Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Agency uses polygraph despite shortcomings
Depleted uranium casts shadow over peace in Iraq
Depleted uranium will affect Iraq for generations to come
David meets Goliath
UN watchdog asks US to secure Iraq nuclear site
Nuclear Material, but No Smoking Gun, Found at Plant
Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze
U.S. Favors WMD - Free Mideast, Linked to Peace
Japanese Utility Shuts Down Nuclear Grid
Power shortage looming large in Japan as nuclear reactors shut down
Powell Optimistic on North Korea Talks
Energy Dept. Eyes More Lie Detector Tests
Radiation Fund Is Expected to Run a Deficit
The misadventures of neoconservatives
Please, no more made-in-the-USA monsters
Clinton blasts US approach to international affairs
MILITARY
As the Iraq War Goes On, Afghan Violence Increases
Indonesia Turning to Russia for Arms
Jobs for the boys: the reconstruction billions
Living dangerously in Colombia
Tests rule out suspect bio-labs
Army probes buried trailers
Arms hunt narrows to priority sites
Troops find 'suspicious labs' buried near factory
As Iraqis Flee To Syria, U.S. Nets Scientist
2,000 policemen report for work
Marines Raid Journalists' Baghdad Hotel
Threat of military tribunals
With God and guns behind them, clerics begin calling shots
People in Basra Contest Official View of Siege
U.S. Convenes Meeting Focusing on Future of Iraq
Mosul shootings overshadow US-led talks
Syria Fears the Unknown: What's Behind U.S. Threats
U.S. Believe Iraqi Scientist Was in Syria
U.S. Threatens to Impose Penalties Against Syrians
Top agent in CIA's 'secret war' dies
Prosecutors: Accused Spy Has Money, China Contacts
Kofi Annan Worriedby Rhetoric on Syria
U.S. Has No Plans to Count Civilian Casualties
Rumsfeld Requests Power to Reorganize Services
CNN's disinformation campaign
War seen as in line with Christian view
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Breyer Says Rights Need Guarding in Terror War
White House seeks to expand DNA database
The war on drugs
Police focus on terror, security
Justice Deems Secrecy Fears 'Unfounded'
ENERGY AND OTHER
The Battle Between Natural Gas and Diesel
Sunlight Can Convert Disinfectant Into Dioxin
ACTIVISTS
IRAQ: Hundreds of U.S. Soldiers Emerge as Conscientious Objectors
D.C. Officer on Desk Duty After Allegedly Hitting Protester
Protests Greet U.S.-Led Talks on Iraq
Seven activists win top environmental prize
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Agency uses polygraph despite shortcomings
ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 15, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030415-98631720.htm
The Energy Department decided yesterday to continue using polygraph tests to protect the nation's nuclear-arms stockpile, despite a scientific study that found severe shortcomings in the tests' accuracy.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the department must use the best tools available to protect sensitive information about the stockpile. Critics said the department is making a mistake by ignoring recommendations of the study of polygraph effectiveness conducted six months ago at the urging of Congress.
"Basically they've ignored the evidence," said Stephen Fienberg of Carnegie Mellon University, who was chairman of the National Academy of Sciences study.
A spokesman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat, said the Energy Department's response to the National Academy of Sciences is a "surprising and disappointing result" that is hard to understand.
The Energy Department imposed polygraph requirements on employees several years ago in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee spy situation at the department's nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. Many scientists at department labs objected that the tests were inherently inaccurate, which prompted congressional inquiries and the scientific review.
Congress ordered the Energy Department to take the study's findings into account.
In a proposed rule, however, the department says that retaining the program is well-suited to fulfilling national security needs.
The scientific review led by Mr. Fienberg concluded that federal agencies should not rely on polygraphs to screen workers and job applicants because the machines are too inaccurate.
The likelihood of ignoring a spy because he passed a polygraph test is so high that relying on the tests is probably a greater danger to national security than discarding them, Mr. Fienberg said in response to the proposed Energy Department rule.
"It's bureaucratic impudence," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. "Energy said, 'We'll replace the existing policy with precisely the same policy.' "
By refusing to change, Mr. Abraham is expressing unwillingness to make life difficult for intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, which made the mistake long ago of using polygraphs as their primary counterintelligence tool, said Dr. Alan Zelicoff, senior scientist in the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratory.
Dr. Zelicoff, whose laboratory is covered by the Energy Department policy, said the careers of some scientists have been ruined because of false positive results on polygraph tests.
In justifying keeping the polygraph program as it is, the Energy Department pointed to language in the scientific study about use of polygraphs as a trigger for detailed follow-up investigations.
Mr. Abraham said the polygraph is not used on a "stand-alone basis but as part of a larger fabric of investigative and analytical reviews."
The Energy Department's position follows a move by the Pentagon to expand its polygraph program. The Pentagon told Congress recently that it might seek authorization to conduct more than the allowed 5,000 polygraph exams per year.
-------- depleted uranium
Depleted uranium casts shadow over peace in Iraq
15 April 03
New Scientist Print Edition
Duncan Graham-Rowe, with additional reporting by Rob Edwards
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993627
Wrecked tanks and vehicles litter the Iraqi countryside. Ruined buildings dominate towns and cities. Many were blown to pieces by shells tipped with depleted uranium, a material that the US and Britain say poses no long-term health or environmental risks. But many Iraqis, and a growing band of scientists, are not so sure.
Last week, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) announced it wanted to send a scientific team into Iraq as soon as possible to examine the effects of depleted uranium (DU). People's fears that DU leaves a deadly legacy must be addressed, says UNEP. Some scientists go further. Evidence is emerging that DU affects our bodies in ways we do not fully understand, they say, and the legacy could be real.
DU is both radioactive and toxic. Past studies of DU in the environment have concluded that neither of these effects poses a significant risk. But some researchers are beginning to suspect that in combination, the two effects could do significant harm. Nobody has taken a hard look at the combined effect of both, says Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. "The bottom line is it might contribute to the risk."
She is not alone. The idea that chemical and radiological damage are reinforcing each other is very plausible and gaining momentum, says Carmel Mothersill, head of the Radiation and Environmental Science Centre at the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. "The regulators don't know how to handle it. So they sweep it under the carpet."
Read "Before the dust settles", the New Scientist editorial on this story here.
A by-product of the uranium enrichment process, DU is chemically identical to natural uranium. But most of the 235 isotope has been extracted leaving mainly the non-fissionable 238 isotope. It is used to make the tips of armour-piercing shells because it is extremely dense: 1.7 times as dense as lead. Also, unlike other heavy metals that tend to flatten, or mushroom, upon impact, DU has the ability to "self-sharpen" as material spread out by the impact ignites and burns off as the munition pierces its target.
During the Gulf war in 1991, the US and Britain fired an estimated 350 tonnes of DU at Iraqi tanks, a figure likely to be matched in the course of the current conflict. In the years since then, doctors in southern Iraq have reported a marked increase in cancers and birth defects, and suspicion has grown that they were caused by DU contamination from tank battles on farmland west of Basra.
As the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence point out, this claim has not been substantiated. Iraq did not allow the World Health Organization to carry out an independent assessment. Given its low radioactivity and our current understanding of radiobiology, DU cannot trigger such health effects, the British and American governments maintain.
But what if they are wrong? Though DU is 40 per cent less radioactive than natural uranium, Miller believes that its radiological and toxic effects might combine in subtle, unforeseen ways, making it more carcinogenic than thought. It's a controversial theory, but one for which Miller has increasing evidence.
Uranium is "genotoxic". It chemically alters DNA, switching on genes that would otherwise not be expressed. The fear is that the resulting abnormally high activity in cells could be a precursor to tumour growth.
But while the chemical toxicity of DU is reasonably well established, Mothersill points out that the radiological effects of DU are less clear. To gauge the risk from low-dose radiation, researchers extrapolate from tests using higher doses. But the relationship between dose and effect is not linear: at low doses radiation kills relatively fewer cells. And though that sounds like good news, it could mean that low radiation is having subtle effects that go unnoticed because cells are not dying, says Mothersill.
Miller has found one way this may happen. She has discovered the first direct evidence that radiation from DU damages chromosomes within cultured cells. The chromosomes break, and the fragments reform in a way that results in abnormal joins (Military Medicine, vol 167, p 120). Both the breaks and the joins are commonly found in tumour cells.
More crucially, she has recently found that DU radiation increases gene activity in cultured cells at doses of DU not known to cause chemical toxicity (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, in press). The possible consequences are made all the more uncertain because no one knows if genes switched on by DU radiation enhance the damage caused by genes switched on by DU's toxic effects, or vice versa. "I think that we assumed that we knew everything that we needed to know about uranium," says Miller. "This is something we have to consider now when we think about risk estimates."
Britain's Royal Society briefly referred to these synergistic effects in its report last year on the health effects of DU munitions. "There is a possibility of damage to DNA due to the chemical effects being enhanced by the effects of the alpha-particle irradiation." But it makes no recommendations for future research to evaluate the risks.
The bystander effect
Miller points to another reason to be concerned about DU: the so-called "bystander effect". There is a growing consensus among scientists that radiation damages more than just the cells it directly hits. In tests using equipment that allows single cells to be irradiated by individual alpha particles, gene expression increases both in irradiated cells, and in neighbouring cells that have not been exposed. "At high doses, 'bystander' is not an issue because you are killing so many cells. But at low doses that's not really true," says Miller. There is a danger that experiments not specifically looking for this effect could miss an important source of damage.
A body of research has also emerged over the past decade showing that the effects of radiation may not appear immediately. Damage to genes may be amplified as cells divide, so the full consequences may only appear many generations after the event that caused it.
And while the chemical toxicity of DU itself is more clear-cut, the possibility remains that there may still be some unforeseen synergistic effects at a genetic level. Other heavy metals, such as tungsten, nickel and cobalt are similarly genotoxic. When Miller and her team exposed human cells to a mixture of these metals, significantly more genes became activated than when the cells were exposed to the equivalent amount of each metal separately (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, in press).
Miller and Mothersill say that recommended safe radiation limits are often based on the idea that only irradiated cells will be affected, and ignore both the bystander effect and the possible amplification over the generations. "Nothing should be written in stone when it comes to risk assessment," agrees Michael Clark at Britain's National Radiological Protection Board. But even if there were a case for re-evaluating the dosimetry for low-dose radiation, he says we should be cautious of the significance of Miller's lab-based research. "An in vitro effect is not a health effect."
Also, says Clark, everyone has traces of natural uranium in their bodies. "If there was some sort of subtle low-dose effect I think we would have seen it," he says. Because none has shown up in epidemiological studies, it seems unlikely there are any health effects associated with DU, which is less radioactive. But Miller is not convinced. While most people have small amounts of uranium in their bodies, she says no studies have been done to see whether this contributes to cases of cancer in society at large.
The military tends to dismiss such hazards as being of only theoretical significance, at least when it comes to civilians. According to the Pentagon, the only risk of exposure is during combat, when DU shells hit hard targets and the metal ignites. This creates clouds of uranium oxide dust that can be breathed in. But heavy oxide particles quickly settle, it says, limiting the risk of exposure. "A small dust particle is still very heavy," says Michael Kilpatrick of the US Deployment Health Support Directorate. "It stays on the ground."
That sounds reassuring until you read UNEP's latest report on DU left over from conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. Last month, a team of experts collaborating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, WHO and NATO concluded that DU poses little risk in Bosnia although it can still be detected at many sites. Just 11 tonnes was fired in that conflict.
But evidence that DU may be moving through the ground and could contaminate local water supplies should be investigated further, UNEP says. And on rare occasions, wind or human activity may raise DU-laden dust that local people could inhale. The Royal Society admits that localised areas of DU contamination pose a risk, particularly to young children, and should be cleared up as a priority. They also recommend the environmental sampling of affected areas (see Royal Society Reports on DU, 2002", below).
Such evidence is partly why UNEP is keen to study DU fired during the present conflict in Iraq. Assessments in former Yugoslavia were made up to seven years after DU weapons were used, UNEP admits, and a more immediate study in Iraq would give us a much better understanding of how DU behaves in the environment. Any hazards such a study identifies could be dealt with immediately, says UNEP. And even now, an investigation in Iraq could reveal risks remaining from DU fired during the Gulf war in 1991.
Veterans show ill effects
Cracks are also appearing in the argument that DU munitions have not proven harmful even to troops. In the 1991 war, more than 100 coalition troops were exposed to DU after being accidentally fired on by their own forces. The majority inhaled uranium oxide, while the rest suffered shrapnel injuries. Some still have DU in their bodies. Britain and America point out that none has developed cancers or kidney problems, as might have been expected if DU posed a long-term danger.
But researchers at the Bremen Institute for Prevention Research, Social Medicine and Epidemiology in Germany have found that all is not well with the veterans. Last month they published results from tests in which they took blood samples from 16 of the soldiers, and counted the number of chromosomes in which broken strands of DNA had been incorrectly repaired. In veterans, these abnormalities occurred at five times the rate as in a control group of 40 healthy volunteers (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, vol 103, p 211). "Increased chromosomal aberrations are associated with an increased incidence of cancers," says team member Heike Schröder. The damage occurred, they say, because the soldiers inhaled DU particles in battle.
The NRPB is unconvinced. "It is possible that exposure to significant amounts of DU could cause excess chromosome aberrations, but this study has technical flaws," says Clark. "There are no proper controls to compare results with soldiers who were not exposed to DU. And some of the reported excess aberrations are well known to be linked to chemicals rather than radiation."
Tough decision to make
Deciding whether DU is to blame will be tough. Independent research may confirm that rates of cancer have increased in the Iraqi population. But the Iraqi government has used chemical weapons on its own people that can produce the same outcome, and it is impossible to know for sure who may have been exposed. Soldiers may similarly have been exposed to chemicals in 1991. The only way to resolve the issue is more research, says Dudley Goodhead, director of Britain's Medical Research Council's Radiation and Genome Stability Unit at Harwell, near Oxford. "It's something important that needs to be explained."
Miller admits it is entirely possible that DU contamination is safe. But many of the scientific investigations into DU have only just begun, and their results will be long coming. "None of this has been looked at or even thought about it until the last few years," she says. As the dust begins to settle in Iraq, it remains to be seen when the ravages of war will end.
Royal Society reports on DU, 2002 - Conclusions
• Most soldiers have a negligible risk of dying of cancer caused by radiation from battlefield DU. It will be undetectable above the risk of dying from cancer over a normal lifetime. Soldiers should not suffer adverse effects on the kidney or other organs.
• A few soldiers, for instance those who clean up vehicles struck by DU, may have an excess risk of lung cancer and may develop short-term kidney damage.
• People living in areas where DU was deployed have a negligible risk of developing cancers as a result of inhaling DU resuspended in the air. But it is uncertain how much DU is inhaled in years following a conflict. Most people should not suffer any effects on kidney function from inhaled DU.
• Ingestion of DU from contaminated water and food, and from soil, will be highly variable and may be significant in some cases: for example, children playing in areas where DU shells have impacted.
Royal Society reports on DU, 2002 - Recommendations
• Long-term epidemiological studies of soldiers exposed to DU, and environmental sampling, particularly of water and milk, should be undertaken. Information about DU levels should be given to local populations, and contaminated areas cleaned up.
• British veterans exposed to high levels of DU should be identified and independently evaluated. An independent study of anecdotal reports of death and illness in US veterans linked to DU is required.
• In any future conflict using DU munitions, tests of kidney function should be completed on soldiers as soon after exposure as practical.
• Better estimates of DU levels in the air around tanks, and models of DU oxide behaviour during impact, are required. More information is needed on the bioavailability of DU and titanium products from munitions, and whether these concentrate in plants and animals.
The full Royal Society reports can be obtained here and here (pdf files).
----
Depleted uranium will affect Iraq for generations to come
Wednesday April 15 2003
Al Jazeera
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/04/16/6309693
Our guest is professor Major Doug Rocke, former chief of the Depleted Uranium Project at the Pentagon.
Prof Rocke says he suffered the effects of depleted uranium from the first week of the Gulf War in 1991 but did not realise it until March 1995. Tests showed that he had 5000 times the normal level of radiation in his body, enough he says sarcastically, to light up a small village. He is also suffering from problems with breathing, immune system and one eye. He has had 15 surgical operations to his liver as a result of his infection by this uranium syndrome.
http://english.aljazeera.net/topics/article.asp?cu_no=1&item_no=2565&version=1&template_id=273&parent_id=258
The Presenter (Ahmed Mansour): Despite research by a large number of scientists and experts on the enormous damage inflicted by depleted uranium ... and the use by the US in the Gulf War in1991 , and wars in the Balkans and Afghanistan in1994 ,1995 , 1999 and2000 ...The US use of depleted uranium is not confined to the total destruction of targets but extends to the destruction of the environment and human life in general in the affected regions. Such areas will be unfit for habitation for millions of years.
Our guest is professor Major Doug Rocke, former chief of Depleted Uranium Project at the Pentagon.
Born in Illinois1949 , professor Doug Rocke joined the US Air Force in1967 , took part in the Vietnam War from 1969 to 1971as a B 52pilot. He obtained his PhD in nuclear physics. He worked until 1996as a field doctor and specialist in nuclear physics in the US Army. He took part in the 1991 Gulf War, tasked with depleted uranium clean up in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
From March to June1991 , Prof Rocke compiled contaminated equipment from the battlefield and shipped part of it back to the US and supervised the burial of more equipment in Saudi Arabian deserts. He was appointed head of the Depleted Uranium Project in the Pentagon between 1August 1994 and November1995 . He also worked as a professor of nuclear physics at Jackson University - Alabama until2000 .
Prof Rocke says he suffered the effects of depleted uranium from the first week of the Gulf War in 1991 but did not realise it until March1995 . Tests showed that he had 5000 times the normal level of radiation in his body, enough he says sarcastically, to light up a small village. He is also suffering from problems with breathing, immune system and one eye. He has had 15 surgical operations to his liver as a result of his infection by this uranium syndrome.
Q: At this very critical time, a lot of people are trying to understand and know more about the weapons containing depleted uranium which the United States plans to use... Despite all the studies and research that came up during the last period and confirmed the risks of using the depleted uranium, officials at the Pentagon announced that they are going to use depleted uranium bombs in Iraq again. What is your understanding of this announcement?
Professor Rocke: The announcement is very simple. Uranium munitions kill and destroy everything that they contact. Going back to the (1991) Gulf War and even before, the Pentagon had decided to use weapons that are absolutely efficient in combat. At the completion of the 1991 Gulf War when I was specifically assigned to clean up the uranium mess I received a memorandum, this is a Los Alamos memorandum written by a colonel at Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico. In that memorandum, he said "Even though we know there are health and environmental effects, you should make sure that we can always use uranium munitions in combat because they are so effective. And therefore lie about the health and environmental effects of the use of uranium munitions in combat."
Smoke rises over the Iraqi capital Baghdad following further bombing raids by US-led forces, March22
The Presenter: Being the former chief of the depleted uranium project in the Pentagon, what are the risks of using depleted uranium on life and human beings in general?
Professor Rocke: The first thing that we have to understand is that each individual uranium round fired by an Abrams tank is ten pounds of solid uranium contaminated with plutonium, neptunium and americium. On impact, you have a fine uranium outside dust that is generated. This represents about one half of the original mass. So if you have4500 grams, you have about 2300 grams or 2200 grams that turn into a dust on the outside, they can be inhaled .. and then get into the body. When this happens, you have all kinds of serious problems both metal poisoning and radiological effects on the body.
The Presenter: Being one of the victims of depleted uranium, can you describe the symptoms you felt when you were infected?
Professor Rocke: The most significant effect that we noticed was respiratory problems. And the respiratory problems acted like you had a really bad case of bronchitis. Your respiratory system was affected, you couldn't breathe as well and you started noticing all kinds of serious apparatus effects with your breathing system......The other health effect we saw immediately in ourselves and everybody else was the terrible rash. And the rash that we suspect and which we still have to this day is from the heavy metal poisoning that occurs just as if you would have eaten a litre of any other heavy toxic metal.
The Presenter: Dr. Rocke, What are the most important symptoms of inhaling depleted uranium?
Professor Rocke: The biggest problem that we had, in addition to the respiratory problems, is cancer which developed in members of our team within eight to nine months. Within two years, additional cancers developed and people started to die. Individuals that we had confirmed had embedded uranium shrapnel deliberately locked in their bodies by the United States Department of Defence did develop tumours in and around that embedded shrapnel. Published research verifies that uranium shrapnel or uranium embedded in the tissue will cause cancer. That we see in any place that uranium has been used, manufactured and processed .... in various areas of the United States.
The Presenter: But Michael Kilpatrick, who was responsible for providing medical care to the veterans at the Pentagon, said in a press conference that a study covering 90 infected veterans from the 1991 Gulf War proved that they were not suffering from any disease, whether it be cancer or otherwise. What do you say about this?
Professor Rocke: Dr. Kilpatrick lied to the world. It is very simple. First he stated that 90 individuals were affected ..... I had well over 100 individuals who were affected. I had another250 individuals who were absolutely exposed while we were cleaning it up. .........
The Presenter: Why did your colleagues in the Pentagon lie and for the benefit of whom?
Professor Rocke: The reason that they lie is to avoid any liability for the deliberate use of uranium munitions not only in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, throughout the Balkans and throughout all the sites in the United States. Again the purpose of the war is to kill and to destroy. Uranium munitions are absolutely destructive.
The Presenter: On 3 February 2003 an official from the Veteran's Association in Britain said that 560 British soldiers have died since 1991 from Gulf War Syndrome and that 5000 are under treatment. Do you have any statistics on the number of wounded American soldiers?
Professor Rocke: Yes, I do. The US Department of Veterans' Affairs released a report in September2002 . In that report they formally acknowledged that there are over160 , 000Gulf War veterans permanently disabled and over 8000 dead from the effects of Gulf War syndrome...It (Iraq) is a toxic wasteland that is absolutely proven to exist today by additional statistics.
House destroyed from a missile during an air strike in Baghdad
The Presenter: What are the main diseases that can be caused by uranium?
Professor Rocke: The problems that we have are very significant. We have the respiratory problems, all the eye problems, neurological problems, and cancers. What we know today is that the American veterans who participated in the 1991 Gulf War are dying at a rate of over 140a month here in the United States alone.
The Presenter: You said that36 % of the veterans who took part in the 1991 Gulf War will die because of cancer and that160 ,000 are handicapped and 8000 have already died but still the US insists on using uranium. Do you expect more cases of infection from uranium?
Professor Rocke: Absolutely. We have already seen additional casualties coming back. Although the war ended in the fall of1991 , the US continued to send troops to that region. Today we know, actually verified by the United States Department of Veteran Affairs that there are now over a quarter of a million American soldiers who served during the Gulf War and stayed in the region until May 2002 are now permanently disabled due to complex exposures. And we also now know that over10 , 000are dead and that the current death rate is over a 140 a month.
The Presenter: What happened to the inhabitants of Kuwait, Iraq and north of Saudi Arabia as a result of the spread of400 tonnes of uranium dust?
