Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
US alarmed by India's war threats
A thousand sites to be inspected for WMD
Inspections required to end sanctions, UN says
Warning to North Korea on Nuclear Arms
N. Korea Makes Big Shift in Nuclear Talks Demand
With N. Koreans, a Quiet Diplomacy
MILITARY
Karzai Threatens Officials Who Do Not Fight Taliban
Still Paying for Past Support of Taliban, Pashtuns Flee South
U.S Commander Wants Afghan Border Patrols
Suspected chemical warhead found in Kirkuk
Hungarians Give Big 'Yes' to EU Membership
Iran may consider resuming ties with U.S.
Suspected chemical warhead found in Kirkuk
Troops Find Huge Underground Complex
For Iraq's Leaders and Loyalists, a Vanishing Act
U.S. Steps Aside to Let Iraqis Fight 'Mujahideen'
U.S. Offers Reward for News on Saddam, WMD
Iraq's Liberation Front Attempts To Assassinate Chalabi
British-appointed Basra chief exposed as former Ba'athist
Baghdad on Edge After a Firefight and New Looting
Mythical Garden of Eden now a wasteland
US Marines, Iraqi Cops To Jointly Patrol Baghdad
In Baghdad, Free of Hussein, a Day of Mayhem
U.S. Discovers Suicide Vests in Baghdad
Baghdad protest against looters
Looters shake Iraqi cities
Syria: U.S. weapons claims 'baseless'
Did Saddam go to Syria?
L.A. spy case leads to resignation
F.B.I. Was Told Years Ago of Possible Double Agent
Aid Is Tied to Approval By the U.N.
U.S. May Send Battle Groups Home
Sniper Fire Greets G.I.'s in Big City in North
In cyberspace, everyone can see the wounded screaming
CNN chief stands by Iraq omissions
Just Another Staged Baghdad Rally?
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Mexico Seizes More Than Four Tons of Pot
Schools Across Nation Redrawing Crisis Plans
Secret Police Files Found
OTHER
IMF Says It Will Help in Iraq After UN Resolution
ACTIVISTS
British Activist Is Reported Wounded by Israeli Sniper in Gaza
Antiwar Priest Removes Flag, but Not for Long
Antiwar Protesters Switch Focus to Iraq Occupation
Thousands in India, Bangladesh Protest Iraq War
Activists Stage Rallies Against Iraq War
Koreans rally against war in N Korea
Anti-war protests continue in New Zealand
Antiwar, Pro-Troop Protests Rally in D.C.
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- india / pakistan
US alarmed by India's war threats
Minister's remark that Pakistan is a fit case for pre-emptive action prompts senior US officials into counselling calm
APRIL 13, 2003
Singapore Straits Times
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/storyprintfriendly/0,1887,182894,00.html?
WASHINGTON - Top Bush administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell or his deputy Richard Armitage, may fly down to South Asia within the next fortnight amid growing concern in Washington that the situation in the region is taking a turn for the worse.
The Times of India reported yesterday that despite its preoccupation with the Iraq crisis, the rhetoric from the subcontinent has rung alarm bells in Washington - particularly after Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha said Pakistan was a fit case for pre-emptive action along the same lines as the US strike on Iraq.
His statement triggered 'frantic' inquiries from the Bush administration, the daily said. To which New Delhi clarified that the statements were 'rhetorical' in nature.
But it also added that the Indian government was under pressure to act 'on infiltrations and violence inspired by Pakistan', referring to India's stand that Pakistan supports guerillas in Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir.
The 'blunt' message from India, the Times said, raised ripples in Washington and senior US administration officials tried to temper the situation.
In statements made to the media, they conveyed to New Delhi that the United States does not see the need for India to take any military action and promised greater American involvement in resolving tensions.
In an interview on Pakistan's state-run television on Thursday, Mr Powell said: 'we do have a very difficult and dangerous situation with respect to actions across the Line of Control.'
He also refined earlier US statement about the dissimilarity between US action in Iraq and India's threat of pre-emptive action against Pakistan, saying he did not think there was a 'direct parallel' to the two situations.
But he also promised that the US would stay engaged in the region and it did not 'believe there is a need now for any military action of any kind'.
'We are looking to help the two parties resolve this in a peaceful way, and you can be sure that I will personally remain engaged, as will President Bush and members of his administration,' Mr Powell said.
Indian officials have stepped up accusations that, contrary to assurances he gave the US last spring, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has been giving free rein to militants fighting to end Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
While India has made such charges before, it has lately begun to draw parallels to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The Times of India said a stream of US officials, leading with Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca and followed by other high-level officials, were likely to make a beeline for the region.
It said they would renew pressure on Pakistan to stop infiltration across the border and convince India to re-open dialogue with its nuclear-armed neighbour.
-------- inspections
A thousand sites to be inspected for WMD
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 12, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030412-51448615.htm
U.S. military specialists in Iraq have inspected about 12 possible chemical, biological and nuclear weapons sites in Iraq and have a list of 1,000 sites to be checked in the coming days now that organized Iraqi military resistance has collapsed.
Defense officials said members of a 200-soldier team, the Army's 75th Intelligence Exploitation Unit, are working on finding Iraq's banned weapons.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday a special "sensitive site exploitation" team recently checked a facility at Al Qaim and is waiting for test results.
Al Qaim has a fertilizer plant that U.S. officials suspect could be part of Iraq's chemical arms program. It also is the location of a facility that in the past refined uranium ore, which could be part of Iraq's nuclear arms program.
A defense official said the 75th is a combat support unit that is working under the U.S. Central Command to investigate chemical and biological weapons sites, to recover and use Iraqi documents on the subject, and to find prisoners of war.
The group also provides interrogators who can question captured Iraqis.
"They're looking for actionable intelligence on anything to do with [weapons of mass destruction] and POWs," the defense official said.
In addition to the 75th, another large team of intelligence and weapons specialists is in the Middle East waiting to go to Iraq once the country is stabilized, the official said.
In Vienna, the U.N. nuclear agency said it has asked the United States to secure Iraq's nuclear facility at Tuwaitha, about 11 miles south of Baghdad.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a statement that until inspectors return to Iraq, "the U.S. has responsibility for maintaining security at this important storage facility."
U.S. Marines near the research center reported high levels of radioactivity and found drums containing radioactive material.
A Marine Corps combat engineering unit uncovered an underground network of laboratories, warehouses and bombproof offices beneath the 70-building complex.
Three warehouses containing some 2,500 barrels of uranium that could be enriched to make nuclear weapons were found unguarded at Tuwaitha, where looters sacked a residential compound in the complex, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday.
Fox News reported yesterday that between seven and 15 Iraqi military vehicles are being tested for chemical and biological weapons on suspicion of being mobile weapons laboratories.
A refrigerated military truck at a construction site also is being probed as a possible biological weapon component.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said searching for weapons is not as high a priority as defeating the remaining pro-Saddam military and guerrilla forces.
"The first task is to prevail in this conflict and to stop the forces of Saddam Hussein in the areas that they continue to operate in and to reduce the violence," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Other priority missions, including finding banned weapons, will follow, he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld said those searching for weapons are seeking out Iraqis who can provide information on the locations of hidden arms. The CIA and the Pentagon have launched a program to offer cash rewards to Iraqis who can help locate banned weapons.
Mr. Rumsfeld said he expects the search for weapons to be difficult because the Iraqis were good at hiding banned weapons from international inspectors.
"We are not going to find them, in my view, just as I never believed the inspectors would, by running around seeing if they can open a door and surprise somebody and find something because these people have learned that they can live in an inspection environment - the Iraqis did; they functioned in that environment, they designed their workplaces to do that," he said.
"Things were mobile, things were underground, things were in tunnels, things were hidden, things were dispersed."
Several suspicious materials have been found so far, including an explosives factory south of Baghdad, where thousands of vials of white powder were found.
A training center for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare was uncovered recently in Iraq's western desert. Numerous chemical protection suits also have been found at several military facilities.
A defense official said dual-use equipment and other goods capable of producing unconventional weapons were found there.
----
RECONSTRUCTION
Inspections required to end sanctions, UN says
By Elizabeth Neuffer,
Boston Globe Staff,
4/12/2003
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/102/nation/Inspections_required_to_end_sanctions_UN_saysP.shtml
UNITED NATIONS - Crippling sanctions on war-torn Iraq cannot be lifted yet because United Nations resolutions require that weapons inspectors first verify that Iraq is free of banned deadly weapons, Security Council diplomats said yesterday.
The UN sanctions on Iraq, mandated by a series of resolutions passed since the 1991 Gulf War, restrict both the flow of goods into the country as well as the sale of Iraqi oil, a combination that could stall efforts to rebuild the country. The embargo was intended to punish Saddam Hussein's regime, but it legally applies to anyone now in charge of Iraq, UN diplomats say.
That means that for goods to flow quickly to Iraq, the United States and Britain must ask the divided Security Council either to void the sanctions or consider having UN weapons inspectors return, diplomats say. Security Council diplomats are to take up the issue next week when they meet with chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix.
In an interview yesterday, Blix said that he will discuss the ''state of readiness'' of his UN weapons team with the 15-member council and that it is up to the diplomats to decide whether to return his inspectors to Iraq. ''There are many [council members] interested in a role for the UN,'' the Swedish diplomat added.
Last week, Blix told reporters: ''On short notice we would be operational again.''
France, Germany, and Russia, which wanted UN weapons inspections to continue rather than wage war, are among those likely to welcome the return of the UN's Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC.
''Germany welcomes the opportunity to discuss with Hans Blix what could be UNMOVIC's future role in reaching the Security Council's goal of having an Iraq free of'' weapons of mass destruction, said Dirk Rotenberg, a spokesman for the German UN Mission. Germany chairs the committee that monitors those goods that can flow to Iraq despite UN sanctions, under the UN's oil-for-food program.
President Bush pledged Tuesday that the United Nations will have a ''vital role'' in a postwar Iraq, although the details of US intentions remain vague.
European nations have insisted that the UN play a central role.
In the first sign of US-UN cooperation, the US Department of State invited Rafeeuddin Ahmed, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's special adviser on Iraq, to Washington for a ''series of briefings on Iraq.'' The first meeting is set for Monday.
Finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is a key goal for the Bush administration, which made its case for war on the basis of its allegation that Iraq still harbors illegal arms. The administration accused Iraq of having mobile biological and chemical laboratories as well as stocks of anthrax and VX, a nerve agent, among other banned weapons.
Three weeks into the coalition-led war, no ''smoking gun'' has emerged proving Iraq has such weapons.
Secretary of State Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he was not surprised that biological or chemical weapons had not been discovered - and suggested they were well hidden.
''It's a big country,'' he told reporters. ''We're going to find the people'' who can help lead allied forces to them, Rumsfeld said.
If UN weapons inspectors return and certify that Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction, that would undermine critics of the war, but the State Department and the Pentagon are divided over whether to give the UN equal authority to do so.
Increasingly, however, it looks as if the decision on the inspectors may play out in the Security Council when it debates lifting the UN sanctions.
Some council members, skeptical of the administration's assertions that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, may want to insist that weapons inspectors return.
''They may not want to let the US and Britain off the hook,'' suggested one council diplomat.
Others members, reflecting views shared by some officials
in the State Department, contend that Blix, who has teams of specialists already knowledgeable about Iraq's weapons stocks, is better placed to find any banned arms.
Yesterday, Blix and other UN weapons inspectors lamented the possible loss of key documents to looting.
Blix received an honorary doctorate from the New England School of Law yesterday, but in his half-hour speech, he steered mostly clear of the war in Iraq. At the beginning, he said, ''I, like others, am relieved it has been short.''
He then sounded a note of skepticism: ''I am very curious to see if the Allies in Iraq will find any weapons of mass destruction.''
He closed the evening by saying, ''Let's all hope for a speedy return to peace.''
-------- korea
Warning to North Korea on Nuclear Arms
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/europe/12MOSC.html
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, April 11 - A top Russian diplomat said today that a nuclear-armed North Korea was against Russian national interests and that the Kremlin would re-evaluate its opposition to international penalties should the North Koreans develop nuclear weapons.
The statements, by Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Losyukov, who was the Kremlin's emissary to North Korea during a diplomatic mission in January, amounted to a warning to North Korea that patience was ebbing in one of the few nations that has offered it sympathy during a five-month nuclear crisis with the United States.
North Korea has said it will regard international penalties as an act of war, a position Russia has previously endorsed even as it has tried informally to mediate the nuclear dispute.
But in an interview with the Interfax news service, Mr. Losyukov said Russia would continue to oppose international penalties against North Korea's nuclear program only "as long as our North Korean colleagues maintain common sense."
Should North Korea begin producing weapons, he said, "Russia will have to seriously consider its position, as the appearance of nuclear weapons in North Korea and the possibility of using them close to our borders goes categorically against Russia's national interests."
"If the issue in North Korea becomes one of nuclear weapons development or, worse, of the possibility of using them, this presents us with a very serious choice."
Mr. Losyukov's comments reflected not only growing Russian concern over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, but perhaps concern that the United States' and Britain's apparent triumph in the war in Iraq might embolden the White House to consider military action against North Korea.
Since the United States confronted the North Koreans last autumn with evidence that they were secretly conducting a nuclear weapons program in defiance of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, North Korea has abrogated the treaty and restarted a reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
North Korea's leaders have insisted that only direct talks with the United States can persuade them to abandon their program, but the White House has argued just as adamantly that the nuclear program is an international problem requiring global pressure and multilateral talks.
The United States has said it has no plans to attack North Korea and that it believes that the standoff over its nuclear program can be resolved in talks. But it also has taken a number of actions, such as airing a recent proposal to move American troops in South Korea out of range of North Korean artillery, which the North has denounced as preparations for war.
The Bush administration's top arms proliferation official, Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton, said this week that rogue states like North Korea should take a lesson from the events in Iraq.
Mr. Losyukov said Russia feared that a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula would affect Russian territory and endanger Russian citizens living along the short border it shares with North Korea.
The Russian government, he said, is studying ways to shield towns along the border from the effects of a nuclear battle. "We are obliged to consider preventive means to safeguard our interests, and - why hide this? - to protect our population," he said. "The government has given orders to this effect to the proper authorities."
Russia has tried to maintain friendly relations with North Korea, its ally during the cold war, even as it has sought to broaden ties with South Korea. In Seoul on Thursday, the Russian defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, said North Korea might well ignore United Nations condemnation of its nuclear program.
Today, the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry's nuclear-fuel company, Tenex, opened an office in Seoul. The company supplies nearly a third of the fuel needed for South Korean nuclear reactors.
----
N. Korea Makes Big Shift in Nuclear Talks Demand
Sat April 12, 2003
(Reuters)
By Martin Nesirky and Kim Yeon-hee
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2553744
SEOUL - North Korea said on Saturday it would consider any form of dialogue with the United States about its suspected nuclear arms ambitions if Washington was prepared to make a "bold switchover" in its policy toward Pyongyang.
The dramatic shift from a rigid insistence on bilateral talks came in comments from North Korea's foreign ministry just days after U.S.-led forces unseated Iraq's President Saddam Hussein in a war the South Korean president said had "petrified" Pyongyang.
Washington -- which lumps communist North Korea in an "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran for seeking weapons of mass destruction -- wants multilateral talks that also include regional players South Korea, Japan, Russia and China.
"If the U.S. is ready to make a bold switchover in its Korea policy for a settlement of the nuclear issue, the DPRK will not stick to any particular dialogue format," the official KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
DPRK is an abbreviation of the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
"North Korea has recently started showing a change in its attitude in a gradual and indirect way," said Kim Jung-roh, deputy spokesman at the South Korean Unification Ministry.
"Also, as the Iraq war is coming to an end faster than expected, North Korea has less options to take."
There was no immediate comment from Washington, but the North Korean shift will clearly give the United States an opportunity to intensify diplomacy toward the North now Saddam is gone. Washington says North Korea is trying to make nuclear weapons.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun told the Washington Post in an interview published on Friday the U.S.-led Iraq war had had a profound impact on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and other North Korean officials.
DIRECT RATHER THAN BILATERAL
"Especially watching the recent Iraqi war I'm sure they are very much terrified...petrified by the Iraqi war," the Post quoted him as saying.
Roh, who will visit Washington next month for talks with President Bush, also said Kim had made decisions "beyond our commonsense understanding" but he felt the North Korean leader was wise enough to choose an open-ended road rather than a dead-end when it came to the North's nuclear plans.
The crisis erupted last October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted having a covert nuclear weapons program, although the North denied making such an admission.
Last Wednesday, the day Saddam's rule ended in Baghdad, the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the North's nuclear stance but did not issue a statement urging Pyongyang to fall into line, because of opposition from China and Russia.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, referred the crisis to the Security Council after North Korea quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on January 10 and kicked out U.N. inspectors. It later restarted a nuclear reactor.
Moscow and Beijing prefer not to put pressure on North Korea through the United Nations but Chinese and Russian diplomats say they have pushed hard behind the scenes to get Pyongyang to shift tack away from insisting on bilateral talks only.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said Pyongyang demanded direct talks to gauge whether the United States had the political will to give up "its hostile policy" toward the North.
By referring to direct rather than bilateral talks, North Korea clearly left open the possibility of talking directly with U.S. officials with representatives of other countries present.
"The U.S. asserts a 'multilateral framework' to be participated in by countries around the DPRK but their Korea policy and stand of desiring a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue are clear by and large," the North's spokesman said. "What matters is the U.S."
He said the outcome of the Security Council meeting had shown there was no need to "internationalize the nuclear issue" and that to do so would make it impossible to solve the crisis.
Earlier, Roh told foreign political and business leaders he planned to meet the leaders of Japan, China and Russia as soon as possible after his trip to Washington next month to help seek a peaceful end to the crisis.
Just a week ago, before Baghdad fell, North Korea said even a non-aggression pact with Washington might not prevent war on the divided Korean peninsula. Saturday's statement made no mention of the pact, which has been a key North Korean condition for talks.
North Korea has a track record of turning up the rhetorical volume before seeking a compromise.
----
With N. Koreans, a Quiet Diplomacy
Network of Academics, Officials at Work to Break Impasse
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 12, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10513-2003Apr11?language=printer
SEOUL, April 11 -- When North Korea unleashed a blistering screed of propaganda Sunday, saying it could no longer trust any promise of peace by the United States and must instead rely on "tremendous military deterrent," it appeared to signal a grave hardening of the combative government's position.
But a few people, scattered from here to Tokyo and Washington, nodded in knowing approval. They saw the harsh rhetoric as a prickly briar patch obscuring a softer meaning: North Korea had gotten the word, they surmised; it was withdrawing a key obstacle to talks with the United States, a demand for a bilateral nonaggression treaty.
"There's no question that signaled a willingness to compromise," said one of those select few, an intermediary in Seoul who recently held private talks with North Korean officials.
Such are the winks and nods in a shadowy world of back-channel contacts underway to resolve the dispute between the United States and North Korea over the North's nuclear program. An informal network of academics, lower-level officials, consultants and intermediaries in several countries is attempting to nurture a secret diplomacy to keep the nuclear impasse from drawing the United States into its next war.
Their meetings do not take place at cloak-and-dagger rendezvous spots. More often, the efforts are pursued over cafeteria coffee at academic conferences with such titles as "East Asian Security Implications."
Some analysts expressed optimism that their efforts could break the rigidly deadlocked positions of the United States and North Korea, from which neither side appears ready to publicly climb down. Others are not so sure. "I've seen a multiple of back channels to North Korea. None of them produced anything of substance," said a former State Department official in Washington, now out of government but still in touch with Korean issues.
"The North Koreans are adroit at using them to build political support," he said. "But when the direct channel, the official contact, starts, all of that warm fuzzy feeling evaporates very quickly."
Now, however, there is no official channel. The United States and North Korea are at an impasse, each refusing the other's conditions for opening talks.
In recent weeks, the closest thing to official talks has involved U.S. special envoy Jack Pritchard and Han Song Ryol, North Korea's deputy U.N. ambassador, who met with little publicity in New York on March 31.
Another contact occurred at the University of California at Berkeley last month. A North Korean diplomat and two North Korean scholars received unusual approval from the U.S. government to attend an academic conference put on by a Canadian research group. To dampen publicity and allow for quiet discussions, the sessions were held behind closed doors.
An even more unusual conference took place in Pyongyang two weeks ago, the first in which South Korean academics were allowed to present position papers at a North Korean meeting.
