photos and maps of their targets, but could not practice their missions with 3-D models ahead of time.
"It was tough to go in blind, looking at a radar scope to see and identify your target where you've never been before," said Herod, now a civilian Navy employee.
A keystone principle in designing technology like Topscene was to ensure that pilots would never again "go in blind" to their targets.
"Back in Vietnam, they found out that if a pilot survived his first six missions, he was immortal. They never got shot down, because they were there, they lived it, breathed it and got used to it," said John Burwell, senior director for government industry at Silicon Graphics. "What the Department of Defense has done is they've tried to develop simulation technologies that would allow these pilots to get through those first half a dozen missions in simulation."
Military rules of engagement require that aircrews positively identify their targets before releasing weapons. With the exception of some weapons that rely on the Global Positioning System for guidance, most of the rockets and bombs carried by an F/A-18D can be fired only after a weapons officer identifies his target, Joe said.
"What [Topscene] allows us to do is be more successful on the first pass," Joe said. That reduces a combat aircraft's "exposure time" and the possibility that a crew will have to abandon a mission out of concern for fuel or ground threats, he said. For the Foot Soldier, an Unproven Technology
Unlike combat pilots, who are being trained to accept and in some cases even demand 3-D mission rehearsal capability, ground soldiers have only recently begun to see models detailed enough to be of use in preparing for combat, Silicon Graphics's Burwell said.
RealSite, developed by Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Corp., was designed with the ground soldier in mind. It allows users to recreate views from likely sniper perches or quickly measure the distance between buildings and other geographic features. Anticipating a conflict against Iraq, Harris created a 3-D RealSite model of Baghdad, complete with scale renderings of Saddam Hussein's urban palaces and the headquarters of the Iraqi dictator's Republican Guard.
Major Brent Cummings, an instructor at the United States Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., said advances in 3-D modeling have been impressive, but added that such tools are, at best, a small piece of the puzzle for infantry. "Simulations that we're using here are never going to replace muddy boot training. You can't replicate the experience" of battle, he said.
"In the near term, the gee-whiz stuff you're going to see [will be] within the aviation community. From a ground standpoint we're in our infancy right now," said Lt. Col. William Banker, chief of the Army's Special Operations Digital Environment Center at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Silicon Graphics marketing materials tout RealSite as being capable of "taming the urban maze" for soldiers. One release suggests that some of the American soldiers killed in the urban battle that erupted in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 might have been saved if they had had access to RealSite.
But Banker questioned the value of even the most meticulous urban model.
"It's wonderful [but] if I'm running around outside in the streets, I'm trying to spend as little time as possible out in the streets. When I get into that building, I'm in a labyrinth. I've not seen one vendor come up and say, 'We're modeling the interiors of buildings,'" he said.
Despite his skepticism, Banker conceded that 3-D models eventually will become indispensable to ground soldiers. "There's no doubt. We're going to get there," he said. An Expensive and Relatively Scarce Technology
Topscene, RealSite and a modeling system developed by McLean, Va.-based Cambridge Research Associates called PowerScene, use data from high-resolution satellite images. In some cases, terrain elevation data provided by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency is used to recreate landscape features.
The level of detail in the 3-D models is limited only by the precision of the satellite images and the processing power of the computers running the simulations, Burwell said. RealSite, for instance, is designed to run on supercomputers 10 times more powerful than a top-of-the-line PC.
In the case of both RealSite and Topscene, public demonstrations (see video) contain far less detail than the models available to soldiers in the field.
Modeling technology has been around since before Desert Storm, but has grown cheaper, faster and far more available in recent years, said Mark Darder, a civilian contractor who works on Topscene.
"There are 1,000 percent more users now," Darder said. "It's an everyday event that you expect to see your mission in 3-D before you fly it."
But from the vantage point of Joe the Marine aviator, 3-D mission rehearsal remains something of a luxury for most pilots in the military.
Many pilots deployed to the Persian Gulf region come from stateside bases lacking Topscene or similar technologies, and even when they are familiarized with the system, they rarely get to use it for longer than five minutes at a stretch, Joe said.
The high cost of many of these systems is a factor. While slower PC and laptop-based versions of Topscene cost less than $1,000, the fully outfitted Topscene racks that are the most useful to combat pilots set the Navy back as much as $300,000 each. RealSite can be even pricier, setting a buyer back anywhere from $100,000 to $5 million in hardware and software costs. That doesn't include the cost of the satellite images necessary to create the models.
"We don't have a lot of these out, and a lot of the guys here are not very familiar with it. Guys are coming on board slowly," he added. "Most guys can't really hog it. We've got a lot of people here and we've only got one [system]."
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Twelve years on, no answer to the threat of friendly fire casualties
JOHN INNES,
The Scotsman,
March 17, 2003
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=322512003
THE Pentagon has produced few solutions to the problem of friendly fire, officials and analysts claimed yesterday.
This is despite the fact that the United States military deemed the number of friendly fire deaths during the Gulf war unacceptable.
In 2001, the defence department leadership terminated an army programme to equip tanks and other military vehicles with electronic devices which would enable troops to distinguish US vehicles from those of the enemy.
The US army now is developing another similar system along with NATO allies, but it is only in the testing stages.
In the absence of such a system, US officials are scrambling to affix combat identification panels (which have a distinctive signature when viewed with infrared technology) on tanks and other vehicles deployed in the Gulf region.
"We are rushing into the quick-solution type of things," said a defence official.
Being killed or wounded mistakenly by troops fighting under the same flag is an age-old worry for armies. But the crowded desert battlefield of the Gulf war, in which a large coalition of nations expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, was particularly conducive to confusion and blunders.
Of the 148 US troops killed in battle in the Gulf war, 35 died in friendly fire incidents. And, of the 467 US troops who suffered non-fatal battle wounds in the war, 72 (15 per cent) were victims of friendly fire.
The Pentagon calls friendly fire casualties "fratricide". Analysts said yesterday the Pentagon has come up short in providing fresh fratricide safeguards for US troops in the field. "If you look specifically at what has been done on the friendly fire question, it appears as though not a whole lot has happened," said Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists, who wrote a comprehensive congressional report on the Gulf war friendly fire problems.
"There's just going to be an awful lot of finger pointing. They've just really set themselves up for a big one here. I just hope that there is not the orgy of recrimination that is obviously waiting in the wings," added John Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.org think-tank.
"But you can go ahead and write this story now: 'First Gulf war identifies fratricide as major issue; army launches major technological initiative to solve this problem; programme gets cancelled in short-sighted, foolish budget-cutting effort.'"
The Pentagon is banking on a comprehensive solution to fratricide through greater reliance on satellite data and better communications.
"Despite the comings and goings of different programmes and how different people interpret that, the broader effort has been sustained and ongoing," said another defence official.
"I don't think anyone's so optimistic to think that we'll ever be able to eliminate the fog of war and the chance of fratricide, but certainly we're making every effort to do so," the official said.
The US army spent $180 million (£114 million) developing the Battlefield Combat Identification System until it was terminated amid concerns about cost and feasibility. The system was to have allowed a gunner to make a rapid "shoot" or "don't shoot" decision at the point of engagement.
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U.S. Carriers in Gulf Hold Pre - War Drills
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimehttp://prop1.orgs.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Mock-Disaster.html
ABOARD THE USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (AP) -- A tense voice from the speaker sounds the alarm: ``Missile inbound, port side! Brace for shock!'' Seconds later comes the sound of impact -- ``hit! hit!'' the speaker booms, and the ship's compartment fills with white smoke.
It's only an exercise this time, a practice scenario in which al-Qaida operatives target the USS Theodore Roosevelt from a speedboat with shoulder-fired Stinger missiles.
But aboard the Roosevelt, one of five aircraft carriers deployed within striking distance of Iraq, the crew reacts to the drill as if their lives depended on it.
``We need to be able to handle real situations, so we take these exercises very seriously,'' said executive officer Capt. Terry Kraft, as sailors rush down ladders and fan out with oxygen tanks.
Dealing with emergencies is a high priority on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. But ahead of possible conflict with Iraq, quick, effective response to threats has become even more crucial on the carrier and the four others deployed in the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf region along with the cruisers, destroyers and frigates that make up their battle groups.
The drills replicate a hit by artillery, missiles, bombs, or torpedoes from enemy ships or aircraft. Now, terrorism has become a top priority, and ``we're more aware of the threats from small boats, different things coming at you that you are not used to,'' Kraft said.
Such a threat became real in October 2000, when an explosive-laden boat rammed the USS Cole off Yemen, killing 17 U.S. sailors. The attack has been blamed on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
Whatever the source of fire, if a ship like the Roosevelt is hit, the focus is damage control: putting out fires, sealing flooding compartments, shoring up ceilings and caring for wounded. The idea is to let the jet pilots on deck keep flying sorties no matter how badly the ship is crippled.
The frenetic activity below decks reflects those priorities.
In a forward compartment, Petty Officer Rob Kerns, 31, of Kennesaw, Ga., waves a pair of red and black pompoms -- fire warnings, not cheerleader props.
``Whenever the fire crews see these, they represent a fire,'' he says of the pompoms. Soon, he's in full action as smoke from a mock blaze rises from the floor.
A fire detail charges in, then backs out: The missile ruptured a fuel pipe and is too dangerous for them to handle. The crew reports it and returns with more help and equipment, including a wide-funneled fire extinguisher. The fire is out within seconds, and the sailors move on to deal with the next emergency.
``I'd call it organized chaos,'' says Kraft, 43, of Norfolk, Va. ``You see a lot of people running back and forth to get to their station. But it's all going according to a plan.''
That plan is coordinated by the staff inside Damage Control, a cabin deep inside the ship. All 10 emergency crews relay what they see and what they're doing back to Damage Control, which moves them to whatever new problems arise.
In the medical ward, just off the main galley for the crew, a heavyset sailor is brought in on a stretcher, one of eight cases arriving for mock treatment.
``Now we can do our thing,'' says the head physician, Capt. Michael McCarten, of Cranston, R.I. McCarten, 51, says that of the eight cases, ``the worst are a sucking chest wound, a broken neck and a burned chest.''
A scalpel-wielding surgeon cuts into the air, inches above the sailor's chest. Others put two mock IV's into his forearms.
As the chest wound is taken care of, a real casualty is being treated nearby. A seaman cut his head on a low hatch during the drill and is getting stitches from a corpsman.
He turns out to be the only one hurt in the drill.
The final grades won't be in until the next day, but Kraft is satisfied. ``We saw a lot of enthusiasm out there,'' he says. ``We're in good shape.''