Professor Rocke: There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the health effects that we have seen in the women, the children and other residents of that region is absolutely due in part to the uranium contamination that has been left there. Congressional representatives and scientists, and independent individuals from all over the world have gone over there and verified the level of contamination and that contamination has not been removed as required by US Department of Defence directives.
The Presenter: Professor Harry Shalimer has said that at least100 , 000of the inhabitants of Basra have been infected with cancer since1991 . Do you have any statistics on the number of infections in these regions?
Professor Rocke: I have not been back to Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, but I have talked to Dr. Shalimer and other scientists and physicians involved in this. I have no doubt in my mind that Dr. Shalimer is probably correct. I know for a fact that he has verified uranium in those individuals residing in that region and therefore you can make a direct correlation between those exposures and the health effects that have been documented. Dr. Shalimer again is one of the world's experts on this, so we must listen to him.
The Presenter: Do you have any information about the uranium ammunition that the US is going to use in its war against Iraq?
Professor Rocke: Absolutely...The uranium munitions that will be used are again and once more the rounds that will be fired by the Abrams tank. Each round is over 4500 grams of solid uranium contaminated with plutonium, neptunium and americium. The A- 10Warthog aircraft will additionally fire the 30 ml round, that is, each individual round is 300 grams of solid uranium. We also know that the Bradley fighting vehicle will fire the25 ml round, and each individual round is over 200 grams of solid uranium. In addition, cruise missiles contain uranium components, and the giant bunker busters contain uranium components.
The Presenter: A weapons expert, Dai Williams, in one of our programs said that the ammunition used by the US in the1991 Gulf War weighed around 5 kilograms, and against Afghanistan they used bombs and ammunition of up 10,000 pounds, and it is expected that they are going to use the same ammunition in Iraq. They even announced that the mother of bombs weighs 10,000 tonnes. If the previous Gulf War left around 400 tonnes of uranium dust, what do you expect will happen to the region this time?
Professor Rocke: What I expect is that we will again see serious health effects in the American soldiers who go there and use it. We will see health effects in all the residents of that region. We will see health effects in the Iraqi soldiers who will be the targets of direct uranium used by US forces. I must repeat and make this very clear, as the head of the project to clean up uranium munitions during the1991 Gulf War, and as the director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the Department of Defence who did the research, and as a DU casualty, the use of uranium munitions during warfare is a crime against God, is a crime against humanity, and should be considered a war crime. You cannot take solid uranium radioactive waste, throw it in anybody's backyard and refuse to provide medical care and complete the environmental clean-up that is required to sustain the health and safety of the citizens of the earth.
The Presenter: Do you think depleted uranium is considered a weapon of mass destruction or a nuclear weapon?
Professor Rocke: The United Nations on10 September 2001 did rule that uranium munitions were considered a weapon of mass destruction. The European Parliament has issued a proclamation that uranium munitions should be banned from use in the world.
The Presenter: Do you think that using depleted uranium against human beings in general falls under the category of crimes of war?
Professor Rocke: Absolutely, because in the United States you cannot even take 500 grams of solid uranium and throw it in anybody's backyard without going to jail. Therefore, what right has the United States, England or any other nation has to take hundreds and hundreds of tons of uranium and throw them in somebody else's backyard, refuse them medical care as they have done now for decades and also refuse to clean up the environment.
The Presenter: Professor Dracovic said that the cleaning of the region needs $ 200billion. Is it possible to clean up the region (if this fund is raised)?
Professor Rocke: The problem that we have, when I actually did the research, was to determine how to clean up. For each and every vehicle that is struck by a single uranium munition you have to take that entire vehicle, and physically remove it. Then you have to clean up all the uranium penetration that is left around that vehicle. Then you have to take a bulldozer, and go out to at least 100 metres and scrape down at least 10 centimetres and remove all of that dirt in order to make that area safe again, that is for each and every vehicle.
The Presenter: If Baghdad is being struck by such ammunition, how far will the effects of such uranium impact the surrounding areas of Baghdad?
Professor Rocke: Studies in the United States by one of the former scientists in this area measuring the uranium contamination from a production plant in the United States showed that the uranium contamination has caused adverse health effects within 50 kilometres.
The Presenter: This is around the plant itself, what about the dust and the wind?
Professor Rocke: The wind carried the uranium dust 50 kilometres away from the plant and there were sufficient quantities to cause adverse health effects. We know today that in and around all the production facilities where they are making uranium munitions there are cancers, kidney problems, respiratory problems, rations, neurological problems in the residents of that area.
The Presenter: Some studies say that in the areas affected in the Balkans, uranium dust travelled more than 1000 kilometres and reached a lot of European capitals. Do you think that Kuwaitis, Saudis, Iraqis and Jordanians are safe from the uranium dust that Iraq might be hit with?
Professor Rocke: You have the whole combination of by-products of the war. When we destroy the infrastructure of Iraq...when we deliberately use uranium munitions and contaminate the air, water and soil, the entire region becomes a toxic wasteland. And again the reason that we know that it is a toxic wasteland today is that since1991 , the United States has continued to send American soldiers into the region. Since1991 , an additional60 , 000American veterans have been labelled as permanently disabled from this exposure and another 3000 have been confirmed dead.
The Presenter: How long can these areas remain contaminated?
Professor Rocke: The contamination will remain in the area unless it is physically and totally removed, for4 . 5billion years and beyond.
The Presenter: Will these areas remain contaminated for4 . 5billion years?
Professor Rocke: Unless it is physically removed according to the procedures and processes that I have developed for the US Department of Defence.
The Presenter: Those contaminated areas, are they fit for human life now?
Professor Rocke: They are not. The US Department of Defence, in the common test training for use of uranium munitions, specifically states that all American soldiers must wear full respirator and skin protection within 25 to 50 metres of each and every vehicle that is struck by uranium munitions.
The Presenter: Having supervised the burial of some of the waste in1991 , how true is that some of the areas north of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are no longer fit for human habitation, and that people should be prevented from going into these areas?
Professor Rocke: Absolutely. The entire...area near Basra, the contamination there is absolutely verified. US Congressmen, James McDermott and his staff went over to Iraq in the fall of last year. They measured the contamination and verified that it was so great that people should be prevented from entering that area permanently until all of it is cleaned up.
The Presenter: Also, the region that could be hit by uranium ammunition, whether Baghdad or other Iraqi cities, would they be contaminated also, and the contamination there will be for4 . 5billion years again?
Professor Rokke: Absolutely...
The Presenter: Is it possible that Baghdad, Basra and other cities will be unfit for human life after this war?
Professor Rocke: If you destroy the entire infrastructure ..... and if Iraq does possess any chemical, biological or radioactive materials and you destroy them, that would be just like hitting an ice cube with a hammer. All you do is split it. If you use uranium munitions and you do not clean it up, the entire area will be a toxic wasteland, that unless all environmental clean-up is completed will be uninhabitable.
An explosion rocks one of Saddam Hussein'spalaces in Baghdad during air strikes
The Presenter: This means that there are more than 20 million human beings in Iraq who are subject to being hit by uranium, and if Iraq will be hit by uranium munitions it will be unfit for human habitation. Does this mean that the United states will eliminate a total country from the surface of the earth?
Professor Rocke: That is an absolute possibility. When you destroy the infrastructure, you use all the types of munitions and you contaminate air, water and soil. That is an absolute possibility...
The Presenter: Can simple human beings who are living in Iraq, and who have nothing to do and are helpless, can they do anything against the United States, which will not hesitate to use uranium against them?
Professor Rocke: For years, as the individual that cleaned up uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War, and as the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I have requested and I have insisted that the United States and other countries refrain from using uranium munitions in combat. Uranium munitions must be banned from use on earth and in the universe for eternity. At the same time, I have requested numerous times that medical care be provided not only for the fired casualties on my staff, but for thousands and thousands of individuals who have been exposed. And I have also requested numerous times that all uranium contamination be cleaned up. However, those requests have been denied, denied, and denied.....
The Presenter: Since you stayed in the region until 1996 and supervised a lot of activities and you know the contaminated areas, is it possible to give us a list of contaminated areas in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait...?
Professor Rocke: One of the problems we have is that the United States Department of Defence has not identified all the areas where uranium munitions have been used. So therefore, individuals who reside in that area must look for the ... signature of uranium munitions use.
On a destroyed vehicle you will see a clean round hole around the area. You will also see black dust surrounding the area. Any vehicle or structure that you see that has this signature you should not approach within 100 metres unless you are wearing full skin and respiratory protection.
The Presenter: What are the symptoms so that if they appear on the inhabitants of those areas they can tell they have been exposed?
Professor Rocke: The first symptom that will show up ..... will be the respiratory problems. It acts like a chronic bronchitis. The second thing that you will probably see is the rashes.
The Presenter: The infections that showed up in the south of Iraq and the deformities in the newborn, do you expect these to last for4 . 5billion years? Is there a possibility that in the future generations more complications will come up?
Professor Rocke: Absolutely... Again as along as individuals are being exposed to uranium, we know that the changes in the RNA in DNA, the changes that occur genetically are causing all of these birth effects. We have seen those birth effects in American soldiers who were exposed. We are seeing those birth effects all over the world where uranium exposures have occurred.
The Presenter: Can the insistence of the United States to use this ammunition again against human beings and against Iraq be considered a new war crime?
Professor Rocke: Anybody who uses uranium munitions in war must understand that it is a crime against God and it is a crime against humanity... Yes, it is. When you deliberately and wilfully spread radioactive waste, ignore the health effects and refuse to clean it up, that is a crime against God and a crime against humanity.
The Presenter: What do you think the size of the disaster that will result from using hundreds of tonnes of uranium in the war against Iraq? If this is the picture given for the past 10 years, what will be from the result on the region of using uranium again?
Professor Rocke: If we have the same exposures and we have extensive use we can estimate that the number of casualties and the percentage of people in the area...that is going to be30 % again. That is the numbers, we cannot change the statistics. We cannot change the epidemiological effects of all of the contaminations that results from war.
--------
David meets Goliath
Lawrence Smallman,
Al Jazeera
Tuesday 15, April, 2003
http://english.aljazeera.net/topics/article.asp?cu_no=1&item_no=712&version=1&template_id=273&parent_id=258
The United States has the ability to kill off any nation on the planet. The biggest bombs, the biggest budget and the biggest army can destroy others in a number of ways. The US military is spoilt for choice when it comes to weaponry.
Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan have provided regular battlefield experience and testing grounds for the US armed forces and their armoury. Depleted uranium, thermobaric weapons, cluster bombs and 6,800kg 'daisy cutters' have all been tested around the world in the last 10 years.
But even before live trials of these weapons, the United States destroyed much of Saddam Hussein's army with devastating effect. Eyewitnesses to the 'highway of death' near Basra spoke of the remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. Many Iraqi and Palestinian civilians were killed too. Aerial bombardment will always be indiscriminate.
Missile falls on Baghdad
The United States is likely to launch 3,000 precision missiles in the first 48 hours; the objective will be the annihilation of Iraqi air and communication defences. If these missiles are as precise as in 1991, this means that 600 missiles will hit their targets and 2400 will hit somewhere else. This is worrying, as the US is highly likely to test out some of the latest generation of its instruments of death.
Bombs and missiles
The BAT, or Brilliant Anti-Tank bomb, is a self-guided weapon that is delivered by missile and then deployed in mid-air. It uses its onboard sensors to identify enemy combat vehicles by using acoustic and infrared scanners. Iraq has some 90-110 surface-to-air missile launchers.
The BLACKOUT bomb is a non-kinetic weapon that dispenses carbon-fibre filaments that disable electrical power grids. The E-bomb emits bursts of microwave energy that can scramble computer systems. Iraq has 500 - 700 light surface-to-air missile launchers.
The CBU-97 is the first 'smart' bomb for Air Force bombers and uses passive infrared and active laser sensors to find its enemy. The JDAM bomb uses GPS signals to convert dumb bombs into higher precision munitions. Iraq has some 3,000 antiaircraft guns.
The MOAB, contrary to popular opinion, does not stand for the 'mother of all bombs' but rather Massive Ordinance Air Blast. This bomb weighs 9 500kg and is like dropping a small nuclear weapon. No one has anything like this in any country, least of all Iraq.
Planes and tanks
The SUPER HORNET is the US Navy's new aircraft. It is equipped with a powerful laser sensor and can designate four targets at once. The B 2bomber is now world famous for its ability to pass near undetected and deliver cruise missiles just about anywhere in Iraq.
Out of Iraq's 316 combat aircraft, "only about 20 are advanced planes that have any ability to confront most of the planes possessed by the United States or Israel. The rest are old planes from the 1970s, or even before" according to General Shlomo Brom (ret.), Senior Research Associate, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University. Even these '20 advanced planes' are 1970s and 1980s models, with no major modernisation of avionics, munitions, or electronic warfare equipment.
The APACHE LONGBOW is touted as the most advanced combat helicopter in the world. It can target 16 enemy tanks at once from eight kilometres away. They will precede the advancing US tank divisions. Iraq has 70 armed helicopters - most of which can be operational for at least short periods.
Even in 1991, the earlier models of the US M-1 tanks proved far superior to the Iraq T-72 tanks that were much touted at the time. The US now has M-1A1 Abrams tanks while Iraq has exactly what remained after the last war. Tanks aren't known to improve with age; the US's depleted uranium shells will tear through them.
Latest technology
The US comes into its own in this department. EYES IN THE SKY are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that will play a key role in hunting for Saddam's dozen or so scud missiles across Iraq. DRAGON EYE, another UAV, is small enough to fit into a Marine's backpack. It weighs only two kilos and can beam video pictures to a screen on a soldier's wrist. PACKBOTS are small reconnaissance robots armed with weapons and sensors that can navigate narrow city streets and other areas of danger. While US special forces will be using their intranet and laptops to relay targeting information to attack aircraft and heavy artillery, Iraqis will still be using walkie-talkies, radio and mobiles to coordinate.
Troops
The United States and Britain have the largest defence budgets between them. Investment in each soldier each year works out at more than US $25,000 per year in training alone. Between them, there are 250,000 troops armed to the teeth and supplied by first world countries with first world communications.
Iraq is now a third world country, coming out of the twelve years of sanctions that have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Half of Iraq's conscript army consists of low-grade reservists who are given a gun and little training, then called soldiers. Although the Iraqi government is clearly taking its presentation of the war more seriously than in the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi public relations machine is still no match for the US in sophistication
-------- iraq
UN watchdog asks US to secure Iraq nuclear site
Story by Marcus Kabel
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
April 15, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20479/newsDate/15-Apr-2003/story.htm
VIENNA - The chief United Nations nuclear watchdog said it had asked the United States to guarantee the security of a former Iraqi nuclear research site until U.N. inspectors could return.
U.S. forces are reported to have entered the Tuwaitha nuclear research site that U.N. inspectors had previously identified as part of Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme that inspectrs dismantled after the 1991 Gulf war.
In a letter to Washington, the head of the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) said American forces must secure the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre to ensure nuclear materials were not removed until U.N. inspectors could resume verification work.
"I have written yesterday to the United States Government asking that it ensure the security and safety of all the nuclear material there, which has been under IAEA seal since 1991," Mohamed ElBaradei said in a statement.
"The IAEA has subsequently received such assurances," the statement said.
ElBaradei has said that his inspectors alone, not the United States, have the authority under U.N. Security Council decisions to inspect and disarm Iraq if weapons or weapons programmes are found.
He has also urged that the inspectors be permitted to return to Iraq as soon as conditions permit to resume their hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
Before the war started last month, IAEA inspectors reported finding no trace of banned nuclear arms activities in Iraq since resuming inspections late last year after a four-year hiatus.
Iraq launched a crash programme to test its first nuclear bomb using highly enriched uranium after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. The target date was April, 1991, but bombing by U.S. planes in the Gulf War earlier that year stopped testing.
Other equipment was destroyed by inspectors in subsequent years.
Nuclear experts familiar with the IAEA inspection history said the U.N. was well aware of nuclear materials stockpiled at a Tuwaitha, a research facility where U.S. troops this week registered high radiation readings, according to some reports.
Iraq was allowed to keep some non-weapons grade nuclear materials after the 1991 war, including tonnes of raw uranium and uranium enriched only slightly. To be used in a bomb, uranium must be highly enriched.
----
Nuclear Material, but No Smoking Gun, Found at Plant
April 15, 2003
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/international/worldspecial/15CND-SEAR.html
KARBALA, Iraq, April 15 - An American team hunting for unconventional Iraqi weapons at an ammunition plant near Karbala have discovered some radioactive material in a maintenance building and biological equipment that can be used for peaceful or military purposes buried in metal containers, but no "smoking gun" proving that Iraq made chemical, biological or nuclear materials at the plant.
Col. Richard McPhee, commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a Defense Department unit responsible for the search for unconventional weapons, brought a specialized nuclear detection team to the site today and removed seven canisters of cesium, a radioactive metal, from the huge maintenance warehouse. Although analysts have not yet determined their specific purpose, the experts said the cesium was probably intended to calibrate machinery in one of the many buildings under construction here.
Ending a weeklong survey here today, the American experts said the specific purpose of some parts of the giant manufacturing and storage plant remained a mystery. The purpose may not be known for weeks, as intelligence analysts in Washington pore over the detailed maps, engineering drawings and inventories of equipment - about 1,000 pounds of documents that were found and removed.
The experts said they continued to regard the plant as "suspicious."
But after a week in which expectations of finding proof of unconventional weapons soared and were repeatedly deflated, the military experts said the survey showed the difficulty of discovering hard evidence without specific information from Iraqi scientists and military officers.
The plant near here was one of Iraq's leading ammunition production facilities, but much of it was under construction when the war began and American bombs targeted it. Although international inspectors visited the plant as late as February, they failed to find biological or chemical weapons or agents.
After the war began, the site was visited by advancing American troops, who reported finding nothing of special interest to weapons inspectors. But because the site was considered sensitive, officials in Washington said, an Army specialist team was also sent to the plant. But that team, too, missed the buried containers of biological equipment and the radioactive material, which was stored openly in a maintenance building. Not until American combat forces came by a second time, more than a week ago, were the first two of what turned to be 11 sealed containers found. Contrary to instructions about what to do in such situations, the soldiers opened one of the containers, then moved on, leaving only a small platoon in charge of guarding the material and securing the five-square-mile facility.
Word that the plant was open to pillage spread quickly through surrounding villages, several of which have been without electricity, medicine and water since the war began. By the time the Defense Department specialist unit arrived, much of the plant had already been looted.
For instance, the experts found manuals that came with two drying ovens imported from Germany, equipment that can be used to culture viruses and bacteria for weapons. But the ovens themselves were gone by the time the specialists arrived.
The weapons experts quickly determined that the containers, found under huge mounds of gravel and dirt, held expensive, highly sophisticated equipment from Germany, Italy, China, Britain and other countries that could be used for military or civilian purposes. An intense survey of the roughly 50 large buildings on the complex began.
One mound of dirt, 50 feet long and 5 feet high, was a particular focus of the team's efforts. Ground-penetrating radar indicated that objects had been buried beneath it.
Lacking earth-moving equipment, the team hired laborers from the nearby village of Ayyash. With the laborers' shovels, bolstered later by a farmer with a tractor and another man with a front-end loader, the team began digging. But the effort, which took more than a day, was for naught. The team found nothing under the mound.
The 75th Exploitation Task Force, camped farther south in Iraq, has struggled to carry out its mission as Washington's attention has shifted from the search for chemical and biological weapons, the ostensible reason for the United States' decision to go to war, to war crimes committed by the Iraqis after the war began. Resources, including communications equipment, security, engineers and even basic supplies like generators and batteries, have often been unavailable. Helicopter transport, essential for rapid mobility in such a large country, has been sporadic, and the weapons teams have had to scrounge vehicles from other units to travel to suspect sites.
People who have monitored the search also say the Army site survey teams have occasionally overreacted or underreacted to discoveries in the field.
Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, the leader of the weapons specialist team at the plant near Karbala, played down the inspectors' problems and said he remained convinced that proof of unconventional Iraqi weapons would be found eventually.
"We're not going to find just a smoking gun, but a smoking cannon," he said. "It's only a matter of time."
----
Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad
Robert Fisk:
15 April 2003
UK Independent
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397350
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.
I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate, but even the dark years of the country's modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked. The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why?
So, as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves "your slave". There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If you don't take our advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz soon to be Saudi Arabia while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government." This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history all that is left of it, which fell into The Independent's hands as the mass of documents crackled in the immense heat of the ruins.
King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the authors of many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Faisel became king of Iraq Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French threw him out of Damascus and his brother Abdullah became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?
-------- israel / mideast
U.S. Favors WMD - Free Mideast, Linked to Peace
April 15, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-mideast-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Tuesday it favored a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction but linked international inspection of Israel's weapons programs to peace with Syria and Lebanon.
``We would like to see that whole region free of weapons of mass destruction,'' Secretary of State Colin Powell told a news conference, in response to questions on whether Washington is willing to apply equal standards to Syria and Israel.
On Monday, Powell threatened economic and diplomatic measures against Syria if it does not meet a range of demands, including abandoning an alleged chemical weapons program.
Syria denies having such a program and has offered to open its facilities to U.N. inspections as part of a regional disarmament campaign which includes Israel.
Powell repeated the list of U.S. concerns on Tuesday, which includes the weapons program, support for groups which Washington labels terrorist, and suspicions that the Syrians allowed fighters to enter Iraq or allowed fugitive Iraqi leaders into Syria.
``We hope that Syria understands now that there is a new environment in the region with the end of the regime of (Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein, and that Syria will reconsider its policies of past years and understand that there are better choices it can make,'' Powell said.
Pressed on inspection of the weapons programs of U.S. ally Israel, which is believed to have some 200 nuclear warheads outside any international inspection system, he said that ``pieces will begin to fall in place'' after peace between Israel and Syria and Lebanon.
``If we can move forward with a comprehensive peace process that leads to a comprehensive solution that creates a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with a Jewish state, Israel, and ultimately have that comprehensive solution reach out and touch Lebanon and Syria, then I think a lot of pieces will begin to fall in place with respect to what people's various needs are,'' he said.
``But right now we will just continue to say that we believe that the entire region should be free of weapons of mass destruction,'' he added.
Powell said he hoped that the Palestinian legislature would confirm prime minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas ``some time in the next week or so'' so that the United States can publish a Middle East peace plan known as the ``road map.''
The Israelis and the Palestinians would then have a chance to comment on the peace plan and discuss those comments with each other, he added.
``This is going to be a very difficult process but I believe progress can be made if both sides enter this road map process with an understanding of the needs of the other side and with a good faith effort to use the new situation,'' he said.
``We have a new opportunity, an opportunity I think that is enhanced by what has happened by the removal of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein,'' he added.
An Israeli delegation gave the United States its preliminary comments on the peace plan on Monday, after reports that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is seeking some amendments to the document.
U.S. officials have said the plan is for implementation in its existing form, but Powell did not say that on Tuesday.