The papers were "sanitized" of provocative language to avoid controversy before they were presented to 150 North Korean officials and academics in the ornate People's Cultural Palace, according to one participant. But "behind the curtains," in private meetings, South and North Koreans tried to hammer away at the issues that divided them.
"Their message was that they are ready to start a dialogue with the U.S., but not in the open," said Park Myung Lim, a professor of Korean studies at Yonsei University in Seoul who has longstanding contacts with North Korean officials.
Among the messages the South Koreans delivered in return was that North Korea's demand for a nonaggression treaty with the United States was meaningless.
"Our side was telling them it was just a piece of paper," said Moon Chung In, a professor at Yonsei University who shuttles often between the Koreas and United States. Six days after the conference ended, the North's Foreign Ministry issued its blustery statement that -- the South Koreans believe -- signaled flexibility on that demand.
There are other signs of diplomatic activity. Yoon Young Kwan, South Korea's foreign minister, traveled to Washington March 26 with what was reported to be a "road map" for restarting negotiations with North Korea.
One source in Seoul said the plan "was to tell the United States that the law-and-order approach doesn't work. We need more carrots-and-stick approach."
A source in Washington familiar with State Department deliberations said one of those carrots was the idea of a summit between South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, an idea U.S. officials discouraged, he said.
"Efforts are underway to make things happen," one State Department official said. "But we're not even at a point yet where there's a formula to discuss."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Karzai Threatens Officials Who Do Not Fight Taliban
By REUTERS
April 12, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/international-afghan-karzai.html
KABUL - Afghanistan's U.S.- backed President Hamid Karzai threatened on Saturday to fire provincial officials who failed to act against remnants of the Taliban regime blamed for a series of recent attacks around the country.
Karzai, whose power barely stretches outside Kabul despite nearly a year and a half in office, told a gathering of provincial governors they had a duty to provide security and defense for the people.
``From now on I want the governors, especially those in the border areas, to resist strongly those Afghans and foreigners who come to Afghanistan and harm the country,'' he said.
``And I shall not show any leniency or consideration to anyone in government responsible for defense of the country who does not carry out his responsibility. He will be dismissed, he will be punished.''
The past three weeks have seen a spate of attacks in southern provinces blamed on remnants of the Taliban regime ousted in late 2001. Government officials say the attacks appear to have been orchestrated from neighboring Pakistan.
The attacks have included the killing of soldiers near the Pakistani border, the burning of several schools, rocket attacks and the killings of a Red Cross worker and two U.S. soldiers.
``This soil is Afghanistan's soil,'' Karzai said. ``Safeguarding Afghanistan's frontiers is the duty of the Afghan nation. If we can't defend it from a few terrorists or foreigners, then we should go.''
He said authorities must arrest all those involved in anti-government activities.
``There were hundreds of thousands of Taliban; they went to their homes. We need the ones who cause problems in Afghanistan under the guise of the Taliban. We need the big Taliban, those guilty of oppression.''
Karzai said these included top commanders Mullah Akhtar Usmani and Mullah Dadullah, who recently announced that the Taliban was regrouping to regain power.
Karzai also reiterated an order issued last year barring provincial officials from holding both military and civilian posts, which the government has had difficulty enforcing.
He also told the governors all custom revenues collected in the provinces must be handed over to the central government.
Most customs revenues are generated in the western province of Herat, but only a proportion reaches the central government.
The powerful governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, who is said to earn millions of dollars monthly from customs, was not seen at Saturday's meeting, which is expected to last for two more days.
Karzai said customs revenues were the property of the state and vital to its efforts to relieve poverty. ``They are not the property of a governor or official; we cannot have a situation where one province lives in tranquility...and another province dies of hunger,'' he said.
--------
Still Paying for Past Support of Taliban, Pashtuns Flee South Toward Safety
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/asia/12REFU.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, April 9 - Families fleeing harassment, beatings and extortion in northern Afghanistan arrive almost weekly at an impromptu refugee camp here, seeking shelter in patched tents on a dusty lot beside the city's animal market.
More than a year after the Taliban government fell and commanders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance took over power in the north of the country, ethnic Pashtuns in the region are still suffering reprisals and harassment for their past support of the Taliban government.
Despite a series of efforts by government commissions, and promises from the leaders of the north to stop the violence, the harassment continues, deepening the ethnic divisions in the region and adding to the quarter of a million displaced people already in southern Afghanistan.
Gul Makai, 50, with her nephew's two children, was among the recent arrivals, having traveled hundreds of miles from the northern province of Jowzjan 10 days ago. "They were harassing us, they stole all our property," she said. She blamed the harassment on local Uzbeks in Jowzjan, six or seven armed men who would drive into their settlement.
"No one would venture outside the village and the women don't go out of their houses, because they are scared," she said. "My nephew went out to the desert to collect wood, and they arrested him. They caught him and beat him and left him there. He came back walking very slowly that evening."
The Uzbeks gave no reason for the beating, she said, but there was no doubt in her mind: "It is because he is Pashtun."
Wali Jan, 38, arrived 12 days ago with his wife and four children. They had traveled for three days from the province of Faryab, where some of the worst reprisals have been occurring over the last year. "It was so difficult," he said. "They were harassing us, taking money and sheep. We do not know if they were soldiers or local people, but they had weapons."
He said he came from a wealthy family, and so had been able to resist the pressure better than most people, buying off the men each of the four times they came to beat him.
But his fear for the women and children in the family was growing steadily. He finally decided to act when a group of Uzbeks turned up two weeks ago and announced they had come to disarm the village. "They demanded my weapon," he said. "I said I did not have one. So they beat me and said, 'Give us money, you were with the Taliban.'"
The next morning Wali Jan packed up and left. Only 20 families remain in the village, where 200 had once lived, he said. "If the situation is the same, I am sure they will leave too," he said. "And if the situation stays the same, we will never go back."
Wali Jan's plight illuminates the enormous problem Afghanistan still has with half a million internally displaced people, the bulk of them - more than 300,000 - living in the south. About 25,000 of those have fled political repression, according to Peter Deck, the officer in charge of displaced people for the United Nations assistance mission in Kandahar. The vast majority of them - 85 per cent - are Kuchis, nomadic tribes and farmers whose livelihoods have been devastated by the five-year drought.
It has landed the fledgling Afghan government with an enormous burden. It is a political problem, too, as Pashtuns in the south demand their share of humanitarian assistance, as well as protection so they can return to their homes.
Mr. Deck estimates that only 8,000 of the displaced may venture home to the north this year - if the security and political situation improves enough to allow their return. Fighting in the north this week put off one group ready to discuss going back.
In a United Nations initiative with the central government, the powerful regional leaders of northern Afghanistan have pledged to support the return of Pashtuns. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord of the north, even vowed to hold accountable any of his commanders found harassing Pashtuns.
Yet the Pashtuns in the camps say they do not trust such promises. A group of elders who met with a delegation from the United Nations and the central government this week in the Zahre Dasht camp, west of Kandahar, pleaded to be given land around the camp so they could stay permanently and make a living.
"While there remains a single warlord in the northern provinces, we will never return," said one of the elders, Abdul Malik, who fled the fighting in Faryab Province seven years ago.
"We are certainly not going now because there have been some clashes just now," said another, Muhammad Khan, also from Faryab.
The government official who met with them, Sayed Usman, from the ministry of Rural Development, admitted that until local commanders were disarmed and replaced, there would be little improvement. Disarmament and taking on the regional commanders and warlords are the most challenging tasks facing the government, and Mr. Usman said he could not see much hope of success before elections in 2004, when there could be a shift in power.
--------
U.S Commander Wants Afghan Border Patrols
April 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-US-Commander.html
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) -- The U.S. commander in Afghanistan is calling for coordinated border patrols by Pakistan and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan to cut off escape routes for terrorists.
``We hope they (Pakistan) will put more troops operating in the field and join us in running complementary operations on our respective sides of the border,'' Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill told The Associated Press in an interview. Advertisement
Better coordination would help tighten the noose on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and help stop other terrorists from escaping across the border, McNeill said.
McNeill indicated the 23-nation coalition force could scale back its presence in Afghanistan by July 2004, when Afghanistan is due to elect a government to replace the interim administration of President Hamid Karzai.
By that time, the general said, the core of Afghanistan's new national army should have reached its full size. U.S., British and French forces have trained about 3,000 soldiers so far, and will continue to train an additional 800 men every five weeks.
Coalition forces will stay in Afghanistan at least until the elections and some countries will likely stay on after negotiating military cooperation agreements with the newly elected government, he said.
McNeill's prediction for phasing down by mid-2004 may be optimistic, however, in view of the difficulties Karzai's government has faced so far in fashioning a cohesive force from the factional fighters who have dominated Afghanistan for decades.
McNeill spoke inside the U.S. headquarters for the war in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Base, from where he commands a multinational force of 11,500 troops.
On Wednesday, a U.S. warplane supporting Afghan allies mistakenly bombed a house, killing 11 civilians, while pursuing attackers who had earlier fought with Pakistani soldiers at the border. McNeill said the incident was ``very tragic.''
He said the coalition was taking the fight to the former Afghan rulers, Taliban, as well as al-Qaida.
``We're on the offensive and we're going to stay on the offensive,'' he said. ``We're not allowing them the opportunity to hunker down in any one place and establish themselves.''
About 8,500 U.S. troops form the backbone of the coalition force in Afghanistan.
He praised the Pakistani efforts, saying they had captured some 450 terrorists, including high-ranking Taliban and al-Qaida members.
As for hunting down the al-Qaida leaders responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, McNeill said he doesn't know whether bin Laden is dead or alive. However, the former head of the Taliban regime, Mullah Omar, has slipped in and out of Afghanistan on more than one occasion, he said.
``Some very senior Afghan leaders tell me that if Mullah Omar walked in the room, they wouldn't know who he was unless somebody told them,'' McNeill said. ``He's almost like a ghost.''
``I can tell he's probably moving around a bit,'' said looking out into the war room. ``But if he goes in the areas where he used to find sanctuary, he will now find coalition forces.''
-------- chemical weapons
Suspected chemical warhead found in Kirkuk
Ex-Iraqi colonel says he has chemical weapons information
From Thomas Nybo,
CNN
Saturday, April 12, 2003
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/12/sprj.irq.chemical/index.html
KIRKUK, Iraq (CNN) -- Weapons experts were called Saturday to an occupied northern Iraqi air base in Kirkuk to determine if a warhead discovered there is laden with a chemical agent.
On Friday, a former Iraqi air force colonel claiming to be the former base commander told U.S. military officials he knew of 120 missiles within about an 18-mile radius of the city -- 24 of them carrying chemical munitions, according to an Army intelligence posting at the airfield's military headquarters.
The man said he had been freed recently from an Iraqi prison, military intelligence said.
The warhead was found in a box Friday during routine operations to secure the airfield by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade. It is about the width of a coffee can and marked with a green band that military sources said is the universal symbol for chemical weaponry.
Two initial "improved chemical agent monitor" (ICAM) tests showed trace amounts of a nerve agent on the baseball bat-length warhead -- at the rear and in the middle where there is a screwed-down circular area about the size of a quarter.
ICAM is a miniature chemical agent detector that allows for simultaneous detection of nerve and blister vapors and aerosol agents.
The warhead tested at one bar on a six-bar scale, which would be consistent with leakage from a chemically armed weapon, military sources said.
But two subsequent ICAM tests showed zero on the scale, contradicting the earlier tests.
A soldier who performed the second pair of tests told CNN that little should be gathered from the findings, because no definitive answers would emerge until chemical experts arrive at the base and break into the warhead itself.
Soldiers were standing guard Saturday outside the storage facility where the warhead was found.
A large wooden box next to the one with the warhead contained a 13-foot missile, one of many troops have found at the base.
Some underground bunkers the size of basketball courts were discovered piled high with cans of munitions, crates of missiles and 1,000-pound bombs.
"It appears as though the air base was evacuated hastily," said Maj. Rob Gowan, a public affairs officer. "A lot of indicators seem to say that the Iraqi forces that were here left very quickly."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This report was written in accordance with Pentagon ground rules allowing so-called embedded reporting, in which journalists join deployed troops. Among the rules accepted by all participating news organizations is an agreement not to disclose sensitive operational details. Thomas Nybo is accompanying U.S. troops with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
-------- europe
Hungarians Give Big 'Yes' to EU Membership
April 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-eu-hungary-vote.html
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarians gave a widely expected huge ``Yes'' in a referendum on Saturday to joining the EU next year, but only 45.6 percent of the country's eight million voters bothered to turn out.
With more than 99 percent of ballots counted, preliminary results from the electoral committee showed 83.76 percent of those who voted in the former communist state had backed accession to the European Union in May 2004.
The turnout was well below forecasts of more than 60 percent, but the result never seemed in doubt as all four parties in Hungary's parliament had joined in a massive campaign since February for a ``Yes'' vote.
For many Hungarians, the main reason for joining the bloc of wealthier European nations was economic. Unfettered access to the EU will help solidify free market reforms implemented since the fall of communism in 1989.
``Europe is a chance and an opportunity for each citizen of the republic... We arrive into a richer, safer and calmer world. Into a reunified Europe,'' Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy told thousands of cheering Hungarians on the banks of the Danube River as celebratory fireworks lit up the night sky.
TEN NEW STATES SET TO JOIN EU
The Hungarian vote is the third in a series of ballots meant to seal enlargement of the EU next year to 25 members with the entry of 10 mostly former communist East European countries. Slovenia and Malta have already approved accession.
But some Hungarians fear membership of an enlarged EU will dilute the sovereignty of a country like Hungary, and that those in rural areas are likely to see fewer benefits from the increased investment and wealth that is expected.
``I was certain that a 'Yes' to the European Union would win over the politically driven petty bickering,'' Foreign Minister Laszlo Kovacs told Reuters, referring to some members of parliament who had tried to play the nationalist card during the campaign.
Financial markets have mostly factored in a ``Yes'' vote, though analysts say Hungary's forint currency could get a boost.
``After the fall of communism, the country was split into two parts, losers and winners... We should learn from the regime change by saying our job now is to make all Hungarians winners in EU accession,'' said former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
``The hardest part of the job still lies ahead. Instead of big words, we will need big deeds now,'' he said.
Millions of dollars were spent on advertising to urge Hungarians to take the final step toward a foreign policy goal their governments have been working for since the end of communism in 1989.
Zsuzsa Sandor told Reuters outside a polling station in central Budapest: ``Of course I voted 'Yes'. I can very well remember the 60s and 70s (in Hungary) and I don't want those times to come back ever.
``It's very simple. I want to belong to Europe, and I want my children and grandchildren to belong there too.''
Pensioner Gyorgyi Csurgay said: ``It's 'No' for me. I cannot make ends meet on my pension as it is. Why should it be better for me in the EU? There's nothing in it for me.''
-------- iran
Iran may consider resuming ties with U.S.
By Modher Amin
(UPI) From the International Desk
4/12/2003
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030412-122035-6148r
TEHRAN, Iran, April 12 -- Iran on Saturday hinted at ways the Shiite Muslim country could resume ties with the United States, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
In an interview with the Rahbord (Strategy) periodical, published by the Center for Strategic Studies, Iran's powerful former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said the two decade-long freeze on relations between Iran and the United States could be resolved either through a popular vote or a decision by Iran's arbitration body, the Expediency Council.
"One solution is to hold a referendum to see what the society says provided the Majlis (parliament) approves it and then it is accepted by the supreme leader," Rafsanjani, who heads the council, was quoted as saying.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the supreme leader of Iran, the most senior cleric in the religious state.
"The other solution is that the problem is referred to us (the Expediency Council) and we discuss it and announce what is expedient. Of course, the leader should approve this too," he further said, adding that is usually the case.
Rafsanjani's comments, particularly his references to the role of the Expediency Council, suggested Iran's leadership may be ready to crack open the door to relations with the United States.
The Expediency Council arbitrates in disputes between Iran's two main governmental bodies, the legislative Majlis and the watchdog Guardian Council. The latter reviews parliamentary bills to ensure they comply with both Iran's constitution and Islam's Sharia law. The traditionally conservative Guardian Council thus wields substantial power over the elected government.
"When an issue turns into a problem, it is referred to the (Expediency) Council to make a decision on that," Rafsanjani explained.
The United States and Iran cut diplomatic ties in April 1980 after militant Islamic students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 staffers hostage for 444 days. The Algiers accord, signed in late 1980 between the two countries, detailed the conditions under which the hostages were released.
Subsequent attempts at rapprochement have failed, however. Tehran resents U.S. support for Israel; Washington, in turn, alleges Tehran backs militant Palestinian groups that hinder the Middle East peace process.
U.S. President George W. Bush dubbed the Islamic republic, and pointedly "its unelected few," as part of an "axis of evil" that tries to develop weapons of mass destruction. Tehran has repeatedly denied the accusation.
Diplomatic sources, however, say that direct U.S.-Iran contacts have taken place in recent years, particularly over the crises in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and most recently Iraq. Tehran nevertheless eyes with concern the build-up of American military presence in the region from Central Asia to the Gulf states.
In the same interview, Rafsanjani alluded to the possibility of restoring ties as well with Egypt. Iran cut off relations with Egypt in the late 1970s after then-president Anwar Sadat signed an agreement with Israel that led to relations between Arab Egypt and the Jewish state. Cairo also received the ailing Mohammed Reza Pahlavi after Iran's fundamentalist movement deposed the autocratic shah from the throne in 1979.
In 2000, the presidents of Iran and Egypt, Mohammad Khatami and Hosni Mubarak, spoke by telephone for the first time. However, in January IRNA reported Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, as saying: "Ties with Egypt are not on our agenda at all."
-------- iraq
Suspected chemical warhead found in Kirkuk
Ex-Iraqi colonel says he has chemical weapons information
From Thomas Nybo,
CNN
Saturday, April 12, 2003
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/12/sprj.irq.chemical/index.html
KIRKUK, Iraq (CNN) -- Weapons experts were called Saturday to an occupied northern Iraqi air base in Kirkuk to determine if a warhead discovered there is laden with a chemical agent.
On Friday, a former Iraqi air force colonel claiming to be the former base commander told U.S. military officials he knew of 120 missiles within about an 18-mile radius of the city -- 24 of them carrying chemical munitions, according to an Army intelligence posting at the airfield's military headquarters.
The man said he had been freed recently from an Iraqi prison, military intelligence said.
The warhead was found in a box Friday during routine operations to secure the airfield by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade. It is about the width of a coffee can and marked with a green band that military sources said is the universal symbol for chemical weaponry.
Two initial "improved chemical agent monitor" (ICAM) tests showed trace amounts of a nerve agent on the baseball bat-length warhead -- at the rear and in the middle where there is a screwed-down circular area about the size of a quarter.
ICAM is a miniature chemical agent detector that allows for simultaneous detection of nerve and blister vapors and aerosol agents.
The warhead tested at one bar on a six-bar scale, which would be consistent with leakage from a chemically armed weapon, military sources said.
But two subsequent ICAM tests showed zero on the scale, contradicting the earlier tests.
A soldier who performed the second pair of tests told CNN that little should be gathered from the findings, because no definitive answers would emerge until chemical experts arrive at the base and break into the warhead itself.
Soldiers were standing guard Saturday outside the storage facility where the warhead was found.
A large wooden box next to the one with the warhead contained a 13-foot missile, one of many troops have found at the base.
Some underground bunkers the size of basketball courts were discovered piled high with cans of munitions, crates of missiles and 1,000-pound bombs.
"It appears as though the air base was evacuated hastily," said Maj. Rob Gowan, a public affairs officer. "A lot of indicators seem to say that the Iraqi forces that were here left very quickly."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This report was written in accordance with Pentagon ground rules allowing so-called embedded reporting, in which journalists join deployed troops. Among the rules accepted by all participating news organizations is an agreement not to disclose sensitive operational details. Thomas Nybo is accompanying U.S. troops with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
----
Troops Find Huge Underground Complex
Pressurized network of rooms holds decontamination gear for hundreds of senior Iraqi leaders; Officer says Hussein "was quite prepared to fight a chemical or biological war."
By David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 12, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-iraq-041203bunker_lat,0,5758884.story
BAGHDAD -- American troops have discovered a vast underground bunker complex equipped with pressurized offices and bedrooms, gas masks and chemical protective gear, and enough sophisticated chemical and biological decontamination equipment to protect hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of senior Iraqi leaders and commanders.
The complex, discovered Friday by troops of the Third Infantry Division, was inspected today by a military chemical team from division headquarters. The team described the complex, located next to gardens on the sprawling Presidential Palace grounds, as a command and control center designed to protect the Iraqi elite from chemical or biological agents.
