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NUCLEAR
World's oldest nuclear power plant to close in UK
Russian Emergencies Minister
FACTBOX-Smart Bombs, Other Tools of War
Korean reaction deemed likely
Pyongyang says US is planning attack
Rising concern in South Korea: Will a war on peninsula be next?
European Union Wants to Meet on Korean Nuclear Dispute
U.S. Marines Storm South Korean Beach
Russian: Nuclear Coorporation Will Go On
Ukrainian nuclear plant managers face criminal charges
Security net tightens at US nuclear plants
Nuke Lab Head Details Security Problems
Bush rewriting war rules step by step
Bush not bothered by inconsistencies
Pentagon Strategy Creates Rift Among Hawks
U.S. embassies close
Bush's Strong Arm Can Club Allies Too
War's certainty: a big price tag
House Narrowly Passes $2.2 Trillion Budget
Who Lost the U.S. Budget?
MILITARY
Softening up with bombs, mind games and stealth
Deep underground, the military sees all
War could see tighter security against terrorist attacks
U.S. Set to Award 7 Contracts for Rebuilding of Iraq
Pentagon Adviser Is Also Advising Global Crossing
Iraqi CW shells
Chemical and biological agents in Iraq
Toxin specialists can aid, not invade
Anti - War EU States Seek Defense Pact Without UK
Iran Leaders Call for Immediate Halt to Iraq War
Iran Oil Depot Hit by Rocket, Iran Warns U.S., UK
Five Questions on the Road to Baghdad
Surprise as first strike short and sharp
Bats and ground huggers go for vital targets
Why all hell broke loose at a suburban house
'Your enemies will be in disgrace and shame' - Saddam Hussein
Iraqis torch gas facility, surrender
Iraq denies capture of town, surrender
'Shock and awe' air strikes launched
Iraq Neighbors Asked to Aid Refugees
Turkey Says Its Troops Will Enter Northern Iraq
Israel Air Defense Goes on Highest Alert
War Brings More Divisiveness for Israelis and Palestinians
Arab Media Look Past War, Focus On Future
Turkey Delays Opening Airspace to U.S.
2 Russian Helicopters Missing
Life Sentence for Failed Spy Who Offered Secrets to Iraq
Annan Seeks to Oversee Oil-for-Food Program
U.S. asks countries to suspend relations with Iraq
Diplomats in dark mood
Taking a risk by 'playing with Saddam's mind'
A sombre morning as navy joins fray
U.S. and British Forces Suffer First Losses in Copter Crash
Night Vision Gear Helps U.S. Army
New Patriots Should Boost Scud Fighting
Psychological Operations Go Into High Gear
Many Mideast Nations Roll Up Journalists' Welcome Mat
CANADA - U.S. media battles trial censorship
Both sides say war laws are violated
Casualties of War - First Truth, Then Conscience
An Orwellian Pitch
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
1,000 Are Arrested in Serbian Crackdown
U.S. Ready to Rescind Clinton Order on Government Secrets
On War's First Day, States Act to Reduce Threat of Terrorism
Missile Defense for Airliners
F.B.I. Seeks Qaeda Suspect in U.S.; Troops Sent to Nuclear Plant
Homeland budget, progress being scrutinized
Security Even Tighter in Area
War, FBI Visits Worry Iraqi - Americans
War fear cited in increased border security
Spain's Qaeda Suspects Had Detergent Not Weapons
ENERGY AND OTHER
German govt agrees on renewables, no details yet
Iraqi Environment Defenseless Before Warring Forces
ACTIVISTS
Arrests in anti-war protests across the US
15,000 pour from offices and shops to protest war [Australia]
Australia boosts security amid protests
Around the Nation
3 arrested in anti-war rallies in D.C. area
Iraq Invasion Sparks Protests in Arab Capitals
Thousands Worldwide Protest Start Of Iraq War
Few Arrests in D.C. Area Protests
Protests in Arab Capitals Continue for Second Day
Arab Protests Are Peaceful in Mideast
Protesters Across the Nation Try to 'Stop Business as Usual'
Protests in Many Nations Swell for Second Day
Wave of Protests, From Europe to New York
Second Day of Protests Around the Nation
Pope Paul upbraided UK, Italian PMs: paper
Thousands of Furious Arabs Protest War
Fans boo The Star Spangled Banner
Protect and defend our country! DUMP GEORGE BUSH
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
World's oldest nuclear power plant to close in UK
REUTERS UK:
March 21, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20237/story.htm
LONDON - The world's oldest industrial scale nuclear power station, Calder Hall in northwest England, is to shut down because of weak UK power prices.
State-owned nuclear power firm BNFL said in a statement that the 196 megawatt plant, small by the standards of more modern nuclear reactors, would stop generating on March 31.
Calder Hall was opened in 1956 at BNFL's Sellafield nuclear site. It is one of seven plants built in Britain using the costly Magnox technology, abandoned everywhere else in the world already but still producing about five percent of Britain's electricity.
"The depressed price for electricity coupled with the relatively high overheads of smaller stations such as Calder Hall makes its continued operation uneconomic," said BNFL in a statement.
Calder Hall was originally scheduled for closure in 2006, along with two larger stations, but BNFL said last year it expected to bring forward the closure.
A 40 percent slide in UK power prices sice 1998 as market liberalisation exposed excess capacity has left high-cost nuclear power in deep trouble.
Last year the British government was forced to provide financial support to its main nuclear producer and its biggest single electricity generating company, British Energy Plc (BGY.L), which was privatised in 1996. The firm may still face insolvency.
The nuclear industry's financial troubles have emboldened anti-nuclear groups calling for the early closure of all the nation's nuclear power stations, which account for about 25 percent of its power demand, and an end to loss-making BNFL's nuclear fuel reprocessing activities.
In recent energy legislation the government avoided a decision on whether to start building new nuclear reactors.
None has been built for 14 years, and most are due to close over the next two decades.
The news comes as the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) announced an acceleration of permissioning for wind farms, seen by some environmentalists as a viable alternative to nuclear.
The BWEA said that in the space of just one week consent was awarded for 120 offshore turbines with a total capacity of 397 megawatts - more than the 344 megawatts installed throughout the 1990s.
------- depleted uranium
Russian Emergencies Minister
US Depleted Uranium Munitions Pose Environmental Threat in Iraq
Rosbalt,
21/03/2003
http://www.rosbaltnews.com/2003/03/24/61863.html
MOSCOW, March 21. The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations has warned against possible grave environmental consequences of the war in Iraq. Military action may have an adverse impact on the region's environment, Deputy Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Yuri Brazhnikov told the press on Thursday. According to the minister, air and drinking water pollution caused by combustion and the use of depleted uranium weapons might become the gravest affects of the war on Iraq.
"People have started to leave [Iraq]" with hundreds of Iraqis going to Turkey, as well as Iran and Jordan, Brazhnikov reported with reference to figures provided by the United Nations. 600,000 people are likely to leave Iraq for Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait, the UN reports. Food supplies are running low in Iraq, Brazhnikov added. Humanitarian aid arriving in the region under the "Oil for food" programme is "not enough to feed the Iraqi population," the deputy minister said.
--------
FACTBOX-Smart Bombs, Other Tools of War
Fri March 21, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2425268
DUBAI - High-tech and packing a big punch, the weapons that will spearhead a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq are a generation or more ahead of anything in President Saddam Hussein's arsenal.
Iraq, which has destroyed more than half of its supply of declared al-Samoud 2 missiles under the eyes of U.N. weapons inspectors, promises surprises -- but denies possessing the weapons of mass destruction that Washington says it is hiding.
Following is a snapshot of some of the weapons that may be used, principally in the U.S. arsenal:
MISSILES AND 'SMART' BOMBS
TOMAHAWK -- This stubby-winged, precision-guided, long-range U.S. cruise missile launched the 1991 Gulf War. Fired from a submarine, a destroyer or a cruiser, it saw action in Bosnia in 1995 and Afghanistan in 2001. It skims in at about 550 mph (880 km/h) 100-300 feet above the ground. Length: 18 feet. Cost: $1.4 million each.
JASSM -- Nicknamed "Jazz'em," the U.S. Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile is an air-launched precision cruise missile that uses signals from satellites to find its way. Cost: $700,000 each.
SMART BOMBS -- U.S. satellite-guided bombs, known as Joint Direct Attack Munitions, are for all-weather use. Laser-guided Paveway bombs, with onboard guidance systems that home in on targets illuminated by an external laser, can be hampered by heavy cloud and darkness.
BUNKER BUSTER -- Air-launched and laser-guided, this 5,000-lb (2m 268-kg) U.S. bomb was developed for the 1991 Gulf War to penetrate hardened Iraqi command centers.
OTHER BOMBS
CLUSTER BOMBS -- Used by U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan, these contain around 200 "bomblets" that can penetrate armor or simply kill or wound anyone stepping on them. Opponents want them banned along with land mines, because of the threat to civilians once war is over.
THE DAISY CUTTER -- A high-altitude delivery conventional bomb dating back to the Vietnam War, the 6,750 kg (14,850 lb.) Daisy Cutter produces a devastating blast and packs a huge psychological punch. The U.S. Air Force used it in Afghanistan.
MOAB -- The 9,450 kg (20,790 lb.) Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), which can take out a whole unit and leaves a trademark mushroom cloud above the desert, is likely to pack an even greater psychological punch. Nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs, the MOAB has supplanted the Daisy Cutter in the U.S. arsenal as the world's largest conventional bomb. E-BOMBS -- U.S. military scientists have reportedly been developing weapons using an energy pulse to destroy or disable electrical or computer systems. It is unclear what stage the development of these weapons has reached.
AIRPOWER
B2 STEALTH BOMBER -- Long-range, multi-role U.S. bomber capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear weapons. Using a range of technologies to elude enemy radar, it saw action in Afghanistan.
F-117A -- The Nighthawk fighter also uses stealth technology to avoid detection. A U.S. veteran of the 1991 war, it also operates as a bomber.
B52 -- A veteran of the Vietnam War, this long-range American bomber played a key role during the 1991 Gulf War and also saw action in Kosovo.
F14 -- The Tomcat is the pin-up of the U.S. Navy and the backbone of its carrier-borne air strike force. The star of the film "Top Gun," along with Tom Cruise, the supersonic, twin-engine jet can track up to 24 targets simultaneously.
A10 THUNDERBOLT -- Nicknamed "the tank buster" or "the warthog," this highly maneuverable U.S. plane is designed to support ground forces both during the day and at night.
BLACKHAWK -- The main U.S. combat helicopter. It can fly over 1,000 miles with extra fuel pods fitted or can be refueled in flight. HARRIER -- The British-designed jump jet was developed in the 1960s. Its ability to take off vertically like a helicopter still makes it unique among jet fighters.
TANKS
M1-A2 ABRAMS -- The U.S. army's most advanced battle tank, it has top speeds of 40 mph (60 km/h). The latest versions have been fitted with devices to protect them from "friendly fire."
CHALLENGER -- The main British battle tank. The latest version can resist nuclear, chemical and biological attacks.
LION OF BABYLON -- Iraq's home-grown version of the old Soviet T-72 tank.
DEPLETED URANIUM -- Designed to pierce heavy armor, it is used to harden M-1A Abrams tank shells and 30 mm rounds fired from A10 attack jets. Critics say depleted uranium, which was used in the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo and Bosnia, causes cancer. U.S. officials say it is not a health hazard.
EYES IN THE SKY
AWACS -- U.S. Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, modified Boeing 707s with rotating radar domes, offer a broad view of a combat area.
PREDATOR -- Equipped with missiles, this Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) saw action in Afghanistan. The CIA later used it to hunt down and kill six alleged al Qaeda members in Yemen last November. In Kosovo, it collected intelligence.
GLOBAL HAWK -- With a wingspan wider than a Boeing 737's this was first used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is likely to spend hours high above Iraq monitoring suspected chemical and biological weapon storage sites.
DRAGONEYE -- The ultimate model aircraft, this tiny unmanned U.S. newcomer will offer small units a safe way of looking over the next hill or scouting out enemy-held buildings. It uses satellite navigation and an autopilot. Cost: $40,000 each.
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Iraq destroyed 72 of its 120 declared al-Samoud 2 missiles under U.N. inspections. A successor to the Scuds of the 1991 Gulf War, the al-Samoud could be fitted with a chemical or biological warhead.
Iraq says it does not possess such weapons of mass destruction.
If it has them and opts to use them, chemical weapons could include VX and Sarin nerve agents, which kill by suffocation; mustard gas, which blisters and often causes blindness; chlorine gas and phosgene, both choking agents; and cyanide.
Biological weapons could include anthrax, smallpox, ricin toxins and botulism. Radioactive dirty bombs are another option.
-------- korea
Korean reaction deemed likely
North will exploit war, experts say
BY MICHAEL ZIELENZIGER
Knight Ridder News Service
Fri, Mar. 21, 2003
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/5443978.htm
SEOUL, South Korea - The U.S.-led war against Iraq is likely to speed North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear warheads or launch another provocative act to force Washington to the bargaining table, analysts warned Thursday.
Reflecting the government's consensus, a senior foreign ministry official, who asked not to be named, said, ''Some sort of brinkmanship to induce negotiations'' is likely from secretive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il now that American missiles are targeting Saddam Hussein. ``They want to accelerate the pace of dialogue.''
The remarks underscored a widespread fear that by focusing U.S. military and diplomatic efforts on Iraq, the Bush administration is ignoring a far more dangerous threat to U.S. security. Bush so far has refused to engage North Korea in direct negotiations.
Analysts predict that the North Koreans might even set off an underground nuclear test to step up the pressure on the United States and make clear to the world that it possesses nuclear weapons and must be taken seriously.
Whatever the tactic, North Korea is expected to exploit the situation in Iraq. `WAIT AND SEE'
''For the time being, the North Koreans, while threatening to test fire missiles, will wait and see, gleefully gloating over the sight of the Bush administration becoming an odd man out in the Western camp,'' said Kim Myong-cho, a Tokyo-based researcher with close ties to Pyongyang. ''The end of the Iraq war will find the North Korean nuclear arsenal expanding,'' while U.S. support is draining away, he predicted.
''There's a lot we don't know about North Korea and what it might do,'' cautioned Robert Gallucci, the former State Department official who negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework with Pyongyang under which it stopped developing plutonium for nuclear warheads.
Despite that deal, the Bush administration last year confronted Pyongyang with evidence that North Korea was secretly developing enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons.
Since then, Pyongyang has kicked nuclear inspectors out of the country, quit an international treaty prohibiting nuclear development and threatened to restart its nuclear production activities. Earlier this month, North Korean MiG fighters buzzed a U.S. RC 135 reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan.
MILITARY EXERCISES
The Iraqi conflict began while U.S. troops were engaged in large military exercises with South Korean troops on the nation's east coast.
Daniel Poneman, a former National Security Council official, said North Korea could soon be capable of selling ''baseball-sized'' masses of nuclear material capable of being detonated in the United States.
''There is a tremendous direct threat to the United States,'' said Poneman, now a member of The Scowcroft Group.
----
Pyongyang says US is planning attack
Friday, 21 March, 2003
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/asia-pacific/2871261.stm
Pro-US demonstration in South Korea North Korea has accused the US of preparing a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear facilities, as US-led forces continued to attack Iraq.
The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said large US-South Korean military exercises were clear signs that the US was preparing for war.
North Korea also warned South Korea to stop loudspeaker broadcasts across their heavily fortified border.
Earlier on Friday, in North Korea's first comment on the start of US-led military action in Iraq, KCNA said that newspapers had reported the start of the war, and predicted the conflict would have "disastrous consequences". It did not elaborate.
The US army has said drills on the Korean peninsula were planned nine months ago, but they come amid tension over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
But KCNA said the US-South Korean annual military drills were "timed to coincide with the US attack on Iraq" and showed the US had a "win-win" strategy towards Iraq and North Korea - two countries which US President George Bush has named as being part of an "axis of evil".
North Korea also berated the South for allegedly resuming propaganda by loudspeaker at the DMZ. Both sides promised to halt slander attacks after the historic summit between both sides in 2000.
"If you do not take immediate measures to halt these damaging messages, then you will be completely responsible for the serious consequences that result," North Korea said to the South in a letter, KCNA reported.
South Korea's defence ministry confirmed receiving a letter but denied it was broadcasting propaganda across the demilitarised zone (DMZ).
"We usually broadcast music, the latest news on inter-Korean relations, the Iraq war and so on, but we don't broadcast anything slandering North Korea," a ministry spokesman said.
CRISIS CHRONOLOGY
# 16 Oct: US says N Korea admits to a secret nuclear programme
# 14 Nov: US halts oil shipments to N Korea
# 22 Dec: N Korea removes monitoring devices at Yongbyon nuclear plant
# 31 Dec: UN nuclear inspectors forced to leave
# 10 Jan: N Korea pulls out of anti-nuclear treaty
# 12 Feb: IAEA refers issue to UN Security Council
# 27 Feb: US says Yongbyon reactor restarted
# March 2: N Korean jets intercept US surveillance plane in international airspace
# 10 March: N Korea fires second missile into sea
North Korea and the US have been locked in an escalating standoff since October when the US said North Korea had admitted to a covert nuclear weapons programme. The US cut off fuel aid to North Korea in protest.
Since then, North Korea has kicked weapons inspectors out of the country, reactivated a key nuclear facility and pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It has also tested two conventional short-range missiles.
North Korea has repeatedly called for direct talks with the US, but Washington has said it will only hold discussions with Pyongyang if the North's neighbours, Japan and South Korea, are involved.
----
Rising concern in South Korea: Will a war on peninsula be next?
Don Kirk
International Herald Tribune
Friday, March 21, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/90486.html
SEOUL The first U.S. air and missile strikes on Iraq provoked worries here Thursday that North Korea may be next on the list of U.S. targets and that South Korea may be drawn into a conflict whether it likes it or not.
Robert Gallucci, the chief negotiator of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement with North Korea, said he was "concerned about the trajectory we're on" in bombing countries suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction.
Gallucci, here for a conference with American and South Korean officials involved in the negotiations that led to the 1994 agreement, said he also wondered how long North Korea would wait before precipitating an incident that might bring about conflict while the United States is engaged in Iraq.
"How thin can they slice the salami?" Gallucci asked. "They're really trying to get our attention," the former US. diplomat added, alluding to recent episodes in which North Korean fighter planes intercepted a U.S. spy plane 240 kilometers (150 miles) east of the North Korean coast and North Korea test-fired ground-to-ship missiles into the same waters.
North Korea, Gallucci said, may lose patience if U.S. forces appear to be about to gain a swift victory over Iraq that would give President George W. Bush the confidence to harden his approach toward the North.
"Attention to that issue is a priority of our administration," Gallucci said. "I hope that we're paying enough attention."
Han Sung Joo, who was South Korea's foreign minister during the nuclear crisis that led to the signing of the Geneva framework agreement in 1994, saw the current crisis as worse.
"Today the North Koreans are much closer to nuclear weapons than nine years ago," he said.
Han said it was "obvious the United States is taking a harder line" than South Korea in the current crisis. A major difference between then and now, he said, "is the shakiness of the U.S.-$ Korean alliance."
"It is, of course, much more difficult to deal with this issue when the two countries are not in lockstep," Han said.
In the midst of the first air strikes in Iraq, South Korea's president offered his personal support of the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq and promised to order noncombat troops there to aid, among other things, in the evacuation of refugees. The U.S. military action "benefits our national interest," Roh said at a televised news conference, calling it "inevitable, to eradicate weapons of mass destruction." He did not, however, comment on efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program or note any differences between his desire for direct dialogue between the United States and North Korea and U.S. insistence on dialogue only with other powers, including the South, at the table.
Thomas Hubbard, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea and a major figure in negotiating the 1994 Geneva agreement, said the agreement had gotten North Korea to shut down its nuclear complex at Yongbyon but had not provided a way to determine if the North was working on another nuclear program.
It was the North's acknowledgment last October that it had a program under way to develop nuclear warheads with enriched uranium that precipitated the current crisis.
Hubbard took pains to assure South Koreans that the United States would not have launched an attack on North Korea during the 1994 nuclear crisis without full consultation with the South and said he was "convinced the same applies today." If he had "a single major objective," he said, it was "to make sure we are working closely together."
Chung Chung Wook, who was national security adviser to President Kim Young Sam during the 1994 crisis, warned that time may be running out for resolution of the nuclear crisis. "We have to act fast," he said. "Perhaps we are heading for a more serious situation with more serious consequences."
SEOUL The first U.S. air and missile strikes on Iraq provoked worries here Thursday that North Korea may be next on the list of U.S. targets and that South Korea may be drawn into a conflict whether it likes it or not.
Robert Gallucci, the chief negotiator of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement with North Korea, said he was "concerned about the trajectory we're on" in bombing countries suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction.
Gallucci, here for a conference with American and South Korean officials involved in the negotiations that led to the 1994 agreement, said he also wondered how long North Korea would wait before precipitating an incident that might bring about conflict while the United States is engaged in Iraq.
"How thin can they slice the salami?" Gallucci asked. "They're really trying to get our attention," the former US. diplomat added, alluding to recent episodes in which North Korean fighter planes intercepted a U.S. spy plane 240 kilometers (150 miles) east of the North Korean coast and North Korea test-fired ground-to-ship missiles into the same waters.
North Korea, Gallucci said, may lose patience if U.S. forces appear to be about to gain a swift victory over Iraq that would give President George W. Bush the confidence to harden his approach toward the North.
"Attention to that issue is a priority of our administration," Gallucci said. "I hope that we're paying enough attention."
Han Sung Joo, who was South Korea's foreign minister during the nuclear crisis that led to the signing of the Geneva framework agreement in 1994, saw the current crisis as worse.
"Today the North Koreans are much closer to nuclear weapons than nine years ago," he said.
Han said it was "obvious the United States is taking a harder line" than South Korea in the current crisis. A major difference between then and now, he said, "is the shakiness of the U.S.-$ Korean alliance."
"It is, of course, much more difficult to deal with this issue when the two countries are not in lockstep," Han said.
In the midst of the first air strikes in Iraq, South Korea's president offered his personal support of the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq and promised to order noncombat troops there to aid, among other things, in the evacuation of refugees. The U.S. military action "benefits our national interest," Roh said at a televised news conference, calling it "inevitable, to eradicate weapons of mass destruction." He did not, however, comment on efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program or note any differences between his desire for direct dialogue between the United States and North Korea and U.S. insistence on dialogue only with other powers, including the South, at the table.
Thomas Hubbard, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea and a major figure in negotiating the 1994 Geneva agreement, said the agreement had gotten North Korea to shut down its nuclear complex at Yongbyon but had not provided a way to determine if the North was working on another nuclear program.
It was the North's acknowledgment last October that it had a program under way to develop nuclear warheads with enriched uranium that precipitated the current crisis.
Hubbard took pains to assure South Koreans that the United States would not have launched an attack on North Korea during the 1994 nuclear crisis without full consultation with the South and said he was "convinced the same applies today." If he had "a single major objective," he said, it was "to make sure we are working closely together."
Chung Chung Wook, who was national security adviser to President Kim Young Sam during the 1994 crisis, warned that time may be running out for resolution of the nuclear crisis. "We have to act fast," he said. "Perhaps we are heading for a more serious situation with more serious consequences."
--------
European Union Wants to Meet on Korean Nuclear Dispute
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/europe/22TALKS.html
The European Council plans to convene a ministerial meeting to discuss the escalating dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program, asking South Korean and Japanese diplomats to attend but not specifically calling for the United States to join the meeting.
The declaration, coming at the end of a two-day European Union summit meeting today, said that the European Union "stands ready to look into the possibility of enhancing cooperation with North Korea if the present crisis can be resolved in a satisfactory manner."
Council delegates called on Pyongyang to step back from recent saber-rattling involving its nuclear aspirations. The nuclear crisis in North Korea surfaced last October, when the White House said the country was trying to enrich uranium.
After Washington imposed a fuel embargo, North Korea expelled United Nations weapons inspectors, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and took actions that indicated that it was trying to resurrect a shuttered nuclear reactor.
The declaration noted that North Korea's "noncompliance with its international obligations in the field of nuclear weapons was a serious concern for the whole of the international community and was detrimental to its own interests." No date was set for the proposed meeting.
Pyongyang has asked for direct meetings with Washington to resolve the crisis, but the White House has said it would prefer to see negotiations conducted through the United Nations Security Council. The Union's involvement may offer a third alternative, since North Korea sees it as trustworthy mediator and Washington may welcome the European Union's involvement as well, despite recent disagreements over Iraq.
While the Union's declaration did not mention involving the United States in the meeting, it did say that "the E.U. will remain in touch with all key players." North Korea today condemned the American-led invasion of Iraq, which it described as the first stage of an attack that will eventually shift to Pyongyang.
"The unilateral demand for the disarmament of a sovereign state itself is a wanton encroachment upon this country's sovereignty," the North Korean government said, according to a state news service. "This high-handed action of the U.S. against Iraq and the war preparations now being made by the U.S. and its followers in the Korean Peninsula compel' North Korea "to do all it can to defend itself."
South Korea has placed its armed forces on alert and American troops have been conducting maneuvers off the South Korean coast amid speculation that North Korea may use the Iraq war as cover to jump-start its nuclear weapons program. This week, China, Japan, South Korea and the United States all warned North Korea not to use the Iraq invasion to force the White House into weapons negotiations.
The South Korean government said today that North Korea had ignored Seoul's stated desires that the war with Iraq not intrude upon diplomatic relations between the two governments of the Korean Peninsula.
"We cannot but voice regret that North Korea is making assertions contrary to the facts and casting doubt on our conciliatory intentions," the South Korean government said.
Although other global flashpoints have receded from view as the Iraq war commands center stage, North Korea continues to pose a diplomatic challenge to the White House. Pyongyang said earlier this week that it might develop long-range missiles, adding to recent concerns that the country was rebuilding its nuclear arsenal. North Korea's "missile program is of purely peaceful nature and does not pose a threat to anyone," the country's state-run newspaper said on Tuesday.
The White House has warned North Korea against any missile tests and said that if Pyongyang reprocesses nuclear fuel it will undermine any possibility of a peaceful resolution of the problem.
Russia, which has also been trying to broker a resolution of the crisis between Washington and Pyongyang, said today that the Iraq war would spark other regional conflicts around the globe.
"The trampling of international law in the Persian Gulf, and the decision to turn away from multilateral to unilateral military solutions, can hurt efforts by Moscow and Seoul to resolve the Korean conflict through diplomatic means," Russia's Foreign Ministry said.
--------
U.S. Marines Storm South Korean Beach
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Storming-the-Beach.html
TOKSOK-RI, South Korea (AP) -- Hunkered in the belly of the USS Juneau off the coast of South Korea, hundreds of U.S. Marines spent the night glued to a mess hall television watching the war in Iraq -- and feeling a little left out.
When the sun rose Friday, they stormed a nearby beach and sloshed through muddy rice fields as part of massive military exercises. North Korea warns that the U.S.-led maneuvers are pushing the Korean Peninsula to the ``brink of nuclear war,'' but for soldiers like Eric Ettinger, they are little more than mundane drills.
``The mood was a little bummed out, because we're not there,'' the 22-year-old Pennsylvania native said about wanting to pitch into the fight for Iraq.
Friday's practice beach assault comes amid mounting tension over North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program. While it highlights how U.S. military has other hot spots to watch outside the Middle East, it also serves as reminder of what could happen if diplomacy fails on the Korean Peninsula as it did in Iraq.
Amid staged explosions Friday, sorties of U.S. and South Korean fighter jets screamed over the horizon and packs of helicopters came thumping in from the sea. Waves of amphibious assault vehicles, enshrouded in a thick white smoke screen, splashed ashore.
After jumping out of the landing craft, the troops scrambled up an embankment to take positions behind pine trees before spreading out across the nearby rice fields. Sitting just off shore was a flotilla of warships, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency said the United States was conducting the war games to test its capabilities of fighting two wars simultaneously.
``This clearly proves that the U.S. win-win strategy, a key link in the whole chain of its strategy to dominate the world by holding an upper hand in strength, is being put into practice on the Korean Peninsula,'' KCNA said. Tensions have run high in the region since October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted having a secret nuclear program. The United States, which bases 37,000 troops in South Korea, says the exercises are unrelated to the nuclear dispute and are purely defensive.
``This is not about North Korea. This is about our commitment to deterrence,'' said Lt. Col. Mike Caldwell, a spokesman for the U.S. Forces in Korea.
Washington has deployed an intimidating array of weaponry for the monthlong maneuvers, including the carrier Vinson and a wing of radar-evading stealth fighters, which are here for the first time in a decade.
The United States regularly conducts military exercises with South Korea. One of the annual exercises -- called ``Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration'' -- ends March 26. A second -- called ``Foal Eagle'' -- started March 4 and runs until April 2.
Before Friday morning's drills began, a lone demonstrator ran onto the beach near this seashore village in southeastern South Korea to unfurl a protest flag. He was quickly tackled by police and hauled away.
On Thursday, South Korea put its military on heightened alert to guard against possible moves by the North to stoke tensions while the world is distracted by the Iraq war. President Bush has described North Korea as part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and Iran.
South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil said North Korea was conducting air raid drills across the country to heighten vigilance. But he said he saw ``little chance of high-intensity military provocations'' from the communist state.
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Russian: Nuclear Coorporation Will Go On
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US-Nuclear.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Tensions between the Kremlin and Washington over the war in Iraq will not damage U.S.-Russian nuclear cooperation, Russia's atomic energy minister said Friday.
Alexander Rumyantsev said the March 12 deal he signed with U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to shut down the last three Russian reactors that produce weapons-grade plutonium would go forward despite Russia's opposition to the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.
``No one is revising it,'' Rumyantsev told reporters in Moscow. ``The question of halting something hasn't come up.''
Under the accord, the United States will spend an estimated $500 million on two new fossil-fuel power plants to replace the reactors, which provide heat and electricity to two remote Siberian cities.
Russia has sharply condemned the U.S.-led attack on Iraq and has said it will boost security at Russian nuclear plants because of an increased threat of terrorism.
Rumyantsev said recent security inspections at nuclear facilities had found ``deficiencies'' but said on the whole Russia's nuclear complex is ``guarded against penetration'' and ``not susceptible to terrorist acts.''
Separately, strong winds caused an electrical short circuit at a nuclear power plant in western Russia, causing at least one reactor to shut down and another unit to reduce power, the plant's administration said Friday.
The incident occurred in Smolensk, about 220 miles west of Moscow. The short circuit posed no danger and radiation levels did not exceed normal levels, the administration said in a statement.
-------- ukraine
Ukrainian nuclear plant managers face criminal charges
UNIAN news agency, Kiev, in Ukrainian
BBC Monitoring
March 21, 2003
http://huknews.hoovers.com/fp.asp?layout=displaynews&doc_id=NR20030321670.2_e1d40004b708e759
Kiev, 21 March: The Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office has opened a criminal case against managers of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, including its director-general, Volodymyr Pyshnyy.
They are being charged with concluding unprofitable contracts with commercial structures over the last three years, which has resulted in the station incurring losses totalling several hundred thousand dollars, a source from the Enerhoatom national nuclear power company told UNIAN.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Security net tightens at US nuclear plants
Story by Matt Daily
REUTERS USA:
March 21, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20238/story.htm
HOUSTON - U.S. nuclear power plants and energy installations ramped up security after Washington raised the nation's alert status ahead of a possible attack on Iraq, federal officials and energy companies said.
"We've advised all plants to go to the highest level of security," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman Sue Gagner in a telephone interview from Washington.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge lifted the nation's color-coded alert status from yellow to orange on Monday, indicating a "high" threat level, after President George W. Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq within 48 hours or face a military attack.
"There will be more security at facilities handling radioactive materials," Ridge told reporters at a news conference Tuesday in Washington.
The NRC responded to the heightened alert by calling for more frequent patrols, wider safety barriers and more thorough checks on cars entering nuclear power plant grounds.
The United States has 103 nuclear reactors that together generate about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.
All of these facilities have been under extra guard since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with National Guard troops joining existing security personnel at reactors in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.
One of those plants - New York's Indian Point nuclear facility - is just 40 miles (60 km) north of the World Trade Center site along the Hudson River.
The Coast Guard are also part of the security effort, prowling the Hudson River and Atlantic waters off the giant Millstone nuclear power station in Connecticut.
Out west, Coast Guard officials said they had stepped up security at "high profile" California locations, including the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant - one of the biggest in the West - about half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
NATIONAL GUARD
During his briefing, Ridge warned that the intelligence community believed al Qaeda would attempt to launch attacks against U.S. interests if the United States invaded Iraq.
To combat the threat, Ridge asked the nation's governors to deploy National Guard or additional police to boost security at critical sites.
Among those heeding the advice were Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster, who called in National Guard units to help protect "key areas", and Texas Governor Rick Perry, whom state officials said was considering placing troops outside the state's many energy installations. (Additional reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York and Leonard Anderson in San Francisco).
-------- california
Nuke Lab Head Details Security Problems
March 20, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Lab-Security.html
ALBUQUERQUE (AP) -- The head of Sandia National Laboratories on Thursday acknowledged security problems at the nuclear lab, including guards napping on duty, stolen computers and the brief disappearance of a set of master keys.
C. Paul Robinson said the security and management problems showed a need for major changes at the lab that helps safeguard and assure the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile.
Some of those internal changes have been made, he said, and more were forthcoming.
``Many of the concerns we are discussing were brought forward by some of our employees. Regrettably, some of their concerns initially did not receive an adequate response when the employees brought them to management's attention,'' he said.
The lab is operated for the Department of Energy by Sandia Corp., a Lockheed Martin company. It has facilities in Albuquerque and Livermore, Calif.
Acknowledgment of the problems surfaced amid an ongoing fraud and corruption probe at Los Alamos National Laboratory, another federally funded nuclear lab based in New Mexico.
Sandia lab managers said security officers came forward last summer with concerns about breakdowns in discipline and lax security.
Robinson said 42 of the lab's 23,000 computers were reported stolen during the 2002 budget year. None of the stolen machines contained classified information.
A set of master keys missing for more than a week was returned, he said. No classified information was compromised, Robinson said.
About a dozen security officers have been put on paid leave. The lab has also referred some cases to the FBI, Energy Department and local law enforcement.
In a March 11 letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham that was obtained by The Associated Press, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, expressed concern about the security breakdown.
``Management appears to be driven by the need for 'coverup and damage control,''' wrote Grassley, who has been involved in New Mexico lab investigations in the past.
On Thursday, Grassley said concerns about terrorism have highlighted the importance of lab security.
``Considering the terrorist threat to our country and especially to places like Sandia, we can't tolerate lax security,'' he said.
-------- us politics
Bush rewriting war rules step by step
BY DAVID VON DREHLE
Washington Post Service
Fri, Mar. 21, 2003
Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/5444031.htm
NEWS ANALYSIS - WASHINGTON - A new kind of beginning for a new kind of war. The television cameras scanned the Baghdad skies searching for the starbursts of a massive bombardment -- which may yet come. But instead of ''shock and awe,'' there was strike and wait, poke and jab.
To understand the war in Iraq, you have to understand certain convictions of President Bush, according to several of his advisors. It is a new kind of war for a new historical epoch.
''This is not a war against a people. It is not a war against a country. It is most certainly not a war against a religion,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday. ''It is a war against a regime.'' Beyond regime change in Baghdad, its purpose is to send a message -- ultimately, to shake up the way the world thinks.
And so, while U.S. bombers carefully calibrate target lists around Iraq, intent on forcing Saddam Hussein from power, other critical targets are spread around the world. American actions in Iraq are designed to hit them right between the ears.
Bush has a different message for different audiences. He wants to intimidate dictators who might consort with terrorists. He hopes to steer the failing autocrats of the Middle East toward progressive reforms. He aims to catalyze optimism in the Iraqi people, and create a sense throughout the Muslim world that friendship with the United States is possible, but to make America an enemy is fatal.
Iraq is, for Bush, not an end in itself, but one battle fraught with implications for a larger, unprecedented war that is being invented step by step.