-------- japan
Japanese Utility Shuts Down Nuclear Grid
Tue Apr 15
By ERIC TALMADGE,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030415/ap_on_re_as/japan_nuclear_2
TOKYO - Staggered by a series of scandals, Tokyo's main power company shut down the last of its 17 nuclear reactors for safety checks Tuesday, meaning Japan's capital may soon face its first blackouts in nearly two decades.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. took the final reactor offline at midnight, said company spokesman Mamoru Shirakashi. Operations at the 16 other reactors run by the company, known as TEPCO, already have been halted.
The closures represent an unprecedented crisis in Japan's power industry.
Though a system glitch left some 3 million people in Tokyo without power in 1987, TEPCO - the world's largest electric utility - says the city has never faced blackouts due to a shortfall in supply.
Senior government officials were quick to voice their concern.
"Unless we can restart the facilities whose operations are halted now, we will inevitably face power shortages," said Yasuo Fukuda, the top spokesman for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Cabinet.
"The government will do all it can," he said. But he did not offer any suggestions on what the government could do.
To break its heavy reliance on imported oil, resource-poor Japan has long pursued an ambitious nuclear power program. The country today gets about 30 percent of all its energy from nuclear reactors.
The industry has been plagued by accidents and coverups of lax safety practices, however.
TEPCO was ordered to suspend operations for a thorough safety review after it admitted last year to covering up structural problems and obstructing government inspections at its reactors a decade ago.
The admissions only deepened concerns raised in 1999 by Japan's worst-ever nuclear accident, when an uncontrolled reaction at a fuel-reprocessing plant north of Tokyo killed two workers - later found to have been illegally mixing uranium in buckets - and exposed at least 600 people to radiation.
No date has been set for restarting TEPCO's nuclear reactors.
That will depend on how long it takes to complete the safety checks and "earn the public's understanding," spokesman Shirakashi said.
In the meantime, TEPCO plans to compensate for the shutdown, which accounts for about 40 percent of the electricity consumed by Tokyo and its surrounding areas, by reactivating five thermal power plants and purchasing surplus electricity from other power companies.
Even so, it forecasts a shortfall of 9.5 million kilowatts - the equivalent of the output from 10 nuclear reactors - when air conditioner use peaks in Japan's sweaty summer months.
----
Power shortage looming large in Japan as nuclear reactors shut down
Tue Apr 15
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030415/wl_asia_afp/japan_energy_nuclear_030415065406
TOKYO - An acute electricity shortage is looming large in Japan as power giant Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) completed the shutdown of all 17 of its nuclear reactors for emergency inspections.
TEPCO, the world's largest private power utility, stopped operations around 12:00 am Tuesday (1500 GMT Monday) at its last running nuclear reactor in Fukushima, 200 kilometres (125 miles) northeast of Tokyo.
TEPCO has been forced to shut down all its nuclear reactors for emergency inspections after admitting to falsifying safety records at nuclear plants since the late 1980s.
With the first halt to all its nuclear reactors since 1976, TEPCO has lost 17.38 megawatts, or about 30 percent, of its power generating capacity.
"We are seriously facing the fact that an unprecedented situation occurred due to a series of scandals," TEPCO President Tsunehisa Katsumata said in a statement.
"Our company will pursue inspections and carry out measures to prevent such a scandal from being repeated so that we can regain people's trust," the president said.
The scandal has angered residents near the reactors, most of whom are opposed to the immediate re-starting of the nuclear plants. The approval of local communities is a pre-requisite of resuming operations.
"We have not set any specific timetable for the resumption of the nuclear reactors here," said Sekiya Hiroyuki, an official of Kashiwazaki city, TEPCO's largest power plant host, which houses seven reactors.
"It is still uncertain when residents can accept TEPCO's request for the resumption as people living near the reactors are still concerned about a future accident," Hiroyuki said.
Japan, which is heavily reliant on nuclear power energy due its lack of natural resources, is widely expected to face a serious power shortage if TEPCO fails to reopen at least 10 reactors by summer when hot humid weather prompts millions to reach for the air conditioner switch.
"We hope we can restart at least 10 reactors by summer, when electricity demand is to hit a peak, but the prospects for resumption are by no means certain," a TEPCO spokesman said.
The company has started boosting operations at other types of power generators -- thermal power and hydroelectric power generations -- and plans to buy electricity from other utility companies in a bid to make up for the drop in nuclear output.
Despite a series of scandals and accidents involving nuclear reactors in Japan, the government still plans to raise its reliance on nuclear power, from providing 35 percent of the nation's power in 2001 to 42 percent in 2010. Germany, by contrast, plans to eliminate all nuclear power plants by 2020.
-------- korea
Powell Optimistic on North Korea Talks
April 15, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Powell-North-Korea.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, citing conciliatory statements by North Korea, said Tuesday ``a lot of pieces have come together'' in his quest for multilateral discussions on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
North Korea signaled willingness over the weekend to accept the U.S. approach after months of insisting on one-on-one talks with Washington.
Powell told a news conference that the quick U.S. military success in Iraq may have influenced North Korea's thinking on opening diplomatic discussions.
While saying he was not prepared to make any announcements, Powell said he was following up the North Korean statement through diplomatic channels.
Powell said it was ``absolutely clear'' that discussions with the North must encompass ``the views and thoughts of all the neighbors in the region.''
At a minimum, Powell has wanted future talks to include the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia as well as the United States. Until now, the North Koreans had ruled out any talks except one-on-one meetings with the United States.
On the Net:
State Department's North Korea page: http://www.state.gov/p/eap/ci/kn/
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Energy Dept. Eyes More Lie Detector Tests
April 15, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Energy-Polygraphs.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Despite mounting scientific evidence against polygraph examinations, the Energy Department plans to continue its lie detector program as is, prompting criticism from lawmakers and some of the agency's scientists.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Monday that the department must continue to use ``the best tools available'' to protect sensitive information about the nation's nuclear arms stockpile. But a National Academy of Sciences report concluded that federal agencies should not rely on the tests to screen workers and job applicants.
``I can hardly believe this decision,'' said Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, senior Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Bingaman said the academy report in October pointed out the twin dilemmas of applying polygraphs to Energy Department employee security screening: Either too many loyal employees will be judged deceptive or too many major security threats will be left undetected.
``Basically, they've ignored the evidence'' at the Energy Department, said Stephen Fienberg of Carnegie Mellon University, who chaired the National Academy of Sciences study.
The department imposed lie detector requirements on employees several years ago in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee spy controversy at DOE's nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. Many scientists objected that the tests were inherently inaccurate, which prompted congressional inquiries and the scientific review.
Congress ordered the department to take the National Academy of Sciences study into account.
In a proposed rule, however, DOE says retaining the program is well-suited to fulfilling national security needs.
The likelihood of ignoring a spy because he passed a polygraph test is so high that relying on the tests probably is a greater danger to national security than discarding them, Fienberg said in response .
The department's ``mishandling'' of the polygraph issue ``is representative of the worst of government,'' said Dr. Alan Zalicoff, senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the labs covered by the polygraph program.
Abraham said the polygraph is not used on a ``stand-alone basis, but as part of a larger fabric of investigative and analytical reviews.''
Fienberg said, however, one problem the scientific study identified is that ``every time we asked what it means to follow up, there is nothing for them to turn to.''
``It's hard to believe that you would be able to catch a spy'' from polygraph tests, he said.
In a news release, the Energy Department characterized the scientific study as having concluded that polygraph testing is accurate enough for ``event-specific investigations'' but that its costs outweigh its benefits when used for employee screening.
Fienberg said that statement ``ignores the substance of all of the problems associated with the polygraph, its use and its scientific base that we spent our time on.''
On the Net:
Energy Department's Office of Security: http://www.so.doe.gov
--------
Radiation Fund Is Expected to Run a Deficit
April 15, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/politics/15URAN.html
WASHINGTON, April 14 (AP) - A report to Congress said today that payments to people suffering from cancer and other illnesses as a result of work on cold war-era atomic weapons projects might be delayed by budget shortfalls.
Based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office, the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, or R.E.C.A., program is expected to run a deficit of $101 million for the 2003-2007 budget years, according to the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm.
The Justice Department projected a smaller shortfall but agreed that the money provided was inadequate, the accounting office said.
The last time the program's money ran out was in May 2000, when for more than 18 months the Justice Department suspended payments.
In December 2001, Congress agreed to add $655 million through 2011 to cover the thousands of anticipated claims.
Those involved in the issue assumed that solved the problem, said Ed Brickey, a former chairman of the Western States R.E.C.A. Reform Coalition.
-------- us politics
The misadventures of neoconservatives
Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish,
Electronic Iraq
15 April 2003
http://electroniciraq.net/news/649.shtml
As the war in Iraq moves toward its conclusion, neoconservatives in and around the Bush administration are beginning to aggressively push a chilling agenda for a generalized war against much of the Arab and Islamic worlds.
This program to deliberately unleash a calamitous "clash of civilizations" must be urgently confronted before it succeeds in plunging us into a cycle of uncontrolled chaos and confrontation.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey illustrated how extreme this vision really is when he recently told a group of California college students that the United States is engaged in fighting "World War IV," which will "last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II," but hopefully not as long as the Cold War.
The enemies in this war, which he unconvincingly presented as a campaign for democracy, are the rulers of Iran, the "fascist" rulers of Iraq and Syria and groups like Al Qaeda.
Woolsey also singled out the pro-American rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, declaring "We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in 100 years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you--the [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubaraks, the Saudi royal family--most fear. We're on the side of your people."
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary magazine, who was the first to dub the project World War IV, and other neoconservatives, openly call for "regime change" in a whole list of Middle Eastern states, governed by both pro- and anti-American regimes.
For Podhoretz, the global extremism, chaos and violence that the war on Iraq may provoke are not the undesirable side effects of a noble mission, but the necessary pretext for more aggressive American intervention. He says that the U.S. can "win" this war and "reform" Islam provided that America has "the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties."
Neoconservatives long have been demanding an attack on Iraq as the first step in a far more ambitious regional and global agenda, but for the past decade made little headway with the rest of the foreign policy establishment.
A 2000 report from the neocon think tank, the Project for a New American Century, co-authored by several key members of the Bush administration, laid out the vision of a world order completely dominated by unilateral American power. It also lamented that, due to opposition from more responsible elements in government, their hyper-aggressive agenda would have to be advanced slowly, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor."
Playing exactly that role, the Sept. 11 attacks opened the political space necessary for the attack on Iraq, promoted mainly through the theory that Iraq might one day supply chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.
Many Americans reluctantly supported the attack on Iraq because they truly believed that it would make America safer and Iraqis freer. Precious few have willingly signed up for a new, catastrophic and completely unnecessary global confrontation with Islam.
An increasing number of more sober voices are speaking out against this recklessness.
A full scale civil war on the right over foreign policy has broken out in the press, with conservative icons such as columnist Robert Novak trading bitter accusations with overwrought neocons like David Frum, author of the irresponsible "axis of evil" speech.
Stalwarts of the first Bush administration such as former Seretary of State James Baker, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger have been openly trying to steer President Bush away from what one unnamed former senior official called "this bum advice he has been getting" from neocons. Another observed that "The only one who can reach the president is his father but it is not timely yet to talk to him," indicating a plan for a protracted campaign. They have obvious potential allies in the Cabinet such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Liberals are also joining the fray, with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) leading the call for "a vision of the world that is very different from what these excessively ideological unilateralists want to thrust on us."
These voices of reason need to be encouraged and emboldened.
President Bush has insisted that U.S. troops will not stay in Iraq any longer than necessary. The question is, necessary for what? The Pentagon intends to rule Iraq directly for the meanwhile, and no plans exist for any election or representative government.
Among those slated for senior positions in Iraq is James Woolsey. Woolsey's latest statements, and continued ambiguity about long-term American intentions in the region, can only fuel fears that neoconservatives in the administration intend not to give Iraq back to its people as soon as possible, but to use it as a launching pad for further adventures that may truly plunge us all into World War IV.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of electronicIraq.net and Hussein Ibish is communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. This article first appeared in The Chicago Tribune on 15 April 2003.
-----
Please, no more made-in-the-USA monsters
April 15, 2003
by David H. Hackworth,
WorldNet Daily
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32067
Hopefully, the looting and shooting across Iraq will soon subside, and peace will settle over the innocents of Iraq - a people who've suffered only bloodshed and repression ever since our CIA recruited Saddam Hussein more than 40 years ago.
Blame it on the Cold War, when "Better dead than Red" became our national byword, and any useful cutthroats were automatically added to the team if they were against communism. We would have dealt with the Devil if he had offered to shoot a commie for Uncle Sam.
So when Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim started playing footsie with the Soviets, placing his Red pals in power positions in his government, all wasn't exactly copasetic in Washington. At the time, CIA Director Allen Dulles declared Iraq "the most dangerous spot in the world."
Enter Saddam, whose potential for violence suited us to the max.
Whether it was the threat of Soviet missiles being set up in Iraq or the chance to secure all that black liquid gold as ours for the pumping, we hired Psycho Saddam as our hit man, set him up in an apartment across the street from the prime minister's Ministry of Defense and ordered Qasim taken out with "extreme prejudice."
But the Mustached One's 1959 assassination attempt was a mess-up from the get-go, the botched mission a precursor to his subsequent eight-year war with Iran and later fights with Stormin' Norman and Tommy Franks. The signs were all there right from the start - we just didn't take the time to read the tea leaves.
For openers, Saddam lost his nerve and triggered the ambush too soon. One member of this hit team that couldn't shoot straight had the wrong ammo; another, the grenade man, couldn't fling that sucker because it got caught in his coat; and yet a third member missed the prime minister but somehow managed to shoot Saddam in the leg. Qasim escaped, and so did Saddam, limping off to Cairo, Egypt, where - even after all those blunders - the CIA propped him up in a safe-house and kept his pockets lined with Yankee green while continuing his training in terrorism
In 1963, after Qasim was knocked off in a second CIA black op, Saddam scurried home to slay his way up the power ladder and eventually become head of the dreaded al-Jihaz a-Khas, the feared intelligence apparatus of the Ba'ath party.
From there, with a little more help from his CIA pals, he continued to plot, plunder and massacre his way to the head-beast slot, where we anointed him our newest very best friend. Not just because of the Cold War or Iraq's rich oil deposits, but also because he went after our former best friend and newest major enemy, Iran. We supported our fave new despot with the works: arms and munitions, precursors for chemical and biological weapons, and intelligence information gained from our ultrasecret intelligence intercepts of Iranian radio traffic and other hot skinny from our satellites showing up-to-the-minute Iranian battle dispositions.
Even current SecDef Donald Rumsfeld rushed to Saddam's palace in 1983 to bow and scrape and assure the Bully of Baghdad he had a Ronald Reagan-signed blank check for almost any bombs and bullets in our arsenal. After which our generals and admirals taught him how to use them, completing his morph into a master of Military Miscalculation.
Then, in 1990, Saddam did a Noriega and foolishly bit the hand that fed him - as has almost every U.S.-sponsored Cold War dictator from every dark corner of every continent. His ill-conceived blitzkrieg against one of our primary gas stations, Kuwait, only served to get him locked down in Iraq for 12 no-fly-zone years, with heavy sanctions and bombing raids.
And when he still didn't get it, the pre-emptors decided to take him out for good.
Now billions and perhaps trillions of our dollars and our best and brightest will be rebuilding Iraq to create a stable government - a beacon of democratic light in a dismally troubled region.
But that's only if we don't empower yet another world-class serial killer, and then in a decade or two have to spend still more precious American lives making another regime change in a country that's already paid too hard a price.
----
Clinton blasts US approach to international affairs
Tue Apr 15
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030416/ts_alt_afp/us_attacks_clinton_030416002722
NEW YORK - Former US President Bill Clinton blasted US foreign policy adopted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, arguing the United States cannot kill, jail or occupy all of its adversaries.
"Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organized by Conference Board.
"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."
The Democratic former president, who preceded George W. Bush at the White House, said that sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.
"We can't run," Clinton pointed out. "If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal."
He said he believed Washington overreacted to German and French opposition to US plans for military action against Iraq and suggested that the current administration had trouble juggling foreign and domestic issues.
"Since September 11, it looks like we can't hold two guns at the same time," Clinton said. "If you fight terrorism, you can't make America a better place to be."
Clinton said that if he were at the White House right now he would scrap a 726-billion dollar tax cut proposal made by the president in January to stimulate the flagging economy.
Congress has since cut the proposal to 550 billion dollars in the case of the House of Representatives and 350 billion under a Senate version of the plan.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
THE TALIBAN
As the Iraq War Goes On, Afghan Violence Increases
April 15, 2003
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/international/worldspecial/15AFGH.html
SANGEEN, Afghanistan, April 11 - It was a good place for an ambush, a natural parapet sticking up from a riverbed within easy firing range of the road, and a warren of gullies providing cover for the getaway. The men who fired on United States Special Forces, killing two instantly and critically wounding a third, chose their spot well, Afghan intelligence officers here said, as they walked over the site.
The gunmen opened up with a machine gun on the last of the four cars on March 29, the Afghans said. The vehicles in front turned at the brow of the hill to return fire. By then, the gunmen had fled.
That Afghan gunmen can stage an effective ambush is no surprise. But the pattern of recent violence and arrests by American forces in southern Afghanistan suggests both that Taliban loyalists are newly active - having laid low here or in neighboring Pakistan for over a year - and that they have had help from local officials who are supposed to be loyal to President Hamid Karzai.
While United States forces have been busy in Iraq, there has been an alarming spate of violence, much of it in southern Afghanistan. Last Friday, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who is commanding the war in Iraq, took time to visit United States forces at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul. The commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, and President Karzai have called for greater efforts to catch the killers. General McNeill told The Associated Press he hoped that Pakistan would put more troops on its border to catch "nefarious characters" escaping there.
In Helmand Province, which was always one of the main Taliban strongholds and where anti-American feeling is still strong, American forces are focusing on wealthy or influential Taliban supporters who remain in local power structures.
Last week, they returned here to Sangeen in force, deploying 500 men to search houses and make arrests. Among those detained was the district police chief, who had been host to the Special Forces during their visit here on the day of the ambush.
Another was the brother of a senior aide to the governor of Helmand Province, who had made 12 telephone calls to senior Taliban figures in recent days, according to an Afghan official citing information from American military officials.
Afghan officials said some of the local officials appeared to be victims of false information being fed to the Americans. But the governors of two southern provinces admitted in interviews that former Taliban, who were granted an amnesty by President Karzai, have been actively undermining the government.
"That was a mistake to let them stay," said Abdul Hai Achakzai, the governor of Farah Province, in southwestern Afghanistan. "We thought, `They are Pashtuns, and this is their country also,' but they took advantage of our leniency. We hope now that we can do what we should have done a year ago. We have started an operation to detain those Taliban who are sitting in their houses and take them in for questioning."
After the murder of a Red Cross worker in northern Kandahar last month, Gul Agha Shirzai, the powerful governor of Kandahar, ordered all Taliban to leave his province in 10 days unless their village and tribal elders could guarantee their good behavior. Mr. Shirzai, who has welcomed the American military and international aid agencies, was smarting at the mounting Taliban attacks in an interview last week.
Some of the worst attacks have been in Kandahar, with a bus bomb that killed eight people Jan. 31, and then the shocking execution of the Red Cross engineer on March 27. Fourteen of Mr. Shirzai's soldiers guarding the American air base have been killed in attacks over recent months. Six more soldiers died in attacks last month on posts near the border, the governor said.
[The violence continued over the weekend when Mr. Shirzai's son was assaulted in Pakistan, and then his brother was attacked at the border in an ambush that killed a relative and one other person.]
"They are people who were in power for seven years and they were just killing during that time," Mr. Shirzai said. "They don't want peace."
Some local leaders, including Mullah Naqibullah, Mr. Karzai's original choice for governor of Kandahar, and some officials in the United Nations mission argue that arresting the Taliban leaves them little choice but to take up arms.
Even as they began a crackdown on suspected Taliban supporters in their provinces, police and intelligence officials across the region said the real leaders and paymasters who were behind the campaign of violence were all sheltering in Pakistan.
"Whoever they are, they are not coming themselves to Afghanistan, they are training people and they pay them to come and do those attacks," said Hajji Muhammad Arif, police chief of the border town of Spinbaldak, the scene of repeated attacks.
The chief of police of Kandahar, Gen. Muhammad Akram Khakrezwal, said three main groups, all based in Pakistan, are behind the recent violence.
One group is clustered around the former Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. His main commanders are still with him, including Mullah Dadullah, who claimed responsibility for the roadblock where the Red Cross worker was killed.
A second group has formed around the former Taliban corps commander of Kandahar, Maulavi Akhtar Muhammad Usmani, who, Afghan intelligence officials say, was behind the ambush on the American Special Forces here. He is a close ally of Mullah Omar and is believed to retain very strong links with members of the Pakistan military intelligence service, General Khakrezwal said. Finally there is a group called Jaish-e-Muhammad, led by Akbar Agha, who is known to have been close to Osama bin Laden, he said.
-------- arms sales
Indonesia Turning to Russia for Arms
Mon Apr 14, 2003
By SLOBODAN LEKIC,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20030414/ap_on_re_as/indonesia_us_russia
JAKARTA, Indonesia - The dictator has fallen, the media unshackled, democratic elections held, East Timor freed and Indonesia was quick to sign onto President Bush's global war on terror after Sept. 11, 2001.
Yet, Washington maintains a 12-year ban on arms sales to the world's most populous Muslim nation to curb continuing human rights abuses, leading Jakarta's frustrated generals to look elsewhere to replace antiquated arsenals.
Toward that end, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri travels to Moscow later this month to seek the Kremlin's help in modernizing her 300,000-member armed forces.
She also is likely to open the way for Russian companies to vie for lucrative deals in the oil and gas sector, long dominated by American and British resource giants.
Although far apart on the globe, Indonesia and Russia have basic things in common.
Both have massive, multiethnic populations. Both struggle to preserve national unity as they fight separatism and build democracy after the collapse of decades of authoritarian rule.
Both are resource-rich but face huge economic problems made worse by endemic corruption. And, both have opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
Indonesia's Foreign Ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa says Megawati's meeting with Russian President Putin scheduled for April 21 will touch on the Iraq crisis.
But other diplomats say that issue will serve primarily to bring the two closer together on bottom-line issues such as trade and arms sales.
Analysts worry that Indonesia's military now is so degraded it no longer can control the borders of the far-flung archipelago, allowing for easy infiltration by extremists.
Last year's Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, illustrated the threat of terrorism in Indonesia. Also, broad opposition to the U.S.-led attack on Iraq threatens to lead to a backlash by militant Islamists.
Close ties between Moscow and Jakarta are not unprecedented.
Indonesia relied on Soviet military assistance in the 1950s under founding President Sukarno - Megawati's father - but these were severed after the anti-communist Gen. Suharto seized power in 1965.
The United States quickly became the Southeast Asian country's main weapons supplier, and annual arms sales peaked at $400 million in the 1980s.
In 1991, however, the U.S. Congress banned this after Indonesian troops killed hundreds of civilians in East Timor.
In 1999, East Timor became free, but only after Indonesian forces laid waste to it as they withdrew after a pro-independence referendum.