"He was quite prepared to fight a chemical or biological war," Maj. Keith Reed, the division's deputy chemical officer, said of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. "This is a very, very interesting facility."
The complex, which stretches underground for several hundred feet in all directions, is located beneath a multi-story, pale yellow stone building that looks similar to other grand structures on the two-mile-long palace grounds on the west bank of the Tigris River. Compartments within the bunkers are separated by three-inch-thick steel doors left open when Iraqis fled the complex, apparently in recent days or weeks.
"It's a very well-built, top-of-the-line system -- over-pressurized, double-sealed, with full filtration," said Lt. Col. David Velazquez, the division's chemical officer. "I've seen other pressure systems, and this one is first-rate."
The chemical officers said the over-pressurization sealed the complex off from contaminated outside air, while the ventilation system insured a supply of clean air.
Velazquez and Reed said they could not determine from a preliminary inspection whether the complex was intended to withstand a chemical or biological attack by Iran during Iraq's war with its Persian neighbor in the 1980s; a feared attack by the U.S.-led coalition; or a release of chemical or biological agents by the Hussein regime against U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians -- or all three.
A Times reporter who toured the darkened bunkers two hours before the chemical team arrived found a decontamination center just below the entrance to the complex, which is reached through a narrow stairway off the building's main lobby. A wide passageway led to a small reception room posted with decontamination instructions in Arabic and an arrow pointing to "Decontamination Showers."
The center is equipped with showers sealed off on two sides by steel doors. On one side are syringes containing nerve gas antidotes, eyewash, kits with decontamination swabs and chemicals, and sealed bins for decontaminated clothing. Beyond the showers are lockers that apparently had contained fresh clothing. Through another steel door lay a small medical facility, apparently designed for doctors to examine people emerging from the showers.
Beyond the medical facility is a series of hallways leading to bunkrooms, apparently for soldiers or security officers. Storage shelves in some bunkrooms contained German-made gas masks, gloves and other chemical and biological protective gear.
Further down were carpeted private bedrooms with bathrooms featuring marble floors. Other hallways contained offices, meeting rooms and two large conference rooms equipped with microphones, video conferencing equipment and maps with military grids.
"It's basically a command and control center designed to keep chemical or biological agents out," Maj. Reed said.
The chemical team inspected the complex for almost two hours, discovering an entrance to an upper central area of the building that was blocked by a submarine-type air-lock door that was sealed shut. A U.S. Special Forces team arrived to secure the building.
"There are at least one or two floors accessible only through that air lock," Maj. Reed told the Special Forces team. "Everything is designed to support something inside. There is definitely something of great interest in those mid-level areas."
The chemical officers said a military team would blow open the doors later to allow for further inspections. If any chemical or biological agents are found, they said, the military's 75th Exploitation Task Force will be alerted. The task force, now in southern Iraq, is searching for evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
The inspection today was conducted with flashlights in the darkened complex, which is without electricity or water. Though the entrance and lobby of the building above the complex was badly damaged by U.S. attacks, the underground bunkers were untouched.
"You could stay in here and easily survive a chemical attack outside," Maj. Reed said, shining his flashlight on a security room equipped with a bank of security cameras.
Most rooms had minimal furniture and furnishings, suggesting they had been cleaned out by Iraqi officials. In the sealed-off environment, there was very little dirt or dust, though a stale, musty odor prevailed because the ventilation system was not functioning. A large underground kitchen - featuring walk-in stainless steel freezers, stoves, ovens, double boilers, an electric meat cutter and empty pantries -- was almost antiseptically clean.
Inside the main control room, Maj. Mark Rasins, operations officer for the Fourth Battalion of the Third Infantry, whose Assassin Company discovered the complex, bent down in the dark and pulled out a ledger wedged beneath a cabinet. It contained detailed schematics of the entire complex, plus a guide to what was contained in each section or compartment.
"Jackpot," Rasins said after an Arabic interpreter, Hakim Kawy Ashalan, read a summary on the ledger's cover.
"This is very important," Ashalan said. "It tells you exactly what is going on here."
The ledger mentioned a subterranean area one level below the bunker containing a "special room," number 309.
The ledger was handed to Sgt. Spencer Willardson of the 141th Military Intelligence Battalion, who was searching the complex for Iraqi documents. Willardson then assisted Maj. Rasins, Ashalan and another interpreter, who gave his name as Abdul, as they shone their lights on a pegboard where scores of keys were hung.
On their knees in the dark, the interpreters inspected the keys, each attached to a heavy metal tag stamped with room numbers. They did not locate number 309, but they did find keys to a "translation room" that possibly contained translated documents, to an information desk, to "gas storage," and to "special latrine number one."
Rasins pried open a locked desk drawer, revealing a tangled pile of more marked keys. "Oh, my!" Abdul said, and began rifling through the keys.
From one paper key tag, Ashalan read a note, apparently from one officer to another: "In front of the glass door, there's another key hidden there."
Down a corridor, outside room 319, a warning light above a door was painted with a skull and crossbones and "C02," carbon dioxide. On a steel door nearby was written, in Arabic, "Do NOT open this door until green light appears. Area could be contaminated."
Beside another steel door down a different corridor, a pressure gauge had been installed with a green light to show when the pressure had been equalized on both sides of the door seal.
Yet another blue steel door, this one numbered "24" and sealed with a massive yellow padlock, contained a warning: "It is absolutely prohibited to open this door." American forces planned to force the door open later.
In the decontamination room, a series of Arabic signs provided detailed commands:
"Put your contaminated clothes inside this bag and then put it securely in the container provided"
"Put on new boots."
"Wash your hands in the liquid provided in the bowl."
"You must have a gas mask. Take it off here and deposit in container."
The shower stalls were divided into three sections -- first, ordinary water, then "special water to remove contamination," followed by a rinse in ordinary water.
Stacked on shelves were military decontamination kits, dated May 1988. They are similar to kits carried by U.S. soldiers and Marines during much of the Iraqi campaign. They contained syringes of atropine for nerve agents, blotting paper for cleaning exposed skin, cleansing powder and sterile eyewash.
A sign next to the kits advised: "Use these as quickly as possible."
Another sign provided instructions for injecting atropine into the thigh and for ingesting sodium bicarbonate if contaminated in the mouth or throat.
The venting, electrical and security systems, along with the decontamination equipment, were stamped with the names of companies based in Germany, Serbia and Russia. Most of the equipment and internal systems were dated 1987, four years before U.N. sanctions were imposed in Iraq.
A surveillance camera was stamped "Helsinki." An electrical and air filtration panel was marked with the name of a firm called Energoinvest. Electric power equipment, dated 1987, was stamped with the name Flakt . "Piller" was stamped on valves and pipes, and the German company Drager manufactured the gas masks.
An American company, Insta-Foam Products of Joliet, Ill., manufactured expanding polyeurethene foam sealant in cans found inside the complex.
----
For Iraq's Leaders and Loyalists, a Vanishing Act
Once-Feared Saddam Loyalists Abandoned Baghdad Overnight
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 12, 2003; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10766-2003Apr11?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 11 -- On the night before Baghdad's fall, Hussein, a Baath Party militiaman, saw the omens of a gathering disaster.
Soon after midnight, he said, the five commanders of his unit went home unexpectedly. They said they were leaving to have dinner. Three hours later, Hussein and his 80 youthful fighters came under attack. They were hit not by U.S. forces but by neighbors who were worried the fighters had invited U.S. bombing by stashing grenades, light artillery and rocket-propelled grenades in their base at the Future Girls' School in Sayidiya.
The firefight lasted 30 minutes -- complete with a rocket-propelled grenade fired by the militia into a house.
"It came from the sky and then it came from the people," said Hussein, a vocational student, his face still tinged with fear in recounting the early hours of Wednesday morning when the Baath Party fighters were besieged. "We couldn't get out. We were surrounded."
In groups of two, they fled by car and on foot to another Baath Party office in the nearby neighborhood of Saddam. They were tired, terrified and hungry, having lived on potatoes for days. On the city's outskirts loomed the frightening firepower of U.S. forces preparing to storm the city. Their leadership was gone, their morale was sapped, and they plotted their next move.
"We talked among ourselves," said Hussein, looking older than his 23 years and reluctant to give his last name for fear of retribution from a city with vengeance on its mind. "We made a decision, and everyone decided to go home. We all took off."
Hussein's account casts light on Baghdad's decisive moment, when thousands of loyalists to President Saddam Hussein simply faded away and his government -- once so feared and powerful -- just vanished.
From dusk to dawn, Baghdad's defenses virtually disintegrated. Thousands of Baath Party militiamen, who had manned every street corner, bridge and intersection, changed into street clothes and went home. Saddam's Fedayeen, black-clad militiamen, who had vowed to fight to the death, were gone by morning, some of them leaving their weapons behind. The remnants of the Republican Guard, the vaunted pillar of the regime's defense, played so small a role that Baghdad fell far more easily than the restive cities of the south.
In the days since, Baghdad residents have asked the question: Why did their city collapse with barely a fight?
Senior Baath officials insist orders were given to disband, and residents confirm that the departure of higher-level officials seemed systematic and deliberate. But the circumstances of that order -- in particular, who gave it -- remain a mystery.
"There is something dubious, something unclear, something unexplainable about what happened that night," said Wamid Nadhme, a professor of political science at Baghdad University and a rare voice of criticism of the government under Hussein's rule.
As in so many times of tumult, the unknown has given rise to rumors spoken with the authority of truth. Many of them revolve around the puzzle of what happened to all the country's senior officials, not one of them known to be captured. Their departure seemed as striking as it was hasty. Only Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf was seen in the days before Baghdad's fall. In the unfinished house of Ali Hassan Majeed, Hussein's cousin and one of the government's most feared and despised officials, looters stumbled across the discarded Iraqi identification card of his wife Shima and citizenship papers of his daughter Hiba and son Abdulla.
In fevered gossip, many have insisted that Hussein dispatched his family to Damascus in two or three buses two weeks before the war's end. Others speculate that he and others went north to Mosul or Tikrit or sought refuge with tribes on whom the government had showered patronage -- cars, guns and money -- since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
For many, the government's fall was inevitable. Its 35 years of absolute power engendered such loathing that no one was willing to defend it, a disintegration akin to the abrupt collapse of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
But others voice shame at how Iraq's army -- still a source of pride to some amid the government's tyranny -- failed to defend Iraq.
"After the provinces lasted 20 days, I expected Baghdad to resist four months," said Adel Kamel, a goldsmith in the neighborhood of Bayaa. "Nobody expected Baghdad to collapse in two days. Where's the Republican Guard, where's the army, where's the government, where are the people from Tikrit? He should have given up from the beginning, he should have resigned and respected the people."
"Everyone wonders where they went," said Abu Omar, sitting in a minibus in central Baghdad.
As he spoke, looters systematically dismantled the Ministry of Higher Education. Black smoke poured out of the building, and flames danced over the nearby Ministry of Industry. Young boys wheeled out carts stacked with wood drawers and copiers, and women in black chadors hauled away office chairs. Records from offices were scattered across the street.
"Is this the liberation of our country?" he asked.
One senior Baath Party official said he was told by his supervisor to leave his post on Tuesday and return to his home. The reason given was that the party's militia rifles and rocket-propelled grenades were no match for the might of American forces.
Other residents report that the word went out soon after dusk, as policemen joined the party militiamen in abandoning their posts.
Naseer Hassan, a manager at the international airport, said he was approached by a police car at an intersection along Palestine Street at 6:30 p.m. The blue-uniformed policemen said the city was no longer safe.
"Be careful tonight, we're going to leave the streets," the 46-year-old Hassan recalled one of the officers saying. "The Americans are very close. If we stay here we have two choices -- either they kill us or they take us prisoner."
In his neighborhood of Zayuna, along his street there were five stations of the Baath Party, 10 militiamen in each, who had patrolled the city night and day after the war's start. When Hassan woke up, "they were all gone."
"They were frightened," he said, sitting in the walled garden of his house today. "These people are not trained to face tanks or a real army. They know how to use a gun, but not like a professional soldier."
That was the sentiment of Hussein, the militiaman in the neighborhood of Sayidiya. In a conversation in his neighborhood, where he stayed behind doors to dodge neighbors' wrath, he recounted the monotony of service in the militia and the collapse of its defense.
From the war's start, he had the graveyard shift, standing outside the party's base at the Future Girls' School with a Kalashnikov assault rifle from midnight to 4 a.m. The rest of the day, he said, "I just sat." With just a year in the party, he did not receive one of the stipends, ranging from $20 to $100 a month, given to more senior members. He and others relied on food from home. They had little water and less sleep.
Like others, he never bargained for a fight with an army. At one point, when the Americans first entered the city, he said the senior party leaders threatened him and others with a gun to make sure they would fight. But it was the leadership's desertion on the morning of the city's fall that ended any pretense of defending Baghdad in what virtually everyone considered a doomed fight.
"We saw that they were hiding," he said.
But he's left ashamed of Baghdad's defeat -- which he calls "a pity." He worries about vendettas that could be waged against the legions of people associated with the government, and he has stayed far from the base and the people who fired on it Wednesday morning. Since the city's fall, he insists, he hasn't slept at all.
As for his future, Hussein said simply, "It's up to the mercy of God."
----
U.S. Steps Aside to Let Iraqis Fight 'Mujahideen'
Sat April 12, 2003
By Sean Maguire
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=focusIraqNews&storyID=2554114
BAGHDAD - U.S. Marines pulled back from a dense slum area of Baghdad on Saturday to allow local people to hunt down non-Iraqi "Mujahideen" volunteer fighters holed up in the district.
"The locals said they wanted to take charge of Saddam City and we said: 'Roger that'," Lieutenant-Colonel Lew Craparotta, commander of a Marine unit that moved back from the fringes of the suburb, told Reuters.
Local leaders told U.S. officers that Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians who volunteered to defend Iraq against U.S. and British forces were still a threat on the streets of Saddam City in northeastern Baghdad.
Daytime patrols by U.S. forces were hindering rather than helping local Iraqi militias trying to stop the looting and mayhem that have engulfed the capital since Saddam's rule collapsed, U.S. officers said.
"It's much easier for them to identify the enemy than for us. We really can't tell who is who," Craparotta said. He said the pullback deal had been struck at a meeting between a Marine colonel and local religious and civic leaders.
The U.S. withdrawal will allow local men to carry weapons openly, set up checkpoints and cordon off areas where they suspect the Arab volunteer fighters are hiding.
Marines are under orders to treat anyone with a weapon as hostile, and local people are worried their militia in civilian clothes could mistakenly be attacked by U.S. forces.
FIERCE FIGHT
Craparotta said it was not clear how many "third country nationals," as the U.S. describes them, were in Saddam City.
Iraq has said thousands of volunteers from across the Arab world came to the country to help fight the U.S.-led invasion.
Local militia and the "Mujahideen" fought fiercely through Friday night until after dawn, with the sound of sustained small arms and heavy machinegun fire suggesting substantial clashes between the two groups. U.S. forces were not involved.
On Saturday, sporadic small arms fire erupted in the poor district, indicating the "flushing out" operation was ongoing.
Baghdad is saturated with weapons, so both the militia and the Arab volunteer fighters have easy access to large arms and ammunition caches.
Saddam City is a large area of closely-packed two-story dwellings. Its peacetime population of two million is largely Shi'ite Muslim, and was regarded with suspicion by the predominantly Sunni Muslim elite that ran Saddam's administration. "We were told there is only about 25 percent of the population resident now. The rest fled, but as they work their way back it's going to get busier," Craparotta said.
A Marine convoy that passed around the edges of Saddam City on Saturday saw shuttered shops and businesses and evidence of looting. Local people had put obstacles on the roads to slow traffic and prevent drive-by attacks.
The U.S. has been criticized for not doing more to restore law and order once it had toppled Saddam.
Its attack units, such as the Marines, are ill-equipped for policing duties or for humanitarian tasks like restoring water, power and medical services. Follow-on forces who can do civilian assistance are not yet on the horizon.
The city is not yet secure even for the military. Craparotta said a marine had been killed and another injured in an ambush on Friday night in the northern sector his unit has moved into.
The attack has been blamed on remnants of the Saddam Fedayeen, an irregular force loyal to Saddam that harassed U.S. troops throughout their three-week march northwards from Kuwait to Baghdad.
Craparotta said his Marines would be taking the fight to the Fedayeen by starting night patrols outside Saddam City.
"We'll try and kill some of these guys. We can't give them freedom of movement at night, that's when they become active," he said.
----
U.S. Offers Reward for News on Saddam, WMD
Sat April 12, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=focusIraqNews&storyID=2554236
AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar - The U.S. military is offering rewards for news that could help its forces capture Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his aides or find weapons of mass destruction, but declined to name the price on Saddam's head.
U.S. Army Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told a briefing at Central Command in Qatar on Saturday that a rewards program had been set up to pay for information "leading to the capture of key leaders."
A day earlier Brooks unveiled pictures of 55 "wanted" men from Saddam's administration, whom the United States wants chased, caught or killed.
"There are even more beyond that of lesser importance to the (Saddam) regime, but nevertheless of interest to us," he said.
Brooks said rewards were also on offer for information about possible weapons of mass destruction programs and the location of hidden weapons caches.
"I won't be too specific about prices. The price tags vary, (but) we think (they are) appropriate prices," he said.
Since launching a war on March 20 to overthrow Saddam and rid Iraq of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. has not been able to track down the Iraqi leader.
"Some regime leaders have been killed...but we don't have any specific reports on that particular individual," Brooks said.
----
Iraq's Liberation Front Attempts To Assassinate Chalabi
Iraqi opposition leader Chalabi escaped an assassination attempt unscathed
By Abdul Raheem Ali,
IOL Cairo Staff, (IslamOnline.net)
April 12 2003
http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2003-04/12/article08.shtml
CAIRO - A number of armed people belonging to the nascent National Front For The Liberation of Iraq (NFLI) tried Friday, April11 , to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, one of the prominent exile leaders and head of the Iraqi National Council (INC), in the southern city of An-Nasiriyah.
"They attacked a camp of Chalabi's devotees, leaving a number of them killed," Abdul Amir El-Rakabi, an Iraqi exile, told IslamOnline.net on Saturday, April12 .
"They narrowly missed Chalabi," he added.
The NFLI released Friday a statement entitled "Aggression Ends, Liberation Begins", a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net.
The statement said the new front "comprises local representatives of armed groups and resistance brigades, some still manning positions in Iraq along with Arab volunteer fighters."
"The front also is regrouping a host of Iraq's elite Republican Guard units and special forces after being disintegrated. Iraq may lose the war, but it would never surrender or die," underlined the statement.
As for the U.S. plans to install former army general Jay Garner in power in post-war Iraq, the Liberation Front underlined that the "Iraqi people will neither allow this Zionist general who is a personal friend to the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to rule them nor the thief of Baghdad Ahmad Chalabi."
The front further rebuffed other prominent Iraqi exiles such as Nezar al-Khazrgi, Nuri Abdul Razek, Mahdi Hafez, Adham al-Samra'I and their "ilk, as well as CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and Mossad (Israeli Intelligence) agents."
Opposition Leaders Flock Home
In the meantime, a number of the national Iraqi exiles came home to heal the rift and help regroup Iraq's mosaic powers to stand up to the invaders and force them out.
Rakabi said that Mohammed Baqir An-Nasiri, a prominent Shiite figure, came back to his home town of An-Nasiriyah, where he was given a welcome reception.
"His comeback would definitely produce a ground-shaking effect since he is one of Iraq's national icons, who vehemently oppose colonialism and the U.S. presence in Iraq. He would boost the morale of the Iraqis and make them act in unison in the face of the occupying forces," he said.
----
British-appointed Basra chief exposed as former Ba'athist
Troops protect sheikh after mob attack
Steven Morris and Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday April 12, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935204,00.html
Violence broke out in Basra after a sheikh asked by British commanders to become the new leader of the province was revealed to be a former brigadier-general in Saddam Hussein's army and a one-time member of the Ba'ath party.
Several hundred protesters hurled stones at the house of Sheikh Muzahim Mustafa Kanan Tamimi as he met other local dignitaries to discuss how to restore order.
The crowd accused Mr Tamimi and his tribe of collaborating with Saddam. The sheikh's supporters armed themselves and accused the protesters, members of a rival clan, of being Ba'ath party sympathisers themselves. Eventually the protesters were dispersed by British troops.
