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NUCLEAR
Australian government urged to act over depleted uranium weapons
Iraq is chance for U.S. to fix its relations
Questions Over Aluminum Tube Shipment
Leading Iraqi Scientist Says He Lied to U.N. Inspectors
Two Koreas Begin High-Level Nuclear Talks
US plans 'Cuba lite' blockade on North Korea
S.Korea Tells North to Scrap Nuclear Program
Revealed: the moment Bush pulled war trigger
U.S. Officials Spar Over N. Korea
The Battle Lines Start in Washington
MILITARY
GERMANY - Executive questioned on N. Korea sale
MP may be tried as traitor
Blair Urges U.S., Europe to Forge 'One Polar Power'
Halliburton: All In The Family
Shultz denies role in Bechtel's Iraq deal
U.S. troops detect lethal chemicals in drum of liquid
US Testing Chemicals Found in Northern Iraq -Report
Germany and France to water down defence plan
Iran Tries to Avoid Row with U.S. Over Iraq
Iraqis Lash Out Over Deaths at Arms Dump
U.S. Says Turks Are Smuggling Arms Into Northern Iraq City
Ties between al Qaeda, Saddam revealed
Airfield, missiles, suspects seized
An Air War of Might, Coordination and Risks
Was Tariq Aziz the coalition's mole?
CIA spirits away Aziz to secret site
Dressed Up Amid Disorder, Unarmed Officers Stand Idle
Israel to hold first issue of U.S.-backed bonds in July 2003
U.S. Wants to Keep Persian Gulf Presence
Pakistan Seizes Huge Arms Cache Near Afghan Border
Vieques ready to celebrate Navy's exit
Russia's Putin pledges stronger Tajik ties but warns of drug flow
Company Man
Cleaning House
Army shakeups clear path for Rumsfeld's vision
U.S. Wants to Keep Persian Gulf Presence
American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super
Rulers of the air
OUT ON THE EDGE
Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies
Galloway: 'Now I'm certain ... all these documents are forged'
Galloway: I'm the victim of Blair's revenge
The spooky provenance of the smoking gun that backfired
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
It Won't Just Go Away
Explosion hits Indonesian airport
Instruction and Methods From Al Qaeda Took Root in North Iraq
ACTIVISTS
Protesting 'Patriots'
A Flashback to the 60's for an Antiwar Protester
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Australian government urged to act over depleted uranium weapons
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Australian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s840836.htm
The Australian Democrats are calling on the Government to pursue an international ban on the use of depleted uranium (DU) in weaponry.
The United States admitted in March, before the war in Iraq began, that it would use ammunitions tipped with depleted uranium in combat.
Democrats defence spokesman Senator Andrew Bartlett says the Government should commit to monitoring all Australian gulf veterans over the next decades.
He says the Government should follow the UK's lead in offering troops testing for depleted uranium.
"And we think that's a clear cut first step, in the same way that Australia has said that we're not using cluster bombs, we should be similarly putting pressure such as the US and the UK to not use such damaging weaponry," he said.
"It's a simple thing to move away from depleted uranium as well," he said.
-------- europe
Iraq is chance for U.S. to fix its relations
By Louis R. Golino
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030427-84959400.htm
Winning the peace in Iraq provides policy-makers with a key opportunity to try to repair the rift in U.S.-European relations, say leading U.S. and European analysts who spoke recently at the Brookings Institution.
They added that in addition to working together to build postwar Iraq, American and European leaders should seek to develop a common approach to curbing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and deploy NATO peacekeepers to Iraq.
But at the same time, after the Iraq war and the rancorous diplomacy that preceded it, returning to the status quo in trans-Atlantic relations is not an option, said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Moreover, he said, both the United States and Europe must adjust to certain new realities,
The new realities include, Mr. Daalder said, the fact that "the trans-Atlantic relationship is no longer the central relationship either for Europe or for the United States."
Although there have been numerous crises in U.S.-European relations since World War II, the analysts agreed that trans-Atlantic relations reached their lowest point in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Mr. Daalder, for example, said he had never seen anything like the current rift, which he considers to be much more fundamental than previous crises in U.S.-European relations.
Growing strategic gap
Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that the roots of today's trans-Atlantic difficulties lie in a growing strategic divergence between the two sides of the Atlantic.
Mr. Kagan said the key issue is the different ways Americans and Europeans view using force - Europe being much more reluctant to use force than the United States is. September 11, 2001, also widened the strategic gap between the two sides of the Atlantic because it was perceived differently in Europe than it was in the United States.
Europe, analysts say, does not believe that it is at war with terrorism and has not acted as decisively since September 11 to protect its homeland security as has the United States. European countries are, however, cooperating closely with Washington on counterterrorism.
In addition, during the run-up to the Iraq war, many commentators pointed out that European views on the conflict were rooted in perceptions of the unparalleled power of the United States. Many Europeans want to be close partners of the United States, while others - such as the French - think Europe should try to become a counterweight to the United States.
Mr. Kagan suggested that Europeans should not seek to counter U.S. power, an effort that will only divide and weaken them, and Charles Grant, director of the London-based Center for European Reform, said the United States should not seek to divide Europe, because a weak Europe is not in American interests.
Weapons of mass destruction
Mr. Grant, who is a former defense editor of the Economist, said Europe should take weapons of mass destruction more seriously and be prepared, if necessary, to use force against states that have such capabilities.
On April 14 European Union foreign ministers for the first time discussed the issue of weapons of mass destruction and began developing a common policy on how the European Union should deal with countries that possess such weapons.
All the analysts at the Brookings forum agreed that Europe must enhance its military capabilities, and develop a strategic doctrine and shared-threat assessment.
Christoph Bertram, a well-known German foreign policy expert who is director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, argued in favor of what is known in EU jargon as reinforced cooperation in the defense field.
He said the only way to start the European defense is to have France and Germany lead a group within the European Union that is likely to include many other EU countries.
European defense spending
Mr. Bertram agreed with the other speakers that Europeans must spend more on defense. He noted that Europeans spend roughly a half-billion euros a day on defense, while U.S. spending is twice that amount.
But he added that the European money is not spent well because of various redundancies within European defense industries and that to develop serious military capabilities EU members would have to pool their defense resources more effectively.
France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg will hold their own defense summit in Brussels on Tuesday to develop a program similar to the one Mr. Bertram proposed.
The proposal for a core defense group has been described by some critics as a project that will divide the European Union because it involves four of the 15 member states.
In advance of the April 29 meeting, the same four countries called for substantial increases in European defense spending, particularly for modernizing equipment.
At the Brookings meeting, Mr. Grant suggested that EU nations strive to spend an average of 2.5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. Some European countries spend less than 2 percent of GDP on defense.
NATO in Iraq
The Bush administration has asked NATO to consider sending peacekeeping troops to postwar Iraq.
Defense experts say there would be many benefits to a NATO deployment in Iraq. These include enabling the United States to share the burdens of postwar stabilization with its NATO allies.
A NATO role in Iraq would also help revitalize the alliance, which has been largely sidelined in the U.S.-led wars on Iraq and terrorism.
And as Mr. Daalder said at Brookings: NATO "knows how to do peacekeeping. It knows how to do stabilization. It knows it better than the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps or indeed anybody else."
Moreover, NATO has considerable experience coordinating peacekeeping missions that involve non-NATO countries, which would be useful in putting together a multinational peacekeeping force in Iraq.
Such a force is likely to be perceived by Iraqis and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world as more legitimate than a mostly U.S. military presence.
U.S. officials have also suggested that NATO might be tasked to oversee the disarmament of Iraq that the United Nations started.
France and NATO
The main obstacle to a NATO deployment in Iraq had been France's position that NATO's mandate should be limited to Europe.
France also raised objections to proposals from Germany and other alliance countries for NATO to take over the U.N.-mandated peacekeeping force in Kabul, Afghanistan, which is under German and Dutch command.
France recently dropped its opposition to NATO involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On April 16, all nineteen NATO allies agreed that beginning in August NATO will assume command of the Afghanistan mission, but the operation will not be under a NATO flag.
That will greatly improve the continuity of command arrangements for this force and will mark NATO's first deployment outside Europe. NATO is providing logistical support to the German and Dutch troops leading the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
France has recently sought to repair its badly frayed relations with the United States. For example, it has become more flexible on the issue of the role the United Nations will play in rebuilding Iraq, saying it would accept a phased-in U.N. role.
Germany and the United States
Germany has gone further than France in recent weeks to show how committed it is to repairing the rift in its relations with the Bush administration, according to news reports.
In addition, defense analysts point out that although Germany did not send any troops to Iraq, it has played an important role in that conflict, one second only to that of the Britain.
For example, Germany assigned a significant number of its police forces to protect U.S. military bases in Germany, deployed an anti-chemical-weapons unit to Kuwait, gave the United States overflight and basing rights, sent Patriot missiles and AWACS surveillance aircraft to Turkey, and might send peacekeepers to Iraq.
Germany has also said it is ready to replace Danish troops in Bosnia if the latter are deployed to Iraq as part of a Danish-led peacekeeping and stabilization force that the United States has requested, and that may also include troops from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Turkey, among other countries.
France and Germany opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq but are offering to work with the United States on the rebuilding, and political and economic reconstruction of postwar Iraq.
Both countries have also acknowledged that U.S. and coalition military forces would take the lead in the initial stabilization of postwar Iraq, as suggested by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in Brussels on April 3.
-------- germany
Questions Over Aluminum Tube Shipment
April 27, 2003
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/asia/27NUKE.html
HAMBURG, Germany, April 26 (Agence France-Presse) - Prosecutors in Germany confirmed today that one of the directors of a German company suspected of supplying aluminum tubes to North Korea's nuclear program had been detained for questioning.
The announcement came after the weekly magazine Der Spiegel said in its issue to be published on Monday that 24 tons of aluminum tubes, essential in the manufacture of enriched uranium, were loaded onto a French ship in Hamburg in early April just as the German government vetoed the shipment.
The German government alerted the French authorities, who ordered the ship's captain to unload the containers in Egypt. The state prosecutor in the southwestern city of Stuttgart also confirmed that an investigation into a local company suspected of contravening foreign trade regulations had been opened.
-------- inspections
Leading Iraqi Scientist Says He Lied to U.N. Inspectors
April 27, 2003
The New York Times
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27SCIE.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 - Nissar Hindawi, a leading figure in Iraq's biological warfare program in the 1980's, says the stories and explanations he and other scientists told the United Nations about the extent of Iraq's efforts to produce poisons and germ weapons "were all lies."
Dr. Hindawi, imprisoned during the final weeks of Saddam Hussein's rule, is now free to talk about his experiences in the program, in which he says he was forced to work from 1986 to 1989 and again sporadically until the mid-1990's.
Iraq, as it belatedly acknowledged, he says, "produced huge quantities" of liquid anthrax and botulinum toxin, which it concentrated 5 to 10 times with sulfuric acid and other preservatives.
"There were orders to destroy it," Dr. Hindawi said during interviews conducted today and on Friday. "They destroyed some - whether all or not, I can't say."
He said that while he worked in the program or was ordered to brief the inspectors on it, Iraq made 8.9 cubic meters of concentrated liquid anthrax, one of the deadliest and most durable germ weapons, and even larger quantities of botulinum toxin, one of the most lethal poisons.
Even so, he added, there is little need for concern if American military teams hunting for unconventional weapons stumble across such stockpiles. The arsenals would have degraded quickly, he maintains.
"Even if it's all kept until now, don't worry about it," he said.
In addition, he said, Iraq was never able to make dried anthrax, a medium that would have made the lethal spores far more durable and easier to disseminate. He thought he had devised a way to turn liquid anthrax into the even more lethal powder, he said, but he did not do it. "I kept the method secret," he said. "History would have cursed me."