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U.S. Soldiers Call Help Desk, Techs When Gear Fails
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-arms-tech.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - When radioman Colum Keating had equipment problems on his nuclear fast-attack submarine in the 1970s, he fixed them himself or suffered the consequences.
But that self-help approach is becoming more difficult as gear grows more technologically complex.
``The technology has gone triple, quadruple what it was,'' said Keating, a former Navy petty officer, second class, who is now retired from the military.
So soldiers now turn to tech-support specialists, who go out on the battlefield, monitor and follow the missiles or electronics aboard ships or answer questions by telephone from across the globe.
The extra help is likely to be crucial should the United States lead an attack on Iraq. The United States and Britain now have some 250,000 troops in the Gulf region, ready for a showdown with Iraq over its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon has deployed B-2 stealth bombers to assist with any conflict, as well as about a dozen missile-firing warships.
Lockheed Martin Corp. sends technical representatives, or ``tech reps,'' to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, or other bases to help with the defense contractor's TADS night-vision sensor used in U.S. Apache attack helicopters. When the choppers move out, so do the tech reps, who follow the equipment wherever it goes.
``You need someone there to ensure the readiness of the system, to ensure that it's ready to fight and perform,'' said Lockheed spokesman Tom Jurkowsky.
Raytheon Co., the prime system contractor for the Patriot PAC-3 missiles, said it has a contractor with every PAC-3 unit that is fielded. PAC-3 missiles use hit-to-kill technology to destroy their targets.
CONTROL, ALT, DELETE
Of course, there's the ever-present computer help desk.
Itronix, a maker of rugged wireless computers and handheld devices for tracking troop and enemy movements, staffs a 24-hour help desk at Spokane, Washington, for its military and civilian customers.
The five-person military help desk receives about two calls a week from its customers in the United States and abroad, said Roger Cresswell, director of services market for Itronix. The company, with locations in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Asia, also trains at least one person from every military unit that carries its GoBook Max or GoBook II wireless computers in basic repairs, such as swapping hard drives or antenna replacement.
If field technicians can't fix the problem, they swap the computers, which use a Microsoft Windows-based operating system, for new ones at a restocking location.
Common office tech support, which helps with recalcitrant computers, is much maligned in the United States, sometimes criticized for being slow or using too many technical terms. But military personnel say they greet their tech reps with relief and gratitude.
``It's a very arduous job,'' said Jack ``Tiny'' McLaughlin, a former lieutenant commander for the U.S. Navy, who flew United Technologies Corp. Seahawk helicopters and relied on tech reps for component repairs. ``They had to work with the enlisted guys who did the work as well as the officers who oversaw it. They worked 12-hour days and were out for six months continuously.''
While some tech reps are civilians who volunteer to follow the products to a variety of locations, most have military backgrounds and are accustomed to spending months away from home.
Tech reps generally are accepted by the enlisted personnel, but those who order and supply replacements for broken equipment often attract the ire of soldiers on the battlefield.
``The supply system might not have it stock, or they'd only keep one part in supply and we break two,'' McLaughlin said.
Others concurred.
``If we had problems with something that was stuck or jammed, we'd kick it or hit it and then take it back,'' said a former soldier who declined to be identified. ``But then they'd say they didn't have a replacement and you'd have to spend several days without the equipment you needed, or carrying broken equipment around.''
And sometimes, there are things that even the most experienced tech reps can't help.
Once out on patrol, Keating and his crew heard a persistent rattling on board their submarine. No one could locate the source or the cause, so the boat returned to Guam for repairs.
The problem: a plastic coffee cup bouncing around in one of its control devices.
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Pentagon says Green laws hamper training for war
Story by Sue Pleming
REUTERS USA:
March 17, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20187/newsDate/17-Mar-2003/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Angering environmentalists, U.S. defense officials argued in Congress for an exemption from environmental laws they said hindered training, including for a possible war against Iraq.
Officials from the Pentagon and regulatory agencies told lawmakers some environmental laws had led to lengthy legal challenges and this jeopardized training for the fight against terrorism and as well as a looming attack on Baghdad.
But environmentalists, some of whom accused the Pentagon of using war as an excuse to erode these laws, countered that the exemptions would give the military a green light to dump spent munitions, poison the seas and endanger protected wildlife.
"(This) is a giant step in the wrong direction. Instead of making the Defense Department a leader in 'environmental compliance and protection', the initiative would give the military special treatment that is not necessary for it to fulfill its mission," said Lenny Siegel, executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight.
The issue was aired at a hearing of the sub-committee of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. The administration is hoping to present proposals on changing specific environmental acts by this summer.
The military, while insisting it will continue to protect the environment, has proposed exemptions from legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Raymond DuBois said a "disproportionate" environmental burden had been placed on the Department of Defense, which worked hard to strike a balance between the environment and training for battle.
"Expanding restrictions on training and test ranges are limiting realistic preparations for combat and therefore our ability to maintain the readiness of America's military forces," DuBois said.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Wayne Arny, said that with two sons in the Navy and as a former fighter pilot himself, he knew first hand how important it was to be exposed to "realistic training" before going to war.
"We are not looking for wholesale suspension of environmental laws as they apply to military readiness." he said.
"We are merely trying to restore balance where environmental requirements adversely affect uniquely military activities - activities that are necessary to prepare sailors and Marines to engage in combat and win," he added.
However, Nina Young, director of marine wildlife conservation at the Ocean Conservancy, a group which works to protect marine life, said proposed changes to the law would increase injuries and deaths to animals.
Several Democrats voiced opposition to the proposals, questioning whether it was necessary to change the law to suit military training.
However, one Republican lawmaker, Rep. Robin Hayes from North Carolina, charged that "radical" environmentalists had compromised essential training of troops and praised the military for its environmental record.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- death penalty
Execution rate drops as scrutiny intensifies
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030317-219077.htm
The machinery of death that is designed to execute the worst of murderers is grinding ever slower, and in some states is in disuse while the death penalty is reconsidered in courts, legislatures and governors' mansions.
Although capital punishment is still far from a dying practice, fewer murderers are being sentenced to die and the number of executions has fallen. Only one prisoner was executed in 1977, and by 1999 this number had reached 98.
In the past two years, courts have imposed death sentences at a rate about half the 296 average for seven previous years, and far below the 328 meted out in 1994.
"We're not really sure why," says Tracy L. Snell, a Justice Department statistician and co-author of the annual federal study of capital punishment. "It could be a function of the murder rate dropping in prior years. That could be part of it, but it's never going to reach that 296 again."
On Dec. 31, the overall death-row population in 37 states was 3,666, according to the annual report of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, which tracks death-penalty cases.
That number is likely to drop substantially this year, in part because of Gov. George Ryan's commutation in Illinois of 167 death sentences on Jan. 11. That would mark only the second decrease in the death-row population since executions resumed in 1977 after the Supreme Court cleared death row and set ground rules for deciding who may be executed.
If capital punishment is actually on the wane, 2001 eventually may be seen as its watershed year.
"There were only 155 death sentences nationwide in 2001," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "My guess is the Justice Department will find the number about the same for 2002. I haven't heard of any surges in death sentences."
He says one factor is the growing practice of sentencing killers to life without parole, except in Texas, which does not have that provision and which carried out 35 percent of the nation's executions since 1977 - the 299th last week.
Despite the paucity of executions in 2001, it also was the only year that the death-row population declined in the current era, dropping by a net of 20 persons from the 3,601 counted Dec. 31, 2000.
Prisons received the 155 newly condemned prisoners, but more than that left prisons, Miss Snell says. In addition to the 66 executed, 17 others on death row died of natural causes and two committed suicide. Courts overturned convictions or sentences of 90 inmates. By year's end, 46 of those had been resentenced to life, 12 awaited resentencing, and 24 were set for retrial. Charges on four were dropped and no action was taken on the other four by the end of the year.
"I don't think executions will again reach a peak in the current atmosphere, which is a lot more cautious," says Mr. Dieter, who opposes executions. "It's hard to predict what will happen five or 10 years from now but right now scrutiny is very high and the attitude is not so much to get on with executions, but to be sure about them and to be careful."
Dudley Sharp, who says he switched from opponent to outspoken death-penalty advocate, says that caution comes at a price.
"A thorough review finds that the risk of executing the innocent has been significantly overstated by death-penalty opponents, that such risk is extraordinarily low and that the cessation of executions will put many more innocents at risk," says Mr. Sharp, of the Houston-based Justice for All.
Mr. Sharp refers to frequent reports that 107 death-row inmates have been freed in the last decade, including a dozen cleared by DNA analysis. Published reports incorrectly asserted that 123 death-row prisoners were freed by DNA evidence, and many capital-punishment foes say public confidence in prosecutors was shaken by decisions that freed so many death-row inmates.
Mr. Sharp attributes the declining use of execution chambers to fewer murders and to Supreme Court review of issues that affect broad segments of those on death-row, whose execution dates are on hold while cases are pending.
"There has been about a 40 percent reduction in the murder rate nationally in the '90s, and current Supreme Court appeals deal with the retarded, juvenile murderers, racial discrimination, and the jury's role in sentencing," he says.
"It's varying within the boundaries nationwide in a way that often has happened in one state or another. Oklahoma had a spurt of 18 executions in 2001 simply because, for some odd reasons, courts were finishing off these cases all at once."
Most killers are not even tried on capital charges, a contributing factor to what capital-punishment critics condemn as a quixotic selection method for a punishment they contend doesn't halt crime. Defenders say it would seem even more capricious to restrict execution to such extreme cases as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, serial killer Ted Bundy, or al Qaeda members involved in the September 11 plot.
"State courts sentence to death about 1 percent of those accused of murder," says Matthew Durose, who tracks state sentencing trends at the Department of Justice.
In Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina, first-degree murder alone is punishable by death. Most other states allow execution only when aggravating factors were connected with the killings. Virginia has 12 such factors, Indiana 16. Most states include robbery, rape and multiple murders, but aggravating factors also include treason in Louisiana, drug trafficking in Florida, aircraft piracy in Mississippi, and kidnapping in South Dakota.
Mr. Sharp says blacks commit about 50 percent of murders compared with 38 percent by whites. He sees broad misunderstanding of how aggravating factors contribute both to who is sentenced to die, and to racial disparities cited by death-penalty opponents who contend that blacks are disproportionately condemned, particularly for killing whites.
-------- drug war
Colombia's Coca Cultivation Down in 2002
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Colombia-Coca.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Colombia's coca cultivation dropped by about 30 percent in 2002 over the previous year, the executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said Monday.
A study by Colombia's government and the U.N. organization reported 250,000 acres of coca under cultivation as of Dec. 31, 2002, down from 357,700 acres in 2001.