The scene illustrated the difficulties for the coalition in finding leaders acceptable to all Iraqis. Asked yesterday why Mr Tamimi was chosen, the armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, said: "We have to work with people on the ground."
It was a "fraught situation", he added, which meant British forces might have to deal with "compromised and tainted" Iraqis. "These are not easy issues," he said.
British commanders revealed earlier this week that they had met the sheikh - at the time not identified - who had offered to help restore stability in Basra, which has been beset by violent looting.
During the meeting, which the Guardian has learned was set up by British intelligence, Mr Tamimi was asked to set up a committee of local people to run the region.
An army spokesman, Chris Vernon, described him as "worthwhile, credible" and with "authority in the area".
On Thursday Mr Tamimi went public when he and 30 local leaders held their first council meeting at the home of a timber merchant.
The council named new heads of the police and civil defence department, and ordered the police to return to work by yesterday to help stop the looting.
Mr Tamimi, 50, would not discuss his past in detail with reporters. But he confirmed that he had been a general in the Iraqi army and at one time was in the Ba'ath party.
Some of his relatives have dismissed the notion that Mr Tamimi was sympathetic to Saddam, and claimed that his brother was a "martyr" who was taken and shot dead by secret police in 1994.
During the council meeting, a crowd carrying a loudspeaker and banners descended on Mr Tamimi's house in the Basra suburb of Zubayr.
They chanted: "No, no Ba'ath party, yes yes freedom," according to a Washington Post report.
One banner read in English: "The Iraqi people need the good man in the suitable location." A second in Arabic said: "No to any opportunities that will lead to a repetition of the Ba'ath party."
Stones were thrown at the house and a window was smashed. Several of the men in the house grabbed their weapons and prepared to defend themselves.
A doctor who watched the protest said: "We are seeing the future of Iraq right here and it's not good."
A religious leader, Sayed Naim al-Musawi, tried to calm the crowd. He told them they were protesting outside the "house of a martyr".
But he also expressed concern at Mr Tamimi's appointment.
He said of the British: "We don't want them to tell us what to do. It's insulting to educated people that anyone from coalition forces would declare one of the sheikhs to be controlling our people."
He said the British had been tricked into believing Mr Tamimi could impose order in Basra. "People want someone who was not a member of the Ba'ath party, who has no relation to the previous government," he said. "They want someone who has loyalty to the people of Iraq and not to the Ba'ath party."
The tribal system had been manipulated by the party to win over the tribes, he added.
The crowd left only once the British troops arrived and told them they could air their views at a meeting of leaders scheduled for today.
----
Baghdad on Edge After a Firefight and New Looting
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CND-MARI.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12 - Looting spread into new areas of Baghdad today as American troops discovered evidence of plans for widespread suicide attacks against them.
Scores of black leather vests stuffed with explosives and ball bearings were found by American marines at a Baghdad school and shown to reporters. And American forces in western Iraq stopped a busload of men who had $650,000 in cash and a letter offering rewards for killing American soldiers.
In the evening in central Baghdad, a fierce firefight broke out in an area that had been presumed secure for several days.
Outside the central Palestine Hotel, where hundreds of foreign reporters are based, American marines traded fire with Iraqis in a palace across the Tigris River. The Iraqis appeared to be an overlooked pocket of resistance in a building thought to have been cleared.
Tank and machine-gun fire resounded in the city streets, and marines rushed to pull back television cameramen. The marines took up positions behind concrete barriers at a street intersection.
As tensions and difficulties in Baghdad persisted, a force of several thousand marines prepared to move north tonight toward the Iraqi city of Tikrit, the tribal home of Saddam Hussein and a suspected last-ditch holdout of several senior members of his regime. The city is about 100 miles north of Baghdad.
The shooting and the threats in the capital, as well as the preparations to take Tikrit, illustrated the enduring military difficulties confronting American forces as pressure grows on them to turn their attention to ending looting and bringing a measure of order in occupied areas of Iraq. For now, the twin problems - military and civilian - appear to be placing severe strains on the limited American force in Baghdad.
But in a potentially important breakthrough, the top Iraqi scientific adviser, one of 55 people on America's most-wanted list of Iraqi leaders, surrendered to American forces, German television reported.
The officer, Gen. Amir al-Saadi, who was the chief liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors before the war, surrendered in Baghdad and was filmed by German ZDF television as he did so.
To now, American forces have not found the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that the Bush administration accused Mr. Hussein of having in the months before the conflict. The accusations formed a central part of the administration's argument for going to war. General Saadi could provide important information on this subject, but said as he surrendered that he felt "in no way guilty" and accused the United States of attacking without reason.
As looting continued throughout the city, a senior American officer said that the American military was moving to hire thousands of Iraqi police officers to control the capital.
Col. John Pomfret, who oversees the supply of ammunition and fuel to about 22,000 marines, said American officers have begun to interview the Iraqi officers and screen them for any association with Mr. Hussein. But he said most rank-and-file police officers would probably be accepted.
"We've talked to the local leaders," Colonel Pomfret said. "The average police officer is O.K. It was the leadership that was corrupt."
He added that American military engineers were also moving to restore electricity and water to the city. Both were cut off while Mr. Hussein still had authority, for reasons that remain unclear. Many electrical grids and pumping stations have been vandalized since the end of the fighting for Baghdad, Colonel Pomfret said, and are urgently in need of repair.
In discussing how the military would help restore power and water to the capital, Colonel Pomfret laid out a vision for the overall approach to the initial rebuilding of the country. He said the Iraqis would do the work and American forces would help by providing expertise and material.
Speaking of Iraqi engineers and professionals, he said: "We don't want to replace these people. We want to find them. If we take over the hospitals and the electrical grids, then we are running them, and not the Iraqis. That is not what we want."
As such problems are confronted, important military targets still remain. Marine commanders said today they intended to begin a rapid encirclement of Tikrit and give the holdouts a chance to surrender. If they resist, the commanders said, they will be destroyed. The bulk of the attacking force is some 300 armored vehicles, which the commanders here hope will move swiftly across the empty plains separating Baghdad and Tikrit.
The operation appears to be shaping up as the last major engagement of the war. American commanders in Baghdad said they expected serious resistance from the holdouts, who are thought to include several senior members of the Republican Guard and possibly some senior members of Mr. Hussein's regime.
"We are moving northward out of Baghdad," said Brig. Gen. John Kelly, the leader of a task force named Tripoli. "The purpose is that it is our understanding that Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units have moved in."
American forces are hoping to approach Tikrit by early Sunday morning. To do that, they would need to cross the Tigris, which, they said, was still being defended by Iraqi forces.
An advance team of American marines moving north found substantial pro-Hussein forces in the town of Baquba, about 25 miles north of Baghdad.
"We expect contact tonight," General Kelly said.
General Kelly did not say precisely who he believed was inside the city, but he indicated that it was mostly military, and not political leaders.
"Right now all the big guys have left the country," General Kelly said. "I don't know what `big guy' means anymore. Some of the Republic Guard have fallen back to Tikrit."
Mr. Hussein, who was born in the nearby village of Awaja, drew heavily on his tribal bonds in running the Iraqi regime. In Iraqi society, tribal ties are regarded as a nearly unbreakable bond of loyalty.
Many senior Iraqi officials and generals bear the name of the city as part of their names. One of them, for instance, was Abdullah Hussein al-Tikrit, the leader of the Al Nida division of the Republican Guard, who was gunned down in a battle with marines last week.
"Anyone who wants to surrender will be given time to come out and do so," General Kelly said.
If Tikrit falls, the last major urban center of resistance to the American invasion of Iraq will have disappeared. But from the evidence in Baghdad today, it appears likely that guerrilla resistance may continue for the foreseeable future.
Weapons found in two schools in the capital provided an ominous warning. In one were the vests stuffed with explosives that could be used for suicide bombings. In a second school, huge crates of weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-launched rockets were discovered.
Residents in one area, the Zayuna neighborhood of Baghdad, said that paramilitary forces came there about a month ago in pickup trucks. They unloaded the weapons into the two school compounds.
----
Mythical Garden of Eden now a wasteland
Al-Qurna,
April 12, 2003,
AFP
http://news.sify.com/cgi-bin/sifynews/news/content/news_fullstory_v2.jsp?article_oid=13006461&page_no=1
It is believed to be the Garden of Eden, the mythic place where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers join, the cradle of mankind where Adam came to pray to God.
Today it is a desolate wasteland of excrement, cracked paving stones and bullet holes. The eucalyptus known as Adam's tree, a place of holy pilgrimage for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike, stands bleached and dead.
"Once we believed it to be a little parcel of paradise on earth," said Qassem Khalif, an English teacher.
"Every generation was taught that this was the true Garden of Eden and this was Adam's tree, the place where he first spoke to God. Now, as you can see for yourself, it is ruined, there is no respect, no humanity, no..."
He struggled for the words. "No loving or kindness."
Whether you believe the holy tradition or not, Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the watery junction of Euphrates and the Tigris, was home to the first modern man.
It was here that the alphabet was invented and our days divided into 24 hours. It was here where the first epic poems were composed to hand down our collective history, and where we learned how to cultivate crops.
And it was here that Saddam Hussein's Baath party built a shrine in the 1970s, in this village known as Al-Qurna, trying to capitalise on the tourists who poured here in pilgrimage.
But within years the war had been begun with next-door Iran, remembered here by a shelter sandbagged against attack. The site fell into neglect and disrepair. The walls and floor of the shrine are now cracked and warped.
Beneath the Garden is a mudflat polluted with urban waste where children fight packs of mangy dogs before plunging in to swim and fish.
"Since those years Iraq has been all but closed. It is so foolish. How can the Garden of Eden be closed?" Khalif said.
"Look at what is left. It is a tragedy. We feel ashamed for we are its keepers. It is our truest hope that when peace comes to Iraq, the people of the world will come back here and pray again at Adam's tree," he said.
In the wake of the last Gulf War, Saddam made the region a victim of his scorched earth policy, punishment for the southern support of British and American forces and the failed uprising against him.
The ruling Baath drained the water and destroyed the life of the indigenous Marsh Arabs, descendants of the ancient people of Sumeria and Babylon.
It was rudely disguised as a feat of civil engineering designed to turn the salty marshes into cultivable farmland but the world saw it as no more than revenge.
Now after another war, British troops from the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment are greeted with waves and applause. They covered the army vehicles with pink frangipani and vibrant orange marigolds.
Ragged children ran from their fields, often with bundles of wood or tin pails of water on their heads while village elders waited on the corners to applaud the convoys.
Some homes, standing on emerald-green inlets and bounded by fragile fences of plaited rush, flew the white flag of surrender but it was unnecessary.
Children followed the troops carnival fashion and asked them to enter the Garden but they declined.
Major Mike Murdoch, the Royal Irish officer who took control of Al Qurna in the immediate hours after Saddam's rule here was ended, said: "It is no place for uniforms and weapons, it should never have been and it will not be now."
"For his actions we are grateful," said Khalif.
"We, the people of Al Qurna, believe this is a special place and it is our earnest hope that one day it will be restored to glory. For the glory of the Garden of Eden is the glory of God."
----
US Marines, Iraqi Cops To Jointly Patrol Baghdad
(AP)
April 12, 2003
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=32130
Baghdad, April 12: As looting spread to new areas of Baghdad, US marines agreed to joint patrols with the Iraqis to help restore order. The number one Iraqi wanted for questioning about Iraq's chemical weapons program turned himself into US authorities.
In Western Iraq, US forces seized a busload of men who had $630,000 in cash and a letter offering rewards for killing American soldiers. US spokesman Vincent Brooks said the 59 men, all of military age, were captured heading toward Iraq's border with Syria. He said he did not know the men's nationalities nor who wrote the letter offering rewards.
In Baghdad, US marines and an Iraqi police official said American forces and Iraqi police would soon begin joint patrols to try to stop looting and re-establish authority in the capital.
Iraqi police Col Mohammed Zaki said the patrols will start in a day or two, but the marines did not give a definite time for the patrols to begin. "It's going to happen sooner rather than later, said a marine leader Jeremy Stafford.
Also in the capital, Lt Gen Amir al-Saadi, a special adviser to president Saddam Hussein who once oversaw Iraq's chemical weapons programs, turned himself in to US forces, according to Germany's ZDF TV. The station said al-Saadi, who has a German wife, had asked it to send a crew to witness his surrender for his own safety.
The TV quoted al-Saadi as saying he knew nothing about Saddam's fate and repeating what he said many times - Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Saadi is first person on US central command's list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis.
In the North, the Kurdish militiamen who captured Kirkuk were beginning to withdraw, solving a political problem with neighboring Turkey. The Turks feared Kurdish control of the oil center would be a step toward a state for Kurds, which could stir up Turkey's Kurdish minority.
Rostam Hamid Rahim, a high-level military commander with one of the major Turkish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said all the Kurdish fighters have been ordered to leave Kirkuk as American forces take over the city.
In the East, the 24th marine expeditionary unit has set up blocking positions north and south of the city of Kut, and marines were stopping vehicles to search for soldiers or paramilitary fighters trying to escape the city.
Kut, 150km southeast of Baghdad, is believed to be a stronghold of foreign fighters - possibly al-Qaeda-affiliated. Estimates of number of fighters anywhere from 100-5,000. A cloud of black smoke was rising from the city, and two US helicopter gunships were circling overhead.
In Baghdad, American troops remained focused on erasing military threats nstead of curbing lawlessness. Marines showed reporters a cache of about 50 explosives-laden suicide bomb vests in an elementary school less than six meter from the nearest home.
----
In Baghdad, Free of Hussein, a Day of Mayhem
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12BAGH.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 11 - American troops cleared wide swaths of the capital of Iraqi forces today, but seemed powerless before a fresh wave of looting and mayhem that flowed in to take their place.
A week after American troops entered the city for the first time, large unbroken stretches of Baghdad's urban center, on both sides of the Tigris River, seemed free of the bands of Saddam Hussein loyalists who have been harassing American forces for the last several days.
But the city was the scene of frenzied looting, with mobs setting fire to government ministries and moving for the first time to ransack private homes rather than merely the symbols of Mr. Hussein's power.
With virtually every government ministry here in flames, the city of Baghdad and indeed the entire country is now operating essentially without a government, with no services or police protection.
The Bush administration appeared to have little prepared in the way of a quick response. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington "You cannot do everything instantaneously." He added: "It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."
The State Department said it would send 26 police and judicial officers to Iraq as the advance team for what might eventually be a contingent of more than 1,150 people to help restore law and order. They will be part of a group led by Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer chosen by the Bush administration to run the initial Iraqi civil administration under American occupation.
In Baghdad, military officials said American troops would try to ensure that religious centers remained open and that public services functioned.
American officers said they had begun enlisting local Iraqi officials to help rebuild police forces as fast as possible. But with hospitals being ransacked and many people still wary of leaving their homes, any resumption of normal life and services appeared remote.
Whole city blocks were descended upon today by greedy mobs , with some people backing trucks into offices and department stores to fill them with stolen merchandise.
Gun battles broke out between packs of looters and defenders of their property, and the city's hospitals received more casualties from rioting and looting than from the war.
Most of the city was still without electricity or fresh water, and with almost every shop still shuttered, Baghdad residents have begun to worry that shortages are reaching a critical point.
The mayhem clearly put pressure on American military commanders supervising the occupation to begin changing a war-fighting operation into one that keeps order and peace. But the fact is the war is not over. Recent days have been marked by suicide bombings against American troops, by the continuing manhunt for senior members of Mr. Hussein's leadership, and by preparations for a military strike against Mr. Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, about 110 miles north of here.
The military's first priority - to crush the Hussein government - appears to be proceeding apace, and the good will so much in evidence here over the last several days has not dissipated yet, although it is by no means uniform.
But the widespread anarchy that followed the first moments of liberty here this week has become a central problem for American soldiers and marines, who constitute the only visible presence of any form of order.
The mayhem gave rise today to signs of widespread Iraqi anger over the direction of the American enterprise here.
But there were also distinct signs of progress. Large tracts of the city appeared to be clear of both civil disturbance and Iraqi resistance. A 10-mile-long strip of the urban core, running along the Tigris River, appeared calm today for the first time since Mr. Hussein's government fell.
The five main bridges linking the two sides of the city over the Tigris were opened today, allowing traffic to flow freely. In some neighborhoods, American tanks that had parked on the street corners have simply moved out, so certain are the soldiers that the resistance is over.
Indeed, the Americans felt so secure in some areas that they sent their troops for some secondary, if emotionally satisfying, pursuits.
At the Rashid Hotel, where many foreign journalists visiting Mr. Hussein's Iraq were required to stay, American troops were sent to break up a tile mosaic of the first President Bush on the floor of the lobby. Until the mosaic was destroyed today, the likeness of Mr. Bush was stepped on dozens of times a day.
There were also glimpses that the banishment of pro-Hussein forces from parts of the city was being sustained by Iraqis themselves.
In Arasat, an upscale area of boutiques and restaurants, pedestrians were seen shouting at fedayeen fighters who had rumbled into the area on a battered old bus. Some of the residents tried to pull the armed men off the bus, and others tried to force the bus to turn into the line of fire of an M-1 Abrams tank parked up the road. The busload of fighters dashed down a side street, fleeing the angry Iraqis.
"These people couldn't be more friendly," said Lt. John R. Colombero, a marine on patrol in a downtown neighborhood today. Asked for evidence, he flourished a freshly picked wildflower that had been stuck into the front of his Kevlar vest by an effusive local.
"See that?" he asked.
In fact, when Lieutenant Colombero's company blew up an Iraqi ammunition cache, rattling homes for blocks, the neighbors came out into the street to complain. But the very quaintness of the complaint - excessive noise in a residential area - seemed a measure of how far the American forces had come.
In neighborhoods across the city, however, the order and peace disintegrated as the last of Mr. Hussein's forces were swept away.
Two more government agencies, the Information Ministry and the Higher Education Ministry, were set afire today by mobs. The Mansur Hotel, a downtown landmark, was also torched. Before the Americans arrived, the Rashid Hotel was ransacked by looters, who virtually emptied the huge structure of its every chair, lamp and light bulb.
Some of the most frenzied looting of the day unfolded at the Sajida Palace, a grandiose structure even by the gaudy standards of the Iraqi president. There, a huge crowd of looters carted out nearly every piece of furniture and adornment that could be lifted or torn from the walls. Whole families worked together, carrying out gilded 18th century-style chairs, wall friezes, beds and tableware.
The looters included not only the usual throng from the city's poorer precincts, but the professional class as well.
"I don't feel any guilt at all," said a pharmacist, who came with her husband, an obstetrician, and two children, to help themselves to brocade sofas and heaps of Wedgwood. "I paid for these a thousand times."
Mr. Hussein's palace, completed in 1999, was constructed on the site of the palace of King Faisal, Iraq's first monarch, who met a violent end when he was overthrown in 1958. Then, the building was called "The Palace of the End," and as the measure of Mr. Hussein's excesses were carted into the streets, that title seemed to have a special irony today.
The looters surged through the city's streets. Having hit every other hospital on the block, a mob came to Al Wasety Hospital, and began banging on the door. One of the doctors, a soft-spoken and overworked man named Yasir Mousawi, pulled a Kalashnikov rifle from a supply closet and fired a single shot into the air. The crowd dispersed.
For the most part, the Americans seemed incapable of controlling the crowds. On the streets where American soldiers worked, the scene was invariably quiet. Faced with a potential calamity, they acted with dispatch. When a gang of looters began to cart away rocket-propelled grenades from an armory at the Ministry of Planning today, American soldiers moved quickly to disperse the crowd. But there were far too few American soldiers to the make a difference in most neighborhoods.
That failure began to provoke anger among many middle-class Iraqis who did not take part in the looting but who feel defenseless against it. At the Ani Mosque today, a group of men confronted an American reporter, angrily denouncing the Bush administration for destroying the city's public administration and doing little to replace it.
"We have no security here," said Hamid Adel Mustaf, the imam. "Listen to the gunfire outside. We cannot even pray in our mosque without hearing the gunfire in the streets."
Another man, Nabil Abed, said, "This is what America has brought us - looting and destruction."
There was evidence today that the American forces were preparing to move more quickly away from fighting and toward occupation and administration. Maj. Paul Konopka, a civil affairs official with the Marines, said he planned to meet soon with religious leaders in the city about problems of electricity, looting and the maintenance of civil order.
Major Konopka said much of the looting was taking place was carried out by people "expressing their dislike of the old regime," but he suggested that the emotion had been taken too far. "There is a fine line between being comfortable with freedom, and chaos," he said.