Several United Nations inspectors questioned his assertion that Iraq had not made a powdered form of anthrax. They said that in 1989 Iraq imported two drying ovens that could have made powdered anthrax and that at least one other senior scientist in the program appeared to know the required techniques.
But Dr. Hindawi says that if Iraq made such a weapon, it did so after he left the scientific wing of the program in 1989.
Though he no longer had firsthand knowledge of the program after that, he said, he kept up on its progress through his students, some of whom stayed in the program until the war began last month. American officials are hunting for several, including Rihab Taha, the microbiologist who reportedly headed the germ weapons program and is known in the West as Dr. Death, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a senior scientist and Baath Party regional command member who is the only woman on America's most wanted list.
Although there has been no public word from American authorities on their whereabouts, Dr. Hindawi said that he had been told that both women were hiding in Syria, as other Iraqi scientists, Baath Party members and military officers are said to be. But he said he was not aware of Syrian-Iraqi cooperation on unconventional weapons. Iraqi scientists built their germ warfare program themselves, he said.
Dr. Hindawi, 61, is now in the protective custody of the Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi.
He painted a portrait of a biological warfare program that was riddled with bitter personality rivalries, sycophancy and corruption. He said he was originally dismissed in 1989 because he had personally complained to Mr. Hussein about fraud in the awarding of contracts in the program. He said Mr. Hussein appeared to agree with him, but did nothing because his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, was in charge of the program.
"He was very gentle with me," the scientist said. "He respected me."
Mr. Hussein allowed him to leave the program and return to his teaching and research post at Mustanserieh University, he said. But there was a catch: "He said, `If I need you, will you be available?' I said yes."
Nevertheless, he seemed bitter about his colleagues and former students in the program. He said he had been paid less than some of his assistants because he was not a permanent staff member and was still attached to the university.
"If you were a director's friend, you got paid more," he said. "If you were an important Baath Party figure, you got more."
Unlike the others, he said, he did not get a car, a house or land. "My salary was the lowest of any senior person in the program," he said.
Dr. Hindawi said he had had grave qualms about his work on germ warfare, despite the fact that Iraq was at war with Iran when he joined the program. He said he had never worked at his full capacity, but at 50 percent of his abilities.
He also says he secretly tried to get information about the illicit program to American authorities in 1994, an assertion that could not be confirmed today.
Some inspectors remain skeptical about whether Dr. Hindawi was really an unwilling participant in the program.
He returned to the program in a different capacity in 1992, when international inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, were arriving to ensure that Iraqi officials were complying with their country's pledge to give up chemical, germ and nuclear weapons. He said military officials had asked him to tell inspectors that he was the head of a single-cell protein facility. The plant, in fact, had made botulinum toxin and anthrax.
He said he had had no choice but to lie, just as he had no choice but to work in the program. "It was that or else," he said.
Although he continued as an informal adviser, Dr. Hindawi said he was determined to try to leave Iraq for the United States, where, he said, he had spent 12 years at college and doing postgraduate work. To secure a Libyan visa, which he intended to use as a steppingstone, he said he turned over seven scientific papers to the Libyan Embassy to prove his scientific bona fides.
"The work was more than four years old," he said. "Libya didn't even have qualified high school teachers, so they could not have used the papers in a biological warfare program."
The Iraqis, contending that he was trying to share military secrets, imprisoned him for 17 months between 1997 and 1999. The only time he was permitted to leave prison was to meet with international inspectors, who kept asking to interview him.
Released in 1999, he said he had worked in his own private laboratory until he was summoned in late 2002 by Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi vice president, because a new group of inspectors asked to see him. He never met with them, he said, and he was rearrested in March.
Dr. Hindawi said he thought that his luck had finally run out when the Iraqi secret police pulled up to his laboratory on March 3, as the American-led war against Iraq was about to begin.
Accused of supporting the opposition, he was imprisoned again. "I was sure I was going to be killed," he said.
So were some of his American associates. Former international inspectors and American officials who monitor Iraq's germ weapons program said they thought that his name was on a list of scientists and others whom the government intended to eliminate in the event of war.
But the war that placed him in jeopardy ultimately saved him, Dr. Hindawi says. The officers guarding him fled when American forces cut communications between Baghdad and his jail. He hitchhiked home.
-------- korea
Two Koreas Begin High-Level Nuclear Talks
By SOO-JEONG LEE
Associated Press Writer
Apr 27, 2003 8:19 AM EDT
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KOREAS_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A South Korean delegation traveled to its isolated neighbor on Sunday to insist that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Communist North Korea repeated that it would not halt its nuclear program unless the U.S. government signs a nonaggression treaty - something the Bush administration has refused to do.
The Pyongyang talks, scheduled to last until Tuesday, come amid heightened tension on the Korean Peninsula. The two sides met for nearly two hours Sunday.
South Korea's chief delegate, Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun, told North Korea that possession of nuclear weapons would be a "serious violation" of a 1992 agreement to keep the peninsula free of nuclear weapons, South Korean spokesman Shin Eun-sang said.
"We made it clear that we can never accept North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons," Shin said. "We emphasized that the North should dismantle nuclear weapons, if it had any, as well as its nuclear facilities."
North Korean negotiators did not confirm whether they had nuclear weapons, saying only they had made a "new, bold" proposal to U.S. officials during talks last week in Beijing, Shin said.
In a meeting between the United States and North Korea in Beijing last week, a senior U.S. official said North Korea claimed to have atomic weapons that it might test, sell or use, depending on U.S. actions.
In a commentary carried by North Korean radio, Pyongyang's official daily Rodong Sinmun said the North was determined to arm itself with "a physical means of deterrence" because the United States refuses to sign a nonaggression treaty.
Washington has said, however, that it would consider some sort of written assurance that it wouldn't invade.
"If Washington does not give us a legal guarantee that it will not take military actions, including use of nuclear weapons, against us, we have no other option but to do everything possible for our self-defense," Rodong said.
Seoul officials were encouraged by the North's willingness to hold the talks after canceling previous Cabinet-level meetings earlier this month. North Korea also halted a joint tourism project last week, citing fears of SARS.
But Jeong acknowledged that the talks were being held "in a very difficult situation," and that the dispute "is going to take a considerable amount of time to resolve."
President Bush spoke by telephone on Saturday with Chinese President Hu Jintao about the standoff.
He thanked Hu for the Chinese government's "full and active participation" in last week's talks with Pyongyang in Beijing, White House spokeswoman Mercedes Viana said.
In Tokyo, a senior U.S. envoy told Japanese officials on Saturday that Washington was examining a new North Korean proposal to settle the dispute.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly met with Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, but refused to discuss the details of the North Korean proposal until he consulted with officials in Washington, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
In Washington, the White House said it would confer with allies about possibly seeking U.N. sanctions against the North. Pyongyang earlier said it would consider international sanctions a "declaration of war."
The talks in Beijing were the first high-level U.S.-North Korean contact since nuclear tensions spiked in October, when Washington claimed that the North said it had a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 pact.
North Korea subsequently withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and took steps to restart nuclear facilities frozen under the pact.
U.S. officials said North Korea told Kelly in Beijing that it had reprocessed spent nuclear fuel rods - a key step in producing nuclear weapons. The claim is not backed up by U.S. intelligence, officials say.
U.S. officials have said they want the "verifiable and irreversible" elimination of the North's nuclear weapons programs. North Korea has pushed Washington for a nonaggression treaty, saying it fears a U.S. invasion.
----
US plans 'Cuba lite' blockade on North Korea
By Julian Coman in Washington
27/04/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/27/wkor27.xml
The Pentagon is planning a permanent selective blockade of North Korean shipping, to prevent the country's threatened export of nuclear materials to other rogue states and terrorist organisations.
The move, nicknamed "Cuba Lite" for its echoes of the tactics used during the 1963 Cuban missile crisis, is America's first reaction to last week's warning by a North Korean envoy that Pyongyang intends to "transfer" nuclear devices or other material overseas.
It is aimed at increasing pressure on the North Korean regime, and would use American ships stationed in the Pacific region, without mounting a total blockade, which Pyongyang would regard as an act of war.
The first talks between the United States and North Korea for six months broke down in Beijing last week after just two days. The North Korean official who took part in the meetings claimed that Pyongyang already had two nuclear bombs and has processed enough plutonium to create many more. He also warned that the regime might "demonstrate" its capabilities in some way.
The threat has concentrated minds at the Pentagon, where senior officials are now devising a strategy to contain North Korea without escalating to a full-scale military conflict on the Korean peninsula - which on some Washington estimates could result in a million casualties on the first day.
A senior adviser to the Pentagon told The Sunday Telegraph that attempts to export nuclear devices would now result in routine "interdiction" and seizing of ships suspected by US intelligence of carrying such material.
"It is a kind of Cuba Lite strategy," said the adviser. "It wouldn't be a total blockade. International shipping would not necessarily be blocked from going in to North Korea, but the passage of North Korean shipping would be contingent on what we knew was being carried. We have the ability to track anything going in or out of North Korean waters."
On Dec 9, US and Spanish naval vessels stopped a North Korean ship, the Sosan, as it neared Yemen carrying 15 Scud missiles and warheads. The ship was eventually allowed to pass through after assurances from the Yemeni government. Under the new plans, nuclear "spot-checks" would be more aggressively pursued closer to North Korea.
"The virtue in an 'interdiction' strategy is that it would not be formally imposed," said the adviser. "There would not be a big set-piece confrontation with the North Koreans. Instead the US would use its intelligence net and only move in when it needs to."
Another option being considered by the US is a precision strike on North Korean nuclear facilities. However, administration officials say that at present such a move would not be worth the risk of an unpredictable North Korean response.
American military movement in the region has been minimal, although reconnaissance capacities have been boosted and 24 heavy bombers have been deployed to the island of Guam.
After last week's talks, North Korea, which has demanded a written non-aggression pact with America as a condition for giving up its nuclear programme, said the US had "simply repeated hackneyed claims without setting forth any new proposals".
The Communist state's aggressive negotiating tactics have put the Bush administration in a quandary. The State Department has backed continued negotiations but has been dismayed by Kim Jong Il's intransigence.
Officials at the Pentagon, including the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, doubt the value of talks but fear the potential military cost of a war.
North Korea would be dangerously well-prepared for any conflict. More than 4,000 pieces of artillery are buried deep in the mountainous terrain to the north of the de-militarised zone that separates North and South Korea.
Hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers, belonging to the world's fifth-largest army, would be expected to invade Seoul within hours of an American attack. North Korea is also believed to possess chemical and biological weapons.
"This isn't Iraq and there is no serious hawk-dove divide here," said an American government official. "The doves know they are being messed around by North Korea. The hawks are not prepared to go to war any time soon. For the moment the administration is pretty unified on this."
• British officials will hold their first talks with North Korea for more than a year this week when a delegation led by the Vice-Foreign Minister, Choe Su-hon, visits London, the Foreign Office announced yesterday.
A spokesman said: "It's important to remain engaged with North Korea and we want to use every opportunity to urge them to comply with their international obligations."
----
S.Korea Tells North to Scrap Nuclear Program
April 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea urged the North on Sunday to give up its nuclear program after U.S. officials said the communist state told Washington it had atomic bombs and could make more.
The head of South Korea's delegation at talks in Pyongyang said the North's declared possession of nuclear weapons was a security threat that broke a 1991 nuclear-free declaration seen as a cornerstone of ties between the neighbors.
South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun underscored the U.S. demand made at talks in Beijing last week, pool reports from Pyongyang said. But North Korea's ruling party newspaper dismissed the suggestion of ditching its declared deterrent as a non-starter without a written U.S. pledge not to attack.
The United States was ``talking nonsense over the talks in Beijing that there will be no security of the system nor provision of rewards to the DPRK (North Korea) even though it gives up the 'nuclear program,''' said the daily Rodong Sinmun.