``This is a major achievement in the international fight against illicit drugs and related crime,'' Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the U.N. office, said in a statement, adding that ``this decline will subtract over 100 tons of cocaine from world markets.''
Costa urged countries around the world to concentrate on reducing demand and promoting drug abuse prevention.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's administration hailed the report as evidence that eradication efforts are working.
``The government's commitment to eradicate coca forever from our territory is irrevocable,'' Interior Minister Fernando Londono said.
The coca survey is produced annually by the Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System, a joint venture set up in 1999 by the Colombian government and the U.N. office. Similar crop monitoring systems for coca are in place in Bolivia and Peru; and for opium poppies in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Laos.
Last month, the U.S. State Department released its estimates of coca production in Colombia, showing only a 15 percent reduction, to 356,668 acres in 2002 compared with 419,406 acres in 2001.
The United States has given Colombia almost $2 billion over the last three years in aid, much of which was aimed at coca eradication.
--------
Marijuana Now Legal in Dutch Pharmacies
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Netherlands-Medicinal-Marijuana.html
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Just what the doctor ordered?
Pharmacies may fill prescriptions for marijuana and patients can get the cost covered by insurance, according to a law that went into effect Monday.
Doctors in the famously liberal Netherlands have long recommended marijuana to cancer patients as an appetite enhancer and to combat pain and nausea. But it is usually bought at one of the country's 800 ``coffee shops,'' where the plant is sold openly while police look the other way.
``The health minister said, look, doctors are prescribing marijuana to their patients anyway, and there are many medicinal users, so we may as well regulate it,'' said Bas Kuik, a spokesman for the Dutch Ministry of Health.
The law also seeks to standardize levels of THC, the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana.
The percentage of THC in Dutch marijuana has increased sharply in the past several years. A government-sponsored study released this month estimated average THC content at around 15 percent, compared with 6.6 percent in imported marijuana.
The Dutch parliament approved the change in policy by a large majority in 2001. The law stipulates that patients can get medical coverage for marijuana use, though most policies don't yet cover pot.
Kuik said that the Dutch government will license several official growers later this year. In the meantime, pharmacies will have to decide for themselves where to get the marijuana.
Many pharmacies use marijuana distributed by Maripharm, a company that advertises its product as ``standardized, vacuum-packed and bearing patient information and dose advice.''
Prices for marijuana in coffee shops vary widely -- from about $50 to $400 an ounce. Maripharm's product at the Dam Pharmacy costs about $225 an ounce.
The Dutch government's stance is in stark contrast to U.S. federal law, which says growers of marijuana for medicinal purposes face the same prison terms that recreational growers do.
Pharmacies typically leave it up to patients whether they want to smoke the weed or make tea from it, but Kuik said smoke-free ``inhalers'' are also under development.
Recent studies show a fractional increase in the number of people in the Netherlands who say they have tried marijuana, while overall use levels remain well below those in the United States, despite its widespread availability here.
-------- homeland security
FBI Has War Plans To Mobilize Agents Against Terrorists
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35147-2003Mar16?language=printer
If U.S. forces invade Iraq, the FBI has plans to mobilize as many as 5,000 agents to guard against terrorist attacks, monitor or arrest suspected militants and interview thousands of Iraqis living in the United States, according to officials familiar with the effort.
The FBI operation, which would approach the scale of the investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is a reflection of widespread fears among counterterrorism officials that the risk of attack will increase dramatically in the event of war. Although authorities said that most Iraqis living in the United States are not a threat, they are concerned Muslim extremists will retaliate for war with suicide bombings and other attacks, the sources said.
Many of the FBI's criminal surveillance operations would be temporarily suspended in order to focus on potential terrorism or espionage suspects, one top law enforcement official said. Any immigration violators found during interviews and sweeps would be detained, several officials said.
The steps are part of a voluminous and detailed contingency plan developed by the FBI over the last year in preparation for an invasion of Iraq. Sources said the plan includes a checklist of more than four dozen steps to be taken by FBI field offices and joint terrorism task forces before and after war begins.
"We're prepared for the worst and hoping for the best," said a senior FBI official. "If there is anything else we can do, I'd like somebody to tell me what it is. . . . There is going to be a very large commitment to anything and everything that could possibly happen."
Although Bush administration officials do not emphasize it publicly, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism experts are in broad agreement that a war in Iraq will dramatically increase the chances of terrorist attacks against U.S. targets. As a result, numerous sources have said the Department of Homeland Security could raise the nation's color-coded threat level from yellow to orange, or "high risk," as early as this week.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft told a House subcommittee earlier this month that "the FBI is prepared to act to defend America, including the possibility of a war against Iraq. Thousands of FBI agents, here and abroad, are working day and night." In a television interview last week, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned that "we have to prepare for the inevitability" of suicide attacks in the United States.
At the start of a war, FBI headquarters and all 56 field offices would immediately staff 24-hour command centers, in conjunction with 66 joint terrorism task forces across the country, authorities said. The head of one major FBI field office said that "the small percentage of agents who aren't directly involved will be on call. . . . This is an all-hands type operation."
Some of the steps outlined in the FBI contingency plan have already begun, including initial meetings between the heads of FBI field offices and local Islamic groups across the country, officials said. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III also met late last month with leaders of Arab American, Muslim and Sikh groups to ask for their support in identifying terrorists and to assure them of FBI protection against hate crimes.
Working from an initial list of about 50,000 Iraqi nationals living in the United States, the FBI has winnowed that number down to about 11,000 who would be targeted for interviews in the event of a war, a senior FBI official said.
Officials hope to complete those interviews within a few weeks of an invasion, the official said. The FBI would be aided by immigration investigators at Homeland Security, who would detain anyone found to be in violation of immigration laws, officials said.
Other interviews have taken place, focused primarily on Iraqis who were considered potential security threats or who were thought to have information that would be helpful to U.S. military efforts, officials said. Several of those interviews have resulted in "information of value," a law enforcement official said, while others have led to deportations or expulsions.
FBI and immigration officials are also still working to locate as many as several thousand Iraqis who entered the United States on valid visas that have since expired.
Senior FBI officials said the interviews and investigations have not changed their general view that most Iraqis in the United States are hostile to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and are unlikely candidates for terror.
U.S. officials are more concerned that Muslim extremists affiliated with al Qaeda or other terrorist groups might wish to use an Iraqi conflict as the reason for an attack. The FBI also warned law enforcement agencies earlier this month about the threat posed by "lone extremists" who are not connected to al Qaeda or other terror groups but who share their radical beliefs.
"There is a lot of animosity out there toward the United States," a senior law enforcement official said. "These groups and individuals want to attack us anyway, and this could give them the perfect excuse."
U.S. intelligence officials also worry that Hussein's regime might secure cooperation from an unwilling Iraqi citizen living in the United States by holding family members hostage back home.
During the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi agents in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines failed in amateurish attempts to bomb U.S. facilities, leading to the widespread view within Western intelligence circles that Hussein's regime is not adept at overseas terror operations.
Yet U.S. officials say they are alarmed by a case last month in the Philippines, where a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat was expelled after allegedly having contact with members of the Abu Sayyaf terror group. The Iraqi government dismissed the allegations as U.S. propaganda.
"Iraqi intelligence did try some pretty pathetic operations last time," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said. "Do I think they'll try it again? Probably, but this time they may have help. That's one of our major concerns."
Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism expert, said, "It's only prudent to think about a spectrum of adversaries" during a new conflict.
"Twelve years ago, we were mostly thinking of a terrorist threat in terms of an overseas or foreign threat, and mainly by Iraqi agents," Hoffman said. "The world has changed a great deal since then, and there are more threats than ever to worry about."
----
Political Plums Begin to Ripen at Homeland Agency
First 'Schedule C' Jobs Listed
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35327-2003Mar16.html
The Department of Homeland Security wouldn't be a full-fledged Cabinet department unless there were a few plum jobs to pass around. So, perhaps in an indication that the new agency is taking shape, the Office of Personnel Management last week published the first list of lower-level political appointments available in the new department.
Unlike the top political jobs -- such as undersecretary or bureau director -- these "Schedule C" positions can be filled by presidential appointment without Senate confirmation.
Many of the jobs, such as assistant press secretary to the assistant secretary for public affairs, don't sound glamorous. But they can be important stepping stones for young aides trying to build Washington careers, said Paul C. Light, a government scholar at the Brookings Institution.
"Schedule C is often where you see the 25-year-old junior staffer who 40 years from now will be the secretary of the department -- or so he or she dreams," Light said. "What you are doing is building your résumé. That credentials you to be something bigger in the next life."
Pay in political jobs varies, but usually is comparable to similar positions within the General Schedule system, experts said.
All the ability and ambition in the world, however, aren't enough to land one of these jobs. It's mainly about connections, past relationships and the right recommendations from people in power.
"You don't get a Schedule C job unless you are [politically] connected," Light said. "There's no political job in the federal government now, no matter how low level, that does not go through the White House personnel process."
Here is the list released by OPM last week. Additional positions will be published in the Federal Register on the fourth Tuesday of each month. A comprehensive list of all jobs is slated to be published this summer.
• Travel aide to the chief of staff.
• White House liaison to the chief of staff.
• Executive assistant to the deputy secretary.
• Speechwriter to the assistant secretary for public affairs.
• Executive assistant to the chief of staff.
• Assistant press secretary to the assistant secretary for public affairs.
• Executive secretariat to the undersecretary for border and transportation security.
• Special assistant to the undersecretary for border and transportation security.
• Executive assistant to the inspector general.
• Receptionist to the secretary of homeland security.
• Executive assistant to the secretary of homeland security.
• Scheduler to the secretary of homeland security.
--------
Homeland Security Glance
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Homeland-Security-Glance.html
Aspects of the Department of Homeland Security's Operation Liberty Shield:
--Increased security at major U.S. ports and waterways, including more Coast Guard patrols, escorts of passenger ships and additional sea marshals.
--Greater surveillance and monitoring of borders. Increased screenings of vehicles and cargo, and more interviews of people crossing borders.
--People from nations where al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operate or have sympathizers who have applied for asylum will be detained until U.S. authorities determine the validity of their claims.
--More law enforcement personnel and patrols at airports. Airlines have been told to review the validity of all IDs for personnel with access to secure areas.
--Temporary flight restrictions put in place over Washington, D.C., New York City and certain other unidentified U.S. cities.
--Governors asked to provide additional police or National Guard troops at selected bridges.
--Railroad companies asked to increase security at major facilities and rail hubs.
--The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is requiring all licensed users of radioactive material to take additional security measures.
--Increased security at chemical facilities, nuclear power plants and key electric grids
--Monitoring of Internet for signs of cyber-terrorism, hacking and ``state-sponsored information warfare.''