The destruction prompted U.S. lawmakers to expand the ban to cover almost all military ties with Indonesia.
Since then, some in the Bush administration - particularly Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a former ambassador to Jakarta and an architect of the Iraq war - have pushed for the ban to be repealed.
However, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity, "In terms of military sales, the accountability is still a problem that's out there, and it's not likely that it will be resolved soon."
When asked about potential arms deals between Indonesia and Russia, the U.S. official said, "Nothing could be served by comment from us on that."
Indonesia, a mainly Muslim but politically secular state, is a natural ally in the struggle against terrorism.
So far, U.S. lawmakers have reinstated only a limited officer training program. But that is far from enough for Indonesia's generals.
"I think the Indonesian military has finally decided that restrictions and conditionalities from Washington are just not worth it," said Juwono Sudarsono, a former defense minister. "So they want to look for alternative sources for planes, helicopters and other hardware."
Moscow has already had some success in wooing Indonesia as a customer.
Jakarta recently purchased some Russian weapons, including 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles, a squadron of naval Mil-2 helicopters and a dozen BTR-80A amphibious carriers for its marines.
Currently, Indonesia uses short-range Rapier missiles purchased 30 years ago to protect its vital oil and natural gas fields in Sumatra, Borneo and Papua from air attack.
"Replenishing them has been a big problem," Sudarsono said.
Air defense commanders want to augment the Rapiers with Russia's impressive long-range S-300 missiles, or shorter-range systems such as the SA-15 Gauntlet or shoulder-fired Igla.
The Air Force reportedly is considering purchasing several squadrons of Sukhoi Su-27 interceptors, considered the world's premier dogfighters.
Previously, Indonesian Air Force commanders preferred Western jets that were compatible with the U.S.-made F-16 fighter-bombers already in the Indonesian inventory. But neighboring Malaysia's success in integrating Russian MiG-29s and American F/A-18 Hornets persuaded them otherwise, Sudarsono said.
-------- business
Jobs for the boys: the reconstruction billions
Questions over favoured firms' links to Bush administration
David Teather in New York
Tuesday April 15, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,937108,00.html
Anti-war protesters in San Francisco recently barricaded the gates of Bechtel, the engineering group that oversaw the construction of the Channel tunnel. The protesters set aside the usual rallying cry: the war in Iraq was not all about oil, they noted, it was also about building roads and schools, and getting power and water services back in operation in a country ravaged by years of underinvestment as well as war.
Contracts worth billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Iraq are already being handed out by the US government, offering huge profits to a few, favoured companies, many with high-level contacts in the Bush administration and a history of donations to the Republican party. The contracts are being awarded exclusively to US firms and, instead of the usual tendering process, are by invitation only. Bechtel is one of six construction firms chosen to bid.
The army said this week that the biggest of the contracts dished out so far, fighting oil well fires, could be worth $7bn (£4.45bn). It has been awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a division of Halliburton, the company once run by Vice-President Dick Cheney. In response to questioning from Capitol Hill, the army said the contract was awarded under an existing deal with KBR signed in December 2001.
Washington, as well as San Francisco, has taken note. "This administration is beyond Nixon when it comes to secrecy," said Bill Allison, a spokesman for the DC-based Independent Centre for Public Integrity. "There's definitely the potential for the appearance of conflict of interest. They have thrown out the normal procedures and the administration is very close to corporate America. When Halliburton in particular is involved then it raises questions."
Separate from the Halliburton deal, a tranche of eight contracts is being awarded by the US agency for international development (USAid). The organisation has earmarked $2.4bn for reconstruction and humanitarian aid but will continue to fund projects beyond the initial work. It is still unclear who will take the lead role in reconstruction.
But what is clear are the huge amounts at stake in what is being billed as the biggest reconstruction effort since the second world war. The cost of reconstruction has been put as high as $100bn and could last several years. It is assumed that those in at the first will have significant advantage in bidding for future deals, including the exploitation of Iraq's oil industry.
The first two awards have been relatively minor. Washington-based International Resources Group won the first in February, a $7m contract to provide personnel support for reconstruction. Stevedoring, a Seattle firm, won a $4.8m contract to manage the port of Umm Qasr.
According to the Centre for Responsive Politics, the invited bidders together contributed almost $3.6m during the current election cycle, mostly to the Republicans. The amounts, though individually not large, are part of the process of ensuring a seat at the table, said Charles Tiefer, professor of law at Baltimore University and an expert in government contracting.
Credibility gap
He said the administration faced a "credibility gap" by awarding the contracts behind closed doors. "I see the Halliburton/Cheney connection as revealing of a broader pattern in this administration rather than something unusual or surprising," he said. "This is not corruption in terms of actually breaking the law but a pattern of favouring and influence."
The connections between the companies invited and the administration run deep. Ray Hunt, a director of Halliburton, is on the president's intelligence advisory board. Lawrence Eagleburger, secretary of state under the first President Bush, is also a Halliburton director.
Kenneth Oscar, the vice-president of Fluor, another of the six bidders, is a former army secretary and oversaw the Pentagon's $35bn procurement budget. Its board also includes Bobby Inman, a former CIA deputy director. The labour secretary, Elaine Chao, worked on the board of another of the six, Parsons, before joining the government.
Bechtel employed the former defence secretary Caspar Weinberger, and the former secretary of state George Shultz is on the board. Jack Sheehan, a senior vice-president with Bechtel, is on the defence policy board, a Pentagon advisory group, one of many apparent conflicts among its 30-strong membership.
Democrats Henry Waxman and John Dingell have written to the general audit office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, asking that the process for handing out contracts be examined. Mr Waxman has separately asked that the contract to the Halliburton subsidiary KBR be put under the microscope.
In a letter to David Walker, comptroller general of the audit office, they asked: "We are interested in how certain companies were invited to bid on these contracts, how the contract winners were selected, why so little information has been provided to the public and Congress about the contracts, and what role various agencies played in making the determination to proceed with these contracts."
The agency's handling of the process was decried by Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external relations, as "exceptionally maladroit". It was only under pressure from Britain that the US administration agreed to open up subcontracting to overseas companies.
But it is inevitably the Halliburton contract that has come under the most scrutiny. Mr Cheney ran the Dallas-based company between 1995 and 2000 before stepping down to run for office. When he left, he received a $33m thank you, much of which was at the discretion of the board. He is still receiving $180,000 a year in deferred income from the business.
The company is also no stranger to controversy. Last year it was forced to pay $2m to settle fraud claims involving work at a military base, and was found in 1997 by the general audit office to be billing the army for questionable expenses. The company has been criticised by its shareholders for dealing with Iran and is still under investigation by the US financial watchdog, the securities and exchange commission, for a possible accounting scandal while Mr Cheney was at the helm.
Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, defended the company's role in Iraq, citing KBR's long history in the field, going back to building ships for the US navy in the second world war. More recently it built the detention centre for suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The company did equally well under the Clinton administration.
"The vice-president has absolutely nothing to do with the awarding of defence contracts, the bidding process or the current work orders," she said.
Innuendo
Construction and government officials point out that there are few companies with the experience or capabilities to carry out the kind of work needed in Iraq. They argue that suggesting any inside influence is being brought to bear is the stuff of lazy innuendo.
Jonathan Marshall, a spokesman for Bechtel, said it was absurd to suggest there was any horse-trading behind the scenes. "The USAid process seems to have been handled by career civil servants and it's not reasonable to suggest they are influenced by political pressure nor that we have attempted to bring any political pressure to bare," he said. "We have a proud record in engineering and construction and have handled very large contracts, many in the Middle East, where we have been for 60 years. It's almost inconceivable that we wouldn't be on the list."
USAid argues that it expedited the usual method of tendering for contracts because of the need to get reconstruction under way as quickly as possible as well as for security reasons.
"There are classified documents they have to see," said Andrew Nastios, the USAid administrator. "We asked for companies that had security classifications already, that knew how to bid for federal contracts and work through the existing accounting system for the federal government, so we could move this very rapidly."
But for critics, the process has been one more example of an unhealthy tendency toward secrecy and the impression of government being run like a private members' club, from the formation of energy policy to new rules giving Mr Cheney more power over what information is eventually declassified for public consumption.
-------- colombia
Living dangerously in Colombia
EDITORIAL
April 15, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030415-22428136.htm
The death toll of Americans fighting terror and narco-trafficking in Colombia has reached five since February 13. Approximately 150 U.S. troops are still combing Colombia's countryside, looking for three Americans kidnapped in February by the most brutal terrorist group in the Western Hemisphere, known as the FARC. By involving Americans in such dangerous work in Colombia, the administration is demonstrating it takes the problems there seriously. But the troubles in Colombia may be escalating beyond the priority level that Washington has assigned them. If further action isn't taken, the Americans in that country may soon be involved in a mission impossible.
Colombia's narcotics and terrorism cabals are currently spreading their violent presence beyond the country's borders. They have been given safe harbor in Venezuela, are involved in coca cultivation in Peru, are behind some drug-related violence in Brazil and launch occassional forays into Ecuador. Recently, this regional aspect of the Colombian problem has developed a dangerous dynamic. Eyewitnesses claim the Venezuelan military has picked and chosen which narco-terror group they are backing, and are bombing the adversaries of their chosen in Colombian territory. Thus far, the Colombian response has been subdued. But, if Venezuelan bombing continues, the situation could erupt in conflict. Also, coca-activism, whereby peasant farmers are demanding their right to harvest the drug crop, is quickly gaining momentum in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. The United States and other donor countries trying to help Colombia are now dealing with a more urgent problem.
Washington has already taken some key steps toward meeting the challenge. Since July 2000, the United States has provided Colombia with almost $2 billion to combat drug trafficking and terrorism. Also, last year Washington approved a trade pact for Colombia and its neighbors. But, the region also needs a country like the United States to help coordinate a regional approach to the transnational threat.
Colombia and its neighbors must do a better job of policing their borders to keep the narco-terrorist danger contained. Since resources in these countries are limited, effective cooperation is essential. And here, Brazil, which has warm ties with Venezuela, must intervene to convince the government of President Hugo Chavez to stop harboring terrorists.
The United States should share its extensive customs, interdiction and border patrol expertise by holding joint training sessions with authorities from Colombia and surrounding nations. These joint exercises will also serve to bolster the trust needed for fluid information and intelligence exchanges. Also, the United States should help Colombia better coordinate police and military activities. These strategies may seem elementary, but they have yet to be implemented.
The donor countries helping Colombia must also provide the funds and know-how to bolster the country's rural development. Colombian authorities only control about 60 percent of the country. Much of the nation is therefore a kind of no-man's land that provides the ideal habitat for terrorists. The presence of the state must be judicious and balanced in order to win the welcome and cooperation of the Colombian people.
Before the violence in Colombia claims more American lives and causes greater regional instability, the administration should become more active in seeking solutions. Colombia's problems can't be eradicated overnight. But, with U.S. help, they can be steadily reduced.
-------- iraq
Tests rule out suspect bio-labs
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
(CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/15/sprj.irq.no.labs/index.html
KARBALA, Iraq -- The buried labs U.S. troops found last week were not the mobile chemical and biological weapons labs one U.S. Army general suspected, according to the head of an expert team brought in to examine them.
The 11 cargo containers were filled with new laboratory equipment apparently intended to make conventional weapons, said team leader Chief Warrant Officer 2 Monte Gonzalez.
"Based on what we've seen, the containers are full of millions of dollars worth of high-tech equipment," he said. "It possibly has a dual use. But it does not appear to be weapons of mass destruction."
Members of the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade found the site -- about 50 miles south of Baghdad near Karbala -- last week as they were heading north to Baghdad.
Some of the containers, used to hold cargo on ships, were partially buried. The troops dug up the containers and Gonzalez's team was brought in to investigate.
The containers held equipment typically found in laboratories, including test tubes, water baths, sand baths, ph transmitters, explosive-proof lights, ethyl alcohol gauges, shakers, test tubes, test tube holders, and temperature and pressure gauges.
Gonzalez's team finished its investigation Tuesday and will report its findings to the head of the 101st Airborne Wednesday, he said.
They will continue to examine the large number of documents found at the site. He said the containers might have been partially buried to prevent looting.
"It's like a Scooby-Doo mystery," he said. "It's a puzzle. But we don't expect to find a smoking gun."
Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said Monday soldiers found what they thought were 11 mobile chemical and biological laboratories. (Full story)
"Initial reports indicate that this is clearly a case of denial and deception on the part of the Iraqi government," Freakley said. "These chemical labs are present, and now we just have to determine what in fact they were really being used for."
During the buildup to the war in Iraq, U.S. officials said Iraq was using mobile laboratories to help conceal its production of banned weapons.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told a U.N. Security Council meeting that Iraq had biological weapons labs on at least 18 flatbed trucks.
Iraq denied having mobile weapons labs. U.N. weapons inspectors said they had found that Iraq used mobile labs to test food but had come across no evidence of banned weapons production.
On a visit February 23, U.N. weapons inspectors found nothing "untoward" at the Karbala Ammunition Filling Plant that is close to the site, a U.N. inspection team spokesman said Monday.
The site was among several that had been visited previously by weapons inspectors.
----
Army probes buried trailers
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 15, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030415-87947820.htm
U.S. Army forces have discovered 11 large containers with equipment inside that appear to be elements of Iraq's covert mobile chemical and biological weapons program.
The vessels, described as modified container express, or conex, trailers, were found buried near Karbala, about 50 miles south of Baghdad. The site was near a weapons plant, defense and military officials said.
The containers, also called vans, were discovered by troops of the 101st Airborne Division. The Army's 75th Intelligence Exploitation Unit was sent to the site to examine the containers.
"Obviously this shows that they [Saddam Hussein´s government] were pursuing a covert weapons program," one official said. "We still need actual proof of the weapons themselves."
Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, said the vans are being investigated "very seriously."
Gen. McChrystal told reporters at the Pentagon that other suspected chemical weapons found last week have not proved to be weapons. Other samples are still being investigated.
The 20-foot by 20-foot metal containers can be attached to trucks or rail cars. In addition to the containers, some 1,000 pounds of documents were discovered at the site.
"Initial reports indicate that this is clearly a case of denial and deception on the part of the Iraqi government," Army Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakly told CNN in Karbala. "These chemical labs are present, and now we just have to determine what in fact they were really being used for."
Gen. Freakly described the containers as "dual-use, chemical and biological."
The mobile laboratories contained an estimated $1 million worth of new equipment and were "clearly marked so they could be found again," he said.
"These chemical labs are present, and now we just have to determine what in fact they were really being used for," Gen. Freakly said.
Iraq's mobile weapons vans were an element of a highly detailed intelligence briefing presented to the United Nations in February by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who called mobile weapons facilities "one of the most worrisome things" about Iraq's arms programs.
Mr. Powell said intelligence on the vans was obtained from several Iraqis, including an Iraqi chemical engineer in 2000 who supervised a mobile production facility for biological and chemical weapons.
"He actually was present during biological agent production runs," Mr. Powell said Feb. 5. "He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents."
At least 18 of the vans were thought to be hidden in Iraq, Mr. Powell said.
"The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors," he said. "In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf war."
United Nations weapons inspectors sent to Iraq earlier this year were unable to find any mobile facilities for banned weapons.
Weapons inspectors visited the site where the containers were found on Feb. 23. It was known as the Karbala Ammunition Filling Plant.
Chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix dismissed the U.S. claims about the mobile facilities on March 7.
----
Arms hunt narrows to priority sites
April 15 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/14/1050172547120.html
United States forces have narrowed their hunt for banned weapons in Iraq to about three dozen sites and hope to accelerate their search, say US government officials.
So far no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been found, although US marines have discovered 278 artillery shells carrying a substance which initial tests showed was a chemical agent.
The shells - found in a Baghdad schoolyard parked in trailers, three of them on launchers - are to undergo further analysis.
The priority search sites are dispersed throughout Iraq and their exact location remains undisclosed. They were selected from more than 1000 laboratories, plants, military installations and storage facilities once thought to contain banned weapons and component materials.
Narrowing the list was intended to increase the odds of military search teams quickly uncovering banned weapons materials, but the inspection of the sites is expected to take at least a month.
The hunt is being conducted by the army's 75th Intelligence Exploration Unit, which includes numerous teams of Defence Intelligence Agency officers, CIA officers, FBI agents and biologists.
Nearly a dozen of the priority sites had already been inspected, officials said. But so far inspectors have found no clear evidence of weapons whose elimination was often cited by President George Bush and Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as a principal justification for the war with Iraq.
Several times in the past three weeks US marines have come upon sites where they suspected banned weapons might have been developed, only to learn later that they were benign.
It remains a strong belief among US officials that Saddam's regime intended to use chemical weapons but did not proceed - possibly because the fall of Baghdad happened so quickly and the chain of military command was broken.
Officials have confirmed that a top Iraqi nuclear scientist, Jaffar al-Jaffar, has surrendered in Iraq in the past few days.
His surrender follows that of Lieutenant-General Amir Saadi, Saddam's chief scientific adviser, who turned himself in on Sunday with the help of Germany's ZDF television network.
A US official said Jaffar would "certainly" know about Iraq's nuclear program as well as "likely other aspects of the WMD program".
Saadi, for his part, told ZDF that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.
Bush Administration officials said they were confident that banned weapons would be found. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said US forces needed to find people "who tell us where the things are".
US military intelligence officials have also sought evidence that al-Qaeda had a presence in Iraq and ties to Saddam's government. Here, too, the US has come up empty so far.
Meanwhile, arms experts say the Bush Administration may be legally bound to let independent inspectors confirm any findings of unconventional weapons in Iraq. But they added that the White House, which has resisted assistance from the United Nations in the search for weapons, might decide to ignore such legalities.
The New York Times, AFP
----
Troops find 'suspicious labs' buried near factory
From Tim Reid in Washington
April 15, 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-647075,00.html
AMERICAN forces in Iraq say they have discovered 11 mobile "chemical and biological laboratories" buried in ground near a factory filled with empty artillery shells.
As the political pressure on Washington and London mounts to find concrete evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, particularly after a series of false alarms that a "smoking gun" had been uncovered, American arms experts were last night analysing the 20ft by 20ft "large metal vans" unearthed near Karbala, south of Baghdad.
General Benjamin Freakly, commander of the 101st Airborne Division 2nd Brigade, which made the discovery after fighting near Karbala last week, told CNN yesterday: "(They found 11 buried . . . large metal 20ft by 20ft vans, buried in the ground. They are dual-use chemical labs, biological and chemical labs . . . close to an artillery ammunition plant, which had empty shells.
"It is too early to tell if this is evidence of banned weapons (programmes but clearly it was new equipment, a lot of money in the 2002/2003 time period spent in that camp, probably over $1 million-worth of capability in these 11 vans and we continue to develop (the investigation with better expertise."
General Freakly added that 1,000lb of documentation was found buried with the mobile laboratories and each "chemical lab" could store 4,467 drums of material. He said no chemical or biological weapons were found with the laboratories.
"Initial reports indicate that this is clearly a case of denial and deception by the Iraqi Government and that these chemical labs were present, and we just have to determine what in fact they were being used for," he said.
One of the key accusations made against Saddam's regime by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, when he addressed the UN Security Council in February was that Iraq had easily hidden mobile laboratories capable of making weapons-grade chemical and biological material.
As each day passes since the demise of Saddam's regime, President Bush and Tony Blair are keenly aware that the discovery of a "smoking gun" has become increasingly urgent. The main diplomatic and moral justification for invading Iraq rested on their repeated assertion that Saddam was hiding chemical and biological weapons, and as coalition troops have spread throughout the country the question of why no incriminating evidence has been found has become acute.
General Tommy Franks, the coalition commander, said on Sunday that it could take a year to search every site in Iraq where weapons of mass destruction might be hidden. He said that up to 3,000 locations were earmarked for visits, which are progressing at the rate of five to fifteen a day.
Pressure has also mounted because repeated finds that appeared to show evidence of banned weapons have turned out to be innocent discoveries. Last week, for example, the 101st Airborne believed they had discovered tonnes of nerve agent. Further analysis demonstrated that it was pesticide.
Some of General Powell's accusations were also disputed yesterday by two former UN weapons inspectors. Joem Siljeholm, a Norwegian, and a German, said that parts of General Powell's presentation were misleading and completely wrong.
They said that mobile laboratories described by Mr Powell did not exist. They also said that there had been no factories making weapons of mass destruction in a series of photographs produced by General Powell.
----
As Iraqis Flee To Syria, U.S. Nets Scientist
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26442-2003Apr14?language=printer
Numerous senior Iraqi officials have fled into Syria over the last two weeks, with some moving on to two third countries and "a handful" still in hiding in Syria, a senior Bush administration official said yesterday. They include Iraq's top nuclear scientist, who turned himself in to U.S. authorities over the past several days after making his way to another Persian Gulf country.
Jaffar Dhai Jaffar, who founded and led Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program and was one of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's three top science advisers, could provide valuable information about the status of Iraq's proscribed weapons programs. Another senior official said Jaffar is in U.S. military custody at an undisclosed location in the Gulf region.
Jaffar and Lt. Gen. Amir Saadi, an Iraqi scientist who surrendered to U.S. troops Saturday in Baghdad, "know, between the two of them, everything about the country's nuclear, biological, chemical and missile programs," said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security. Jaffar, he added, "is the best scientist Iraq ever produced."
U.S. intelligence officials confirmed Albright's view of Jaffar but said he had not yet proved helpful under U.S. questioning. If he cooperates, one official said, "he could tell us the whereabouts" of prohibited weapons as well as the countries or groups that supplied Iraq with weapons components and knowledge.
U.S. troops have not found chemical or biological weapons, or nuclear weapons components, in Iraq, although the presence of such weapons was cited by President Bush as one of the main justifications for the war.
As the hunt for members of the ousted Iraqi government continued, the fate of most of them, including Hussein, remained a mystery. One senior official said yesterday that U.S. intelligence reports seem to indicate the former Iraqi president "was more dead than alive," though the official added there was no absolute evidence that would prove it. "There are all sorts of reports saying he's dead," the official said.
U.S. military teams have begun digging through a complex in southern Baghdad that was the target of an airstrike by U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and 2,000-pound bunker-penetrating bombs on March 20, the first night of the war. CIA officials believed Hussein and his sons were spending the night at the complex and did not exit before the bombs hit, though there were conflicting reports in the weeks that followed over whether the Iraqi leader had been killed or wounded or had escaped unharmed.
On April 7, U.S. warplanes struck a building in the upscale Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad, where intelligence officials received what they said was a reliable tip that a man who matched Hussein's description was holding a meeting with senior Iraqi intelligence officials. It remains unclear whether any Iraqi leaders were at the site.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials have charged for several days that Syria was allowing Iraqi leaders to cross the border to escape. U.S. officials yesterday were not precise about how many Iraqi officials have fled to Syria, though a defense official said Hussein's wife is believed to be among them.
The official said that a large convoy of several dozen vehicles crossed into Syria from Iraq during the first week of the war and that it is believed to have been carrying Hussein's wife and other government officials.