``Those who know politics and understand the reality would not have made such infantile and nonsensical remarks over the negotiation on the nuclear issue,'' it said in a commentary that did not address whether North Korea had nuclear weapons.
Rodong Sinmun repeated Pyongyang's longstanding demand for a non-aggression treaty but made no new demands.
``The DPRK will be left with no option but to do everything to defend itself unless the U.S. legally guarantees no use of arms including nukes against the DPRK,'' said the statement, published in English by the North's state-run KCNA news agency.
South Korea's Jeong said North Korea's nuclear program was ``unhelpful for inter-Korean relations,'' according to the media pool reports of his opening remarks to the North.
North Korean delegation head Kim Ryung-sung appealed to Korean unity and said ``since it's the first such talks for your new government, let both sides be wise and cooperative to produce good results,'' according the pool report.
``A BIG MISCALCULATION''
In Tokyo, Japan's defense minister said North Korea was wrong to believe announcing it had atomic weapons would ensure the survival of its system and that the United States and China would never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea.
``It will be a big miscalculation if it is reckoning that remarks that it has nuclear weapons will lead to the maintenance of its regime,'' Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba said on a TV Asahi current affairs program.
Before leaving Seoul, Jeong said he would tell Pyongyang the stance of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's two-month-old government was ``it is unacceptable for North Korea to have nuclear weapons.''
Roh's security adviser said North Korea's admission, if true, violated a 1991 South-North Joint Declaration on Denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula -- a bilateral pledge not to test, produce, receive, store, deploy or use nuclear arms.
Jeong cited that pact in rejecting Pyongyang's insistence that the nuclear issue is solely a North Korea-U.S. dispute.
``The North-South denuclearisation statement goes back 12 years, to before the issue was taken up between North Korea and the United States,'' Jeong said.
A North Korea armed with nuclear weapons would increase the threat to neighboring Japan, China and South Korea and to the 37,000 U.S. troops based in the South, and would make it trickier to craft a solution to the six-month nuclear standoff.
The crisis erupted in October, when Washington said the North had admitted to an active covert program to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear arms in addition to a plutonium program frozen under a 1994 pact with the United States.
The United States has said it will pursue a diplomatic solution despite Pyongyang's disclosure in Beijing.
While opinion among experts differs as to how far North Korea has actually taken its nuclear arms program, the outcome of the Beijing talks prompted a hardening of opinion in South Korea and calls for reconsidering Seoul's aid for the North.
Jeong gave no indication Seoul might use aid as leverage over Pyongyang. On Thursday, the South announced plans to donate corn and medicine to the impoverished and hunger-stricken North.
North Korea's Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had put forward a bold new proposal at the Beijing talks but had heard nothing new from Washington. The ministry did not mention nuclear weapons or spell out Pyongyang's proposal.
-------- us politics
Revealed: the moment Bush pulled war trigger
By Toby Harnden, Washington
April 27 2003
The Australia Sun-Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/26/1051316050142.html
Saddam Hussein was probably severely injured and might have been killed at the start of the Iraq war, President George Bush said in a rare, in-depth interview.
The CIA, he said, was in close contact with "a guy on the ground" in Baghdad who was passing on intelligence about the dictator's movements, prompting Mr Bush to start the war 48hours early.
"They [the CIA] had a source on the ground...convinced that not only Saddam Hussein would be in the complex, but Uday and Qusay, his two sons, would be there as well."
Afterwards, the source reported that Saddam had been in the leadership compound hit by US bombs and precision-guided missiles.
"He felt like we got Saddam," Mr Bush said. "And we're trying, of course, to verify."
Saddam's death, Mr Bush suggested, would account for tactical mistakes by his regime's forces.
"It explains, for example, why dams weren't blown up or oilfields destroyed, even though we found them to be wired."
Mr Bush was reflective and relaxed in the interview with Tom Brokaw of NBC television on board Air Force One.
Mr Bush explained that he wavered over ordering the early strike against Saddam for fear of killing the Iraqi leader's family.
"I was hesitant at first, to be frank with you, because I was worried that the first pictures coming out of Iraq would be a wounded grandchild of Saddam Hussein [and that] Saddam Hussein, who was not there at the time we started making the decision, would never show up."
But the intelligence got "richer", convincing Mr Bush that Saddam would go to the complex.
"The actual moment of making that decision was a heavy moment. I then went outside and walked around the grounds, just to get a little air and collect my thoughts."
Mr Bush accepted that Iraqi resistance in the south had been unexpectedly tough.
"Shock and awe said to many people that all we've got to do is unleash some might and people will crumble. And it turns out the fighters were a lot fiercer than we thought.
"Because, for example, we didn't come north from Turkey, Saddam Hussein was able to move a lot of Special Republican Guard units and fighters from north to south. So the resistance for our troops moving south and north was significant. On the other hand, our troops handled it, handled that resistance quite well."
He had been distressed, he said, by the looting after Saddam's regime fell. "The hospitals and museum were the absolute worst part...that museum was a terrible incident.
"I couldn't agree more with people who say we're sorry that happened.
"We are, by the way, helping find treasure, restore treasure, and we'll provide all the expertise and help they need to get that museum up and running."
Mr Bush made clear he was not about to forgive President Jacques Chirac for France's opposition to the war. "I doubt he'll be coming to the ranch any time soon," he said, noting that Australian Prime Minister John Howard would be a guest this week.
Asked about the role of his personal faith, Mr Bush replied: "I don't bring God into my life to be a political person; I ask God for strength and guidance.
"The decision about war and peace is a decision I made based upon what I thought were the best interests of the American people."
Mr Bush also made a joke about Iraq's information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf.
"He's my man, he was great," he said. "Somebody accused us of hiring him and putting him there. He was a classic."
----
U.S. Officials Spar Over N. Korea
State Dept. Says Nuclear Claim 'Was Shared Appropriately'
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42441-2003Apr26?language=printer
President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao yesterday spoke by phone about efforts to end the North Korean crisis, including the meetings last week in Beijing at which North Korea announced it possessed nuclear weapons.
The 15-minute conversation, reported by the White House and China's Xinhua news agency, reflected the increasingly urgent diplomatic problem posed by North Korea. At the Beijing meetings, North Korea also asserted that it had nearly completed reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods, which experts say could produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to help build several weapons.
China, as host of the meeting and a longtime supporter of North Korea, was deeply embarrassed by the revelations, Chinese analysts said. U.S. officials hope the North Korean behavior at the talks will encourage China to cooperate even more with the Bush administration in persuading the Pyongyang government to give up its nuclear programs.
Meanwhile, the reprocessing claim has ignited another battle within the administration, which is deeply split over its North Korea policy, officials said yesterday. North Korea first told State Department officials in March it had begun reprocessing the fuel rods, but the information was kept from officials in other parts of the government, officials said.
The disclosure, first reported Friday night by Reuters, has angered officials who prefer to take a hard-edged approach to North Korea. They charge that some elements of the State Department purposely did not report the claim to senior officials in the Defense Department and the National Security Council in order to avoid rupturing the Beijing talks before they began.
The announcement by North Korean officials to a pair of State Department officials that Pyongyang had begun reprocessing occurred during a meeting on March 31 at the United Nations, known as the "New York channel" for communications between Washington and Pyongyang. The purpose of the meeting was to make sure North Korea was serious about attending trilateral talks in China.
"I think heads will roll over this," one administration official said yesterday. He said prompt disclosure of this claim would have allowed the intelligence community to step up surveillance of the North Korean nuclear facilities. "North Korea for the first time ever officially communicated to the U.S. government that they were reprocessing. That that information was not shared is very disturbing," he said, adding that it possibly weakened the U.S. negotiating position at the talks.
Other U.S. officials did not learn of the North Korean assertion until April 18, days before the talks, when the North Korea news agency broadcast a statement that it had told the United States in March that it had begun reprocessing. At the time, the State Department suggested the statement was in error because of a translation mistake from the original Korean. Then, North Korea repeated it at the talks in Beijing.
"The interagency process is poisoned over this," the official said.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told Reuters that in a series of meetings with the United States and others in March, North Korea made contradictory and sometimes ambiguous statements about reprocessing.
At every point, he said, the State Department went back to the intelligence agencies to check on whether the situation with North Korea's nuclear program had changed in any way, and the intelligence agencies said repeatedly they had no confirmation Pyongyang was reprocessing nuclear fuel.
"Information was shared appropriately with other agencies of the U.S. government at senior levels -- not every agency and not every person, but appropriately," Boucher said.
----
The Battle Lines Start in Washington
April 27, 2003
The New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/weekinreview/27BOXB.html
In the annals of famous "Don't Invite 'Em's" - people feuding so hotly that you would never want them together at your small dinner party - American secretaries of state and defense have always been especially prickly pairs.
Secretaries Colin L. Powell and Donald H. Rumsfeld are no exceptions. Indeed, they may be setting a new standard of sustained animosity.
Since at least the Civil War era, when Secretary of State William H. Seward was more conciliatory toward the South than other cabinet members, the feuds have usually revolved around the chief diplomat's desire for diplomacy over military confrontation. In the 1970's, during the cold war, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger tried to salvage detente with the Soviet Union and clashed with President Ford's hawkish Secretary of Defense - Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The battles continued in the Reagan era, when Secretaries of State Alexander M. Haig and George P.Shultz also had to contend with a defense secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger, who rivals said thought of himself as the guardian of the administration's hard-line foreign policy.
Under President Clinton, open feuding declined. In that era, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright broke the mold and favored more use of force than the military, in the Balkans and elsewhere.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Powell have fought on many fronts since they took office. Here is a look at the milestones.
North Korea In March 2001, Mr. Powell said the administration was likely to "pick up" where the Clinton administration had left off in negotiating with North Korea about its missile program. This outraged hard-liners, and President Bush himself reversed the course. More recently, Mr. Powell restarted talks with North Korea, over Pentagon objections.
China When an American spy plane was forced to land on a Chinese island in April 2001, after colliding with a Chinese jet fighter, some Pentagon officials objected to the conciliatory approach Mr. Powell took in negotiating the crew's released.
Israel and the Palestinians Mr. Rumsfeld has stressed unswerving support for the tough policies of Israel's hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Mr. Powell has championed involving the United Nations, the European Union and Russia to try to revive peace talks and lay out a timetable for reaching a settlement.
Iraq Before the war, conservative Pentagon officials resisted seeking United Nations approval for an attack on Iraq, while Mr. Powell led unsuccessful efforts to strike a bargain with France and Russia in the Security Council. Now, the Pentagon has backed its own candidates for a new Iraqi administration, but the State Department has objected.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
GERMANY - Executive questioned on N. Korea sale
Briefly
April 27, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030427-42569350.htm
HAMBURG - Prosecutors in Germany confirmed yesterday that one of the directors of a German company suspected of supplying aluminum tubes to North Korea's nuclear program has been detained for questioning.
The announcement comes after weekly magazine Der Spiegel said in its issue due to be published tomorrow that 22 tons of aluminum tubes, essential in the manufacture of enriched uranium, were loaded onto a French ship in Hamburg in early April, just as the German federal government vetoed the shipment.
The German government alerted the French authorities, who ordered the ship's captain to unload the containers in Egypt.
Officially the tubes were on their way to China's Shenyang Aircraft Corp. but, according to Der Spiegel, Berlin believes that this company was a front for North Korea. The German firm's business contact was a North Korean national, it said.
-------- britain
MP may be tried as traitor
Antony Barnett and Martin Bright
Sunday April 27, 2003
The UK Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,944392,00.html
George Galloway, the anti-war Labour MP who is suing over allegations he secretly took money from Saddam Hussein, faces the prospect of a criminal prosecution for treachery.