--------
U.S. Discovers Suicide Vests in Baghdad
April 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Suicide-Vests.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Scores of black leather vests stuffed with explosives and ball-bearings were found by U.S. Marines at a Baghdad school, along with empty hangers hinting that suicide bombers might be wearing them in the chaotic city.
More than 40 of the vests -- on hangers and shrouded in plastic -- lay on the floor of a classroom Saturday morning, two days after Marines discovered them in an elementary school in a middle-class neighborhood.
``Odds are high that someone is out there wearing one,'' said Marine Lt. David Wright, 27, of Goldsboro, N.C.
A junior high school about 150 yards away was filled with hundreds of huge crates of weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-launched rockets.
Residents said members of the paramilitary Fedayeen came into the neighborhood of Zayuna about a month ago in pickup trucks in the middle of the night. The Fedayeen fighters unloaded the weapons in the two school compounds, each one just yards from the nearest houses.
The residents said they had no idea what was being unloaded.
``We could not say, 'Don't put it here, don't put it there.' We couldn't prevent it,'' said Zina Selman, 45, whose house is less than 50 yards from the school with the apparent suicide vests.
The Marines discovered the weapons caches Thursday night. A reporter from The Associated Press was given a tour of them Saturday morning, as Marines continued to secure the compound to prevent residents of the middle class neighborhood from entering.
In another sign that the threat of suicide attacks has not been eradicated, U.S. forces Saturday stopped a bus near the Syrian border that contained 59 men of military age who had with them $650,000 and a letter offering a reward for killing American soldiers.
Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said the men were trying to leave Iraq and that the money was in $100 bills. He said he did not know the men's nationalities nor who had written the letter offering rewards.
The vests found at the school sat in what appeared to be a biology classroom with diagrams of cells on the walls. They looked almost professionally made, each an almost exact replica of the others.
``They were indeed dedicated to do something if they strapped on those vests,'' Wright said.
Each weighed nearly 20 pounds, the black leather filled with blocks of C-4 explosive laced with ball bearings. Wires protruded from the vests.
In a courtyard outside the classroom, sat cardboard boxes of black detonators with two red buttons on the end and Velcro on the side, apparently so the detonator could be attached to a vest. Three boxes of dynamite and a crate marked ``explosives'' were nearby.
Next to the classroom lay stacks of long plastic bags filled with reddish-brown puttylike blocks that appeared to be explosives. Some of it was sculpted onto the back of a metal bar that Marines speculated was a crude effort to make a shaped charge.
Residents said the Fedayeen left the neighborhood about a week ago and lit a fire in that school. When the neighbors ran in to put the fire out they discovered the vests.
``We have children, we have families, what are we supposed to do?'' asked Farouk al Amary, 54, whose house is just across the street from the school. ``We don't want bombs.''
Selman said she left her house when the vests were discovered. But the men of the neighborhood poured sand on the vests to try to dampen any potential explosions and she moved back the next day.
At the junior high school, Marines slept in a courtyard just feet from hundreds of crates of ammunition. Several crates of weapons was marked ``GHQ Jordan Armed Forces, director of planning and organization, Amman, Jordan.''
For the past day, residents had brought dozens of rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-launched rockets and even a mortar systems found throughout the neighborhood to the Marines.
The neighbors said the Fedayeen had put the ammunition in their yards, on their roofs and in their parks.
Wright said it appeared an effort to position weapons throughout the neighborhood in preparation for house-to-house fighting that never happened.
Selman said she was sure here neighborhood was not unique.
``All over Baghdad there are bombs near people,'' she said.
On Friday, U.S. Marines searching for POWs in Baghdad stumbled upon three trailers containing Russian-made missiles capable of carrying chemical warheads.
Each trailer contained four FROG-5 surface-to-surface missiles, the U.S. military said. The missiles are easily transportable and can be fired from the back of a truck.
Tests were being conducted to determine if any of the missiles were tipped with chemical weapons.
U.S. troops in Iraq have been on high alert against suicide attacks.
In Baghdad, four Marines and a medical corpsman were wounded late Thursday when a vehicle blew up as it approached a checkpoint.
On Friday, a car carrying an Iraqi family drove through a checkpoint in Baghdad without stopping, and Marines opened fire fearing a possible suicide attack. Three adults were killed, and a 5-year-old girl was wounded.
U.S. soldiers killed six Iraqi fighters wearing the head bands and clothes of Islamic suicide attackers Sunday on the southern outskirts of Baghdad.
The week before, two Iraqi women blew themselves up in an attack on U.S. forces, killing three American soldiers in western Iraq.
In the first suicide attack against American forces early in the war, a bomber posing as a taxi driver pulled up to a roadblock north of Najaf, waved to American troops for help, then blew up his vehicle up as they approached, killing four. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein rewarded the attacker with a posthumous military promotion, two medals and a financial reward for his family.
----
Baghdad protest against looters
UK Guardian
Saturday April 12, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935443,00.html
Iraqis have held a protest in central Baghdad today calling for an end to the looting and lawlessness that has broken out across the city since US forces overthrew Saddam Hussein.
About 100 Iraqis, many of them students, protested outside Baghdad's central Palestine hotel, where most foreign journalists are based.
They held a banner that read "We want a new government as soon as possible to ensure security and peace".
"We want to cooperate with the new Iraqi government and American troops to keep peace and security," Dhargham Adnan, a 25-year-old student from Baghdad university, told the Reuters news agency.
Adnan said US troops did not appear to be doing anything to stop the looting of most public buildings in the capital.
"They try just to protect the oil companies and the oil ministry and everything else is destroyed. They don't do anything, they just watch," he said.
At one point the crowd outside the Palestine approached US troops, waving their hands in the air, but they were moved back.
Meanwhile, several former Iraqi policemen spoke to US officers at the Palestine hotel to volunteer their services.
"We volunteered to maintain the security of the city," said Brigadier Mohammed al-Bandr, a retired policeman who said he ran a police station in western Baghdad until 1996 when he was forced to retire by Saddam's government.
"We appeal for police patrols to resume their work. The Americans have welcomed our move and they said they want to cooperate with us."
Latif Abdullah, who said he had been in the police force for 25 years and was a specialist in fighting car crime, said he had burned his uniform because he was worried he would be taken for a Saddam loyalist. But he was ready to help patrol the streets.
Thousands of Iraqis - including some entire families with young children - have raided government buildings and hauled away everything from cars to refrigerators. But foreign embassies, hospitals and some private businesses have been robbed.
Others took the law into their own hands and, armed with rifles, beat up looters to try to quell the looting running rampant in the Iraqi capital. Some residents set up neighbourhood roadblocks and checked vehicles for stolen goods.
US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday said looting was part of the transition process and accused media reports of exaggerating the scale of the chaos. "Freedom's untidy," he said. "And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
Looters' paradise
Looting also raged in Basra, where British troops yesterday killed five men who were attempting to rob a bank.
Meanwhile in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city which fell into coalition hands yesterday, celebrations quickly turned to civil disorder.
People in Mosul plundered the central bank, grabbing wads of money and throwing bills in the air. Mosul university's library, with its rare manuscripts, was also ransacked, despite appeals broadcast from the mosque minarets to the people to stop destroying their city, the Arab-language TV network al-Jazeera reported.
"What is happening shouldn't happen," said one local man watching the looting. "This is barbaric. This is not Saddam's money. This is the nation's and the people's money."
Combat continues in Iraq, says US military
Combat continues in a "number of areas" of Iraq, said US general brigadier Vincent Brooks this afternoon.
Brig. Gen. Brooks said that US-led forces were turning their attention to the southern town of Kut in Iraq where he said there was "still indications their may be a regime presence."
He went on to say that while fresh water remained a "challenge" humanitarian aid in the form of wheat and other supplies was arriving by the shipload from countries such as Australia.
"Assessments are ongoing in areas that have been liberated," he said.
US troops today also took the last known stronghold of non-Iraqi Arab fighters in Baghdad.
US army staff sergeant David Richards told Reuters that the opposition they had encountered in the last few days had faded to almost nothing this morning when they took control of the information and foreign ministries in the Mansur district of Baghdad.
US heads for Sadaam's home town of Tikrit
But with Saddam now toppled in Iraq's three main cities - Baghdad, Basra and Mosul - the focus of the military assault shifted to Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad.
Die-hard regime supporters are thought to be regrouping there, possibly for a bloody last stand.
Remnants of the Republican Guard's Adnan Division and regular Iraqi forces around Tikrit have been pounded from the air for weeks, though, and allied military officials are increasingly confident of a quick victory.
Some Iraqi troops are already thought to have fled and military sources said the soldiers at Tikrit were not an effective fighting force.
In what is expected to be the final battle of the war the remaining Saddam loyalists at Tikrit will probably face the US 4th Infantry Division.
There have already been reports of Kurdish fighters attacking Iraqi positions at Tikrit and five small camouflaged planes, believed to be for regime leaders to escape in, were found nearby.
Syria is considered to be their likeliest bolt hole and the US president, George Bush warned the country not to give sanctuary to Saddam, his relatives or any of his fleeing henchmen.
"Syria just needs to know we expect full co-operation and that we strongly urge them not to allow Ba'ath Party members or Saddam's families or generals on the run to seek safe haven and find safe haven there," he said.
"If they are in their country we expect the Syrian authorities to turn them over to the proper folks."
US troops enter Mosul
US soldiers today moved into the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, after Iraqi troops surrendered there yesterday.
Like other cites in Iraq, looters were raiding shops and government buildings throughout the city and the US military said that the situation was still dangerous. Reuters reported loud explosions from the direction of the airport during the late morning.
Reuters said that a convoy of vehicles, many with heavy machine guns or rocket-launchers mounted on top, headed down the main road to Mosul from the main Kurdish Iraqi town of Irbil this morning.
Iraqi officer: there was no clear battle plan
A colonel in the Republican Guard today said today that he and his troops had made no effort to fight the US-led forces in Iraq, explaining that his orders were simply to hide from incoming bombs.
Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the un-named officer said that soldiers had deserted his unit on a daily basis and that commanders, who had no clear battle plan, did not try and stop them.
"The plan was not good, if the plan was good, maybe they would have fought. The airport [at Baghdad] was not shut down - it was stupid," he said. "If you leave your home door open, the thieves will enter very easy."
The officer also offered an explanation why the much-anticipated street fighting had failed to materialise in Baghdad.
"If you want to fight, you should fight out of your home. If I fight in my city, there are our families, our babies," he said.
'Suicide vests' found in Baghdad school
US soldiers have found a cache of suicide bomb vests in a primary school in central Baghdad.
On the floor of the science classroom - with a picture of Saddam Hussein on the green chalk board - soldiers found nearly 50 black leather vests each packed with C4 explosives and ball bearings. The suicide vests nearly covered the floor, sealed in plastic and still on hangers.
Despite the discovery, US troops remained edgy. "Odds are high that someone is out there wearing one," said US marine lieutenant David Wright.
In the school's courtyard, Us soldiers found cardboard boxes filled with detonators with two red switches on one side and Velcro on the other. They also found a roll of red detonation chord, three boxes of dynamite, a crate of electrical chords ina box marked explosives, and stacks of empty hangers.
Nearby, they discovered stacks of plastic bags filled with blocks of reddish brown putty that the soldiers said could be explosives.
In a school less than 150 meters away, US soldiers displayed hundreds of crates filled with rocket propelled grenade launchers, surface to air missiles, shoulder launched rockets and ammunition.
Turkey worries as Kurdish forces remain in Kirkuk
Turkish officials were said today to be concerned that Kurdish forces remain in the town of Kirkuk in Northern Iraq, despite assurances from the US yesterday that the forces had withdrawn.
Kurdish forces entered Kirkuk on Thursday, prompting concerns from Turkey that the Kurdish iraqis want to declare the city capital of an independent state. Turkey fears the move would cause unrest amongst the Kurdish sector of its own population.
Reuters correspondent Mike Collett-White said he saw dozens of Kurdish fighters trying to curb looting in Kirkuk by setting up road blocks on roads into the city and turning back people they suspected of wanting to plunder buildings.
A Kurdish official told Reuters that the Kurdish fighters still planned to leave Kirkuk "as soon as possible" despite the fact that the presence of US soldiers on the streets of the city is said to be barely visible.
Interim authority talks
Washington has confirmed that a meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders and US officials to discuss the formation of an interim government will take place in the southern city of Nassiriya on Tuesday.
US state department spokesman Richard Boucher said of the planned Nassiriya meeting: "We expect this to be the first in a series of regional meetings that will provide a forum for Iraqis to discuss their vision of the future."
Full story: Date set for talks on interim government
Desperate hunt for banned arsenal
Britain and the US have bypassed the United Nations to establish a secret team of inspectors to resume the search for weapons of mass desctruction in Iraq.
An Anglo-American team has already conducted three inspections in the past two weeks, a move which is seen as a sign of the desperation in London and Washington to find a "smoking gun" to justify the war.
The decision to set up a new group of inspectors, dubbed US-movic, will infuriate the UN.
----
Looters shake Iraqi cities
CHAOS: Troops watch as Baghdad is ransacked
Robert Collier,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, April 12, 2003
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/12/MN304117.DTL
Baghdad -- A frenzy of looting swept across Baghdad on Friday as mobs stripped bare the interiors of government offices, cultural institutions and embassies and U.S. troops mostly did not intervene.
The looting, which on Thursday had been aimed chiefly at targets connected to Saddam Hussein's regime, accelerated throughout the city Friday in an alarming outburst of street anarchy.
Everything from high-tech government laboratories to university labs to foreign embassies were methodically sacked by thieves who, in some cases, loaded their trucks with stolen goods in front of U.S. soldiers.
The destruction appeared to cause a strong backlash from many Baghdad residents who feel thankful for the U.S. troops liberating them from a cruel dictatorship but are angry at the apparent American inaction toward looters.
"Is this freedom?" asked an irate Abbas Yaccouby as crowds sacked a large complex of government laboratories near the campus of Baghdad University. "The Americans promised us liberation, not this."
It was a dramatic reversal of public sentiment from the jubilant scenes of the first U.S. entry into Baghdad.
"Iraq is not Rwanda or Burundi, where people do such things," said Faisal Al-Khudairy, one of Iraq's wealthiest private businessmen, who lives near Yaccouby opposite the laboratory complex. "We are a developed nation, and what you see here is simply a crime," he said.
"There are tens of millions of dollars of sophisticated equipment that is being destroyed right under the Americans' noses," he added. He gestured at the line of U.S. armored vehicles idling on the avenue where he stood opposite the Central Organization for Standardization and Quality Control, which provides high-tech services for the entire Iraqi economy, from the oil industry to pharmaceuticals.
Al-Khudairy then pointed nearby, to the broad campus of Baghdad University, which had also been methodically looted by thieves with cargo trucks. "These are the building blocks of any country, which the new Iraqi government is going to need. This is stupid, nonsensical, crazy."
MINISTRIES IN FLAMES
With virtually every government ministry in flames, Baghdad was operating essentially without a government, public services or police protection. The U. S. military command was scrambling Friday to adjust from warfare to peacekeeping, but scenes throughout the capital reflected lawlessness.
While the Geneva conventions prohibit pillage during occupation, U.S. military officials argue that their forces are stretched too thin to do much against looters. And these are combat troops, untrained in policing, who were still engaged in skirmishes with Hussein loyalists.
"If we see looting, we are to approach them, to show a presence and stop the looting," said Maj. Martin Hermann, operations officer of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, which has taken control of part of southeast Baghdad.
Army Lt. Col. Michael Belcher, a battalion commander, said his priorities were first to protect key structures, such as the power system, and second to safeguard humanitarian sites like hospitals and aid distribution centers. Commercial buildings are last, he said.
"If I see them tearing down electrical infrastructure in some of these facilities, I'll step in to stop it," Belcher said.
Baghdad police, considered an arm of Hussein's security apparatus, have completely disappeared. U.S. officers said they were trying to enlist local Iraqi officials to help rebuild police forces quickly.
HOSPITALS RANSACKED
But with hospitals being ransacked and many Baghdadis wary of being on the streets, the resumption of normal life and services appeared remote.
The mayhem started Wednesday, the day after U.S. troops rolled into central Baghdad. Poor residents from Saddam City, a mostly Shiite area to the east, started breaking into government offices and houses of top officials of the Hussein regime and carting off furniture and equipment.
By late Friday, looters had hit:
-- The Iraqi Museum, and the Saddam Arts Center.
-- Many hospitals.
-- Nearly all government ministries, businesses and headquarters.
-- All state-owned supermarkets.
-- Most public universities, including the engineering and nursing colleges.
-- Many embassies, including those of Germany, Finland, South Korea, China, Jordan and Turkey, the French cultural center and the headquarters of UNICEF.
-- Most state-owned factories, including Baghdad plants that make auto batteries, electronics and electrical gear.
-- Three five-star hotels: the Al-Rashid, the Al-Mansour and the Babel.
In some neighborhoods, residents erected street barricades of tiles, huge rocks and sandbags to keep looters out. In others, they started creating their own vigilante forces.
Gunbattles broke out between packs of looters and people defending their property, and the city's hospitals on Friday took in more casualties from rioting and looting than from the war.
At roadblocks in the Kerradeh neighborhood, residents wielding Kalashnikov rifles stopped a stolen red double-decker bus stuffed with stolen truck tires and air conditioners, pulled out the driver and his assistants, beat them and sent them fleeing barefoot down the street.
At the al-Kindy hospital, doctors and support staff were so outraged by being looted late Thursday that they organized a mob of their own. They stormed across the neighborhood and found two trucks with the loot.
Supported by neighbors wielding Kalashnikovs, they threatened the thieves with bodily harm, recovered the loot and drove back to the hospital in a raucous, cheering convoy.
But for many furious Baghdadis, the looting proves that the U.S. invasion is not about liberation, as American officials had claimed. Conspiratorial theories were commonly heard on the streets.
"If they wanted to free us, they would stop this," said one irate middle- class woman near Baghdad University. "They just want to drive down Iraq, ruin us as a viable country, and grab our oil. They are ruining us. They call this democracy?"
Chronicle news services contributed to this report. / E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.
-------- mideast
Syria: U.S. weapons claims 'baseless'
(UPI)
4/12/2003
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030412-035913-1341r
DAMASCUS, Syria, April 12 -- Syria's foreign minister said Saturday that U.S. accusations that Damascus was sheltering Iraqi officials and weapons of mass destruction were "baseless" and were meant to break the historical ties between Syria and the Iraqi people.
Farouk Sharaa said the U.S. threats were being made by a "fanatic" group within the U.S. administration that "does not even see the West's public interests in the Middle East," and he said that it "faces real dangers ... for resorting to military action in Iraq."
Sharaa spoke at a joint press briefing with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is on a whirlwind tour of the Middle East this weekend.
"I tell you frankly they (U.S. officials) don't know what they want," he said. "Sometimes, they say you have weapons of mass destruction smuggled from Iraq to Syria. But they don't bring evidence or give us any sort of document. You must believe me. Let them deny what I am saying."
He continued: "These are baseless allegations. Until now, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq despite that all of Iraq is occupied. So how would they accuse Syria of something they did not discover in Iraq?
"We are victimized. I am telling you from now."
He accused the United States of trying to target another country, whether Syria or another in the region, after it had taken military action in Afghanistan and Iraq before resolving problems in these two countries.
"They conquered Afghanistan. Is it stable?" he asked rhetorically, noting that the Americans had not been able to locate Osama bin Laden despite all the "highly sophisticated instruments" they have.
On Iraq, he said: "What can be seen after the fall of the regime? They cannot continue with these provocations. We have to stop them. What's happening is very dramatic, very horrible.
"Innocent people are killed for no reason while those who are not innocent are not killed ... What's happening now is the destruction of Iraq, its institutions and infrastructure."
Sharaa warned that "even the Israelis will pay the price in the future if they don't tell their friends in Washington to stop."
He said recent U.S. threats were meant to "break the historical and national ties between Syria and the Iraqi people," reminding his audience that Syria's relations with Saddam Hussein's regime were "not friendly for long years." Rival wings of the Baath Party took control of Syria and Iraq.
The French foreign minister held talks with Syrian president Bashar Assad on ways to end the Iraq crisis, Sharaa noted.
A source told United Press International that Villepan had expressed France's full support for Assad's modernization project and advised "not to give Washington any pretext for hitting Syria."
Villepin, who is visiting the region, said his visit came "at a decisive moment in the history of the Middle East and we should all bear our responsibilities in the region and the international community."