--State and local health departments, hospitals and medical care providers urged to report any unusual diseases or disease patterns.
--Enhanced inspection of imported food.
--------
Region braces for red alert, war
Plans: Agencies anticipate possible terror; ports, other facilities to be guarded.
By Bill Hillburg From our Washington Bureau
Long Beach Press Telegram
Monday, March 17, 2003
http://www.presstelegram.com/Stories/0,1413,204%7E21474%7E1251515,00.html
WASHINGTON Should war with Iraq erupt, Southern Californians could find themselves living in a world of restricted travel, constrained trade, closed schools and public buildings, canceled events and hypersecurity.
With growing fears of domestic terrorist acts linked to military action against Saddam Hussein, state and federal officials are bracing for a possible worst-case scenar io.
"It certainly would be incumbent upon us to take into consideration military involvement as we determined the level of protection we needed for homeland security. We'd be foolish if we didn't,' said Homeland Defense Secretary Tom Ridge.
The nation Monday moved to condition orange (a high threat of terrorist attack) shortly after President Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face U.S. military action. A move to condition red (severe risk of attack) is not being ruled out.
Under a condition red, the department's responses would include "monitoring, redirecting or constraining transportation systems and closing public and government facilities,' as well as deploying emergency response teams.
If the nation goes on a war footing, the task of warning thousands of local responders, city officials and school administrators would start with the California Highway Patrol.
"We've got quite an extensive communications tree worked out,' said CHP Commissioner Spike Helmick. "We are linked to every local law enforcement in the state and can notify them all on our hotlines within five minutes. They in turn will notify local city leaders, fire and emergency personnel and school districts.'
Helmick said that getting the word out across Southern California would be no small feat. The region has more than 200 cities, 167 school districts, 76 fire and paramedic departments and 116 police agencies. He noted that it is critical to have one source issuing alerts, given the fact that many local police and fire units still lack the equipment needed to communicate with one another.
Critical installations
Helmick said that, if a condition red alert is called, his CHP forces will go on 12-hour shifts, deploy at state buildings, bridges and aqueducts and other critical installations and put all 30 of their patrol planes into the air.
"Since 9/11 we've improved all of our plans, training and coordination,' added Helmick. "There's also more of a willingness to pull the trigger and take all the needed precautions if the situation calls for it.'
Key decisions, including whether to close schools and other public buildings, cancel a Lakers game at the Staples Center or shut down the state's airports, would lie with Gov. Gray Davis. The level of danger and areas of the state most likely to be hit would be determined by Davis and members of the State Threat Advisory Committee.
L.B. security
Whether it's manning the phones to calm residents or patrolling the streets, Long Beach police will be "in a state of readiness' in case war breaks, said Commander Robert Luna.
Plainclothes officers and detectives will be required to have their uniforms with them.
"We anticipate how residents are going to react to the news, if they are experiencing high levels of anxiety,' Luna said. "We expect bigger antiwar demonstrations.'
At the highest stage of alert, officers will work 12-hour shifts and patrol critical facility locations, which Luna declined to disclose. The state attorney general's office recently identified the Port of Long Beach and the Queen Mary to be among the 624 places terrorists could hit.
"I know we're just about ready for anything that happens,' Luna said.
Mike Fleming, spokesman for the Customs Service office that serves the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport, declined to discuss specific antiterrorism measures, but said "we always have contingency plans in place.'
Cargo inspections
He noted that, during the recent condition orange alert, Customs inspectors increased their scrutiny of cargo. "We ramp up or ratchet up as necessary,' he said.
Customs on March 1 became part of the new Department of Homeland Security, as did the Border Patrol and the Transportation Security Administration that screens airport passengers and baggage. In a condition red, personnel from all three units would step up their inspections, which could lead to delays at ports, airports and border crossings.
Many local first responders have been on antiterrorism duty only since 9/11. Local police and fire chiefs have been waiting nearly as long for federal money to pay for training and equipment and to offset the cost of overtime and other expenses.
The Department of Homeland Security released the first $566million in local first responder funding on March 7. California's $45 million share includes $31.6 million for equipment, $7.9 million for practice exercises, $2.4 million for training and $3.1 million for planning. It includes no money to offset expenses already incurred.
Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn recently estimated that his city had spent $70million on antiterrorism efforts since 9/11. Long Beach's tab stands at $3 million.
Hahn, Long Beach Mayor Beverly O'Neill and other leaders had repeatedly urged President Bush and Ridge to send aid money directly to cities and counties in the form of block grants. Instead it was sent to the states.
And Media News Group, owner of the Press-Telegram, has taken the measurements of its 10 Washington bureau reporters, who are based two blocks from the White House, for custom-fitted biohazard suits.
Staff writer Karen Robes contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
Terror Alert Raised to Orange
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/national/17WIRE-ALERT.html
WASHINGTON -- Worried that war in Iraq could lead to terrorist reprisals at home, the Department of Homeland Security raised the terror alert one level to orange, or "high," Monday night and called for an increase in security measures nationwide.
Calling the effort "Operation Liberty Shield," the department deployed extra Border Patrol officers, stepped up patrols at seaports, airports and nuclear power plants and safeguards over the nation's food supply, officials said.
Separately, the FBI acknowledged increasing surveillance on Iraqis and others in connection with the attacks.
The department also called on governors to deploy National Guard troops or extra state police to protect key public facilities.
Orange, second highest on the five level, color-coded terror alert system, means intelligence and analysis suggests that a high risk of terrorist attacks inside the United States exists. Yellow, a step below, means an "elevated" level of risk. It has been about 2.5 weeks since the last orange alert ended and reverted to yellow.
The heightened alert took effect immeditaely after President Bush declared in a nationally televised address that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein must leave Iraq within 48 hours or military action would be mounted to oust him.
Counterterrorism officials said the threat comes from several quarters, including al-Qaida, Iraqi operatives or independent, freelance terrorists.
"While al-Qaida remains the principal concern, we are also concerned Iraqi state agents, Iraqi surrogate groups or ad hoc groups or disgruntled individuals might choose to use the time period as well to launch attacks against the United States or against our coalition partners," said Homeland Security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
Several officials said the security increase was not related to a specific body of intelligence, but a general belief that terrorists may try to respond to the U.S.-led war on Iraq by striking at American interests, either at home or overseas.
--------
Al Qaeda links pose threat in Europe
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-54091242.htm
Terrorists linked to the al Qaeda network are operating in Bosnia, according to the Croatian member of the country's tripartite presidency.
"Al Qaeda cells are active in Bosnia," President Dragan Covic said in an interview with The Washington Times. "The Bush administration needs to deal aggressively with this problem. If nothing is done about this, Islamic extremist groups could in the future destabilize the entire region."
Radical Islamic groups in Bosnia are plotting terrorist attacks, said Mr. Covic, who was elected in October and shares power with representatives of the country's Serbian and Muslim populations.
"In Bosnia there are many 'humanitarian' agencies that are in reality fronts for terrorist groups from the Middle East," he said Friday, adding that the most prominent are those linked with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
The radical Islamist cells are funded from countries all over the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Mr. Covic said.
"We believe that our security forces, along with U.S. intelligence personnel, have this information and are working to deal with the problem," he said.
Mr. Covic, 47, was in Washington for a two-day trip, in which he met with aids on Capitol Hill.
The proliferation of Islamic extremist groups threatens to undermine Bosnia's fragile peace, he said. He urged the Bush administration to take action to stem the tide of Islamic fundamentalism in the Balkans.
"These terrorist cells are very dangerous not only to peace and stability in the Balkans, but to European and American security interests," Mr. Covic said. "The failure by the United States during the 1990s to deal with the threat posed by the al Qaeda network based in a country as far away as Afghanistan resulted in the horrific consequences of September 11. Just imagine the devastation that can be unleashed from the growth of Islamic extremism in the heart of Europe."
The past several years have brought sporadic attacks by Muslim extremists on Catholic churches around Sarajevo. Three Croats - a father and his two daughters - were gunned down last Christmas Eve in their home by an Islamic militant near the town of Konjic. The reason: The family was celebrating Christmas.
Bosnia's constitutional system also needs to be reformed, said Mr. Covic, who is vice president of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), a party that enjoys the strong support of ethnic Croats.
Now is the time to revise the 1995 agreement reached in Dayton, Ohio, which ended the war in Bosnia, Mr. Covic said. The Dayton accords divided the country into two entities, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Bosnian-Serb republic.
"Dayton was a major accomplishment because it established the peace in Bosnia. However, the internal structure of the state devised by the agreement was only a short-term solution," Mr. Covic said.
He said Croats are denied full political and cultural rights throughout Bosnia, especially in areas with Muslim or Serbian majorities. The smallest of Bosnia's three main ethnic groups, Croats constitute roughly 18 percent of the population. Muslims are the largest group, with 44 percent; Serbs make up 31 percent.
Because Muslims are in the majority in the Muslim-Croat entity, Mr. Covic said, Croats are denied positions in many government ministries.
"This amounts to discrimination against the Croats," he said, adding that their minority status means they cannot influence implementation of many laws.
"The Croats in Bosnia have not resolved the question of their national status within the country. They should be granted the full and equal rights that are applied to the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims," Mr. Covic said.
For Bosnia to achieve long-term political stability, he said, it must devolve power from the central government, allowing greater authority and freedom to the three ethnic groups at the local level.
"The model should be that of Switzerland or Belgium," Mr. Covic said.
-------- torture
Old law finds new use against oppressors
By Tom Carter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-94486662.htm
Oscar Reyes remembers the terrible night 20 years ago as if it were yesterday. On July, 8, 1982, men wearing black ski masks and military fatigues ransacked his home in Honduras before dragging him and his wife, Gloria, away.
Mr. Reyes soon found himself naked, blindfolded, and hoisted into the air from his arms bound behind his back.
"The beat me like I was a pinata," said Mr. Reyes, remembering the fists, sticks and electric shock that eventually caused him to pass out. "I still have pain putting my arms up."
Accused of being leftist sympathizers during the height of the Central American wars of the 1980s, the Reyeses were held for six months before being sent into exile in Vienna, Va.
Now, with the help of a 2-century-old U.S. law drafted to battle pirates on the high seas, Mr. Reyes hopes to face his torturer, Col. Juan Lopez Grijalba, in an American court.
"We want the people who tortured us to be condemned for what they did," Mr. Reyes said in an interview recently. "It is important that someone is held responsible."
His weapon, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of 1789, lies at the center of a legal maelstrom, with a broad assortment of activists eyeing it as a weapon to settle scores.