The Observer can reveal that the Director of Public Prosecutions is considering pursuing the Glasgow politician for comments during the Iraq war when he called on British troops not to fight.
In an interview with Abu Dhabi TV during the Iraq conflict, Galloway said: 'The best thing British troops can do is to refuse to obey illegal orders.' Lawyers for service personnel claim his call for soldiers to dis obey what he called 'illegal orders' amount to a breach of the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934. The maximum penalty is two years in jail.
The relevant part of the Act is Section 1, which states: 'If any person maliciously and advisedly endeavours to seduce any member of His Majesty's forces from his duty or allegiance to His Majesty, he shall be guilty of an offence.' Under the terms of the Act, the word 'maliciously' means wilfully and intentionally.
Galloway dismissed attempts to prosecute him, but said: 'I hope to have chiselled on my gravestone: "He incited them to disaffect."'
The lawyer spearheading the action is Justin Hugheston-Roberts, chairman of Forces Law, a nationwide group of 22 law firms which acts for service personnel and their families.
The case is being handled by Hugheston-Roberts's law firm in Wolverhampton, Rose Williams and Partners.
The last time a prosecution was brought under this law was in 1974, when a protester was charged after distributing leaflets outside Army camps urging soldiers not to accept postings to Northern Ireland.
Galloway's calls for British troops to disobey orders came during the TV interview in which he described Tony Blair and George Bush as 'wolves' for embarking on military action.
When accused of treachery, Galloway said: 'The people who have betrayed this country are those who have sold it to a foreign power and who have been the miserable surrogates of a bigger power for reasons very few people in Britain can understand.'
After Galloway made the comments on Abu Dhabi TV, Hugheston-Roberts wrote to the DPP asking him to prosecute or allow a private prosecution to be brought.
Last week the Crown Prosecution Service wrote to the lawyers requesting more information and details of the comments Galloway made.
Hugheston-Roberts has refused to reveal the identity of his clients, but said they were meeting this week to decide on the best course of action.
Hugheston-Roberts said if the CPS decided not to prosecute but gave consent for a private action, then his clients would be happy to pursue that avenue.
Human rights lawyers said last night it would be an extremely difficult case to pursue. Roger Bingham of the civil rights group Liberty said: 'Galloway's statement is an expression of opinion. We live in a free-speech, democratic society and elect MPs to speak out on national issues.'
Andrew Burgin, of the Stop the War Coalition denounced the move. He said: 'This war was immoral and illegal and should never have been fought. This proposal to prosecute is part of an ever-expanding witch-hunt against George Galloway because he was the most vocal anti-war voice.'
This latest twist comes as The Observer reveals details of a secret trip Galloway made to Morocco for the British-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Fagih, an Islamic fundamentalist who purchased a satellite phone used by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
In February 1996 Galloway flew to Morocco for a secret meeting with the then Crown Prince of Morocco to explore a deal between the Islamic Saudi dissidents in the UK and the Saudi royal family.
--------
Blair Urges U.S., Europe to Forge 'One Polar Power'
April 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-britain-blair.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Europe and the United States should work as ``one polar power'' to tackle the world's problems rather then bickering as they did over Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview published on Monday.
Speaking to the Financial Times newspaper, Blair said the best way to stop Washington acting unilaterally was to join forces with it rather than opposing it.
``I don't want to see a situation develop again in which either Europe or America sees a huge strategic interest at stake and we are not helping each other,'' Blair said in what the paper described as a warning to French President Jacques Chirac.
``Some want a so-called multi-polar world where you have different centers of power, and I believe will quickly develop into rival centers of power.
``And others believe, and this is my notion, that we need one polar power which encompasses a strategic partnership between Europe and America.''
``Those people who fear 'unilateralism' -- so called and in inverted commas -- in America should realize that the quickest way to get that is to set up a rival polar power to America.''
France led bitter opposition to the war in Iraq while Britain was easily Washington's closest and most important ally in the toppling of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Blair strove to reconcile the differing views in the United States and Europe but ultimately failed in his bid to get a second resolution from the United Nations Security Council sanctioning the use of force in Iraq.
While Blair insisted on the need to stand side-by-side with the United States, he also stressed the importance of Europe to Britain -- traditionally more skeptical about the drive toward European unity than many of its neighbors.
``To absence yourself from the main strategic alliance on your doorstep -- which is Europe -- would be an act of self-mutilation as a country,'' he said.
Blair told the paper it was important any new government in Baghdad had international legitimacy and said he was still convinced there were banned weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though none have surfaced since the U.S.-led invasion force took control of the country.
``I don't think it in the least surprising that it is going to take some time before we assemble the evidence.''
The prime minister also touched on the nuclear stand-off between the West and North Korea following reports by U.S. officials that Pyongyang had admitted having nuclear arms.
``It is not just the U.S. and Britain that regards a nuclear capability in the hands of North Korea as a threat,'' he said. ``I think China and South Korea would say the same.
``The question is how you deal with it. And again I think we have got to offer North Korea a way out of its present situation.''
On the domestic front, Blair said he his government would not succumb to growing militancy among the country's unions -- from firefighters to railway workers to teachers.
``We will not give in in any shape or form to any resurgent trade union militancy,'' he said. ``Trade unions have really got to understand that. That is absolutely fundamental to me.
-------- business
Halliburton: All In The Family
Halliburton nearly doubled the value of federal contracts it received - from $1.2 to $2.3 billion - during the five years Cheney was its CEO.
(CBS)
April 27, 2003
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/25/60minutes/main551091.shtml
After dropping more than 28,000 bombs on Iraq, the United States has now begun the business of rebuilding the country.
And it promises to be quite a business. With at least $60 billion to be spent over the next three years, the Iraqi people won't be the only ones benefiting. The companies that land the biggest contracts to do the work will cash in big-time.
Given all the taxpayer money involved, you might think the process for awarding those contracts would be open and competitive. Well, so far, it has been none of the above. And the early winners in the sweepstakes to rebuild Iraq have one thing in common: lots of very close friends in very high places, correspondent Steve Kroft reports.
One is Halliburton, the Houston-based energy services and construction giant whose former CEO, Dick Cheney, is now vice president of the United States.
Even before the first shots were fired in Iraq, the Pentagon had secretly awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root a two-year, no-bid contract to put out oil well fires and to handle other unspecified duties involving war damage to the country's petroleum industry. It is worth up to $7 billion.
But Robert Andersen, chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers, says that oil field damage was much less than anticipated and Halliburton will end up collecting only a small fraction of that $7 billion. But he can't say how small a fraction or exactly what the contract covers because the mission and the contract are considered classified information.
Under normal circumstances, the Army Corps of Engineers would have been required to put the oil fire contract out for competitive bidding. But in times of emergency, when national security is involved, the government is allowed to bypass normal procedures and award contracts to a single company, without competition.
And that's exactly what happened with Halliburton.
"We are the only company in the United States that had the kind of systems in place, people in place, contracts in place, to do that kind of thing," says Chuck Dominy, Halliburton's vice president for government affairs and its chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill.
He says the Pentagon came to Halliburton because the company already had an existing contract with the Army to provide logistical support to U.S. troops all over the world.
"Let me put a face on Halliburton. It's one of the world's largest energy services companies, and it has a strong engineering and construction arm that goes with that" says Dominy.
"You'll find us in 120 countries. We've got 83,000 people on our payroll, and we're involved in a ton of different things for a lot of wonderful clients worldwide."
"They had assets prepositioned," says Anderson. "They had capability to reach out and get sub-contractors to do the various types of work that might be required in a hostile situation."
"The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants, and I know that it's a perception that those at the very highest levels of the administration, Democrat and Republican, get involved in procurement issues. It can happen. But for the very most part, the procurement system is designed to keep those judgments with the career public servants."
But is political influence not unknown in the process? In this particular case, Anderson says, it was legally justified and prudent.
But not everyone thought it was prudent. Bob Grace is president of GSM Consulting, a small company in Amarillo, Texas, that has fought oil well fires all over the world. Grace worked for the Kuwait government after the first Gulf War and was in charge of firefighting strategy for the huge Bergan Oil Field, which had more than 300 fires. Last September, when it looked like there might be another Gulf war and more oil well fires, he and a lot of his friends in the industry began contacting the Pentagon and their congressmen.
"All we were trying to find out was, who do we present our credentials to," says Grace. "We just want to be able to go to somebody and say, 'Hey, here's who we are, and here's what we've done, and here's what we do.'"
"They basically told us that there wasn't going to be any oil well fires."
Grace showed 60 Minutes a letter from the Department of Defense saying: "The department is aware of a broad range of well firefighting capabilities and techniques available. However, we believe it is too early to speculate what might happen in the event that war breaks out in the region."
It was dated Dec. 30, 2002, more than a month after the Army Corps of Engineers began talking to Halliburton about putting out oil well fires in Iraq.
"You just feel like you're beating your head against the wall," says Grace. However, Andersen says the Pentagon had a very good reason for putting out that message. "The mission at that time was classified, and what we were doing to assess the possible damage and to prepare for it was classified," says Andersen. "Communications with the public had to be made with that in mind."
"I can accept confidentiality in terms of war plans and all that. But to have secrecy about Saddam Hussein blowing up oil wells, to me, is stupid," says Grace. "I mean the guy's blown up a thousand of them. So why would that be a revelation to anybody?"
But Grace says the whole point of competitive bidding is to save the taxpayers money. He believes they are getting a raw deal. "From what I've read in the papers, they're charging $50,000 a day for a five-man team. I know there are guys that are equally as well-qualified as the guys that are over there that'll do it for half that."
Grace and his friends are no match for Halliburton when it comes to landing government business. Last year alone, Halliburton and its Brown & Root subsidiary delivered $1.3 billion worth of services to the U.S. government. Much of it was for work the U.S. military used to do itself.
"You help build base camps. You provide goods, laundry, power, sewage, all the kinds of things that keep an army in place in a field operation," says Dominy.
"Young soldiers have said to me, 'If I go to war, I want to go to war with Brown & Root.'"
And they have, in places like Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo and now Iraq.
"It's a sweetheart contract," says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center For Public Integrity, a non-profit organization that investigates corruption and abuse of power by government and corporations. "There's no other word for it."
Lewis says the trend towards privatizing the military began during the first Bush administration when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, commissioned the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to do a classified study on whether it was a good idea to have private contractors do more of the military's work.
"Of course, they said it's a terrific idea, and over the next eight years, Kellogg, Brown & Root and another company got 2,700 contracts worth billions of dollars," says Lewis.
"So they helped to design the architecture for privatizing a lot of what happens today in the Pentagon when we have military engagements. And two years later, when he leaves the department of defense, Cheney is CEO of Halliburton. Thank you very much. It's a nice arrangement for all concerned."
During the five years that Cheney was at Halliburton, the company nearly doubled the value of its federal contracts, and the vice president became a very rich man.
Lewis is not saying that Cheney did anything illegal. But he doesn't believe for a minute that this was all just a coincidence.
"Why would a defense secretary, former chief of staff to a president, and former member of congress with no business experience ever in his life, not for a day, why would he become the CEO of a multibillion dollar oil services company," asks Lewis
"Well, it could be related to government contracts. He was brought in to raise their government contract profile. And he did. And they ended up with billions of dollars in new contracts because they had a former defense secretary at the helm."
Cheney, Lewis says, may be an honorable and brilliant man, but "as George Washington Plunkett once said, 'I saw my ... seen my opportunities and I took them."
Both Halliburton and the Pentagon believe Lewis is insulting not only the vice president but thousands of professional civil servants who evaluate and award defense contracts based strictly on merit.
But does the fact that Cheney used to run Halliburton have any effect at all on the company getting government contracts?
"Zero," says Dominy. "I will guarantee you that. Absolutely zero impact."