''The struggle against global terrorism is different from any other war in our history,'' the Bush administration's new national security strategy declared last fall. ``It will be fought on many fronts against a particularly elusive enemy over an extended period of time. Progress will come through the persistent accumulation of successes -- some seen, some unseen.''
NOVEL IDEA
War as a mode of persuasion -- much less as an advertisement for the United States -- is a rather novel idea. Protests and even riots around the world Thursday suggest that it might not work. Victory may require far more bloodshed. But more bloodshed would cloud the message. Greater violence might intimidate dictators effectively, but would do nothing to catalyze optimism in the Arab streets.
But if the Iraq war seems unprecedented to some Bush critics, the president answers that precedent collapsed with the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. ''Americans should not expect one battle,'' he told a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks, ``but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.''
Bush fastened on the principle that America is engaged in a new war against a new kind of enemy -- and that new tactics and strategies would be necessary. It was a transformative moment for a man who had preached the value of ''humility'' abroad in his campaign for president.
EXPANDED MISSION
On Sept. 12, 2001, after New York and Washington were attacked, he said: ``The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out against our country were more than acts of terror; they were acts of war. . . . The American people need to know we're facing a different enemy than we have ever faced. . . . The United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy.''
His conception of that war was far from humble. It was, rather, audacious. Bush targeted not just terrorists but also sovereign nations that ''harbor'' terrorists. And the mission continued to expand. By September 2002, a year after the attacks, the new security strategy cast the net broadly, declaring that ''America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror,'' without defining what ''compromised'' might mean.
The terrorists who struck the United States were different, according to Bush and his allies, for two reasons. First, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it this week, 'What was shocking about 11 September was not just the slaughter of the innocent; but the knowledge that had the terrorists been able to, there would have been not 3,000 innocent dead, but 30,000 or 300,000, and the more the suffering, the greater the terrorists' rejoicing.''
That leads to the second difference: If the point of this terror is to maximize the body count, then terrorists must be prevented from getting their hands on more lethal weapons.
''The greatest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology,'' the Bush administration explained in December. ``Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction. . . . The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed.''
Thus, the linkage was made between a stateless network like al Qaeda and rogue states such as Iraq.
COMPLEX GOALS
But the goals of the United States in its war against terrorism are more complex than just disarming rogue states.
Bush aims, at the same time, to ''drain away a certain toxicity, the anti-Americanism'' that is rampant in parts of the Middle East, according to one advisor.
''Shock and awe'' might not be the best way to do that. He wants to expose the gap between the goals of rogue-state tyrants and the more humane aspirations of their people, and what better way to accomplish that than to have Hussein toppled from within with U.S. support?
This is a very thin tightrope to walk, between not enough force and too much. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that it is not the only tightrope Bush is walking in his new war. He finds himself extolling the healing powers of democracy even as he depends on help from dictators in Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and elsewhere, Carothers has written. He finds himself promoting liberty abroad while curtailing certain liberties at home.
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Bush not bothered by inconsistencies
By JIM HOAGLAND SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
Friday, March 21, 2003
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/113469_hoagland21.shtml
WASHINGTON -- In the end it came down to George W. Bush's code of moral geopolitics and the deceptively swift pace of U.S. military deployments into the Persian Gulf region this winter. Nothing else counted for much on the road to launching the second U.S. war on Iraq.
Certainly not the United Nations weapons inspections and months of hyperventilation at the Security Council. They produced the predictable ambiguity and confusion that Bush sliced through with missiles aimed directly at Saddam Hussein. Bush was not about to let Hans Blix make war or peace decisions for America.
And certainly not the administration's intramural, petty sparring over Iraq that Bush tolerated while keeping his own counsel. Participants in the policy-making process say that there was never a full-scale discussion of whether the United States should go to war against Saddam in the Principals' Meetings of the National Security Council, which brings together the secretaries of state and defense and other key officials.
Instead, the "decision," if that is the right word, emerged piecemeal early last summer from what had become a war cabinet of two -- Bush and Vice President Cheney. A few officials outside the White House spotted the direction that Bush and Cheney were taking in July and went to work on the best ways to conduct a campaign that they understood was coming absent a miracle.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell were among those officials. Rumsfeld was operating from a position of strength. He was both friend and ally to Cheney. His shadow was in the room when the president and vice president talked about Iraq. And in the end he would have the tools to make a strategic U.S. retreat at the last minute virtually unthinkable.
Powell, still uncomfortable with the president and his policies, inserted himself into a Bush-Cheney dialogue with a now well-publicized Aug. 5 dinner presentation to Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. But Powell was reacting by then to a train already leaving the station, trying to influence the route it would take, perhaps as a way of modifying the eventual destination.
It was not until December, when the Iraqis filed a fantasy-filled, insulting 12,000-page weapons declaration to the Security Council, when Powell finally concluded that war was inevitable and appropriate. That is the conclusion I draw from his own public utterances as well as the impressions he left on U.S. and foreign officials who observed him in policy-making councils at the time.
Even then Powell's optimistic manner and words seem to have convinced some of his wishful colleagues that he still opposed the war and would be able to block it if they weighed in heavily. "There will be no war," one foreign minister told me flatly last winter after talking to Powell. But that was before French and German confrontational tactics enraged Powell almost as much as Iraq's duplicity, and confirmed his metamorphosis into a hawk.
Rumsfeld, on the other hand, had a clear field in the decentralized policy environment that Bush encourages. By late February, the Pentagon had deployed more than 200,000 troops into the theater with a speed and purpose that caught Rumsfeld's bureaucratic rivals off balance.
"I'm not sure we realized how fast and big this build-up was getting until after it had essentially happened," one official says now. "That helped shut down the clock on inspections and other options for the president."
Perhaps. But Bush seems to have needed little persuasion or squeezing by Rumsfeld or by Cheney, who took part in the 1991 decision to let Saddam survive and who is known to believe that this is a rare chance in public life to correct a serious mistake.
Bush had stayed aloof from the formal policy review on Iraq that was initiated in early 2001, while Cheney took a keen interest in it. But after 9/11, the president quickly developed his own black-and-white view of the unique evil and the dangers presented by the Iraqi regime.
Throughout the long months of debate and preparation, as U.S. policy seemed to zigzag and U.N.-mounted obstacles to regime change proliferated, one thing was always clear: In the end, Bush would have to make up his mind on the basis of incomplete and conflicting information and divided advice from within his own administration. That seemed to bother him less than it would have most other politicians I have known.
"This comes down to this president's character and his instincts," one Iraq hawk who knows the president well told me months ago. "I'm not worried about the outcome."
Jim Hoagland is associate editor/senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. Copyright 2003 Washington Post Writers Group. E-mail: hoaglandj@washpost.com
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Pentagon Strategy Creates Rift Among Hawks
By Jim Lobe,
AlterNet
March 21, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15439
An almost audible sigh of relief could be heard from a nondescript downtown building in Washington, D.C. on Thursday morning when President Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi television some hours after U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles bombarded a residence in Baghdad.
Media reports quoted U.S. officials as saying that the raid was directed at a "target of opportunity," possibly Hussein and his two sons themselves, shortly after the 48-hour ultimatum delivered by President George Bush had expired. If the raid had succeeded in killing the three men, U.S. officials told reporters, the Pentagon's war plans might have shifted dramatically against an all-out war.
But fortunately for the neo-conservative hawks over at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on 19th St., three blocks from the White House, it appears that Hussein remains alive, and the invasion will now go forward as planned. "That we appear not to have gotten Saddam Hussein last night ... may be a blessing in disguise," came the email message from AEI's press center.
A "decapitation" strategy targeted on Hussein, his sons, and a few other top Ba'ath officials without a full-scale invasion and occupation represents a dangerous threat to the neocon vision for the future of the Middle East. "As in Operation Desert Storm, the measure of victory in this war against Iraq will not be how big we start but where and when we stop," said the message from resident fellow Tom Donnelly. "'Going to Baghdad' means more than physically occupying the city. It is a metaphor for tearing out Saddamism, root and branch. There will be many moments - and a quick kill on Saddam would be one - where some might be tempted to say, as the first Bush administration did when the television pictures of the famous Highway of Death hit American airwaves in 1991, that enough has been done".
Perish the thought, cry the AEI hawks led by chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), Richard Perle. The current Pentagon strategy has them deeply worried that that their hopes for a thorough-going purge of ruling Ba'ath Party officials - which they see as the first step to transforming the entire Arab Middle East - may yet be frustrated.
The disagreement over military strategy is the first sign of a disagreement within the powerful alliance that has shaped U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. The coalition consists of three main components: hard right-wing, or nationalist Republicans like the Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney; neo-conservatives like Perle and most of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's immediate subordinates, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; and the Christian Right, whose concerns have been represented most forcefully within the White House itself, particularly among Bush's domestic advisers.
Over the past eighteen months, these groups have agreed that the "war on terrorism" must include the ouster of Saddam Hussein, beating the war drums against Baghdad moments after the dust settled in lower Manhattan. While they have been unanimous on key issues of tactics, such as marginalizing Secretary of State Colin Powell and other "realist" veterans of the first Bush administration, and strategy, such as ousting Hussein, they have never agreed on what happens once Hussein is removed.
"The earliest and most salient rift (in the hawks' coalition) will be the hard-right nationalists, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the neo-conservatives," according to Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and National Security Council strategist under former President Bill Clinton. "For the hard right, this is really about getting Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Once that's done, they're going to say, 'Okay, we've done our job, now let's get the hell out and go home".
But the neo-conservatives, on the other hand, want to stick around to use Iraq as a base from which to exert pressure on other presumably hostile regimes, particularly Syria, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia. The third wing of the coalition, the Christian Right, is more likely to side with Rumsfeld and Cheney than the neo-conservatives in Kupchan's view, creating a split that "will complicate George Bush's life immensely". In many ways, these rifts were already apparent in Afghanistan, with Rumsfeld and Cheney dead-set against serious "nation-building" and the extension of peacekeeping forces beyond Kabul for fear it would interfere with U.S. military operations against al Qaeda. The result - which the neo-conservatives warned against at the time - is that the authority of the U.S.-installed central government is basically confined to the capital, while most of the countryside remains in the hands of warlords. The neocons claim that Washington cannot afford to leave Iraq in a similar state of disorder.
While Cheney and Rumsfeld have both given lip service to the idea that Washington's occupation of Iraq will be the first step toward the democratization of the entire region, they have also been the most outspoken in insisting that Hussein's self-exile would be one sure way of avoiding war. This attitude has caused no end of anxiety among the neo-conservatives both within the administration, in the think tanks like AEI, and in such media outlets as the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard (headquartered in the AEI building), Fox News, and on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
For them, Iraq must not only be de-Ba'athized, but Washington must also be accorded the opportunity to show the world, (especially other Muslim states) just how powerful and determined the United States is to both wage war and enforce political reform. The neoconservatives view "Saddamism without Saddam" as the worst possible outcome of the present crisis. In the past months, they have excoriated the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for encouraging coups d'etat or enlisting the participation of even former senior Ba'ath officials in any post-invasion administration.
For the same reasons, they have voiced - albeit, far more tactfully due to their interest in preserving the strategic alliance - concern about Cheney's and Rumsfeld's calls for Hussein's exile and suggestions that U.S.-backed purges of the Iraqi regime will be carefully targeted and limited. The neo-conservatives have long favored a far-reaching purge that would bring to power the core of the exiled Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by Ahmed Chalabi, an old friend of Perle and Wolfowitz. Chalabi would be ideally suited to co-operate with U.S. efforts to knock over the other "dominoes" in the region who are perceived as hostile to the U.S. or Israel.
It is still too early to tell whether the neocons will get the opportunity to fulfill their vision for the Middle East or whether their hopes will be rudely shattered by a carefully targeted Cruise missile.
forums What do you think? Discuss this story! http://forums.alternet.org/guest/motet?enter+The_War
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U.S. embassies close
March 21, 2003
Embassy Row
James Morrison
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-76603400.htm
The United States closed diplomatic missions or cut back their services in more than a dozen countries because of security concerns over the war in Iraq.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said certain embassies and consulates were closed for "local security reasons, possibility of demonstrations or existing demonstrations that may not threaten the post, itself, but may threaten Americans who might be coming and going or people who might be waiting outside."
He said embassies and consulates were closed in Argentina, Australia, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, South Africa and Syria. Services were cut back in Brazil, France and Turkey.
Meanwhile, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened a hearing on embassy security.
"Terrorists who seek to harm the United States but who lack the means to directly attack our homeland have often shifted their focus to U.S. diplomatic posts overseas," said committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar, Indiana Republican.
Diplomats are on the "front lines in the war on terrorism," he added, noting recent attacks on U.S. missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Congress has earmarked about $860 million to rebuild old embassies in the most dangerous locations.
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Bush's Strong Arm Can Club Allies Too
Lawmakers, Activists Say Tactics for Enforcing Loyalty Are Tough and Sometimes Vindictive
By Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2713-2003Mar21?language=printer
Editor's note: This article was withheld from later editions of yesterday's paper to accommodate coverage of the start of the war in Iraq.
After a Newsweek cover story in 1987 titled "Bush Battles the Wimp Factor," the label stuck to George H.W. Bush for years. Now, his son is creating the opposite perception: the Bully Factor.
As the United States wages war this week following a pair of ultimatums to the United Nations and Iraq, the airwaves and editorial pages of the world have been full of accusations that President Bush and his administration are guilty of coercive and harrying behavior. Even in typically friendly countries, Bush and the United States have been given such labels this week as "arrogant bully" (Britain), "bully boys" (Australia), "big bully" (Russia), "bully Bush" (Kenya), "arrogant" (Turkey) and "capricious" (Canada). Diplomats have accused the administration of "hardball" tactics, "jungle justice" and acting "like thugs."
At home, where support for the war on Iraq is strong and growing, such complaints of strong-arm tactics by the Bush administration nonetheless have a certain resonance -- even among Bush supporters. Though the issues are vastly different, Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups report similar pressure on allies at home to conform to Bush's policy wishes.
Although all administrations use political muscle on the opposition, GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive. Just as the administration used unbending tactics before the U.N. Security Council with normally allied countries such as Mexico, Germany and France, the Bush White House has calculated that it can overcome domestic adversaries if it tolerates no dissent from its friends.
In recent weeks, the White House has been pushing GOP governors to oust the leadership of the National Governors Association to make the bipartisan group endorse Bush's views. Interest groups report pressure from the administration -- sometimes on groups' donors -- to conform to Bush's policy views and even to fire dissenters.
Often, companies and their K Street lobbyists endorse ideas they privately oppose or question, according to several longtime Republican lobbyists. The fear is that Bush will either freeze them out of key meetings or hold a grudge that might deprive them of help in other areas, the lobbyists said. When the Electronic Industries Alliance declined to back Bush's dividend tax cut, the group was frozen out when the White House called its "friends" in the industry to discuss the tax cut, according to White House and business sources.
Under such pressure from the administration, lobbyists and lawmakers who voiced doubts about Bush's economic policies have publicly reversed themselves. "I think I should have kept my mouth shut," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in one such recantation last month.
The forms of pressure -- exclusions from White House guest lists, a loss of access to key Bush aides, calls to dissenters' superiors, veiled threats saying the White House has noted the transgression or even shouted accusations -- convey the same message. Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who enforces loyalty for the White House, puts it this way: "If I bitch, guess what? I get coal in my socks."
The technique has served the Bush White House well by maintaining the lockstep support among Republicans needed to pass Bush policies in a closely divided Congress. "It's fascinating the extent to which this administration has been able to hold troops in line for an extended period of time," said Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution.
But on the latest round of tax cuts, there are signs of a backlash against Bush's tough tactics. In Congress, a group of moderate GOP senators and representatives said they would only support a tax cut much smaller than Bush's. And lawmakers suggest that resentment is growing beneath the surface.
More than a dozen members of Congress interviewed for this article said support for Bush's economic plan is weaker than the public might realize because lawmakers don't want to challenge the president publicly. "We don't want to stick it in the president's eye -- at the moment," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). He said as many as 20 House Republicans oppose Bush's tax cuts, and an additional 40 or 50 are uneasy about the details and timing.
The White House says its style is vigorous but not strong-armed. "The president believes strongly in issues and he diligently pursues what he believes in on the basis of policy, and that's why he's won so many votes -- because members agree with him," press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
But GOP lawmakers have other reasons for their support. "People have come to realize that it is better to be seen helping the administration than pulling down parts of his plan," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.). Foley knows the consequences. He opposed Bush on a free-trade vote despite intense pressure. So when Bush senior adviser Karl Rove recently encouraged Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel R. Martinez to run for the Senate from Florida -- the same seat Foley is seeking -- many on Capitol Hill suspected it was Bush's revenge on Foley. Foley, in an interview, said he was worried he might get the "Pawlenty" treatment, a reference to last year's Minnesota Senate race, in which the Bush White House pushed out Tim Pawlenty, the GOP majority leader in the Minnesota House, to clear the way for handpicked candidate Norm Coleman.
Some of the White House's tactics have become lore. After Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) opposed Bush's first tax cut, White House slights and threats to cut his pet programs drove Jeffords from the GOP. Last year, after Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) voiced concern about Bush's immigration policy, Rove told him to never again "darken the door" of the White House.
But the hardball tactics are deeper and more pervasive.
Eager to send a message to the National Governors Association to reflect a GOP majority, the White House for the first time excluded Raymond C. Scheppach, the NGA's executive director, from the governors' annual dinner at the White House last month. Encouraged by the administration and its allies, a few Republican governors -- including the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- threatened to stop dues payments or quit the group. After a bipartisan NGA committee drafted a statement seeking more federal money for the states, the White House let its displeasure be known to the governors, and Republicans arrived at the meeting last month demanding the rejection of the "partisan" statement.
Conservative interest groups get similar pressure. When the free-market Club for Growth sent a public letter to the White House to protest White House intervention in GOP primaries for "liberal-leaning Republicans," the group's president, Stephen Moore, picked up the phone at a friend's one evening to receive a screaming tirade from Rove, who had tracked him down. On another occasion when Moore objected to a Bush policy, Rove called Richard Gilder, the Club for Growth's chairman and a major contributor, to protest.
"I think this monomaniacal call for loyalty is unhealthy," Moore said. "It's dangerous to declare anybody who crosses you an enemy for life. It's shortsighted." Leaders of three other conservative groups report that their objections to Bush policies have been followed by snubs and, in at least one case, phone calls suggesting the replacement of a critical scholar. "They want sycophants rather than allies," said the head of one think tank.
Corporations are coming under increasing pressure not just to back Bush, but to hire his allies to represent them in meetings with Republicans. As part of the "K Street Project," top GOP officials, lawmakers and lobbyists track the political affiliation and contributions of people seeking lobbying jobs.
In a private meeting last week, chief executives from several leading technology firms told Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (Calif.) and other moderate Democrats that they were under heavy pressure to back the Bush tax plan, even though many of them had reservations about it. "There is a perception among some business interests there could be retribution if you don't play ball on almost every issue that comes up," Dooley said.
Staff writer Dan Balz contributed to this report.
----
War's certainty: a big price tag
Conflict's costs - from $6.77 meals to billions for rebuilding - are hard to predict.
By David R. Francis
The Christian Science Monitor
March 21, 2003
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0321/p02s02-woiq.html
In 1966, the Pentagon offered an estimate of what the Vietnam War would cost. When America pulled its troops out in 1973, the tab was 90 percent higher - $111 billion.
The Civil War, similarly, cost the North 13 times the original estimate of President Lincoln's Treasury secretary.
As the United States launches its first major war effort of the 21st century, history suggests one financial fact to bank on: The cost will be higher than forecast.
Of course, this conflict, in which the world's most sophisticated weapons are aimed at the leader of a nation with vastly inferior military capabilities - is not your typical war. Uncertainties, ranging from a quick toppling of the regime to an expensive peacekeeping aftermath - could push the tab higher or lower than even the most careful estimate.
So far, the Bush administration itself has not provided an official estimate. The White House may fear a public forecast will create a negative climate of opinion toward the war. Already, the war is seriously jeopardizing the chances of President Bush's proposed $726 billion tax cut passing. Even some Republicans in the Senate are talking about cutting that amount in half.
Nonetheless, the Defense Department and White House budget officials have been preparing a supplemental spending request. Early reports suggested it could be in the $60 billion to $95 billion range for one year, to be submitted to Congress once war starts. It would cover the war, some aftermath costs, and extra terror-war expenses.
The total tab is made up of items small and big, multiplied many times:
• About $10,000 to 15,000 per hour for a bomber run, depending the plane.
• $6.77 for each "meal ready to eat" for soldiers in the field
• $21,000 or so to convert a gravity bomb into a satellite-guided JDAM bomb.
• About $1 million for each Tomahawk cruise missile.
• $3 million a day to deploy an aircraft carrier battle group (the number deployed has gone up because of the war).
Some 80 percent of the costs of combat derive from salaries, transportation and other logistics, food, and the like, says Gordon Adams, a war expert at George Washington University in Washington. The other 20 percent is for ammunition, missiles, other weapons-related costs.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) took a stab at reckoning some war costs last September. The cost of deploying troops is some $14 billion. Add just over $10 billion for the first month of combat. If the war lasts longer, include an extra $8 billion for each month. After hostilities end, the cost to get the forces and their equipment home again could be $9 billion.
Not counted by the CBO are occupation costs, perhaps $1 billion to $4 billion a month, and reconstruction costs and foreign aid costs. The nonpartisan agency says it has no way to estimate such costs.
Mr. Adams describes this as a "low-end estimate."
"The historical record is littered with failed forecasts about the economic, political, and military outcomes of wars," writes William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.
Factoring broader economic impacts into his estimates of the costs of an Iraqi war, Mr. Nordhaus figures the tab could range from $99 billion in the 2003-2012 period if the military and nation-building campaigns are quick and successful to $1.9 trillion if it goes badly. That big sum involves $778 billion in higher oil costs if the war destroys a large part of Iraq's oil infrastructure and $391 billion because this pushes the US economy into a slump.
In the first Gulf War, to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, American allies, primarily Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait itself, covered more than 80 percent of the costs of that war. This time, the US is having difficulty rounding up supporters for its present move against Iraq.
Experts suspect European nations and Japan may be somewhat more willing to contribute to postwar humanitarian and rehabilitation costs in Iraq. Iraq's own oil revenues might eventually cover some of those costs as well.
Unofficially other numbers play into the cost: aid promised to nations that may help with the war effort, such as Turkey.
Christopher Hellman, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, calls the talk of a $60 billion to $95 billion supplemental appropriation as just a "down payment" on the eventual costs of a war. "It is to get people to start thinking about large numbers."
Mr. Hellman figures the US will be stuck occupying Iraq "for an awful lot of years."
The Bush administration hopes the stay will not be so extended.
The cost of a war has become increasingly a political issue in Washington. Sen. Ernest Hollings (D) of South Carolina sent a letter to the Senate Finance Committee recently requesting a hearing on methods to pay for impending military action.
Moreover, he introduced a "War Financing Act of 2003" to impose a 1 percent value-added tax designed to pay for the war. Chances of passage are slim. But Mr. Hollings, a hawk on budget deficits, hopes to make a point that the war could expand the federal deficit from $300 billion-plus this year to $400 billion or more.
"We have paid for every other war in our nation's history," Mr. Hollings stated. Without paying for the war now, those members of the armed forces returning to the US will be handed "the bill."
US wars: The cost in today's dollars
Conflict Cost (billions) Per capita cost
Revolutionary War (1775-1783) $2.2 $447
War of 1812 (1812-1815) 1.1 120
Mexican War (1846-1848) 1.6 68
Civil War (1861-1865) 62.0 1,686
Spanish-American War (1898) 9.6 110
World War I (1917-1918) 190.6 2,489
World War II (1941-1945) 2,896.3 20,388
Korea (1950-1953) 335.9 2,266
Vietnam (1964-1972) 494.3 2,204
First Gulf War (1990-1991) 76.1 306
Source: William Nordhaus, Yale University. Cost in 2002 dollars.
----
House Narrowly Passes $2.2 Trillion Budget
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/politics/21CND-BUDGET.html
WASHINGTON, March 21 - Voting largely along party lines, the House early today narrowly approved a 10-year budget plan that would allow the deep tax cuts President Bush has proposed.
The Republican-controlled House approved its plan by a vote of 215 to 212. The legislation calls for a $2.2 trillion budget for the 2004 fiscal year that includes $726 billion in tax cuts that the White House has proposed.
The Senate intends to vote on a completely different version of the budget measure later today. A group of moderates who want to limit the tax cut to about half of what the president wants seemed to lack the votes to prevail because they could not bring around a small group of senators who refuse to vote for any tax cut at all.
If that is the case, President Bush's full tax cuts will probably be part of the Senate plan.
The measures are called budget resolutions. They are planning measures and do not carry the force of law. But the resolutions are politically significant because they establish general guidelines for the tax and spending legislation Congress will deal with for the rest of the year.
Still, the details of the resolutions at this stage are not very important, because they will undergo so much change when House and Senate negotiators reconcile the differences between the two versions.
Neither the House nor the Senate resolution allocates funds to meet the cost of the war against Iraq or its aftermath. But there is no doubt that at least this year, Congress will approve spending as much money as the president asks for.
Before adopting it, the House rejected four alternative resolutions offered by mainstream Democrats, conservative Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus and conservative Republicans.
Earlier this week, enough Republicans were opposed to the $726 billion in tax cuts and deep spending reductions in the plan that it seemed to be in jeopardy.
But Republican leaders picked up support by rewriting the plan to restore more than $200 billion in cuts over 10 years that had been ordered for Medicare and to set aside another $400 billion for prescription drug coverage under Medicare.
Then, at a closed meeting of Republican representatives on Thursday morning, the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, and other leaders appealed to the rank and file not to hand the president an embarrassing defeat just at the outbreak of the war.
The plan supposedly would lead to a balanced budget by 2012. But it accomplishes that with cuts that might not be politically realistic in popular benefit programs like Medicaid and student loans. It also reduces spending for almost all programs for which Congress provides annual appropriations, except those involving the military or domestic security.
Arguing for the plan, Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut said Republicans were interested in "strengthening the economy and creating new jobs."
The spending limits, he said, could be met by restricting "waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement."
But Democrats said it was irresponsible to cut taxes and ignore the cost of war. "We set a different set of priorities," said Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. of Tennessee. "We believe states should be helped. We believe the war should be paid for. We believe we should balance the budget."
--------
Who Lost the U.S. Budget?
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/opinion/21KRUG.html
The Onion describes itself as "America's finest news source," and it's not an idle boast. On Jan. 18, 2001, the satirical weekly bore the headline "Bush: Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over," followed by this mock quotation: "We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."
Whatever our qualms about how we got here, all Americans now hope that the foreign front proceeds according to plan. Meanwhile, let's talk about the fiscal front.
The latest official projections acknowledge (if you read them carefully) that the long-term finances of the U.S. government are in much worse shape than the administration admitted a year ago. But many commentators are reluctant to blame George W. Bush for that grim outlook, preferring instead to say something like this: "Sure, you can criticize those tax cuts, but the real problem is the long-run deficits of Social Security and Medicare, and the unwillingness of either party to reform those programs."
Why is this line appealing? It seems more reasonable to blame longstanding problems for our fiscal troubles than to attribute them to just two years of bad policy decisions. Also, many pundits like to sound "balanced," pronouncing a plague on both parties' houses. To accuse the current administration of wrecking the federal budget sounds, well, shrill - and we don't want to sound shrill, do we?
There's only one problem with this reasonable, balanced, non-shrill position: it's completely wrong. The Bush tax cuts, not the retirement programs, are the main reason why our fiscal future suddenly looks so bleak.
I base that statement on a new study that compares the size of the Bush tax cuts with that of the prospective deficits of Social Security and Medicare. The results are startling.
Accountants estimate the "actuarial balance" of Social Security and Medicare the same way a private insurance company would: they calculate the present value of projected revenues and outlays, and find the difference. (The present value of a future expense is the amount you would have to invest today to have the money when the bill comes due. For example, if $1 invested in U.S. government bonds would be worth $2 by the year 2020, then the present value of $2 in 2020 is $1 today.) And both programs face shortfalls: the estimated actuarial deficit of Social Security over the next 75 years is $3.5 trillion, and that of Medicare is $6.2 trillion.
But how do these shortfalls compare with the fiscal effects of recent and probable future tax cuts?
The new study, carried out by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates the present value of the revenue that will be lost because of the Bush tax cuts - those that have already taken place, together with those that have been proposed - using the same economic assumptions that underlie those Medicare and Social Security projections. The total comes to $12 trillion to $14 trillion - more than the Social Security and Medicare shortfalls combined. What this means is that the revenue that will be sacrificed because of those tax cuts is not a minor concern. On the contrary, that revenue would have been more than enough to "top up" Social Security and Medicare, allowing them to operate without benefit cuts for the next 75 years.
The administration has tried to deny this conclusion, inventing strange new principles of accounting in the process. But the simple truth is that the Bush tax cuts have utterly transformed our fiscal outlook, for the worse. Without those tax cuts, the problems of an aging population might well have been manageable; with them, nothing short of an economic miracle can save us from a fiscal crisis.
And there's a lesson here that goes beyond fiscal policies. On almost every front the outlook for the United States now seems far bleaker than it did two years ago. Has everything gone wrong because of evildoers and external forces? In the case of the budget - and the economy and, yes, foreign policy - the answer is no. The world has turned out to be a tougher place than we thought a few years ago, but things didn't have to be nearly this bad.
The fault lies not in our stars, but in our leadership.
-------- MILITARY
Softening up with bombs, mind games and stealth
By Michael Gordon in Camp Doha, Kuwait
March 21 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749883345.html
The common assumption is that wars begin with a bang. In fact, they often start with limited air strikes, stealthy border movements and psychological operations to weaken resistance.
All three occurred yesterday as the US military, with the support of its Australian and British allies, began the softening-up process for the expected full assault on Baghdad.
President George Bush revealed just after 2pm Sydney time that the initial air assault to collapse Saddam Hussein's government had begun.
It involved a series of offensive actions to undermine Saddam's military capabilities - sharp jabs designed to set up a knockout punch.
There was even the early attempt at the knockout, the so-called decapitation blow involving a fusillade of missile strikes at a southern Baghdad home believed to contain Saddam and some of his top advisers.
It was unclear late last night whether the strike against the "target of opportunity" had been successful.
But the United States-led operation is moving fast. In the dark of night allied war planes attacked about a dozen artillery pieces near the southern Iraqi town of Al Zubayr and on the Al Faw peninsula.
The strikes were important militarily and politically. Allied war planes patrolling the southern flight exclusion zone have attacked surface-to-air missiles, radar and surface-to-surface missiles in southern Iraq. But this was the first time that artillery had been attacked.
The military rationale seemed clear: to set the stage for the invasion of Iraq.
With a range of about 40 kilometres, the Howitzer artillery that was attacked could have reached the US and British forces moving into positions in northern Kuwait and threatened them as they advanced north.
Allied war planes attacked field guns stationed on the peninsula, which were in range of Kuwait's Bubiyan Island. There were also reports of an oil refinery in southern Baghdad being ablaze.
US military sources said the air strikes would continue for the next two or three days as part of a "pre-battle" plan before a big assault.
A military commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the planned strikes would be beefed-up versions of the bombing raids carried out in Iraq's southern flight exclusion zone in recent years.
Tom Allard, Herald correspondent in Doha, reports that Australia's special forces troops are believed to be on the ground in Iraq and its F/A-18 Hornets are in the skies over enemy territory providing escort support for US tanker and early warning and control aircraft.
Dubbed Operation Falconer, the limited Australian military contribution swung into action within hours of the first coalition missile attacks.
In another prelude to a fully fledged air and land assault, the US military issued instructions to what it hopes are poorly motivated Iraqi troops on how to surrender to allied forces or at least ensure that they are not attacked.
Other indications of a looming attack were evident in Kuwait. US and British forces moved to attack positions inside the previously demilitarised zone that separates Kuwait and Iraq.
Cuts have also been made in the electrified fence that separates Kuwait from Iraq.
The US Army's 3rd Infantry Division and 101st Airborne are still on the Kuwaiti side of the demilitarised zone, as are its marines and British forces.
-------- australia
Deep underground, the military sees all
March 21 2003
AAP
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749882764.html
As the first bombs fell over Iraq yesterday, Australia's military chiefs sat huddled in a secret war room buried metres beneath defence headquarters in Canberra.
Behind the high, razor-steel fences of the Defence Signals Directorate, the Defence Minister, Robert Hill, joined the chief of the military, General Peter Cosgrove, for a brief tour of the ADF's command and control centre.
From here the military can contact and direct Australian forces anywhere in the world, including teams of Special Air Service commandos operating deep inside Iraq.
Entry requires passage past two security desks and the surrender of mobile phones and laptops.
Behind banks of computers and video screens, military personnel and a scattering of civilians and defence scientists filtered information rolling in from around the world - a process known as de-conflicting.
"They need to work out what the senior commanders need to know and de-conflict that information," an ADF spokesman said. "It just means making sure everything is right."
Under clocks showing the time in the Middle East, Christmas Island, London and the United States, the control centre boasted wall-size maps of Iraq and video conferencing facilities, and screens marked "secret".
From here the ADF controlled operations in East Timor in 1999, the interception of asylum seekers and the "war on terror" deployment to Afghanistan.
"This is a huge command post," General Cosgrove said.
"This is an absolute beehive. They're processing information; they're sending it on.
"With satellite communications we can speak to [the troops] whenever we want."
The war room, called the pit by its inhabitants, will provide information to senior officers, including General Cosgrove and the centre commander, Major-General Ken Gillespie, 24 hours a day. General Cosgrove, other senior officers and the secretary of the Defence Department, Ric Smith, will receive daily briefings early each morning and will in turn brief the Government.
Morning briefings at Parliament House will include the Prime Minister, John Howard, and senior ministers on the National Security Committee of cabinet.
Also in the war room were lawyers ready to advise on the legality of combat missions in Iraq under Australia's tight rules of engagement.
"There are teams of lawyers here 24 hours a day, relating to lawyers in the field, who are relating to other lawyers in allied forces," Senator Hill said.
"From a planning point of view I really think the performance here has been excellent. That leads to the forces in the field having confidence in what's happening here."
----
War could see tighter security against terrorist attacks
By Darren Goodsir
March 21 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749882776.html
Counter-terrorism agencies, operating on heightened alert since November, will consider lifting the threat level even higher in the belief that war could trigger terrorist attacks.
Intermittent restrictions could be imposed at airports, meeting places and transport and utility locations.
Meetings of the top security agencies will be held more regularly to look at reams of fresh intelligence on possible reprisals.
Intelligence agencies believe our prominent role on Iraq does not constitute grounds for an upgraded threat. However, given declarations by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation that war "may well influence the timing of some terrorist attacks", it is likely that critical areas will be targeted for discreet security upgrades - rather than a blanket alert being issued.
Airports, embassies, transport centres and places like the Opera House are likely to be first in line for this extra fortification. Big private companies with identifiable Australian links, such as Qantas, will also be on high alert - as will utilities such as water and information technology providers.
The move to war has already brought together the National Security Committee of cabinet. This body, which includes the Prime Minister, Defence Minister, Attorney-General and Minister for Foreign Affairs, is the peak decision-making organisation on national security. In the past few months, it will have repeatedly assessed the military and resource implications of going to the Gulf. Another key body is the Secretaries' Committee on National Security, or SCONS, as it is more commonly known.
This forum unites heads from the main "war" departments; namely Defence, Treasury and Foreign Affairs, with representation from ASIO and the Australian Federal Police. Its main job is to assess the home front's requirements while at war.
Next in line is the National Counter Terrorist Committee, a more operationally focused organisation comprising officials from the country's police forces.
There is representation from the AFP and ASIO - but its activities fall under the direction of officers in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Responses to possible terrorist attacks will be co-ordinated through the Protective Security Co-ordination Centre.
It has a 24-hour watch office in place to decipher and disperse the latest intelligence and ensure appropriate resources are deployed to locations considered vulnerable to attack.