The French official emphasized Syria"s important role" regarding the Iraqi problem because "it's a border country with Iraq and a key country in the Middle East."
"Any solution should be comprehensive: peace in Iraq and in Palestine. We can't separate between the two," he said. "We want to be united to rebuild Iraq and thus we need the (U.N.) Security Council. We should restore confidence" between Europe and the United States.
----
Did Saddam go to Syria?
Saturday, April 12, 2003
CNN
Sheila MacVicar
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/12/otsc.irq.macvicar/index.html
(CNN) - As coalition forces continue to secure Iraq, questions continue about what happened to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, as well as key figures in his regime.
CNN correspondent Sheila MacVicar spoke to CNN anchor Carol Costello from Damascus, Syria, Saturday.
COSTELLO: Sheila, good morning. Many questions to ask you about Syria. Of course, there is still the thought out there that members of Saddam Hussein's regime and maybe even Saddam Hussein himself have gone into Syria.
MACVICAR: That is indeed one of the big questions, and we've been hearing about that over the course of the last number of days from various U.S. administration officials: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and yesterday from the president himself when he was speaking at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
The American administration has been saying publicly that they believe that some members of the regime or some family members of the regime may have come into Syria. But it's important to note, Carol, that Rumsfeld yesterday characterized that information himself as "scraps of intelligence."
The Syrians, in various conversations that I have had with them, have said that they do not have any information that would lead them to believe that there were such people here in Syria.
The question, of course, is whether there could be people here without the knowledge of the regime, or whether there are people here whom the regime in Syria is concealing. I think on balance at the moment the view seems to be that what we are hearing from U.S. administration officials in Washington is a very loud and very public warning based, it appears, on not very much evidence here in Syria. A deck of 55 playing-sized cards featuring members of Iraqi leadership will be distributed among members of Coalition forces. A deck of 55 playing-sized cards featuring members of Iraqi leadership will be distributed among members of Coalition forces.
Of course, the Syrians have been told that if such people do indeed show up on their borders, then they expect them to be handed over to the proper authorities, and that, of course, would be the United States.
COSTELLO: But Syria is not actively looking for anyone from the Iraqi regime.
MACVICAR: Those borders between Iraq and Syria have been closed. The only people permitted across the border into Iraq are Iraqi passport holders. Now, this is something that the U.S. has been asking the Syrians to do ... since before the war started, something that they did just in the last couple of days.
We were out at the border yesterday, one of the official border crossing points -- there are several others -- and what we saw was a very deserted landscape with only a few Iraqis heading back home, people who actually had either been in exile in Syria or people who had left Baghdad before the war began, heading back home to see what conditions were there.
Now, we also know that on the other side of the border, on the Iraqi side of the border, there are American military checkpoints, a number of them, we are told, operating on those highways leading toward Syria. Checkpoints are in place in an effort to ensure that if there are already senior members of the regime attempting to flee into Syria that they could be apprehended and arrested.
I know, as a matter of fact, that just a day ago those checkpoints were operating so efficiently that they managed to detain some Syrian diplomats who were returning home to Damascus. The Syrians, it seems, had not told the Americans what their route was.
COSTELLO: Sheila MacVicar reporting live from Damascus, Syria, this morning.
-------- spies
L.A. spy case leads to resignation
April 11, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030411-093807-1390r.htm
LIVERMORE, Calif., April 11 -- An employee of one of the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories resigned Friday in connection with the arrest of a former FBI counterintelligence agent and his long-time girlfriend who allegedly was a Chinese double agent.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory refused to identify the employee, whose departure was linked to the arrest Thursday of retired FBI agent James Smith and Katrina Leung on charges related to her alleged copying of classified bureau documents.
"We have been working closely with the FBI on this situation," the Northern California laboratory said in a brief statement. "They have provided no information to indicate that any classified information from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was compromised."
Livermore carries out a wide range of scientific research, including management of the United States' nuclear arsenal. The employee in question chose to resign after being suspended and having his security clearance revoked.
"National security is paramount," the statement said. "It is a mission LLNL takes very seriously."
The resignation came after Smith, 59, Westlake Village, was arrested and charged with gross negligence in the handling of sensitive FBI documents in his possession.
Smith allegedly carried on a sexual relationship for around 20 years with Leung, a 49-year-old San Marino resident who is well connected to the Chinese-American community in the Los Angeles area and has a reputation of having ties to both the Beijing government and to Southern California political figures.
According to federal prosecutors, Leung was able to occasionally take classified documents from Smith's unlocked briefcase during his visits to her home and make photocopies. Investigators said telephone records indicated that Leung had been in regular contact with Chinese intelligence officials.
--------
F.B.I. Was Told Years Ago of Possible Double Agent
April 12, 2003
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/politics/12SPY.html
WASHINGTON, April 11 - Senior F.B.I. officials were told in the early 1990's that a Los Angeles woman accused this week of being a double-agent appeared to be spying for the Chinese, but they continued using her as an informer nonetheless, current and former officials said today.
Around 1991, senior Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence officials met in Washington to discuss evidence that the woman, Katrina Leung, was spying for the Chinese, an official said today on condition of anonymity.
One F.B.I. supervisor in Los Angeles attending the meeting was James J. Smith, who was having an long-term affair with Ms. Leung after recruiting her to the bureau as an informer in the early 1980's. They were arrested this week on espionage-related charges.
An administration official who demanded anonymity said it was also "common knowledge" for years among senior people in the bureau's Los Angeles office that Mr. Smith and Ms. Leung were having an affair and that F.B.I. officials at headquarters suspected that there might be a Chinese intelligence "penetration" of the bureau on the West Coast.
Indeed, officials said today that they were investigating the possibility of a separate security breach involving China and another agent in the bureau's Los Angeles office.
The F.B.I.'s handling of the long-held suspicions surrounding Mr. Smith and Ms. Leung and whether it moved aggressively enough to head off the problem will be a major focus of inquiries by the bureau and the Justice Department, officials said.
Investigators are also trying to determine what information on nuclear, military and political issues she gave to China and what damage it may have caused to national security.
The bureau declined to comment today on questions about when senior officials at headquarters first became aware of suspicions in the case. "That's one of the things we're looking into as part of our oversight review: how the whole Smith and Leung matter was handled," an F.B.I. official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said.
But other current and former officials say that if it is demonstrated that senior bureau officials had evidence for years pointing to Ms. Leung's activities, the bureau is sure to face difficult questions about why it did not take aggressive steps until recently.
One theory, officials said, is that officials were trying to use Ms. Leung to pass disinformation back to her native China without realizing that she had access through her affair with Mr. Smith to very sensitive material.
"There are really two possibilities," said William Baker, who was a high-ranking F.B.I. official until 1991 but said that as chief of the criminal division he had no knowledge of the case. "You're either talking about gross dereliction of duty at F.B.I. headquarters and the L.A. field office, or the F.B.I. wanted to play her back on China, and it just backfired on them, because they were played themselves. Either way, it didn't work, and the outcome was horrible."
Mr. Baker said bureau officials in Los Angeles should have been particularly sensitive to the dangers of an agent becoming too close to an informer because in 1990 a former agent, Richard W. Miller, was convicted on charges of passing information to Moscow through his Russian lover. "The red flag should have been the Miller case," Mr. Baker said.
Mr. Smith was allowed to be Ms. Leung's so-called handler from the early 1980's until his retirement in late 2000, and officials said the two had an affair for about 18 years. The bureau paid her $1.7 million as an informer to provide information on China.
The Justice Department acknowledged in court documents unsealed on Wednesday that a second F.B.I. agent in San Francisco who was also having an affair with the woman became aware in 1991 about an audiotape indicating that Ms. Leung had unauthorized contacts with officials in the Chinese intelligence agency and was passing information to them.
The San Francisco agent alerted Mr. Smith in Los Angeles; an alarmed Mr. Smith assured him that he would take care of the problem, prosecutors said. The second former agent, who is unidentified in court papers but whom law enforcement officials identified as William Cleveland, resigned on Thursday as head of security at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after the lab began investigating the case.
Prosecutors suggested that only the two agents knew about the suspicions surrounding Ms. Leung, but officials said in interviews today that knowledge of the case extended to senior officials at the bureau.
"The F.B.I. chain of command was fully aware of the '91 report indicating that she was talking about things with China that she should not have been talking about," an official who spoke on condition of anonymity said. "Headquarters knew she had unauthorized contacts and communications with people in China. There were memos generated."
Officials said Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I. became aware of the case through back channels in late 2001 and dispatched senior counterintelligence people to do a full investigation. Last year, he demoted Sheila Horan, who was leading the national security division, because he was upset about how the case was handled, officials said.
Lawyers for Ms. Leung and Mr. Smith have defended their clients' character and pledged vindication. Brian Sun, a lawyer for Mr. Smith, said it was irresponsible for the Justice Department to try to pin full responsibility on the former agent.
"The bureau was fully aware from at least 1991 of the potential risks of using Ms. Leung as an asset," or informer, Mr. Sun said in an interview. "It's unfair to try to portray Mr. Smith as the only person responsible for the F.B.I.'s failure to follow up on this matter. If J. J. Smith committed acts of gross negligence, then the entire counterintelligence office of the F.B.I. was equally culpable."
-------- un
POSTWAR FINANCING
Aid Is Tied to Approval By the U.N.
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12FUND.html
WASHINGTON, April 11 - Administration officials are turning to a gathering of the world's financial ministers to help pay for the rebuilding of Iraq. But they are discovering that without a stamp of approval from the United Nations, they are fighting an uphill battle.
While the pleas for aid have been greeted positively, the administration is running into a familiar problem. Foreign institutions and foreign governments say they may need approval from the United Nations Security Council before they give or lend money to Iraq while it is under military occupation.
James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, said the organization was ready to help postwar Iraq but was authorized to work only with "recognized governments."
"It is very clear that we are limited in terms of the provision of funding to deal with recognized governments, and that is a decision for the United Nations to take in principle," he said.
Mr. Wolfensohn added that he would need approval from the members of the World Bank, of which the United States is the largest shareholder. Also at issue are United Nations penalties against Iraq that have yet to be lifted and could inhibit travel and work in the country.
High on the administration's agenda this weekend is winning support for debt relief for Iraq from some of the countries gathered here for the annual spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Some of Iraq's biggest debts are to France and Russia, the two nations that helped sink the second United Nations Security Council resolution sought by the administration before invading Iraq.
This weekend President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany are meeting in St. Petersburg with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to discuss postwar Iraq. All three leaders have called for the United Nations to assume the lead role in rebuilding Iraq.
Horst Köhler, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said at a news conference on Thursday that he would not speculate on what role the United Nations might play. But he said the fund would be willing to help in Iraq, if his board approves such action. It would include a fact-finding mission, a detailed assessment of Iraq's economic situation and its financial institutions, and offers to provide technical assistance.
"All who are responsible should think how, in the most rapid manner, there is a system in place which helps the Iraqi people," Mr. Köhler said.
Although Iraq is not on the official agenda, it is the unofficial theme of the whole weekend.
John Snow, the treasury secretary, will be the administration's point man, seeking debt relief for Iraq with his colleagues from the Group of 7 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) as well as Russia, which is the eighth country attending the meeting.
Experts at the World Bank and the monetary fund pointed out that Iraq is anything but a poor country. With the world's second-largest oil resources, the country had been one of the Middle East's early economic successes until Saddam Hussein started using its resources to pay for an ever-growing military.
Iraqi oil could revive the economy, but only after wells and infrastructure are repaired and modernized. Several financial experts said the military powers occupying Iraq could use oil revenue to fulfill their obligation under the Geneva Conventions to help Iraq's citizens.
Already, the war has had a noticeable effect on the global economy, not only weakening growth but taking attention and resources from the effort to fight global poverty.
The World Bank's initial estimate of the war's impact on the global gross domestic product is a loss of $75 billion to $100 billion. That sum is similar to the economic aftershock felt after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The International Monetary Fund released its World Economic Outlook on Wednesday. Over all, the report said the damage from the war was largely contained. But fund officials refused to predict whether there would be a rapid rebound.
"There is no question that there has been some collateral damage to the global economy from the uncertainties surrounding the long run-up to the war in Iraq, not to mention the war itself," said Kenneth Rogoff, director of research at the fund. "The uncertainty has impacted consumer confidence, business confidence, oil prices and financial markets."
Unlike the administration, which is awarding major contracts to American firms without an assessment of Iraq, the World Bank and the monetary fund have said they would need to send teams of experts into the country before deciding how to help.
-------- us
U.S. May Send Battle Groups Home
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
Apr 12, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WAR_US_MILITARY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Now that the air war over Iraq is winding down, the Navy is seeking to send home, within days, two of the three aircraft carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf, the commander of all naval forces in the Gulf said Saturday.
Vice Adm. Timothy Keating told reporters in a videotelecast news conference from his Gulf headquarters that the first to head home will likely be the USS Kitty Hawk, whose home base is Yokosuka, Japan.
He said the USS Constellation, based in San Diego, may go home soon, too. He stressed that the decision is up to Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall war commander, and that no orders have been issued yet.
Keating also said that Scud missiles, which are a banned weapon in Iraq, have been spotted on the ground by U.S. and British soldiers and Marines. His chief spokesman, Cmdr. Jeff Alderson, said in an interview later that although Keating used the term "Scud" in describing the missiles, he was referring to other surface-to-surface missiles that are similar to Scuds.
Under the cease-fire arrangement that ended the 1991 war, Iraq was required to destroy all of its Scud missiles, which it fired at U.S. troops as well as Israel and Saudi Arabia during that war.
Iraq has declared that it possesses no Scuds, and none has been launched in the current war. U.S. intelligence agencies have estimated that Iraq retained about two dozen Scuds.
Keating said an extensive U.S. leaflet-dropping campaign aimed at discouraging Iraq from firing Scud missiles resulted in "a total lack of Scud launches," adding, "we've seen some on the ground."
The Navy has been flying planes from a total of five carrier battle groups within striking distance of Iraq, including two in the eastern Mediterranean, since the war began.
"It's likely we'll decrease that number gradually in the days ahead," Keating said.
Pentagon officials, meanwhile, are concerned that the looting and destruction of government offices in Iraq could destroy evidence related to weapons of mass destruction the United States wants to find.
U.S. and coalition forces also are working to prevent Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological weapons experts from fleeing the country, defense officials say. Some Iraqi officials trying to leave Iraq through Syria, for example, are believed to be those with ties to weapons programs.
Finding and eliminating the chemical and biological weapons manufactured by Saddam Hussein's defunct regime is a top priority. To do so, the U.S.-led troops must find the documents and experts that can tell them where the banned materials are.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that U.S. forces were working "as best we can" to secure the documents, material and people needed to root out weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. officials fear documents and other clues to weapons of mass destruction are being destroyed as Iraqi government facilities are ransacked.
Aid organizations said the lawlessness was making the humanitarian situation in Baghdad worse and urged the Bush administration to move quickly against it.
The U.S. military rejected criticism that it was allowing a wave of looting and violence to take place, saying troops must remain focused on combat, not restoring order.
Rumsfeld characterized the looting as "untidiness" and part of a transitional phase after the fall of Saddam's government and on the way to freedom.
"Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said.
Much of the looting was at government ministries and the homes of former government leaders. But looters also stripped foreign embassies, took ambulances from hospitals and attacked some private businesses.
--------
Sniper Fire Greets G.I.'s in Big City in North
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12MOSU.html
MOSUL, Iraq, April 11 - American Special Forces troops entered northern Iraq's largest city today, finding it engulfed by anarchy. Gunfire from Iraqi irregulars greeted the force of several dozen Americans, and the shots prompted them to pull back after spending only 30 minutes in the streets here.
The American incursion here came after the organized Iraqi resistance had fled and was the result of 24 hours of negotiations with tribal and Baath Party leaders intended to bring about the peaceful surrender of Iraq's third-largest city.
The brief fight here this afternoon reflected the enduring difficulties of the military situation in Iraq. An important center of resistance has formed in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, 110 miles north of Baghdad. The road south of Kirkuk, the other major northern city, has become a no man's land frequented by Iraqi irregulars, or fedayeen.
In Kirkuk itself, American officers said 4,000 soldiers would arrive soon to replace Kurdish fighters, whose presence in a city at the center of an area with large oil reserves has alarmed Turkey.
"The war will end when Tommy Franks says we've achieved our objective," President Bush said today, referring to the general who commands the Iraq campaign. "The specific thing I want to hear is that our commanders say we've achieved the clear objective I set out." That moment has not come, the president added, declining to declare victory.
The Bush administration's war objectives, as set out by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, included bringing down Mr. Hussein's government, eliminating any chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, capturing or driving out terrorists, and helping the people form a "representative self-government."
Today, those aims seemed far from complete in Baghdad, where American troops cleared parts of the city, but faced widespread looting, and in the north of the country as well.
In large parts of Mosul this morning it appeared that no one was in control, and throughout the day armed Kurds in civilian clothes drove around the city flying the yellow flag of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Thousands of Kurdish troops remained outside the city.
Kurds in the city staged a small-scale uprising, and by late afternoon the city's Arabs were emboldened enough to attack the Americans.
The burning buildings, feverish looting and cold stares that the Special Operations soldiers encountered suggested that Mosul could be one of the more difficult places in Iraq for the United States military to govern.
The city of about 1.5 million people is the homeland of Sunni Arab nationalism in Iraq. For decades Mosul has produced the Iraqi Army's officer corps. Mr. Hussein is a Sunni, although the majority of the Iraqi population belongs to the Shiite branch of Islam.
"Is this the freedom America is talking about?" Asal Hani, a recently discharged soldier, asked as he watched swarms of young men ransack the city's finest hotel. "America is the reason for this."
Arabs as well as Kurds blamed the United States for not moving soldiers into Mosul quickly enough. American commanders could not be reached for comment tonight, but Kurdish leaders said American reinforcements were en route and patrols to pacify the city would begin on Saturday. As in much of Iraq, it appeared that American forces here were stretched.
In repeated interviews today, Mosul residents said they opposed American or Kurdish rule.
"No American troops!" one man shouted in English at a group of Western journalists. "Allah! Allah!"
A few feet away, a second man thundered, "No Kurdish president - an Arab president!"
The clash today occurred as a convoy of Americans and several hundred Kurdish fighters wound its way through the heart of the city. Just after they passed a looted military hospital and a burning Iraqi Airlines office, a gunman fired several shots.
"It came from inside, inside a building," a soldier said. "He was hiding in the shadows."
As hundreds of residents watched, the American convoy of a half-dozen white sports-utility vehicles arrived at the abandoned governor's office. Again, shots were fired. Special Operations soldiers peered through telescopic sights on their rifles and tried to find the source.
A few minutes later, shooting was heard from three directions, and the Americans crouched beside their cars. Thirty minutes after it began, the first American entry into the city ended in the withdrawal.
"Mount up," an officer shouted, and the Americans were gone. No Americans were wounded.
The attack, believed to have been carried out by fedayeen, was the culmination of a day of open hostility toward Westerners.
Residents said Iraqi forces pulled out of the city at 7 p.m. Thursday. Beginning this morning, hundreds and perhaps thousands of young men stripped hospitals, hotels, factories, clinics, college dormitories, government ministries and other institutions of anything of value.
The chaos could, it seemed, easily turn to ethnic conflict between Arabs and Kurds. While Sunni Arabs, who make up 65 percent of the city's population, benefited from Mr. Hussein's rule, Kurds suffered. Today in Mosul, Arabs blamed Kurds for the looting; Kurds blamed Arab members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party for it.
At least one man was killed and two others were injured in the looting. At the central bank, brawls broke out as men fought over stacks of cash. Men hiding wads of money in their shirts were beaten and robbed by other men waiting in the lobby.
Later in the day, one man was shot dead in a dispute near the safe. The bank was also set ablaze, one of at least six fires seen in the city this afternoon.
Looters swarmed the interior and exterior of the Nineveh International Hotel, Mosul's finest, and stripped it bare. The heart of the hotel - a six-story atrium that allowed guests to gaze down from outside their rooms into the lobby - was given over to frenzied looting.
Rather than use elevators, thieves simply hurled mattresses, rugs and any other goods to the lobby below, whether they stood on the first or fifth floor. More delicate items, like lamps, were lowered by makeshift ropes - hotel sheets tied together.
Other thefts were rampant as well. Outside the campus of the city's sprawling university, trucks backed up for student desks, beds and bookshelves. Dormitories and the medical and engineering schools were all cleaned bare.
A few miles away, a lab technician in a health clinic, Moyasar Abdullah, stood dumbfounded in front of the remains of his former laboratory.