"In fact, I wish I could embed [critics] in the department of defense contracting system for a week or so. Once they'd done that, they'd have religion just like I do, about how the system cannot be influenced." Dominy has been with Halliburton for seven years. Before that, he was former three-star Army general. One of his last military assignments was as a commander at the Army Corps of Engineers.
And now, the Army Corps of Engineers is also the government agency that awards contracts to companies like Halliburton.
Asked if his expertise in that area had anything to do with his employment at Halliburton, Dominy replies, "None."
But Lewis isn't surprised at all.
"Of course, he's from the Army Corps. And of course, he's a general," says Lewis. "I'm sure he and no one else at Halliburton sees the slightest thing that might look strange about that, or a little cozy maybe."
Lewis says the best example of these cozy relationships is the defense policy board, a group of high-powered civilians who advise the secretary of defense on major policy issues - like whether or not to invade Iraq. Its 30 members are a Who's Who of former senior government and military officials.
There's nothing wrong with that, but as the Center For Public Integrity recently discovered, nine of them have ties to corporations and private companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts. And that's just in the last two years.
"This is not about the revolving door, people going in and out," says Lewis. "There is no door. There's no wall. I can't tell where one stops and the other starts. I'm dead serious."
"They have classified clearances, they go to classified meetings and they're with companies getting billions of dollars in classified contracts. And their disclosures about their activities are classified. Well, isn't that what they did when they were inside the government? What's the difference, except they're in the private sector."
Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the defense policy board last month after it was disclosed that he had financial ties to several companies doing business with the Pentagon.
But Perle still sits on the board, along with former CIA director James Woolsey, who works for the consulting firm of Booz, Allen, Hamilton. The firm did nearly $700 million dollars in business with the Pentagon last year.
Another board member, retired four-star general Jack Sheehan, is now a senior vice president at the Bechtel corporation, which just won a $680 million contract to rebuild the infrastructure in Iraq.
That contract was awarded by the State Department, which used to be run by George Schultz, who sits on Bechtel's board of directors.
"I'm not saying that it's illegal. These guys wrote the laws. They set up the system for themselves. Of course it's legal," says Lewis.
"It just looks like hell. It looks like you have folks feeding at the trough. And they may be doing it in red white and blue and we may be all singing the "Star Spangled Banner," but they're doing quite well."
----
Shultz denies role in Bechtel's Iraq deal
GOP insider says he 'made no calls'
Julian Guthrie,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/27/BA300122.DTL
Former Secretary of State George Shultz, the imposing, blue-eyed eminence grise of Republican politics, finds himself at the center of an international controversy over his support of the Iraq invasion and the role of San Francisco's Bechtel Group in postwar Iraq.
But the perennial power player -- and ex-president of the construction and engineering giant -- says that he played no part in landing Bechtel's deal to rebuild Iraq.
In an interview Wednesday at his quiet and spacious wood-paneled office at Bechtel -- three floors up from metal barricades erected to keep street level protesters at bay -- Shultz was soft-spoken and unflappable.
"I made no calls," he said. "I had no contact with the government. I had nothing to do with the contract. The bidding process was transparent. The process is a very careful one."
But the allegations don't seem to be going away.
"George Shultz has a long and deep connection to both Bechtel and the Republican Party," said Antonia Juhasz, project director of the International Forum for Globalization in San Francisco.
Shultz, who is married to San Francisco's chief of protocol, Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is a member of Bechtel's board of directors and was president of the firm for eight years before joining the Reagan administration. The Iraq contract could be worth up to $680 million.
"This was absolutely not a transparent bidding process," Juhasz said. "It was a private request for bids put out to a handful of select companies. A more open process would have alleviated concerns of insider connections."
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and lead sponsor of a bipartisan bill that would open up the process of procuring contracts to rebuild Iraq, said: "There's a troubling pattern that's emerging here, with very influential companies and parties getting awarded contracts.
"There ought to be a public explanation of how these companies are being picked."
A New York Times column Monday began with the words, "Somewhere George Shultz is smiling." The columnist wrote that Shultz "wanted this war with Iraq.
Oh, how he wanted the war" and that "blatant warmongering followed immediately by profiteering" raises questions about why Americans were fighting and dying in Iraq.
Such statements anger Shultz, who is a veteran of World War II.
"It's so preposterous, so low," Shultz said. "I'm a soldier. I served in combat. I saw people die. War is a brutalizing thing. Anyone who's been in war is not in favor of war."
Shultz was in favor of getting rid of biological and chemical weapons that he believes Saddam Hussein possessed and of replacing a dictatorship with democracy. He said that for decades he has warned of the imminent threat of terrorists.
In words similar to those employed by President Bush to press his case for war, Shultz said stronger action was needed to deter and punish terrorists. "Violence and aggression must be met by firm resistance," Shultz said in an October 1984 speech. "Fighting terrorism will not be a clean or pleasant contest, but we have no choice."
Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who didn't always see eye to eye with Shultz during the Reagan years, dismissed the flurry of criticism and insinuations around Shultz and the Bechtel deal.
"Any company that gets a big contract is going to face people who start searching wildly for something evil," said Weinberger, who was Bechtel's general counsel and served on the board of directors from 1975 to 1981.
"If the contract had been awarded to Halliburton, you'd have the same suspicions and noise," Weinberger said. "The subject, however, would be that the company's former chairman (Dick Cheney) is now vice president. There's a strong desire to criticize and find something that's wrong."
Weinberger, who says he is -- "sadly" -- no longer affiliated with Bechtel, believes there are only a handful of companies in the world that could rebuild Iraq.
"You want to know the motives? The government wanted the job well done. Bechtel does the job well," he said.
Bechtel, a privately held company with 47,000 employees and revenues last year of $11.6 billion, has helped build high-profile projects, including the Hoover Dam, Bay Bridge, BART, the Trans-Arabian pipeline and the Channel Tunnel between England and France.
Shultz, who served as secretary of labor and of the Treasury as well as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Richard Nixon, left the White House in 1974 to join Bechtel.
"I met Steve Bechtel Jr. when I was secretary of labor," Shultz said, wearing a natty midnight blue suit with light blue pinstripes, made up of barely legible stitched letters reading "georgeshultzgeorgeshultzgeorgeshultz."
"People were telling me that labor relations in construction were terrible, but no one had any ideas on how to fix them. At one meeting, a young man got up and said, 'I know there are problems in construction, and I know what needs to be done.' His name was Steve Bechtel. I collared him, got to know him."
Shultz's role at Bechtel today, he said, is to offer his thoughts on matters ranging from the costs of a project to the procurement of goods such as cement.
"I'm on the board," Shultz said, "so when questions come up, I reflect on them, I give advice."
E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.
-------- chemical weapons
U.S. troops detect lethal chemicals in drum of liquid
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030427-83918938.htm
BAIJI, Iraq - Initial tests on a pile of 50-gallon drums found by U.S. troops near this small industrial town north of Baghdad came up positive for chemicals used to make weapons of mass destruction, military officials said.
"We've confirmed that we have a cyclo-sarin agent also known as CF," said Lt. Valerie Phipps, a chemical and biological weapons specialist with a reconnaissance element of the Army's 4th Infantry Division.
Tests of the fluid inside one drum, conducted by soldiers using field equipment including kits with chemical test paper, "also detected mustard [agent], and we detected another unknown agent," Lt. Phipps said.
Although military officials are waiting for more thorough tests on the fluid before calling the discovery of the 50-gallon drums a "smoking gun" for weapons of mass destruction, Lt. Phipps said that "usually, you don't get many false positives on mustard."
Lt. Col. Ted Col. Martin, the unit's commander, would not say the discovery was the evidence so eagerly sought by U.S. officials after the defeat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But he said his soldiers "may have latched onto the fact that [Saddam] had proof-positive for weapons of mass destruction."
Lt. Phipps said her unit with the 4th Infantry's 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry, was sent to secure and investigate the suspicious-looking pile of drums late Friday, after a U.S. Special Forces team discovered it near Baiji.
The town, home to one of Iraq's dozens of oil refineries, is on the western bank of the Tigris River about 20 miles north of Tikrit, birthplace of Saddam Hussein and a known pocket of his most loyal supporters.
Before last week, no U.S. troops had operated thoroughly in the area around Baiji. Such units as the 101st Airborne Division and the Marines bypassed the town on their way to Mosul, about 80 miles to the north.
Col. Martin, commander of 1st Squadron, said his soldiers located a total of 14 of the 50-gallon drums, which appeared to have been dumped hastily and were "sitting out in the wide open." Wearing gas masks and full-body protective suits, the soldiers punched a small hole in one drum to extract and conduct tests of the fluid inside.
Col. Martin said a sarin agent combined with a mustard agent could make a "superweapon" concoction of the lethal chemicals.
The fluid "looked clear in color like water," Lt. Phipps said. She said none of the other drums was opened.
Soldiers also discovered about 100 gas masks near the 50-gallon drums and the remains of what Col. Martin said likely were two "mobile labs," which appeared to have been looted by Iraqi civilians. Several Iraqis who live nearby told soldiers through an interpreter that there were chemicals in the area, Col. Martin said.
"To me, this is a pretty significant find," he said. "This is the first time I've had a soldier in my unit who can show me a piece of paper and say, 'Hey, this is positive for cyclo-sarin.' "
U.S. military officials increasingly have felt pressure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - or at least find the agents that could be used to make chemical and biological weapons.
Not only did U.S. troops cope with the threat of being attacked by such weapons, some worried that the international community and Americans back home would criticize the military if no chemical or biological agents are discovered.
Before the war, President Bush aggressively touted the need to strip Saddam of his arsenal of chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons, which he said were hidden from United Nations weapons inspectors.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that the hunt for Saddam's arsenal of such weapons is under way at numerous sites.
"On a continuing basis, we get a report out of known sites," he said, "and it's still a long road. I mean, we're at a small fraction of the number of potential sites."
One U.S. soldier said last night that before he was deployed to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom, it had bothered him deeply to see "all those actors in Hollywood" speaking out against the war.
"Now that we're finding all these chemicals over here, we can go and shove it in their face," the soldier said.
Other soldiers interviewed last week said that though they were concerned they might not find weapons of mass destruction, they were not afraid of what it would mean for the validity of the war effort.
"There's no doubt [Saddam] had them," said Capt. Joseph W. Vongs, intelligence officer for the 4th Infantry's Aviation Brigade. "Of course, I'm concerned about how the world views the United States. If we don't find chemical weapons, yeah, it's gonna make the United States look bad."
But, Capt. Vongs added, "I don't necessarily think it would make what we've done here any less justified."
Standing last night by the pile of 50-gallon drums, Col. Martin said: "After seeing what I've seen in this country, we don't have to find weapons of mass destruction to justify this mission."
Col. Martin appeared unfazed by the notion that his cavalry squadron, known as the "Buffalo Soldiers," might be on the verge of making history. Straining his voice to be heard over the noisy chopping of Army helicopters circling in the dark overhead, he said: "This is just another recon[naissance] mission to me."
1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry, was formed in 1866, when it consisted mainly of slaves freed after the Civil War. It won its nickname after battling armies of Indians in the Southwest. Indian fighters thought the hair on the heads of the freed blacks looked like Buffalo hair.
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US Testing Chemicals Found in Northern Iraq -Report
Sun April 27, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=PI4U4CQVDB4E0CRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=2636684
WASHINGTON - Initial tests have detected nerve and blistering agents in a barrel of chemicals found by U.S. forces in northern Iraq, ABC News reported.
A special forces reconnaissance team found 14 unmarked barrels, at least a dozen missiles and 150 gas masks at a site east of Baiji, 112 miles northwest of Baghdad, on Friday, ABC News said in a report on its Web site on Sunday.