Last November, Australia's defence, police and counter-terrorism capabilities were primed after the receipt by ASIO of "credible, non-specific" information of an attack over the Christmas-New Year period. The alert has remained in place.
If new intelligence is received in the days and weeks ahead, a "stepped" escalation of security will be unveiled. This could see access to airports restricted or even closed for periods, a more visible policing presence near embassies and key meeting points and transport hubs.
Any intensification in the alert will be the subject of publicity, similar to waves of warnings issued in the United States and Britain.
-------- business
U.S. Set to Award 7 Contracts for Rebuilding of Iraq
Initial Work Will Go to American Firms
By Paul Blustein and Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A665-2003Mar20?language=printer
The U.S. Agency for International Development said yesterday that it will shortly award seven contracts to American companies for the initial stages of reconstruction in postwar Iraq -- two of them as early as today.
Justifying the decision to restrict the contracts to U.S. firms, Andrew S. Natsios, the USAID administrator, said one reason is the need for the firms' personnel to have security clearances, because "there are classified documents they have to see."
Natsios and other officials emphasized, however, that they expect the long-term reconstruction effort to go well beyond the USAID contracts and include international organizations and aid agencies from other countries, which would presumably award contracts to non-U.S. firms.
"We expect U.N. agencies will be involved in a major way," Natsios said, adding that he has also been talking "below the radar screen . . . for three or four months now" to his counterparts at the aid agencies of other wealthy countries in the expectation that they, too, would play significant roles in rebuilding Iraq after U.S.-led forces unseat President Saddam Hussein.
Other U.S. officials said they envision important contributions from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as well. The IMF has established a task force to study the Iraqi economy, although any financial support from either it or the World Bank probably would take considerable time because the two institutions last worked in Iraq in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The U.S. officials' comments may go at least part way toward defusing a controversy that has arisen over USAID plans to limit its contracts to U.S. firms. The agency almost always awards American companies a large portion of its contracts, but international criticism erupted after recent news reports that the USAID had limited the selection process for the biggest contracts to a handful of huge U.S. multinational firms, some of which are well connected to the Bush administration. Those firms include a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., the company once headed by Vice President Cheney.
The agency's handling of the matter, and the implication that international organizations and other aid agencies would be left out, was denounced as "exceptionally maladroit" by Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external relations. The amount of aid that is needed for reconstruction, although still far from determined, is certain to dwarf the sum that the USAID is planning to spend on the contracts in question, and that is one major reason that U.S. officials say they would welcome involvement by international agencies and other countries. Many experts have cited estimates ranging from $25 billion to $100 billion for the full reconstruction, while the largest contract the USAID is planning to award at this stage is for about $600 million.
That contract, to repair the country's infrastructure, including roads and bridges, is to be awarded early next week. The field of competitors was narrowed from seven to two or three, and the companies have been asked to submit their "best and final offers," agency officials said. Two contracts to administer Iraq's seaport and airports may be awarded as soon as today.
The total cost of the USAID's plan is still unknown, Natsios said, and will be allocated in a supplementary appropriation bill that President Bush plans to submit to Congress soon. According to people who have seen contract documents that have been distributed to some of the firms, the USAID effort is intended "to provide tangible evidence to the people of Iraq that the U.S. will support efforts to bring the country political security and economic prosperity."
Even if Washington does not intend to have U.S. firms dominate Iraq's reconstruction, officials of many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have been actively involved in aid are upset about the USAID plan because it apparently envisions a minor role for them. NGO officials contend that they have far more expertise than giant companies in the on-the-ground work in local communities that is required to build successful health and education systems.
"We've received verbal assurances from the U.S. government that NGOs will be involved in reconstruction activities, but we'll believe it when we see it," said Sid Balman Jr., a spokesman for InterAction, an umbrella group of NGOs. "There's been a worrisome trend we've been seeing, based on what we saw in Afghanistan, where the Bush administration seems to be turning to a small pool of mainly large U.S. contractors for most reconstruction activities."
----
Pentagon Adviser Is Also Advising Global Crossing
By STEPHEN LABATON
March 21, 2003
NY Times
http://nytimes.com/2003/03/21/business/21GLOB.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
WASHINGTON, March 20 - Even as he advises the Pentagon on war matters, Richard N. Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, has been retained by the telecommunications company Global Crossing to help overcome Defense Department resistance to its proposed sale to a foreign firm, Mr. Perle and lawyers involved in the case said today.
Mr. Perle, an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration, is close to many senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who appointed him to lead the policy board in 2001. Though the board does not pay its members and is technically not a government agency, it wields tremendous influence in policy circles. And its chairman is considered a "special government employee," subject to federal ethics rules, including one that bars anyone from using public office for private gain.
Mr. Perle and his lawyer said yesterday that his involvement with Global Crossing did not violate the ethics rules.
According to lawyers involved in the review and a legal notice that Global Crossing is preparing to file soon in bankruptcy court, Mr. Perle is to be paid $725,000 by the company, including $600,000 if the government approves the sale of the company to a joint venture of Hutchison Whampoa, controlled by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, and Singapore Technologies Telemedia, a phone company controlled by the government of Singapore.
Lawyers said today that Mr. Perle had been helping Global Crossing for several weeks. They said he was brought in as a prominent Republican with close ties to the current officials. He has taken on a particularly important role, they said, since the company recently pulled back its request for the government to clear the sale in the face of opposition from the Defense Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those agencies have said that the proposed deal presents national security and law enforcement problems, because it would put Global Crossing's worldwide fiber optics network - one used by the United States government - under Chinese ownership.
Mr. Perle and his lawyers were preparing to file an affidavit dated March 7 and a legal notice dated today, March 20, that said he was uniquely qualified to advise the company on the matter because of his job as head of the Defense Policy Board.
But after a reporter raised questions today about whether Mr. Perle was using his job at the Defense Policy Board for the benefit of a client, they said the references to his job should not have been in the legal papers and would be deleted before they were filed in the bankruptcy proceeding.
In the March 7 affidavit, Mr. Perle said, "As the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, I have a unique perspective on and intimate knowledge of the national defense and security issues that will be raised by the CFIUS review process that is not and could not be available to the other CFIUS professionals." The company used similar language in its legal notice.
CFIUS refers to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a government group that includes representatives from the Defense Department and other agencies. It has been considering the deal and has the power to block it. "CFIUS professionals" refers to the other lawyers and lobbyists who have been trying to get the committee to approve the deal.
Mr. Perle, in an interview late this afternoon, said that he had not noticed the language in the affidavit and that it was an erroneous reference because the Defense Policy Board has nothing to do with reviewing the sale of American companies to foreign investors.
"It was drafted by the lawyers, and I frankly didn't notice it," he said.
Shortly after that interview, Mr. Perle called back and said that he remembered that the language concerning the Defense Review Board had appeared in an earlier draft of the affidavit and that he had struck it out because it was incorrect.
"You have a draft that I never signed," he said.
After consulting with a company lawyer, Mr. Perle called back and in a third conversation said that he had taken the phrase out of the affidavit "because it seemed inappropriate and irrelevant" but that someone put it back in the document and he signed it without noticing it.
"This was a clerical error, and not my clerical error," he said.
An adviser involved with one of the parties in the case said tonight that Mr. Perle had not read the affidavit closely and that he had, in fact, signed it but that it would be changed before it was filed.
Mr. Perle said he did not seek an ethics opinion as to whether he could work on the Global Crossing matter, because he said it posed no legal problems.
"I've abided by the rules," he said. "The question, I should think, is have I recommended anything to the secretary or discussed this with the secretary, and I haven't," he said, referring to Mr. Rumsfeld. "The alternative is if you are on the board, you can't have any action before the Defense Department. That isn't the rule. If that were the rule, I'd have to make a choice between being on an unpaid advisory board and my business."
Mr. Perle said that he was not engaged in lobbying with senior officials at the Defense Department and that his role was to advise Global Crossing on the process of gaining approval. He said his sole discussions with Pentagon officials had been over what assurances they would need to satisfy themselves that a deal would not pose any national security problems.
"I'm not using public office for private gain because the Defense Policy Board has nothing to do with the CFIUS process," he said.
But other lawyers and advisers to the companies involved in the deal said that Mr. Perle had been brought in precisely because he has access to top officials. They noted that Mr. Perle's fee was largely contingent on the deal's being approved, an unusual arrangement in Washington legal circles. And they noted that he was retained after Global Crossing, which has a history of using well-connected lobbyists, had realized that many of the other lawyers and lobbyists had strong Democratic ties but no solid Republican ones.
Among others who have been retained to gain approval of the proposed deal are Thomas F. McLarty III, the former Clinton chief of staff; Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former deputy Treasury secretary, and lawyers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Dewey Ballantine.
Mr. Perle, who as chairman of the Defense Policy Board has been a leading advocate of the United States' invasion of Iraq, spoke on Wednesday in a conference call sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which he advised participants on possible investment opportunities arising from the war. The conference's title was "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?"
-------- chemical weapons
Iraqi CW shells
Inside the Ring,
by Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
March 21, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030321-87375993.htm
U.S. intelligence officials tell us the evidence that Iraqi artillery units are preparing to use chemical warfare shells is based on reconnaissance photographs of the shells.
The rounds were identified as chemical weapons-capable shells with slots where a vial of nerve agent or biological-weapons dust is inserted before firing.
No evidence of the actual chemical or biological agents has been spotted so far. Officials said the weapons of mass destruction vials are kept separate from the artillery shells and then brought to the units before being fired.
The artillery units with the special shells were bombed Wednesday in southern Iraq in a pre-emptive strike. Officials believe the Iraqis, if they use weapons of mass destruction, will draw on their hidden stocks of VX nerve agent, an extremely potent poison.
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Chemical and biological agents in Iraq
EDITORIAL
March 21, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030321-77404251.htm
The war with Iraq has begun. Coalition forces are now fighting to liberate the Iraqi people and to rid the world of the threat of terrible agents that Iraqi scientists have worked on.
''Weapons of mass destruction." The phrase says it all. Over the years, Saddam Hussein is believed to have built up a terrible arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. He already has unleashed them against his own people, and he could be preparing to use them against coalition soldiers and civilians. While the symptoms and effects of the agents heavily depend on the method and amount of exposure, here's a rundown of what agents Iraq is believed to possess, their typical effects and their possible treatments.
Chemical agents
• Mustard gas: A potent and insidious weapon. It causes skin burns and blisters, eye irritation and respiratory problems, including coughing and bronchitis. Those symptoms appear some time after exposure - between two and 24 hours. There is no specific antidote, although mustard gas disables far more than it kills. Iraq has used mustard gas in the past, and some units of the Iraqi army are believed to be equipped with it.
• Ricin: Poison made from castor beans. It can be inhaled, ingested or swallowed. After a few hours, symptoms include nausea, breathing difficulties and aching muscles, followed by internal bleeding and organ failures. Death follows between 36 and 48 hours of exposure. There is no known antidote.
• Sarin: Nerve toxin also known as "GB." Exposure can come via skin or eye contact, inhalation, or ingestion of poisoned water. Effects, which are almost immediate after exposure to the vapor form, include small, pin-point pupils, blurred vision, rapid breathing, followed by convulsions, paralysis and death from respiratory failure. Antidotes are available, but they must be applied quickly. High exposures are almost certain to cause death.
• Tabun: Nerve toxin similar to sarin, also known as "GA." Exposure is possible through inhalation, skin or eye contact and drinking poisoned water. Symptoms are similar to sarin. Antidotes are available, but they must be given soon after exposure.
• VX: Considered to be the most potent nerve agent of them all. Exposure is most likely through inhalation, and skin or eye contact. Symptoms are similar to sarin and tabun. Treatments are available, but must be applied quickly. U.S. military officials believe that some of Saddam's Republican Guard units are equipped with VX-filled munitions.
Biological agents
• Aflatoxin: Aflatoxins are made by some species of fungus. Best known for their ability to cause cancer, particularly in the liver. Their level of lethality in the short term is not clear.
• Anthrax: Caused by the bacteria bacillus anthracis. For inhalation anthrax (the most lethal form), cold- and flu-like symptoms begin within seven days of exposure, followed by shock and respiratory failure. U.S. soldiers have been vaccinated against it, and antibiotics are also effective. While cutaneous anthrax (a skin infection) is rarely fatal, inhalation anthrax could potentially be quite deadly.
• Clostridium botulinum toxin: The nerve toxin that causes botulism. Symptoms commonly begin between about 12 and 36 hours of ingestion and include blurred vision, slurred speech and general muscle weakness, followed by paralysis and death. An antitoxin is available, and if administered early, it can greatly reduce effects.
• Ebola: The terrifying virus that causes Ebola hemorrhagic fever. Symptoms usually begin between two and 21 days of exposure to either the virus itself or fluids from an infected individual. Those sickened experience flu-like symptoms followed by internal and external bleeding, and often, death. There is no known antidote.
• Smallpox: One of the most frightening of all biological agents. After an incubation period of between 12 and 17 days, flu-like symptoms are followed by an outbreak of a rash. Smallpox will kill one-third of the unvaccinated people it infects. Pre- or quick post-exposure inoculation is the only effective treatment.
With the coalition troops in harm's way, committed to "no outcome but victory," we hope that Saddam fails in any attempt to use any of those horrific weapons.
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Toxin specialists can aid, not invade
By Bruce I. Konviser
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-64215682.htm
PRAGUE - The United Nations' failure to approve an attack on Iraq has sidelined two U.S. allies from "new Europe," meaning that some of the world's best chemical-detection units will not be deployed with the frontline troops.
In recent weeks, 460 specially trained troops from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have been based at Camp Doha in Kuwait, preparing to accompany U.S. troops into Iraq.
The Czechs and Slovaks' nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) units offer decades of accumulated expertise and highly sensitive equipment that can detect trace amounts of deadly agents.
They are deft at disinfecting; they can decontaminate 1,000 people and 300 vehicles per hour.
They can also provide medical care.
The White House considered the Czechs and Slovaks to be on board for the campaign. But parliamentary mandates of the troops' nations prohibit them from crossing into Iraq as part of a military offensive not explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations.
The Czechs may support the U.S. venture but they cannot join the offensive, said Tomas Klvana, spokesman for President Vaclav Klaus.
"The [Czech] government is not part of the coalition," Mr. Klvana said. "It's not part of the forces that attacked Iraq last night. But the forces there are mandated to take part in any humanitarian operation."
U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Craig Stapleton said that despite being locked out of frontline action, the Czech and Slovak units could play an important role.
"The newest [parliamentary] resolution allows that unit to protect Turkey, to protect Israel and to move into battle if weapons of mass destruction are used," Mr. Stapleton said.
They can be dispatched throughout the region - including into Iraq - to provide medical aid and clean up the aftermath of a chemical or biological attack.
Otherwise they will be relegated to monitoring the air, water and ground in Kuwait.
The United States' NBC units have made major advancements since the Persian Gulf war of 1991. Much of it has been gleaned from Czech and Slovak expertise honed on the Soviet side of the arms race during the Cold War.
Twelve years ago NBC units from then-Czechoslovakia detected low levels of nerve toxins in the air but U.S. commanders largely ignored their alerts.
It took five years but it was these measurements that ultimately convinced the Pentagon that thousands of soldiers were in ill health as a result of the war, said Austin Camacho, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Deployment Health Office.
"We discovered later that some warheads contained sarin and we realized that some servicemen may have been exposed to it," Mr. Camacho said. "It didn't cause an immediate health reaction, but it could pose a long-term problem."
When alerted to the Czech detections of both sarin and mustard gas, U.S. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf dispatched American detection units that were unable to verify the results.
In an e-mailed response to questions, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Donald Sewell said, "We didn't have the biological and chemical detection equipment that we have today. We are able to field a number of new items ... that give us a greatly enhanced capability over what we had in 1990-91."
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Anti - War EU States Seek Defense Pact Without UK
March 21, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-eu.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - European Union divisions over Iraq widened Friday when three anti-war states agreed to hold a summit on defense integration without Britain, while London stood by charges that France had wrecked diplomacy in the crisis.
As EU leaders wrapped up a second day of tense talks, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt announced plans for France, Germany and Belgium to meet next month to discuss integrating their armed forces more closely.
The move reopened EU rifts hours after the 15 leaders had papered over their splits with a statement pledging support for U.N. humanitarian relief efforts and urging Iraq's neighbors, in a warning to EU candidate Turkey, not to make mischief.
As U.S. missiles and bombs rocked Baghdad and U.S.-led ground forces pushed north from Kuwait, the European Commission earmarked emergency aid totaling $105 million to help tackle the humanitarian consequences of the war.
Britain, which has committed 45,000 troops to the U.S.-led Iraqi campaign, maintained its accusation that France, leader of the anti-war camp, scuttled diplomacy by threatening to veto any U.N. Security Council resolution on the conflict.
Asked whether he regretted attacks on Paris that drew an angry protest from his French counterpart, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: ``I stand by the words I have used.''
``I don't regret the fact that we have argued, that we disagree with the French position, because we do,'' he said.
``NO BED OF ROSES''
French President Jacques Chirac, struck a philosophical note, insisting that he did not see Britain as an adversary.
``Things are not black and white. Europe has never been a bed of roses,'' he told a news conference.
But Chirac also made clear France would veto any new U.N. resolutions backing the war at this stage and would oppose granting Washington and London administrative power in Iraq.
He also repeated France's belief that the United Nations alone could direct the reconstruction of Iraq.
But Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an ally of Washington, criticized France's threatened use of its veto.
``I believe (the veto) is an obsolete mechanism that does not correspond any more to the post-(World War II) situation that set up the organization of the United Nations,'' he said.
The rift in the EU appeared to have one immediate consequence with the tripartite defense initiative apparently designed to isolate Britain, Europe's preeminent military power.
Although German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder insisted no country would be excluded from a common defense policy, Belgian officials said only three were invited to the initial summit.
Schroeder said the initiative would boost European defense industries and could one day lead to common EU armed forces.
Belgium's Verhofstadt said he hoped to meet Chirac and Schroeder in Brussels in April ``to try to start putting our ideas into practice,'' adding that Luxembourg might also join in.
Britain's Europe Minister Denis Macshane derided the plan: ``I wonder how serious is the idea of basing European defense on Belgium without Britain. European defense is a matter of two countries that have military capacities: France and Britain.''
Germany and Belgium are among the lowest defense spenders in NATO as a proportion of gross domestic product.
BLAIR, CHIRAC KEEP DISTANCE
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, looking tired and drawn after Britain suffered its first war casualties in a helicopter crash, shook hands and accepted condolences from Schroeder.
Chirac entered the room only after cameras had been ushered out, avoiding being photographed with Blair. But diplomats said the French leader handed Blair a personal note of condolences on ``this cruel ordeal.''
Blair denied any suggestion that divisions over the Iraq crisis had dimmed his enthusiasm for the EU.
``The answer to that is unhesitatingly no. I am not less enthusiastic. Where there are the disagreements, the right way to handle them is not turn our back on our other partners but to engage with them,'' he said.
In a statement, the EU leaders could not agree to say who was responsible for the war. France forced the removal of a phrase that Iraq had failed to take a final chance to disarm.
Diplomats said the leaders' message to Iraq's neighbors ``to refrain from actions that could lead to further instability'' was aimed primarily at EU candidate Turkey.
Ankara has refused to let U.S. troops invade Iraq from its soil but cleared the way for thousands of its own soldiers to move into northern Iraq, raising the risk of clashes with Kurds.
The leaders stressed their commitment to strengthening transatlantic ties, severely strained by the crisis.
Blair said relations with Washington had been exposed as a fault line in the past few weeks.
``Europe should be the friend and partner of America, not its rival. That is an article of faith for me,'' he said.
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Iran Leaders Call for Immediate Halt to Iraq War
March 21, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-iran.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's top political and religious leaders called on Friday for an immediate halt to the U.S.-led military assault on neighboring Iraq and said the war was a threat to global peace.
But President Mohammad Khatami and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei offered no support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who attacked Iran in 1980, sparking an eight-year war.
``The Islamic Republic of Iran, while calling for an immediate halt to the war, does not defend the dictatorial (Iraqi) Ba'ath regime,'' Khamenei said in a speech to mark the start of the Iranian New Year, according to extracts translated by the official IRNA news agency.
``It only defends the Iraqi nation and believes the future of Iraq must be decided only by the Iraqi nation,'' he said.
Iran, which Washington has branded an ``axis of evil'' member along with Iraq and North Korea, has adopted a policy of ``active neutrality'' over Iraq, pledging to offer support to neither side while urging a political solution to the crisis.
``We have opposed this move from the outset and today we again clearly condemn this military attack,'' Khatami said, according to translated extracts of his New Year speech also reported by IRNA.
``(This) is a threat against humanity and global peace, since it is based on a horrible illusion of a superpower which (thinks) that since it has force, it has the right to impose its demands at will at whatever cost,'' he added.
Washington severed ties with Tehran shortly after the 1980 Islamic revolution and many Iranians fear it may target Iran next after dealing with Saddam.
U.S. officials have expressed grave concern in recent weeks over a number of nuclear facilities under construction in Iran, which they say are part of a nuclear weapons program. Iran says the nuclear plants are for producing power to meet booming electricity demand.
Khamenei warned Iranians to be on their guard against Western influences aimed at undermining Iran's Islamic values.
``Although we may have no military war, we will definitely have a political and economic and especially a cultural war,'' he said.
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Iran Oil Depot Hit by Rocket, Iran Warns U.S., UK
March 21, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-iran-rocket.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - An oil refinery depot in southwestern Iran close to the Iraqi border was hit by a rocket on Friday, officials said, and the Islamic Republic warned Washington and London to respect its airspace.
Government officials, who asked not to be named, told Reuters it was not clear where the rocket, which hit the depot in the city of Abadan at around 7.45 p.m. local time (11:15 a.m. EST), had come from.
``When it happened the city of Abadan shook,'' Hossein, a government employee, told Reuters by telephone from Abadan which is about 30 miles east of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, and on the opposite side of the Shatt al-Arab estuary from Iraq's Faw peninsula.
The Faw peninsula adjacent to Abadan was secured earlier on Friday by British forces advancing into Iraq as part of a land attack against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Hossein said two guards at the Abadan depot were injured. Government officials were unable to give any further details on the extent of the damage. There was no indication that operations at Abadan's oil refinery were affected and no reports of any other missiles falling on Iranian territory.
The official IRNA news agency, without referring directly to the Abadan incident, said Iran's Foreign Ministry had expressed its opposition to the violation of its airspace to the ambassadors of Britain and Switzerland, which represents U.S. interests in the Islamic Republic.
Washington severed diplomatic relations with Tehran shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
IRNA said the Foreign Ministry's director general of legal affairs Mehdi Danesh Yazdi asked the envoys, who represent the two counties with the largest military involvement in the attack on Iraq, ``to prevent such events from happening in future.''
Heavy bombing by U.S. and British forces during the attack on Faw shattered windows and caused villagers to flee in panic in neighboring Iran, according to IRNA.
Iran, which fought an eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s in which hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides, has condemned the U.S.-led attack on its western neighbor, but vowed not to be drawn into the conflict.
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Five Questions on the Road to Baghdad
Key battles, military and political, that may shape the war - and the peace
By TONY KARON
Friday, Mar. 21, 2003
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,435747,00.html
How's the war going? According to Donald Rumsfeld, pretty good indeed. Day Three of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was all about control. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saddam Hussein may be losing control of his country; at the same time, U.S. forces took control of some important oilfields in southern Iraq. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines caused a minor stir in when they raised the U.S. flag over the Iraqi port Umm Qasr - while the U.S. is, in fact, taking control of Iraq, it doesn't want to be seen as, um, occupying Iraq. Just liberating it. So the flag came back down.
The battle has been completely joined. Baghdad was pulverized by U.S. Friday, the first installment of the promised "shock-and-awe" air campaign that U.S. commanders had held off on for the past 48 hours. and ground troops advanced deep into Iraq. At the same time, U.S. and British ground forces moved into southern and central Iraq, having seized Iraq's only deep-water port at Umm Qasr and begun fighting for control of Basra, the capital of Shiite southern Iraq. Air strikes have also blasted targets in the key northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, where unconfirmed reports also suggest U.S. airborne troops may have seized control of important oilfields. Five things to watch for in the next stage of the war:
Baghdad Bound: Although coalition forces encountered some significant resistance at Umm Qasr and elsewhere in the south, the military units on which Saddam is depending to stand and fight have been deployed closer to Baghdad. The crucial indicator of how long and bloody this war will be is likely to come over the next week as U.S. and British forces come face to face with Republican Guard units deployed along the approaches to the capital. Saddam and his generals knew they could not stop the U.S. and British forces at Iraq's borders; their game plan has been to force a bloody battle for the capital, in the hope that this would raise political pressure on Washington to halt its offensive. But, if anything, that strategy increases the incentive for U.S. commanders to accelerate their campaign.
Destroying Saddam's regime quickly and with minimal civilian casualties remains the fundamental objective of the war. Bombing Baghdad certainly raises the political stakes, because it substantially increases the risk of civilian casualties in the densely populated city. Precision-guided munitions help alleviate the danger, but can't entirely eliminate it. And precision bombing requires precision intelligence - the U.S. bomb that destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1998 was guided by satellite with deadly accuracy; the problem lay in the intelligence that had wrongly identified the building. The inability of U.S. and British intelligence tips to guide UN weapons inspectors to any "smoking guns" over the past three months is a reminder that there's much on the ground in Iraq that remains unknown to coalition forces.
The latest round of bombing is likely to inflame the unprecedented hostility the war has ignited among even relatively moderate quarters in the Arab world. Fierce clashes on the streets of Egypt and Yemen in the past two days have served as a reminder of the strains the war has put on Arab governments allied with Washington. Still, the danger of civilian casualties increases exponentially if coalition armies are forced to wrest control of Baghdad from determined defenders, and U.S. commanders are hoping that the combination of heavy air bombardment of the regime's power centers and the rapid drive by coalition forces towards Baghdad will prompt an internal collapse of Saddam's regime as even loyal troops read the writing on the wall.
A Battle For Baghdad? In what may be a dress rehearsal of any battle for Baghdad, British forces are advancing quickly on Basra. But their commanders have indicated that they plan to avoid fighting street by street for control of Iraq's third city, planning to enter only once they'll be welcomed in. That possibility is not as outlandish as it may sound - Basra was the epicenter of the bloody Shiite revolt against Saddam in 1991, and coalition commanders have reason to suspect that Saddam's control of the city may once again be broken by an internal uprising. Images of coalition forces being welcomed by cheering crowds would certainly help the Bush administration silence critics of the war, but entering the city may pose its own challenge: The U.S. and Britain want to avoid a reprise of the bloody retribution against government officials that followed the 1991 uprising, which would be unlikely to help coalition efforts to persuade most of Saddam's generals and officials to surrender. The priority appears to be the drive on Baghdad to decapitate the regime - if not by a precision-targeted air strike then by a the rapid deployment of overwhelming force. That will be helped by capturing Basra, which guards a route to the capital along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.
A secondary question that arises in the largely Shiite region is how the locals will respond to the invading forces. They've shown themselves willing to fight Saddam, but the failure of the U.S. and its allies to support their 1991 rebellion, which left them at the mercy of Saddam's army, generated widespread bitterness towards the U.S. And the most powerful political-military force in the region appears to be the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is based in Iran and has a close relationship with the leadership in Tehran. Iran certainly has a strong interest in influencing the outcome of the U.S. war in Iraq, and events in southern Iraq in the weeks ahead may yield some clues as to Tehran's intentions.
What About Kirkuk? British reports suggest U.S. airborne troops have seized control of some of Iraq's most important oil fields near the northern city of Kirkuk. But the fate of the city remains one of the most important questions shaping the outcome of the war - and the peace. The U.S. has been advised to take control of the city as soon as possible because Kirkuk may be the focal point of post-war conflict between Turkey and the Kurds of northern Iraq. Thousands of Kurdish fighters whose families were driven out of the city by Saddam's ethnic cleansing campaign over the past decade have vowed to return and claim their property. But Turkey sees Kurdish control of Kirkuk as unacceptable, both because it would strengthen Kurdish autonomy in a new Iraq and because they see the city's rightful owners as the Turkmen minority, which has a long history of conflict with the Kurds.
Even after Turkey's parliament agreed to allow the U.S. the right to use Turkish airspace, negotiations at the executive level broke down over disagreements between Washington and Ankara over Turkey's role in northern Iraq, suggesting that the potential for violent clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces remains high. And that creates an incentive for the U.S. to take control of the most prized piece of real estate in that conflict. That would have been a lot easier, of course, if Turkey had allowed the U.S. to launch a ground invasion from its territory.
Can We Find Saddam's Banned Weapons? The fact that U.S. ground troops are obliged to don gas masks every time Iraq fires shells or missiles in their direction underscores the tactical importance of finding and eliminating any chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. has little intelligence on where any such stocks may be located; dedicated teams will be looking to gather this intelligence in the field as the battle unfolds and the regime begins to collapse. Even greater than the tactical need to eliminate such weapons is the political need to show they exist. President Bush and Tony Blair have insisted that this war is an act of preemptive self-defense against Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, while most of the UN Security Council remains unconvinced. Even as the first air strikes began, chief UN weapons inspector Dr. Hans Blix publicly chided U.S. "impatience" to go to war, and questioned the veracity of U.S. and British claims on Iraq's weapons programs. The geopolitics of the post-Saddam era will be made considerably easier for Bush and Blair if they can get some egg on Blix's face.
Back to the UN? The U.S. and Britain failed to win UN endorsement for the war, and signs are that they may face a struggle to win endorsement for their version of the peace. Britain has taken the lead in efforts to ensure that whatever political order is established in Baghdad after the war carries UN authorization. Already, the coalition has moved to expand funds available to the UN oil-for-food program, on the basis that Iraqi oil revenues controlled by the UN would be used to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of Iraqis as a result of the war. And Blair has sought European Union backing for a Security Council resolution to authorize a new civil administration in Iraq. But France and others who have opposed the war have expressed opposition to the idea of retrospectively sanctioning regime change - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan even questioned the legality of the war - and France has given notice it will resist any move to transfer de facto political authority in Baghdad to Britain and the U.S.
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Surprise as first strike short and sharp
By Marian Wilkinson,
Herald Correspondent in Washington
March 21 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749882539.html
Into the darkness ... US troops from the 3rd Infantry Division make their way to their tactical assembly area in northern Kuwait to join a convoy. Photo: AFP/ Romeo Gacad
President George Bush launched the war on Iraq with a surprise strike on the regime's leadership just after 8pm Washington time as the deadline passed for Saddam Hussein to quit Baghdad.
Nearly 40 cruise missiles were launched from United States Navy ships, and unconfirmed reports said four bunker buster bombs were dropped from fighter jets, hitting Baghdad at dawn local time.
About two hours later Mr Bush appeared on television to tell the nation that the US-led war on Iraq had started.
"On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war," Mr Bush said.
"These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign."
The short, sharp strike defied all predictions that the war against Iraq would open with a 48-hour "shock and awe" bombing attack of Baghdad.
The strategic strike came after a long meeting late in the afternoon between Mr Bush and his national security team. Those present included Vice-President Dick Cheney, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the directors of the CIA and the National Security Agency.
The two intelligence chiefs reportedly briefed Mr Bush on the option of targeting the Iraqi leadership in the opening stage of the campaign. Following this meeting Mr Bush took the decision to strike soon after his deadline on Saddam passed.
Signalling that the attack was just the beginning of a huge operation involving air and ground forces, Mr Bush told the American people: "Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half-measures and we will accept no outcome but victory."
Mr Bush said the US-led coalition would "make every effort to spare innocent civilians" but he indicated that the bombing campaign on Baghdad was coming.
He sought to put the blame for any significant civilian casualties on the Iraqi regime. He said: "Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military; a final atrocity against his people."
For the first time, Mr Bush also warned Americans that the war, "could be longer and more difficult than some predict" and that the aftermath would "require our sustained commitment".
On the question of how long US forces would occupy Iraq, he tried to reassure the Iraqis and the American public.
"We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."
The White House told reporters to stand by soon after the US deadline passed for Saddam to leave Iraq.
Mr Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, had passed a message to the President from the CIA director, George Tenet, and the National Security Agency that Saddam was still in Iraq.
About 90 minutes later a White House spokesman announced that the disarmament of Iraq had begun and that Mr Bush would address the nation later in the night. By then the Pentagon was releasing information that a cruise missile attack had been launched on Baghdad at a "leadership target".
Earlier in the day the White House also released a letter from Mr Bush to Congress that informed it of the legal grounds for a military attack on Iraq.
In it he cited the need to protect the national security of the US and to take action against international terrorism.
In his address to the nation, Mr Bush justified the pre-emptive war on Iraq by linking Saddam with terrorism.
"The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder," Mr Bush told Americans.
"We will meet that threat now with our army, air force, navy, coast guard and marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities."
Although the Iraqi regime has never been linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mr Bush strongly implied that it was capable of backing such an atrocity.
As Mr Bush spoke, Washington remained on a heightened terrorist alert.
Key buildings were under heavy police guard, and helicopters patrolled the air space around the White House and the Capitol.
Photo of bomb cloud in Baghdad: http://www.smh.com.au/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1047749888888_2003/03/20/wld_explosion.jpg
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Bats and ground huggers go for vital targets
By Robert Burns
March 21 2003
Associated Press
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749883429.html
Related links: - Cruise missile cross-section
http://www.smh.com.au/media/2003/03/20/1047749887447.html
The opening salvos in the war to remove Saddam Hussein relied on tried-and-true cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs dropped by United States Air Force stealth fighter-bombers.
The attacks involved about three dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles and bombs dropped from a handful of F-117A Nighthawk stealth jets, military officials said.
Three of the Tomahawks were launched from the USS Donald Cook, a destroyer in the Red Sea. The navy released three pictures of the missiles being launched just hours after the attack.
The Tomahawk, introduced during the war with Iraq a dozen years ago, is still a technological wonder, able to fly at just under the speed of sound, hugging the ground to deliver a 450-kilogram warhead onto a pre-programmed target.
The navy probably has about 1000 Tomahawks, which at about $US600,000 ($1 million) a pop are considered expensive. Radar detection of the missile is extremely difficult because of the small radar cross-section and low-altitude profile.
A next-generation Tomahawk adds the capability to reprogram the missile while in flight to strike any of 15 pre-programmed alternate targets.
The F-117A Nighthawk, the distinctive fighter-bomber that looks like a bat, is the world's first operational stealth aircraft. In the Gulf War a dozen years ago, the Nighthawk was the only US or coalition aircraft to strike targets in downtown Baghdad.
The F-117A program created a revolution in military warfare by incorporating radar-avoiding technology into operational aircraft.
Before Wednesday night's strike, a US air force planner said US warplanes were likely to drop 10 times as many precision-guided bombs on the first day of a war against Iraq as they did to open the 1991 Gulf war.
"I don't think the potential adversary has any idea what's coming," said Colonel Gary Crowder, the chief of strategy at Air Combat Command.
At a Pentagon news conference, he said 300-400 precision-guided weapons were dropped on the first day of the 1991 war, and suggested at least 3000 would be used on the first day this time.
War planning also has become much more efficient, he said. In the first Gulf war, US warplanes attacked each element of Iraq's air defences in sequence - early warning radars, followed by air defence operations bunkers, followed by airfields and surface-to-air missile sites - before getting to the ultimate target: the Iraqi leadership.
This time, due to more accurate weapons and a fuller understanding of targets in Iraq, the leadership will be attacked at the same time that communications, transportation and air defence targets are bombed, the colonel said. Examples of leadership targets are palaces and command centres expected to be used by President Saddam Hussein and his senior generals.
This more efficient approach is based in part on improved weapons technology and more advanced means of matching weapon types with the kinds of damage desired, Colonel Crowder said. For example, if the goal was paralysis of the Iraqi electrical grid, the war planners might single out a small number of power stations or transmission towers as targets rather than striking every power station in the grid.