When Nazi victims used it to go after Swiss banks for laundering gold stolen from Jews who were on their way to German gas chambers, the case never made it to court. Instead, the Swiss coughed up billions of dollars in pretrial settlements.
To others, it offers a way to go after leaders and former leaders with blood on their hands - from Cuba's Fidel Castro to Chile's Augusto Pinochet.
It is being used to sue corporations such as Coca-Cola and Del Monte by human-rights activists, campesinos in Latin America and torture victims in nations where big corporations do business with the government.
Legal struggle looms
"There is a looming fight. What is at stake is the last 20 years of jurisprudence and the way these statutes can hold human-rights violators accountable," said Elisa Massimino, D.C. director of the Laywers Committee for Human Rights.
Advocates on both sides are marshaling forces, meeting informally, mapping strategy and buttonholing lawmakers on Capitol Hill in hopes of either abolishing, preserving or changing the law.
With the most pro-business White House and Congress in decades, human-rights activists fear that corporate lawyers with plenty of money and clout will succeed in abolishing the law and thereby make the world a safer place for dictators, torturers and assorted human-rights abusers.
Terry Collingsworth, director of the International Labor Rights Fund and lead counsel in half-a-dozen of the most prominent cases, said business is working the issue hard.
"Business wants to be immunized from human-rights liability. There is an accelerated effort to repeal or modify the law. And with the Republicans in charge, they think they have a political 'moment.' ... They are actively lobbying on the Hill," Mr. Collingsworth said.
Just days after the Republican victory in November 2000, about 50 corporate lawyers gathered for a closed meeting in Washington to discuss the law.
Stuart Eizenstat, best known for negotiating an $8 billion settlement for Holocaust victims against companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, was the principle speaker at the forum sponsored by USA Engage and the National Foreign Trade Council.
"It is on their radar screen," said Mr. Eizenstat, who advocates the creation of a voluntary set of guidelines for conducting business in authoritarian nations. He said many in his audience favored a frontal assault through Congress to change the law, a strategy Mr. Eizenstat advised against. He warned the lawyers to tread softly.
"Any time you open a statute with a strong human-rights component, there is a risk that it will be strengthened ... and business will be seen as against human rights," Mr. Eizenstat said.
Violating 'law of nations'
The ATCA of 1789 says: "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States."
The ATCA was originally written to assure Europe that the United States would not provide sanctuary for pirates who kidnapped or accosted diplomats on the open seas.
Its wording - "violation of the law of nations" - has been interpreted by U.S. federal courts since 1980 in the case of Filartiga v. Pena-Irala to include the violation of human rights.
Joelito Filartiga, the teenage son a prominent leader in the political opposition to Paraguay's military government under Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, was kidnapped and tortured to death in March 1976.
After being confronted with the boy's body and threatened by Americo Noberto Pena-Irala, the inspector general of the Asuncion police, the family left Paraguay and received political asylum in the United States, settling in New York.
In 1979, Joelito's sister Dolly discovered that Pena-Irala had also come to America and was living just around the corner.
Distraught that an admitted torturer and murderer could be comfortable and living freely so close by, Miss Filartiga and her father, Dr. Joel Filartiga, sought help.
They found it when Peter Weiss of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) came upon the ATCA.
CCR lawyers hoped the law might be interpreted today to permit noncitizens of this country to bring a civil claim in the United States against other foreigners if a violation of the modern "law of nations" could be proved.
To have a court interpret the phrase "law of nations" to cover war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide or torture seemed like a long shot at the time.
Test case reinstated
But after the case was first dismissed, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York sided with the Filartigas and reinstated the suit. The case went forward, and the family eventually won a $10 million judgment against Pena-Irala.
Pena-Irala fled before the trial took place, and Dr. Filartiga has since returned to Paraguay. But human rights activists saw the ruling as a giant step in the evolution of human-rights law and a new weapon against war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and torture.
"No money has actually been collected," said Jennifer Green, one of the CCR attorneys who represented Dr. Filartiga and has spent the past 20 years pursuing rights abusers with this law.
"People say things like, 'At least someone believed me.' Their priority is on finding out what happened and holding someone responsible in court," she said.
Ms. Green said the law is used sparingly because it is fraught with restrictions on who, how, where and why the law can be used. It is rare that a case actually makes it to trial or, much less, is won. Only the most egregious abusers can be held accountable under current U.S. law.
But with the Filartiga victory, human-rights activists gained a legal precedent.
"Filartiga was the first time a U.S. court found a human-rights violation to be a part of customary international law, and the first time a human-rights victim was allowed to sue in U.S. courts for a human-rights violation," said Ms. Green.
"If a violator comes here, they bring their wrongs with them, and they can expect to be hauled into court," she added.
The case opened a new avenue for victims seeking to hold human-rights abusers, and more recently companies that do business with repressive regimes, accountable for their acts. Targets of pending lawsuits include Salvadoran military officers, Burmese government officials, Indonesian police and African dictators.
Heads of state 'immune'
Lawsuits have been filed against Cuban President Fidel Castro, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and recently against China's outgoing President Jiang Zemin, for reputed government abuses against the Falun Gong.
But because heads of state have immunity while in office, those suits are routinely dismissed.
The first time Mr. Reyes encountered Col. Grijalba in the United States was at a State Department reception that Mr. Reyes attended as editor of El Pregonero, a Spanish-language Catholic newspaper, based in Hyattsville where he and his wife work today.
But as a military attache with the Honduran Embassy, Col. Grijalba had immunity at the time.
"A case usually starts when someone comes in and says: 'I was the victim of torture in 'X' country and I just saw the guy who did it, working down the street in the 7-Eleven," said Ms. Massimino, whose group is suing two Salvadoran generals now living in Florida over the 1980 rape and murder of four American churchwomen during that country's civil war.
What concerns U.S. corporations is that the ATCA is being used by activists to target companies for doing business with repressive regimes.
More than 100 U.S. businesses are being sued for their investments and business activities in South Africa during apartheid.
And dozens of other U.S. businesses, many in oil, mining or other "extraction" industries, that have done business in nations such as Burma, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Ecuador, Indonesia, Haiti, Guatemala, India, Egypt, Mexico and Saudi Arabia are being sued in U.S. courts for aiding and abetting repressive governments.
Coca-Cola is accused of hiring military thugs in Colombia to terrorize union organizers.
Rodrigo Calderon, spokesman for Coca-Cola in Latin America, said the accusations have been investigated by two Colombian judges and found to be without merit. "The allegations are totally false," said Mr. Calderon, by telephone from Mexico City. "They are a shameless effort to generate publicity using the name of our company."
Federal stance varies
Fresh Del Monte Produce is accused of coordinating with Guatemalan security forces to destroy a union, which victims say led to torture, extrajudicial killing and crimes against humanity. Del Monte declined to comment.
Cuban-American activists are preparing cases against European and Canadian businesses working on the island.
The victims want U.S. and foreign-based companies held accountable in U.S. courts and to pay for human-rights violations committed by governments with which they have worked. Specialists on both sides say as many as 1,000 U.S. businesses could be brought into court.
The State Department is sometimes asked by the court to explain if a particular suit will have an impact on the U.S. government's ability to conduct foreign policy. In responding, the department has written briefs siding with victims, as in the Filartiga case, or with the plantiffs, asking that a case be dismissed.
The State Department sided against Korean "comfort women" forced into prostitution by the Japanese military because the United States had an agreement with Japan at the conclusion of World War II that superseded the victim's suit.
In a case against ExxonMobil, the State Department said in a July 29, 2002, letter that the suit "could potentially disrupt" the fight against terrorism and undermine Indonesia's economic stability, which is a U.S. interest, by scaring off foreign investment.
"The number of cases in which the State Department has intervened and the vociferousness of their arguments is novel. It signals a change," said Joshua Sondheimer, litigation director of the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, which represents Mr. Reyes.
The State Department said it would be inappropriate to comment on cases currently in litigation.
'Vicarious liability' at issue
Some members of Congress known for their support of human rights have written "friend-of-the-court" briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of human-rights victims when corporate lawyers tried to get cases dismissed.
The ATCA "serves the useful function of discouraging 'rogue' state actors, or unscrupulous and sadistic dictators, from ignoring international treaties and universally accepted norms of international law," wrote Republican Reps. Christopher Smith of New Jersey and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida in one such court filing in support plaintiffs suing Royal Dutch Petroleum for human-rights abuses in Nigeria.
Big business disagrees.
"The issue is vicarious lability," said Daniel O'Flaherty, vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents U.S. exporters.
"They say, 'You were there. You paid taxes. You profited from police protection. You are vicariously liable.' We are concerned about the proliferation of lawsuits against U.S. companies for behavior over which they have no control," he said.
Thomas Niles, president of the U.S. Council of International Business, said that a lawsuit against more than 100 U.S. companies who did business in South Africa during apartheid undermines the good that business can do in authoritarian regimes.
"The U.S. government encouraged U.S. companies to do business with South Africa. It was called 'constructive engagement.' It was to fight apartheid from within," said Mr. Niles. "The companies being sued are companies that adhered to the Sullivan Principles. It is grossly unfair. They were there. They were encouraged by the U.S. government to remain. Does that 'aid and abet'? They were undermining apartheid as part of this country's policy."
Mr. O'Flaherty said business does not condone human rights abuses and, in fact, he said, U.S. business works overtime to mitigate rights repression abroad. But, he said there is a new breed of lawyers, unconcerned about the rights of victims and more interested in gouging giant settlements out of U.S. companies with deep pockets.
"China is where this whole thing is headed," he said. "Imagine trying to hold all the companies doing business in China liable for the human-rights abuses of the PRC. There is gold in them thar' hills."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
UK says aviation industry should pay pollution costs
Story by Daniel Morrissey
REUTERS UK:
March 17, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20183/story.htm
LONDON - Britain's aviation industry will have to pay for polluting the environment, and the estimated bill could more than triple to 4.8 billion pounds ($7.7 billion) a year by 2030, the government said.
The government said in a discussion paper that its objectives for sustainable aviation development required a proper balance to be "struck and maintained" between economic, environmental and social considerations.
"Within this framework, the polluter should pay and aviation, like other industries, should meet its external costs, including environment costs," said the report, entitled "Aviation and the Environment: Using Economic Instruments".
The paper does not contain any specific proposals, and the UK Treasury emphasised that it was a discussion paper, not a prediction of what the industry would have to pay in 2030.
"To say the aviation industry will face a bill of 4.8 billion pounds is utter rubbish. What we are doing is opening a debate on the environmental aspects of aviation with the industry, environmentalists and other stakeholders," a Treasury spokesman said.
Britain expects air passenger numbers to more than triple to 500 million a year by 2030, with densely populated southeast England, including London, accounting for about 300 million.