A platoon of chemical weapons experts from the Army's 1-10 Cavalry was sent to the area and tests on one of the 55-gallon barrels were conducted on Saturday, it said.
"Lt. Valerie Phipps and her squad used three different methods to test liquid from one of the barrels. The preliminary tests showed it to be a mixture of three chemicals, including a nerve agent and blistering agent," ABC News said.
The United States said destroying Iraq's alleged chemical arms and other weapons of mass destruction was one of its main goals when it invaded Iraq last month. Iraq denied having such weapons.
Some chemicals previously found by U.S. forces and initially suspected of being chemical weapons materials turned out to be pesticides.
"Despite initial appearances, officials in Washington were stressing caution on the Baiji discovery, particularly in light of earlier false alarms," ABC News said.
Citing Pentagon officials, ABC News said any material found would be sent to Maryland for testing because the military does not have testing equipment in Iraq sophisticated enough to eliminate all pesticides. Such tests would take about a week.
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Germany and France to water down defence plan
By Judy Dempsey in Brussels
April 27 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051389530361&p=1012571727166
France and Germany will push to water down plans for an independent European defence force at a summit in Brussels on Tuesday in an attempt to repair their relations with the US. Advertisement
The summit - called by Guy Verhofstadt, Belgian prime minister - which includes leaders from France, Germany and Luxembourg only, is widely seen by other EU governments as anti-American and anti-Nato in its timing and intentions.
It is also seen as furthering divisions in a Europe already deeply split over Iraq. The anti-war stance of France and Germany, pitted against Britain, Spain and other countries, has left the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy in tatters.
Greece, the current EU president, will not be attending Tuesday's summit, nor will Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief. And without the participation of Britain - British officials say they were not invited, adding that the summit is unnecessary - diplomats from Belgium and Luxembourg admit it will be impossible to create any credible EU defence policy and capability without London.
The Netherlands and Italy, the other two founding members of the EU, were also not invited. "This is a very wobbly summit-like gathering," said a Dutch foreign ministry official. "It is bad on timing, bad on content and bad on the participating states."
Even France and Germany have become reluctant supporters of the event, called at the height of European opposition to the Bush administration in the run-up to the war against Iraq.
But Jacques Chirac, French president, is now desperate to repair relations with Washington. Diplomats say this explains why he does not want the summit to become a forum for Nato-bashing or for a European defence policy independent of the US-led military alliance.
"Chirac wants this summit to be as unprovocative as possible," said an EU diplomat. "At the same time he wants to support the idea of a stronger European defence policy. It may be a difficult balancing act."
The original aim of the summit was to beef up EU defence to avoid member states being dragged into ad hoc "coalitions of the willing" created by the US.
Mr Verhofstadt, a staunch advocate of a strong EU defence strategy, had already told Tony Blair, British prime minister, how he wants to create a separate European military headquarters with its own planning facilities. All multinational forces in the EU would be placed under a central command. The Dutch, fervent Atlanticists, say this would lead to unnecessary duplication with Nato.
Germany has also been watering down the Belgian proposals as it seeks to rebuild its relations with Washington. Berlin has publicly rejected calls for a European army, and opposes plans for integrated military headquarters.
Mr Verhofstadt, who faces elections next month, remains the only advocate of his own plans. He wants a much stronger collective defence clause to be included in proposals drawn up by the European Convention on the future of Europe.
The draft articles on defence so far only suggest a "solidarity clause", in which a member state might be assisted if it came under a terrorist or non-state attack.
-------- iran
Iran Tries to Avoid Row with U.S. Over Iraq
April 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-iran-usa.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian leaders have made a flurry of comments suggesting that they are prepared to engage more constructively with their long-time arch-enemy the United States after its swift seizure of power in neighboring Iraq. Senior U.S. officials have said they hoped Iraq's defeat would persuade Iran, Syria and North Korea to give up their ambitions for weapons of mass destruction. Last year Washington tagged Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' for allegedly aiding terrorism and pursuing nuclear arms. Advertisement
``Tehran does not want confrontation and friction with America in Iraq,'' newspapers quoted conservative National Security Council Chief Hassan Rohani as saying.
``Iranian leaders know their country is under serious threat. They obviously do not want to make Washington angry,'' political analyst Saeed Leylaz told Reuters.
After staying neutral in the U.S.-led war, Tehran welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who ordered the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
It has denied U.S. charges that it was interfering in postwar Iraq, but has urged the United States to leave the country at once and let Iraqis decide their own future.
President Mohammad Khatami's reformist allies have long argued the Islamic Republic's national interest calls for the restoration of ties with Washington, cut after militant Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy during the 1979 revolution.
But the reformers' calls were silenced last year by the intervention of Iran's most powerful figure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The hardline judiciary also declared that calling for the restoration of ties with Washington could be a crime.
Now even Iran's conservatives, who have spent more than two decades stoking enmity with the ``Great Satan,'' are trying to foster a policy of engagement and show good faith, marking a significant break with previous policy, analysts said.
``Iran's foreign policy must become more active and politically productive, otherwise tension will rise,'' newspapers quoted Mohsen Rezai, secretary-general of the influential, conservative-dominated Expediency Council, as saying.
``Iran can work with America directly... but we need a strong policy,'' he said, without going into detail.
RELIGIOUS RIVALRY REVIVED
Iran's central foreign policy goal now is trying not to bring down the wrath of Washington on its head and becoming the next target in the U.S. ``war on terror,'' analysts said.
Washington, worried by the sight of tens of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites demonstrating their political muscle last week in Najaf, a center of religious learning, has warned Iran not to stir up its co-religionists in Iraq.
Some 60 percent of Iraqis are Shi'ites, but Saddam Hussein, at the head of a secular regime, oppressed their religious leaders and banned their major pilgrimages. Shi'ite Iran has rejected the idea that it is interfering in Iraq by promoting a political role for Iraqi Shi'ites, and analysts say it may actually not want a rival religious state as its neighbor.
``No Iranian officials have suggested the formation of an Iranian-style government in Iraq,'' newspapers quoted Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi as saying.
Earlier this week Kharrazi told a news conference ``...we are not insisting on (the role of the Iraqi) Shi'ites...for us Shi'ites, Sunnis, Turks and Arabs are the same and everybody should play their role in a democratic Iraq.''
He also urged Washington to stop accusing Iraq's neighbors of interfering in Iraq and welcome their cooperation. ``Instead of accusing they should pay more attention and start cooperating with other countries.''
The re-emergence of Najaf in Iraq as the center of Shi'ite learning could threaten the position of the Iranian city Qom, which gained pre-eminence after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
``For a religious regime, nothing is worse than having a religious regime as a neighbor,'' said an analyst who asked not to be named. ``There will be disputes over who is the boss and who is the big brother.''
At least privately, some Iranian parliamentarians suggest a secular government for Iraq, although it is against Iranian law to advocate a secular political system for Iran itself.
``Look at what happened in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai is a secular person. He respects all people's rights much better than the Taliban who said they were religious leaders,'' said one deputy who asked not to be named.
``All Iranian leaders believe a secular government will be beneficial for all Iraqis and even for Iran,'' he said.
-------- iraq
Iraqis Lash Out Over Deaths at Arms Dump
April 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Blasts.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Hundreds of Iraqis frantically dug through the ruins of destroyed homes and screamed at U.S. troops, blaming them for a series of explosions at a U.S.-held weapons cache that pummeled a residential area and killed at least six people.
The U.S. military blamed unknown attackers who they said fired four flares Saturday into the sprawling open dump, laden with 80 Iraqi missiles, setting off a cascade of warheads, rockets and mortars that pummeled homes for miles.
``This is the safety that Bush promised us?'' demanded Munthir Safir, the blood of his family dried on the cloth of his white caftan. Around him, wailing women collapsed over the coffins of two adults and four teenagers.
``No Saddam! No Bush! Yes to Islam!'' fist-waving men shouted. The disaster touched off protests in the stricken Zafaraniyah neighborhood and in the city center.
Hours later, smoke still surged from the blackened crater left at the missile cache. Explosives boomed, a rocket whistled and rounds popped. One unexploded missile protruded from a lawn. U.S. forces promised to send removal experts.
One American soldier suffered a broken arm in the initial attack on the depot, said Col. John Peabody, commander of U.S. Army's 11th Engineering Brigade.
In Qatar, U.S. Central Command spokesman Lt. Mark Kitchens placed blame squarely on what he called ``the despicable people'' who allegedly fired the flares.
``This is not just an attempt to disrupt the process of peace. It's a crime against the Iraqi people,'' Kitchens said.
Elsewhere on Saturday, U.S. soldiers found 14 suspicious barrels, including one that preliminary tests found could contain a mixture of nerve and blistering agents, according to ABC News. The barrels were found about 25 miles north of Saddam Hussein's home region of Tikrit in a large weapons storage area that included missiles and missile parts. ABC was escorted to the site by the U.S. military.
Previous finds of chemicals suspected of being weapons of mass destruction have turned out to be false alarms. The Pentagon said it was aware of the report but could not confirm it.
The disaster in Baghdad struck at 7:50 a.m. as residents slept or assembled bread and tea for breakfast.
Out of sight of U.S. troops at the depot, someone fired four flares over a wall around an open field where ordnance had been stored, said Sgt. 1st Class Ronald King, a witness.
Americans said some of the tactical weapons had been stored there by Saddam's regime, which had stashed such items in schools, homes and other populated areas.
The U.S. military had put some of the ordnance there itself, however, collecting abandoned Iraqi caches from around the city for later disposal, King said.
The cache included Russian-made Frog-7s and Iraq's own Al Samoud 2 -- 80 missiles in all, said Peabody, whose unit had been helping at the site.
The flares hit an ammunition pit, setting fire to wooden ammo crates, King said. In a flash, deadly remnants of Saddam's regime were pounding homes without warning. Booms rattled windows across the city.
About a mile away, a missile plowed into a dirt lane between two rows of crude two-story homes. Walls crumbled and roofs blew off, demolishing four houses. Inside one, the impact killed a 50-year-old worker, his four teenage children and his 23-year-old daughter-in-law, a new mother.
``Our house collapsed. That's all I remember,'' Mohammed Khazaal, 15, said from a hospital bed, his head wrapped in bandages and gashes across his body. A brother of the dead young woman, he had been sleeping when the missile hit.
Nearby, medical workers treated deep cuts in the legs of Zeineb Thamer, the year-old daughter of the woman who died. Blood matted Zeineb's light-brown hair. In English, the message on her T-shirt declared, ``Welcome, Little Friend.''
Peabody said 10 or more Iraqis were wounded. Two of them were said to be near death.
U.S. forces initially came under small-arms fire when they went to the scene, Peabody said. They returned fire. There was no word on further casualties.
Peabody wouldn't speculate on exactly who fired the flares. ``Somebody who does not want us to be here,'' he said.
Ultimately, Peabody said, the fallen Iraqi regime was responsible. ``We are very sorry that the practice of Saddam Hussein putting his missiles ... throughout Baghdad has resulted in this.''
In Zafaraniyah, residents described days of what appeared to be U.S.-controlled blasts at the missile dump, apparently to destroy leftover Iraqi weaponry.
Mohammed Hussein said he and some neighbors had personally visited U.S. military officers to stress that the depot was near crowded neighborhoods. American forces stopped night explosions after that, and ended the daytime ones three or four days ago, Hussein and others said.
Many Iraqis in the area, though, contended that an intentional American blast had triggered the disaster.
``Why?'' one distraught man demanded when three American soldiers went to look for missile parts in the shattered home. Responded one American: ``It's not our fault.''