He also said that the experience gained from patrolling "no fly" zones over southern and northern Iraq since shortly after the first Gulf war gives American and British forces a big advantage.
"Having lived over the no-fly zones for the last 12 years, it is a significantly less hostile place than it was in northern and southern Iraq on the opening night of the Gulf war," he said.
The routine of patrolling the zones also provides a form of cover for allied aircraft preparing to launch an all-out air war.
Earlier on Wednesday, US and British planes attacked nine military targets in southern Iraq. The headquarters for allied air forces in the Persian Gulf announced that the strikes were in response to Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery.
The targets included long-range artillery near the southern city of Basra and the nearby Al Faw peninsula near the Gulf coastline, plus three military communications sites. Also targeted was a mobile early-warning radar and an air defence command and control site at the H-3 airfield complex in western Iraq near the Jordanian border.
US aircraft also dropped nearly two million leaflets over southern Iraq with a variety of messages, including instructions to Iraqi troops on how to surrender.
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Why all hell broke loose at a suburban house
By Barton Gellman and Dana Priest in Washington
March 21 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749883522.html
Related links: - Where the strike hit
http://www.smh.com.au/media/2003/03/20/1047749886749.html
Just before 4pm on Wednesday, the director of the CIA, George Tenet, offered President George Bush the prospect - improbable, yet suddenly real - that the war might be transformed with its opening shots.
The CIA believed it had a fix on Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi leader and others at "the most senior levels" - the most elusive of men - had fallen under US surveillance, Mr Tenet said.
Not only did the agency know where Saddam was, but it believed with "a high probability" that it knew he would be there for some hours - cloistered with advisers in a known private residence in southern Baghdad.
The intelligence offered what one Administration official called "a target of opportunity" that might not come again.
Mr Bush listened calmly as Mr Tenet described the sources and limits of his information, the likelihood that it was true, and the length of time Saddam could be expected to be at the site before moving to his next refuge.
The Iraqi President is a man of many palaces but he avoids them at moments of maximum risk and there was no guarantee that he could be pinpointed again.
For the next three hours, Mr Bush and his senior national security advisers tore up the carefully orchestrated war schedule that the US Central Command had honed for months.
Those present in the Oval Office, officials said, included the Vice-President, Dick Cheney; the Secretary of State, Colin Powell; the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld; the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard Myers.
When Mr Bush signed the launch order at 6.30pm, it had a hastily prepared insert. The first shots would punch through the roof and walls of an anonymous Baghdad home and deep beneath it in hopes of decapitating the Iraqi Government in a single blow.
"If you're going to take a shot like this, you're going to take a shot at the top guy," said a government official. "It was a fairly singular strike."
Aboard navy warships in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, operations officers reprogrammed Tomahawk cruise missiles on the fly with digital target data transmitted from CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Pilots of stealth F-117A fighters were pulled from ready rooms and given new mission briefs.
The aircraft and missiles carried satellite-guided warheads and the bombs on the F-117s were 2000-pound "bunker busters" designed to penetrate layers of stone and steel.
At 5.33am local time, southern Baghdad was rocked by a series of closely spaced explosions. The results were unknown.
Three hours later, a defiant Saddam appeared on state television and lashed out at Mr Bush.
He wore his military uniform and took care to refer to the date, saying: "To the great Iraqi people, the brave strugglers, to the heroic armed forces: with the prayers of dawn on March 20, 2003, the reckless criminal little Bush committed the crime that he has been threatening to commit against Iraq and humanity."
US officials cautioned that it would be some time before intelligence could assess with certainty what had been hit, and who had been there.
During the 1991 Gulf War there were hundreds of strikes at "leadership targets", but it was never acknowledged that they were aimed specifically at Saddam. After the war, it became clear that there had been dozens of attempts to target him.
In 1991, if the CIA had come across Wednesday's intelligence windfall, the military would have lacked the capacity to hit the house quickly enough, with no way to enter precision-targeting data within minutes, or even hours.
But since then the Tomahawk's guidance system has been linked to global positioning system satellites and the navy can download new digital co-ordinates direct from the intelligence directorate at US Central Command.
Whatever the result of the strike, officials said, there will be more rapid re-targetings and more unexpected opportunities before the war is over.
----
'Your enemies will be in disgrace and shame' - Saddam Hussein
March 21 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749880777.html
A speech by the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was broadcast on Iraqi state television three hours after the first coalition assault on Baghdad. The following is a partial text of his address:
In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate ...Those who are oppressed are permitted to fight and God is capable of making them victorious. God is greatest. To the great people of Iraq, to our brave strugglers, to our men in the heroic armed forces, to our glorious nation:
At dawn prayers today on March 20, 2003, the criminal, reckless little Bush and his aides committed this crime which he was threatening to commit against Iraq and humanity. He executed his criminal act with his allies; thereby he and his followers have added to the series of shameful crimes committed against Iraq and humanity.
To the Iraqis and the good people of our nation: your country, your glorious nation and your principles are worth the sacrifices of yourself, your souls, your family and your sons.
In this context, I don't need to repeat to you what each and every one of you must and needs to do to defend our precious nation, our principles and sanctities.
I say to every single member of the patient and faithful Iraqi family which is oppressed by the evil enemy to remember and not to forget everything that he has said and pledged. These days, and according to God's will, will add to the eternal history of glorious Iraq. You brave men and women of Iraq, you deserve victory and glory and everything that elevates the stature of the faithful before their God and defeats the infidels, enemies of God and humanity at large. You, Iraqis, will be victorious along with the sons of the nation.
You are already victorious with the help of God. Your enemies will be in disgrace and shame.
To you friends, opposed to the evil in the world, peace upon you: now that you have seen how the reckless Bush belittled your positions and views against the war and your sincere call for peace, he has committed his despicable crime today.
We pledge to you in our name and in the name of our leadership and in the name of the Iraqi people and its heroic army, in the name of Iraq civilisation and history, that we will fight the invaders and, God willing, we will take them to the limit at which they will lose their patience and any hope to achieve what they have planned and what the Zionist criminal has pushed them to do ...They will be defeated, a defeat that is wished for them by the good faithful and lovers of peace and humanity.
Iraq will be victorious, God willing, and with Iraq our nation and humanity will be victorious and the evil [invaders] will be hit in a way that will make them unable to achieve their crime in the way that they, the Americans and Zionist coalition, have planned for nations and peoples, above all our glorious Arab nation.
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar [God is greatest], long live Iraq and Palestine, Allahu akbar, long live our glorious nation, long live human brotherhood, long live lovers of peace and security and those who seek the right of people to live in freedom, based on justice.
----
Iraqis torch gas facility, surrender
By Richard Tomkins
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030320-012719-3376r.htm
WITH THE FIFTH MARINES, Iraq, March 20 (UPI) -- Dawn broke over the al-Ramallah oil fields of southern Iraq Friday to plumes of billowing smoke from torched wells and destroyed Iraqi military positions and the sight of Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the score.
The Gas Oil Separation Plant 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of the Kuwaiti border was burning fiercely in two places, set alight in an apparent scorched earth move by the Saddam Hussein regime.
Elsewhere on the horizon, at least four natural gas facilities were spewing flame and smoke in the distance.
The facility, referred to on Marine Corps maps as GOSP-3, was the prime objective of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, of the 5th Marine Regimental Combat Team, which crossed the border Thursday night at 1730 GMT (8:30 p.m. local/1230 pm EST) in armored assault vehicles. It suffered less than a half-dozen casualties and none of the wounds was life threatening.
Pushing though the border line from LD (line of departure Florida), the Marines had to move through a narrow 5-km path - the Kuwait border berm, a tank ditch, an electric fence and then the Iraqi border berm. The task was made easier by vanguard that destroyed the obstructions hours earlier.
To a crescendo of distant explosions from U.S. aircraft doing what they do best, the Marines split into several columns and raced to their objectives.
"It's a good day to be a Marine," one man yelled in his 26-ton vehicle.
"They put up some minor resistance, kind of a show of face, I guess, and then surrendered," Staff Sgt. Gregory Craft said.
Craft said his unit took six prisoners in the inky black night while searching trenches, eerily illuminated by the burning remnants of an artillery battery vaporized by laser guided bombs from planes.
A small number of tanks were also engaged, but did not fire back. The Iraqis had abandoned them and fled.
With the coming of dawn, a dribble of disheveled Iraqi troops began leaving their foxholes on the south side of the gas and oil plant in groups of three and four, waving makeshift white flags as they approached 1st Battalion troops. Before an hour had passed, they were coming out in larger groups.
In the first two hours of Friday morning, more than 159 Iraqis had surrendered and more were continuing to approach U.S. troops, turning themselves in.
"Wsearch 'em, search 'em for weapons, never mind the mementos and papers for now," Lt. Dave Denials, commander of the company's 1st platoon told his men. "And keep each other covered."
The prisoners, ranging from teenagers to older men, appeared thankful to turn themselves over. Many asked for food and water, which they would be given when taken to positions in the rear.
"Hey, look, they're forming lines themselves," said Lance Cpl. Gregory Moll, looking at the detainees. "It looks like they've done this before.
"They all look so dirty, tired and hungry."
The attack Thursday night launched the ground war to topple Saddam and disarm him of suspected weapons of mass destruction. It came after troops spent two days in forward positions along the border, practicing the attack but also taking time out to listen to President George W. Bush on the radio announce the start of hostilities.
That start was readily apparent to them. As the president spoke, aircraft streaked overhead, heading north to Iraq.
The Marines of the 1st battalion suffered no casualties in the skirmishes and busied themselves Friday further securing the GOSP.
Details of their next objective cannot be disclosed for reasons of operational security.
----
Iraq denies capture of town, surrender
By GHASSAN al-KADI
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030321-071742-5418r.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 21 (UPI) -- Iraqi top officials confirmed Friday that the U.S. missile strikes on Baghdad hit the house of President Saddam Hussein whose family escaped unharmed but denied that the border area of Umm-Qasar fell to the U.S.-British forces or that Iraqi soldiers surrendered.
Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said during a news conference in Baghdad that Saddam's family house was hit but "God protected his family." Al-Sahhaf, wearing military fatigues, lashed out at U.S. and British forces calling them as "miserable gunmen who consider themselves a superpower. They are a superpower of villains."
Expressing Iraqi readiness to defend their country and leader, he said: "All 26 million Iraqis are Saddam Hussein."
Al-Sahhaf said 37 Iraqi civilians were wounded in last night's U.S. bombardment of Baghdad and showed pictures of them being treated in hospitals. He promised the U.S. and British "gangs" that "we will not let them get out of the quagmire we let them in."
He denied that more than 159 Iraqi soldiers surrendered to the invading forces, saying: "Those who have been shown by the gangs of villains as Iraqi prisoners are not Iraqi prisoners or members of the armed forces. From where did they get them? We are trying to know."
Standing next to al-Sahhaf was Interior Minister Mahmoud Ziab al-Ahmed who raised his machine gun and said: "The Iraqi command and people have sworn that we will not relinquish this weapon until the day of victory."
"My 12-year-old son is carrying a weapon his height," al-Ahmed said. "We made a pledge of honor to defend Saddam, his family and Iraq. Scram little Bush and Blair who pushed their people into this battle without a reason."
He strongly denied that the U.S.-British forces entered the area of Umm-Qasar, saying it is "silly and a lie" and that he just called the Umm-Qasar governor who refuted the U.S. claims.
"It's an attack and retreat battle. How would they enter Baghdad. It will be their crematory," al-Ahmed said. "Iraq's territories are vast and one or two tanks could enter and be filmed. The Iraqi Army will fight them and will kill them in the land of Iraq." Al-Ahmed said Iraqis have no problem and don't want to kill the U.S. and British people but appeared confident of Iraq's "certain victory in the coming days."
Al-Sahhaf confirmed that Umm-Qasar was "still in the hands of the Iraqis" and said "they claimed to have entered 200 miles inside Iraq. This is wrong." "They distributed a tape showing they were in a desert ... but where is this desert?" he said.
He refuted claims of "strong resistance in Umm-Qasar but there is nothing in Umm-Qasar" and "nothing is also happening in the south" where U.S. and British forces reported big explosions.
Al-Sahhaf also confirmed that Iraqi forces shot down two U.S. helicopters and described as silly U.S. claims that one helicopter crashed and the other was destroyed to prevent being captured by the Iraqis.
On firing Scud missiles into Kuwait, he said Iraqis feel no enmity towards the Kuwaiti people but lashed out at their rulers "who are conspiring against Iraq and made Kuwait a base to attack it."
He said the Scud missiles that were fired Thursday hit U.S. and other military targets in Kuwait.
Al-Sahhaf said the U.S. and British invading soldiers will be treated as "mercenaries and war criminals on whom international laws are not applied." He also denounced reports that Iraqi funds and properties deposited abroad, especially in the U.S., saying the move was "part of desperate measures that indicate they have started to lose their nerves."
He warned that "stealing Iraqi money and properties in the U.S." will greatly harmed "those miserable" forces.
Al-Sahhaf said U.S. and Britain tried to portray to their public opinion that the war on Iraq is "an easy action" and then started to prepare them that "it's going to be a long and difficult matter."
"This is their way of lying and deception. Now it is the time of truth. They cannot continue on lying," he said, affirming that the Iraqi morale will not be affected as "we are the just party and they are the evil."
----
'Shock and awe' air strikes launched
U.S. suffers 1st combat deaths as allies sweep through south
NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES
March 21 2003
http://www.msnbc.com/news/870749_asp.htm?0cv=CA01
March 21 - Massive cruise missile strikes took out dozens of buildings in Baghdad and across Iraq on Friday as the Pentagon began its promised "shock and awe" aerial campaign. Fires and huge plumes of smoke filled the skies of downtown Baghdad in what correspondent Peter Arnett said were strikes far larger than what he had seen in the 1991 Gulf War. Meanwhile, on the southern front, thousands of U.S. Marines and British Commandos moved across the desert to the key southern city of Basra after taking control of Iraq's oil port.
AT THE PENTAGON, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said that "a massive air campaign throughout Iraq" had been launched.
"Several hundred military targets will be hit over the coming hours," he said.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S.-led forces had intensified talks with individual Iraqi military units over surrender conditions, though no direct country-to-country talks on a general surrender were under way.
He said it was possible the United States "has not been sufficiently persuasive."
In Baghdad, Arnett reported only an hour earlier that many missiles had struck the presidential compound of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"It's gone up totally in smoke ... it's just blown apart," said Arnett, who is reporting for National Geographic Explorer and NBC News.
He estimated that 25 buildings were blown up in a matter of 10 minutes. Other buildings that were on fire included offices of the Council of Ministers and a government bunker.
Arnett: Bombs on Baghdad
March 21, 2003 - Peter Arnett reports for National Geographic Explorer and NBC News on the massive strikes Friday night in Baghdad.
One U.S. official told The Associated Press that hundreds of sorties were planned against targets in other Iraqi cities as well. The source described it as "A-Day," meaning Aerial Day.
In Kirkuk, northern Iraq, MSNBC.com's Preston Mendenhall saw aircraft in the skies. Other witnesses saw antiaircraft fire in Mosul.
One U.S. official involved in military planning told The Associated Press that B-52 bombers had been scrambled en masse from a base in England and would launch cruise missiles in a strike that would be bigger than anything seen thus far in the conflict.
In the early hours of the war, the U.S. launched two rounds of sea-based cruise missile attacks against Baghdad, but sent only two Stealth bombers over the city.
----
Iraq Neighbors Asked to Aid Refugees
U.N. Predicts Food, Supplies Needed for 2.1 Million People in Coming Month
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1313-2003Mar20?language=printer
The United Nations' chief refugee coordinator appealed yesterday to Iraq's neighbors to open their borders to war refugees as international aid organizations hurried to increase their preparations for a potential humanitarian crisis.
Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the imperative to save lives requires that neighboring countries provide access to refugees and relief organizations that aim to help. He called on the rest of the world community to "do its part" by supporting aid efforts.
As the United Nations prepared a campaign to raise more than $1 billion in food, cash and supplies, the World Food Program said hundreds of thousands of tons of food must be ordered within days. Arrangements must also be made for the ships and trucks to transport the goods, the agency said.
The WFP projects that 2.1 million people could need emergency assistance in the coming month. Government food stocks are low, and deliveries to Iraq have been interrupted, leading to worries about segments of the population already undernourished.
Iraq's neighbors have been hesitant to commit to plans for possible refugee flows. Worried about creating a long-term refugee population, countries including Turkey, Syria and Kuwait have indicated they intend to block entry to most refugees, instead encouraging the establishment of centers on the Iraqi side of the borders.
Most Iraqis have enough basic food to sustain them for six weeks, the WFP said. But an agency spokesman said existing food stores in the center and south of the country are nearly depleted.
To meet part of the need, the Bush administration said it will release as much as 600,000 tons of wheat from a government grain reserve. Some will likely be shipped to Iraq, with other parts sold to buy food for Iraq, officials said.
Relief groups reported no significant movement of people from Iraq or its major cities in the early hours of the war. Some Iraqis, particularly from northern sectors controlled by Kurdish parties, drove across the border just before the war, but one official said they likely would not be dependent upon relief efforts.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appealed to Iraqis to keep off the streets and listen to radio broadcasts for instructions on how to get food, water and other basic supplies.
"There is no need for Iraqis to flee across their borders into neighboring countries," he told reporters.
U.S. authorities hope to prevent a large exodus of Iraqis that could complicate war plans and the delivery of humanitarian aid. Military planners believe they will seize control of significant parts of the country within days, clearing the way for relief and reconstruction work to begin even as battles may continue elsewhere.
The U.S. military is prepared to deliver emergency rations and medical supplies, but the Americans are hoping civilian agencies and international organizations will soon carry the primary load. Yet the United Nations and nongovernmental groups have warned repeatedly that they are poorly positioned to help if the war produces widespread calamity.
Few aid groups operate in Iraq south of the Kurdish zone. The best positioned is the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has hired several dozen new workers in the past month to bring its total to a dozen foreign nationals and about 400 Iraqis, said Christophe Girod, head of North American operations.
"As long as there is no one else among the humanitarian actors, we are pretty alone and hoping that we will be able to move around, supply the medical structures, to reach the population, if need be," Girod said. "We fear that might not be sufficient."
State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said the administration has given the WFP money to feed 900,000 displaced Iraqis for 10 weeks. The administration is also providing food, still being bought and shipped, capable of feeding 2 million of Iraq's neediest people for three months.
"We're continuing to work on these efforts to obtain and ship food supplies," Boucher said, "and to try to make sure that there is a continuing flow for what's needed in the weeks and months ahead."
A leading American aid organization complained yesterday that U.S. government regulations continue to prevent U.S. humanitarian groups from operating within Iraq. Despite the lifting of some restrictions, International Rescue Committee president George Rupp said, "the amount of red tape is completely counterproductive."
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Turkey Says Its Troops Will Enter Northern Iraq
March 21, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-turkey-troops.html
ANKARA, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkey said Friday its troops would enter northern Iraq to prevent an influx of refugees across its borders, but gave no date for an incursion the United States says it opposes.
Turkey's armed forces would also enter the Iraqi Kurdish enclave to prevent ``terrorist activity,'' Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters at a news conference.
``A vacuum was formed in northern Iraq and that vacuum became practically a camp for terrorist activity. This time we do not want such a vacuum,'' Gul said.
``Turkey's relationship with northern Iraq is to hold migrant movements in their own country without allowing them into Turkey. ... Turkey has no designs on Iraqi soil,'' he added.
A U.S. official in Washington said the United States had not agreed to Turkey sending troops into northern Iraq.
Turkey's defense minister said earlier Turkey had opened its airspace to U.S. military aircraft.
Turkey already stations several thousand soldiers a short distance inside northern Iraq, but Iraqi Kurds oppose their presence saying they threaten Iraq's territorial integrity.
Iraqi Kurds have vowed to fight Turkish troops if they come into their self-governing area, especially if they do so without U.S. allies.
Kurds have ruled Iraq's three northernmost provinces since 1991, when U.S. and British warplanes enforced a ``no-fly'' zone there to keep Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces away after he put down a Kurdish uprising at the end of the Gulf War.
Kurds have been generally positive toward the arrival of U.S. forces, but they oppose any Turkish plan to send its own troops, saying Ankara is only interested in repressing Kurds.
Turkey has a large Kurdish minority living near its Iraqi border and fears for its own territorial integrity if a Kurdish homeland enters the agenda for a post-Saddam settlement in Iraq.
Turkey has frequently cited the need to protect Iraq's Turkoman minority, ethnically, linguistically and culturally close to Turks, as another reason for sending in troops.
But senior Iraqi Turkoman officials have dismissed the need for such a move.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Air Defense Goes on Highest Alert
March 20, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Israel-Missile-Defense.html
PALMACHIM AIR FORCE BASE, Israel (AP) -- Israel's air defense units are on highest alert, prepared to intercept incoming Iraqi missiles with conventional or non-conventional warheads, an Israeli general said Thursday.
Brig. Gen. Yair Dori, in charge of Israel's air defenses, said his units have been on highest alert since Tuesday morning, even though Israeli officials say chances are slim that Iraq will fire missiles at Israel in retaliation for the U.S. strike on Baghdad.
Israel has called up 11,000 reservists in the past 48 hours, including those serving those manning Arrow and Patriot anti-missile batteries.
Speaking at an Israeli air force base, Dori said Israel couldn't take chances, despite the low probability of being attacked. ``A very low risk with 500 kilograms of warheads -- I'm not sure that I would be willing to stand in open space and say that's not a threat,'' Dori said.
During the 1991 Gulf War, 39 Iraqi Scud missiles landed in Israel, causing damage and panic but few casualties. At the time, Israel did not have the proper air defense systems to combat the threat, relying on seven Patriot missile batteries to intercept the incoming Scuds.
Now, Israel has the Arrow anti-missile system -- made jointly with the United States -- to intercept missiles at a higher altitude than the U.S.-made Patriots.
With a two-tiered approach -- the Arrow working at a higher altitude and the Patriot operating at a lower one -- Israel hopes to combat any Iraqi threat, he said.
At the base, reporters on Thursday were shown five Arrow missile batteries, each able to hold six missiles. They rose from shrub-covered sand dunes not far from Israel's coastal city of Rishon Lezion. Patriot missile batteries are scattered throughout the country, as are Hawk anti-aircraft systems.
The Arrow is designed to intercept an Iraqi missile over the Syrian-Jordanian border, a military official said. The interception would occur at such a high altitude that if the warhead contained chemical or biological agents they would dissipate in the atmosphere and not harm anyone on the ground, the official added.
Dori said the Arrow missile system has undergone 11 tests -- each one examining a different part of the system. Although it has never been tested in a war situation, Dori said he was confident it would operate properly.
``If we need to cope, if we need to launch a missile, I hope it will work,'' Dori told reporters. ``We will do our best to intercept.''
--------
JERUSALEM
War Brings More Divisiveness for Israelis and Palestinians
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, March 20 - Many Israelis headed to work and school today with gas masks tucked under their arms, while Palestinians staged several protest rallies, condemning the American attack on Iraq and waving pictures of Saddam Hussein.
The war in Iraq today gave Israelis and Palestinians a new forum for expressing their sharp political differences, but there was no surge in violence to accompany the onset of hostilities.
Israelis overwhelmingly support the United States, and they have made extensive preparations to guard against an Iraqi missile strike. The Palestinians oppose the war in equal numbers, with some cheering the Iraqi leader for his willingness to confront the Americans.
More than 90 percent of Israelis have picked up army-issued gas masks, and the Israeli authorities on Wednesday told citizens to carry them at all times, while still going about their normal routines.
Schools and businesses were open, though only about half the students turned up in Tel Aviv, the city that was most often targeted by Iraqi missiles in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Israel would like to remain on the sidelines during the war.
"We estimate, believe and hope that we will not be involved in the war," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Israeli radio. "But if by misfortune we should be drawn in, Israel is ready to face whatever it takes against this threat."
Still, public sentiment is clear. The Jerusalem Gold Hotel temporarily changed its name to the George W. Bush Hotel, hanging a large banner outside.
"I think George W. Bush has a lot of courage, and we wanted to express appreciation and solidarity with him," said Ariela Schmida-Doron, owner of the 200-bed hotel.
Some Israelis in Tel Aviv and other coastal cities that could be targeted by Iraqi missiles have left for hotels in Jerusalem and Eilat. Jerusalem, with its Islamic holy sites and large Palestinian population, is considered safe from Iraq's inaccurate missiles, as is Eilat, which is at the remote southern tip of Israel on the Red Sea coast.
Israel believes that its Arrow antimissile system will protect the country, and as part of a public relations campaign to deter an attack, journalists were invited to see the Arrow batteries at the Palmachim Air Force Base, south of Tel Aviv.
In the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem in the West Bank, and in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip, hundreds of Palestinians rallied at each site to denounce the American bombing campaign, burning American flags and brandishing Iraqi banners.
"Death to America, death to Bush," shouted the marchers in Gaza. "We will sacrifice our soul and our blood for Saddam."
Also in Gaza, the Arab Liberation Front, a small, pro-Iraqi group, handed out $10,000 checks that Mr. Hussein sent to 21 families of Palestinians killed in the fighting with Israel.
The Iraqi leader has used the group to funnel more than $35 million to Palestinian families since the Palestinian uprising began 30 months ago. Mr. Hussein's biggest checks, for $25,000, are reserved for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
The Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, supported Iraq in the 1991 gulf war, a position that left the Palestinians diplomatically isolated afterward. The Palestinian leadership has generally sought to avoid talking about the confrontation in recent months, but today came out strongly against the American bombing campaign.
"This region desperately needs to learn how to solve disputes through diplomatic means," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian cabinet minister. "I'm really worried that the Israeli government is going to exploit the situation with attention focused on Iraq."
Israel this week imposed a complete closure on the West Bank and Gaza, which prevents Palestinians from entering Israel proper.
Palestinians say they also fear the Israel military could step up operations.
However, today was largely calm. The only death was that of a Hamas militant killed in a clash with Palestinian security forces outside Gaza City.
Hamas militants were training with a rocket launcher during the night when the security forces confronted them, prompting a gun battle. Two Hamas members were also arrested, the group said.
Palestinians fired a rocket several hours later at a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, but it caused no damage or injuries.
-------- mideast
Arab Media Look Past War, Focus On Future
Mideast Witnessing 'Hours of Destiny'
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1271-2003Mar20?language=printer
Aside from a few cartoons, one depicting President Bush in cowboy duds dunking a scrawny Saddam Hussein wearing tattered combat fatigues into an oil barrel, the Arab media largely began looking ahead yesterday to an Arab world transformed after hostilities end.
"The Iraq War Has Been Launched and the Arab World Faces the Unknown," said a front-page headline in An Nahar, an independent daily newspaper in Beirut. "One thing is certain," wrote Gebran Tueni, An Nahar's publisher and lead columnist. "The phase after the war in Iraq is going to be radically different from the one preceding it."
"We are witnessing hours of destiny and history, we are in need of men and policies that measure up to these times so we can be partners and key players, so modern versions of Mr. Sykes and Mr. Picot do not revisit us to redraw our borders and decide on our fate," he wrote, referring to the Sykes-Picot agreement, which Britain and France used to carve out contemporary Arab states from the Ottoman empire after World War I based on oil and other geo-strategic interests.
"We should all move on from protesting the war and crying over the ruins to bolstering our positions and stands with a clear idea of what we want for the future of our countries in the Middle East," Tueni said. "We should start out with the conviction that the necessary evolution . . . the pillars and means of change should be democratic and emanate from the will of our people. We have had enough coups, revolutions and counterrevolutions."
The United States tried to placate certain Arab governments and those opposed to military action by offering a roadmap for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with "the road passing through Baghdad," he added.
The Saudi daily Al-Watan said in a front-page story that the future of the Iraqi president and his family was limited to two possibilities: "death or detention." If Hussein is not killed, he will be referred to an Iraqi tribunal, the newspaper said, with the United States offering a large dossier on his human rights violations. In an unsourced report, Al-Watan said the United States had agreed with Iraqi opposition groups that Hussein and his senior advisers would not be referred to the International Criminal Court to avoid an adverse reaction among the Arab public.
Several newspapers in Persian Gulf countries gave front-page billing to reports from northern Iraq that Iraqi Kurds and key tribal figures believed to have been allied with Hussein had switched sides and put their men at the disposal of U.S. commanders.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat, another Saudi newspaper, quoted Iraqi opposition sources as saying that a former army chief of staff, Nizar Khazraji, who had gone into exile in Denmark, had reached Kurdistan via Turkey with eight of his officers to take part in military operations against Hussein.
Shafik Ghabra, a Kuwaiti academic who until recently had served as head of Kuwait's Information Bureau in Washington, said that one can "predict that the United States' descent with all its might into Iraq will tip the balance in [the United States'] favor, but that will be for the short term and only help it temporarily."
In an opinion piece written before the war started but published yesterday in the Arabic-language Al Hayat daily, Ghabra wrote that most Arab countries were in the role of "silent objectors" to the war. "While most of them fear the Iraqi regime, they do not see it as threatening to them and would prefer for the war not to take place out of concern about the changes it will bring and the unpredictable scale of instability that will follow."
In the same newspaper, under the headline "There Is Nothing Embarrassing About Reforms," Jordanian writer Mahmoud Rimawi said: "If there was anything embarrassing, it was the failure to deliver on the imperatives of development, including political development, which in a way allows American and non-American right-wing hawks to hold on to these shortcomings and portray them as chronic and incurable backwardness, for which the last remedy . . . is surgical (war)."
In a cartoon by Shujaat Ali that appeared on the Web site of al-Jazeera, a satellite television network based in Qatar, a destitute family appears in a charred Iraqi wasteland being buzzed by military planes. A crying baby laments his empty bottle while his mother holds up a dish, mistaking a plummeting missile for U.N. humanitarian relief. Scattered on the ground are pamphlets about antiwar demonstrations, Chinese and German opposition to the U.S.-led war and French and Russian threats.
-----
Turkey Delays Opening Airspace to U.S.
By JAMES C. HELICKE
Associated Press Writer
Mar 21, 2003 7:52 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TURKEY_US_IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkey on Friday delayed opening its airspace to U.S. warplanes for strikes against Iraq despite parliamentary approval for the overflights, diplomats and military officials said.
U.S. and Turkish officials held talks through the night, but failed to reach an agreement on conditions for the overflights, western diplomats said.
Yasar Yakis, a lawmaker in the governing party and the former foreign minister, confirmed that no agreement had been reached but said the two sides would continue talks.
Turkey's parliament voted Thursday to allow the United States to use its airspace, a measure that would allow attack jets on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean to fly more directly into Iraq. The United States could also use Turkish airspace to ferry troops into northern Iraq.
After parliament's approval, the United States still needs the Turkish government's go-ahead before flying over Turkey.
The resolution passed by parliament would also allow Turkey to move its own forces into northern Iraq.
The United States opposes any unilateral move by Turkey into northern Iraq. Washington has warned that a Turkish incursion could lead to friendly fire incidents with U.S. forces. Iraqi Kurdish groups say the move could lead to clashes.
Turkish newspapers reported Friday that Turkish insistence on sending its troops into northern Iraq has prevented an agreement on the use of Turkish airspace.
According to CNN-Turk television, negotiations are also locked over Turkish demands that the U.S. military provide information on the type of planes, their mission, and their destination ahead of the overflights. The United States wants to be able to use the airspace without prior notification.
The United States hopes to see the agreement "implemented in the most immediate fashion," said a western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
U.S. Ambassador Robert Pearson held talks until 4:00 a.m with top foreign ministry officials, but the talks failed to deliver a breakthrough, the western diplomat added.
The measure would not allow U.S. warplanes to use Turkish air bases or refuel in Turkey.
Thursday's vote granting overflight rights follows intense lobbying by the United States, but falls far short of Washington's original request to send 62,000 soldiers to Turkey to open up a northern front against Iraq.
Polls show up to 94 percent of Turks oppose the war, making the government reluctant to cooperate with the United States.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher had welcomed the vote granting airspace rights, but said the United States remained "opposed to unilateral action by Turkey or by any party in northern Iraq."
When asked when airspace would be opened, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday: "We will inform you about this later."
Parliament earlier this month failed to pass a resolution that would have let in U.S. ground troops for an Iraq invasion.
The United States had offered Turkey a package of $15 billion in loans and grants if it lets in U.S. troops for a ground war. But the United States withdrew the aid package as war drew closer and it became clear that even if Turkey voted in favor, the U.S. army would not have time to bring in the army units.
-------- russia / chechnya
2 Russian Helicopters Missing
World In Brief
Associated Press
Friday, March 21, 2003
Washington Post; Page A34
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1268-2003Mar20?language=printer
MOSCOW -- Two Russian helicopters with four crew members aboard went missing in Chechnya yesterday and the military sent rescue crews to locate them, the Defense Ministry said.
The helicopters were Mi-24 models escorting two transport helicopters in dense fog in the mountains of southern Chechnya, said Col. Vyacheslav Sedov, a ministry spokesman. The Mi-24s were ordered to climb above the clouds, and radio contact was immediately lost at 10:36 a.m., Sedov said. Rescuers headed to the region to search for the crew.
The Defense Ministry initially denied the report, saying the two helicopters had arrived back at the Khankala military base, just outside Grozny, behind schedule. A spokesman later said the ministry had incorrect information.
Col. Alexander Drobyshevsky, a spokesman for the air force, said the helicopters were taking part in a combat landing mission in southeastern Chechnya, the Interfax news agency reported. He declined to give any other details.
Rebels have dug into the rugged, forested mountains of southern Chechnya, dodging regular Russian artillery barrage and airstrikes and mounting surprise raids against the federal forces.
Associated Press Alleged Plotters Held in France
PARIS -- French authorities have detained two people with alleged links to a network supporting Chechen rebels planning chemical-weapon attacks on Russian targets, officials said.
The arrests Tuesday in the Oise region northwest of Paris brought to nearly a dozen the number of people arrested since December, when authorities uncovered the plot to attack Russian targets.
No information was provided on the latest arrests. Under French law, suspects can be held for up to four days for questioning.
A total of nine people were placed under investigation -- a step short of being charged -- in late December. Three of them had traveled to training camps in Afghanistan and to Georgia, investigators said at the time.
-------- spies
Life Sentence for Failed Spy Who Offered Secrets to Iraq
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/national/21SPY.html
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 (AP) - A retired Air Force master sergeant was sentenced to life in prison without parole today for offering to sell intelligence secrets to Iraq and China.
Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of Federal District Court imposed the sentence, which was brokered by prosecutors and by lawyers for the defendant, Brian P. Regan. In the agreement, the government promised not to prosecute Mr. Regan's wife, Anette, and allowed her to keep part of Mr. Regan's military pension.
Mr. Regan also agreed to tell the government about any classified information he might have given to other people or countries and to submit to lie detector tests. His wife also agreed to cooperate.
Mr. Regan, 40, was convicted last month on two counts of attempted espionage and a charge of gathering national defense information. He was acquitted of trying to spy for Libya.
Standing before Judge Lee, Mr. Regan apologized but said the penalty was too harsh.
"I feel a life sentence is excessive in my case," Mr. Regan said. "I never harmed anyone. I'm entering into this to protect my family."
Judge Lee said a stiff sentence was warranted. "You betrayed your country's trust," he said. "There's no doubt that your attempted espionage put our nation's intelligence-gathering at risk."
Mr. Regan avoided the death penalty when the jury decided that in trying to spy for Iraq he did not offer documents about nuclear weapons, military satellites or war plans.
Mr. Regan, a father of four from Bowie, Md., worked at the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the government's spy satellites. He first worked there for the Air Force, then as a civilian employee for the defense contractor TRW.
Mr. Regan was arrested on Aug. 23, 2001, at Dulles International Airport outside Washington while boarding a flight for Zurich. He was carrying coded information about Iraqi and Chinese missile sites, prosecutors said. He also had the addresses of the Chinese and Iraqi Embassies in Switzerland and Austria in his wallet and tucked into his right shoe, prosecutors said.
They said Mr. Regan had written letters to Iraq and Libya offering to sell United States intelligence for $13 million.