"There's certainly a lot of circumstantial evidence that absolutely high-level people are there," an administration official said. However, there is no conclusive list of Iraqi officials in Syria because the intelligence is inconclusive. "We have scraps of information," another senior official said.
Two weeks ago, U.S. troops began blocking the main roads out of Iraq to Syria, but the 375-mile-long border includes hundreds of small roads used for decades by smugglers to move contraband goods. "We still don't control all the back roads," said one administration official. "They could still escape that way."
The two Iraqi scientists now in U.S. custody amount to "a very good catch," said Khidhir Hamza, the head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program until he fled the country in 1994. Jaffar, in particular, "is a very well-connected member of the cabinet," he said.
In his book, "Saddam's Bombmaker," Hamza describes Jaffar as "a willowy genius" Hussein arrested and jailed in 1979 for questioning Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
"To give him a taste of what could come," Hamza wrote, "Jaffar was strapped to a dungeon wall and forced to watch as other men were tortured," including a colleague, Hussein Shahristani. Jaffar "recanted and returned to work."
Officially, Jaffar headed Iraq's nuclear program only until 1991, when he dropped out of sight. It is believed he then "launched Iraqi's underground nuclear program," Albright said.
Saadi, who worked in the Iraqi chemical weapons program in the 1980s and 1990s under Hussein's son-in-law, last year became the main liaison with U.N. weapons inspectors. Upon his surrender, Saadi told a German television network that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, a position he maintained before the war in his contacts with the U.N. inspection teams.
The Bush administration charged this year that Iraq had secretly reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, although the evidence it used to make its case -- mainly the purchase of special aluminum tubes to make gas centrifuges -- was disputed by other intelligence agencies that believed the tubes were mainly for civilian use.
Staff writer Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.
----
2,000 policemen report for work
By David Blair in Baghdad
15/04/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$1LIJNQBZI2SRDQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/04/15/wcops15.xml/ More than 2,000 Iraqi policemen reported for work in Baghdad yesterday as efforts were made to curb the looting and vandalism.
Following American radio appeals, the officers arrived at the National Police College to register for work.
Iraqi police remove a poster of Saddam in Baghdad
Later American soldiers made their first joint patrol with Iraqi policemen. Two marine Humvees accompanied five Iraqi police cars through the eastern part of the capital.
Yet this largely symbolic start to a crackdown on lawlessness has made little difference so far. Baghdad normally has 40,000 police and it will be some time before all of the new volunteers are deployed on the streets.
Four of the capital's six general hospitals are closed, plumes of black smoke rise across the city, only a handful of shops are open and looters wheel their gains through the streets with apparent impunity.
Baghdad's five million people still have no electricity or reliable water supplies.
Cars piled high with furniture, typewriters and air conditioning units are common sights. Six young men strode through the al-Thawra area wearing black fencing masks and carrying foils, all pilfered from a gymnasium.
Compared with the looting frenzy that followed the arrival of Americans in Baghdad last Wednesday, the wholesale theft has subsided. Capt Frank Thorp, a central command spokesman, said: "We're beginning to see a downward trend in looting."
This is largely because Baghdad's obvious targets have been plundered to destruction.
The ransacking of two presidential palaces, every government ministry, two five-star hotels, national museum, national library and almost every building associated with Saddam Hussein's regime has satiated the demands of most looters.
But the bands of thieves continue to paralyse the capital. The closure of businesses and shops means that no one can go to work and few can buy food.
Marines have responded by abandoning their armoured vehicles and mounting foot patrols. Two hundred men from 17 Weapons Company were deployed to bring order to the Karrada area.
They sealed off several streets with barricades of bricks, protecting St Raphael's Hospital, a small Christian clinic and a nearby Roman Catholic church. The marines gathered in groups of three or four on street corners, their M16 carbines held at the shoulder.
Shopkeepers felt confident enough to open for business. Ghazi Said, 65, said he had reopened his small supermarket only because three marines were standing within 20 yards of its entrance.
Asked why most of his shelves were still empty, he replied: "I am keeping most of my stock safe at home because I do not know if this stealing will start again."
----
Marines Raid Journalists' Baghdad Hotel
Apr 15, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WAR_HOTEL_RAID?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. Marines looking for hardcore Iraqi fighters searched rooms early Tuesday in the hotel that serves as headquarters for most foreign journalists in Baghdad, apparently taking some people into custody.
The Marines had keys to the rooms, but in cases where the doors were bolted, they kicked them down, rousting journalists from their beds and pointing M-16s in their faces, footage from Associated Press Television News showed.
Marines were seen guarding suspects in a hall; interrogating a man who claimed to be a cameraman; and breaking down a door to get to the roof.
Four Iraqi men who did not have proper identification were detained in the raid that began at about 7 a.m.
The Marines had information that Fedayeen paramilitary fighters might be hiding there, military officials said. Arms were also believed to be hidden there.
"This building wasn't 100 percent safe and we're making sure it is," Marine Sgt. Jose Guillen said. "There weren't any gunshots or anything, but intelligence thought it wasn't 100 percent safe."
The raids hit the 16th and 17th floors, where journalists with CNN, Turkish TV, Japanese TV and other networks were staying. It was unclear how many rooms were searched in the 18-story hotel overlooking the Tigris River.
A CNN producer, Linda Roth, said she opened her door to find armed Marines, who ordered her to get down while they searched the room without explanation.
"There was definitely tension," she said. "They were definitely looking for someone."
After the Marines left her room, she said, she saw three men who appeared to be Iraqis in the hallway, sitting cross-legged, their hands behind their backs, under Marine guard.
Last week, an American tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel because of what the U.S. military said was enemy fire coming from the building. Two journalists were killed and three others wounded.
----
Threat of military tribunals
By Fergus Shiel
April 15 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/14/1050172547040.html
The international lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC, spoke out yesterday against the use of a special US military commission to hear war crimes cases in Iraq..
Mr Robertson, president of the special court trying crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone, said the proposed commission for Iraq was the greatest threat there was to the adversarial system as the preferred method of prosecuting war crimes.
Speaking at the Commonwealth Law Conference in Melbourne, he said military commissions, set up by presidential decree, had been described by the the American Bar Association as "kangaroo courts".
In truth, Mr Robertson said, they were not courts at all but "extensions of the executive power of the president of the United States", staffed, paid for and promoted by the US Defence Department.
The very same arm of US government which alleged guilt and detained prisoners would prosecute them without the normal evidentiary rules or safeguards of civilian courts, and with review only by the Secretary of Defence.
He noted the US was a signatory to the United Nations Genocide Convention, which stipulates that those charged with genocide should be tried by a tribunal of the country in which the act was committed or an appropriate international tribunal.
Mr Robertson said opponents of adversary trials plausibly, but wrongly, blamed them for being too slow and costly, citing the war crimes tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
He proposed other measures to make them more cost-effective.
----
With God and guns behind them, clerics begin calling shots
April 15 2003
Sydney Morning Herald / Washington Post
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/14/1050172545620.html
Ali Shawki, a Shiite Muslim cleric with the swagger that a gun on each hip brings, strode through the no man's land that Baghdad has become and, in words and action, left little doubt there was a new authority in town.
At the Prophet Muhammad mosque, where he resides, the 47-year-old Shawki led prayers in a room stuffed with booty confiscated from looters rampaging through the city. His guns stayed on. With an armed retinue - one guard carrying a heavy machine-gun with rounds slung around him bandolier-style - he pressed the flesh at a health clinic that he had ordered open after it was closed for days by war.
He described his plans for the sprawling slum once known as Saddam City: armed patrols at night that he would lead, a curfew by 8pm on the turf he controls, and orders that no gunfire was allowed, which he would broadcast by mosque loudspeaker.
"We order people to obey us. When we say stand up, they stand up. When we say sit down, they sit down," Shawki said, his black turban framing the long beard of religious study. "With the collapse of Saddam, the people have turned to the clergy."
In this neighbourhood on the eastern edge of Baghdad, awash in sewage and littered with garbage, the clergy of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority have moved to fill the void left by the overthrow of president Saddam Hussein. With encouragement from their leadership based in Najaf, they have set up about 100 roadblocks to deter looters and put men in charge of safety of hospitals and the security on the streets.
Mosques have filled up with confiscated loot, popular committees are being organised by clergy to restore civil services and order, and some prayer leaders have taken to patrolling their neighbourhoods, forcing bakeries to feed people. The words of the new order are written on the walls. Hastily painted slogans in black convey a less-than-subtle message: "Stealing is forbidden by God." Across the city, graffiti has cast away the 28-year-old name of Saddam City in favour of "Sadr City", designated for a leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, who was assassinated by Saddam's government in 1999.
"Sadr City welcomes you," a young man painted on the neighbourhood's entrance along Habibiya Street on Sunday.
The clergy claim credit for preventing bloodshed that many feared would erupt in the tattered sector of 2 million people, which for decades bore the brunt of repression under Saddam's government. But the rise of the clerics hints at the formidable challenges that might face any new government in Baghdad: Sunni-Shiite disputes, the spectre of warlords seizing and administering territory, and the dangerous jockeying for position with United States forces.
The clerics are among the first to articulate their postwar intentions: a government shaped if not controlled by religious leaders who enjoy respect and authority among Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority. "The clergy are taking over," Maher Abdel-Hassan, a 42-year-old prayer leader in the neighbourhood, said with a mix of hope and satisfaction.
"There's no other authority. The people will only obey the orders of the religious men."
----
People in Basra Contest Official View of Siege
Life Was Mostly Normal, Residents Say; Doctors Report Many Civilians Killed
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26066-2003Apr14?language=printer
BASRA, Iraq -- There was nothing resembling a popular uprising against the Iraqi militiamen who controlled this city during its 13-day siege by British forces. Life continued largely as normal in many neighborhoods, with police directing traffic and residents doing their best to avoid fighting.
Doctors at local hospitals treated scores of civilians wounded by British artillery and U.S. bombs during the siege, despite briefing-room claims of pinpoint accuracy. Many others were killed.
These conclusions about life under siege emerge from a week of interviews in Basra and they differ in many ways from accounts offered by military and other sources before the city's fall. Reports of large numbers of Basra residents being forced to take up arms and militiamen firing from behind human shields were similarly not borne out in the interviews.
People expressed more dismay at the looting and general lawlessness that followed the British entry into the city on April 6 than at the behavior of the Iraqi militiamen. People say they were largely able to stay away from the fighters, though sometimes they mingled with them in a false show of solidarity.
Hamid Azzawi, a medical school professor who lives a block away from what was the city's intelligence headquarters, said he served refreshments to militiamen who took up positions in sandbagged emplacements on his street. "They might say, you are obliged to leave this house," he recounted. "So you needed to supply them with tea, water and a big smile."
Basra was supposed to be easy pickings for U.S. troops and British soldiers who crossed the border from Kuwait on March 20. According to the original plan, British officers said, U.S. Marines would sweep through the city on their way north, and then hand it over to British troops to clean up remaining pockets of resistance.
But as one British officer said, when he arrived at Basra's southernmost highway bridge, which was supposed to be secure, there was intense firing from Iraqi mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. "Here it is -- it's all yours," the officer recalled a Marine telling him.
British commanders debated whether to enter the city, but decided a full-scale assault might cause many civilian casualties. So they stayed put, and a cat-and-mouse battle ensued.
The Iraqis had moved their T-55 tanks to the southern gateway to the city, near Basra University and facing the highway bridge. But whenever the British moved forward to engage those tanks, the Iraqis withdrew toward the city and the British held back.
At Basra University, Kadhin Ali, an English professor, said those tanks never moved far into the city and generally remained at the edge, to guard the gateway.
Like most professors on campus, Ali was part of a security team that was supposed to protect the university grounds. He initially turned out carrying an old AK-47 assault rifle. But he said that after the first few days, he and most of the other professors became frightened and fled to friends' homes, leaving only about a dozen hard-core members of the Saddam's Fedayeen militia on the campus.
Most of these fighters were young, teenagers even, with no military training. They were responsible for most of the rocket-propelled grenade and mortar attacks on British positions during the standoff.
According to one Iraqi resident familiar with their tactics, the Fedayeen members would typically go in a group of 20 to the southern edge of Basra, to the highway bridge linking the city to the town of Zubair. From there, they would split into three or four smaller groups and fire mortars or rocket-propelled grenades at British troops stationed on the bridge.
The Iraqis sometimes used the tanks stationed at the southern gateway to the city as cover, allowing them to operate out of the buildings of a technical college about a mile farther south, closer to British positions.
This Iraqi resident said British return fire was so accurate that out of those teams of 20 fighters, typically only three would return. British troops later overran the technical college, killing as many as 20 Iraqis inside, said Maj. John Cotterill, who is attached to the Irish Guards.
As for fighters situating themselves near civilians, Iraqis said in interviews that it was common practice for top government and ruling Baath Party officials to operate out of houses around the city, mostly in such affluent civilian areas as Ashshar that were home to academics, doctors and other professionals. "What happened is these people, Saddam's men, if you like . . . rent civilian homes and use that for their business," said Azzawi, the medical professor, referring to then-President Saddam Hussein.
U.S. intelligence officials found out about this and targeted some of those houses. One airstrike, on April 5, hit a house that was believed to be used by top Iraqi intelligence agency officials. Two bombs turned the house into a large crater but also demolished the home of Abid Hassan Hamoodi next door, killing 10 members of his family, including seven children.
"If they had any suspicion of anything there, they should have notified us to move from there," Hamoodi, 72, said in an interview.
British officers said they believed their targeting was accurate overall, and that many times requests to strike at targets were denied by senior commanders because of the risk of harming civilians. But they said that in any war, some civilian casualties are unavoidable.
British officers said throughout the standoff that their artillery fire was "degrading" the Baath Party's grip on power. "We were creating the conditions to enter," said Capt. Richard Coates, a British military spokesman inside the city. "We dislodged them."
However, many residents inside the city disputed whether the allied strikes had any effect in loosening the government's control. Instead, they described a city that functioned relatively normally until the British entered -- and many said the main fear was of artillery and airstrikes.
Andres Kruesi, a worker for the International Committee of the Red Cross who lived in Basra for 18 months, returned to the city during the siege to find it "firmly in Iraqi control."
Asked about a civilian uprising and militiamen firing on crowds to suppress it, Kruesi said: "I didn't see any of that happening. In the city, it was similar to before. It was the same city I had worked in for the last year and a half."
"The police were out. There was even traffic enforcement," he said. "My impression was they were in control."
Archbishop Gabriel Kassab, the Chaldean Catholic prelate in Basra who represents most of the area's small Christian community, said scores of people spent nights in St. Ephrem's Church, mainly to escape the artillery and air bombardment, but there was never a problem from the militia or Baath Party fighters in the city. "We left all the churches open 24 hours a day," he said.
Holding up a piece of shrapnel from a bomb he said landed just a few yards from his residence, the archbishop said: "Look here -- that is a gift, from [President] Bush to me. I will take it with me when I go to the United States."
On April 5, U.S. and British commanders thought they scored a major victory in Basra when they destroyed a compound that they believed was the hiding place of Iraq's local commander, Ali Hassan Majeed, a cousin of Saddam Hussein known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in the 1980s. Some officers believed his death may have weakened the resistance and made it easier for British troops to eventually enter Basra.
Now some officers say they are unsure what happened. "He may be dead, or he may be alive," Coates said. "We think he's dead, but we don't know." He added, "Obviously, Elvis is alive for some people."
At one of Majeed's guesthouses, Mohammed Yahya, an unemployed 32-year-old, was scavenging recently for whatever the looters left behind. Yahya, who lives near the guesthouse on the banks of the Shatt al Arab waterway, said he saw a convoy of six or seven four-wheel-drive vehicles leave the compound early on April 6, heading for a northbound military road that cuts between palm trees close to the Iranian border.
Yahya, who said he often watched the comings and goings from the guesthouse, said the cars belonged to "some very important people." He added: "We don't know who occupied the cars. But it might have been Ali."
The British entered Basra that day with little resistance, finding most of the Iraqi fighters had abandoned the sandbagged emplacements they had built at government buildings throughout the city. Coates and others said Iraqis may have concluded that continued resistance was futile. Other accounts suggest that the Iraqi withdrawal was an organized retreat, not a last-minute flight. Several Iraqis who claim to have friends in the militia said an order went around early on April 6 that the fighters should stop resisting. Several people said the looting began even before the British entered, indicating that police, government security guards and militiamen had already left their posts.
Mochdad Fadhil, 44, a mechanical engineer, recounted that early that day, some army guards at a nearby compound often used by Majeed during the standoff came to him asking a favor. "The guards came and borrowed some civilian clothes," he said. "They came in their underwear."
"They needed a place to change," he said, adding: "There was no officer left when they came. All the officers were gone."
----
U.S. Convenes Meeting Focusing on Future of Iraq
Thousands of Shiite Muslims Protest Gathering
By Alan Sipress and Carol Morello
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29634-2003Apr15?language=printer
DOHA, Qatar, April 14 -- The United States formally begins creation of a new Iraqi government on Tuesday, convening a meeting of 75 Iraqi community leaders and exile figures in a newly pacified town on the Euphrates River.
Even before the conference in Nasiriyah started, the challenges it faced were clear: Some former opposition groups have refused to attend, and officials from the State Department and Pentagon are offering different views over how much leeway the delegates should get in charting the country's future.
[The Associated Press reported that the meeting began on schedule Tuesday at Tallil airbase. Thousands of Shiite Muslims whose representatives were boycotting the meeting demonstrated in nearby Nasiriyah against the gathering, chanting, "No to America and no to Saddam!" Jim Wilkinson, spokesman at U.S. Central Command, said, "It's critical that the world understand that this is only the fledgling first meeting of what will hopefully be a much larger series of meetings across Iraq."]
The meeting is "the start of a national dialogue among Iraqis about the future of their country," a senior U.S. official said Monday. It is designed "for them to get together to talk about their aspirations and plans and processes to move toward the establishment of an Iraqi interim authority. Our role is to facilitate, given the security situation . . . that conversation."
Many delegates were being transported to Nasiriyah by the U.S. military. Despite the absence of some groups from the roster, the meeting will represent diverse visions for Iraq. "This is a big-tent concept, a town hall meeting," one official said.
Bush administration officials hope that the process launched in Nasiriyah could lead to the creation of an interim Iraqi administration within weeks. Iraqi authorities would gradually assume powers from U.S. reconstruction officials led by Army retired Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner.
The urgency of establishing a new government and civil authority is underlined by the scope of humanitarian needs across Iraq in the wake of the war. Electricity and water remain cut off in many cities, looted hospitals are bare of medicines and equipment, and shortages of water and food are menacing many areas.
International relief agencies said that a lack of security is impeding the distribution of aid. The International Committee of the Red Cross has dozens of trucks on standby in Jordan, ready to transport food parcels, hygiene sets and basic kitchen utilities for 50,000 people in Baghdad and central Iraq, said spokesman Muin Kassis. A similar cache of goods is in Kuwait for delivery to towns and cities in southern Iraq.
"At any minute, the relief people are ready to take to the road," said Michele Mercier of the Red Cross in Jordan. "The only thing they're waiting for is a green light on security."
The Bush administration remains divided about how to build the interim authority, envisioned as gradually gaining responsibility over the Iraqi government. Current thinking is that preliminary regional meetings will be followed by a larger national gathering in Baghdad to select the interim government.
The State Department and Pentagon have long disputed timing and tactics for this phase of reconstruction. The State Department insists that the lead be taken by Iraqis, while the Pentagon advocates greater U.S. control over the agenda and approach, and a large role for expatriate Iraqis.
In an effort to show openness at Tuesday's meeting, senior U.S. government officials said Monday in Doha that they would not automatically bar members of deposed president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from participating. The officials said the desire to hold Baath Party members accountable for past abuses would be weighed against the need for national reconciliation.
Some of the delegates were coming from Iraqi opposition groups that have long been allies of the U.S. administration, including the Iraqi National Congress, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Iraqi National Accord. Others represent local Iraqi community leaders who have become known to U.S. and British forces only since they captured Iraqi towns in the past month.
Several groups from Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, including the Iran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had announced that they would not attend. A spokesman for the group, Abdelaziz Hakim, told reporters in Tehran that his group objected to the "U.S. umbrella."
The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, who is close to some senior officials in the Bush administration, dismissed the meeting as inconsequential after failing to put together a rival gathering in advance. He plans to drive to Baghdad on Tuesday and be represented at the meeting by his nephew, Salim Chalabi, a lawyer from London.
U.S. officials said the intention was to bring together mid-level officials from the groups. They said they did not expect people of Chalabi's rank to attend.
The officials added that their immediate goals for the one-day session included introducing Garner. Garner's group, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, has dispatched advance teams in recent days to the north, center and south of Iraq.
Even before the interim administration begins functioning, the U.S. Central Command is eager for Iraqis to take a hand in the day-to-day running of public services. U.S. officials said they expect the Nasiriyah meeting to begin figuring out how Iraqis can coordinate their decisions with the U.S.-led forces now controlling most of the country.
Tribal leaders have already begun laying the foundation for local governments in western and northern Iraq by arranging coalitions of their tribes, according to Army Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks. In Karbala, meantime, the city fathers have established a 200-member uniformed police force, he said.
U.S. officials said they expected the United Nations to play a part in the final conference that creates a government, but not as what one called the "managing partner."
Rather, the guiding role in this process is to be taken by several U.S. administration officials, including special U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad from the National Security Council, Ryan Crocker, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and Lawrence T. DiRita, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, as well as Garner.
Some Iraqis have questioned U.S. intentions, suggesting that Washington wants to install Chalabi as the country's next leader. This speculation was further fueled when the U.S. military airlifted him and 600 allied fighters into the Nasiriyah air base last week. Senior U.S. government officials repeated several times today that Chalabi had not been accorded special treatment.
The precarious security situation continued to prevent international relief agencies from moving into Iraq in force. Frustrated aid workers are appealing to the Bush administration to make the relief effort a greater priority now that the major combat portion of the war has been declared over.
"You don't want to send a food convoy into a crowd of looters," said Khaled Mansour, a spokesman for the World Food Program (WFP), which has 1,300 tons of food in Jordan destined for Baghdad. "Things aren't fully under control in the capital yet."
The 1,200-bed Yarmouk General Teaching Hospital in Baghdad, for example, is closed because it has been looted and was hit by rockets and shells during the conflict. Corpses that were piled in the entrance hall have been buried in the hospital garden.
The Red Cross plans to help with repairs to Baghdad's damaged water plant and trying to recover stolen water tanks and bladder trucks.
The WFP already has sent food convoys from Turkey into the three Kurdish provinces in northern Iraq. The need for food was considered more dire in the north, because before the war the Iraqi government had doubled food rations for people living in central Iraq, where Baghdad is located. Some brighter news emerged as violence subsided. UNICEF reported that schools reopened in the country's three northernmost provinces. The WFP said it hopes by this weekend to send one convoy to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq and a second to Baghdad.
Morello reported from Amman, Jordan. Staff writer Peter Slevin in Washington contributed to this report.