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U.S. Says Turks Are Smuggling Arms Into Northern Iraq City
By DAVID ROHDE
April 27, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27TURK.html?ei=1&en=831c605d4bdd5499&ex=1052407148&pagewanted=print&position=
KIRKUK, Iraq, April 26 - Men who identified themselves as Turkish Special Forces soldiers tried to smuggle grenades, night-vision goggles and dozens of rifles into this oil-producing city in northern Iraq this week, American military officials said today. The officials say they believe that the weapons, which were hidden in an aid convoy, were bound for ethnic Turkmens living here.
Tonight, gunfire erupted as aid was distributed at a Turkmen political office in the city. One Arab and one Turkmen were wounded, witnesses said. It was unclear what led to the shooting.
Turkey has repeatedly said it might launch a military incursion into northern Iraq, citing what it says is abuse of Turkmens by Arabs and Kurds. Turkmens make up less than 5 percent of Iraq's population.
The discovery of the smuggled arms came on Wednesday, when a Turkish aid convoy reached an American checkpoint north of the city, officials said. American soldiers, who had heard that Turkish Special Forces soldiers were trying to enter the city, questioned the men.
"They were all in civilian clothes, and they didn't produce anything that they were authorized to be in the area," an American military official said. "They identified themselves as Turkish Special Forces."
The American seized and then searched the half dozen vehicles in the convoy. They found several dozen AK-47 assault rifles and other military equipment, including a small number of American-made M-4 rifles and grenade launchers.
Night-vision goggles, radio scanners, pistols and banners and flags of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, the main Turkmen political party in Iraq, were also found. About half of the roughly two dozen men in the convoy identified themselves as Turkish Special Forces soldiers. American soldiers escorted them to the border.
Kemal Yaycili, chief of the Turkmen front's new offices in Kirkuk and nearby Mosul, said local Turkmens needed to defend themselves against "our enemies." He said that six members of the ethnic group had been killed in Kirkuk since it was captured two weeks ago and that three had been killed in Mosul.
Kurds have expelled 300 Turkmens from their homes, he said. "Really, when we feel any threat, when we feel anyone bother us from outside," Mr. Yaycili said, "we have a right to ask for help from the outside." But he added that security was improving.
Kirkuk sits on top of huge oil reserves, and Kurds and Arabs claim that 100,000 members of each of their groups were expelled from the city by Saddam Hussein's government.
American military officials who have been trying to ease tensions in Kirkuk reacted with frustration to the arms smuggling. "As we are trying to maintain stability," one said. "We don't need an outside force coming in and stirring things up."
Col. William Mayville, the commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which patrols Kirkuk, said he had been urging Turkmen leaders to use the fall of Mr. Hussein to begin a new chapter in their relationship with the local Kurds. "They were a group that was a minority that did suffer under Saddam Hussein," he said. "I think it's time for the Turmen here to re-evaluate their relationships."
Gular el-Nakib, a 48-year-old teacher was one of dozens of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens lounging near the city's central square tonight. "We don't want differences; we want to live happily without enemies," she said. "Our main enemy is gone."
----
Ties between al Qaeda, Saddam revealed
By Inigo Gilmore
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
April 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030427-87318755.htm
BAGHDAD - Iraqi intelligence documents provide fresh evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's regime, including discussions of a visit by bin Laden to Iraq.
Papers found here in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al Qaeda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998.
The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish and maintain a relationship between Baghdad and al Qaeda based on mutual hatred of the United States and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad.
The papers show that, despite denials by both sides, Saddam's regime desired to "maintain contacts" with bin Laden and al Qaeda.
The Sunday Telegraph found the file on bin Laden inside a folder lying in the rubble inside a room of the bombed intelligence headquarters. There are three pages, stapled together; two are on paper headed with the insignia and lettering of the Mukhabarat.
The file shows correspondence between Mukhabarat agencies over preparations for the visit of al Qaeda's envoy, who traveled to Iraq from Sudan, where bin Laden was based until 1996.
The documents recount what Baghdad hoped to achieve from the meeting, which took place less than five months before bin Laden was placed at the top of America's most-wanted list following the bombing of two U.S. embassies in east Africa.
Perhaps aware of the sensitive subject matter, Iraqi agents at some point clumsily attempted to mask all references to bin Laden, using white correcting fluid. When the dried fluid was carefully removed, however, the name is clearly legible three times.
The file contradicts the claims of Baghdad, bin Laden and officials of some Western governments that there was no link between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda.
One Western intelligence official described the file as "sensational," adding: "Baghdad clearly sought out the meeting. The regime would have wanted it to happen in the capital, as it's only there they would feel safe from surveillance or detection."
One paper dated Feb. 19, 1998, is marked, in handwriting, "Top Secret and Urgent." It is signed "MDA," a code name believed to be the director of an intelligence section within the Mukhabarat. It refers to the planned trip by bin Laden's unnamed envoy and arrangements for his visit.
A letter with this document says the envoy is a trusted confidant of bin Laden. It adds: "According to the above, we suggest permission to call the Khartoum station to facilitate the travel arrangements for the above-mentioned person to Iraq. And that our body carry all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden."
Khartoum station is Iraq's intelligence office in Sudan.
The letter refers to bin Laden as an opponent of the Saudi Arabian regime and says the message to convey to him through the envoy "would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him."
According to handwritten notes at the bottom of the page, the letter was passed through another director in the Mukhabarat and on to the deputy director general of the intelligence service.
It recommends that "the deputy director general bring the envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."
The deputy director general penned his signature of approval to the document. All of the signatories use code names.
The other documents confirm that the envoy traveled from Khartoum to Baghdad in March 1998, staying at al-Mansour Melia, a first-class hotel. It mentions that his visit was extended by a week.
In notes in a margin, the name Mohammed F. Mohammed Ahmed is mentioned, but it is not clear whether this is the envoy or an agent.
Intriguingly, the Iraqis refer to sending back an oral message to bin Laden, perhaps aware of the risk of a written message being intercepted. However, the documents do not mention whether a meeting took place between bin Laden and Iraqi officials.
Over the past two weeks, the Sunday Telegraph has discovered various other intelligence files in the wrecked Mukhabarat building. They include documents revealing how Russia passed on to Iraq details of private conversations between Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and how Germany held clandestine meetings with the Iraqi regime.
The latest revelation coincides with the arrest of Farouk Hijazi, who was captured Friday by U.S. forces in Iraq near the Syrian border. Mr. Hijazi became head of external operations for the Mukhabarat in the 1990s.
Washington says he was the link man between Iraq and al Qaeda and that he met bin Laden in Kandahar before the September 11 attacks, when he was Iraq's ambassador to Turkey.
----
Airfield, missiles, suspects seized
By Stephen Coates
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
April 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030427-38762485.htm
BAQUBAH, Iraq - U.S. forces seized an airfield yesterday in the northeastern Iraqi city of Baqubah near the border with Iran, along with a stash of missiles and dozens of people suspected of hiding weapons.
Officers with the 4th Infantry Division said U.S. troops detained 40 Iraqis but met no resistance as they moved into the airfield on the northern edge of the city in the early morning.
"This was not a military target, but it will most likely become a forward operating base for us where we will push logistical assets," said Lt. Col. Robert Valdivia.
Two men also were detained outside the air base after Iraqi military assault rifles were found in their van. Intelligence officers said they appeared to be arms dealers.
Some soldiers reported seeing a vehicle mounted with a heavy machine gun fleeing from a village nine miles outside the airport as the U.S. troops approached. Local residents also pointed U.S. troops to a stash of 12 missiles, which Iraqi soldiers apparently had left there several weeks ago.
Col. Valdivia said U.S. regular forces had not yet established control in Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, where several paramilitary groups are believed to be competing for control.
"We did not meet any resistance, but that does not mean there are not MEK or other noncompliant forces operating here in Baqubah," he said. MEK stands for Mojahedin Khalq, or the People's Mojahedin, the main armed Iranian opposition.
Saddam Hussein sheltered the People's Mojahedin, and the U.S.-led coalition targeted its bases. However, the U.S. military says it has reached a cease-fire agreement with the group.
A spokesman for the group has said the truce agreement allows the guerrillas to keep their arms and carry on their fight against Tehran.
The Baqubah airport showed no signs of recent use but was littered with the remains of light and vintage aircraft, including helicopters bearing the Iraqi flag that were bulldozed aside to make way for U.S. tanks and fighting vehicles.
More forces from the 4th Infantry's 2nd Brigade are expected in the coming days to pour into the airfield, from where they will conduct operations throughout Diyala, between the Iranian border and the northeastern edge of Baghdad.
U.S. forces now control at least five air bases in the country. The Pentagon has denied news reports the United States is seeking a base for military operations in Iraq after an Iraqi government is established.
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An Air War of Might, Coordination and Risks
By Bradley Graham and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42694-2003Apr26?language=printer
Several days into the war against the government of Saddam Hussein, sandstorms raged across Iraq, and thinly stretched U.S. ground forces paused in their rapid march to Baghdad. But there was no pause in the air war. On the contrary, Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley ordered a dramatic escalation in the assault on Iraqi military forces dug in south of the capital.
"We're killing the Republican Guard," Moseley said at the close of his morning briefing at the U.S. air operations center in Saudi Arabia, according to a deputy. "But I want you to kill them faster."
Moseley did not just order more attacks; he rearranged the air battle. In a risky bid to extend strike missions by making it easier for planes to refuel, he ordered tanker aircraft -- which are relatively vulnerable, because they lack their own warning radar and armaments -- to venture into Iraqi airspace, even though Iraq's dense air defense network had not been eliminated.
At the same time, he shifted large, lumbering and similarly vulnerable surveillance aircraft into Iraq. Among them were JSTARS radar planes, each equipped with a Doppler radar system capable of viewing hundreds of square miles at once -- and unaffected by blowing sand.
Information from JSTARS and other monitoring systems was relayed in minutes to target planners on the ground, who then sent attack instructions to AWACS control planes over Iraq, which in turn directed warplanes to the target. "If the Iraqis moved in a coherent formation, they were immediately detected and targeted," said Maj. Jon Prindle, a senior JSTARS director. "Most of them got destroyed."
With such imagery streaming into the air operations center, U.S. commanders "knew the layout of the Republican Guard forces better than their own division commanders did," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Dan Darnell, the center's director.
Although television cameras captured the dramatic bombardment of downtown Baghdad, Moseley's aggressive prosecution of the broader air war -- a campaign that dropped 29,000 bombs and missiles on thousands of targets in Iraq -- played out largely behind the scenes. There were several reasons for this: Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations playing host to U.S. air crews refused to accept embedded reporters, who might have conveyed a greater sense of the air strategy to American audiences; many targets were out of sight of journalists on the battlefield; and senior military officials did not discuss their strategy in public.
But in interviews over the past week, Air Force pilots and battlefield commanders described an air campaign significantly different from any the United States had waged before, one that not only featured far greater use of overhead imagery and all-weather precision munitions but that also saw an unprecedented degree of coordination between air and ground forces.
The main result was an intense, sustained air assault on Iraqi forces that cleared the way for the speedy advance of U.S. ground troops into Baghdad, followed by the sudden collapse of resistance in the Iraqi capital.
Beyond technology, the air war also stood out for the way commanders fought it, showing a willingness to take considerable risks -- risks that mirrored those taken by ground commanders, who invaded with a smaller force than traditionalists would have liked. They were emboldened in part by the fact that Iraqi air defense forces put up less of a threat than anticipated, never sending their own fighter jets aloft and keeping their targeting radars turned off to avoid being located by U.S. planes. But the Americans also had planned an aggressive campaign from the start.
Moseley credited Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war's top commander, with setting the campaign's push-the-limits tone before the first bombs fell.
Franks's "guidance was to make it 'fast and final,' " Moseley said in written response to questions. "That was the mark on the wall for his commanders."