-------- un
Annan Seeks to Oversee Oil-for-Food Program
U.S., Britain Will Present Request to U.N.
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1286-2003Mar20?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, March 20 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan asked the Security Council today to put him in charge of a humanitarian program that uses billions of dollars in Iraqi oil proceeds to pay for the delivery of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies to needy Iraqi civilians.
The United States and Britain supported Annan's request for control of the oil-for-food program in their own resolution, to be presented to the council Friday. It would grant the United Nations power for at least 30 days to replace the Iraqi government as the chief supplier of food and other essential goods to millions of Iraqis.
Although there was growing consensus in the council for the need to expand the United Nations' humanitarian role in Iraq, Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov said he was not interested in hearing new proposals from the United States and Britain, the two chief belligerent nations in the conflict with Iraq. "It's for [the secretary general] and not for anybody else to give these proposals," he said.
U.S. and British officials said they are seeking to merge the U.N. chief's ideas with theirs and persuade a neutral Security Council member to formally present the resolution to the council. "We have to figure out how to work with [Annan's] ideas as well as our own," said John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Anything that gets the job done."
More than 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people are entirely dependent on the oil-for-food program, which has been jointly administered by the United Nations and the government of Saddam Hussein since 1996. A senior U.N. official estimated that Iraqis currently have enough food to last 30 days unless they are forced to flee their homes.
Even if the U.S.-British resolution were quickly adopted, it appeared unlikely that food distribution could resume immediately. The United Nations removed its humanitarian staff Monday and does not plan to send the workers back until their security can be guaranteed.
Despite his efforts to restart the humanitarian program under U.N. control, Annan said today that "primary responsibility" for addressing the humanitarian consequences of war will fall to U.S. and British authorities once they seize control of the country. Annan said that once security is assured, he would begin distributing $8.9 billion in humanitarian goods, including $2.4 billion worth of food, that are ready to be imported into Iraq.
Annan said that Iraq should continue to control the country's oil industry, retaining the right to sign contracts with partners of its choosing. The proceeds of those sales, however, should be deposited in an account controlled by the United Nations.
"The U.N. image is already tarnished among the Iraqi people," according to a confidential U.N. paper. "It will be further damaged if the question of Iraq's oil resources is not managed in a transparent manner that clearly brings benefit to the Iraqi people."
Bush administration officials said that Washington does not want to address the fate of Iraq's oil industry in the current resolution.
----
U.S. asks countries to suspend relations with Iraq
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-655875.htm
The United States yesterday asked 62 countries with diplomatic ties to Saddam Hussein's regime to break relations by closing embassies, expelling diplomats and freezing all Iraqi assets and property on their territory.
The State Department also notified the three diplomats at the Iraqi interest section in Washington, the de facto embassy, that they must leave the country by today.
In an unusual diplomatic move shortly after military action in Iraq began, the Bush administration sent cables to U.S. embassies overseas with instructions that they communicate to their host governments a request "to suspend Iraq's diplomatic presence on a temporary basis," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
"We feel that [Saddam´s] government has failed in so many ways that it's time for others to recognize that by not allowing their representatives to continue to pretend to represent the Iraqi people," Mr. Boucher said.
"Our expectation is that once an interim Iraqi authority is in place, it will name interim replacement representatives and diplomatic missions that can reopen and truly represent the interests of the Iraqi people rather than represent a corrupt and ruthless regime," he said.
It was not clear yesterday how the new U.S. request would be received overseas, but it was speedily rejected by Poland, one of Washington's closest allies helping with the operation in Iraq.
"Embassies represent not only the leaders of these countries, but also the nations, and Iraqi nationals also live in Poland," Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said at a press conference.
"If embassies violate international law, steps must surely be taken," he said. "At first glance, this appeal would not be justified."
The spokesman also said the United States asked the 62 countries "to respect and protect Iraqi diplomatic property and prevent the destruction of mission records" so that they can be used by the missions' future occupants.
Iraq has working embassies in 56 countries, as well as one consulate and six interest sections, including the one in Washington.
Mr. Boucher said the advice from Washington was that the most senior diplomats at those missions be expelled, while the bureaucrats remain in the country without performing their functions. He allowed for the possibility that some low-level personnel would be rehired by the new Iraqi government.
"We are also looking at the possibility of third countries providing basic consular services for Iraqi nationals in these countries to minimize any impact on average Iraqi citizens," he said.
Asked where the expelled diplomats would go, Mr. Boucher said, "To put it bluntly, that's their problem." Asked whether the United States would be interested in giving some of them asylum if they offered information in exchange, he said anyone is free to apply for asylum, although he has no specific offer now.
"But I think I can add we are always happy to have people provide us with useful information," he said.
He also noted that the countries were asked to freeze bank accounts belonging to the Iraqi government. "Such a move will be critical to ensuring that any embezzlement of funds or damage to assets that rightfully belong to the Iraqi people does not occur," he said.
Two weeks ago, the United States asked more than 60 countries to expel several hundred Iraqi diplomats that the CIA identified as suspected of being intelligence agents. Some nations, such as Australia and Romania, complied, while others, such as Russia and Belgium, refused to do so.
----
Diplomats in dark mood
March 21, 2003
Embassy Row
James Morrison
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-76603400.htm
Foreign diplomats in Washington yesterday tried to attend to business as they watched the war in Iraq unfold on television.
Some whose countries opposed the war expressed sadness. Others whose countries supported the United States said the action was necessary but still felt anxiety over the bombing.
Bulgarian Ambassador Elena Poptodorova, whose country is part of the U.S.-led coalition, had been on the phone all night with reporters from Bulgaria. She told them about the politics on Capitol Hill and how Washington was reacting to the initial reports of the early bombing.
"I'm talking to you with a heavy heart," she told Embassy Row.
Mrs. Poptodorova said Bulgaria, like other Eastern European nations, knows the trauma of living under a dictatorship and realizes that sometimes the only way to remove a tyrant is by force.
She said she was disappointed by the "inability of the [U.N.] Security Council to act."
"Had there been unity, Saddam would have acted differently," she said. "It's not a failure of diplomacy. Diplomacy went to the end."
The ambassador said she was trying to balance her attention to the war as it unfolded on CNN and her duty to attend to embassy business. She had a State Department meeting yesterday afternoon concerning Bulgaria's preparation for NATO membership.
"Strangely enough," she said, "I feel my mind working in two halves. I am watching the development of the war and trying to take care of business."
Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy, whose country opposes the war, recalled the many conflicts he has seen in the Middle East and expressed his "personal frustration" of seeing another one.
"In the case of war, I don't really see a best-case scenario," he said. However, he added, a "worst-case scenario will be a nightmare."
The anxiety in the Muslim world will not ease until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved, he said.
"We must address the anxiety. ... We must prevent people from taking advantage of this to promote terrorism," he said. "The Middle East peace process will be key."
Egyptian Embassy spokesman Hesham Elnakib described a "very dark mood" among his fellow diplomats.
"People feel very sad and frustrated," he said.
Mr. Elnakib said he found the same mood among American friends over lunch at La Tomate and at a nearby Starbuck's.
"The mood is not so different here from how it is in Cairo," he said. French diplomat Nathalie Loiseau said, "When war breaks out, all you can do is be sad. ... We can only be sad that the path of a peaceful solution has not been chosen."
Ms. Loiseau expressed her frustration at the way France has been treated in many news reports and by television commentators who have savaged French President Jacques Chirac for his strident criticism of President Bush.
"Yes, there have been insulting articles, silly jokes and bad comments on France and the two world wars," she said.
-------- us
Taking a risk by 'playing with Saddam's mind'
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030321-28922600.htm
President Bush has approved a gambler's strategy for the opening days of war against Iraq, hoping that early, limited air strikes on Baghdad's leadership and secretly arranged surrenders will decapitate the ruling Ba'ath Party and induce a quick capitulation.
The bombing is being accompanied by a concerted effort to isolate Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from his military commanders by "frying communications," as one official described the electronic battle.
"It's what's called a decapitation operation," the official said. "It's been around forever. That's what you do. You try to cut off the head. You cause such disarray that the idea would be to have massive defections."
The official added, "We have started to close down his ability to communicate with his forces. You go after communications lines and we have all sorts of ways to doing that."
"They are playing with Saddam's mind," a military official said. The officials said the United States has delayed "shock and awe" bombing to give the Iraqi generals time to jump ship.
The military plan is matched by an active but covert warfare program. U.S. officials said special-operation troops, in the form of special-mission units, and CIA operatives are in and around Baghdad spying on the enemy, trying to spot "high value targets."
On Wednesday, the first night of the war, Tomahawk missiles and F-117 stealth aircraft attacked a site thought to house Saddam, his sons and other top leaders. Saddam is believed to be alive.
Tomahawk missiles struck downtown Baghdad yesterday. The targets: the offices of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and, according to Iraqi officials, the homes of Saddam's family members, including sons Qusai and Uday.
The leadership strikes are coupled with a far-reaching intelligence and psychological warfare operation to convince Iraqi generals to surrender.
"We see evidence of military personnel; some have already surrendered in Kuwait," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.
"We are in communication with still more people who are officials of the military at various levels - the regular army, the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, who are increasingly aware that it's going to happen, he's going to be gone."
By killing Saddam and his leaders and by arranging surrenders, Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall coalition commander based in Qatar, and Mr. Rumsfeld hope their plan will make for a quick war, fewer casualties - and victory.
The strategy is risky because Gen. Franks has assembled a total invasion force that is about half the ground, air and sea armada used in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when the objective was to liberate Kuwait, not conquer Baghdad.
"It ... better work," said retired Army Col. Ken Allard, a military analyst. "We do not have the overwhelming ground force we had in 1991. We are clearly taking a degree of risks here. We are light on the ground. They've got an evolving strategy here that is part Afghanistan, part getting surrenders and part getting them to defect."
The Afghanistan model involves using indigenous rebels to attack the Iraqi military, with air strikes augmenting the effort.
The U.S. military's growing reliance on "smart" munitions enables war planners to pencil in fewer heavy ground troops.
There is one heavy Army division on the scene, the 3rd Infantry Division, which is poised to spearhead the march toward Baghdad. It is supported by smaller armored regiments, and two light infantry divisions, the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions.
The 4th Infantry Division was planned as the northern front invader, but Turkey did not permit basing rights. The 4th Division's soldiers remain at Fort Hood, Texas. The Pentagon alerted the 1st Cavalry and 1st Armored divisions, but there are no reports that they are moving toward the Persian Gulf.
Minutes after the first bombs fell on Baghdad, U.S. forces began major ground action in America's other battleground - Afghanistan. About 1,000 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division attacked fighters suspected of being members of the terror network al Qaeda and the ousted hard-line Taliban regime.
"Bush is dispelling the notion that we cannot conduct the war in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time," the U.S. official said. "They are two very different types of conflicts."
----
A sombre morning as navy joins fray
By ML Lyke
Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf
March 21 2003
Sydney Morning Herald; by Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749880830.html
At 7.42am on Thursday, an F-14 Tomcat, with a cartoon of Felix the cat carrying a lit bomb painted on its tail, roared off the deck of this aircraft carrier and into the morning haze. The war had begun for the Abraham Lincoln.
Rear-Admiral John Kelly made the official announcement to the more than 5000 men and women aboard the ship just after reveille at 6am. The navy's first salvo, he announced, were Tomahawk cruise missiles. Then Lee Greenwood's song Proud to be an American played over the ship's intercom.
"Early this morning on order, we commenced Tomahawk operations against Iraq," Admiral Kelly later told reporters on the Abraham Lincoln. "Four cruisers and destroyers and two submarines participated in these initial strikes. Of the missiles fired, the great majority proceeded to target. One missile failed in transit from launch to flight."
The mood aboard the ship was sombre. Sailors seemed to stand at attention around TV sets. There was no joking.
Less than two hours after the admiral's announcement, six planes were catapulted off the deck for the Abraham Lincoln's first strike of the war.
The Tomcat came first. It carried Sidewinder missiles and bombs. Then came an S-3 Viking. On its tail was painted a wolf wearing spurs and exposing its teeth.
The planes kept coming, including a Hawkeye, which has an eight-metre rotating electronics dome to provide command and control as well as early warning of enemy attacks.
It was a solemn moment on the flight deck. The faces seemed to ask the same question: Will they come back?
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U.S. and British Forces Suffer First Losses in Copter Crash
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21MILI.html
KUWAIT, Friday, March 21 - Supported by relentless artillery barrages, American and British armed forces pushed from Kuwait into the Iraqi desert on Thursday as cruise missiles pounded the heart of Baghdad.
The missiles struck an area of Iraqi government buildings on the banks of the Tigris River, sending plumes of black smoke into the sky above a deserted city.
As the Pentagon expressed satisfaction with the results of the early stages of the war, the first American and British casualties were reported. Military officials said 8 British commandos and 4 American marines were killed when their CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter crashed in Kuwait. No further details were immediately available.
The American and British advance into southern Iraq on Thursday followed a raid on Baghdad by stealth fighters and an attack with cruise missiles intended to destabilize the Iraqi government by killing Saddam Hussein. American intelligence officials were trying to determine Thursday night whether any Iraqi leaders had been hit by this first strike of the war. The Pentagon suggested that some senior Iraqi officials might have been killed or wounded.
From land bases across the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean and from aircraft carriers at sea, American and British warplanes flew through moonlit skies to strike targets, including radar and artillery positions, in southern Iraq.
The attacks on Thursday, while substantial, fell short of the all-out bombardment promised by the Pentagon as the most effective means to force a quick surrender. It appeared that the Pentagon was still exploring the possibility that Mr. Hussein might be ousted without a fight through the defection of the his elite units.
Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, said there was still time for the Iraqi Army to surrender and avert an American attack "of a force and scope and scale beyond what has been seen before."
The attack today was authorized by President Bush at the conclusion of a meeting in the White House situation room on Wednesday morning, a senior White House official said Thursday night. At the meeting, according to the official's account, Mr. Bush spoke in a video conference with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, head of the United States Central Command, who was at an air base in Saudi Arabia, and other commanders who were scattered across the region.
The president asked each commander whether they had everything they needed to win, and whether they were comfortable with the war plan. At the end of the meeting, the official said, Mr. Bush gave the go-ahead to the commanders to begin the war at the time they judged best, saying, "For the peace of the world and benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God Bless the troops."
General Franks replied, "May God bless America," and exchanged salutes with the president, who then left the room.
Reporters stationed with or near troops on the front lines in Kuwait reported intense artillery and aerial bombardment that began just before sundown. Bulldozers muscled aside earthen barriers to allow the rush of tanks and thousands of mechanized infantry vehicles under the staccato illumination of muzzle flashes and ordnance bursts. Hours later, journalists traveling with the Army's Seventh Cavalry reported an engagement with a small Iraqi force of tanks and trucks, which the American force destroyed.
The journalists said the unit was moving at a rate of 25 miles an hour, traveling in Bradley fighting vehicles, and had penetrated dozens of miles into Iraq. Most of the allied troops who crossed into Iraq were outfitted in their full chemical protection suits, gas masks at the ready.
There were no initial reports that Iraqi forces had employed chemical or biological weapons against the advancing allied force.
Armored units from the Army's Third Infantry Division and from the First Marine Expeditionary Force crossed into Iraq at 8 p.m. (noon, Eastern time). Four hours earlier, an armored Marine unit reported the first firefight with Iraqi forces when it encountered two Iraqi armored personnel carriers on the Kuwaiti side of the frontier and destroyed them with machine guns and antitank missiles.
British and American marines had seized the Iraqi border town and port of Umm Qasr south of Basra, Western reporters said. Iraqi television denied that the city had fallen, but an Egyptian journalist, Ashraf Fuad, reached by telephone late Thursday, said he had seen allied forces entering the town under light resistance.
Kuwaiti officials said that at least three Iraqi oil wells had been set on fire in the hours before the invasion. Sheik Thalal al-Khaled Al-Sabah, spokesman for Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, said that around noon on Thursday, Kuwaiti oil field workers near the border "saw explosions at the wells and fires in the sky" over Iraq's Ramallah oil field, a strategic asset that United States forces had been seeking to protect.
The assault was preceded by a series of Iraqi missile attacks on military targets in Kuwait, an action that appeared to have accelerated the beginning of combat operations.
At least four medium-range missiles were fired from Iraqi launching sites that had apparently escaped detection during months of pre-war bombing missions over southern Iraq intended to eliminate missile threats to Kuwait and to United States forces here.
Nonetheless, American forces shot down at least two of the incoming missiles, and two others struck in the desert, one near the Ali Salem Air Base and the other near Camp Commando, one of the main staging areas for United States forces.
Another factor that may have advanced the hour of the attack was frantic efforts by Iraqi forces to lay mines in the border region where allied forces were preparing to cross, military officials said.
The ground invasion advanced along at least two vectors: one, spearheaded by the Third Infantry, pushed northwest across the desert on a course that was expected to run along the western flank of the Euphrates River toward Baghdad. A second, led by British and American marines, employed ground and helicopter borne troops to attack on a northeasterly course toward the river and port complex around Basra.
"The British forces have closed the main coastal road and are using it as a helipad to launch their Chinook transport helicopters, and they are flying them into Iraq," said Mr. Fuad, the Egyptian journalist, speaking from the border region. He said an American Patriot missile battery, able to shoot down incoming missiles, had been moved closer to the border to protect allied forces.
The First Marine Division, which was expected to join the Army's Third Infantry Division in its drive on Baghdad, opened fire on Iraqi positions at 6:25 p.m. with 155-millimeter howitzer barrages as Cobra helicopter gunships clattered ahead.
The marines focused their early fire on an elevated piece of desert known as Safwan Hill near the Iraqi border town of the same name, which was being defended by the Iraq 51st Mechanized Division. A senior Marine officer confidently predicted that the Iraqi defenders would be "history within 12 hours."
A second wave of about 15,000 marines, most of them with the First Marine Division, attacked at 6 a.m. today, apparently breaking and scattering the Iraqis.
"Their officers have cut and run," a Marine intelligence colonel said this morning. American military officials had predicted mass surrender by units of the 51st division, whose soldiers are more poorly equipped and paid than Iraq's frontline Republican Guard divisions.
Military officials reported light resistance in the opening hours of combat. Two crew members of an AH-64 Apache helicopter were injured when the craft crash landed in northern Kuwait. And six crew members of a MH-53 Pave Low special operations helicopter were uninjured when their craft went down in Iraq on Wednesday night.
The helicopter had been engaged in a secret mission. Its crew was recovered,
Explosions were seen in the night sky by journalists near the southern port city of Basra. In northern Iraq, a reporter for the Arabic television station Al Jazeera said Mosul was hit by explosions overnight.
Kuwait's civilian population, which has been host to more than 130,000 troops in its northern desert for months, was kept on edge by air raid sirens that began just after noon and continued to wail almost hourly until early this morning.
Though some Iraqi artillery shells landed in northern Kuwait and damaged buildings, there were no reports of injuries.
Submit a question for Patrick E. Tyler: The Times's bureau chief in Kuwait City will answer a selection of readers' questions every day.
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Night Vision Gear Helps U.S. Army
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Night-Vision.html
IN THE KUWAITI DESERT (AP) -- The night vision equipment that makes the dark desert glow green is not just for the infantrymen.
Most U.S. military personnel here are equipped with the $3,000 scopes, so that the mundane tasks of operating a forward base can be done in darkness.
``You've got to give night vision to literally everybody, so you can refuel, attack, plan and reposition at night,'' said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the Army War College.
Unlike the clunky old Starlight scopes strapped to rifles, new ``night optical devices'' are lightweight. They are worn on the head or attached to the helmet, resembling miniature televisions sitting inches in front of the eyes.
One company of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division is equipped with three different models of night vision equipment.
The most sought-after version is the brand-new PVS-14, a monocle that leaves an eye free to aim the rifle. The PVS-14 mounts on the helmet and can be flipped out of the way when the soldier does not need it.
``The 14s give you the option of being able to fire with light or without light,'' said Spc. Marcus Coe of New Port Ritchie, Fla.
The monocles also reduce the risk of being temporarily blinded if someone turns on a light or aims a flashlight at the night vision gear.
An older scope, dubbed the ``skull crusher,'' straps to the head with a web of strings and pads that make it look like a medieval torture device.
In extremely dark places, like basements, the soldiers can switch on an infrared spotlight that illuminates the room with light visible only through the NODs. Add a laser sight and the assault rifle can put a bullet wherever the beam points.
The gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle, which carries infantrymen into battle, can peer through thermal imaging equipment that can detect heat farther away than the naked eye can see. Soldiers can use the gear to see armored vehicles or even mice scurrying across the desert at night.
All of the Bradley's weapons systems -- including the 25 mm cannon, TOW anti-tank missile and heavy machine gun -- are operated through the sight, which makes everything look a ghostly red. The Bradley commander looks through the same sight to verify a target before ordering the gunner to open fire.
The Army's night vision initiative dates from the Vietnam War, when Vietnamese guerrillas who had been beaten back during daylight returned to fight handily at night, Scales said.
``The big frustration in Vietnam was the enemy could operate at night but we couldn't,'' Scales said. ``The Army said, `In order to fight and win at minimum cost, we've got to do this at night.
--------
New Patriots Should Boost Scud Fighting
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Patriots-vs-Scuds.html
Just as in the first Gulf War, the new fight against Saddam Hussein probably will involve showdowns between Iraq's Scud missiles and the Patriot system the United States has deployed to shoot them down.
The Patriot had a spotty record in 1991, but it should have a better chance this time around. The U.S. military invested $3 billion to make the missile smaller, more agile and more accurate -- while Iraq's dwindling arsenal of Scuds essentially still sport their 1960s Soviet design.
Just a few hours into the latest war, the new and improved Patriot scored its first success, intercepting two missiles Iraq fired at forces in Kuwait, according to U.S. Central Command. Kuwaiti officials said they were Scuds, but U.S. officials described them only as ``tactical ballistic missiles.''
Such success was rare in 1991.
Although the Army initially claimed Patriots successfully intercepted 80 percent of the Scuds they fired against, a congressional report concluded that Patriots downed Scuds just four times in 47 firings.
A Patriot failure was blamed for letting through a Scud strike that slammed into Marine barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 U.S. soldiers.
Since then, the Patriots' maker, Raytheon Corp., has souped up the system's radar and the software that steers a Patriot to an enemy warhead.
In addition to Raytheon's upgrade of older Patriots, known as PAC-2s, Lockheed Martin Corp. has developed a new version -- the PAC-3 -- that plugs into Raytheon launchers. Both are being used.
The PAC-2 and Raytheon's Guidance Enhanced Missiles explode near targets and try to bring them down with shrapnel. The PAC-3 -- which according to Central Command was involved in Thursday's successful strike -- is designed to ram incoming warheads head-on. ``That provides a commander a quiver full of missiles for a multitude of targets,'' Raytheon spokesman Steve Brecken said Thursday. In the first Gulf War, ``all he would have had were PAC-2 missiles that were rushed into the field. They were just undergoing testing when Kuwait was invaded.''
Now, Brecken said, a Patriot system can defend an area seven times larger than it could in 1991.
Scuds are difficult to hit because they wobble wildly and break up near the end of their flight. Iraq isn't supposed to have them at all because their range exceeds the 93-mile distance allowed for Iraq that postwar U.N. resolutions allowed for Iraq.
U.S. intelligence, however, says Iraq has several dozen Scuds, along with Al Samoud 2 missiles that Saddam Hussein began destroying to comply with the most recent U.N. weapons inspections.
The presence of the Patriots was credited with keeping Israel out of the war after it was barraged with 39 Scuds in 1991. But the Patriot's hit rate over Israel was considered so poor that Israel and the United States have spent at least $2 billion developing a different system, the Arrow.
The Arrow is designed to complement the Patriot by intercepting incoming missiles at a higher point than a Patriot can. Israel's air force believes it could shoot down more than 90 percent of incoming missiles.
Military analyst John Pike said ``it would be astonishing'' if the new Patriot system wasn't more effective than its predecessor.
But he warned: ``I don't think anybody is treating them as having reliably solved the missile problem.''
On the Net:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/patriot.htm
http://www.raytheon.com
-------- propaganda wars
Psychological Operations Go Into High Gear
Rumsfeld Tells Iraqis Hussein Is 'Going to Be Gone,' That His Military Is Wavering
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1261-2003Mar20?language=printer
As the United States and Britain attacked Iraq from the air and on the ground yesterday, the largest psychological operations campaign in U.S. military history kicked into overdrive, with 2 million leaflets urging Iraqi troops to lay down their arms and with a direct warning from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broadcast to those troops.
The leaflets, dropped from aircraft in "leaflet bombs" that detonate at 4,000 feet, told Iraqi forces how to tune into radio broadcasts that for the first time gave them specific instructions in Arabic on how to surrender.
"The coalition forces do not wish you, the Iraqi soldier, any harm," the broadcasts said. "However, you must comply with the following instructions in order to save yourself. . . . [S]tow your artillery and your air defense artillery systems in their travel configurations . . . display white flags on vehicles . . . gather in groups a minimum of one kilometer away from your vehicles or positions."
The military has dropped 20 million leaflets thus far. But the most potent message may have come from Rumsfeld himself, who used his first news briefing since the beginning of the war in Iraq -- held hours after a missile attack aimed at killing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- to try to speak directly to the Iraqi forces, the people of Iraq and the entire Muslim world.
"You will have a place in free Iraq if you do the right thing," Rumsfeld said. "But if you follow Saddam Hussein's orders, you will share his fate. And the choice is yours."
"He kept saying 'you' to the Iraqis," a senior administration official said afterward. "He was in a room full of reporters, but he was speaking past them to the Iraqi people. You can look at how many times he said 'you.' It was very clearly directed to the Iraqis."
Pentagon spokesman Victoria Clarke said Rumsfeld's briefing, translated into Arabic, was broadcast nearly simultaneously onto Iraqi radio frequencies from Commando Solo aircraft flying in the region.
CNN, which reaches 7 million households in the Middle East and 160 million households and hotel rooms around the world, carried the event live. Al-Jazeera, the most influential satellite news broadcast service in the Arab world, focused extensively on Rumsfeld's remarks during its evening newscast, with a "news crawl" below the video of Rumsfeld that said in Arabic: "Rumsfeld: The days of the Iraqi regime are limited."
During the briefing, Rumsfeld sought to convince listeners that the Iraqi military was already wavering. "We are in communication with still more people who are officials of the military at various levels -- the regular army, the Special Republican, the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard -- who are increasingly aware that it's going to happen: He's going to be gone," Rumsfeld said.
He referred to "broad and deep evidence" without elaborating. But one senior administration said afterward that the U.S. military is engaged in active surrender negotiations with some Iraqi unit commanders.
At one point in the briefing, Rumsfeld was asked by a reporter whether it would be "an early propaganda victory" for Hussein if he turns out to have survived the missile attack that was unleashed as he met with key aides. Rumsfeld said he did not think so -- and analysts inside and outside the Pentagon agreed, saying the attack would probably go down as a significant "psyops" victory for the U.S. military, both in sowing fear inside the regime and in demonstrating to soldiers and civilians alike that, this time around, Hussein himself is the target.
"Taking the shot at Saddam Hussein -- whether you hit him or you miss him -- was worth it for the message it sends," one defense official said.
Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the strike could lead Hussein and other leaders to wonder "if the United States targeted that particular location because of either a traitor in their midst or communications that were even more compromised than they knew."
"At a minimum," added Tom Donnelly, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, "there's surely no downside for making it obvious that we know where he is, we're coming after him, and if we didn't get him this time, we're going to get him one of these times. And it demonstrates to the Iraqis right from the start that, yes, Saddam is going."
One defense official said the attack would also go a long way toward countering a persistent propaganda theme of the Iraqi regime -- that the Americans have not been serious about deposing Hussein for a dozen years and that they're not serious now.
"This attack certainly sends a message to counter that theme," the official said.
Nonetheless, another defense official sounded a note of caution. "There seems to be a lot of confidence, but no one is willing to step up and say, we know it's going to happen," the official said. "It's still wait-and-see if they do it, once they come in contact with our troops."
Still, another official at the Pentagon cited an additional risk stemming from the attack on Hussein and the relentless, and apparently successful, psyops campaign. "It's always been believed that he will use chemical weapons," the official said, "when he believes he's going to be killed."
----
Many Mideast Nations Roll Up Journalists' Welcome Mat
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1320-2003Mar20?language=printer
When American news organizations made plans to "embed" with U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia, they thought they were set. But on Tuesday all they got was a rude surprise: Saudi officials told the journalists they weren't welcome.
Similarly, U.S. officials say other Arab and Muslim nations -- nominally America's "silent partners" in the war against Iraq -- have also kept American journalists away from their air bases, apparently out of concern that media coverage of U.S. operations there will incite internal opposition.
"Some of these countries . . . want to support the war on terrorism and the action in Iraq but because of their domestic situations prefer to be silent about it," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "Having journalists [reporting from bases within their territory] is not being silent about it."
Whitman wouldn't identify the nations that have rejected journalists, but in recent days reporters from CNN, U.S. News & World Report, NBC and The Washington Post have been unable to gain direct access to U.S. forces stationed in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Turkey has prevented some journalists from crossing its border into northern Iraq, according to media sources. Air bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have also been deemed off-limits to the media by those countries.
In effect, the restrictions mean that reporters have been able to move around Iraq more freely than in some neighboring countries that aren't participating in the war.
"I think it proves that in the Coalition of the Willing, willingness is a very subjective thing," said Phil Bennett, The Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news. Saudi Arabia's denial, he said, was particularly "schizophrenic" because the Saudi government has issued numerous visas to journalists in recent months, but still won't allow access to military installations. "It's a false openness," he said.
A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Nail Al-Jubeir, characterized his government's policy as "a logistical issue. We got an enormous amount of requests from journalists. It got to the point where the government said, 'Let's put a hold on this and study it.' "
The Saudi policy caught U.S. Air Force officials by surprise. The service had expected the Saudis to accept some "embeds" at Prince Sultan Air Base, the massive installation near Riyadh that is home to the U.S. central air command in the Gulf. Yet the United States was told by Saudi officials earlier this week that no reporters would be accepted. Post reporter Bradley Graham spent four days in Riyadh waiting to enter the base but wound up returning home instead.
The Saudis' reluctance suggests how radically different the politics of the current war are from its predecessor in 1991. In the first Gulf War, Saudi Arabia hosted more than a thousand journalists, many of whom were housed next to an air base near Dhahran that Iraq attacked with Scud missiles.
But the current U.S. action is widely unpopular in much of the Arab and Muslim world, and many governments aren't eager to let their citizens know the extent of their cooperation with American forces.
The Air Force, which is operating at more than 30 bases spread across the Middle East, seems to have had the most trouble persuading host nations to accept journalists along with troops. Brig. Gen. Ronald Rand said "a handful" of reporters are embedded with units at only two air bases, both in Kuwait, which has hosted the bulk of American and British forces.
Kathryn Kross, CNN's Washington bureau chief, said most news organizations expected a few countries to block reporters from "embedding" with troops on their soil. "Overall, I think the Pentagon gets high marks for creativity, and for the size and scope of this process," she said. "We are not, by the multiplicity of our demands, an easy group to satisfy."
And access will likely get even tougher, she predicted, as the battles heat up.
----
CANADA - U.S. media battles trial censorship
World Scene
March 21, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-11911246.htm
VANCOUVER - Five U.S. media organizations asked an appeals court yesterday to overturn inclusion of the Internet in a publication ban covering a preliminary hearing in Canada's worst serial-killing case.
The Associated Press, the Seattle Times and three Seattle television stations also asked for the release of affidavits that were introduced in support of extending the ban in the case of Robert Pickton.
Mr. Pickton, 53, is accused of killing 15 women who were among more than 60 prostitutes and drug addicts missing from downtown Vancouver during the past 25 years.
He has said little during the preliminary proceedings, but in a defense statement, he denied killing one of the women.
----
Both sides say war laws are violated
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-493959.htm
The United States and Iraq accused each other of violating international law yesterday, with Baghdad filing a protest at the United Nations and Washington vowing to prosecute the Iraqi regime for placing military targets among civilians.
The Bush administration also expressed concern about the prosecution of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by the new International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague.
But administration officials said they felt no urgency to negotiate bilateral agreements exempting Americans from the jurisdiction of the tribunal. Twenty-four countries have already signed such accords.
"It's still an important issue, and we are concerned about an ICC that is not constrained," a senior State Department official said.
But, another official said, "there is no push because of Iraq" to speed discussions with other nations to protect U.S. soldiers and officials under Article 98 of the court's statute.
The United States refuses to participate in the ICC, which held its inaugural session earlier this month, fearing it will be used by U.S. critics to score political points by prosecuting American soldiers on missions abroad.
With reports from Iraq suggesting that President Saddam Hussein's regime has put military personnel and installations among civilians, the State Department declared such moves war crimes that should be prosecuted.
"We think quite clearly that intentionally taking civilians and putting them in harm's way or trying to shield an army by putting civilians around them is clearly a crime that needs to be dealt with," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
A group of 14 international-law experts released a letter calling such practices illegal.
"International laws of war impose duties, to protect civilians, on defending military forces and not just on attackers," said Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University who coordinated the drafting and release of the letter under the auspices of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
"The United States and its allies have obligations to take precautions to protect civilians, but so does the Iraqi military," Mr. Anderson said.
At the United Nations, Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri sent a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan maintaining that the U.S.-led attack on his country was an act of aggression in violation of international law.
In addition, Iraq's U.N. mission issued a statement saying it will ask the Security Council to brand the United States a "terrorist state" for trying to assassinate Saddam with its first missile strikes of the war.
The Bush administration defended its actions with familiar arguments, citing three U.N. resolutions demanding Iraq's immediate disarmament that have been defied by Saddam for 12 years.
"The source of this authority is U.N. Security Council Resolution 678, which was the authorization to use force for the Gulf war in January 1991," the State Department's legal adviser, William Taft, said yesterday.
"In April of that year, the council imposed a series of conditions on Iraq, including, most importantly, extensive disarmament obligations as a condition of the cease-fire declared under U.N. Security Council Resolution 687.
"Resolution 1441 then gave Iraq a final opportunity to comply, but stated specifically that violations of the obligations, including the obligations to cooperate fully under 1441, would constitute a further material breach," Mr. Taft told the National Association of Attorneys General.
The last resolution, adopted unanimously in November, warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to comply.
"Historical practice is also clear that a material breach by Iraq of the conditions of the cease-fire provides a basis for the use of force. This was established as early as 1992," Mr. Taft said.
"The United States, the United Kingdom and France have all used force against Iraq on a number of occasions over the past 12 years," he said.
He also maintained that under the U.S. Constitution, the president "has not simply the authority but the responsibility to use force to protect our national security."
"Congress has confirmed in two separate resolutions, in 1991 and again last fall, that the president has the authority to use our armed forces in the specific case of Iraq," he said.
Legal experts, however, are divided on the war's legality, with many saying that the existing U.N. resolutions do not go as far as to authorize the use of force.
The Bush administration tried to get another U.N. resolution to help British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the face of rising domestic opposition to war, calling the effort politically desirable but not legally necessary.
Washington withdrew the resolution without calling for a vote, amid opposition from France, Russia, Germany and other members of the 15-nation Security Council.
"I think you're going to find the historians, legal scholars will have differing conclusions about these matters," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Wednesday. "But the conclusion the president reaches is that Iraq's failure to disarm presents a threat to the people of the United States and, therefore, he is prepared to use force."
----
Casualties of War - First Truth, Then Conscience
by Norman Solomon
March 21, 2003
Media Monitors Network
http://www.mediamonitors.net/solomon117.html
The national media echo chamber is not receptive to conscience. On television, the voices are usually loud and facile. People often seem to be shouting. In contrast, the human conscience is close to a whisper. Easily unheard.
Now, the biggest media outlets are in a frenzy. The networks are at war. Every cable news channel has enlisted. At the bottom of FM radio dials, NPR has been morphing into National Pentagon Radio.