----
Mosul shootings overshadow US-led talks
April 15, 2003 (USET),
Australian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s832822.htm
United States troops have opened fire on a crowd opposed to the US-installed governor in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, killing at least 10 people and injuring as many as 100, witnesses and doctors said.
The incident overshadowed the start of US-brokered talks aimed at sketching out a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and was sure to ignite anti-US sentiment sparked in protests in Baghdad and at the talks in the southern city of Nasiriyah.
Witnesses reported that US troops had fired into a crowd which was becoming increasingly hostile towards the new governor, Mashaan al-Juburi, as he was making a pro-US speech in the northern oil city.
"There are perhaps 100 wounded and 10 to 12 dead," Dr Ayad al-Ramadhani said at the city hospital.
US forces in Mosul refused to comment to AFP, and at US Central Command in Qatar, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told a press briefing he had seen no military reports of the incident and could not confirm it.
One witness, Marwan Mohammed, 50, told AFP: "The people moved toward the government building, the children threw stones, the Americans started firing. Then they prevented the people from recovering the bodies."
Another, Ayad Hassun, 37, said: "They (the soldiers) climbed on top of the building and first fired at a building near the crowd, with the glass falling on the civilians. People started to throw stones, then the Americans fired at them," Hassun said.
"Dozens of people fell," he said, his own shirt blood-stained.
According to a third witness, Abdulrahman Ali, 49, the US soldiers opened fire when they saw the crowd running at the government building.
Pentagon denies victory
The Pentagon meanwhile said it was not yet ready to declare victory after nearly four weeks of war, but US commanders expressed hope the main stage of hostilities was over with the fall of Saddam's hometown of Tikrit.
The commander of a 16,000-strong Iraqi military unit surrendered control of an area of western Iraq extending to the Syrian border, after US central command said it was continuing to consolidate its position.
US officials switched their focus to neighbouring Syria, alleging that Damascus has been developing weapons of mass destruction, prompting appeals for calm from the United Nations and Arab and European governments.
The US-sponsored meeting in Nasiriyah is the first since the launch of the war on March 20 and was billed as a major step forward in the search for a new Iraqi leadership.
But the man tipped to become Iraq's next leader, Ahmad Chalabi, head of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress, was not due to attend.
Iraq's leading Shi'ite Muslim opposition group was also boycotting the talks, amid distrust over the US role and division over who should lead Iraq.
Mr Chalabi, who has insisted he is not a candidate for a post in the interim administration to be run by retired US general Jay Garner, planned to send a representative.
Dozens of representatives from Iraq's fractious mix of ethnic, tribal and opposition groups, including those formerly in exile, were said to be invited although no official list was given.
The New York Times quoted Mr Garner as saying his mission to rebuild Iraq's political structures would be messy and contentious.
His fears appeared justified as the talks in the Shi'ite bastion sparked a demonstration estimated by journalists to number around 20,000 people, led by religious figures.
"Yes to freedom... Yes to Islam... No to America, No to Saddam," the crowd chanted in the centre of Nasiriyah.
The meeting came against a backdrop of renewed differences across the Atlantic, this time over Syria.
US officials have accused the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of state terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction and of harbouring fugitive Iraqi officials.
-------- mideast
Syria Fears the Unknown: What's Behind U.S. Threats
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR,
April 15, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/international/worldspecial/15SYRI.html?ex=1051429846&ei=1&en=9e5e0792069b19ef
DAMASCUS, Syria, April 14 - Last week, Syria's main scientific research institute staged its first air-raid drill in recent memory.
Damascus residents, who just days ago were either bemoaning the humiliation of Baghdad's rapid collapse or whispering about the chances of it provoking change at home, now wonder aloud if the United States Army plans to march on their city.
The Syrian foreign minister, Farouk Al-Sharaa, in his sole news conference since the war began, expressed bewilderment this weekend over what, exactly, Washington wanted from its barrage of threats against his country.
These are unsettled days in Damascus, a city that has long prided itself as the capital not just of Syria, but of all things Arab. The government of the young president, Bashar al-Assad, gained widespread popular support for its heated oratory against the United States over the war against Iraq. Indeed, hundreds of Syrian and other Arab volunteers rushed to fight in Iraq's defense.
But now Syria finds itself caught between burnishing its pan-Arab credentials by criticizing America and facing a new, painful fact: the United States is now on Syria's doorstep, across the border in Iraq, and the American administration has already shown it is ready to flex its muscles again even before the battlefield smoke clears.
Some reflective souls still muse about the chances of change in Iraq rattling the Baath Party's iron grip here, but the debate on possible American military action garners more attention.
"Some might believe that Rambo can move in many directions at once, but this is incorrect," Imad Fawzi Shueibi, a Damascus University professor and analyst, said on television last week. "Damascus has grown accustomed to political pressure."
Such confidence began to fray under the daily threats from Washington, however.
The warnings - issued by President Bush himself, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior advisers - mostly seem to reflect American concerns that the Iraqi leadership might escape to Syria. But for good measure, the Bush administration is warning Damascus, in terms once reserved for Baghdad, against providing a place where groups the United States accuses of terrorism might find weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, the Bush administration has made clear it is not contemplating military action against Syria.
The United States issued no specific details about which senior Iraqi officials might have gone to Syria. Diplomats report no confirmation that any of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam Hussein's government, including Mr. Hussein himself, have entered the country. Rather, there is a sense that the repeated American warnings could be preemptive or could be based on information that rarely surfaces publicly.
There have been scattered press reports in Europe and the Middle East suggesting two possible scenarios. First, that the Russian diplomatic convoy that was fired on as it left Baghdad on April 6 actually smuggled out several senior Iraqis. Second, that Mr. Hussein's first wife, Sajida, traveled through Syria on her way to Moscow with several daughters, grandchildren and truckloads of goods.
Syria denies that senior Iraqis of any stripe have crossed the border. When American military officials noted that one of Mr. Hussein's half brothers was caught Sunday near the Syrian border, Buthaina Shaaban, the foreign ministry spokesman, noted drily that he was still in Iraq.
Damascus seems the most likely haven due to its broadsides against Washington over the war. But Syrian officials argue that senior Iraqis would not be welcome here.
First, the two countries have long been ruled by bitterly competitive branches of the Baath Party. Baghdad used to refer to the late President Hafez al-Assad as the "dwarf ruler" for joining the military coalition to evict Iraq from Kuwait, although trade relations have improved dramatically in recent years.
----
U.S. Believe Iraqi Scientist Was in Syria
April 15, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Iraqis-in-Syria.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Intelligence information indicates a top Iraqi nuclear scientist recently spent time in Syria, and Saddam Hussein's first wife is possibly there now, officials said. But they characterized reports of other top Iraqi leaders arriving in Syria as uncorroborated.
The scientist, Jaffar al-Jaffer, left Syria and went to another Middle Eastern country, where he turned himself over to authorities during the past few days, officials said Monday. He was being interviewed by American officials.
Some reports put Saddam's first wife, Sajida Khairallah Telfah, in Syria, but other reports placed her in other countries that officials declined to specify. She was believed to have left Iraq, but it was unclear when, officials said.
Bush administration officials have alleged publicly that Syria was taking in members of Saddam's regime.
As early as April 2, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld spoke of unconfirmed reports that members of the Iraqi president's family, including his first wife, had fled.
The officials said Monday that information on the wife's departure, but not her destination, had firmed up since then.
Saddam's half brother, Watban Ibrahim Hasan, an adviser to the deposed Iraqi president, was captured near Mosul in recent days, apparently preparing to flee to Syria, U.S. officials said.
The nuclear scientist, al-Jaffer, was believed to know key people and locations of facilities connected to Iraq's nuclear weapons program, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
His confinement, along with Saturday's surrender of Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein's alleged point man on various weapons' programs, could provide U.S. officials with a wealth of information on Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile efforts.
Al-Jaffer, a British-educated physicist, was described by U.N. inspectors as the father of Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
The whereabouts and status of other members of Saddam's immediate family were not known. Nor did officials have definitive word on Saddam or his elder sons, Odai and Qusai, both senior leaders in Saddam's administration.
Other members of Saddam's family, including Saddam's second wife, three daughters and another son, may have information on their whereabouts, officials said. All kept low profiles during Saddam's rule, and none held senior positions.
Saddam's first wife was mother to Odai, Qusai and three daughters: Raghad, Saddam's favorite; Rana; and Hala. Some of the children have children of their own. Saddam remains married to both wives. In Islam, a man may have as many as four wives.
In 1995, Raghad's and Rana's husbands defected from Iraq to Jordan. The brothers were debriefed by Western intelligence officials and reportedly disclosed secrets of Iraq's military and weapons programs.
They failed to gain the trust of Iraqi exiles, however, and returned to Baghdad with their families six months later on Saddam's promise neither they nor their families would be harmed. They were shot down shortly after they arrived, and Saddam placed Sajida under house arrest because she demanded that he punish the killers. Opponents said they were instigated by Odai.
Saddam's second wife, Samira Shahbandar, was mother to Saddam's other son, Ali Saddam Hussein. Saddam married Shahbandar, a daughter of a prominent Iraqi family, in the late 1980s, and their son is not believed to be old enough to have any responsibilities.
--------
DIPLOMACY
U.S. Threatens to Impose Penalties Against Syrians
April 15, 2003
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/international/worldspecial/15DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, April 14 - Six months ago, Syria voted with the United States to demand that Saddam Hussein disarm, helping to make the United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq unanimous.
Since then, the Bush administration has watched with mounting anger as Syria has sided with Mr. Hussein in the war and even provided him with economic and military aid, according to administration officials.
Today, in a vivid illustration of the erratic up-and-down relationship between Washington and Damascus, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell threatened economic and political penalties if Syria continued to offer safe haven to Iraqi leaders or to defy American demands on chemical weapons and terrorism.
Although Syria has denied that Iraqi leaders around Mr. Hussein are finding refuge in its territory, Mr. Powell expressed skepticism over the claim. "It's a rather porous border," he said, adding that Syrian authorities should "do everything they could" to deny Iraqi fugitives a place to hide.
Echoing Mr. Powell, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, called Syria a "rogue nation" and said Syrian leaders under President Bashar al-Assad "need to seriously ponder the implications of their actions."
Syria was not mentioned as a member of the "axis of evil" by President Bush in his State of the Union message in early 2002. But today an administration official said that, along with Libya and Cuba, Syria was regarded as a member of the "junior varsity axis of evil."
Administration officials hastened to add today that military action was not being considered.
But American officials say they are convinced that the victory in Iraq has begun to have what they call a "demonstration effect" on other countries, bringing a measure of restraint by North Korea on its nuclear program. The latest words were aimed at seeing whether such restraint could also be forced in Syria.
"We've changed the geostrategic situation in the Middle East," an administration official said. "Syria can either wake up to that fact, or not. It is up to Syria to decide whether to become a part of the new Middle East that we are shaping."
Whether or not military action was contemplated, the administration's strong words were also spreading alarm in the Middle East and among Europeans, who fear that the United States, in its headiness over victory in Iraq, may now be overly eager to swagger in the region.
The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who led the charge in opposing the Iraq war at the United Nations, warned the United States to exercise restraint in light of its victory.
"Do not let us underestimate the fact that this region today - whether at government or popular level - is experiencing a very deep feeling of unease, frustration, sometimes even humiliation," Mr. de Villepin said.
A top Russian Foreign Ministry official also urged "greater restraint" by the United States.
Even Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain felt it necessary to assure Parliament that there was no plan to use military force against Syria.
Syria has had a quirky, hot-and-cold relationship with the United States since the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when Damascus sided with the first President Bush, helping give legitimacy to the war in the Arab world and impetus to a postwar Middle East peace conference in Madrid.
Since then, there have been many moments when members of the first Bush administration and then the Clinton administration thought - along with Israeli prime ministers - that Syria might be ready to make a historic peace deal with Jerusalem.
The administration's main objection has nothing to do with Syria's chemical weapons, which have been known as existing for years. Rather, American concerns are focused on Syria's support of terrorism, in tandem with Iran.
The Hezbollah terrorist organization operates in the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad has a headquarters in Damascus.
"Syria has operated as a kind of way station for these terrorist groups," said Martin Indyk, the former Middle East specialist in the Clinton administration, adding that Iran has helped to supply the groups through Syria.
Today intelligence officials said Hezbollah had crossed into Iraq from Syrian territory. Administration officials say they fear that Syria will be able to continue sending teams of suicide bombers into Iraq to menace American and British forces there for many years.
President Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria for many years until his death in 2000, and in that period is believed to have come close to reaching a negotiated settlement with Israel, in which Syria would get nearly all the Golan Heights captured by Israel in 1967 in return for security guarantees to Jerusalem.
Since the current Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza began in late 2000, hopes for peace between Israel and Syria have all but vanished. In the last several months, Syria helped Iraq circumvent the penalties against it by piping in oil from Iraq and selling Iraq arms, according to American officials.
Then in the last two weeks came reports of Syria offering safe haven to Iraqi leaders and allowing Arab fighters to go into Iraq to help defend Mr. Hussein's government. The number of such fighters has been placed at 300 to 3,000, an administration official said today.
But administration officials say Syria offers a case study of how the American conquest of Iraq has changed the political map in the region. Whereas Syria has long been a fulcrum of influence, suddenly it is now surrounded by nations not friendly to it - Israel, Turkey, Jordan and, now, a post-Hussein Iraq.
The administration has even bigger objectives than getting Syria to stop helping pro-Hussein Iraqis. Eventually, Bush administration officials say, the United States wants to get Syria and Iran to curb anti-Israel terrorist activities, knowing that there can be no progress on talks between Israel and the Palestinians if attacks on Israel continue.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has been among those skeptical of Syrian intentions, departing from the view of his predecessors. Today Mr. Sharon's national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy, said President Assad "has been one of our biggest disappointments."
-------- spies
Top agent in CIA's 'secret war' dies
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 15, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030415-83958373.htm
BANGKOK - Jack Shirley, a legendary former CIA official who helped run America's failed "secret war" in Laos, died yesterday in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya after a long bout with cancer.
He was 76, according to his Thai wife, Pen.
"Most people don't realize, the CIA was created to do the things the country couldn't do out in the open," Mr. Shirley was once quoted as saying.
"Nothing we did was legal. Everything we did was illegal. 'Plausible deniability' was the name of the game."
Mr. Shirley, an American, reached his professional zenith during the Vietnam War, when the CIA armed minority ethnic Hmong tribesmen in Laos against communist Pathet Lao guerrillas and North Vietnamese fighters.
During the horror of those years, the U.S. unleashed on Laos the heaviest aerial bombardment any country had ever suffered. Nevertheless, many of his Laotian friends remained loyal to him after the war was lost.
In recent years, he was a lively personality inside the small, quiet Madrid Bar - favored by retired U.S. government and military officials - on Patpong Road in Bangkok's red-light district.
Mr. Shirley, who settled in Thailand, regaled listeners with tales of gossip, scandal, adventures and bumbling within the CIA and the armed forces.
"He had a very sharp wit and a very good sense of humor. He had a real, genuine affection for Asia and its people," said Canadian screenwriter Dave Walker.
Mr. Shirley expressed occasional bitterness over the Vietnam War.
"Jack complained about a lot of the [U.S.] bureaucracy during the war and the needless loss of life," Mr. Walker said.
During Washington's 15 years of trying to contain communism, more than 1 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were estimated killed alongside more than 50,000 Americans.
It was a time when "hundreds of CIA and other officers in god-awful circumstances did their [best] to do what they were told was their duty," wrote historian Harold P. Ford.
Mr. Shirley joined the CIA in its early years after World War II.
The CIA, meanwhile, slipped into impoverished, landlocked Laos in 1954 after French colonialists retreated. For America, Laos became a line drawn across lush mountains to stop North Vietnam's communism from infecting the region.
Starting in 1961, Mr. Shirley and other CIA officers gave weapons and cash to rugged, indigenous Hmong tribesmen - former allies of the French - and aimed them at Vietnamese communists encroaching into Laos.
Vietnamese used eastern Laos as a so-called "Ho Chi Minh Trail" to zigzag across the border during attacks against U.S. forces in South Vietnam.
While fighting for the CIA, the Hmong's fragile culture was mostly obliterated and thousands of them perished. Thousands of others fled to refugee camps in Thailand.
Washington, however, was pleased that the Hmong disrupted the Ho Chi Minh Trail and saved American lives.
Mr. Shirley worked in Laos for the CIA from 1961-68, according to the investigative, archival Web site, NameBase.
"After the 1973 truce, the CIA's cowboys and their proxies shrugged their shoulders and went to Thailand or the U.S. to retire on their pensions. They left behind a country ... full of bomb craters, antipersonnel bomblets, and amputees on crutches," NameBase says.
One of Mr. Shirley's closest partners was a fabled CIA legend - Anthony Poshepny, aka Tony Poe - who became immortalized as the insane, bloodthirsty intelligence officer Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in the film "Apocalypse Now."
"He [Poshepny] once said he was collecting heads for humanitarian reasons. He had been paying a bounty for ears [of dead communists in Laos], until he ran into a little boy with his ears missing," Mr. Shirley told the San Francisco Weekly.
"The boy said his father had cut them off and sold them [to Poshepny for a reward]. Tony was so shocked, he gave the boy a few hundred kip [a small amount of Laotian currency], and immediately decided he would accept only heads from then on," Mr. Shirley said.
--------
Prosecutors: Accused Spy Has Money, China Contacts
April 14, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-crime-spy.html
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A woman charged with stealing classified documents from her FBI agent lover has access to large sums of money and top Chinese government officials, prosecutors said on Monday as they asked that she be denied bail to keep her from fleeing.
Katrina Leung, an alleged double agent who was arrested last week along with her lover -- a man who also served as her FBI handler -- has more than $1 million in various bank or investment accounts and last met with high-ranking Chinese officials in March, prosecutors said in the court papers.
Leung's lawyers could not be reached for comment late on Monday but have disputed the charges against her and said that they will ask a federal judge to grant her bail.
Leung, a 49-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, is charged with obtaining documents related to national defense for the advantage of a foreign nation. James J. Smith, a 30-year veteran of the FBI's counter-intelligence squad, is charged with gross negligence of classified material.
Each faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if convicted and prosecutors have said that more charges could follow.
Also named in court papers but not charged in the case is a retired FBI intelligence expert -- identified by law enforcement sources as William Cleveland Jr. -- who also had an affair with Leung and last week resigned as the top security official at a nuclear research lab.
Officials at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California have been reviewing Cleveland's work there for security breaches.
HIGH-RANKING CONTACTS
The court papers were filed by prosecutors as part of a bid to keep Leung behind bars as she awaits trial and cite financial records showing that she and her husband have access to $872,000 in four U.S. bank or investment accounts.
Prosecutors say in the documents that Leung and her husband also have controlled at least 16 different foreign bank accounts over the past 20 years and that at least some of them have ``substantial balances.''
In addition, prosecutors say, Leung has traveled repeatedly to China over the past 20 years, having made more than 2,100 contacts with government officials there during that time.
``Defendant had the personal telephone number of a high-ranking PRC (People's Republic of China) official in her personal telephone book which was seized during (a) search,'' prosecutors said in the papers, adding that a Chinese government magazine has written articles about Leung ``that included photographs of her with both the current president and premier of the PRC.''
In early March, prosecutors said in the court papers, Leung traveled to Washington, where she met with various Chinese officials and was offered a five-year visa.
According to the court papers, Leung has admitted under questioning by the FBI that she copied documents she found in the briefcase of her lover and handler -- and fed them to the Ministry of State Security, a Chinese intelligence service.
Prosecutors said that information included personal information about FBI agents and a person who had defected to the United States from China.
According to the court papers, Leung also admitted during an FBI interview that she had been paid $100,000 by the Chinese government and said she had been assigned the code name of ``Luo Zhongshan'' by the Chinese ambassador to the United States.
-------- un
Kofi Annan Worriedby Rhetoric on Syria
April 14, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Syria.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed concern Monday that recent statements about Syria may further destabilize the Middle East -- but stopped short of accusing the United States.
The brief statement from Annan's spokesman came hours after the Bush administration escalated its rhetoric against Syria, accusing it of harboring remnants of Saddam Hussein's government and supporting terrorism.
``The secretary-general is concerned that recent statements directed at Syria should not contribute to a wider destabilization in a region already affected heavily by the war in Iraq,'' the statement said.
U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice indicated the administration was not contemplating military action against Syria, though Secretary of State Colin Powell raised the possibility of diplomatic and economic sanctions.
In an apparent reference to those statements, Annan welcomed ``recent clarifications.''
He reiterated ``his strongly held view that any claim of threats to international peace and security'' should be referred to the Security Council, the statement said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed concerns about Syria harboring members of the Iraqi regime but said Syrian President Bashar Assad assured him over the weekend ``that he would interdict anybody who was crossing over the border from Iraq into Syria, and I believe they are doing that.''
``There are no plans whatever to invade Syria,'' Blair told the House of Commons.
Syria's deputy U.N. Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad told The Associated Press on Monday that ``there is no cooperation'' with the former Iraqi government.
``We have no chemical weapons. Israel is the only state in the region that has nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. We did not give any facilities for Iraqis running away, and this is our position,'' he said.
-------- us
U.S. Has No Plans to Count Civilian Casualties
Congress Calls for 'Assistance' to Iraqis For War Losses
By Bradley Graham and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26305-2003Apr14?language=printer
The Pentagon said yesterday that it has no plans to determine how many Iraqi civilians may have been killed or injured or suffered property damage as a result of U.S. military operations in Iraq.
The statement followed passage Saturday of a congressional measure calling on the Bush administration to identify and provide "appropriate assistance" to Iraqi civilians for war losses.
The congressional action stopped short of requiring military forces to conduct a formal assessment of all individuals who may have suffered from the war, as some human rights activists have sought. But it made clear that Congress supports compensating innocent Iraqis to buttress U.S. claims that the war was not directed against the Iraqi people and that U.S. forces tried to avoid civilian deaths and destruction of civilian property.
The measure was contained in the final version of the $78.5 billion emergency spending bill to cover war-related expenses. The money for compensating civilians is to come out of a $2.5 billion relief and reconstruction fund that also is intended to pay for food, water, health care, transportation and other needs.
In language from a Senate-House conference agreement, lawmakers explained their intention that the State Department and the Agency for International Development, coordinating with the Pentagon and nongovernmental organizations, "seek to identify families of non-combatant Iraqis who were killed or injured or whose homes were damaged during recent military operations, and to provide appropriate assistance."
The provision was inserted in the bill by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) in the final day of negotiations, according to congressional sources. Similar language was included in a 2002 supplemental spending bill covering costs of the war in Afghanistan and in the 2003 omnibus appropriations law passed earlier this year.
"Innocent civilians have suffered grievous losses," Leahy said in a statement yesterday. "As we help rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, we should do what we can to assist the innocent, to show that we were not at war against them and that the United States does not walk away. It is the right thing to do, and it is in our own national interest."
Timothy S. Rieser, who works for Leahy on the foreign operations subcommittee of the Appropriations panel, stressed that the conferees did not intend to create a formal claims process or saddle the military with an obligation to identify every individual or community that suffered injury. Rather, he said, the aim was to provide resources when there is sufficient evidence that military action caused injuries or serious property damage.