"My solution, my microscope," he said, as he picked up each item from the floor and shook his head. "This a medical laboratory offering medicine for people."
Outside, he questioned a stocky, middle-aged man who had stolen the refrigerator from his house. Told that the refrigerator held vaccines that could help people, the man said: "I live nearby. It's empty."
At the Republican Hospital, one of the city's largest, weeping workers said looters had made off with 18 of the hospital's 20 medical vehicles. One expressed a deep sense of shame over the theft of medical equipment.
"This is happening in Iraq?" he asked.
Inside, angry staff members blamed the United States for the rioting. "Let Mr. Bush see the situation," said Hashim Muhammad. "These are our things. These are for all the Iraqi people."
It is unclear why American and Kurdish forces were slow to enter the city. Surrender negotiations with some senior Iraqi officials from Mosul dragged on, a senior Kurdish official said. The same official accused the United States of being too stringent in its demand for an unconditional surrender, saying the Iraqis should "not be humiliated."
There were also questions about whether the United States had enough ground troops in the region to secure Mosul as well as Kirkuk, which fell on Thursday.
An estimated 2,000 paratroopers and up to 1,000 Special Operations soldiers are in northern Iraq. Since the arrival of the 173rd Airborne Brigade three weeks ago, no new infantry units have been deployed to the north.
During a four-hour tour of the lawless city today, the calmest point, oddly, was Mr. Hussein's grandiose presidential palace. Iraqis visiting the site gawked at the marble floors, stairwells and murals. They then tried to steal them.
Asad Hasan, a retired army captain, said the looting would increase distrust of American troops in the city. "If there was any kind of control," he said, "nothing like this would happen."
-------- propaganda wars
In cyberspace, everyone can see the wounded screaming
By Ty Burr
April 12 2003
The Boston Globe
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/11/1049567875734.html
My most vivid memories of the 1991 Gulf War come from the 1999 movie Three Kings. That's right, the one with George Clooney, Ice Cube and Marky Mark, about a group of US soldiers who come up against greed and conscience while out on the war's sandy perimeter.
It's about the only American movie to get down in the desert and show the conflict as it affected the troops and the people they came in contact with.
But it's a Hollywood movie, you splutter, shot in California. Yes, but there's more human truth to the film than in the video-game footage of buildings silently exploding that we saw on TV during the Gulf War. The film industry takes its sweet time, but occasionally gets it right.
Perhaps Americans will have to wait another eight years to see an unfiltered picture of what is happening now in Iraq. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is watching images and hearing voices that Americans can't, because US media handlers - the Government and the mainstream news outlets - decided that Americans are too sensitive to be exposed to them. Airing footage of casualties on both sides, close-up civilian damage and captive American POWs - footage that has been seen everywhere but in the US - crosses the boundaries of taste, we are told. So does war, in case anyone needs reminding. It doesn't matter where you stand on the question of whether or not this conflict is necessary. To say that we should wage battle while looking away, as a people, from its particulars, cannot be anything but hypocrisy. This nation is often accused by outsiders of living in a bubble, ignoring any but its own interests and culture.
And by keeping the more unpleasant and incorrect images off our radar screens, we risk becoming actively, willfully blind.
The US Government wants its citizens to see the good news, of course: the tanks forging across the desert, the bombs bursting in air over Baghdad. That's what governments during wartime do.
Director John Huston made a brilliant series of documentaries for the US Department of War during WWII, and the one they didn't like - Let There Be Light, about shellshocked soldiers - was banned for 35 years. To be surprised by this is to be naive.
This time around, US reporters are "embedded", which means they're not getting out to get a different perspective. It's up to reporters from other countries to get other sides of the story. They're delivering the goods, but unless Americans consciously seek their reports out on their websites, on non-mainstream US news sources, or through personal weblogs, they're just getting a slicker version of the same old video game.
Some have argued the airing of images of US casualties and prisoners goes against civilized propriety, not to mention the Geneva Convention. They are right - and, in an age of instantaneous satellite uplinks and internet distribution, there is not a thing anyone can do about it.
It's doubtful that Americans can get a rounded sense of this conflict from TV alone, unless they're content with long shots of Baghdad by night, impressive displays of military hardware on the move, and crisp Defence Department spokesmen.
As with the Gulf War, the enemy is abstract; what's different this time is the rest of the Arab world and any other countries that have the temerity to disagree with us are being ignored, too. This is fine for morale. It's not so great if lasting lessons are to be learned.
Those other voices are out there on the web. The filings on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq) are stridently anti-war but full of stuff you won't find on CNN. Ether Zone (http://www.etherzone.com), by contrast, offers a pro-war slant, but its media-links page is huge, useful and reasonably bipartisan. One of the most informed and straight-down-the-middle journalists is Michael Young, columnist for the Lebanon Daily Star, whose news log is at http://www.beirutcalling.blogspot.com and there are first-person weblogs emanating from Baghdad, the most impressive of which is Salam Pax's at dearraed.blogspot.com - apolitical civilian reporting at its finest.
You will probably see pictures that will offend you. This is as it should be.
To quote Susan Sontag in her prescient new book Regarding the Pain of Others: "Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing - may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget."
----
CNN chief stands by Iraq omissions
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 12, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030412-64366560.htm
CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday disclosed that his network withheld details of Saddam Hussein's brutality from its coverage to protect CNN employees.
Alarming facts about secret police, abductions, beatings, dismemberment and assassinations under the Iraqi dictator were not reported to the public, Mr. Jordan wrote, "because doing so would have jeopardized Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."
"I felt awful having those stories bottled up inside me," Mr. Jordan wrote in an editorial titled "The News We Kept to Ourselves" published yesterday in The New York Times. "At last these stories can be told freely."
In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Jordan stood by his decision yesterday, saying he felt "relieved" and was "absolutely sure I did the right thing holding these stories."
CNN coverage, he said, had already offered evidence of "the brutality in Iraq," and the move was not intended to "preserve CNN's presence in Iraq."
"We've already been thrown out of Iraq several times. And we are proud we've been thrown out," he said. CNN correspondents were expelled from Baghdad last month.
Some are baffled by it all.
"I was stunned by that op-ed," Fox News Channel and ABC radio host Sean Hannity told The Times yesterday. "Doesn't CNN have a journalistic obligation to report these kind of details, or to make their reporters aware of them? You can bet if CNN made discoveries about, say, a conservative administration, they would share them."
The editorial "sounds like a confession more than anything," Mr. Hannity said. "And I found it hypocritical."
Rich Noyes, director of research at the conservative Media Research Center, said that "Jordan now admits that CNN kept many of Saddam's secrets.
"Have other networks also censored their own tales of Saddam's evil?" he asked.
"If accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was access to this dictatorship so important in the first place? And what truths about the thugs who run other totalitarian states - like North Korea, Cuba and Syria - are fearful and/or access-hungry reporters hiding from the American public?" Mr. Noyes said.
But Mr. Jordan had more dramatic revelations to justify his decision.
In companion pieces telecast on CNN yesterday, he said: "There were people in Iraq who believed that CNN was effectively the CIA."
Saddam's regime had accused CNN reporters of working for the CIA and Israel, Mr. Jordan said, and planned to attack them in northern Iraq last month.
The plot was discovered by Kurdish police, who arrested two Iraqi intelligence agents. CNN obtained their videotaped confessions.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi official told Mr. Jordan that "the severest possible consequences" awaited CNN correspondents and that the network's presence in the region "was a violation of Iraqi sovereignty."
According to Mr. Jordan, officials warned other news organizations that anyone caught helping CNN cover the war in Iraq would be jailed.
Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism supports Mr. Jordan's decision, and described him as "obviously tortured" yesterday.
"He wrote an extraordinary and sensible essay," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "He was weighing out his journalistic responsibility and his human responsibility. It's a difficult task, but it comes with the territory of an editor who is responsible for his people - and the news."
Fox News media analyst Eric Burns said he "commended" Mr. Jordan, if he had indeed protected innocent people from harm.
"But why reveal all this now? Maybe CNN wants to cash in on the current pro-liberation sentiment," Mr. Burns said.
"If he had knowledge he couldn't reveal, then I hope that it would at least be reflected in CNN's coverage."
Barbara Cochran of the Radio and TV News Directors Association said Mr. Jordan was right not to reveal information that could endanger lives, citing the association's code of ethics, "which addresses balancing the harm you do with the news you present."
----
Just Another Staged Baghdad Rally?
by Ivan Eland Senior Fellow and Director, Center on Peace & Liberty
Independent Institute
April 12, 2003
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/baghdad.html
This wide-angle photo by Reuters of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in central Baghdad arouses suspicions that the "spontaneous jubilation" by the Iraqi masses shown on television around the world was a "media event" orchestrated by the Pentagon.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/statuescene.jpg
Rather than a spontaneous mass demonstration, the photo clearly shows that only a couple hundred Iraqis participated in the largely empty and heavily guarded Fardus Square. American tanks and troops surrounded the square and one armored vehicle "helped" the Iraqis pull down the statue.
In the upper part of the photo, it appears that normal traffic into the square has been blocked by American troops. Conveniently, this square is in close proximity to the Palestine Hotel, which houses journalists covering the war. The timing of the activities is also suspicious; the wrecking of the statue occurred during the morning shows on the American television networks.
The motive for this seemingly staged event: In the wake of reports of an ambivalent Iraqi reaction to an invasion billed as one designed to "liberate" Iraq, the Bush administration badly needed television pictures showing Iraqi popular support.
Thanks to Information Clearing House for the source information and photo. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm
[Expanded photo showing Chalabi follower at event: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/images/CHALIB~1.gif]
Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and author of the book, Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- drug war
Mexico Seizes More Than Four Tons of Pot
April 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Mexico-Drugs.html
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Army troops manning a roadblock near the Arizona border seized a truck packed with more than four tons of marijuana, the Defense Department reported Saturday.
The men in the truck fled on foot into the desert when they were pulled over at the checkpoint on a dirt road across the border from Yuma, Ariz.
Soldiers found packages inside the truck containing 8,600 pounds of marijuana.
Also Saturday, the Justice Department reported that the alleged head of security for the Juarez drug cartel was ordered to stand trial on organized crime charges.
Arturo Hernandez, a former police commander, was arrested April 4. According to the Justice Department, Hernandez's ``job was to execute members of rival drug gangs.
Corruption and drug ties among police in Mexico are a longstanding problem, and dozens of officers have been tried and convicted for helping traffickers in recent years.
-------- homeland security
Schools Across Nation Redrawing Crisis Plans
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/education/12SECU.html
The Spence School now owns a scanner that directly monitors communications from the city's Office of Emergency Management. At a moment's notice, the school, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, can turn its windowless gymnasium into a "safe room" where all students and staff can take shelter in case of a radiation or biochemical attack.
Public School 89 and Intermediate School 289, which share a building in TriBeCa, can evacuate their entire student body of more than 600 children in less than six minutes. They have done repeated drills to prove it.
And Booker T. Washington Middle School, on the Upper West Side, has asked parents to donate bottled water, to guarantee an ample supply in an emergency.
In the last two months, schools in New York City, and elsewhere across the nation, have been redrawing crisis plans, ordering more drills and briefing their staffs on new emergency procedures. In many cases, these new precautions were sparked by the latest round of terror alerts and by Tom Ridge, the country's homeland security chief, who urged Americans to devise emergency kits, with duct tape, plastic sheeting and other provisions in case of terror attacks.
Parents, once finished stocking their own homes, turned their attention to the schools, in some cases bombarding them with questions about their readiness.
For many principals, however, dealing with the issue has meant walking a fine line, sending home letters detailing their precautions while trying not to terrify everyone.
"The effort is always to address the widest range of concern without getting too extreme and without creating any kind of panic," said Lawrence Lynch, the principal of the Booker T. Washington Middle School.
City government, too, has pushed schools to beef up their emergency plans. Just before the start of war, the city's Education Department ordered schools to review safety procedures. But parents have often demanded that schools go far beyond that, taking unusual measures like stocking up on water and nonperishable food.
"There was the Code Orange elevation and a lot of parents were concerned - do we have the proper provisions?" said Sandra Kraehling, a co-chairwoman of the PTA at P.S. 89, who said parents were moved by Mr. Ridge to make sure the school had enough food and water.
Ms. Kraehling said she developed an evacuation plan for her family and kept a backpack filled with emergency supplies by the front door of her apartment. Schools must be just as ready, she said.
"We are told by the government to have a two or three-days' supply," she said. "Once a dark cloud would pass over, you'd be able to get out."
While fears may be more acute in New York, schools across the country have taken similar steps. For instance, in Virginia, the Fairfax County Public Schools now follow a security protocol tied directly to the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded alerts.
At the orange alert, Fairfax schools must take inventory of emergency supplies and step up communication with parents. And at red, the highest alert, schools may close or a "parent-child reunification process" may be implemented.
Many public school principals and private school headmasters have delicately sidestepped the grim details of a chemical or biological attack. The letters they have sent home often do not mention any specific events for which schools are now prepared. Instead, they use phrases like "In light of the increased concern for the safety of our community," which was the opening of a letter sent home last week by P.S. 89. The letter describes "indoor and outdoor evacuation drills" without any speculation about what might prompt an actual evacuation.
A posting on the Web site of Jamaica High School in Queens similarly describes Plan A, in which students remain in classrooms; Plan B, in which students are "escorted to safe areas of the building," and Plan C, an evacuation to one of three off-site destinations, without ever mentioning what might cause their need.
But some schools have been more direct. At Booker T. Washington, the top item in the most recent P.T.A. newsletter focused on school safety and noted that "duck-and-cover drills won't combat every threat."
Certain safety measures are not feasible in a large school building, the newsletter pointed out, "such as quickly sealing all windows in the event of a gas attack."
The possibility of an airborne attack - either biological, chemical or radioactive - prompted officials at Spence to make plans for the school's basement gymnasium to become a safe room, with provisions to shelter about 750 students and staff members for up to three days.
It was after a meeting on safety strategies held by the Guild of Independent Schools, an association of city private schools, that Spence decided to buy a radio scanner to monitor information from the city's Office of Emergency Management and get early warning of any attack.
"We have the capacity to immediately shut and seal the school's air intake system and gather everyone in the school building into the basement gymnasium," said Madlyn Deming, a spokeswoman.
A letter was sent to parents detailing the plans, Ms. Deming said. "We just wanted them to know that we will do absolutely everything we can to keep their daughters safe," she said.
Other city private schools recently subscribed for crisis communication services from a company called Pace, which allows a principal to record an emergency message that can be delivered to as many as six different telephone numbers per student within 20 minutes.
Among the Manhattan subscribers to the service, which costs $8 to $12 per student per year, are the Dalton School, the Ramaz yeshivas and the Grace Church School.
George Davison, the head of Grace Church School, has recorded a message for instant distribution. "We are in a sheltered-in-place situation," Mr. Davison says in the message. "And we are going to shelter the kids in the school until further notice. Please do not come to pick up your child until you receive a phone call from us that the streets are clear."
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has sought to reassure the parents of the city's 1.1 million public schoolchildren. "In the days and weeks ahead, the Department of Education and the principals and teachers at your child's school will be doing everything possible to prepare for potential emergency situations," he wrote to parents.
After the attack on the World Trade Center, the Education Department required all schools to revise their safety plans, which must be approved by the New York Police Department. The plans must specify at least three evacuation points and prepare for "a range of incidents including but not limited to: hostage situations; hazardous materials; shootings; kidnappings; fire emergencies; bomb threats; disasters; etc."
Nationally, many school districts have paid more attention to security issues since a spate of school shootings in the late 1990's. In one case, in Jonesboro, Ark., assailants pulled the fire alarm to draw students and teachers outside before opening fire.
This prompted many schools to develop alternatives to evacuation, called "sheltering in place."
After Sept. 11, 2001, schools once again reviewed their emergency plans. But the most recent terror warnings have triggered yet another round of upgrades. The Wayne Township School District, which encompasses 20 schools and 11,000 students in Indianapolis, has long had detailed plans, said Chuck Hibbert, the district's security director. But amid fears of terrorism and the war in Iraq, he said, officials felt they needed to do more to reassure parents.
The district adopted the model from Fairfax, Va., tying specific measures to the federal colored alert system. Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan has made many changes to its emergency procedures since its students were forced to flee as the World Trade Center burned and crumbled.
Built in the 1990's, Stuyvesant's building has a backup power generator that until recently had been intended only to speed an evacuation, said the principal, Stanley Teitel.
"Now what we have done is we have added things on to the generator so we could stay if need be," Mr. Teitel said.
Stuyvesant has also bought a supply of 3,200 bottles of water as well as granola bars and other dry food.
"I am not serving everyone a gourmet meal," Mr. Teitel said. "But everyone will eat."
-------- torture
Secret Police Files Found
April 12, 2003
(CBS)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/12/iraq/main549060.shtml
BAGHDAD - U.S. Marines have uncovered an underground vault containing th detailed files of Saddam Hussein's secret police.
Under the headquarters of the Special Security Organization, run by Saddam's most trusted son, Qusay, the Marines found a massive complex of offices over an area the size of two football fields, littered with millions of documents - detailed records that stretch back more than three decades.
In just one room were files for a million souls - their pictures, personal details, and entire history recorded in minute, chilling detail, reports CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan.
The complex was targeted by coalition planes on the first night of bombing. A missile struck the prison, the place where people who dared criticize the regime often ended up, many never seen or heard of again.
Now, with Marines in control, people want answers. Angry families descended on the neighboring intelligence headquarters, searching for any trace of loved ones.
"A lot of families in the surrounding area had family members who were in here," said Greg Clancy, First Marines. "One of them I'd heard hasn't seen their relative in six years but the last place they knew that they were in was this prison."
But Saddam's faithful fled before us forces arrived. They left no prisoners behind.
In its 2002 annual report, the human rights organization Amnesty International said that Iraq employed systemic torture.
"Common methods of physical torture included electric shocks or cigarette burns to various parts of the body, pulling out of fingernails, rape, long periods of suspension by the limbs from either a rotating fan in the ceiling or from a horizontal pole, beating with cables, hosepipe or metal rods, and falaqa (beating on the soles of the feet)," the report read.
"In addition, detainees were threatened with rape and subjected to mock execution. They were placed in cells where they could hear the screams of others being tortured and were deliberately deprived of sleep."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- imf / world bank /wto
IMF Says It Will Help in Iraq After UN Resolution
April 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-group-imf.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund's policy-setting committee said on Saturday the fund and World Bank will help in the reconstruction of war-ravaged Iraq once a United Nations resolution gives them a mandate.
The two Washington-based lenders have firmly resolved in recent days against being dragged into a political wrangle over who would lead a rebuilding effort and whether it would be done under a UN banner.
Some countries, particularly France and Germany, had been concerned that the United States -- as the lenders' largest shareholder -- would use the institutions to bypass the UN while still claiming multilateralism.
But the IMF and the bank, holding meetings here, said they would help only if all their shareholders were on board.
``The IMF and World Bank stand ready to play their normal role in Iraq's redevelopment at the appropriate time,'' a communique issued after the meeting of the IMF's policy-setting committee in Washington said. ``We support a further U.N. Security Council resolution,'' it added.
Committee leaders appeared relieved at the willingness of finance chiefs to agree on the need for a UN resolution.
``It's an enormously positive step forward,'' said British finance minister Gordon Brown, who is also chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC).
IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler called the decision ``a wonderful outcome.''
Koehler said with the three-week war in Iraq apparently near an end and Saddam Hussein's regime defunct, he was more optimistic about the global economy's prospects that just two or three weeks ago.
And, raising the possibility of restructuring or forgiving some of Iraq's debt to give the oil-rich but crippled country a boost, the IMFC said: ``It is important to address the debt issue, and we look forward to early engagement of the Paris Club (group of creditor nations).'' Germany, France and Russia are Iraq's three largest creditors.
The U.S.-UN relationship has been strained since the United States and Britain went into Iraq without UN backing. America had wanted the World Bank and IMF to take the top role in the rebuilding. European nations, including Germany, France, Russia and Britain, wanted the UN in charge.
Muslim countries including Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Syria, said in a statement earlier in the week that they too wanted the UN to lead the rebuilding effort.
UNSEEMLY BICKERING
Tensions eased when finance leaders opted for a united front, realizing that public bickering over how to handle the reconstruction when the Iraqi people sorely need aid would set a bad tone for further talks on all aspects of post-war Iraq, an official at the IMFC meeting this weekend told Reuters.