With American tax dollars financing the war on Iraq, the urgent need for us to get in touch with our consciences has never been more acute. The rationales for this war have been thoroughly shredded. (To see how the sordid deceptions and outright lies from the Bush team have been demolished by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy, take a look at the www.accuracy.org website.) The propaganda edifice of the war rests on a foundation no more substantial than voluminous hot air.
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices," Voltaire wrote in 1767. The quotation is sometimes rendered with different wording: "As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities."
Either way, a quarter of a millennium later, Voltaire's statement is all too relevant to this moment. The Bush administration is proud to turn urban areas of Iraq into hell -- defying most of the U.N. Security Council and violating the U.N. Charter -- all with the righteous claim that the United States is enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions.
As the apt cliche says, truth is the first casualty of war. But another early casualty is conscience.
Rarely explored in news media, the capacity for conscience is what makes us human. Out of all the differences between people and other animals, Darwin wrote, "the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
Voltaire contended that "the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience" and added: "With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear of death." Franz Kafka was alluding to a similar truth when he wrote: "You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided."
Conscience is smaller than a single pixel, and much less visible. You can't see it on a TV screen. Or hear it. Or smell it. Or taste it. You can only feel it.
That's not a marketable sensation. The huge news outlets have swung behind slaughter in Iraq, and the dissent propelled by conscience is not deemed to be very newsworthy. The mass media are filled with bright lights and sizzle, with high production values and degraded human values, boosting the war effort while the U.S. government implements a massive crime against humanity.
In May 1952, the playwright Lillian Hellman wrote in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."
In 2003, this year's media fashions are increasingly adorning the conformist models of pseudo-patriotism. For many Americans, the gap between what they believe and what's on their TV sets is the distance between their truer selves and their fearful passivity.
In the domestic media siege being maintained by top-notch spinners and shrewd political advisers at the White House, conscience is in the cross hairs. They aim to intimidate, stampede and suppress the many millions of Americans who recognize the deranged and murderous character of the war makers in Washington.
Half a century ago, Albert Einstein urged: "Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." Today, one way or another, the mass media are going along with the Bush administration's demands that we not challenge the U.S. military actions now taking uncounted lives in Iraq.
Conscience is not on the military's radar screen, and it's not on our TV screen. But media messages do not define the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do.
"Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You," by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, was published in late January by Context Books. For an excerpt and other information, go to: http://www.contextbooks.com/newF.html
Note to online readers: :
For the transcript of Solomon's March 11 appearance on CNN discussing U.S. plans for war on Iraq, go to:www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/11/sdi.04.html
--------
An Orwellian Pitch
The inner workings of the war-propaganda machine
by John R. McArthur
MARCH 21 - 27, 2003
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=42761
The first time that a President Bush sold a war against Saddam Hussein, the PR package came wrapped in the flesh and blood of babies torn from incubators. On the second go-round, you might say that the media kit lacks what salesmen call the "touchie-feelie" dimension - for this year's propaganda season has been sponsored mainly by the cold alloy of 81mm high-grade aluminum tubes.
Comparing the advertising techniques of 1990-91 and 2002-3, I can't point to anything as dramatic as the White House/Kuwaiti/Hill & Knowlton fabrication of the great baby-incubator atrocity, allegedly committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwaiti hospitals. But I can cite numerous fraudulent assertions - aluminum tubes, in particular - by a Bush PR team that scatters Enlightenment notions of reason and logic (to paraphrase Bush the First's baby-killing metaphor) like so much firewood across the U.S. Capitol's floor.
Government manipulation of public opinion is an old story, of course, but the two Presidents Bush seem especially gifted in the black arts of publicity and sloganeering. In 1990, Bush the First - with brilliant support from a Kuwaiti "witness" named Nayirah - harnessed the fake baby-killing atrocity to help drive a reluctant Senate and public into rescuing the Kuwaiti royal family (and, as Bush the First's U.S. trade representative, Carla Hills, told me, "to guarantee the right to import oil"). The "liberation" of a tiny emirate that had never known liberty remains one of the great propaganda coups of recent times, and its lessons were not lost on Bush the Second. But in seeking to "liberate" Iraq itself from Saddam Hussein, the younger Bush and his counselors have shown themselves every bit the equals of the father.
Twelve years ago the case for war was easier to make - Saddam had, in fact, invaded Kuwait. More recently, George W. Bush possessed no such advantage. Except for the far-fetched (now refuted) connection between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi government, George W.'s team began its race for congressional war authorization from a standing start. But beginning on September 7, they accelerated quickly, launching their campaign with a near total fabrication that was nothing more than a calculated scare story.
It was then that the president and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had issued a "new" report describing a revived nuclear-weapons project in Iraq, built on the foundations of the old. Inarticulate to a fault, Bush backtracked a bit from "new" and stated that "when inspectors first went into Iraq and were . . . finally denied access, a report came out of . . . the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
Effective propaganda relies on half-truths and the conflation of disparate "facts" (like Saddam's genuine human-rights violations), so the notion of new IAEA evidence at least sounded plausible. Saddam almost certainly harbored ambitions to build an A-bomb - it was this that caused Israel to bomb Iraq's first and only nuclear reactor in 1981 (a pre-emptive act of war that drew unanimous condemnation from the U.N. Security Council). The trouble was that no such "new" report existed. Nor had there ever been an IAEA report containing the "six months away" assertion - not in 1991 after the war; not in December 1998 when the U.S. weapons inspectors pulled out of Iraq; not in September 2001.
More than three weeks elapsed before The Washington Times (not the "liberal" media) took the trouble to straighten out the story, but by then the administration was well on its way to panicking the Congress into authorizing war. The day after the Bush-Blair confidence trick, the newspapers and talk shows were flooded (through the good offices of Michael Gordon and Judith Miller of The New York Times) with an administration leak about Iraq's attempt to buy special aluminum tubes, supposedly destined for its "six months away" nuclear program. Suddenly (along with the phantom IAEA report), aluminum tubes had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon.
Not until December 8, when 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, did any expert point out publicly that the aluminum tubes were probably meant for conventional weapons. Not until January 9 did Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA, essentially bury the aluminum tubes (and the Iraqi nuclear weapons program) by confirming Albright's supposition. But it was too late; Congress had long ago given Bush carte blanche to attack Iraq with its open-ended war resolution of October 11.
Propaganda success breeds contempt for the old-fashioned notion that politicians require the informed consent of the people before they go to war. The media bears much of the blame; it has been so painfully slow in refuting administration double talk that Karl Rove and Andrew Card can count on a fairly long interval between propaganda declaration and contradiction; or they can bet that the contradiction will be so muted as to be insignificant. Thus could the president brazenly include the discredited aluminum tubes in his State of the Union address.
Meanwhile, stories designed to frighten the public onto a war footing proliferate. Colin Powell tells the Security Council of a "poison factory" linked to al Qaeda in northern Iraq. Reporters visit a compound of crude structures and find nothing of the kind, so an unidentified State Department official responds by saying that "a 'poison factory' is a term of art."
Powell cites new "British intelligence" on Saddam's "spying" capabilities; British Channel 4 reveals that this new dossier is plagiarized from a journal article by a graduate student in California.
The administration raises its terrorist threat level to orange, causing widespread anxiety and duct-tape purchases (a handy placebo for a faltering economy); ABC News reports (at last, a rapid response) that the latest terror alert was largely based on "fabricated" information provided by a captured al Qaeda informant who subsequently failed a lie-detector test.
Powell announces a new threat from an Iraqi airborne "drone"; the drone, patched together with tape and powered by a small engine with a wooden propeller, turns out to have a maximum range of five miles.
The administration trumpets alleged attempts by Iraq to purchase uranium from Niger; the IAEA concludes that the incriminating documents were forged.
On March 7, Powell is back in the Security Council brandishing . . . aluminum tubes!: "There is new information . . . available to us . . . and the IAEA about a European country where Iraq was found shopping for these kinds of tubes . . . [tubes] more exact by a factor of 50 percent or more than those usually specified for rocket-motor casings." When I ask the State Department the name of the European country, I am informed that said country wishes to remain anonymous. (So did Nayirah al-Sabah.) When I inquire with the IAEA about the "new evidence," I am told that El Baradei's analysis, presented before Powell's declaration, is unchanged: "Extensive field investigation and document analysis have failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81mm tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets."
The question is, why do they get away with it?
George Orwell blamed "slovenliness" in the language, like the phrase "weapons of mass destruction." Most people think it means nuclear weapons, sure to kill hundreds of thousands. With no A-bombs in sight in Iraq, Bush can still shout about nerve gas and poison gas - also "weapons of mass destruction" - and unsophisticated folks think he's still talking about A-bombs. Bad as they are, chemical and biological weapons are very unlikely to kill in the same quantities as nuclear weapons, but Bush gets a free ride on sloppy English.
PR practitioners say it's easy for politicians to have their way. Peter Teeley, Bush the First's press secretary when he was vice president, explained it this way: "You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it." If it happens to be untrue, "so what. Maybe 200 people read [the correction] or 2,000 or 20,000."
Hermann Goering was more specific: "Why, of course, the people don't want war," he told G.M. Gilbert at the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal. "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's magazine and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
1,000 Are Arrested in Serbian Crackdown
By JOVANA GEC
The Associated Press
Thursday, March 20, 2003; 5:45 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64169-2003Mar20?language=printer
Nearly 1,000 people have been arrested in Serbia's crackdown on criminal groups following the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, a top official said Thursday.
Parliamentary speaker Dragoljub Micunovic spoke as authorities announced further arrests of officials loyal to former President Slobodan Milosevic.
However, the prime suspects - former paramilitary commander Milorad Lukovic, also know as Legija, and other crime bosses - remained at large.
"There will be more arrests in the next few days," said Ivan Andric, another top official in the ruling reformist coalition. "There still exist remnants of Slobodan Milosevic's regime."
The government also said deputy state prosecutor Milan Sarajlic, arrested for suspected ties to the gang accused of the Djindjic slaying, has confessed to being on the payroll of organized crime.
In a statement, the government said Sarajlic had admitted to obstructing legal proceedings against key mafia bosses and to undermining investigations into assassinations of prominent Serbian figures in recent years.
Sarajlic's arrest on Wednesday followed the forced retirement of 35 Serbian judges amid accusations that they failed to prosecute the crime bosses who were plotting the assassination.
On Thursday, the head of the Serbian Supreme Court, Leposava Karamarkovic, resigned, citing "political and media pressure." Also Thursday, Serbia's top defense body, the Supreme Defense Council, fired its intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aca Tomic, a bitter foe of Djindjic. It was not clear whether the sacking was related to the crackdown.
Djindjic, Serbia's leading pro-Western politician was killed by a sniper March 12 as he stepped out of an armored car in front of the government headquarters in downtown Belgrade.
Authorities accused the so-called Zemun Clan of the killing and imposed a state of emergency, launching a major hunt for leading crime figures, as well as their associates in the judiciary, police and other state services.
Organized crime - including drug and human trafficking - flourished during Milosevic's decade-long rule in Serbia, establishing a network that also included dozens of corrupt police and court officials.
After Milosevic was ousted in 2000 and handed over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal to face a trial a year later, Djindjic pledged to curb rampant crime and purge the country of Milosevic's allies. Djindjic also promised to extradite all war crimes suspects, which angered hard-liners in Serbia.
Andric said the police investigation following Djindjic's slaying has pointed to financial links between the Zemun Clan and war crimes fugitives. He did not elaborate.
-------- FOIA
U.S. Ready to Rescind Clinton Order on Government Secrets
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By ADAM CLYMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/politics/21SECR.html
WASHINGTON, March 20 - Making it easier for government agencies to keep documents secret, the Bush administration plans to revoke an order issued by President Bill Clinton that among other provisions said information should not be classified if there was "significant doubt" as to whether its release would damage national security.
The new policy is outlined in a draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies. A final version is expected to be adopted before April 17, when the last elements of the Clinton order would take effect, requiring automatic declassification of most documents 25 or more years old. Under the draft, such automatic declassification would be postponed until Dec. 31, 2006.
Other provisions of Mr. Clinton's order, which was issued in 1995, are already in force. But major changes to them contemplated in the draft would treat all information obtained from foreign governments as subject to classification and end the requirement that agencies prepare plans for declassifying records.
The new policy would also permit reclassification of documents that have already been made public, and give the Central Intelligence Agency special authority to resist decisions by an interagency panel that considers classification appeals, typically from researchers.
Sean McCormack, spokesman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on the ground that the Bush order was not final. But William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives, defended the proposal, saying it "comes as close to institutionalizing automatic declassification as possible."
Historians and other critics of government secrecy had mixed reactions. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coalition for History, said of the draft, "In general it's far better than what many in the historical community had expected to see coming out of the Bush administration." He called it "more an edit than a substantial rewrite."
Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "One might have expected a more aggressive, pro-secrecy policy than this draft." He said its strength was that it preserved both automatic declassification and the interagency appeals panel from the Clinton administration.
"This draft does not shred the existing policy; it merely attenuates it somewhat," said Mr. Aftergood, who made the draft public last week in Secrecy News, his Internet publication.
But Anna K. Nelson, an American University historian, was more critical, saying: "This is in context with the way this administration has done the whole bit on secrecy. They have left a skeletal process."
The document does retain many central provisions of the Clinton directive, notably that "in no case shall information be classified in order to (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment of a person, organization or agency; (3) restrain competition; or (4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of national security."
Dr. Nelson, however, complained in particular about the deletion of the sentence in Mr. Clinton's order that said, "If there is significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified." She called that change "a clear fire bell in the night." Mr. Aftergood agreed, saying, "It signals a preference for secrecy."
Mr. Leonard, who was appointed to his post by the national archivist with the approval of President Bush, took a different view. He said the Clinton administration had inserted that provision to overturn a Reagan administration policy that took the opposite tack, calling for classification in cases of doubt. He said the new deletion would mean that the order "doesn't say one way or the other - a change of tone more than anything else."
The practical effect will be "nil," Mr. Leonard continued, because the draft order retains provisions urging agencies to see declassification's values, for instance the national progress that results from the free flow of information.
Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, a group that publicizes government documents, also objected, though, particularly to the provision on information from foreign governments. It says, "The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to national security." The phrase "damage to national security" is defined in the order, and in law, as the basis for classifying documents as confidential, secret or top secret.
Mr. Blanton said the language on foreign government information was too broad, and would extend even to information given the Department of Commerce or the Export-Import Bank.
"Making all foreign government information presumptively classified," he said, "means we're lowering our openness standard to the lowest common denominator of our ostensible allies."
A frequent critic of government secrecy, Mr. Blanton did praise the draft for retaining the concept of automatic declassification.
The Clinton order required that documents generally be classified for no more than 10 years. But it allowed for periods up to 25 years in several specific circumstances, including those involving information on weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration's draft, on the other hand, does not require a specific reason for the 25-year standard, saying instead that it can be applied if the classifying authority determines that "the sensitivity of the information" demands it.
Mr. Leonard, of the National Archives, said an important element of the draft was its retention of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, which decides appeals from decisions by agencies to classify or not to declassify documents. He said the panel had overruled agency decisions in about 70 percent of the cases brought before it.
But the administration's draft gives the Central Intelligence Agency special standing. While other agencies can appeal to the president if they feel that panel decisions against them are wrong, the director of central intelligence would be permitted to block panel declassification orders unless the president overruled him.
-------- homeland security
On War's First Day, States Act to Reduce Threat of Terrorism
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21SECU.html
LOS ANGELES, March 20 - State and local authorities bolstered security across the nation today, barring recreational boats from a naval channel off Miami, posting scores of new sentries at several Mississippi River freight ports and preparing to deploy the National Guard in Hollywood to protect the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday.
From California to Washington, D.C., the authorities responsible for security fanned out to power plants, national monuments and bridges to protect against terrorist attacks during the first day of war with Iraq. Airplane flights over Disney World and other Florida theme parks were restricted this week. Governors in several states ordered their highway patrols onto overtime shifts.
"We're anticipating all kinds of problems, preparing for the worst and hoping for the best," Gov. Gray Davis of California said here today.
Mayor James K. Hahn announced that Los Angeles had doubled the security force assigned to protect the city's electric power and water plants, and had increased the frequency of tests of the municipal drinking water to guard against the possibility of contamination.
Extensive security measures have been put into place to protect the Academy Award presentations in Hollywood, Governor Davis said, including the deployment of a mobile laboratory run by the California National Guard that will be on hand to test any suspicious materials for chemical, biological or toxic threats.
In Arizona, National Guard troops patrolled the desert around the Palo Verde Nuclear Power plant, 30 miles outside Phoenix. They were deployed by Gov. Janet Napolitano after federal authorities said they had received information that the plant could be a specific terrorist target.
In Mississippi, 44 additional National Guard troops were deployed to protect several freight ports and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Grand Gulf Nuclear Facility, said Maj. Danny Blanton of the Mississippi National Guard.
In Orlando, Fla., the Orange County sheriff, Kevin Barry, ordered deputies to continue driving marked patrol cars when they were off duty to project an image of an increased law enforcement presence.
In South Florida, Miami-Dade County and Coast Guard officials restricted the Miami ship channel to cruise ships, barring small recreational boats.
But Mayor Alex Penelas of Miami-Dade County said that the authorities had detected no specific threats. "We have to live our lives as Americans," he said. "We cannot alter our unique quality of life."
--------
Missile Defense for Airliners
Lawmakers Propose Technology to Protect Passenger Planes
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A663-2003Mar20.html
Republican and Democratic leaders of a House panel that oversees aviation security vowed yesterday to quickly draw up legislation to equip U.S. airliners with technology to ward off attack from shoulder-fired missiles, even at a price as high as $1 million per aircraft.
After what was described as the first closed-door congressional hearing on the topic with U.S. and Israeli security officials, Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.) said he supported at least $30 million in research funds to find the best antimissile technology. He also suggested that the technology could be placed on a number of commercial jetliners, but how many and which ones would be kept secret as a deterrent.
"I hope it's like the air marshals -- you don't know how many or how soon" the technology could be installed on commercial airplanes, said Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's subcommittee on aviation.
In the Senate, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) filed legislation last month that would equip about 6,800 of the nation's commercial aircraft with antimissile technology, at a cost of $6 billion to $10 billion. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) has filed similar legislation, but neither measure has come up for a vote.
Mica did not file a bill yesterday but said he intends to find "any vehicle" to move the legislation as quickly as possible after conferring with House leaders and the White House.
"We welcome the opportunity" to work with lawmakers, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. "We recognize it's a serious issue, and we look forward to working with them."
Although U.S. security officials emphasize that they have received no information indicating the nation faces a specific threat, they have become increasingly concerned about the possibility that terrorists could use shoulder-fired missiles to bring down civilian aircraft as they are taking off or landing. Since 1978, there have been 35 attempts worldwide to shoot down civilian aircraft with "Man Portable Air Defense Systems," or Manpads, resulting in the loss of 24 planes and more than 500 deaths.
In May, a Russian-built SA-7 missile was fired at a U.S. military plane taking off from the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, but it missed. In November, two similar missiles nearly hit an airliner full of Israeli tourists after it took off in Mombasa, Kenya.
Many such incidents have occurred in "war-torn" areas, said James M. Loy, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration. But the Kenya incident, he said in written testimony, "was outside the confines of the normal 'combat zone' and underscores how this threat has grown and now must be taken very seriously, everywhere."
In recent months, the TSA has begun evaluating 22 of the nation's largest airports to assess each airport's vulnerability to such an attack. Shoulder-fired missiles can be launched from as far away as 30 miles and reach altitudes of up to 18,000 feet. Heat-seeking technology directs the missiles toward the aircraft.
The weapons weigh 35 pounds and are relatively easy to purchase in foreign countries that do not have strict export controls. There are as many as 700,000 such weapons available worldwide. They typically cost $25,000 to $80,000 each.
Robert L. Del Boca, a vice president at Northrop Grumman Corp., told the House panel yesterday that his firm has already drawn up a proposal to equip 300 U.S. airliners that fly international routes with the company's antimissile technology. Northrop Grumman's technology, which would cost $2 million per plane, would emit sensors from the bottom of the aircraft to detect missiles and then interrupt the missile's tracking system to cause it to veer off course.
In his written testimony, Del Boca said the cost could drop to $1 million per aircraft if the government decides to outfit more aircraft.
Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), who supports Mica's efforts, said the federal government, not airlines, would bear the costs of the program. "In this instance, we're clearly talking about national security," DeFazio said.
----
F.B.I. Seeks Qaeda Suspect in U.S.; Troops Sent to Nuclear Plant
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21HOME.html
WASHINGTON, March 20 - Federal law enforcement officials warned today about new domestic terrorism threats, including an "imminent threat" that might be posed by a suspected Al Qaeda member sought by the F.B.I. The officials also said they were worried about continuing intelligence reports that suggested terrorist attacks linked to the Iraq invasion.
The officials said that National Guard members were sent on Tuesday to a large nuclear power plant in Arizona after intelligence reports suggested that Al Qaeda or its sympathizers might be planning to attack it. The officials said a foreign spy agency had provided information about a threat to the plant, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Tonopah, 50 miles west of Phoenix.
The three-reactor site is classified as the largest nuclear power plant in the United States. The officials would not say which agency had supplied the information. Although he offered few details, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said there had been a "very specific piece of threat information" to suggest that the plant was in danger.
Law enforcement officials said there was not necessarily any connection between that threat and an announcement today by the F.B.I. that it was searching for the suspect from Al Qaeda, Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah, 27, who was born in Saudi Arabia. Residents of Miramar, Fla., said a man who appeared to be Mr. Shukrijumah was living there as recently as last weekend.
The F.B.I. announced the search as it said it was preparing to interview thousands of Iraqi-born residents of the United States in the next several weeks, to develop leads on possible terror attacks.
Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said Mr. Shukrijumah had been identified as a potential terrorist from Al Qaeda by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the senior terrorist leader who was captured this month in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and has been intensively questioned.
The officials said suspicions about Mr. Shukrijumah and his intentions had grown with the discovery that he had flight training in the United States about the same time as several Sept. 11 hijackers, that he had recently traveled on a passport issued by Guyana and that he had used a variety of aliases.
The bulletin said Mr. Shukrijumah might try to cross American borders with a Saudi, Canadian or Trinidadian passport. The bulletin included photographs of the suspect, including one from a Florida driver's license issued in February 2001.
Neighbors in Miramar, south of Fort Lauderdale, said a man who identified himself as Mr. Shukrijumah had lived and had been seen there as recently as last weekend. Orville Campbell, 26, a commercial artist who lives in a nearby apartment complex, said he saw Mr. Shukrijumah barbecuing at 1 a.m. on Sunday with other people.
A senior Bush administration official said the government had evidence to suggest that Mr. Shukrijumah had attended the Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., one of two schools that Zacarias Moussaoui attended in 2001. Mr. Moussaoui, a Frenchmen, is awaiting trial in Virginia on charges that he conspired with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
But the director of operations at the school, Dale Davis, said a search of its records found no student with any of the six names that Mr. Shukrijumah is believed to have used. In a telephone interview, Mr. Davis said the F.B.I. had not been in contact with the school for months and, to his knowledge, had never asked the school about Mr. Shukrijumah.
The reports of threats to the power plant and the search for Mr. Shukrijumah circulated as law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said they were continuing to see new intelligence to suggest that Al Qaeda, Iraqi intelligence agencies and others would try to carry out terrorist attacks timed to an invasion of Iraq.
The F.B.I. said it was preparing to interview 11,000 Iraqi-born Americans and immigrants in the next few weeks for information that they may have about threats. The program is expected to involve almost 5,000 agents. F.B.I. officials said that the interviews, which they described as voluntary, began months ago but were stepped up this week.
"It's an accelerated process," an official said. "The intensity has picked up. Agents were knocking on doors and saying, `Hey, is there anything you know that could be helpful as we are waging war against your former country?' "
A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ibrahim Hooper, said the stepped-up Iraqi interviews and the F.B.I.'s expanded powers to detain illegal immigrants were another effort to single out unfairly Arabs and Arab-Americans in the United States.
----
Homeland budget, progress being scrutinized
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030321-24174769.htm
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge yesterday presented his 2004 funding request to Congress and was warned by both sides of the aisle that spending and the new department's progress will be closely scrutinized.
Mr. Ridge asked for $36.2 billion and was told by the chairman of the new House subcommittee with jurisdiction to set specific goals and outcomes so the new department's performance can be judged by Congress.
"We can't afford to waste time waffling in bureaucratic inertia," said Rep. Harold Rogers, Kentucky Republican and chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security.
Minnesota Rep. Martin Olav Sabo, ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said the budget contained "many deficiencies" to fund first responders and that the Bush administration's continued support for tax cuts while the country is at war "flies in the face of reality."
The overall budget request is nearly 8 percent higher than the current year and sets aside $3.5 billion for first responders at the local and state level.
When Mr. Ridge spoke with the nation's governors Monday night before raising the national threat level from elevated (Yellow) to high (Orange), no one asked for funding, he said.
"I understand that they've got some tough fiscal situations in their respective states, but not a governor said, 'What about the money?' Every governor and every homeland security adviser said, 'We'll get it done,' " Mr. Ridge said.
There is a clear role for the federal government to help fund local responders in light of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and additional funding will be requested in a supplemental spending bill. However, Mr. Ridge said that fire and police are not nationalized and responsibility must be shared by cities and states.
Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, criticized the current funding structure, which he says borrows from other grant programs like the COPS program to pay for homeland security protections.
"We simply have to come clean about how much of this is new money and make certain that we are not taking away with one hand what we are giving with another," Mr. Wolf said.
"If you had asked [cities and states] do they want to lose the grants for additional law enforcement and policemen, they would say no," Mr. Wolf said. "They actually wanted both."
The president's budget also contains $18.1 billion for border and transportation security, $829 million for information analysis and infrastructure protection, $809 million for science and technology, $6.8 billion for the Coast Guard, $1.3 billion for the Secret Service, and $1.8 billion for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Rep. Jose E. Serrano of New York, an outspoken Democrat on the issues of civil liberties and civil rights, questioned Mr. Ridge on profiling, detention practices, and the use of enormous databases to gather information on U.S. citizens.
"History is full of examples of well-intentioned efforts to ensure our safety leading to serious and significant violations of the rights and privileges provided under our laws. My fear is that we may be adding another troubling chapter to this history," Mr. Serrano said.
"In the process of getting the bad guys, let's make sure we don't throw away our Constitution and trample on the rights of the good guys," Mr. Serrano said.
Mr. Ridge said privacy, civil rights, and civil-liberties officers within the department "will afford the kind of protections that you and your colleagues all desire."
Mr. Rogers did offer help to Mr. Ridge if he encounters turf battles from within his department that Congress could resolve.
"Each group comes to the table with a growth of knowledge, but they will also bring parochial interests and cultures that may not readily lend themselves to the openness required to be successful," Mr. Ridge said.
"We will give you a good deal of leeway as you begin to organize this department, but I want you to make no mistake Mr. Secretary, we will carefully monitor your progress," Mr. Rogers said. "That's the way we operate."
----
Security Even Tighter in Area
FBI to Interview Iraqi Residents; Police Beef Up Presence
By Spencer S. Hsu and Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1322-2003Mar20.html
Across the Washington area, the outbreak of war in Iraq prompted further tightening of the security already in place to guard against terrorism, and District leaders pronounced the capital safe as they urged people not to cancel their plans to visit the city.
The Washington field office of the FBI assembled a list of about 400 local Iraqis and began interviewing them, seeking information that would assist U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf or the investigation of terrorist activity in this country. Van Harp, head of the field office, said the interviews were being conducted "to ensure that we leave no stone unturned and try and obtain all information and intelligence to prevent another terrorist incident."
On other fronts, D.C. police pumped up neighborhood patrols, Metro transit officers conducted extra sweeps of stations to look for explosives, and some area governments began checking the identification of everyone entering public buildings. The Metro system also restricted bus service near military bases.
As far away as Prince William County, police activated an emergency plan to boost staffing and increase surveillance at major bridges and public gathering spots such as the Potomac Mills mall. Howard County activated its emergency operations center Wednesday night and ordered all police and fire department personnel to be ready to report to duty within one hour.
In all cases, law enforcement officials said they were not reacting to any specific information but taking extra precautions to address the general terror threat and to reassure the public.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said at a news conference that he was "comfortable with the plans we have in place" and declared the capital safe for residents, workers and visitors.
"I think Washington is probably the safest place to be," Ramsey said. Asked what his message was to the public, he said: "Come on down to enjoy yourselves. There's no reason for people to cancel their plans. If we knew something like [an attack] would occur, we'd alert people, but right now there's no indication of that."
Ramsey, who was joined at the news conference by Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, vowed not to let antiwar demonstrators disrupt traffic.
They made their comments two days before the start of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, an event that kicks off the city's spring tourism season.
The FBI had planned to start interviewing Iraqi residents as soon as the war began. The bureau said the interviews will be voluntary and low-key and that in addition to soliciting information, agents will encourage Iraqis to report any hate crimes against their community. The vast majority of the estimated 5,000 Iraqi immigrants in the area are staunchly opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Law enforcement sources said the FBI is particularly interested in talking to people with ties to the Iraqi army or knowledge about terrorist organizations. They said that many of the Iraqis to be interviewed by the Washington field office live in Northern Virginia and that the Baltimore FBI office plans to talk to about 60 Iraqis in its region, including many from Prince George's and Montgomery counties.
In other war-related security measures, Maryland authorities posted officers at entrances to the Port of Baltimore; the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant cut off public tours; and the Maryland Transportation Authority Police opened a mandatory inspection station on northbound Interstate 95 for trucks over five tons.
Officials in several jurisdictions asked members of the the public to be more attentive when going about their routines and to report suspicious activity. First Sgt. Kim Chinn said Prince William police were receiving a larger-than-usual volume of calls yesterday.
Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens (D), whose county partially activated its emergency operations center yesterday, said, "Do not underestimate the importance of keeping your eyes and ears open."
Officials also began looking at the fiscal impact of the additional security they have put into place because of the war and the Code Orange terror alert level. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge told state officials Wednesday that the Bush administration will request funds to offset their expenses. No estimates of those costs were available yet, but Ramsey provided some salary data suggesting that the District's costs alone would run into hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.
Maryland, Virginia and the District also are following Ridge's directive to deploy more officers to protect a half-dozen or so "critical assets" within their jurisdictions -- sites such as military bases, trucking or shipping ports and chemical stockpiles.
--------
War, FBI Visits Worry Iraqi - Americans
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Americas-Iraqis.html
POMONA, Calif. (AP) -- Images of explosions in Baghdad and the silence of dead phone lines are sending waves of fear through America's Iraqi communities, as expatriates worry about relatives and friends trapped by the war. Visits by the FBI also are heightening anxiety.
Bassam Al-Hussaini, an engineer who left Iraq in 1982, spoke with his mother in Baghdad two days before the first missile strikes.
``In case I don't see you again, kiss your children for me,'' she told him. Since then, he's had no word on his mother's fate, or that of 14 other family members in Iraq's capital.
``I felt personally I wasn't going to see her again,'' said Al-Hussaini, who now lives in Southern California and is member of a Pomona mosque serving a large Iraqi-American community.
The feelings of Iraqi-Americans toward the invasion are far from universal. While some oppose war, others would welcome the end of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Whatever their political leanings, however, the U.S. attacks seemed to unite people in concern for their loved ones.
In Pomona, Kothar Al-Qazwini said the sight of milk in her refrigerator, or stocked grocery store shelves, fill her with worry for Iraqi civilians.
``All my mind is with the people,'' she said. ``I am just thinking about them -- if they are hungry now, if their kids have any milk to drink.''
In the Detroit area, home to one of the nation's largest concentrations of people with roots in the Middle East, talk of war dominated Thursday.
``The innocent people, they don't deserve this,'' Huda Alsenad, whose husband has relatives in Iraq. ``You just watch it and you are scared. They are human beings. It attacks your heart.''
Haider Al-Jubury, 29, who came to the United States in the 1990s, watched the start of the military campaign in a cafe Wednesday night in Dearborn, Mich.
``It's like waiting for a newborn baby. You want to see it, but you know there's going to be a lot of pain before then,'' he said.
In Pomona, Al-Hussaini and others held a news conference Thursday at a school, The Assadiq Foundation, to ask that President Bush not keep forces in Iraq too long, remove sanctions quickly and not use nuclear weapons.
Since the attack began, community members have received 100 hate calls, said Sayed Moustafa Al-Qazwini, Kothar's husband and imam of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County.
Iraqis around the country, including members of Pomona congregation, also reported visits by FBI agents as part of a national search for potential terrorist cells, spies or people who might provide information helpful to a U.S. war effort.
Al-Qazwini said the interrogations often struck fear into those being questioned.
``Unfortunately some members of our community have experienced some of the same threats that we lived with in Iraq,'' he said. ``Iraqi-Americans are not the enemies of the American community. We share the goal of liberating Iraq.''
On the Net:
Iraqi American Council: http://www.al-iraq.org/aic.htm
-------- immigration / refugees
War fear cited in increased border security
By Ken Bensinger
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030321-74539039.htm
MEXICO CITY - Mexicans fear they could be an early casualty of the war as the Bush administration, already upset at Mexico's refusal to back it in the United Nations, begins introducing unprecedented security measures along the border.
In recent weeks, the U.S. government has ramped up restrictions along the nearly 2,000-mile border and with the war, a severe crackdown on cross-nation traffic is expected.
In what amounts to a partial border closure, there will be fewer open entries, more inspections and mind-numbing wait times for the thousands of Mexicans who cross every day.
The Homeland Security Department, which oversees the border, said the security boost is "not against Mexicans, it's against criminals."
Mexico, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council, took a surprisingly adversarial stance with the United States in opposing war with Iraq.
Many feel the new border restrictions are the first of many U.S. decisions that will affect Mexico adversely.
"For us, an exporting country that has hundreds of thousands of Mexicans along the border zone, this will have a seriously negative impact," said Silvia Hernandez, a Mexican senator in the Party of the Institutional Revolution.
Mexico sends more than 80 percent of its exports across the Rio Grande.
Since the Bush administration abandoned its Security Council resolution earlier this week, it's gone overboard to emphasize the importance of its relationship with Mexico.
But down here, the focus is on comments from various U.S. officials calling Mexico's unwavering anti-war stance a "disappointment."
"In one form or another, there will be consequences," said Jorge Montano, former Mexican ambassador to the United States.
Mexican President Vicente Fox, under tremendous pressure from an overwhelmingly anti-war populace, never offered support for the U.S. resolution.
Finding himself, as the Spanish expression goes, "between the sword and the wall," Mr. Fox addressed his nation just two hours after Mr. Bush gave his Monday night ultimatum.
Mexico "laments the road to war," he said, going on to say that "our relationship with the U.S., our closest partner, our neighbor and friend, shouldn't change."
But along the border, things have already changed. Since March 1, when the Homeland Security Department assumed control of the zone, average crossing times increased by as much as a third.
On Monday night, the national threat level was raised to Orange Alert, the second-highest level, and inspections were beefed up with bomb-sniffing dogs, radiation-detecting devices and gamma-ray sweeps of trucks.
For the typical Mexican border-crosser, transporting food and manufactured goods to the United States, that spells serious delays.
Such delays distress many Americans, too. The Chamber of Commerce in San Ysidro, Calif., the world's busiest border crossing, recently reported a 40 percent to 60 percent drop in local business during the first period of Orange Alert last year.
-------- terrorism
Spain's Qaeda Suspects Had Detergent Not Weapons
Fri March 21, 2003
By Daniel Flynn
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2424750
MADRID - Spain released almost all of a group of 16 men accused of being al Qaeda militants on Friday after suspected chemical weapons material found at their homes turned out to be laundry soap, court sources said.
In an embarrassing setback for an operation trumpeted as a major blow in the "war on terrorism," a High Court judge freed seven of the suspects who remained in police custody on Friday. The judge had freed seven others late on Thursday.
Two men are still being held -- one for possession of forged identity documents and the other while police probe telecommunications equipment found at his home along with video recordings of a guerrilla attack in Chechnya and protests in Algeria.