"We're trying to move the ball a bit," Rieser said.
Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman issued a two-sentence statement last night taking note of the new funding but saying the department "has no plans" to determine the total civilian casualty toll.
Before its demise, the Iraqi government reported 1,254 civilian deaths as of April 3. The Bush administration has offered no estimates of its own.
"We really don't know how many civilian deaths there have been, and we don't know how many of them can be attributed to coalition action, as opposed to action on the part of Iraqi armed forces as they defended themselves," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a BBC interview Sunday.
Historically, the Pentagon has not tried to count civilian casualties and losses resulting from U.S. military action. Military officials have given various reasons for this, citing principally the time and resources involved and the difficulty of separating damage caused by U.S. forces from damage caused by the enemy.
But this time, the Bush administration is facing greater pressure to undertake at least some kind of accounting for what military authorities call "collateral damage." Before and during the war, U.S. officials repeatedly stressed the extent to which American forces were trying to avoid civilian losses by employing precision weapons, computerized target planning and restrictive rules of engagement. More than 70 percent of the bombs and missiles used in this war were either satellite- or laser-guided, according to the Pentagon.
"Because this administration has put so much emphasis on the care that it has taken, it would be very difficult for them to avoid coming to some kind of assessment of how they did in this regard," said Sarah Sewall, who served in the Pentagon during the Clinton administration and now directs a study on civilian suffering in war being conducted under the auspices of Harvard University.
Sewall added that it would be "unrealistic" to expect the Pentagon to come up with "a reliable figure" for civilian casualties given the "size, intensity and speed" of the U.S. campaign. But she said investigating at least some incidents would not only bolster U.S. credibility but also contribute to better military planning next time by understanding the actual effects of particular U.S. battlefield decisions.
One Air Force general, asked why the military has not done such postwar accounting in the past, said it has been more cost-effective to pour resources into increasingly sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering equipment.
"The best way of limiting collateral damage is knowing what you're going after and being able to hit what you go after," the officer said.
He suggested that once the Pentagon started down the track of studying collateral damage caused by bombs, it could lead to endless assessments.
"I do wonder if we're going to do this every time the Army fires an artillery shell or every time a Special Forces soldier fires a 50-caliber" gun, he said.
But he also acknowledged the practical value of validating the Pentagon's damage-control models by counting the number of civilians who died.
"Maybe that's our next task someday -- to try to get that kind of information so that we can feed it back into the process," he said.
Another senior military officer noted that during the 1999 Kosovo war, U.S. military officials developed a computer program to track every weapon employed. This assisted peacekeeping troops who later entered Kosovo, providing them with information about what munitions had been dropped where -- and especially what ordnance may not have exploded. The program has been in use in the Iraq war, he said.
"So we now have a better system of tracking every weapon delivered, and if we go into an area, we can assess what's in there, what the potential duds might be and how we're going to go about cleaning them up," the officer said.
----
Rumsfeld Requests Power to Reorganize Services
By THOM SHANKER
April 14, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/14/international/worldspecial/14GENE.html?ei=1&en=c30a9d1264e103b8&ex=1051335337&pagewanted=print&position=top
WASHINGTON, April 13 ? Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is asking Congress for broad new powers to reshape the uniformed services from the highest ranking officers down to reservists and supply clerks.
If approved, the legislation would put Mr. Rumsfeld's stamp on personnel practices for years, even decades, to come, powerfully influencing assignments and promotions at the top of the chain of command and refocusing many people lower in the ranks on fighting wars rather than pushing pencils.
Mr. Rumsfeld's legislative requests, which Congressional aides said today were delivered this weekend and would be circulated broadly to members on Monday, are certain to spark debate. But they could receive a more sympathetic hearing in the wake of the campaign in Iraq, which is already seen as a victory for advocates of a leaner and more agile military, one that is both more sophisticated and deadlier.
David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, described the plan as the most sweeping reorganization of military personnel since the Eisenhower administration.
He said the proposed legislation requests greater flexibility over personnel policy affecting the very senior levels, allowing a defense secretary to extend the tenure of generals and admirals in especially important jobs, while easing the early retirement of those unlikely to be promoted further.
Lower in the ranks, the legislation would clear the way for transferring a large number of military support jobs to civilian employees ? about 300,000 are under consideration, Mr. Chu said ? increasing the numbers of combat troops without adding to the roughly 1.5 million people in uniform today. And it would change the peacetime schedule of reservists, who have been called up by the tens of thousands over the past two years for the campaign against terror.
Active-duty military personnel could switch into the Reserves for a number of years if family pressures or desires for education made full-time service difficult, and then return to the active service, which does not happen now.
Reservists could opt for specialties that guarantee more active service time and mobilization if that fit their lives; others, depending on the specialties they chose, would be confident of less time on active duty beyond the weekend a month and two weeks a year of training now.
Senior Pentagon officials and Congressional aides who have read the legislation say its most significant, and probably most controversial, proposals provide for longer tenure for some of the most senior generals and admirals, raising the retirement age from the current 62 years and allowing a number of four-star positions to serve beyond one term. For example, the chiefs of the armed services must now retire after four years unless Congress declares war or a national emergency.
Mr. Rumsfeld already experimented with this process, asking Gen. James Jones to depart early from his post as commandant of the Marine Corps, a four-year job that had been the final post for the top Marine four-star general, to serve as commander of all American and allied forces in Europe.
Even at lower levels of the general and flag officer corps, the goal would be to have more senior military leaders spend more than the traditional two years in a single job.
The legislation has been written and rewritten since late last year, and Mr. Rumsfeld hinted at some of the designs in January in a speech to the Reserve Officers Association.
The armed services "make a terrible mistake" by "having so many people skip along the tops of the waves in a job and serve in it 12, 15, 18, 24 months and be gone," he said. "They spend the first six months saying hello to everybody, the next six months trying to learn the job and the last six months leaving. I like people to be in a job long enough that they make mistakes, see their mistakes, clean up their own mistakes before they go on to make mistakes somewhere else."
To ease the growing numbers of senior officers whose advancements would no doubt be slowed by longer-serving superiors, the legislation seeks to allow any officer of one-star and above to retire with full benefits even if he has not served the full three years set by law today.
By law, all officers "serve at the pleasure of the president," and can be asked to retire at any point. The legislation would ease financial hardships of early retirement.
Mr. Chu said certain positions would be untouched by any new rules to lengthen tours of duty, and he cited the commanders of ground divisions, naval battle groups and air wings, whose responsibilities are focused on readiness and war fighting and less on carrying out new policies. However sweeping these proposed changes may be, Mr. Rumsfeld chose not to pursue two significant proposals that had been aired privately with some members of Congress.
One previous proposal, to consolidate a number of senior staff positions of the Joint Staff under the defense secretary, would have required rewriting the Goldwater-Nickles legislation that set up the current system of the Joint Chiefs and regional combatant commanders. The idea of merging personnel, which was viewed by some officers as an attempt to reign in the independent analysis of the military's Joint Staff, is not in the proposed legislation.
Also absent from the proposed legislation is a suggestion to eliminate a number of assistant secretary of defense positions, consolidating their responsibilities.
Mr. Rumsfeld has made no secret that he views his personnel decisions as equally significant to changes he may bring to weapons procurement strategic doctrine, and he has begun interviewing each candidate from all of the four armed services for every position of one-star and above, according to senior aides.
This involvement in the advancement of senior officers, which is far more detailed and hands-on than previous defense secretaries, has rankled some in the officer corps who say Mr. Rumsfeld is weeding out the high command to preserve only like-minded officers.
In broad terms, Mr. Rumsfeld does not argue with that assessment. "My whole life as an executive has proven to me the importance of people," he said during the speech in January. "That's why selecting them is so critical."
Assuring long-term Pentagon changes requires senior leaders with the "orientation, attitude, energy and intellect to move big chunks on their own initiative," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "If you get the right people, those ripples go out in exactly the right way, and for a long time."
Mr. Chu said that Pentagon analysis found more than 300,000 military jobs that could be filled by civilians. The proposed legislation would allow the Pentagon to "convert some of these posts that could be civilians to civilian status," using those personnel slots "for other new kinds of structure that the country will need in the years ahead," he added.
-------- propaganda wars
CNN's disinformation campaign
EDITORIAL
April 15, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030415-872196.htm
Yesterday, CNN executive Eason Jordan claimed that the network had not covered up evidence of atrocities in Saddam Hussein's Iraq because it wanted to ensure access, but because it was worried about putting people's lives in danger. Writing on today's Op-Ed page, former CNN Baghdad correspondent Peter Collins, who personally witnessed Mr. Jordan and network President Tom Johnson unsuccessfully begging for an interview with Saddam, makes a strong case that Mr. Jordan is lying when he denies that ensuring access was a motive for CNN's shading of the truth on Iraq.
Mr. Collins writes that in January 1993, he participated in meetings in Baghdad between CNN executives and various officials close to Saddam, among them Tariq Aziz, during which Messrs. Jordan and Johnson made their pitch for an exclusive interview with the Iraqi dictator. "From both the tone and the content of these conversations, it seemed to me that CNN was virtually grovelling for the interview," Mr. Collins writes. At one point, the CNN executives offered Saddam an hour's worth of time on the network without commercial interruption.
Mr. Collins adds that, the day following one such meeting, he was preparing to do a "live shot" when a producer handed him some notes, telling him that Mr. Johnson wanted them read on camera. The notes were an item-by-item summary of points that had been dictated by the Iraqi information minister. Mr. Collins was forced to read those propaganda points on the air verbatim, without providing any context. Moments later, Mr. Johnson reproached him for not sounding sufficiently enthusiastic while "reporting" what the Iraqis told CNN to say. Mr. Collins adds that, the following day, when he factually reported that Iraqi charges that American war planes were bombing "innocent Iraqi farmers" were false (it turned out that the "farm" in question was most likely a location for Iraqi missile batteries), CNN correspondent Brent Sadler rebuked him for hindering the network's chances of landing an interview with Saddam.
In short, contrary to the assertions made by Mr. Jordan, the facts presented by Mr. Collins strongly suggest that CNN's coverage of Iraq was largely dictated by concerns about currying favor with Saddam Hussein in an effort to win an exclusive interview with the dictator. No careful viewer can trust CNN's reporting on international affairs.
----
War seen as in line with Christian view
By Cheryl K. Chumley
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 15, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030415-19136524.htm
The Bush administration's decision to minimize civilian casualties in the war in Iraq shows that the conflict is being fought in accordance with Christian principles, say prominent supporters and opponents of the military campaign.
The Rev. Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, said many Christians who support the war believe the biblical principles of loving one's enemy means that precautions must be taken to minimize civilian casualties.
He said some Christians may be reluctant to embrace the war effort because of their opposition to the taking of human life.
"But as long as we continue the course we're on," Mr. Robertson said, referring to the overall concern for Iraqi civilians, "we're on solid ground, not only in terms of Christian, biblical concepts, but also in terms of public relations."
But not all agree that Christians can find solace in the United States deliberately targeting attacks away from Iraqi civilians.
Opponents of the military campaign, such as Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Illinois Democrat, said the administration's concern for the lives of innocent Iraqis is a sign the war has developed in line with Christian views of just engagement. But the overall reasons for the attack still make the war inappropriate, said Frank E. Watkins, a Jackson spokesman.
Mr. Jackson, who graduated from the Chicago Theological Seminary with a degree in theology, believes the war was initiated for impure reasons and, therefore, can never be reconciled with the Christian ideals of fair engagement, Mr. Watkins said.
"It does not meet the criteria of a just war," said the spokesman, adding that the resolution passed in October by the House and Senate granting the president the authority to use force in Iraq was unconstitutional.
"The resolution was unconstitutional because it tried to cede to the president such authority to declare war ... and it does not have international legal support," Mr. Watkins said.
He defended Mr. Jackson's decision to support NATO's 1999 bombing campaign to oust Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's forces from the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo - even though that action also did not receive a congressional declaration of war or authorization from the United Nations - because the air strikes were humanitarian in nature.
"Kosovo - that was done on a humanitarian basis and also done on regional authority, that being NATO," Mr. Watkins said. "With Iraq, we've been given five or six different motives - there's talk about the oil, about imperialism, weapons of mass destruction, to end the regime. But with a just war, your motive must be pure."
The "just war" doctrine states that the use of military force is legitimate only for defensive purposes to protect innocent people from unjust aggression. The Catholic Church historically has said war can be waged only with the intention of establishing a just peace, and that there must be no intentional killing of innocent civilians.
Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a District-based conservative think tank, said the campaign in Iraq fulfills the Catholic teachings of a just war. He said the war is aimed at protecting Americans and others in the Middle East from the threat posed by ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and that U.S. forces have sought to save Iraqi civilians.
Mr. Cromartie's sentiments were echoed by other religious groups that supported the war effort.
"We do support the war," said Preston Noell, spokesman for the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, an organization of conservative Catholics.
"I think in terms of Christian perspective, the war is just," he said. "We have a right to defend ourselves" from terrorist attacks.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- courts
Breyer Says Rights Need Guarding in Terror War
Associated Press
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26775-2003Apr14?language=printer
NEW YORK, April 14 -- Lawyers and judges must ensure that civil liberties are protected in the government's efforts to prevent terrorist attacks, Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer said today.
Breyer urged attorneys to question government anti-terrorism practices, including the lack of access to legal counsel for some people detained for questioning.
"The Constitution always matters, perhaps particularly so in times of emergency," Breyer said in remarks prepared for delivery before the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
By searching for alternative methods that avoid "constitutional mistakes," lawyers, judges and security officials help the government avoid extreme positions that the Constitution does not matter or that security emergencies do not matter, Breyer said.
Several court cases contend the Bush administration has gone too far in the war on terror, both in tracking and locking up suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and in denying legal representation to Afghan war fighters detained at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.
Members of the Supreme Court are generally circumspect in commenting on politics and policy outside their formal opinions. Some do, however, occasionally try to use their public appearances to gently influence the legal system's agenda.
Breyer said that disagreements "about government restrictions, security threats, civil liberties, do not mean that disaster is upon us, but that the democratic process is at work."
Named to the court in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, Breyer generally votes with the more liberal justices.
Susan N. Herman, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, said Breyer's New York trip "may be a way for him to present a different point of view" than that of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative who after the attacks predicted unprecedented restrictions on Americans' personal freedom.
Some Bush administration critics praised Breyer's speech.
"I think you have a government that's antagonistic to the Bill of Rights, and we need a bench and bar that's prepared to rein them in," said William Goodman, an attorney and former legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights.
-------- dna
White House seeks to expand DNA database
4/15/2003
By Richard Willing,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-04-15-dna-usat_x.htm
WASHINGTON - DNA profiles from juvenile offenders and from adults who have been arrested but not convicted would be added to the FBI's national DNA database under a Bush administration proposal.
Under current law, only DNA from adults convicted of crimes can be placed in the national database, which is used to compare those samples with biological evidence from the scenes of unsolved crimes. As of January, there were about 1.3 million DNA samples in the database, U.S. officials say.
Adding profiles from thousands of adult arrestees and juvenile offenders would greatly expand the DNA system's worth by increasing the number of potential matches, administration officials say. Justice Department officials have discussed potential changes in federal DNA law with key members of Congress and are pushing for legislation this year.
"DNA is to the 21st century what fingerprinting was to the 20th," says Deborah Daniels, assistant U.S. attorney general for justice programs. "The widespread use of DNA evidence is the future of law enforcement in this country."
But critics say adding juvenile and arrestee profiles to the database threatens privacy by expanding the pool of samples beyond adult criminals. Although only digital DNA profiles would be linked to the FBI computer, the blood or saliva samples from which the DNA was drawn would be kept by state labs, they note.
"It's only a matter of time before the government gets its hands on those DNA samples and starts playing around with our genetic codes," says Barry Steinhardt, privacy specialist for the American Civil Liberties Union's national office in New York City. "They say they don't want to do that, but not too long ago they were saying they'd only take DNA profiles from rapists and murderers and now they want juveniles ... We're not just on a slippery slope, we're halfway down it."
DNA system defenders say the actual samples must be retained for quality-control testing and in the event a DNA match is challenged in court. They note that strict privacy laws prevent researchers from using the stored samples for any other purpose. And they note that the U.S. government already stores fingerprints from arrestees in a giant computer system without causing privacy problems.
Privacy advocates aren't convinced. They note that researchers are identifying genetic markers for height, hair color and other features. They suspect that authorities soon will want to search DNA samples for such genetic markers.
DNA, a cellular acid contained in blood, semen and other body fluids and tissues, is an ideal tool for crime solving. Because it contains an individual's unique genetic code, a DNA sample taken from blood, semen or even traces of saliva in a bite mark left on a crime victim can be used to match the perpetrator to the crime.
In 1989, states began to collect DNA from convicted criminals and add the profiles to a computer that could match them to DNA from unsolved crimes. In 1992, the FBI created a system that linked the state databases via a bureau computer in Morgantown, W.Va.
Thirty states already collect DNA profiles from juvenile offenders, who typically range in age from 13 to 17 but can be as young as 8, according to the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group. Since January, Virginia also has collected DNA from those accused of murder, rape and other violent felonies. But under U.S. law, only DNA from people convicted of crimes can be put into the FBI system.
The national DNA database has had many successes. As of December, 6,670 DNA samples had been matched to unsolved crimes, the FBI says.
States that take DNA from the widest range of offenders seem to produce the best results. New York has had 830 matches since it began to collect DNA from violent felons in 1996. But 80% were made after 1999, when the state began to require DNA collection from most other felonies.
In Virginia, DNA from 74 crimes, including 12 rapes and nine murders, has been matched to DNA profiles from juvenile offenders during the past 10 years.
"Not all juveniles are going to become adult criminals," says Paul Ferrara, director of Virginia's DNA program. "But for the few who are, the sooner we have them in the system the better."
It is unclear how many new DNA samples would be put into the system if juvenile offenders and adult arrestees are added. In 1996, the last year for which data are available, 567,200 youths were found responsible for crimes by juvenile courts or other authorities. Virginia expects to collect DNA from 8,000 arrestees this year.
The White House is pushing to make DNA a more effective law enforcement tool. Last month, it announced a plan to spend about $1 billion over five years to improve the national database.
-------- drug war
The war on drugs
William H. Peterson
April 15, 2003
Washington Times Editorial
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030415-41665480.htm
Prominent drug legalizers or decriminalizers read like a who's who of conservatives: William F. Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz.
Mr. Shultz, now at the Hoover Institution with Mr. Friedman, is but a recent convert. In 1984, he sang a different tune, declaring: "Drug abuse is not only a top priority for this Administration's domestic policy, it is a top priority in our foreign policy as well."
The background for the Shultz conversion is well-demonstrated in "Bad Neighbor Policy" by Cato Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Ted Galen Carpenter, who dwells here on the more than 30 years since President Nixon declared a War on Drugs. Mr. Carpenter tweaks the title of his timely and instructive book in a play on Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy for Latin America in the 1930s, as he documents multiple U.S. sins south of the border and comments on our stepped-up war on drugs:
"U.S. officials have bribed, cajoled, and coerced Latin American governments to try to stem the outflow of illegal drugs. The result has been a rising tide of corruption and violence in those countries and a growing dissatisfaction on the part of affected populations with their own governments - and with the United States. Washington's hemispheric war on drugs is the epitome of Bad Neighbor Policy."
So, the United States plays the ugly American as it pushes its Latin neighbors to adopt policies of interdiction, eradication, and crop-switching from drug plants like marijuana to staples like cotton. But, it reaps grief, including guerrilla warfare, even as the Clinton administration in its final year granted $1.3 billion for Colombia, in what Mr. Carpenter calls "the most ambitious supply-side antidrug offensive to date."
Colombia, a nation of 44 million, has had more than its share of chaos and violence. Some two million people have fled their homes to duck the fighting. More than 35,000 civilians have died in that fighting in the last decade. Bogota's official figures say that 126,000 were made homeless by the drug war in the year 2000 alone.
For its part, the United States has dispatched 300 Green Berets to help train Colombian officers and enlisted personnel. It transferred 16 Black Hawk troop transport helicopters and 11 planes for aerial fumigation of drug crops in 2001, with another 25 smaller Huey II helicopters and 14 more fumigation planes set for delivery in Colombia last year.
But, the irony is that the more "successful" these programs have been, the more they have served to spike street prices in places like Los Angeles and New York apart from places like London and Paris, and hence to spike coca prices in places like Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Terror and corruption in all those places have erupted on both on the supply-side and the demand-side of roiling black markets over much of the world.
Many a poor grower in the Andes asks: "Coffee for coca? You've got to be kidding," as he opts for far more remunerative coca. Anne W. Patterson, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, admitted that "there's no question we are now focusing more on terror." Congress, for its part, has tried to meet terrorist charges with a provision in its Colombian aid package requiring the executive branch to check closely the behavior of the Colombian army and police. But, the check seems to have only contributed to more corruption and violence.
Not surprising for a libertarian, Mr. Carpenter at the end of his book charts a blueprint for peace by ending the war on drugs. He hails the welcome, if guarded, support by Mexican President Vicente Fox for also ending the war. In a 2001 interview, President Fox said the solution might be eventually to legalize drugs. He tacked on a key caveat for Mexico, a nation of 100 million, however:
"When that day comes that it is time to adopt the alternative of lifting punishment for consumption of drugs, it would have to come from all over the world because we would gain nothing if Mexico did it but the production and traffic of drugs ... continued here." The continuation is of course due to lucrative [black] markets abroad where drugs remain illegal.
Mr. Carpenter asks Washington to stop its demeaning and costly "spectacle of alternatively bribing and threatening its neighbors to do the impossible."
William H. Peterson is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and a contributing editor to the Foundation for Economic Education's Ideas on Liberty.
Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's futile war on drugs in Latin America. By Ted Galen Carpenter. Palgrave Macmillan.
-------- police
Police focus on terror, security
By Matthew Cella
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 15, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030415-80011464.htm
Guarding against terrorist activity and providing security for antiwar protests has made it more difficult to keep officers in city neighborhoods, Metropolitan Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said.
However, he dismissed charges that the city's murder rate has increased because officers have been deployed on federal assignments.
Chief Ramsey's statements come after a spate of killings since March 17, when federal officials heightened the nation's terrorist alert level to Code Orange. There have been 24 killings in the District from March 17 through yesterday, including 18 in the first two weeks of April.
The killings increased the city's homicide rate 22 percent over last year, from 59 to 72 murders.
"I'd be lying if I didn't say that the heightened alerts and the special attentions didn't somehow take away from" neighborhood patrols, Chief Ramsey said.
Still, he said the department's first priority is to put officers in neighborhoods, also known as police service areas.
"So if we go short anywhere we go short on the other end," Chief Ramsey said. "That's why we have had to stay in 12-hour shifts for so long."
The D.C. homicide figures so far this year are reminiscent of those in 2001, which were headed for a 30-year low, then escalated after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The number went from 135 before the attacks to 233 at the close of the year.