Earlier on Saturday, the Group of Seven finance ministers agreed at a session on the fringes of the IMF and World Bank gatherings that the framework for rebuilding Iraq should be based on a new UN Security Council resolution. The 184-strong IMF membership backed that view unanimously.
IMF experts have been working for weeks to develop plans for an Iraqi currency and ways to reestablish commerce in the country after the war.
The idea of some sort of debt forgiveness for Iraq was raised earlier this week by U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow who said Iraqis should not be saddled with debts run up by a dictator. Should those debts be forgiven or written down, it would set an intriguing precedent for many other nations who saw their national debts balloon under despots.
Debt forgiveness advocate Oxfam on Saturday said Snow's call for writing down Iraqi debts should be extended to African nations, who it said were ``undermined by crippling debts often incurred in previous decades by undemocratic regimes and dictators who have now been replaced.''
REASON FOR HOPE
With the Iraq leadership crushed after weeks of pounding by U.S.-led forces, Koehler expressed hope the global economy could resume stronger growth.
``I am much more optimistic now than I had been two or three weeks before,'' the IMF chief told a news conference. ``Not only because of news that the war will be short, but also because of the confirmation that the (IMF) spirit of cooperation is strong and intact. This gives me a lot of confidence.''
The war build-up, which lasted months longer than expected due to rows between the United States and Europe over how to proceed, landed hard on an already bruised global economy.
That ``fog of war'' was one reason the IMF this week cut its forecasts for global economic growth this year to 3.2 percent from the 3.7 percent the lender forecast just last September.
But while Koehler may now be more upbeat, IMF Chief Economist Kenneth Rogoff has warned against excessive optimism because risks to the global outlook are still high.
He said the ``insidious effects'' of the ongoing terror threat may linger and curb activity for decades.
The Iraq war badly strained the transatlantic alliance with America and Britain, who led the attack, opposed by France, Germany and Russia. As the debate grew up over who should lead the rebuilding effort, Britain crucially decided not to stand behind the Bush administration position.
One burning question is the creation of a new currency to help the Iraqi people get back to normal life and Koehler said that, ``the IMF can contribute to this issue, to the plan and the concept, to build up a solid currency.''
-------- ACTIVISTS
British Activist Is Reported Wounded by Israeli Sniper in Gaza
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/middleeast/12MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, April 11 - An Israeli sniper shot and critically wounded a British activist today as he tried to protect Palestinian children near a roadblock in the southern Gaza Strip, his organization said, citing witnesses.
The Israeli Army said it was investigating the report. But it said it knew of only one instance in which soldiers shot in that area today, to kill what the army said was an armed Palestinian who had opened fire on an Israeli post.
The Briton, Tom Hurndall, 21, was in the Rafah refugee camp with eight other members of the International Solidarity Movement, a group that uses nonviolent methods to impede Israeli Army actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Snipers opened fire from a tower to the east, said Tom Wallace, a spokesman for the group, citing members who were present.
Mr. Wallace said that Mr. Hurndall had spotted a child who was in the open, and that he retrieved that child successfully before leaving a protected area to escort two other children to safety. "As he went to get the other children, he was shot in the back of his head," Mr. Wallace said.
The shooting occurred between 4:30 and 5, during daylight hours. Mr. Wallace said that Mr. Hurndall was wearing a bright orange jacket with reflective strips, and that no Palestinians were firing in the area.
Mr. Hurndall was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in Beersheba.
He was the second activist from the International Solidarity Movement to be shot in less than a week. Last Saturday night, Brian Avery, 24, of Albuquerque, was shot in the face and seriously wounded when he stepped into the street during an Israeli curfew to investigate gunshots in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Members of the group said an Israeli armored vehicle had opened fire on him. An Israeli security official said that there were gun battles in the area at the time and that Mr. Avery might have been struck by a Palestinian bullet.
On March 16, another American member of the group, Rachel Corrie, 23, was crushed to death by an Israeli Army bulldozer as she tried to stop it from demolishing a home in Rafah. Witnesses said Ms. Corrie had been clearly visible, but the army said its investigation showed that the driver never saw her.
Mr. Hurndall arrived in the area a week ago and was based in Rafah, Mr. Wallace said. He said Mr. Hurndall had volunteered as a "human shield" in Iraq but had left because he thought President Saddam Hussein was exploiting the volunteers.
In a separate incident in Gaza today, Israeli helicopter gunships fired several missiles into a cemetery bordering an Israeli settlement, Palestinian witnesses said. No one appeared to have been wounded in the attack. The Israeli Army declined to comment on the incident.
On Tuesday, Israel killed a senior member of Hamas, a bodyguard, and five other people with a missile strike in Gaza City. On Thursday, it killed a bomb maker from Islamic Jihad in another such attack.
--------
Antiwar Priest Removes Flag, but Not for Long
April 12, 2003
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CHUR.html
SAN ANTONIO, April 11 - A Roman Catholic priest who removed an American flag from in front of his church has now restored it on orders of the archbishop of San Antonio, who says the priest's antiwar views should not be forced on the public.
Though the Vatican has expressed strong opposition to the war in Iraq, the move by the prelate here has not been the only one within the hierarchy of the American church to rein in activities by priests and staff members who are against the war.
Earlier this week, for instance, the Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., dismissed the longtime director of its peace and justice program after repeatedly warning him to curtail his antiwar activism.
Here in San Antonio, Archbishop Patrick Flores issued his order to restore the flag after receiving inquiries from parishioners at Our Lady of Grace Church in the town of La Coste, 20 miles southwest of the city. The parishioners said their priest, the Rev. John Mannion, often criticized the United States in sermons and kept the flag in front of the church at half-staff. Last week he removed the flag entirely.
"I have advised Father Mannion that the American flag must be restored at full height to its usual place of honor immediately," Archbishop Flores said on Thursday. "While I respect Father Mannion's passion for the dignity of all life and his right to his personal position on the war, nothing is accomplished by using the flag to force that view on those who are suffering the pain and uncertainty of knowing that America's men and women of the armed forces are in harm's way."
Father Mannion, pastor at the church since 2001, declined to comment.
In Portland, meanwhile, a spokesman for the archdiocese said Frank Fromherz, for 12 years director of its peace and justice program, had been laid off because of budget cuts. But Mr. Fromherz, 49, said archdiocese officials had told him that he was being fired because he had violated his role as an agent for the archbishop and his views.
Mr. Fromherz and the archbishop, John G. Vlazny, had repeatedly clashed over the war. In one instance, Mr. Fromherz sent an e-mail message to hundreds of people that encouraged antiwar protests and called on "the International Criminal Court to indict and prosecute our own president as a war criminal."
That was in contrast with a recent message from Archbishop Vlazny to the 350,000 Catholics of the archdiocese, in which he told them to emphasize prayer and solidarity. "Divisiveness," he said, "is not at all helpful."
--------
Antiwar Protesters Switch Focus to Iraq Occupation
April 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-protests.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Thousands of peace campaigners poured onto the streets of Europe and elsewhere on Saturday switching their focus from preventing war on Iraq to protesting against the continuing U.S. and British military presence.
Although U.S. and British officials say the military operation is drawing to an end after the fall of President Saddam Hussein's government, activists said their concerns were as grave as ever.
``It is good Saddam has gone but we cannot forget this war is illegal and without the sanction of the United Nations. It is setting a very dangerous precedent of pre-emption,'' Pakistani politician and former international cricketer Imran Khan told Reuters as he joined a mass rally in London's Hyde Park.
``No country should have the right to be judge, jury and executioner. That is the reason the U.N. was set up -- to protect the weak from the strong. But this war sets a precedent where might is right and undermines the U.N.''
Organizers estimated 100,000 people marched through the city center, waving banners saying ``No Occupation of Iraq'' and chanting ``Bush, Blair, CIA, how many kids have you killed today?'' Police put the numbers at closer to 20,000.
In Washington, thousands of people demonstrated against the war. Wearing T-shirts like one that read ``I see all the dead Iraqi children. Boy, do I feel safe,'' and carrying signs saying ``Fight the new colonialism!,'' the protesters also condemned the way U.S. media covers the war.
Police at one point used their batons to hit several protesters, who pushed and shoved back, and arrested three people.
In the Italian capital Rome, a march originally organized to call for an end to the fighting changed its slogan to ``No to an infinite and global war.''
``This war is far from over and anyway it will have terrible effects on the Middle East and maybe on the whole world,'' university professor Umberto Allegretti who joined the protest.
TV footage showed a giant rainbow banner, about 500 yards long, being pulled around the Circus Maximus where Romans used to race chariots.
'STOP THE OCCUPATION'
As the military campaign in Iraq enters its final stages, Washington is preparing to install an interim U.S.-led administration to oversee reconstruction.
Maha Alkatib, an Iraqi woman living in Britain, said it was vital the Iraqi people be allowed to take responsibility for forming their own government.
``It is difficult to comprehend a democratic government appointing a government for another state,'' she said.
In Paris, about 11,000 people marched through the streets demanding an immediate cease-fire in Iraq and the withdrawal of U.S. and British troops.
Demonstrators, led by several prominent French Communist politicians, carried banners reading ``Stop the occupation in Iraq'' and ``Yes to a democratic and independent Iraq.''
In Berlin, about 12,000 protesters marched past the headquarters of the opposition CDU conservatives, who have backed the U.S.-led campaign, shouting ``peace not occupation.''
About 200 Kurds also gathered in the city to celebrate the toppling of Saddam.
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, tens of thousands burned effigies of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair while in Calcutta, about 15,000 leftist demonstrators formed a human chain around the U.S. and British consulates, shouting ``Iraq will become another Vietnam for America.''
Dozens of hard-line students protested noisily in front of the British Embassy in Tehran, shouting ``Down with Bush,'' ``Down with England.''
In San Francisco, more than 1,000 demonstrators huddled peacefully under umbrellas in a steady rain in front of City Hall to protest a U.S. ``occupation'' of Iraq, then marched to a nearby park for another anti-war rally.
Although the turn-out in London was far below the roughly million anti-war protesters who marched through the capital in February, organizers said numbers exceeded their expectations.
``It shows there are still plenty of people still horrified by this illegal war,'' said Andrew Burgin from the Stop the War Coalition, which organized the event along with the Muslim Association of Britain.
``They have not found any weapons of mass destruction. It is an illegal occupation in terms of the international community and it has been an illegal war,'' he said.
Washington launched the war three weeks ago to destroy Iraq's alleged banned weapons, but has not found any so far.
Burgin said there was a fear that Iraq was only the beginning in a series of wars planned by the United States, and possibly Britain.
``Iraq now, but will it be Syria and Iran tomorrow?'' he said.
Most of Saturday's protests were peaceful and there were few arrests.
--------
Thousands in India, Bangladesh Protest Iraq War
April 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-southasia-protest.html
CALCUTTA, India/DHAKA (Reuters) - Thousands of people chanting anti-U.S. slogans took to the streets in a major eastern Indian city and Bangladesh on Saturday in protest against the war in Iraq, but there were no reports of violence.
About 15,000 leftist demonstrators formed a human chain around the U.S. and British consulates in Calcutta, which has seen many anti-war demonstrations.
Shouting ``Iraq will become another Vietnam for America,'' they blocked traffic in the city's main shopping and business center, as hundreds of police armed with bamboo canes and rifles stood guard at the foreign missions.
``Baghdad may have fallen to U.S. forces, but we shall continue to protest against American imperialism and its attempt to control human civilization,'' Tithankar Mukherjee, an activist leading the demonstrators, told Reuters.
Several effigies of President Bush were set alight by the protesters.
Most of the anti-war protests in Calcutta, capital of communist-ruled state of West Bengal, have been peaceful but a few have turned violent, including attacks on a Nike showroom, a Citigroup Inc office and the stoning of the American Center.
India, a Cold War ally of the Soviet Union, has said the war on Iraq could have been avoided but has refrained from directly criticising the United States as ties between New Delhi and Washington have warmed in recent years.
In neighboring Bangladesh, about 20,000 rallied in the capital, Dhaka, protesting against what they said was the ``occupation of Iraq by Anglo-American forces.''
They chanted ``Down With Bush, Down With Blair,'' ``Bush Blair Go Back From Iraq,'' ``Bush Blair (are) Enemies of Humanity,.''
They also burned the effigies President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as the national flags of the two countries.
Similar protest were also reported from other parts Bangladesh, including the port city of Chittagong.
-------
Activists Stage Rallies Against Iraq War
April 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Protests.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even as the war with Iraq winds down, protesters in the United States and abroad renewed their campaign against the conflict Saturday. In Washington, 10 blocks from an antiwar demonstration, supporters of the war effort drew thousands to their own rally.
Protesters turned out in much smaller numbers than in the months leading up to the conflict, and their focus switched from keeping American troops out of Iraq to bringing them home.
In Washington, where tens of thousands marched during protests in January and March, a few thousand people rallied a few blocks from the White House for speeches and a march calling on U.S. troops to leave Iraq.
``We're not the police officers of the world,'' said Alissa Johnson, 24, a student from Boston. ``It's not up to us to go in and involve ourselves in everything, especially through force.''
Near the antiwar protest site, a similar number, intermittently chanting ``U-S-A U-S-A,'' held their own rally against the backdrop of the Capitol dome. As demonstrators waved American flags, people said nothing about U.S. troops' leaving any time soon.
``They should stay as long as required to help out the Iraqi people,'' said Rimma Dean, 42, an insurance analyst from Olney, Md. ``The Iraqi people need our support.''
Among speakers were former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, now a television actor; actor Ron Silver and former Reagan administration official Linda Chavez. Organizers read the names of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.
``Our parents died for Vietnamese freedom. Our children are fighting for Iraqi freedom,'' said P.T. Dao, 53, editor of a Vietnamese newspaper in Falls Church, Va. He was among 200 ethnic Vietnamese on the National Mall.
The turnout of protesters also was modest in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities.
Other countries had antiwar demonstrations Saturday. They, too, were not on the scale of past protests, such as the February march in London that drew up to 2 million people.
This time, police said 20,000 demonstrators marched in London. Many held placards demanding ``No occupation of Iraq.'' They paused for two minutes of silence for the victims of war and tossed bunches of yellow daffodils at the gates of 10 Downing St., Prime Minister Tony Blair's official home. Separately, Iraqi exiles held their annual meeting to remember family members imprisoned under Saddam Hussein.
The numbers were down to several thousand from previous rallies in Montreal, the epicenter of Canada's anti-war sentiment, and other Canadian cities. ``I would expect there's been a lot of disillusionment and discouragement among those who have been protesting,'' said Jack Layton, leader of the leftist New Democratic Party.
In Berlin, about 12,000 people gathered for a rally near the Brandenburg Gate, the city's best-known landmark. Around 50,000 protesters marched in Rome. A Paris demonstration drew around 11,000, closely watched by police to prevent anti-Semitic acts. Nearly 50,000 school children and other protesters marched in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Demonstrators in Washington marched near the White House and past offices of companies that organizers said are profiting from the war and media organizations they said ignored the plight of Iraqi civilians. Three people were arrested. At one point along the route, nightstick-wielding police clashed with some demonstrators.
Police said two protesters were charged with assault on an officer, the third with failure to obey an officer.
For activists, the Iraq war has overshadowed the spring meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Even so, security was tight for the meetings, with police closing streets around the financial institutions. Organizers expect no more than 2,000 for a march Sunday.
Associated Press writers David Ho and Sam Hananel contributed to this report.
On the Net:
International Answer: http://www.internationalanswer.org
Citizens United: http://www.citizensunited.org
----
Koreans rally against war in N Korea
AFP
April 12, 2003
http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2003/april/49811.htm
Seoul: South Koreans rallied today to protest at what they called a US plot to start a war on North Korea following Iraq.
They chanted slogans and waved banners which urged the United States to stop "invading" Iraq and seeking to start a war on the Korean peninsula.
Many of them carried pictures of civilian victims of the war in Iraq, with inscriptions reading "Is this liberation?" in reference to the US and British description of the nature of the war in Iraq.
Lee Young-Hee, a renowned pro-unification activist and former communication professor at Hanyang University, said the war in Iraq had helped open the eyes of South Koreans to the "immorality" of US foreign policies.
"The Bush administration has misled the world opinion as if Iraq had a huge stock pile of weapons of mass destruction and formidable conventional forces," Lee said in front of the crowd of some 3,000.
"But have they found any trace of weapons of mass destruction? Where are all those Iraqi forces gone?... Iraq had nothing left even before this war," he said.
Lee said the threat to peace on Korean peninsula comes from the US instead of North Korea, accusing the Bush administration of being intent on attacking the North.
The protestors also chanted slogans urging the South Korean government to scrap its plan to send 700 non-combatants to help coalition forces in Iraq.
There have been mounting concerns that the United States might apply military means to North Korea, as it did to Iraq, when the focus of international attention moves to the North following the Iraq war.
----
Anti-war protests continue in New Zealand
Saturday, April 12, 2003.
ABC (Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s830879.htm
About 1,000 anti-war demonstrators have marched through Auckland protesting outside a newspaper office and the state television studio over what they said was biased coverage of the conflict in Iraq.
They were also to protest outside a petrol station.
Police said the demonstration was peaceful, with no reported arrests.
Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA) spokesman John Minto claimed that since the war began last month the New Zealand Herald had been become "blatantly biased", but he acknowledged its recent independent editorial line and balanced reportage.
In a letter delivered to TVNZ chief executive Ian Fraser, the protesters claimed its news service had become a "mouthpiece and visual portal for an unrelenting stream of bald US/UK propaganda and blatant lies".
The letter noted the state-owned broadcaster had shown "uncritical footage" from embedded journalists who "were chosen in the first place for their willingness to have their stories and pictures censored by the Anglo-American forces".
The marchers were also to visit the British and Australian consulates before finishing with a rally outside the US consulate.
Around 200 people also protested in the capital Wellington as part of rallies organised in major cities around the world this weekend to call for an end to the US-led war.
-------
Antiwar, Pro-Troop Protests Rally in D.C.
By Christina Pino-Marina
washingtonpost.com Staff Write
Saturday, April 12, 2003; 6:03 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13190-2003Apr12?language=printer
Antiwar activists and counterdemonstrators held separate rallies in downtown Washington today, prompting police to close several streets to allow for permitted protest activities.
Anti-war activists marched along Pennsylvania Ave. in downtown Washington as D.C. police officers lined up along the march route, keeping an eye on the crowd.
At the front of march, protesters displayed a large yellow and black banner with the words, "Impeach Bush!" as marchers chanted "No blood for oil, U.S. off Iraqi soil."
D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey said the demonstration has been peaceful for the most part but there was a skirmish involving officers and protesters dressed in black near 9th and G streets NW after a protester tried to push an officer off his bicycle. A few officers had pepper spray canisters at the ready while others used their nightsticks to push the demonstrators back onto the streets. Ramsey said no arrests were made, but he did say one protester suffered a minor leg injury.
Earlier, protesters gathered in Freedom Plaza, 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW chanting slogans, beating drums and raising their fists in the air. Many were determined to continue their campaign to denounce the conflict after the U.S.-led military campaign ousted Saddam Hussein's regime from power earlier this week.
Former Navy Recruiter Esther Pastor, 48, traveled to Washington from Virginia Beach to support the rally said: "(There are ) a lot of us who don't believe that this war should have started, who don't believe that it should continue, and who do not believe that it represents the true American Spirit."
The antiwar activities were organized by International ANSWER, which is the same coalition that organized demonstrations in Washington in January and March. ANSWER spokesman Brian Becker told The Washington Post that tens of thousands would come to the nation's capital but that the protest would likely be smaller than a March 15 march that organizers estimated at 100,000 and police estimated at 40,000. Antiwar organizers requested a permit for 10,000 demonstrators for today's events.
The street closures began Friday morning and continued overnight. Police closed the following streets in Northwest Washington: 19th Street between G Street and Pennsylvania Avenue; H Street between 18th and 20th streets; 18th, 19th and 20th between F and I streets; 17th from New York Avenue to I Street; and Pennsylvania, F and G streets between 17th and 21st streets. In addition, H Street is closed from 21st Street through Connecticut Avenue. Police expect to keep all those streets shut until at least 5 a.m. Monday, but they said streets could be reopened sooner, depending on the circumstances.
On Sunday, anti-globalization demonstrators will head to the Foggy Bottom offices of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are holding their spring meetings this weekend. That group of protesters will march from 16th and Euclid streets NW to the World Bank. That route could affect traffic on 13th, 14th, 15th, 18th, H and I streets, plus New York and Connecticut avenues.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.