The second man, an Algerian, said the equipment was given to him by a friend and the videos were recorded by his wife while he was at work to help him keep up to date with current affairs.
The 16 men, mainly from Algeria, were detained in dawn raids on a dozen homes in the northeastern region of Catalonia in January. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said at the time his government had smashed a "major terrorist network."
The raids were launched soon after British police found the deadly toxin ricin in a London flat.
Spain's Interior Minister Angel Acebes said in January that police had discovered chemicals, bomb components and radio transmission equipment at the homes of the men.
But tests showed that the suspicious material was detergent.
Authorities retained the passports of the 14 freed men until the end of the investigation in a standard procedure, court sources said. They must appear before authorities once a week.
Spain is one of President Bush's staunchest European allies in the Iraq conflict and the "war on terrorism."
It has made about 40 high profile arrests of al Qaeda suspects since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington but about half have been released for lack of evidence.
Aznar's government has compared Bush's campaign against al Qaeda, blamed for the September 11 attacks, to its own battle against the armed Basque separatist group ETA, Western Europe's most active guerrillas.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
German govt agrees on renewables, no details yet
REUTERS GERMANY:
March 21, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20229/story.htm
BERLIN - Months-long discussions within Germany's government over renewable energy subsidies have been concluded, but details will only be published over the next two days, negotiators said.
"We have a result," the energy spokeswoman for the junior partner, the Green Party, told Reuters late this week.
Rolf Hempelmann, negotiator for the dominant party, the Social Democrats, said the compromise suited both sides, but needed to be run past Economics Minister Wolfgang Clement (SPD) and Environment Minister Juergen Trittin (Greens).
At stake are subsidies for expensive renewable energies as energy-instensive industries have put pressure on Clement to cap them, but Trittin's party in return wants them to accept stricter energy market supervision.
German electricity consumers this year are expected to pay around two billion euros ($2.13 billion) towards power from renewable sources, which attracts above market prices because Germans consider it desirable to protect the environment.
Analysts say it is open what form market supervision might take - and if the Greens manage to achieve the trade-off they demand - but some energy consumers hope for pre-emptive price controls to be introduced on the distribution grids.
Those opposed to change want to hold on to Germany's model of self-regulation which involves network owners working out access terms with leading consumer representatives.
But parties left out of the discussions say they are discriminatory and are responsible for German energy prices being among the highest in Europe.
-------- environment
Iraqi Environment Defenseless Before Warring Forces
March 21, 2003
Environment News Service
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2003/2003-03-21-01.asp
DOHA, Qatar, The air campaign of coalition forces against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein went into high gear today, as hundreds of aircraft and cruise missiles targeted select regime leadership and military targets in Baghdad and other cities, U.S. Central Command officials said at their headquarters on the outskirts of Doha.
By midday Friday, as many as 30 oil wells were on fire in southern Iraq near Basra, according to British Defense Minister Geoff Hoon, who did not name a source for the information. A black haze from the fires billowed over Kuwait City and surrounding areas.
As coalition forces labored to secure the oil facilities, cruise missiles pounded Basra, considered the first major target of the advancing armies.
Once the current conflict is over, the environment in Iraq will pose many environmental challenges to those involved in post-conflict humanitarian relief and reconstruction.The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) announced today that its Post Conflict Assessment Unit has begun a desk study of Iraq's environment that is intended to provide a quick and timely overview of key issues to assist those attempting to heal the country.
The study team will identify and suggest possible responses to environmental hazards arising directly from the ongoing military conflict. It is likely to identify priorities related to the management of freshwater and waste, as well as means of preventing further ecosystem degradation in the country.
Drawing on information available from the media, government and NGO reports on the conflict, the UN agency will prepare a preliminary assessment with recommendations for avoiding, minimizing or mitigating risks to the environment and human health in Iraq.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq set on fire 730 of the 1,000 oil wells in Kuwait, and released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf, creating a set of environmental problems that are still being addressed by cleanup action.
According to the U.S. Defense Department Iraq has about 1,500 well heads, roughly 1,000 in the south and roughly about 500 in the north. Iraq has a capability to deliberately release up to two to three million barrels a day of oil into the Gulf, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. Release of oil could impact up to 15 desalination plants around the Gulf which provide essential drinking water to the population of this arid region.
U.S. Department of Defense strategists are considering their responses to possible flooding by Iraqi military forces. If the Iraqi military releases water into the Tigris River from upstream reservoirs, extensive flooding between Baghdad and Al Kut could occur.
There is a precendent for their concerns. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi military created water obstacles to deter Iranian advances.
Iraq's strategy could include releasing a small amount of water from major dams and canals to interrupt maneuvering units.
Iraq also could cause catastrophic flooding of portions of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, either by releasing large amounts of water from dams or by destroying them. The latter could cause major humanitarian crises in parts of Iraq, though Baghdad would experience minimal damage.
The Al Qadisiyah Dam and its Hadiyha Reservoir are the primary water sources for possible strategic flooding. The strategic release of water from five reservoirs - Saddam, Dokan, Al Azim, Darbandikhan and the Diyala - could be initiated to increase the flow rate of the Tigris. Water levels are expected to rise in these reservoirs as the rainy season continues.
In Washington on Tuesday, international and environmental law experts from around the world warned that war in Iraq could cause an environmental catastrophe in the Gulf region, and lead to serious violations of international laws governing war and environmental protection.
In an open letter to the United Nations Security Council, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the leaders of the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey and Iraq, nearly 200 international lawyers and scholars from 51 countries warned of the "potential for massive, and possibly irreversible, environmental destruction that may follow from the use of internationally unlawful methods and means of warfare on the part of both the so-called 'coalition of the willing' and Iraq."
planes U.S. F-16C Fighting Falcons fly over northern Iraq (Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force) International law prohibits the use of weapons or tactics "that are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long term, or severe damage to the natural environment."
The letter expresses deep concern at the refusal of all governments involved to rule out the possible use of nuclear weapons, noting that the use of such weapons "constitutes an indiscriminate threat with likely harmful consequences to the civilian population of Iraq, civilians in other countries, and to future generations of non-combatants.
Don Anton, professor of international environmental law at the Australian National University and a lead author of the letter, said, "This initiative highlights the growing uniformity of opinion around the world about the grave danger of long term, and in some cases irreversible, damage posed to the natural environmental and cultural heritage in the event of war. If war comes to Iraq, it is paramount that international law in limiting such damage is observed."
The Post Conflict Assessment study, requested by UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer, will be financially supported by the government of Switzerland. Opened in December 2001, the Post Conflict Assessment Unit has completed studies of environmental damage from conflicts in Afghanistan, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia, and the Palestinian Territories, as well as a study of depleted uranium effects across the Balkans.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Arrests in anti-war protests across the US
Story by Niala Boodhoo
REUTERS USA:
March 21, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20235/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Dozens of people were arrested this week when hundreds marched in cities across the United States to protest a looming U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Demonstrators in Washington, New York, Boston and San Francisco railed against war, shouting "No Blood for Oil" and "Shame," while the clock ticked toward an 8 p.m. EST (0100 GMT) deadline set by President George W. Bush for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to go into exile or face a massive invasion.
"If the war breaks out, walk out!" chanted a crowd of about 250 people around Lafayette Park, which faces the White House.
In Boston, police arrested 36 people in two anti-war protests at a federal building and outside the Boston Stock Exchange.
During a midday march to the United Nations in New York, 45 anti-war demonstrators were taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct.
A man who may have been protesting the war plunged to his death from San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Bridge, officials said.
The unidentified man, who handed authorities a statement before jumping, survived the initial fall into the frigid San Francisco Bay but died soon after Coast Guard rescuers scooped him up and rushed him to shore for treatment, police said.
Protesters seemed resigned that the United States would invade Iraq to topple Saddam, whom the Bush administration accuses of producing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism.
'BETTER THAN SITTING AT HOME'
"Probably being out here won't make a difference, but it's better than sitting at home," said Maryland high school student Annie Berger, 17, who came out with a friend to protest at Lafayette Park, near the White House.
Her thoughts were echoed by 58-year-old John Hammond of Waltham, Massachusetts, who was among 20 people arrested in Boston after they tried to block entrances to the John F. Kennedy federal office building amid chants of "Shame" and "Arrest George Bush."
"I don't personally think what I do today will make a difference in terms of the government's plan for invading Iraq but it will make a difference to me personally," Hammond told Reuters before he was arrested at the Kennedy office building.
U.S. Parks Service police closed Lafayette Park in Washington, a traditional place for people to make political statements, soon after several hundred people gathered there. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the park can be shut if more than 25 people gather there.
More than 100 people from groups like Greenpeace and International ANSWER, a coalition of groups that have banded together to oppose war, chanted "George Bush, CIA, how many kids will you kill today?"
About 125 others formed a circle on the other side of the park to pray for peace.
Police asked the protesters to disperse and about two dozen refused. They knelt on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House with life-size photos of Iraqi women and children.
Earlier, a group of women staged a mock funeral procession to Congress. Clad in pink shirts smeared with fake blood, carrying maimed plastic babies, the group was also leading the procession to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's house.
----
15,000 pour from offices and shops to protest war [Australia]
By Kirsty Needham
March 21 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/20/1047749882761.html
Photo: http://www.smh.com.au/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1047749893671_2003/03/21/320_townhall,0.jpg
Spontaneous demonstration ... part of the crowd protesting the United States attack on Iraq rally outside the Town Hall yesterday. Photo: Rick Stevens
They poured out of city offices clutching briefcases and with makeshift banners printed on A4 paper from the desk computer demanding no war.
They marched with prams, dogs, on bicycles, carrying shopping and ice-creams. Breastfeeding mothers, businessmen with wheeled luggage, doctors, schoolgirls, workmen in hard hats, fashionistas in high heels and low trousers, and large groups of university students were applauded by Thursday night shoppers and Japanese tourist groups.
Peak-hour traffic came to a standstill last night as more than 15,000 protesters gathered at the Town Hall within hours of the first bombs being dropped on Baghdad. Rows of mounted police closed Castlereagh Street in front of the United States consulate as thousands filed past booing disapproval.
About 20,000 people marched through Melbourne, led by actors Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts and Joel Edgerton.
Another 5000 gathered in Brisbane's King George Square as Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley told the crowd the Prime Minister, John Howard, should be condemned as a hypocrite.
In Canberra, 1500 gathered outside the US embassy. Ahmed Rogzay, 20, a Kurdish refugee recently released from "10 months, five days and two hours" of detention in Woomera, summed up the feeling of the crowd when he called for "peace, peace, peace".
Smaller protests were organised in towns from Penrith to Taree.
Iraqi-Australian Macquarie University student Hassan Mahdi, 21, marched in Sydney with a group of 30 students.
"We feel helpless because our Government is not listening to us and is acting on its own. We are outraged," Mr Mahdi said.
His family arrived in Australia from Iraq five years ago and is distressed for those relatives left behind in Baghdad. "We can't get through," he said. "The lines are cut. We feel helpless."
Schoolgirl Bridie Lee-Knowles was in class at St Vincent's College, but had asked her father to call her on her mobile phone when the bombing began. When she marched her father, stuck at work, listened in on the phone.
Gary Masman, 54, said he had never been on a protest march before and had come down from the office to make a statement.
Rafa Zairn, 25, had brought her three young children to teach them "violence is not the answer".
At least 20 Doctors Against War challenged Mr Howard to spend one day working in an Iraqi hospital "with no anaesthetic, no morphine, no clean fluids or blood transfusions". GP Gillian Deakin said she still dealt with patients suffering the impact of war 60 years after World War II, "and that was a just war".
In one incident, a small group broke off from the main protest around Phillip Street and, mistaking the white car of the Premier, Bob Carr, for a Commonwealth car, pelted it with eggs and paint. Mr Carr is said to have shrugged it off. Police said no arrests were made and praised the crowd as well behaved.
The Deputy Premier, Andrew Refshauge, said Australia had no right to be at war. Warning the crowd to be sceptical of the televised images they would view,
Dr Refshauge said: "This is not PlayStation ... this is innocent people being killed."
----
Australia boosts security amid protests
Story by Andrea Hopkins
REUTERS AUSTRALIA:
March 20, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20221/newsDate/20-Mar-2003/story.htm
CANBERRA - Australia stepped up security at landmarks, military bases and embassies yesterday as the government warned a war in Iraq could start within 24 hours.
While Prime Minister John Howard denied his commitment of troops to an Iraq war had increased the threat of an attack against Australia, peace protesters exposed the vulnerability of tourist sites and even the prime minister.
Local authorities and the Defence Department stepped up security after anti-war protesters scaled Sydney's famous Opera House and blockaded Howard's residence in Canberra for hours without police interference.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer warned "there is every chance" that a war against Iraq will begin at noon on Thursday (0100 GMT), because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is unlikely to meet Washington's 48-hour ultimatum to leave Baghdad.
Armed state police are now posted beneath the white sails of the Opera House, and Queensland state has asked Howard's national government to boost security at ports and border points.
Howard said Australia had been on a heightened security footing since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and that had not changed despite a looming Iraq war.
"We haven't received...any intelligence in recent times suggesting that there should be an increase in the level of security or threat alert," Howard said in a radio interview.
"Obviously, if we did we would take the appropriate action."
MILITARY ON ALERT
While Defence Minister Robert Hill said security at 44 military bases across Australia had been increased since a decision was made to contribute troops to Iraq, he too said the upgrade was not in response to an increased threat level.
Hill told parliament the move was a prudent reaction as Australian troops had been committed to war.
He also said protection had been increased for "certain individuals" and embassies.
Howard shrugged off concern about his own security after Greenpeace activists blockaded his official residence for nearly three hours yesterday when they took four-wheel-drive vehicles up to his gate and chained themselves just metres from his house.
Federal Police played down the incident, but Howard was forced to walk through the protesters and climb into a car outside the gates of his residence to get to work.
This week, two anti-war activists climbed to the top of the Sydney Opera House and painted "No War" in large red letters on one of its huge roof sails with no interference from police. They were arrested hours later when police scaled the landmark.
The prime minister dismissed the protests as stunts, and said the Greenpeace blockade had not even prevented him from taking his morning walk through Canberra's leafy streets.
Australia is deeply divided on the need to use force to disarm Iraq of its alleged stocks of weapons of mass destruction.
Opinion polls show that about two-thirds of the public are against a war without U.N. backing. Opposition political parties, including centre-left Labor, are also opposed.
----
Around the Nation
March 21, 2003
Washington Times
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030321-5708163.htm
Women wear paint in war protest
FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS - Wearing nothing more than masks and body paint, nine women protested the war in Iraq at a busy intersection just blocks from the University of Arkansas campus.
Calling it a "Code Pink" emergency, the bare protesters, who ranged in age from 18 to 71, stopped traffic at an intersection Wednesday while carrying a banner that read "Women of the World Say No War." The words "No War" were painted in pink on their backs. They also used the pink paint to cover their private parts.
Fayetteville police allowed the women to disrobe but quickly asked them to move out of the intersection. A police spokeswoman said that since the women were covered with body paint in the right places they were free to protest as long as they didn't block traffic.
Protesters rally at courthouse
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE - About 100 people rallied yesterday to protest the U.S. war in Iraq, with authorities arresting four women who blocked the entrance to the federal courthouse.
A handful of counter-demonstrators gathered across the street, with one man waving a sign that said, "Saddam is Satan."
The anti-war protesters moved toward the courthouse at noon, carrying their own signs, including the one held by Lynn Foltz, 58, of Wilmington, that read "No Terror in My Name."
Miss Foltz also held her Chihuahua, Brio, as she explained she was frustrated the Bush administration did not listen to Americans who did not want the United States to go to war.
----
3 arrested in anti-war rallies in D.C. area
By Arlo Wagner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 21, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030321-95682686.htm
Anti-war protesters took to the streets in cities across the nation yesterday in reaction to the U.S. military strikes against Iraq.
Protests were staged in the District, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities. Rain apparently diminished the enthusiasm in the District, where about two dozen people demonstrated at Lafayette Square in front of the White House midafternoon. Sponsors had a parade permit for 500 to 1,000 participants.
"All over the world, people are protesting," said demonstrator Hussein Agrama, 45, a graduate student and D.C. resident who came to the United States from his native Egypt when he was 2.
Last night, a wall of police officers lining barricades kept protesters out of Lafayette Square, so they blocked the intersection of 17th and H streets NW.
Officers on horseback backed up those on foot.
The group had marched down Connecticut Avenue NW from Dupont Circle, blocking the southbound lanes.
In San Francisco, an estimated 1,000-plus anti-war activists chanted and blocked the streets, and hundreds were arrested as they skirmished with police at the start of a major civil disobedience campaign against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"Stop the bombing" and "No war for oil" protesters chanted as they lay down in intersections, causing traffic jams; tied themselves to utility poles; or bound themselves together with plastic cable to prevent arrest.
Police arrested protesters for resisting police and "violent behavior" in the city's downtown. Most were expected to be cited and released.
Washington-area police arrested three persons yesterday. Arlington police charged demonstrators with obstructing justice as more than 100 protesters blocked traffic at 8 a.m. across the Key Bridge and several threw a traffic barrel in front of a police cruiser.
Erica Wagner, 25, of Brookville, Md., was subdued with pepper spray after shoving an officer, police spokesman Matt Martin said.
Also charged were Wade Fletcher, 25, of Woodbridge, Va., and a juvenile female.
About 50 demonstrators bicycled through downtown Washington carrying signs that said, "Bikes not bombs."
Probably the biggest demonstration in the region was at Montgomery Blair High School, north of Silver Spring, where more than 2,000 students walked out about noon, then marched and chanted around the school.
Officials said they would be charged with unexcused absences if they didn't return. Then the doors were locked. A couple dozen boarded the Metro at Silver Spring to meet other high school protesters from the District, Virginia and Prince George's County at Judiciary Square in Northwest.
Becky Levy, 16, of Bethesda Chevy Chase High School, said all Montgomery County high schools were to participate in the protest called "Students for Peace and Justice," which had been planned for more than a week.
"My parents support me," said Miss Levy, a high school junior.
The students, some with slogans inked on their faces, joined adult protesters near the Capitol and the White House.
Elizabeth Greenberg, 17, a Bethesda Chevy Chase senior with "peace" inked across her face said of her parents, "They support me cautiously. They basically said, 'Go ahead. Just don't get arrested.' "
Meanwhile, in Nevada, the war received support from hundreds of flag-waving veterans and others gathered outside the state's legislative building in Carson City to back U.S. military personnel deployed to Iraq.
In New York, protests in Manhattan drew about 300 people yesterday, and about 30 people gathered in heavy rain in Atlanta just before midnight, quietly holding signs that read, "War is not the answer."
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
----
Iraq Invasion Sparks Protests in Arab Capitals
Demonstrators Defy Security Forces in Mideast Cities, Voicing Support for Iraq's Besieged Leader
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64902-2003Mar20?language=printer
CAIRO, March 20 -- Thousands of antiwar demonstrators clashed with riot police in the Egyptian capital today, throwing stones at the U.S. Embassy and waving Iraqi flags as they demanded an end to U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf region.
After protesters attempted to move within 50 yards of the heavily fortified embassy, police unleashed dogs and fired water cannons, sending the crowds running through downtown streets. Ambulances rushed to help bloodied protesters after they were beaten by baton-wielding police.
"The U.S. wants to try all its new weapons on the Arabs so we must speak louder," said Ahmed Shehat, a college student who had been chanting: "Our blood is not cheap," and "Please arm us and send us to Baghdad."
"If Saddam Hussein, and George Bush fight man to man," he said, "Bush will die."
The protest in Cairo was in contrast to milder demonstrations in other Arab countries, where public anger was muted by heavy government security.
In Saudi Arabia and Jordan, thousands of police officers in riot gear guarded the streets as protesters complained not only about the U.S. attack on Iraq but also about their own leaders allowing thousands of U.S. troops to use their airspace and bases.
In Saudi Arabia, the government has gone to great lengths to veil the presence of more than 5,000 U.S. troops at two air bases in the desert, one of which, Prince Sultan air base, is being used to direct U.S. air operations. Hours after the start of hostilities, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud Faisal, reiterated his government's position that it was not taking part in a war against "brotherly" Iraq. In a statement to the official Saudi Press Agency, Saud expressed "grave concern and deep regret" over the war. He said he hopes "military operations end as soon as possible and that there be a return to the language of peace efforts."
In Syria and Libya, thousands of protesters called for U.S. ambassadors to leave their countries.
In Beirut, thousands gathered in front of the British embassy and the local headquarters of the United Nations. The groups included students from Beirut's American University and Arab University, along with Greenpeace activists and Palestinian refugees.
"It is a pity, a pity, a pity, a pity and a shame," said Angham Saleh, 21, a business student at the American University. "We feel so helpless. We feel handcuffed."
Scattered demonstrations were staged in the Palestinian territories in support of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and against the U.S. attack on Iraq. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, several hundred protestors gathered in the streets. In Bethlehem, demonstrators waved Iraqi and Palestinian flags and carried portraits of Hussein.
In Gaza City, about 100 protesters fired rifles into the air and paraded through the streets. The Palestinian Authority canceled classes today for all schoolchildren.
The Egyptian protest was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest Islamic political party, and other opposition groups. The Muslim Brotherhood has renounced violence, but its leaders said they were furious about the war in Iraq and felt helpless to defend the Iraqi people.
"American interests shouldn't feel safe in the Arab region," said Essam el-Eryan, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood member who organized the protest. "Iraq should be supported to transform the swift war that the U.S. wants, to gang and city fights, to make Iraq a graveyard to the Americans. This way, American people will revolt against this war."
One group of protesters tried to hush the crowd as security forces, including uniformed police officers and soldiers, and men in dark sunglasses and suits and carrying walkie-talkies approached. Protests are rarely allowed in Egypt, where political opposition parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are officially banned.
The police succeeded in dispersing larger protests, breaking the demonstrators into smaller pockets. In the afternoon, however, about 5,000 people regrouped in downtown Cairo's famed Tahrir Square. The protesters threw stones and police advanced, spraying them with jets of blue-dyed water.
The demonstrators were varied in appearance -- there were society women who wore black, families from villages outside of Cairo, and Arab Americans here on study programs.
"I feel sick, this is genocide," said Ferial Ghazoul, an Iraqi professor of comparative literature at American University who has lived in Egypt since 1979. She said she was worried about her relatives and other fellow Iraqis.
"The only one who can save us now is God," said Gamil Rabie, 45, who held up a copy of the Koran to the clear and sunny sky.
"This protest is the minimum we could do," said Sahar Abdelraeof, 28, who took off from her job at a sugar factory and got a babysitter for her two children so she could join the antiwar protest.
At one point, a small crowd of Americans, French and Canadians also gathered in the square and called for Bush to be removed from office.
"I get into a cab and the driver asks if I am American," said Reema Hijazi, 19, of Chantilly, Va., who is studying here for a semester. She has one Palestinian and one American parent. "I say 'I am' and then I say, 'I am very sorry.' "
Staff writer Carol Morello in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, correspondent Molly Moore in Jerusalem and special correspondent Alia Ibrahim in Beirut contributed to this report.
----
Thousands Worldwide Protest Start Of Iraq War
Many Groups Mass Near U.S. Embassies
By Robert J. McCartney
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1351-2003Mar20?language=printer
BRUSSELS, March 20 -- Much of the world condemned the start of war against Iraq today, as numerous governments said the U.S.-led assault was not justified and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protested in front of heavily fortified American embassies, shouting slogans criticizing President Bush.
China and Russia issued surprisingly strong denunciations of the conflict. Leading European opponents such as France and Germany were critical but seemed to mute their comments. They stressed their desire for a short war with humanitarian relief for civilian victims.
The United States' allies in the war, including Britain, Spain and Japan, defended the importance of disarming Saddam Hussein's government. In Italy and Australia, however, pro-war government statements were accompanied by substantial public protests. Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the war against terrorism, avoided direct criticism of the United States while deploring the start of hostilities.
Antiwar demonstrations were reported in scores of cities across the globe. In Berlin, 50,000 protesters, mostly students, marched past the U.S. Embassy and through the Brandenburg Gate. Up to 40,000 protesters stopped traffic for a time in Melbourne, Australia.
More than 100,000 people, many of them high school and university students, marched to the U.S. Embassy in Athens, chanting "No to the war" and "Americans, killers of people," while an estimated 45,000 people turned out in Milan, and about 10,000 youths demonstrated in Paris at the Place de La Concorde, beside the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy.
Here in Brussels, a large crowd of protesters shook their fists and shouted "Bush, murderer!" as they pressed against barbed-wire barricades protecting the U.S. Embassy. Police in riot gear stood nearby.
"No to the massacre of civilians and the destruction of Iraq for petroleum," said a hand-painted banner at the Brussels protest. "No war for oil. Stop the USA," said a number of printed cardboard placards. Some of the most pointed opposition came from Beijing and Moscow, both veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council. They have been against the war all along, but were less active than France in the recent diplomatic activity.
"We strongly urge relevant countries to immediately stop military action," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman told reporters.
Without mentioning the United States by name, he said the attackers "ignored the opposition of most countries and peoples of the world." He said the war "constitutes a violation of the U.N. charter and the basic norms of international law."
Chinese analysts said the tough stance was aimed at China's domestic audience. They predicted the government will use the attack as another way to criticize the United States, and by association its political system.
But China is unlikely to allow its criticism to affect U.S.-China ties, the analysts said. To that end, Beijing has rejected applications by student groups to demonstrate against the war, and it has ensured that China's state-controlled media have been generally free of the anti-American screeds that were popular during the U.S.-led attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia called the attack indefensible and "a big political mistake" in a short address on national television. "Nothing can justify this military action," he said. "Iraq posed no threat. Especially after a 10-year blockade, it was a weak country both militarily and economically."
Putin did not refer to Bush as his friend and a good politician, as he has done in recent weeks, but, in an apparent effort to protect Russia's budding partnership with the United States, he did not criticize Bush personally.
In Japan and South Korea, however, the threat of the North Korea crisis and the loyalty expected of allies prompted the governments to support the U.S. attack despite public opposition. Both had wavered on whether they would support an attack not sanctioned by the United Nations.
"It is in our best interest to support the United States," said South Korea's new president, Roh Moo Hyun, after an emergency meeting of his National Security Council. The Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, said his government's support is the price of U.S. protection in case of conflict with North Korea. In a televised speech, Koizumi noted, "America has said clearly that any attack on Japan is an attack on the United States. . . . The Japanese people must not forget that this provides a strong deterrent against an attack on Japan."
In Islamabad, Pakistan, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri walked a fine line between offending public opinion, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the war, and offending the Bush administration.
"Pakistan deplores the initiation of military action against Iraq," Kasuri said. But he added, "We regret that President Saddam Hussein did not consider all options to save the Iraqi people from death and destruction."
The government's stance did not sit well with the hard-line Islamic parties that constitute Pakistan's main parliamentary opposition. They called for nationwide protests after midday prayers on Friday.
Israel, hit by 39 Scud missiles during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, recommended that all residents carry gas masks and many children lugged cardboard boxes containing their masks to school. The military placed its antimissile defense systems on highest alert, according to a senior military official, although officials have said they believe the diminished capability of the Iraqi military has reduced the threat of Scud attacks.
President Jacques Chirac of France expressed regret over the conflict in a television address and said it would have "serious consequences." But he did not criticize the United States by name, and emphasized the importance of avoiding civilian suffering. "I hope these operations are as fast as possible, with the least fatalities, and that they do not lead to a humanitarian catastrophe," Chirac said.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Chirac's principal ally in Europe on the issue, took a similar tack. "The wrong decision was made. The logic of war won out over the chance of peace," Schroeder said in a television address. "But this is not the time to make accusations and to list faults. Our task must point to the future. The war has begun. It must be ended as quickly as possible. Hopefully, the victims in the civilian population will stay as low as possible."
Among U.S. allies in the war, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain said, "We have assumed our responsibilities. There were more comfortable options, but we don't want to pass on to the future risks that we should confront in the present."
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, president of the Philippines, said, "The war in Iraq is a reality that we expected" and added, "The Philippines is part of the coalition of the willing."
Churches generally opposed the war, and the Vatican said it was "deeply pained" by it. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell gave the Vatican advance warning of the attack in a telephone call Monday, and Pope John Paul II was awakened at dawn this morning to be informed of the missile strike on Baghdad.
"The Holy See has learned with profound sorrow of the evolving of the most recent events in Iraq," spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement.
"On one hand, it laments that the Iraqi government did not accept United Nations resolutions and the same appeal by the pope, who asked for the country's disarmament," he said. "On the other hand, it deplores the interruption of the path of negotiations, according to international law, for a peaceful solution to the Iraqi drama."
Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans, said in a statement with David Hope, the archbishop of York, that the world had entered "dangerous new terrain."
Correspondents John Pomfret in Beijing, Doug Struck in Tokyo, Sharon LaFraniere in Moscow, DeNeen L. Brown in Toronto and John Lancaster in Islamabad contributed to this report.
----
Few Arrests in D.C. Area Protests
Demonstrators March Across Key Bridge, Stand Vigil Near White House
By Manny Fernandez and Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A638-2003Mar20?language=printer
They linked arms and momentarily took over one of the city's busiest bridges during morning rush hour. They abandoned their offices and classrooms to chant for peace on soggy streets. They waved banners denouncing war at Dupont Circle and shouted through bullhorns at passing traffic near the White House, drawing honks of support from many of the cars, trucks and taxis driving by.
Activists around the world had named yesterday Day X -- the antiwar movement's first day of response to a U.S. attack on Iraq.
In the Washington area, the result was a loosely organized series of rain-soaked demonstrations that disrupted traffic, drew heavy police presence and resulted in few arrests. The protests began shortly after 8 a.m. in Rosslyn, near the Key Bridge, and continued in smaller groups at lunchtime and into the afternoon. Several groups converged at a Dupont Circle rally in the evening, and hundreds then marched to join another group's White House vigil.
"The fact is, right now in Baghdad, people are getting decimated. People's lives are just being thrown away," said Ev Yankey, 18, a Georgetown University freshman. He joined the umbrella-carrying, sign-waving throngs at 5 p.m. at Dupont Circle, where Washington area high school and college students, pacifists, religious leaders and union workers gathered to hear antiwar speeches and poetry.
Protests throughout the day brought together veteran demonstrators such as Scott Codey, a 28-year-old activist from the District, and first-timers such as Savita Seth, a social worker from Potomac. She said she left her job at St. Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Hyattsville to shiver with about 100 others on H Street NW, across from the White House on the far side of Lafayette Square, holding a rectangular blue piece of paper on which she had scribbled the Hindi word "shanti" and its English translation, "peace."
For Seth, 50, a native of India who has lived in the United States for 30 years and became a citizen last month, it seemed the appropriate message.
Stanley Krauze, 25, joined the small crowd on H Street, but only after wandering into historic St. John's Episcopal Church across the street to kneel in one of the pews.
Krauze said he relished the chance to think in a quiet spot and talk to God. He had left his gym Wednesday night once news of the first strikes against Iraq began flashing on television screens. He couldn't bear to go to work yesterday as if it were any other day. He wanted to get as close to the White House as possible, he said, to bear witness to his belief that the war was terribly wrong.
"It will make the world a less safe place," Krauze said. "Because if countries feel they are threatened, they can attack now."
About 1:30 p.m., the protesters left H Street and marched a circuitous route through downtown, briefly blocking traffic on 16th Street NW until police ordered them back onto the sidewalks.
Outside the Capital Hilton, a woman raised two fingers in a solemn peace salute as they passed. At an office building a block to the north, a woman lifted her middle finger at the crowd and shouted obscenities.
The protests had begun during the morning rush on the Rosslyn side of the Key Bridge, where about 150 activists emerged from the Metro station just after 8 a.m.
Three were arrested and charged with obstructing justice when they picked up an orange traffic barrel and threw it in front of a police cruiser, Arlington County police said. Officers used pepper spray when others attempted to block the arrests, said Arlington police spokesman Matt Martin.
The protesters then headed across the bridge into Washington, with about 30 men and women linking arms and walking in the traffic lanes. As part of the protest, activists had driven a Dodge Caravan minivan onto the bridge and abandoned it.
The demonstration lasted about 20 minutes, and traffic backed up in both directions.
"I'm out here breaking the law a little bit, because the war in Iraq is far more illegal than anything we are doing," said Dan Beeton, 28.
Upon reaching the District, protesters heeded police demands that they move to the sidewalk.
At a noon briefing, senior D.C. officials said they were concerned that protesters might disrupt traffic and life in the capital "for the forseeable future," especially in light of the success of a North Carolina tobacco farmer in doing just that earlier in the week.
Peter G. LaPorte, D.C. emergency management director, said the District was considering moving more tow trucks or cranes near the Potomac River bridges to thwart further efforts to dump cars in traffic lanes.
Even before protest organizations announced their plans for more demonstrations today and tomorrow, D.C. police beefed up patrols at bridges and major roadways. Chief Charles H. Ramsey said "civil disturbance" platoons would be stationed in unmarked vehicles. The department added three surveillance cameras to the 14 activated Monday in its high-tech command center so that officials could monitor bridges as well as downtown.
D.C. police, who have been criticized for mass arrests made during anti-globalization protests in September, had not made any arrests as of yesterday evening.
"We could have [made arrests] on the bridge," Ramsey said. "But we stopped them, gave them the warning, gave them time to get off the bridge, and they did."
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Protests in Arab Capitals Continue for Second Day
March 21, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-arabs-protests.html
CAIRO (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters spilled onto the streets of Arab capitals after Muslim Friday prayers at which preachers across the Middle East condemned the United States for attacking Iraq.
For a second day, demonstrations swept the Arab world against the U.S.-led invasion intent on ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Protests also erupted in Italy, Germany and France.
In the Yemeni capital Sanaa, an 11-year-old boy and a policeman were shot dead in a clash between police and anti-war protesters, security sources said.
At least 10 people, including three policemen, were hurt in the shootout that flared after police blocked about 3,000 protesters from marching on the U.S. embassy in the Arab state.
Witnesses said the demonstrators set tires and garbage cans alight while chanting: ``Oh youth of Islam, say no to war and yes to peace'' and ``No to U.S. hegemony and hypocrisy.''
In Cairo, the biggest city in the Arab world with almost 17 million people, at least 5,000 angry protesters clashed with police using water cannon outside the historic al-Azhar mosque.
``With our heart and our soul, we sacrifice ourselves for Iraq,'' chanted demonstrators outside al-Azhar, and in the Palestinian cities of Gaza and Nablus.
In a rare statement, Egypt's interior ministry appealed to citizens to vent their frustration in an orderly manner through previously authorized demonstrations.
In Jordan, thousands of protesters fought baton-wielding riot police after the authorities sealed off parts of the capital, Amman, to foil Islamist organized pro-Iraq protests.
Scores of young people were injured and several arrested as police used tear gas to disperse worshippers in the city's Wihdat area, a predominately Palestinian refugee neighborhood.
``Death to America. Death to Israel, Oh Iraq remain steadfast in the face of vengefulBush,'' thousands of youths chanted.
In Italy, about 200,000 farmers marched through Rome for peace, waving rainbow-colored flags and paralyzing traffic.
``I would like to cut out Bush's tongue -- it's a war for the rich and those who pay in the end are the poor people,'' one woman told Reuters Television.
In Germany more than 10,000 rallied. Activists blocked entrances to a U.S. military base in the southern city of Stuttgart as well as the American embassy in Berlin.
Stuttgart police carried about 50 sit-down protesters away from the gates of the U.S. European command headquarters (EUCOM), which is involved in logistics for the Iraq war.
Around 1,000 students in the French capital Paris staged an impromptu anti-war sit-down on Place de la Concorde.
In the Lebanese capital Beirut, police used tear gas and water cannon to hold back hundreds of stone-throwing youths who tried to march toward the U.S. mission.
Hundreds of protesters in Bahrain, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, also took to the streets to show their fury.
``We reject the war against Iraq. Arab rulers should unify their ranks against it, and should not allow U.S. bases in Gulf Arab states,'' said laborer Adel Isa, 45.