Critics said the numbers increased because officers were being pulled out of neighborhoods to provide greater federal security, an assertion Chief Ramsey denied at the time.
Since the beginning of the military campaign in Iraq on March 20, officers have been deployed on 12-hour shifts for all but a few days. The department's civil-disturbance unit has been deployed to enhance security around government facilities, protect important buildings and monitor antiwar protests. The deployments ended yesterday, and officers returned to normal eight-hour shifts.
Chief Ramsey said that with fewer protests than expected, the department has been able to keep officers in high-crime neighborhoods. He also denied that the higher threat level has anything to do with the recent spree of killings.
"Most of them have been situations where I don't know if increased coverage on the street would have made a whole lot of difference," he said.
Chief Ramsey said the high-profile killings of three restaurant workers at Colonel Brooks' Tavern in Northeast on April 6 happened indoors during an apparent robbery attempt.
Still, he has proposed having the federal government pay for additional D.C. police officers, who could be assigned to civil-disturbance units during heightened-security alerts.
Chief Ramsey said the department spent roughly $13 million on overtime pay since March 17. The federal government paid the city $15 million for federal security costs last year, money that was supposed to reimburse the District government for the cost of handling such things as Sunday's antiglobalization protests.
"I think that we have to come to the realization in our city that if we're going to have to continue with this, then we're going to need some federal assistance," he said.
Tony Bullock, a spokesman for D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams, said Chief Ramsey's proposal "makes a lot of sense."
"What we end up doing is putting everyone on 12-hour shifts, which provides the coverage but gives us a big overtime tab."
He also said Mr. Williams has proposed a "substantial" increase in funding for the police department in the District's fiscal 2004 budget.
Under the proposal, the police department's budget would increase from about $316 million to about $379 million.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Justice Deems Secrecy Fears 'Unfounded'
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26777-2003Apr14?language=printer
The Justice Department told a federal judge yesterday that it is confident it can prosecute Zacarias Moussaoui at a public trial -- and in fact relishes the challenge -- saying that concerns about excessive secrecy are "premature and therefore unfounded."
In a possible preview of their trial strategy against the alleged Sept. 11 conspirator, prosecutors invoked the terrorist attacks to say the case must go forward because "heinous and unparalleled crimes shattered the lives of thousands of innocent victims and terrorized an entire nation." At the same time, prosecutors defended their continuing need to classify intelligence and other pretrial data, saying that in the war against al Qaeda, "the national interest dictates great care in the handling of this sensitive and life-saving information."
Although they admitted that Moussaoui's right to a fair trial must be balanced against the nation's security needs, prosecutors insisted that "should not breed skepticism about the propriety of prosecuting this case in" a civilian court. "On the contrary, the challenge itself invites a reaffirmation of the ability of the courts to try complex criminal cases like this one . . . even when it involves national security information or other complex issues."
The government's argument, filed in response to a handwritten motion from Moussaoui that said the secrecy is denying him a fair trial, marks another escalation of the fierce legal battle that has enveloped the case of the only person charged in the United States in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It came on the same day that Moussaoui's defense lawyers filed a motion endorsing the concerns of media groups that have challenged the sealing of numerous filings in the case.
"The level of secrecy imposed by the government's national security concerns has had the pretrial proceedings in this case obliterated from public view for close to six to seven months," said Frank W. Dunham Jr., the chief federal public defender who is representing Moussaoui. "It's up to the government to declassify enough information so you can have a fair and open trial," he said in an interview yesterday.
Moussaoui, a French citizen who is representing himself, is charged with conspiring with al Qaeda operatives to hijack the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He has pleaded not guilty and has said in court that he is an al Qaeda sympathizer who had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He faces the death penalty if convicted.
Government efforts to classify documents in the case accelerated since the October capture in Pakistan of Ramzi Binalshibh, alleged planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the recent arrest of al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammad. Moussaoui, who is representing himself, and the lawyers appointed by the court to help him are seeking access to Binalshibh, believing that he might have information that will help their case.
But the government has objected to a defense interview, contending that it would disrupt its interrogation of Binalshibh at a critical point in the campaign against al Qaeda.
The case has reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, with the government's appeal of a sealed Jan. 30 decision by U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema that allowed the defense team to interview Binalshibh. If the government loses the appeal, officials have indicated that they will seek to move the case to a military tribunal. But government officials have made clear that for now, they intend to see the case through the 4th Circuit and a possible appeal to the Supreme Court.
In a two-page order April 4, Brinkema questioned the government's ability to try the case in open court, criticizing the "shroud of secrecy" imposed by U.S. intelligence officials.
Prosecutors, responding to Moussaoui's complaint that they have changed their trial strategy without informing him, said they have sufficient evidence to show that Moussaoui was part of a conspiracy to kill Americans by hijacking commercial airliners that resulted in the Sept. 11 attacks. They reiterated that they have never alleged that he was supposed to be the 20th hijacker, only that he took part in the conspiracy.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
The Battle Between Natural Gas and Diesel
April 15, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2003/2003-04-15-09.asp#anchor6
BOSTON, Massachusetts, A new study from the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis finds that compressed natural gas technologies deployed on urban transit buses offer more health benefits than competing "clean diesel" technologies but at greater cost.
The analysis of the two technologies showed that compressed natural gas (CNG) provides one third more health benefits than emission controlled diesel (ECD)" but the cost per unit of health improvement is six to nine times higher.
The study, published in the current issue of the journal "Environmental Science and Technology," measures the public health damages of air pollution from urban transit buses in units of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs).
According to the research team, the study finds that new ECD buses reduce health damages by 40 percent, and that new CNG buses cuts health damages by 55 percent, compared with new conventional diesel buses.
Both technologies reduce emissions of fine particles by some 75 percent, but CNG also reduces emissions of nitrogen oxides, which contributes to smog and the formation of fine particles.
Yet the cost per QALY saved using CNG would be six to nine times greater than for ECD because of the higher cost of acquiring and maintaining these vehicles, as well as installing and maintaining infrastructure to fuel them, and paying more for fuel to run them.
The study did not take into account the safety risk of CNG, which is readily ignitable, nor does it consider some of the drawbacks of diesel technology, including a strong odor and noisier operation.
The authors say this analysis is the "the first to compute and compare aggregate incremental costs and health benefits for bus propulsion technologies."
"These first order ball-park estimates of the costs and benefits of these alternative propulsion systems provide an important way to think about the pros and cons of different ways to address this important environmental issue," said senior research associate Joshua Cohen.
-------- environment
Sunlight Can Convert Disinfectant Into Dioxin
April 15, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2003/2003-04-15-09.asp#anchor5
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, Researchers have shown that sunlight can convert a common disinfectant into a form of dioxin. The study, conducted by scientists at the University of Minnesota, indicates that this process may produce some of the dioxin found in the environment.
It was already known that triclosan, a common disinfectant used in antibacterial soaps, could be converted to dioxin in a laboratory and that sunlight causes the disinfectant to degrade in the environment. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey found triclosan in 58 percent of natural waters tested.
But scientists did not know that the natural degradation resulted in dioxin, explained researchers Kristopher McNeill, an assistant professor of chemistry, and William Arnold, an assistant professor of civil engineering.
In their study, McNeill and Arnold added triclosan to river water, shined ultraviolet light on the water, and found that between one percent and 12 percent of the triclosan was converted to dioxin.
Although the dioxin was a relatively benign form, the scientists said that treating wastewater with chlorine could possibly lead to the production of a much more toxic species of dioxin.
"This form of dioxin is at least 150,000 times less toxic than the most dangerous form," said McNeill. "But repeated exposure to chlorine, perhaps in water treatment facilities, could chlorinate triclosan."
"After chlorinated triclosan is discharged from the facility, sunlight could convert it into more toxic dioxins," he explained. "Such a process could be a source of highly toxic dioxin in the environment."
Reported in the "Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A: Chemistry," the study was started after the researchers read numerous environmental studies that reported the presence of pharmaceutical compounds in surface waters around the nation. It seemed appropriate to McNeill and Arnold to examine the natural processes that led to the loss of such materials in the environment.
"This study also shows that the disappearance of a pollutant such as triclosan does not necessarily mean an environmental threat has been removed," said Arnold. "It may just have been converted into another threat."
The researchers said that even low levels of toxic dioxin are worrisome because dioxin readily accumulates in organisms and becomes more concentrated in tissues as it moves up the food chain.
-------- ACTIVISTS
IRAQ: Hundreds of U.S. Soldiers Emerge as Conscientious Objectors
Gabriel Packard,
Apr 15, 2003
(IPS)
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=17584
NEW YORK - Although only a handful of them have gone public, at least several hundred U.S. soldiers have applied for conscientious objector (CO) status since January, says a rights group.
The Center on Conscience and War (CCW), which advises military personnel on CO discharges, reports that since the start of 2003 - when many soldiers realised they might have to fight in the Iraq war - there has been a massive increase in the number of enlisted soldiers who have applied for CO status.
"The bare minimum is several hundred, and this number only includes the ones that have come to my group and to groups we're associated with," CCW official J.E. McNeil told IPS.
"There will be others who will have gone through different channels, and some people do it on their own," she added.
Generally, COs possess a sincere conviction that forbids them from taking part in organised killing. This objection may apply to all or to only particular aspects of war.
Only a small percentage of people who apply receive a CO discharge. But military statistics lag about one year behind, and the decisions on CO applications take on average six months to one year - sometimes as long as two years - so the exact number of COs in the present war will not be known for some time.
Also, military figures do not count applications from servicemen who are absent without leave, so they will not include Stephen Funk, a marine reserve who was on unauthorised leave before he publicly declared himself a conscientious objector and reported back to his military base in San Jose, California, Apr. 1.
Funk, 20, realised that he was against all war during his training, which including having to bayonet human-shaped dummies while shouting, "kill, kill".
Since publicly declaring his opposition to war, he has become a symbol of resistance both in the United States and around the world.
"Since Stephen went public," says Aimee Allison, a CO from the first Gulf War who has been supporting Funk, "some people from Yesh Gvul (a group of Israeli soldiers who have refused to fight in the occupied territories in Palestine) have contacted me to pledge their support for Stephen and to show solidarity and to thank him for making a stand."
"People in other countries are proud that an American can stand up to the hegemony and the violence of the war in Iraq," she adds.
Soldiers in other countries, including Turkey, have refused to fight in the current war sparked by last month's U.S.-led attack. Three British servicemen were sent home from the Persian Gulf after objecting to the conduct of the invasion and a U.K. member of parliament, George Galloway, says he "is calling on British forces to refuse to obey the illegal orders" involved in the war.
As it is in the British army, CO discharge is a long-established practice in the U.S. armed forces and always peaks in wartime. CCW says there were an estimated 200,000 COs in the Vietnam War, 4,300 in the Korean War, 37,000 in World War II and 3,500 in World War I.
The military granted 111 COs from the army in the first Gulf War before putting a stop to the practice, resulting in 2,500 soldiers being sent to prison, says Bill Gavlin from the Center on Conscience and War, quoting a report from the 'Boston Globe' newspaper.
During that war, a number of U.S. COs in Camp LeJeune in North Carolina state were "beaten, harassed and treated horribly", Gavlin says. In some cases, COs were put on planes bound for Kuwait, told that they could not apply for CO status or that they could only apply after they'd already gone to war.
As far as Gavlin knows, that type of treatment has not happened this time. But he has counselled service members who were harassed. For example, one woman was told that if she applied for CO status she would be court marshalled. It is not an offence to apply, and her superiors did it, Gavlin says, "to intimidate her."
Funk is being treated ''with kid gloves'' in his home camp, where he is on restricted duty, according to Allison. But he is poised to be transferred to a ''remote'' camp, a standard procedure for COs, says Gavlin.
Allison says she was both supported and condemned when she became a CO. "Privately I received overwhelming personal support from the other members of my unit," she says. "But publicly I was isolated by my unit."
"I was a senior at Stanford at the time, and again, in private I got lots of support - for example anti-war groups on campus asked me to speak at events," she adds. "But there were also detractors on campus and in the broader community."
Even though conscientious objection is well established, Funk - like many others - found it difficult to find information about it within the military system. "It took him six or seven months," says Allison. "And eventually he was searching the Internet .... and found the G.I. Rights website."
G.I. Rights is a network of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that give advice and information to service members about military discharges and about complaint procedures. CCW belongs to this network.
The NGOs advise soldiers on whether they meet the criteria for CO status, and help them complete a CO application. The process involves filling in a 22-question form, being interviewed by a military chaplain, a psychologist and an investigating officer. To succeed in getting CO status, soldiers must demonstrate that their beliefs about war have changed since they enlisted.
Soldiers that have this change of heart fall into three main groups, says McNeil.
The first group contains "those who go into the military understanding war and are willing to accept it", she says. "But then something happens during their service and they are no longer OK with war."
The second group contains people who have "sought out spiritual growth and have come to believe that God doesn't want them to participate in war."
The third, and biggest, group, she says, is made up of young, often naive, people who join the military in their late teens. They are often poor whites, blacks or Hispanics, who either have limited employment opportunities, or are looking for a way to fund their college education.
Because military recruiters target poor youth in urban centres - the so-called "poverty draft" - this is probably the fastest-growing group of COs as well as the biggest, added McNeil. (END/2003)
----
D.C. Officer on Desk Duty After Allegedly Hitting Protester
By David A. Fahrenthold and Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page B02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25893-2003Apr14?language=printer
A D.C. police officer accused of hitting an antiwar demonstrator several times with his nightstick Saturday has been placed on desk duty while his actions are investigated.
The officer, whom police did not identify, was shown on WRC-TV (Channel 4) appearing to strike the man, Marc Frucht, as Frucht was held down by other officers. Police officers at the scene have said that Frucht ignored three orders to get on the sidewalk, then resisted as officers attempted to handcuff him, according to Assistant Police Chief Peter Newsham, who heads the department's internal affairs division.
Frucht, however, said yesterday that he was tackled by police after taking photographs of other officers who were handling a demonstrator roughly. His attorney, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, said Frucht suffered welts and bruises and was later taken to the hospital by police.
Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for the D.C.-based Partnership for Civil Justice, said that police attacked marchers without cause three times Saturday and that dozens of marchers were injured in the confrontations.
But Newsham said the incident involving Frucht is the only one of the weekend that has spawned an internal investigation. The city's Office of Citizen Complaint Review had received no complaints as of yesterday about police actions during the weekend's three major events, which drew thousands of people.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said there might be "training issues" raised by the officer's conduct, but he also said that officers were in a tense situation and that demonstrators threw rocks and spit at them during the protests.
"Certainly we'll listen to what the officer has to say" and then make a decision, Ramsey said. "But I'm not just going to hang this guy out to dry just because someone made an allegation."
The antiwar coalition International ANSWER organized a rally and march Saturday to oppose the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Police estimated that as many as 30,000 attended. Marchers left a rally at Freedom Plaza, at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, about 2:30 p.m. The march route spanned several blocks of downtown, targeting companies that activists say stand to profit from the war and media outlets whose coverage they criticize.
Verheyden-Hilliard said marchers were hit by officers with nightsticks three times Saturday, including once on Ninth Street NW near the main public library and later on 18th Street near the rear of the march.
The incident involving Frucht, 39, of Milwaukee, happened on 18th Street near K Street when the march was almost over. Frucht said he was trying to take photos of a woman he said he saw being attacked by police. He said an officer on a bicycle then told him to leave the area.
As Frucht turned to leave, he said, a group of officers tackled him. He said he was struck repeatedly by at least one police baton.
"I remember vividly three hits, and I began praying, 'I hope this stops soon,' " said Frucht, who added that he did nothing to provoke the officers. "I feel like it was beyond excessive force. . . . It felt like an act of wilding."
Police said the video aired by WRC-TV Saturday night appears to show the officer with two hands on his nightstick, poking at Frucht's head six or seven times while Frucht lay on the pavement. Afterward, the video shows Frucht with a red mark on his head, apparently where he was struck. Frucht was one of three people arrested during the march.
Newsham said investigators from the department's Civil Rights and Force Investigation Team -- on standby during the protests -- responded to the scene shortly after the incident. After watching the footage later that day, he said, they were able to identify the officer involved.
The officer has consulted with an attorney and made a statement to investigators. He is now in "non-contact" status, without dealings with the public, Newsham said.
Newsham said that after completing their investigation, police will hand the case over to the U.S. attorney's office. If the U.S. attorney declines to prosecute the officer, he said, the department will consider taking administrative action against him.
----
Protests Greet U.S.-Led Talks on Iraq
Tue April 15, 2003
By Adrian Croft
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=J4BYZ3JLDMUU4CRBAEZSFEY?type=topNews&storyID=2568617
TALLIL AIRBASE, Iraq - The United States opened the next phase in reshaping Iraq on Tuesday, gathering fractious political groups to discuss a future government, but boycotts, delays and protests pointed to the hard road ahead.
Participants were flown to a makeshift U.S. air base beside the remains of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur in southern Iraq and met in a big white marquee pitched next to a stepped ziggurat temple.
But in nearby Nassiriya, thousands of Iraqis protested that they did not need American help now Saddam Hussein had gone.
"No to America, No to Saddam," chanted Iraqis from the Shia Muslim majority long oppressed by Saddam, who is from the rival Sunni sect. Arabic television networks said up to 20,000 people marched.
At talks that began after a delay, skepticism ran deep among groups united by little more than joy at Saddam's fall and unease at getting too close to Washington.
Even Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, eager not to be seen as a stooge of the Americans who back him, opted to stay away and send a representative instead.
The main exiled Shi'ite group decided not to come at all.
"We cannot be part of a process which is under an American general," said a spokesman for the Iran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI.
Retired U.S. general Jay Garner is to head the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) until Iraqis take over, probably in six months to a year.
The U.S. military command under General Tommy Franks looks set to oversee Iraq for longer.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, visiting Qatar, sought to reassure Iraqis that no government would be imposed.
"This is not an American or British operation but one we have sponsored to get things going," he said.
FACTIONS
U.S. officials want Iraqis to form their own decision-making structure ahead of elections, but they said on Tuesday the various leaders would just get acquainted.
Scant news seeped out of the talks.
Establishing a stable government is a daunting task in a divided and now leaderless country. Exiles claim a say, as do those who lived for decades under Saddam's iron rule.
Tribal, ethnic and religious leaders, particularly Shias, have loyal followings.
Stopping the country fragmenting into Kurdish, Shia and Sunni zones will be a tough struggle -- but one that Iraq's neighbors, fearing a reaction among their own minorities, insist on.
The whole process of building peace faces the same dilemma as war did: should the United Nations play a major or minor role, or should the United States call the tune.
The United Nations, promised some sort of role by Washington under pressure from Britain, was attending as an observer.
Britain's Straw said a bigger U.N. role hung on France and Russia now putting aside opposition to the war and cooperating.
"It is the responsibility of all members of the Security Council, but particularly those with vetoes, not to play games but to recognize this new reality and to move forward," he said.
After the United States toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United Nations oversaw the selection of a government and the administration of the country.
ROLE FOR MEMBERS OF FALLEN LEADERSHIP?
About 60 Iraqis -- radical and mainstream Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, Kurds and supporters of the monarchy axed in 1958 -- were expected to attend the meeting 235 miles southeast of Baghdad.
A spokesman for Chalabi told BBC radio leaders of the Iraqi opposition planned to hold their own meeting in Baghdad soon.
"Iraqis must rule Iraq. We don't need either an American general or a U.N. bureaucrat in charge," said Zaab Sethna.
Garner said ahead of the talks that every day counted and the power vacuum had to be filled. In a country whose former ruling Baath Party controlled everything for decades, coping without its members will be barely possible.
Saddam's police are already back on the streets to help quell days of looting and violence. "The use of the former regime's police ... puts them in the position of sort of starting de-Nazification by rehiring the Gestapo," military analyst Dan Plesch told CNN television.
But Britain's top ORHA official said they were small fry.
"We've been successful in taking the head off the regime, in taking off the top layer," Brigadier General Tim Cross told BBC radio. "Most of the other people who are trying to rebuild their lives will put aside the Baathist regime with great pleasure."
Outside the air base, a few tribal leaders asked to join the talks but were kept outside the barbed wire cordon.
"We need this meeting because we need freedom from Saddam Hussein and we need a new government for Iraq," said one of them, Sheikh Jabar Alowayed.
----
Seven activists win top environmental prize
Story by Michael Kahn
REUTERS USA:
April 15, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20472/newsDate/15-Apr-2003/story.htm
SAN FRANCISCO - A coal miner's daughter fighting to end a destructive form of mining and two Aboriginal elders working to block the construction of a nuclear waste dump in Australia were among seven winners of a top environmental prize awarded yesterday.
Other winners of this year's $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize include a Nigerian activist who won protections for his country's last remaining rain forests and a Peruvian woman who led a campaign to clean up Peru's fishmeal industry.
"This year's winners have looked beyond themselves, often risking freedom or safety, to inspire their communities for environmental protections," said Richard Goldman, the award's founder.
The Goldman prize, awarded annually to grass-roots activists from six regions across the globe, is often termed the Nobel prize of the environmental movement. Each regional winner, or group, is awarded $125,000.
This year's winner from North America was Julia Bonds. The West Virginia woman has campaigned to stop mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, a practice that involves blasting off the tops of mountains so machines can mine thin seams of coal.
Bonds, 51, a coal miner's daughter and the director of Coal River Mountain Watch, is the target of routine threats as she fights against a form of mining blamed for destroying the environment and forcing the evacuation of entire towns.
"Julia is lifting up a region of the U.S. often forgotten by the rest of the country," said Carolyn Johnson, staff director of the Citizens Coal Council.
AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE WINNERS
Australian Aborigines Eileen Kampakuta Brown and Eileen Wani Wingfield won for leading a campaign to block construction of a nuclear waste dump in their South Australian desert homeland.
The pair who are both in their seventies, traveled thousand of miles (kilometers), visited Parliament House and wrote to government officials to protest the proposed dump.
"We're worrying for the country and we're worrying for our kids," wrote the elders in a letter of opposition to the site. "We say NO radioactive waste dump in our ngura - in our country." The two women will split the $125,000 prize.
The African winner this year is Odigha Odigha, 46, who has helped limit industrial logging in the Cross River State in southeastern Nigeria. These are the country's last remaining rain forests and home to 2,400 native forest communities.
He was also instrumental in creating a statewide logging moratorium and has educated hundreds of communities on sustainable forestry practices.
"Poverty can lead to environmental destruction," Odigha said. "Likewise a degraded environment can aggravate poverty."
The winner from Asia was the Philippines Von Hernandez, 36, an activist who organized campaigns against waste incinerators, which release cancer-causing dioxins into the air. His efforts led the Philippines to institute the world's first nationwide ban on waste incinerators.
Peru's Maria Elena Foronda Farro, a 44-year-old sociologist, won for her efforts in forging partnerships between community groups, fish meal producers and the government to institute sustainable practices for fish meal production.
Europe's winner was Pedro Arrojo-Agudo of Spain, an economics professor who was the principal architect behind the campaign to stop his country's National Hydrological Plan from damming and rerouting the country's last remaining free-flowing rivers.
-------
------- 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.