The report comes amid a bitter national debate over where the government should allow more runways to be built to meet the estimated demand for air travel. The government will make its decision on its 30-year aviation strategy later this year.
SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGES
John Healey, economic secretary to the Treasury, said the government recognised the vital role the aviation industry played in the country's economy but the industry also raised "significant environmental challenges".
"The government is committed to finding ways to tackle these impacts the most efficient way, while recognising the benefits that aviation delivers," Healey said in a statement.
But the Freedom to Fly Coalition, which represents airlines, airports, business, tourism groups and trade unions, said the existing aviation environment costs of about one billion pounds were already covered by taxation through the air passenger duty.
"We would obviously be concerned if there was any indication that our industry would be specifically targeted for additional taxation beyond those required to meet our environmental responsibilities," said coalition chairman Brenda Dean.
The aviation industry also argues that the amount of emissions from jet engines has been falling as jet engine makers such as Rolls-Royce Plc (RR.L) respond to demands by airlines to reduce fuel costs. Plane designs have also lowered emissions.
But demand for air travel - excepting a hiatus since September 11, 2001 - has skyrocketed, and the government projects continuing growth for the next two to three decades at an annual 3.5 percent.
British Airways Plc (BAY.L), Europe's biggest airline, said this week that it supported the international drive to reduce global warming emissions and backed the long-term approach of limiting aviation emissions through emissions trading.
"The more successful we are in realising the economic benefits of expanding air travel, the more resources we will have to deal with the adverse environmental impacts of increased air travel," BA said in a report to a parliamentary committee.
-------- health
Cases of Killer Pneumonia Spread Around the World
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-health-pneumonia.html
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A deadly form of pneumonia is moving rapidly around the world as travelers from parts of Asia spread the disease, creating new suspected cases in Britain, Germany, Australia and the United States.
``It could be a brand-new microbe,'' Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview. ``It doesn't look like something that already exists.''
The mysterious respiratory disease, known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, may have killed nine people and made hundreds sick since originating in China late last year.
The World Health Organization said on Monday that there seemed little chance that it would become a world pandemic but it has issued an advisory alerting travelers to the disease.
Health officials said that until scientists had a clear idea of what caused the disease the possibility that it was a highly infectious influenza could not be ruled out.
The illness begins with a high fever, chills, cough and breathing difficulty, and can deteriorate within a week into pneumonia, which is apparently showing some resistance to conventional drugs.
Health officials say that while the illness is contagious, and is transmitted by coughing or sneezing, it does not seem to have been transmitted by casual contact -- such as being on an aircraft with someone who is infected.
China has reported 305 suspected cases, with a further 170 in other parts of the world. But experts say it is not yet clear if all the cases are related.
WORLD OVERDUE
Scientists have been warning for years that the world is overdue for another flu pandemic such as two that killed around one million people each in the 1950s and 1960s.
In both cases, experts believe the virus originated in southern China and jumped the species barrier from pigs or ducks.
The WHO says the latest disease, an atypical pneumonia, appears to have begun in November in China, which has reported five deaths. It then spread to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.
U.S. and Canadian officials have both discounted the possibility of a deliberate bioterrorist attack.
Chinese authorities only gave the WHO an initial report on their handling of the outbreak last Sunday, a day after the U.N. body issued the worldwide travel alert as cases appeared outside Asia. Chinese journalists say they have been told not to report on pneumonia cases.
In Hong Kong, where one person has died, government officials said on Monday the number of people infected had nearly doubled to 95, of which 83 had developed severe pneumonia. Vietnam's Health Ministry reported the total infections in Hanoi had risen to 58 by late Monday.
HONG KONG WORRIES
Worry is growing in tiny, crowded Hong Kong that the bug may spread outside the confines of hospitals, where most of the infections are believed to have occurred.
Bus drivers wore protective masks on Tuesday and some parents with children in school were being advised to keep them at home if they have high temperatures.
``We don't know if there will be a second wave or if it will spread in the community,'' said Sydney Chung, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Chinese University, who advised people to see their doctors immediately if they develop symptoms.
The syndrome looks like influenza, which kills up to 500,000 people around the world each year. But tests of fluids and tissues of patients have so far turned up neither an influenza virus nor bacteria.
``The reason we are alarmed is because we do not know what is causing it,'' Dr. David Heymann, head of communicable diseases at WHO, said in an interview. ``If this be a disease such as a new influenza, it could spread very rapidly throughout the world.''
Hong Kong's health minister has repeatedly said there were no signs that the disease was spreading rapidly in the community at large but tour agents in both Hong Kong and Vietnam have reported travelers have canceled some trips. Some airlines have told staff not to check in passengers with symptoms of the disease.
Germany reported four new suspected cases on Monday and the United States said it was watching 14 suspect cases, although officials doubted any were related to the outbreak. Britain also reported its first suspected cases.
Australian health officials said on Tuesday they were investigating its first three possible cases but added that none of the patients was seriously ill.
-------- human rights
ITALY - Mafia's loss is gain for homeless
Washington Times
World Scene
March 17, 2003 •
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030317-22076576.htm
ROME - Italian authorities say they will distribute around 400 apartments confiscated from the Mafia to disadvantaged Sicilian families as part of a bold move to use criminal assets for the needy.
The state will use apartments, houses, farms and other property confiscated from the Cosa Nostra and other regional Mafias to house families crowding local waiting lists and boost local employment plans across Sicily.
-------- ACTIVISTS
American Is Killed By Israeli Bulldozer
Student Was Protesting Demolitions
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35126-2003Mar16.html
JERUSALEM, March 16 -- A 23-year-old American protesting the demolition of Palestinians' houses in the Gaza Strip was killed today by an Israeli military bulldozer that crushed her body as she crouched in its path, according to witnesses from her pro-Palestinian organization.
Rachel Corrie, a college student from Olympia, Wash., was the first international protester to be killed during the 30-month conflict between Israelis and Palestinians here, although numerous protesters have been injured, arrested or ordered out of the country by Israeli authorities.
"This was a very regrettable incident," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman. "We're dealing with a group of protesters acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger -- the Palestinians, themselves and our forces."
Corrie, who had been in the Middle East for about six weeks as a volunteer for a U.S.-based Palestinian support group called the International Solidarity Movement, was kneeling in front of the bulldozer and tried to scramble out of its way, said Tom Dale, 18, a British protester who said he was standing several yards away.
"She thought they'd stop, but they kept going," Dale said. "She tried to stand up and fell over backwards. The bulldozer dragged her under its blade. About four of the internationals [protesters] gestured to the driver . . . but it kept going, and she was under the main body of the bulldozer.
"I couldn't believe it. I was sure the bulldozer would stop," he said, adding that "when we arrived she was still alive but had blood all over her face."
An official at the nearby hospital where she was taken said Corrie died of skull injuries and chest fractures.
Dale said eight representatives of the international group were near the bulldozer during its operations late this afternoon. But he said no other demonstrators were within several yards of Corrie as she knelt in the rubble between a Palestinian's house and a metal wall that Israel is erecting along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Dale said Corrie was wearing a bright orange vest.
The Israeli military forces were removing shrubbery in the border area and were approached by the protesters, according to a statement released by the military tonight. Troops ordered the demonstrators to move back, the statement said.
"An initial inquiry indicates that an Israeli bulldozer apparently accidentally ran over a protester," the statement continued, adding, "The windows of the bulletproof bulldozer are very small and the visibility is very limited, and the bulldozer operator did not see the woman." The military "expresses sorrow" and is investigating the incident, the statement said.
"It's possible they [the protesters] were not as disciplined as we would have liked," Thom Saffold, a founder and organizer of the International Solidarity Movement, said in a telephone interview from the group's base in Ann Arbor, Mich. "But we're like a peace army. Generals send young men and women off to operations, and some die."
Saffold said 30 to 50 volunteers from the group are in the Palestinian territories, many of them focused on protesting the Israeli military's destruction of Palestinians' houses in the Gaza Strip.
Ben Granby, who volunteers with the group in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, called Corrie "remarkably brave."
"She didn't seem too fazed by all the gunfire and the danger," said Granby, 27, who recently went home to Madison, Wis., after spending the first week of March with Corrie in Gaza.
In an interview with reporters on Friday, Corrie said: "I feel like what I'm witnessing here is a very systematic destruction of people's ability to survive."
Anne Fischel, a faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., where Corrie was a student, said that many people had asked Corrie whether she had thought through her plan to go to Gaza "and what her support system would be there. But did we tell her not to go? No. If we had, she would have done it anyway. She was following her own convictions."
A U.S. Embassy spokesman declined to comment on the incident but said the State Department has warned Americans not to travel to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Two Palestinian men also died in separate incidents in the Gaza Strip late this evening. An 18-year-old man was shot to death in a clash involving Israeli soldiers, and a 43-year-old man was hit by Israeli gunfire as he stood in his doorway, according to Palestinian media reports.
Staff writer Blaine Harden in Seattle contributed to this report.
----
Hagelin proposes new U.S. government
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030317-87318556.htm
The man who lost to Pat Buchanan in a struggle for Reform Party presidential campaign funds in 2000 has announced plans to start a second U.S. government: the U.S. Peace Government.
John Hagelin, a physicist based at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, said he is not talking about secession.
"This will be a complementary government headed by people with expertise in science. Its focus will be to create a prevention-oriented, problem-free administration in the nation," said Mr. Hagelin, who was the Natural Law Party's presidential nominee in the last election.
Hagelin aide Julia Busch said the proposed U.S. Peace Government would function solely in an advisory capacity and wouldn't usurp the responsibilities of the federal government.
Mr. Hagelin said it would concentrate on issues such as violence, international conflicts, drug abuse, education, health care and food safety.
In a telephone interview from New York on Saturday, Mr. Hagelin said he's pressing to prevent a U.S. invasion of Baghdad.
"The bottom line ... is that a war will increase terrorism. This country is increasingly seen as an enemy of the world. There is a backlash against the current administration, which is seen as being desirous of war," Mr. Hagelin said.
The Indian mystic, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, endorsed Mr. Hagelin's plans in a weekend statement. He praised Mr. Hagelin as a "great scientist who can save America."
He and Mr. Hagelin describe this second government entity as one that would be based on the principles of science and natural law.
Mr. Hagelin said he is seeking two to four top scientists, educators and health professionals from each state to be part of the new government. Each would be Cabinet-level representatives.
Mr. Hagelin said scientists who join the new government should have a commitment to public service. He made his initial announcement at a global news conference.
Asked whether he believes he will get the people he wants for this new government, Mr. Hagelin said he has no doubt about his success.
"I only started talking publicly about this Wednesday, and my mailbox is full of messages from scientists ... concerned about our headlong rush to war."