In Kuwait -- which a U.S.-led coalition freed from Iraqi occupation in 1991 and which was a key staging post for the current invasion -- worshippers said Iraqis had suffered enough.
PRAISE FOR SADDAM
In Gaza, some protesters praised ``beloved'' Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and called on him to ``strike Tel Aviv!''
Iraq launched missiles against Israel in the 1991 Gulf War.
``It is a war of the unbelievers against the Muslims in Iraq and everywhere,'' said Palestinian worshipper Amin Saeed. ``What can we do? We are fighting Israel which represents the United States' dirty hand in the Middle East. We stand for Iraq.''
``Saddam is the only honest and heroic Arab leader. All the others are cowards and collaborators with the Americans,'' said Umm Adel as she waved an Iraqi flag.
Arab states have tried to persuade restive publics they have done all they could to avert a war, but many Arabs say they are dismayed by their countries' diplomatic impotence.
FIERY SERMONS
In many Middle Eastern cities, Muslim preachers fired up their congregations with powerful sermons denouncing the war.
``Let God be with us (Muslims) against the infidels,'' said one in Cairo's downtown Gama'ia el-Shara'ia, asking God to punish the Americans.
From non-Arab Iran in the east to Morocco in the West, preachers accused Washington of stealing the region's resources and seeking global hegemony.
In Iran, which fought an eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, Tehran's Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the U.S. ``aim is to dominate Iraq's oil wells and also to dominate the region, and give Israel the security and guarantee that nobody could harm it.''
At Gaza's central al-Omari mosque, Imam Mohammed Nijen said ``Arab leaders should open the borders so that fighters and volunteers can reach Iraq and defend Iraqi soil. Today jihad and the fight are a religious duty.''
The Grand Sheikh of Cairo's al-Azhar Mohamed Sayyed al-Tantawy said in his sermon:
``Whoever defends the Iraqi people and himself and dies, will be considered a martyr...Islamic sharia law says we must defend the Iraqi people and stand by them. If we fail, we have wasted the trust that God has placed in us.''
In Sanaa, one cleric wearing a traditional turban told scores of worshippers: ``We pray for victory for the Iraqi people and for the defeat of the invading forces. May an earthquake overturn the American and British forces in Iraq.''
---------
CAIRO
Arab Protests Are Peaceful in Mideast
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By SUSAN SACHS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21EGYP.html
CAIRO, March 20 - Edgy Arab nations weathered the first day of the American war against Iraq with scattered protests, appeals to the Bush administration to stop the bombing and condemnation of Saddam Hussein.
The overall mood was one of frustration, partly from knowledge that the war condemned publicly by Arab leaders was, in fact, being launched with the acquiescence of some from Arab territory.
Commentaries on television and in the newspapers in the Middle East bemoaned the lack of Arab unity. The 22-nation Arab League denounced the war as "illegitimate." And demonstrators lashed out at the United States as a bully exploiting Arab weakness.
"I am angry and ashamed," said Abul ela Madi, the leader of an Islamic reform group in Egypt called Al Wasat. "The Arab governments did not do anything. Egypt should have closed the Suez Canal. Kuwait should not have allowed the use of its territory."
Mr. Madi was one of about 1,000 protesters in Cairo's vast Tahrir Square. The demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans and briefly clashed with security forces who prevented them from marching to the United States Embassy.
"Destroy Bush, the enemy of humanity," the crowds chanted as police barricaded the streets around the square. Smaller protests were staged in Syria and Jordan, but were contained by the police.
At the Arab League, foreign ministers pleaded for international intervention to stop the airstrikes on Iraq. But at the same time, Kuwait's delegate to the organization, Ahmed al Kulaib, demanded that the League condemn Iraq for firing missiles early this morning into its territory.
Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary general, lashed out at what he termed "this aggression" against Iraq.
"An end must be put to this illegitimate war, which was launched despite worldwide opposition," Mr. Moussa said. "It's a sad day for all the Arabs that Iraq and its people should be subjected to a military strike that targets the lives and safety of Arab people."
Most Arab officials have blamed Saddam Hussein for creating the opening that allowed American military power into the region.
One of the most pointed criticisms came from President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who spoke of Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait as laying the foundation for American military action in the Persian Gulf.
"It is most unfortunate," Mr. Mubarak said in a televised speech on Wednesday, "that we have reached this serious stage as a result of the mistakes of many parties, notably the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which created fears for security in many states in the region and prompted them to open their doors wide for intensive foreign presence."
Like the Arab states, Pakistan has also sought to straddle opposing currents, striving to maintain good relations with the United States while trying to appease the powerful Islamic factions.
The Pakistani delegate, Khurshid M. Kasuri, said today that Pakistan "deplores the initiation of military action against Iraq," but blamed Saddam Hussein for inviting a war through his intransigence.
The only Muslim country that has openly supported American military action in Iraq has been Afghanistan. But individual Afghans, remembering the bombing of their own country in 2001, have mixed feelings.
"The people of Iraq are innocent, they are not guilty, so the aim should be only Saddam and a few others," said Col. Muhammad Arif, a police commander in downtown Kabul.
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Protesters Across the Nation Try to 'Stop Business as Usual'
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE and DEAN E. MURPHY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21PROT.html
Thousands of protesters across the country today honored their pledge to "stop business as usual" the day after bombing began in Iraq, walking out of classes and work, shutting down major roads and converging on plazas, bridges, military bases and federal buildings to proclaim their opposition to war.
San Francisco was the antiwar movement's epicenter, with more than 1,000 protesters arrested in the financial district. Demonstrators also made the Bay Bridge and about 40 intersections impassable during the morning rush hour.
Marchers set fire to bales of hay in the shadow of the Transamerica Building, opened fire hydrants and smashed police car windows. They vomited on the pavement outside a federal building and linked themselves with metal chains, forcing firefighters to use circular saws to separate them.
By late in the day, Assistant Chief Alex Fagan said, the situation in San Francisco deteriorated into "absolute anarchy."
Scattered vandalism and hundreds of arrests were reported elsewhere, as well, with large crowds gathering despite cold and heavy rain in some places. In Washington, protesters forced the police to close Potomac River crossings during the morning commute. In Chicago, protesters shut down Lake Shore Drive during the evening rush hour. Protesters in Atlanta and Boston also shut down major streets. About 100 protesters were arrested in Philadelphia, 8 were arrestd in Los Angeles, and in New York, 21 people were charged with disorderly conduct after a crowd of several thousand lay down in Times Square.
Protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
"This is one of the most worthwhile things I have ever done in my life," said Elliot Rubin, a 54-year-old English teacher, who sat under arrest in one San Francisco intersection, hands cuffed behind his back. "War is immoral. When no one listens, you have to take action and make a statement."
According to plans set weeks ago, protesters gathered at public places at 5 p.m. in dozens of cities and towns, like Bangor, Me., Fairbanks, Alaska, Nacogdoches, Tex., Los Angeles, Miami and New York.
"Going to war like this completely takes away everything the U.N. stands for," said Petra Vallia-Buckman, a junior at the University of Michigan, who joined the 5 p.m. protest in Ann Arbor.
Large numbers of police officers watched the crowds as the country remained on high alert against terrorist attacks. The tension between the police and protesters was particularly high in San Francisco.
"It has turned into an ugly situation," said a police spokesman, Dewayne Tully. "There has been no abatement to the protests. It's challenging the resources of the police department."
San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. said that about three-quarters of those arrested were not from the city. He criticized the protesters who disrupted traffic, saying they were costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime. The police estimated the day's cost at $500,000.
"I just wish they would stay in their own communities and protest rather than putting the expense on us," Mr. Brown said.
If arrests were fewer in other cities, the crowds were about as heavy.
"I want to clear up the misconception about us not supporting our soldiers," said Tricia Thomas, 28, who was protesting with her husband and infant son in Atlanta. "We support them. It's just that we don't support war and inhumanity."
In the Washington area, high school students - with numbers estimated from several hundred to 1,000 - walked out of class.
Christine Miranda, a high school student from Maryland, said she was protesting even though her parents were not opposed to war against Iraq.
"I didn't really know anything about it," she said. "Then I read up and found that we gave Iraq a lot of the things that we're complaining about."
Many protesters were students. In Boston, some wore patches reading, "I'm walking out on war today." But the young were far from the only demonstrators. In Bellingham, Wash., at least 15 law firms shut down for the day, posting signs in their windows: "Closed in honor of those now being killed in Iraq."
Opponents and supporters of the war skirmished in some spots. And some vandalism was reported.
In Madison, Wis., protesters smashed the windows of the state Republican Party headquarters, splattering red paint that they said symbolized blood.
President Bush has said he will not let protests sway his decisions. But the marchers said that did not discourage them.
"I feel like this moment is partly a way to talk with other Americans; we're not speaking to Bush," said Ben Brooks, 32, a carpenter in Los Angeles who had taken the day off and attended a rally outside the federal building in Westwood. "We know it's falling on deaf ears, but we also want him to know we're on to him."
In Washington, Julia Klima, 14, said, "It helps more to protest than to do nothing."
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Protests in Many Nations Swell for Second Day
March 21, 2003
Agence France-Presse
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Protests.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Egypt, Australia, Japan and Malaysia on Friday for a second day of protests against the U.S.-led war in Iraq, as Muslim leaders around the world denounced the U.S. strikes as imperialist aggression.
Demonstrations also were held India, Thailand, China and other countries across Asia. They echoed an outpouring of anti-war sentiment in the United States, where more than 1,500 people were arrested Thursday from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.
Authorities were bracing for new protests in predominantly Muslim countries including Pakistan and Indonesia, whose president has condemned the war as a violation international law.
In Tokyo, at least 11,000 people took advantage of warm spring weather and a national holiday to march for peace.
The protests came hours after President Bush called Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to thank him for joining Bush's ``coalition of the willing.'' Koizumi backs efforts by the United States, Japan's main ally, to disarm Saddam Hussein and has promised to provide aid for refugees and help rebuild Iraq after the fighting is over. Students and families carrying placards and giant paper cranes -- a symbol of peace -- were joined by flag-waving representatives of Japan's main opposition parties and labor unions.
One demonstrator brandished a poster captioned ``Oil War'' showing Bush's face superimposed on Darth Vader.
``When I thought of the children in Iraq, I felt like I had to come,'' said housewife Fumiko Nakajima, 38, who was marching with her husband and their two children. ``If our government can't stand up to the United States, then we citizens have to.''
In Melbourne, Australia, about 5,000 protesters marched to the sound of mock air raid sirens. The demonstration came as officials confirmed for the first time that units of the nation's military were engaged in operations in Iraq.
Labor unions in Greece declared a four-hour strike starting at noon Friday that was expected to shut down airports, banks, public services and transportation.
Schools and universities closed to allow students to participate in protests, and consumer unions called for a boycott of all American products.
Greece's socialist government, which holds the European Union presidency, has supported the protests. Rallies were planned Friday in Athens.
In Germany, police broke up a sit-down protest outside the U.S. military's European Command in Stuttgart. In Berlin, schoolchildren placed candles on a street leading to the U.S. Embassy, which was protected by heavy concrete barriers and fences.
Anti-war activists set up a 10-foot steel peace symbol and an 800-pound bell near the embassy. They said they would ring the bell every half-hour until the war is over.
Muslim leaders around the world condemned the war against Iraq as a product of American imperialism.
``Every intelligent decent person in the world knows that Bush is lying and that his goal is to control Iraqi oil and to spread his control of countries in the region one after the other,'' said Sheik Taj El Din Al Hilaly, 62, the spiritual leader of Australia's Islamic community .
Thousands of Muslims in eastern Malaysia burned British and U.S. flags and effigies of the two countries' leaders. Chanting ``Destroy Bush,'' and ``Long Live Islam,'' about 7,000 protesters filled a busy road in Kota Baharu city as police stood guard, witnesses told The Associated Press.
In Bangladesh, thousands marched through the streets of Dhaka, shouting such anti-American slogans as: ``Stop the attack on Iraq,'' ``Bush is a war criminal.''
In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, police were beefing up security at foreign embassies and businesses ahead of large protests expected over the weekend.
Shouting ``Americans are terrorists!'' members of Thailand's small Muslim community led a march on the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.
In Pakistan, the nation's religious right called for peaceful protests against the war but withdrew demands for a nationwide strike, saying it would hurt ordinary Pakistanis. But in the tribal northwest -- the stronghold of the religious coalition organizing anti-war protests -- shops were closed and a strike went ahead.
In neighboring India, police fired tear gas at about 50 people who marched through Srinagar, summer capital of the nation's only Muslim-majority state.
``Don't kill Iraqi children! They didn't kill yours!'' the protesters shouted.
Demonstrations were expected in other cities in India, whose government called the U.S. attack unjustified.
Two dozen foreigners in Beijing gathered at the north gate of the city's Ritan Park, located in the embassy district, to protest the military action.
The group marched through the park carrying banners emblazoned with slogans in Chinese, English and Spanish, some of them reading ``Not in our name,'' and ``No War.''
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Wave of Protests, From Europe to New York
March 21, 2003
The New York Times
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/international/worldspecial/21REAX.html
PARIS, March 20 - Leaders and protesters around the world today condemned the start of war in Iraq, with President Jacques Chirac of France warning that it "will be fraught with consequences for the future."
In Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin called for an immediate halt to the American-led assault, saying, "This military action cannot be justified in any way."
Regardless of whether their governments supported or opposed the war, hundreds of thousands massed at protests across Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Britain. In Berlin, an estimated 40,000 demonstrators streamed past the United States Embassy and through the Brandenburg Gate, waving banners that read, "Stop the Bush Fire" and "George W. Hitler."
In the United States, the antiwar demonstrations were generally smaller, but thousands descended on military bases or blocked roads and bridges to voice their opposition. Chanting "Peace Now," some 5,000 people demonstrated in Times Square in New York.
The wave of global protest began even as the first missiles were hitting Baghdad, with tens of thousands in Melbourne, Australia's second city, bringing traffic to a standstill. In the Middle East, demonstrations were scattered - a crowd of only 1,000 in Cairo, for instance - but more vociferous protests were expected on Friday, the day of Muslim worship.
In France, the American Embassy and consulate buildings, just off the Place de la Concorde in Paris, were heavily guarded as tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled, chanting antiwar slogans. The National Assembly briefly suspended its session in symbolic protest.
In Madrid, about 40,000 people packed the Puerta del Sol tonight in protest at the Spanish government's support for President Bush. Fliers that called for a boycott of American consumer goods passed through the crowd.
"At least we can show the world that our government does not represent us," said Javier Velazquez, an economics professor. "It is important to have a European response to a country that just does anything it wants, which is the United States."
American flags were burned outside the embassy in Athens, where an estimated 80,000 demonstrators, mainly students and labor activists, marched peacefully, chanting anti-American slogans.
Sentiment ran generally high against the United States. Fans in Montreal booed loudly tonight when "The Star-Spangled Banner" was sung before the Canadiens' game against the New York Islanders.
Appearing on national television this morning, Mr. Chirac reiterated France's opposition to the war and said he regretted it was "initiated without United Nations backing."
While emphasizing that France was supported by many other nations, he added an appeal for the world and especially Europe to reunite in pursuit of common goals.
"Tomorrow, we shall have to meet again, with our allies, with the whole international community, to take up together the challenges awaiting us," he said. "Europe must realize the need to express its own vision of world problems and support this vision with a credible common defense."
Mr. Chirac spoke before attending a previously scheduled summit meeting of the leaders from the 15 European Union nations in Brussels, where an attempt was made to paper over the continent's deep rifts with a common statement on how best to secure peace after the war in Iraq.
Also attending the summit meeting was Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Mr. Bush's staunchest ally. Before leaving for Brussels, Mr. Blair recorded a five-minute speech that was broadcast in Britain at 10 p.m., formally acknowledging that British troops are now at war.
"I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our country," said Mr. Blair, who has faced strong popular protest and a revolt in his Labor Party. "But this new world faces a new threat: of disorder and chaos born either of brutal states like Iraq, armed with weapons of mass destruction, or of extreme terrorist groups. Both hate our way of life, our freedom, our democracy."
Spain's prime minister, José María Aznar, who has also backed Mr. Bush, sent only a hospital ship and 900 personnel to the Persian Gulf. He told his country: "We have assumed our responsibilities. There were more comfortable options, but we don't want to pass on to the future risks that we should confront in the present."
Yet here and there, even among leaders critical of the war, a sense of resignation - and a desire to begin healing divisions - were evident.
In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said on television that "the wrong decision was taken." Yet he added, "The differences over the war are clear differences of opinion among governments, not deep-seated differences between friendly peoples."
The New China news agency reported that the former Chinese foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, in a telephone call with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appealed for an end to military operations, "so that the Iraq issue can be returned to the current track of a political solution."
In Russia, Mr. Putin called the war a "big political mistake."
Mr. Putin, a staunch defender of Russia's sovereignty over the rebel region of Chechnya, said, "If we allow international law to be replaced by the law of the first, in which the strong is always right, and has the right to do anything, then one of the most basic principles of international law will come into question: the inviolability of state sovereignty."
Yet this evening, Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, told reporters that Russia and America "remain partners, not opponents, despite the war in Iraq."
In Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien sought to smooth relations with Washington, saying, "We must do nothing to comfort Saddam Hussein."
"We hope it will be brief, with a minimum of casualties on both sides," Mr. Chrétien said of the war.
In the Pacific, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, all close allies of the United States, expressed support.
Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, despite widespread opposition to the war in Japan, said Baghdad had "not acted sincerely."
The Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, said her country was "part of the coalition of the willing."
But Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslim nations, condemned the war.
Severe condemnation of the war came from the papacy and the leaders of other religions.
In Rome, the papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said Pope John Paul II was "deeply pained." In a statement, he deplored the fact that Baghdad "did not accept the resolutions of the United Nations and the appeal by the pope himself, which asked for the country to disarm." But he also criticized the rupture of negotiations toward peaceful disarmament.
The papal displeasure was echoed in denunciations of the war from leaders of Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Muslim groups.
In South America, official reaction of the six governments making up the Mercosur group, led by Brazil, was uniformly negative. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil condemned the American position as an act of "disrespect to the United Nations and the rest of the world."
"All of us want for Iraq not to have atomic weapons or weapons of mass destruction," he said, "but that does not give the United States the right to decide by itself what is good and what is bad for the world."
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Second Day of Protests Around the Nation
March 21, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-US-Rallies.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Anti-war activists rolled out another wave of demonstrations Friday in their campaign against the war on Iraq that includes sit-ins in the streets and at federal buildings, mass rallies and quiet vigils. Hundreds have been arrested.
Vowing to shut down the city for a second day in a row, protesters descended on the streets of San Francisco's financial district Friday morning. In East Lansing, Mich., about 100 protesters, including some who were chained together, blocked a main road near Michigan State University. Five arrests were made initally, and more were expected, said East Lansing Police Lt. Kevin Daley.
About 70 protesters dropped to the ground on damp grass outside a federal courthouse in Baltimore. One protester held a sign saying ``This is what war looks like.''
The war has stirred one of the broadest rounds of anti-government protesting in years, with demonstrations and civil disobedience in dozens of cities coast to coast. However, the outbreak of fighting has also given rise to cross-country counterdemonstrations and rallies to support American soldiers.
On Thursday, San Francisco police wearing helmets and carrying nightsticks arrested more than 1,300 people Thursday as a shifting mass of thousands of anti-war protesters commandeered the streets and paralyzed the evening commute.
Traffic was snarled Thursday in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., as anti-war protesters blocked off major intersections, some chaining themselves together. Scores of high school and college students walked out of class. In all, more than 1,800 people were arrested.
``The United States is acting in a completely aggressive way,'' said Howard Lisnoff, who donned a rubber President Bush mask at a protest in Providence, R.I., and held a sign reading ``War Criminal.''
Thousands of counterdemonstrators included some 2,000 who gathered outside the state Capitol in Mississippi.
Marlena Puckett, who is engaged to a Marine in the war zone, fought back tears as she watched people waving American flags and carrying handmade signs with slogans like ``God bless our troops'' and ``Let's roll.''
Sheila Murphy attended a rally in Lincoln, Neb., where more than 200 people sang, cheered and prayed. ``This is a time they need to know that everyone is behind the troops and supporting the troops,'' she said.
Though most of the anti-war rallies were peaceful, pockets of protesters in San Francisco scuffled with police, broke windows and heaved newspaper racks and debris into streets. Some protesters hurled rocks at trains, briefly halting service at a station in nearby Oakland.
``We went from what I would call legal protests to absolute anarchy,'' Assistant Police Chief Alex Fagan Sr. said.
One protester died after tumbling from the Golden Gate Bridge. Authorities were investigating the death as a possible suicide.
In Portland, Ore., protesters smashed in three windows at a McDonald's restaurant, set a flag on fire and sprayed graffiti on a sign at a Shell gas station. More than 100 people were arrested.
``I like the idea of shutting down commerce and the city to counteract Bush's economic motives for this war,'' said Eric Anholt, 19, of Portland.
About 1,000 anti-war protesters demonstrated outside the West Los Angeles Federal Building, briefly clashing with police and forcing the closure of one of the city's busiest intersections at rush hour. At least 14 were arrested, and 50 were arrested in Santa Rosa for blocking traffic.
Several thousand marchers snarled afternoon rush-hour traffic along Chicago's main arteries, repeatedly breaking through lines of police on horseback or in riot gear.
In Washington, D.C., dozens of activists temporarily shut down inbound lanes of a Potomac River crossing, holding up the morning commute. Outside the White House, about 50 shouted, ``No blood for oil!''
Anti-war activists in Philadelphia blocked entrances to the downtown federal building, forcing police to detour motorists away from the area. More than 200 people were arrested in protests across Pennsylvania.
In New York, more than 300 protesters snarled traffic in Times Square during the evening commute. Police arrested 36 people.
Counterdemonstrators gathered alongside anti-war protesters in many places, shouting patriotic slogans and encouraging support of the president.
``The debate is over, we've had the debate,'' Robert Strickland, an Army veteran, said as he waved an American flag in Louisville, Ky. ``It's time to rally around our troops and rally around our leaders.''
Dennise Linville, 33, stood at the edge of a rally in Cleveland, with a placard declaring President Bush a hero.
``I have children and if this (Iraq) is not taken care of now, in five or 10 years they're going to be the ones who will have to go in the military and take care of it,'' Linville said.
Some anti-war demonstrators took pains to express their support for U.S. troops as they denounced the policy that sent them into Iraq.
``We support them so much that we don't want one to die in an unjust war,'' said Mike Slaton, who demonstrated in Louisville, Ky.
Students walked out of class at some high schools, while protests were held at several colleges.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, about 600 students converged on the student center, some chanting and wearing mock biochemical protective suits. A protest and sit-in at the University of California at Berkeley, led to 110 arrests.
In Texas, several hundred University of Texas at Austin students linked arms and sat down in a busy street. Several hundred people blocked traffic in Asheville, N.C., and about 20 were arrested.
In St. Louis, as many as 1,000 anti-war protesters linked arms to form a human chain around the federal courthouse. Peaceful marches of about 2,000 people were held in Seattle and Madison, Wis.
Other demonstrations were solemn, with the reciting of Christian, Jewish and Muslim prayers through a bullhorn at a federal building in Pittsburgh.
On the Net:
International ANSWER: http://www.internationalanswer.org
Pax Christi USA: http://www.paxchristiusa.org
Win Without War: http://winwithoutwarus.org
Free Republic: http://www.freerepublic.com
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Pope Paul upbraided UK, Italian PMs: paper
HiPakistan,
March 21, 2003
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en19954&F_catID=&f_type=source
ROME: Pope John Paul II lost his temper with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi in recent discussions at the Vatican on a possible war in Iraq , a Catholic leaning newspaper reported on Wednesday.
"John Paul II used words and gestures bordering on a diplomatic incident," in his audience with Blair on Feb 22, the daily said.
A luncheon meeting with Berlusconi and the undersecretary at the prime minister's office, Gianni Letta, on March 4 scarcely went better, according to the newspaper.
Vatican sources told the newspaper the pope had "raised his voice, pointed an accusing finger at the two of them, and even banged his fist on the table," because he disagreed with Italy's support for a US-led war on Iraq.
Mr Berlusconi's spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti slammed the report, carried in the centre-left daily Europa, as "a bizarre, shameful and completely false reconstruction."
Europa is the party newspaper of the Catholic-leaning Daisy group of parties in the opposition centre-left Olive Tree coalition.
Contacted by AFP, the newspaper said it stood by its story which came from a highly placed ecclesiastical source.
John Paul II, who will be 83 in May, has been one of the staunchest opponents of a US-led war on Iraq and has used his moral position as leader of the worlds 1.5 billion Catholics to lead a diplomatic offensive aimed at averting war.
Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini told reporters late on Wednesday that people should not try to politicise the reports.
"The pope is not political, his is a spiritual message. He condemns war, it would be astonishing if he didn't. But that doesn't mean that he is being political, as some would have us believe."
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Thousands of Furious Arabs Protest War
By MORT ROSENBLUM
AP Special Correspondent
Mar 21, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WAR_MIDEAST_FURY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Furious Arabs stormed Middle Eastern streets Friday, screaming "Death to America" and demanding vengeance for the invasion of Iraq. Gunfire in Yemen killed three people outside the U.S. Embassy.
About 30,000 people assembled after prayers in the ancient Yemeni city of San'a and marched several miles to the embassy.
Riot troops in armored cars held them off with water cannons, tear gas and, finally, live ammunition fired into the air.
Witnesses said a teenage boy was shot dead by a police bullet, and a security official who asked not to be named said a policeman was killed by a protester.
The official Yemeni news agency Saba reported late Friday that two demonstrators had been killed, but gave no details.
The security official said seven other policemen were wounded, and at least 30 demonstrators were overcome by gas.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh expressed regret for the casualties and ordered an investigation. In a statement, he said people had the right to express their opinions, but "what happened damages and harms security and the nation."
Saleh stressed he also opposed the war.
In Beirut, Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah used his Friday sermon to denounce both the United States and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"We call on the Iraqi people to topple the tyrant who has destroyed Iraq and thrown the Arab and Islamic world into disarray," said Fadlallah, a Shiite.
But, he added, he rejected "Iraq's occupation by the arrogant powers, particularly America."
In a statement faxed to The Associated Press, the Iraqi Communist Party, in exile, blamed both Saddam and Bush for what it said was carnage to come.
"There is no doubt about the dictator's grave responsibility," it said. "But this does not exclude the U.S. responsibility for the harm, the human and material damage that will befall our people."
In Amman, 4,000 Palestinians jammed into a mosque courtyard to hear Hamza Mansour, a cleric leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, urge them to fight back with car bombs and martyr themselves to Allah.
Riot troops pumped tear gas into three crowds of stone-throwing youths in Amman, including one turned away from the Israeli Embassy.
"The Americans are targeting not only Iraq but also our nation, our dignity, our holy land," Mansour told the chanting, cheering crowd.
Behind him on a stage, young men set alight American, British and Israeli flags. A large American flag was spread on the ground at the entrance gate where thousands of feet trampled it to tatters.
In a television address, King Abdullah II said, "I know the pain and anger you are feeling because of the suffering and ordeal that the Iraqi people are suffering," but he urged his subjects to act in "a civilized manner."
Meantime, Amman police entered a downtown mosque and took away two imams who delivered fiery sermons, worshippers said.
About 10,000 angry protesters surged through Cairo, the Egyptian capital, after Friday prayers. Police beat them back with riot sticks and water cannons, leaving several streaming with blood.
In his sermon, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the grand sheik of Al-Azhar Mosque, called for jihad - holy war - to support Iraqis.
"Jihad in Islam is meant to defend ... those subject to injustice," he said. "We have to support and defend the people of Iraq."
A smaller violent protest erupted in Bahrain, and a crowd of Palestinians marched from al-Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, Syria, carrying portraits of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.
The largest demonstration was in Yemen, where an estimated 30,000 chanting protesters converged on the U.S. Embassy to demand that Americans leave their country.
Security forces fired automatic rifles into the air to stop their advance. At least two people - one demonstrator and one policeman - were killed by stray bullets.
Some Arab voices blamed Saddam Hussein for crippling Iraq and unsettling the region, but most of them nonetheless opposed the American invasion.
Violent messages in the streets were echoed in calmer assessments by a number of academics and analysts.
"People are very angry about this invasion," said Labib Kamhawi, who teaches political science at the University of Jordan. "In the end, extremists will congratulate George W. Bush for unleashing terrorism."
He predicted a two-stage conflict in which Americans would score an initial military victory but then lose out to a protracted, bitter war of resistance.
"These people are not in a mood to surrender their country for free," he said. "It will be like Afghanistan, where occupiers can't go outside the capital, with warlords destroying the country."
While protesters raged in the streets of Amman, shopkeepers watched and spoke their minds.
"This American aggression is unjust," said Rami Abu Salah, 27, among his watches and perfumes. "We only hope for Saddam's victory. Americans are trying to weaken the U.N. so Israel can be stronger."
Even beyond the Middle East, Muslim clerics opposed the invasion.
"This attack is not on Iraq, it is an attack on Islam itself," Syed Ahmed Bukhari told 6,000 followers at Friday prayers in India's largest mosque, in New Delhi.
"The war between right and wrong has begun," he said. "This is a jihad. We have to sacrifice our lives for Islam."
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Fans boo The Star Spangled Banner
Friday March 21, 2003
CNN Sports Illustrated Hocky News
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/hockey/news/2003/03/20/anthem_booed_ap/index.html
MONTREAL (AP) -- Fans booed during the playing of the U.S. national anthem before the New York Islanders' 6-3 victory over the Montreal Canadiens on Thursday night.
The sellout crowd of 21,273 at Bell Centre was asked to "show your support and respect for two great nations" before the singing of the American and Canadian national anthems.
But a significant portion of the crowd booed throughout The Star Spangled Banner in an apparent display of their displeasure with the U.S.-led war against Iraq. More than 200,000 people turned out for an anti-war demonstration in Montreal last Saturday.
"I'm sure there are a lot of people against the war, but some things people can't control," said New York's Alexei Yashin, who is from Russia. "They were probably showing what they feel about it."
Teammate Mark Parrish, a native of Bloomington, Minn., was upset hearing the boos.
"I came to the game pretty pumped up, but once I heard that it really got me going," Parrish said. "So I guess I can thank them a little bit for getting me more pumped up."
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Protect and defend our country! DUMP GEORGE BUSH
Fri, 21 Mar 2003
From: jane stillwater <jpstillwater@yahoo.com>
It is time for ALL Americans (even Republicans) to unite and defend our democracy -- against the "Coalition of the Willing".
Assuming that there are some honest Republicans left in America, that they managed to be shaken out of their somnambulism after watching the televised wave of human slaughter in Iraq, that they noticed that the economy is going to hell in a handbasket, that they finally developed a sense of reality and started to demand George Bush's resignation, we might forgive them for waiting so long to step up to the plate.
I can hear them now -- waving flags and shouting, "Save America! Save our economy! Protect our families! Save us from hoards of evil barbarians lapping at our shores seeking revenge from Shock and Awe! Be pro-life and stop murdering children! DUMP GEORGE BUSH."
Wouldn't it be nice if they too for once spoke up for freedom and democracy in America (even in their own subtle bumper-sticker-talk manner), for once defended the country that has made them rich -- and even got mad enough to take to the streets yelling, "Save our flag! Fight against the evil empire! Defend democracy! United we stand! God Bless America! DUMP GEORGE BUSH."
However anybody says it -- for the sake and safety of American democracy, George W. Bush and his "Coalition of the Willing" has got to go. And it would be nice if Republicans finally helped out and started to pull their weight. There's a rally you could go to tomorrow...
Very truly yours, Jane Stillwater, Berkeley, CA
"Imagine a world where EVERY child is wanted, nurtured, protected and loved: World Peace in one generation!" Shock and Awe is a terrible idea! Whatever you do to others, they will try to do back to you. NEXT TIME, GEORGE, THINK BEFORE YOU ACT.
Links: In 1998, when Clinton spoke against Iraq, the Republicans made this statement:
http://www.conservativeusa.org/iraq-war.htm
AT LEAST TEN REASONS TO OPPOSE INITIATION OF WAR ON IRAQ A project of The Conservative Caucus 450 Maple Avenue East * Vienna, Va. 22180 * 703-938-9626
Excerpted from Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin of February 15, 1998
There are at least ten reasons why America should not now make war on Iraq, even if it were certain that such an effort would be "successful":
1) President William J. Clinton lacks the moral authority to function properly as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States.
2) Let's not change the subject. The Number One business of the nation at this time should be the removal from office of William J. Clinton.
3) It is unconstitutional for America to go to war without a Congressional declaration of war.
4) Given the present set of facts, there is no Constitutional predicate on the basis of which Congress has the authority to initiate war, even with a declaration of war.
5) Wars of defense are morally appropriate. Foreign wars for purposes other than national defense are not.
6) In war, there is no substitute for victory. Victory, as commonly understood, with respect to an assault on Iraq, has not been defined, let alone declared to be the objective of any such attack.
7) The Federal government's ability to provide for the common defense (of the United States) is substantially diminished in consequence of resources expended during President Bush's "Operation Desert Storm". Not only have America's arsenal and battle-ready personnel resources not been fully restored, they have, in fact, been radically depleted since Desert Storm, in consequence of massive redu ctions in Congressionally authorized spending for the defense of the United States (even as expenditures for U.N. intervention operations and other "social policy objective" activities have risen). Defense analyst Peter Schweizer, now at the Hoover Institution, who favors air strikes, nonetheless observes that "[t]hanks to military cutbacks, we don't have anything close to the force that won Desert Storm. In 1991, the U.S. Air Force had 24 fighter wings to draw from. Today it only has 13. That means fewer planes and (even more importantly) pilots. Desert Storm was fought with two Marine divisions, seven active Army divisions, and combat brigades of two additional divisions. Now, that commitment alone would exhaust all of the Army's 10 active divisions." (Source: USA Today, 2/18/98, p. 15A)
8) The strategic position of the United States in the world may be diminished, rather than enhanced, by an attack on Iraq. Many regimes friendly to the United States will be placed at severe risk if they are seen to assist, or even favor, the U.S. attack.
9) If we "succeed", what have we gained? If we don't begin a war, what have we lost?
10) War has consequences which are often unintended and almost always beyond comprehensive anticipation. If we and our "allies" join to attack Iraq, Iraq and its allies may combine to attack us in ways which cannot be fully foreseen. How many planes will crash? How many water supplies will be polluted? How many nuclear weapons will be detonated? How many civilian targets will be made subject to terrorist assault? Will chemical weapons be deployed?
The fundamental issue is whether Bill Clinton's military action against Iraq is important enough to die for. I am prepared to die in defense of God, family, and country---but I don't believe that this preemptive strike against Iraq is worth dying for. Ask yourself: is it worth your life, or that of your spouse, your child, your parent, or your neighbor
Peace rally info from ucstopthewar:
The "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad has begun. The U.S. military is raining down a vast array of "weapons of mass destruction" on a densely populated city of 5 million people. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines have started the land invasion of southern Iraq. Join a massive protest against this sick, unjust, hypocritical, and brutal war:
Saturday, 3/22/03, NOON San Francisco Civic Center
More reasons against the the Iraqi slaughter -- from UNICEF: Children will die in this war. That's a fact. Food distribution in Iraq has stopped. One-half million Iraqi children are already malnourished. They have no flexibility. A break in the food supply will kill them. In the 1980's Iraq was close to being middle class. Iraq now has the second worst infant mortality rate in the world (Afghanistan is number one). One-fourth of Iraqi children are now not in school. The Food For Oil program has been suspended.
Bush's Constitutional violations:
The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute says Bush has violated Article I, Article VI, Amendment I, Amendment IV, Amendment V, Amendment VI, Amendment VII and Amendment XIV of the US Constitution.
Bush's United Nations Charter Violations:
The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute says Bush has violated Article 1, Article 2, Article 33, Article 39, Article 55 and Article 56. (www.mcli.org)
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