----
On the Mall, Songs of Old Carry Current Plea for Peace
Familiar Faces Protest Potential Action in Iraq
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35303-2003Mar16.html
Surrounded by about 400 peace activists who carried lighted candles and posters urging "Mr. President, Please Change Your Mind," guitarist Noel Paul Stookey of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary mused that folk songs are always apt for political demonstrations.
One line from the Bob Dylan song "Blowin' in the Wind," he said, was particularly appropriate for last night's vigil against possible war with Iraq:
"How many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned?"
Stookey and fellow trio members Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers serenaded fans old and new at the vigil below the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Organized by Win Without War, a District-based nonprofit group led by former Maine congressman Tom Andrews (D), the vigil was one of 6,000 that were scheduled in 136 countries at 7 p.m. in their respective time zones.
Members of the trio, which first performed at the memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, said last night's appearance on the Mall was their most critical.
"The stakes are much higher here," Yarrow said. "As urgent as the other issues were in the '60s, they weren't going to potentially precipitate an Armageddon."
Many in the crowd said the vigil gave them perspective not only on their own lives, but also on the lives of those in Iraq.
Cathy Egan, 42, who came with her husband and two daughters, ages 7 and 5, said, "My kids are so concerned about eating cookies and pretzels, but Iraqi families have to worry about bombs falling on them."
Jeanette Sawyer, 23, of the District said she spent the past two months making orange peace ribbons and handing them out on the Metro. Having grown up with her dad's Peter, Paul and Mary albums and the song "Leavin' on a Jet Plane," she said that she was excited to see the band play but that there was something sad about their simple messages still being needed.
"It's great that they're here," she said. "Unfortunately, it still means we have a lot of work to do."
Gretchen Vanek, a retired Army nurse who was based in South Vietnam in the early 1970s, said the only military action she supports is going after Osama bin Laden. She said she does not support attacking a country preemptively.
"I didn't take the band seriously" in the early 1970s, Vanek said. "Now, I'm smarter." In recent months, she formed a peace organization in her home town of Pocatello, Idaho. "We haven't learned the lessons of Vietnam."
The vigil drew religious leaders of various faiths, among them Jews, Muslims, Christians and Hindus.
Robert W. Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former six-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, looked at the overcast sky and shook his head.
"Here we are, with the dark storm clouds, with Bush in the Azores on the eve of war. You can't go to war with Spain and England as your only allies. There are so many churches opposed to this, it's unprecedented."
The vigil also was attended by many immigrants who have made the United States their home in recent years, including Olga Kupcova, 31, a World Bank health educator who moved from the Czech Republic six years ago.
She said war will only fuel anti-American sentiment in her homeland.
"I worry about the safety of American citizens," she said.
As the music began, Bethany Yarrow, 28, got on stage with her father for a duet. Before singing, she told the crowd, "I might be the youngest person onstage, but I think it's important for the younger generation to be out here, because soon this is going to be our country."
----
Borne in Effigy
If Protest Is Theater, Its Biggest Actors Are Puppets
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35656-2003Mar16?language=printer
Near the front of the tens of thousands of antiwar marchers heading north on 17th Street Saturday was a gauzy Madonna (with dead child), the mother's body mounted on a shopping cart, her arms manipulated with broomsticks. Shortly after came a bulbous-headed George W. Bush, with a hawkish beak of a nose and a bomb cradled in his right hand. And then a weeping woman, an image borrowed from Picasso's "Guernica," her head craned back at a painfully impossible angle, her mouth open as if she's catching raindrops and screaming at the sky simultaneously.
If not a huge display of puppetry, it was a representative one. The Madonna belongs to Marianne Ross, a puppetmaker from Bethesda who works regularly with the granddaddy of political puppet companies, the Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater. The Guernica puppet was made by the husband-and-wife team of Marco Giammetti and Carol Hendrickson from Freehold, N.J. It harks back, says Giammetti, to the European tradition of large masks and puppets used during Carnival celebrations. And the George Bush figure was made by a guy from Bryn Mawr, Pa., with no particular background in the form.
"My daughter told me to do a puppet," says Hank Wilson, holding Bush low around the president's magenta, gray and yellow camouflage pattern drapery that forms its midriff. "Because it's fun."
There is a renaissance of political puppetry, according to amateur and professional practitioners alike. Since 1999, when protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle prominently featured huge puppets (and a good deal of heavily televised mayhem), puppets -- and large effigies and masks -- have become part of the essential vernacular of protest. Established companies bring them by the truckload to prominent marches. Loose networks of "puppetistas" have posted manifestos on the Web. And everywhere there is the homemade product.
The puppets seen Saturday were ambivalent objects -- both festive and threatening -- and like so much of the iconography of the peace movement, they inspire ambivalent reactions. If a new war in Iraq is like the last one, then tens of thousands of young Iraqi men will be shredded by flying metal, incinerated and bulldozed into trenches. The puppet, bobbing above a sea of drumming circles and Mardi Gras costumes, seems at first a woefully inadequate -- and decidedly silly -- symbol.
But that's the view from outside. Within the puppet world, they are a kind of answer, a riposte, to the criticism that has bedeviled the new era of political protest, whether it's anti-globalism or anti-imperialism. The short list of carps: that protest has become a babble of messages with no coherence; that it reflects an impotent nostalgia for the more meaningful resistance of the 1960s; that it lacks intellectual gravitas.
The puppet, however, is about ideas, say puppeteers, even those who make their living doing theater for paying audiences. Unlike other performing arts, especially the high arts, having an overtly political message doesn't put the puppeteer on the radical fringe of the puppet community. Political protest is a perfectly legitimate part of the form.
The large puppet, say an Uncle Sam dripping blood from his lips, clutching a bundle of missiles and lumbering grotesquely in the wind, is, of course, a throwback to the 1960s. But, according to John Bell, a puppeteer and assistant theater professor at Emerson College in Boston, it is not a simple, atavistic throwback to the Vietnam era.
"People will say, oh, this is like the '60s," says Bell. "It is the '60s, but it is also the '40s, the '30s, the '20s, the 1890s and the 18th century. They are connected to a very strong tradition."
That tradition, says Bell, runs back through anti-Nazi demonstrations in New York in the 1930s, to celebrations of Carnival in the Middle Ages, and further, at least to the Greeks, who used to carry huge phallic symbols through the streets to inaugurate theater festivals. He rattles off a long multicultural list of festivals and dramatic forms that have involved puppets (and masks and processional theater), from the Indian Ram Lila to the Iranian Ta'zieh. It isn't just that human beings have been making inanimate representations of living beings for millennia. They have been doing it (very often) to express a worldview that is anti-authoritarian, often licentious and filled with paradox.
"Puppets are discomforting, puppets are weird, puppets are bringing dead materials like paper, wood, plastic to life," says Bell. "And there is something odd and mystical and spiritual about that."
Bill Severnsen, who accompanied the George Bush puppet from Bryn Mawr, speaks of it affectionately. "Everybody who came with us knows to look for George. It's a rallying point," he says.
There's a whiff of the dizzying paradox of the form in that. People will spend dozens of hours, working together, lovingly crafting an image of the thing they hate ("Well, not hate, I try not to hate anyone," says Severnsen). The large puppet, which looms above the people who made it, reverses a familiar dynamic of theatrical puppetry, the human being pulling the strings or moving the rods of a much smaller creation. The big puppet raises, in visual form, a central question: Who, asks the puppet, is pulling whose strings? It enacts a drama of enfranchisement and frustration. The Puppetistas
If puppets burst on the scene with renewed vigor in Seattle more than three years ago, another galvanizing moment came in August 2000, in Philadelphia before the Republican National Convention. Dozens of artists and activists from around the country were making puppets, masks and banners in a warehouse, in preparation for confronting conventioneers with opposing opinions. And then the cops swooped in, rounded everybody up and held them in custody (the charges were later dropped, says one artist who was arrested). Then they destroyed hundreds of puppets. The Philadelphia police, citing a lawsuit, refused to comment. News of the raid on the Haverford Puppet Warehouse swept through the puppet world. It was a tragic/comic, infuriating/intoxicating moment.
"It's what we expected from the current regime," says Nancy Lohman Staub, founder of the museum at Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts. "I love it when people think that puppets are important enough to bring down political action. In America people think it is for children, that it's innocuous. Philadelphia was a triumph."
The triumph gave political puppetry a rallying a cry, a Stonewall of sorts. It wasn't just a confrontation with authority -- the destruction of the puppets resonated with a long tradition of symbolism about representation and destruction, including the burning of effigies and harvest festivals.
"At that moment," says Bell, "the puppeteers involved adopted the name 'puppetista.' Here are these ideas made out of cardboard, cloth, papier-mache. It's nonthreatening. On the other hand, these are ideas that must be destroyed, that can't be allowed on the streets."
Lurking just beneath the surface of the puppetista movement is a whole lot of Bakhtin -- Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist who theorized that Carnival isn't just a holiday, it's a whole, rockin' mode of human existence. Carnival, said Bakhtin, suspends "hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it." Puppetry, according to an Internet puppetista manifesto, "is an anarchic art, rooted in mockery, a ridiculous gesture towards the absurdity of the established order. It is the unique ability of the clown to laugh in the face of the king."
That central sense of resistance is what gives coherence to the dizzying messages of the antiwar and anti-globalism movements (and there is a lot of overlap between the two). Peace, vegetarianism, freedom for Palestine and "Free Ireland First" (according to one sign) are far from a crazy quilt of messages; the thread that binds is a loathing of injustice, and the conviction that violence is the primary tool that supports the existing order of the world. It is, in puppetista terms, a loose coalition of people united by the need to laugh at the king.
That's the view from inside. Street Theater
From the outside, the response to a Madonna on a grocery cart cradling a dead baby is often Enough with the puppets already. Makers of political puppets seize on their visibility, on the fact that a few bucks of material can make an object, a symbol, that will be seen around the world if the cameras pan in. It pleases them to compare the cost of puppets with the cost of taking out a full-page newspaper ad: "They may be primitive, but they're effective," says one puppeteer. Puppets are part of street theater, and street theater is the poor man's propaganda.
But what is the message the photograph of a puppet sends? The intentionally ugly, garish and threatening object, no surprise, often registers as: ugly, garish and threatening. Just as Americans either like or loathe mimes, they either like puppets with big, brassy political messages or find them ridiculous. An image of a puppet, of street theater, can go around the world in an instant, and be dismissed, just as quickly, by people immune to its charm or opposed to its message.
"This is the first time for the baby," says Marianne Ross, who made the puppet of the Madonna with dead child. She's brought the Madonna figure, which she calls "another mother for peace," to other rallies. The dead baby has been added because "this is the result of Bush's attacking Iraq."
If you can't commune with Ross's sincerity, this imagery may seem like bathos.
Cheryl Henson, the daughter of Muppets creator Jim Henson and president of the Jim Henson Foundation, doesn't like generalizations, but she volunteers this: "There tends to be a resistance, among Americans, to symbolic theater. Americans tend to be very literal."
It's tempting to leave it right there: that some Americans enjoy the big gestures and stark images of a symbolic street theater -- the weeping mother, George Bush in a cowboy hat, Dick Cheney as the heartless Tin Man -- and others just don't. But it's not so simple.
The rhetoric of the pro-war movement, especially the president's rhetoric, with his "axis of evil" and "Osama, dead or alive," is no less stark and symbolic than Ross's dead baby. Language that would make some people uncomfortable, coming out of the mouth of a puppet, makes other people uncomfortable coming out of the mouth of a politician.
And if there is a puppetista strategy to reveal "the absurdity of the established order," there is no less a strategy of the "established order" to reveal the absurdity of things like street theater. The president, many protesters feel, has dismissed them as "a focus group." Even the term "street theater" is easily turned into a sneer: It is something antic, unreal, adolescent. Puppets don't register as serious discourse among the crowd that bops from one Sunday morning political talk show to another.
Wandering a bit aimlessly through the crowd on Saturday was a young man with a sign that captures the complexities of the dialectic between the suits who run the country and the people who protest their decisions: "Stop Bush's Puppet Show," it read. So it's either a theater of politics or a theater of street protest. And you know where you stand with this simple litmus test: Is it the politicians, or the puppets, that give you the willies?
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Spain ends Greenpeace blockade of naval base
REUTERS SPAIN:
March 17, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20176/story.htm
MADRID - Greenpeace said on the weekend Spanish police had carried out a midnight raid to end a 14-hour blockade of a U.S.-Spanish naval base by the environmental group's Rainbow Warrior flagship.
No comment was immediately available from police or the government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, one of U.S. President George W. Bush's staunchest European allies over Iraq.
A Greenpeace spokeswoman said police boarded the Rainbow Warrior after it obstructed the entrance to the Rato naval base on Spain's southern coast last week and prevented a U.S. military supply ship from leaving.
The Rainbow Warrior's captain and two crew members were arrested, the spokeswoman said.
"They have been charged with resisting authorities and released. They are due to appear before a judge in the next few days," she said.
The spokeswoman said a Spanish military tug had towed the Rainbow Warrior to the nearby port of Cadiz early on the weekend.
Aznar was due to join Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Portuguese Azores islands on Sunday for an emergency summit on Iraq. Opinion polls show most Spaniards oppose any U.S.-led war against Baghdad.
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Global Peace Vigil a wonderful witness of light!!
From: Bette Hoover <BHoover@afsc.org>
Mon, 17 Mar 2003
The Washington, DC Peace Vigil which linked to the 5000+ vigils around the world (see globalvigil.org) and as called for by Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a wonderful success!!
On Sunday night, March 16th, from 6 - 8 p.m., several thousand people came together at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, for a prayerful vigil for peace. Organized by WIN without WAR, the American Friends Service Committee, and Move On, the event was one of thousands around the world that spanned a 24 hour period. Tutu called for peace-loving people to gather in a spirit of peace in a candlelight ceremony. The DC office of the AFSC took on the challenge to help coordinate an event on the Mall in just a few days!!
Many local spiritual warriors took part in the event that included prayers and words of wisdom. Participants included Baptists, Quakers, Sikh, Catholics, Muslim, Spirit House, and many, many more. AFSC's own General Secretary, Mary Ellen McNish was among the presents. All offered their presence, prayers, and intentions for peace and the possibility of winning without war.
Folk singers Peter, Paul, and Mary got the crowd singing songs of peace - many nostalgic to those of us over 40!! "If I had a hammer'" and "This Little Light of Mine" got participation from an energic and spirited audience. Pam Rogers of "In Process" led a group sing of " Down by the Riverside" and the Rejoice Community Choir of Faith Temple entertained with some gospels renditions.
Even a light misting rain did not dampen the spirits of the thousands who lit their candles for peace on the Mall in Washington, DC on Sunday night. All were encouraged to keep their lights shining and to continue to raise their voices against a war and stand for Peace with Justice.
Bette Hoover, Director DC/American Friends Service Committee 2211 14th St. NW Washington, DC 20090 202-299-1050
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Anti - War Protesters Raid London Oil Exchange
March 17, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-britain-protest.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Anti-war protesters broke into London's International Petroleum Exchange on Monday and halted business at Europe's largest oil futures trading hub.
Carrying banners such as ``Oil fuels war'' about 15 people evaded guards at the building in London's financial district, home to multi-billion-dollar trade in Brent crude oil futures.
``There is a lot of hooting and hollering and there have been a couple of altercations,'' a trader said.
Demonstrators said one or two of their number were taken to hospital after sustaining injuries in fights on the trading floor.
``We want to expose the links between the war economy and the oil economy,'' said Andy Thomas, a 35-year-old protester. ``It is clear the U.S. has a strategic interest in controlling and releasing Iraqi oil reserves.''
The exchange remained shut at 1515 GMT. The IPE declined comment except to confirm the closure.
The trading floor was evacuated after the raid, but police arrived soon afterwards carrying chain cutters. Anti-war groups also staged dramatic ``die-ins'' elsewhere in Britain on Monday, smearing themselves with fake blood and pretending to be dead at military bases and outside government offices.
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Protests Planned for Beginning of War
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Wars-Outbreak-Protests.html
Having had months to focus on the buildup toward conflict with Iraq, America's anti-war activists say they are ready to mark the first days of war with protests in dozens of cities coast to coast.
They vow to block federal buildings, military compounds and streets in a rash of peaceful civil disobedience. They say they will walk out of college classes, picket outside city halls and state capitols, and recite prayers of mourning at interfaith services.
``It is sort of an acknowledgment that we are probably not going to be able to stop the war,'' said Joe Flood, who is helping to plan a student walkout from classes at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass. He said more than 1,000 people have pledged to participate.
Some plans for the first day or two of war are writ large, like paralyzing traffic with bicycles and cars and disrupting commerce in San Francisco's financial district. Others are small, like showing a single lit candle on a Web site of the United Church of Christ.
Some are meant to be noisy, like a march in Portsmouth, N.H., with clanging pots and pans. Others will be quiet and solemn, like a vigil in Ann Arbor, Mich., with Christian, Jewish and Muslim prayers.
Many groups intend to carry out die-ins, where activists lie on the ground to symbolize war victims and to block passers-by. Some students at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, intend to lower campus flags to half-staff.
However, in Columbia, S.C., activists hope to serve up satire, making fun of the government's anti-terrorism advice to homeowners. They want to plaster a federal building with duct tape and plastic sheeting.
Gordon Clark, the national coordinator of the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, said acts of civil disobedience -- with the risk of arrest -- have been set up at more than 50 cities. ``When you get to the point that the war actually begins, that's a point when many ... feel they have to take the strongest action they can personally take,'' he said.
With President Bush signaling that war could be imminent, some anti-war groups were pressing supporters Monday to begin civil disobedience immediately.
Eight opponents of a war were arrested Monday in Traverse City, Mich., when they tried to block an Army Reserve convoy headed to a training area. One handcuffed himself to a truck and the other seven locked arms in front of the vehicle, police said.
In San Francisco, anti-war protesters shrouded themselves in body bags Monday in front of the British consulate, chanting ``no killing civilians in our name.'' Some blocked traffic in the city's financial district. Police in riot gear cleared an intersection, and about 40 arrests were made.
San Francisco anti-war groups have laid out similar plans on a larger scale for the outbreak of war, including an effort to shut down the Pacific Stock Exchange and some high-profile commercial buildings. ``The bare bones of the plan is to basically shut down the financial district of San Francisco. The way we see it is that we basically unplug the system that creates war,'' said Patrick Reinsborough, one of the organizers.
Tim Kingston, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based Global Exchange, says his anti-war group has kept away from organizing civil disobedience, though some members expect to take part on their own. He said some worry about stirring more resentment than sympathy with such disruptive tactics.
But he added, ``What else are we supposed to do? Sit and say nothing ... and be silent? That's not very American.''
It was not clear how many supporters would follow through with illegal actions, faced with possible arrest. However, in Philadelphia, organizer Robert Smith said at least 50 activists, both young and middle-aged, were ready to block entrances of a federal building.
``The statement we're conveying is that there can be no business as usual for a government that would trample on democracy and international law in order to kill thousands of people for the sake of superpower status,'' Smith said.
Some groups are focusing on defense-related sites. Protesters plan to block traffic at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., and sit in at the gates of Truax Field in Madison, Wis., which houses state guardsmen.
In Baltimore, anti-war protesters say they will wash off an American flag splashed with red paint and oil to symbolize the blood and oil of a war with Iraq.
In a gentler mood, peace activists expect to converge on an Islamic mosque in Birmingham, Ala.
Some anti-war activists say their efforts will demonstrate support for American soldiers, because the best way to help them is to bring them home. But counter-demonstrators say they, not anti-war protesters, will be voicing genuine solidarity with the troops.
Michigan State's College Republicans intend to organize a rally to back President Bush and the troops, said chairman Jason Miller. John Georges, a member of the College Republicans at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York, said his group will hand out American flags.
Barbara Kerr of Schenectady, N.Y., who works at an American Legion office that helps soldiers' families, said she simply plans to get down on her knees and pray for her own son in the service.
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Jeff Donn is the AP's Boston-based Northeast regional writer.
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Dozens Arrested in D.C. Anti - War Protest
March 17, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Capitol-Arrests.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dozens of anti-war protesters were arrested Monday outside the Capitol in the continuation of what promises to be a week of demonstrations against a war in Iraq.
Holding signs and singing ``we shall overcome,'' more than a hundred people peacefully marched from a church in southeast Washington to Capitol Hill.
Arrested for crossing police lines were 54 people, among them relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, said Capitol Police spokeswoman Jessica Gissubel.
The protesters are planning other nonviolent acts of civil disobedience this week to make their views known to lawmakers.
Nadine Block, whose shopping cart contained a large puppet of a woman with a sign reading ``Another mother for peace,'' criticized members of Congress who had not voiced opposition to war.
``They need to stand up and have backbone,'' she said.
Gissubel said the protesters would be released upon paying a $50 fine.
Anti-war demonstrators poured into the nation's capital over the weekend. Tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets around the White House on Saturday, while hundreds held a candlelight vigil at the Lincoln Memorial Sunday night.
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