Pulling Punches
That aggressive spirit was evident from the beginning. When the air campaign kicked off in earnest on March 21, it unleashed more than 2,500 missiles and bombs across Iraq in the first 72 hours. There were 11 missions reflected in the campaign's daily blueprint, the "air tasking order." They included close air support for Special Operations Forces in southern, western and northern Iraq; suppression and destruction of Iraqi air defenses; and missions designed to keep Iraq's air force on the ground by patrolling the sky and bombing Iraqi airfields.
Nonetheless, two senior military officials acknowledged that U.S. commanders, anticipating a possible quick victory, pulled some punches in the opening days of airstrikes. In part to limit civilian casualties, about two dozen targets, mostly communication nodes and a few leadership sites, were dropped from the hit list, they said.
"There was a hope that there would be a complete and utter collapse of the regime early on," said Lt. Col. David Hathaway, deputy chief of strategy at the Combined Air Operations Center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. "In order to let that come to fruition, they initially held back those targets."
When U.S. and British ground troops entered southern Iraq a day ahead of schedule on March 21, scores of other targets in that region also fell off the list. Hundreds of bridges, rail lines, power stations and other facilities, once considered potential targets, were spared to preserve infrastructure for a speedier postwar recovery.
This restricted approach drew criticism from some inside and outside the Air Force for weakening the impact of what was widely labeled a "shock and awe" campaign. But architects of the strategy said they believed that by focusing the first strikes on Hussein's palaces, security operations, intelligence services and Baath party buildings, the protective screen around the Iraqi leader could be removed and his downfall precipitated.
"We wanted to make it clear to the Iraqi people that we were attacking regime targets," said Col. Mace Carpenter, chief strategist at the air operations center. "We wanted them to see that we were clearly targeting those people who had been repressing them."
Targeting the Guard
Once it became clear that the initial attacks had not broken the government's will to fight, the air campaign shifted focus to Republican Guard forces, particularly the three divisions -- the Medina, Hammurabi and Nida -- arrayed south of Baghdad.
While the ground forces paused during the last week of March to refuel, refit and wait for the sandstorms to blow over, air commanders pressed the attack.
"There was no pause," said Vice Adm. Timothy Keating, who commanded naval forces in the war, including more than 250 strike aircraft flying from five aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. "The visibility was lousy and I'm sure brutal for the folks on the ground, but from the various sensors we had and the very good intelligence work done before the campaign started, it was a simple matter to continue prosecuting a certain target set -- the Republican Guard. We could tell where they were."
Lt. Col. Robert Givens, an operations officer with the 524th Fighter Squadron who was piloting an F-16, could see through the dust using an infrared scope. With coordinates provided by Army intelligence officials, he bore in on a battalion of the Medina Division about 20 miles east of Karbala, dropping 500-pound, laser-guided GBU-12 bombs on eight tanks and infantry fighting vehicles one night.
"We would set up different types of attack patterns to try to be random to defeat any enemy gunners, who were still shooting in the sandstorm, still putting up antiaircraft artillery," Givens said in a telephone interview.
The Iraqis appeared to believe the sandstorm would provide cover. For example, instead of dispersing to avoid detection, so many T-72 tanks and other armored vehicles ended up packed together tightly near Najaf that a U.S. strike took out 30 of them with four satellite-guided bombs, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. Dan Leaf, the senior air commander at the allied land forces headquarters in Kuwait.
Lt. Col. Mike Webb, an operations officer for the 190th Fighter Squadron, told how A-10 attack planes in his unit were given additional latitude to operate during the sandstorm. Normally, he said, A-10 pilots are required to identify their targets "either by eyeball -- binoculars -- or onboard sensors" before firing. But in this case, the requirement was lifted. Authorization to drop 1,000-pound CBU-87 cluster munitions -- weapons that disperse hundreds of smaller bomblets across the ground -- on Republican Guard positions came from airborne controllers, who took responsibility for assessing the potential damage to civilians.
"At any other time, that would not be standard procedure for us," Webb said.
As the weather improved, the attacks on the Republican Guard intensified, occupying more than two-thirds of the approximately 800 strike missions being flown by U.S. and allied aircraft in the war's second week. By then, U.S. forces had seized Tallil air base outside Nasiriyah and turned it into a refueling station for A-10 attack planes, providing them an extra hour over most target areas.
Aircraft flying a variety of missions over all parts of Iraq were also instructed, before returning home, to circle back over the Republican Guard divisions and unload whatever ordnance they still had on board.
Finishing the Job
Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which had distinct air and ground campaigns, this air war was designed, in Darnell's words, to stay "very tightly lashed" to the ground campaign.
To pound the Republican Guard harder, U.S. commanders had to resolve an early difficulty with what the military calls the "fire support coordination line." That is the line, demarcated ahead of advancing Army forces, that keeps U.S. warplanes from bombing too close to U.S. ground troops. But in this case, it had been set so far ahead that it was inhibiting air attacks on Iraqi fighters on whom U.S. soldiers were closing in.
When the problem became clear, Moseley arranged with Army ground commanders to allow warplanes to operate behind the line in 30-mile-by-30-mile "kill boxes" -- areas that had been identified as free of U.S. troops.
"The first few days, things were moving so fast that it was difficult to optimize the use of anything," said one senior Air Force officer who requested anonymity. "There's a price to be paid for simultaneity."
By pushing the tankers and surveillance aircraft north nearer to Baghdad starting on March 24, Moseley was extending the time that U.S. warplanes could spend over Iraq between refuelings and support advancing Army and Marine forces. Moseley himself questioned whether his gamble was paying off and queried Leaf after several days. Leaf recalled telling Moseley that the improved intelligence from the surveillance aircraft was indeed proving "worth the risk."
Moseley left the guarded security of the air operations center on April 3 and flew on a tanker mission that brought him within 60 miles of Baghdad.
"He knew he was pushing the risk envelope, and he wanted to show the folks who flew for him that he was willing to take the risk," Leaf said.
Much of the air attack on the Republican Guard by then was being watched -- and coordinated -- by soldiers and Marines on the battlefield. On April 4, for instance, as the Marines were advancing on Baghdad, a Hunter reconnaissance drone spotted a large group of Iraqi artillery and other military vehicles moving out of the capital under the cover of darkness. In the Marines' Combat Operations Center, the video stream played live on a display screen, and the officers coordinated a devastating attack on the convoy.
Lt. Col. David Pere, the senior watch officer, called out grid coordinates as other officers forwarded them either by telephone or even Internet chat rooms. A flock of F/A-18 Hornets and AV/8B Harriers raced to the scene. On the video, tiny figures could be seen running from the vehicles. At times a giant flash of light would blind the Hunter camera, and all that would be left on the highway would be smoking wreckage. On a few occasions, the initial hit was followed by repeated secondary explosions and crackling fireworks, suggesting that an ammunition truck had been struck.
A bomb-damage assessment report indicated that about 80 vehicles were destroyed in what amounted to a turkey shoot.
By April 4, U.S. Army intelligence estimated the Medina Division had been reduced to 18 percent of its full strength. The Hammurabi Division was rated at 44 percent. An Army intelligence officer, presenting these figures to unit commanders, added: "These numbers are somewhat in dispute. They may actually be lower." Battle over Baghdad
As they bore down on Republican Guard forces in the field, U.S. commanders also turned more aggressive in striking Baghdad, going after those targets that had been held back initially out of concern for avoiding civilian casualties or damaging civilian property. These included not only telephone exchanges and other communication nodes, but also Iraqi television broadcast facilities.
To provide air cover for the U.S. Army and Marine forces moving into Baghdad, air commanders had developed a special concept for close-air support in a large urban area. It involved stacking different types of warplanes with varying munitions over the city to provide multiple attack options. It also involved allowing aircraft to fly as low as they needed to identify targets and to shoot.
For the A-10s, which are equipped with 30mm Gatling guns, this meant getting down to 2,000 or 3,000 feet at times for strafing runs. Webb, the A-10 operations officer, said his aviators were "very concerned" about the lingering air defense threat in the capital, particularly from "dozens and dozens" of portable, shoulder-mounted launchers.
One shoulder-fired missile ended up downing an A-10 on April 8. Another A-10 was hit nine minutes later but managed to fly back to Kuwait. The day before, an A-10 was also struck but limped to Tallil air base.
Of 1,800 U.S. and allied aircraft, only two U.S. warplanes were lost to enemy fire: the A-10 over Baghdad and an F-15E fighter jet that went down April 7 near Tikrit north of the capital. The A-10 pilot was rescued; the two F-15E crewmen were killed.
One of the lingering mysteries is why no Iraqi warplane took to the air. Moseley suspects the Iraqi air force was intimidated by the U.S. attack, which included heavy bombing of airfields.
"We hit him pretty hard up front," Moseley said in a news conference on April 5. "So I believe that he has not flown because in their mind, they've made a calculation that they will not survive."
Correspondent Peter Baker in Iraq contributed to this report.
----
Was Tariq Aziz the coalition's mole?
By Con Coughlin
27/04/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/27/waziz27.xml
Iraq's former deputy prime minister, now in US hands, was the urbane public face of the Saddam regime. But he may have helped the allies to target his ex-boss, reports Con Coughlin
Saddam Hussein's security chiefs placed members of Tariq Aziz's family under arrest shortly before the start of the war to make sure that the former Iraqi deputy prime minister did not defect to the West, The Telegraph can reveal.
Concerns about the fate of his family - in particular his eldest son - if he surrendered to coalition forces was Aziz's primary concern during the lengthy negotiations that finally resulted in his decision to give himself up at the end of last week.
"Tariq was still terrified of what the remnants of Saddam's regime would do to his family if he surrendered to us," said a Western security officer. "Even if Saddam were dead, he knew that there were still Ba'ath Party loyalists who would want to exact revenge on his family."
As part of Aziz's surrender terms, coalition commanders agreed to place the Iraqi politician's immediate family under the equivalent of protective custody to ensure that they were safe from revenge attacks by Saddam loyalists.
But yesterday the favourable surrender terms agreed between coalition commanders and Aziz prompted speculation that Saddam's trusted foreign policy adviser may in fact be the Iraqi spy who provided the intelligence responsible for the cruise missile attack on the Iraqi dictator's bunker in southern Baghdad in the opening salvoes of the conflict.
Intelligence officials have claimed that the information they received that allowed them to target Saddam's bunker came from a "senior official" within the Ba'ath regime, and as one of the leading members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Aziz would have prior warning that Saddam was planning to hold a meeting at one of his heavily-fortified bunkers.
"You get the feeling, now that Aziz is safely in American custody, that he will be getting re-acquainted with people he has known for quite some time," said a former CIA officer who specialises in Iraq.
"The information that enabled the coalition forces to target Saddam in the opening hours of the war could only have come from someone like Aziz who had access to Saddam's inner circle."
There has been intense speculation about Saddam's fate since the attack on the bunker in the early hours of March 20. At first it was reported that Saddam had been killed in the attack, then it was suggested that he had suffered non-life threatening injuries that had been treated by a specialist team of Russian doctors.
Coalition officials appeared to confirm that Saddam had survived the initial strike when they bombed a restaurant complex in central Baghdad on April 7 at which the Iraqi dictator had been seen arriving with his younger son, Qusay, and other Ba'ath Party officials.
At the end of last week, however, President George W Bush said he believed that Saddam had either been killed or critically injured in the March 20 attack, and paid tribute to the "brave soul" who provided CentCom with the intelligence that enabled the attack to take place. Asked if the Iraqi spy was still alive, Mr Bush replied: "Yes he is. He is with us. Thank God."
Whether or not Aziz was responsible for providing intelligence about Saddam's whereabouts during the conflict, there is no doubt that the Iraqi dictator had become deeply suspicious about his deputy prime minister's intentions.
Relations between the two men had become strained in the aftermath of the Gulf war in 1991 when Saddam became concerned that Aziz, who was then his foreign minister, enjoyed too much popularity among Iraqis as a result of his well-publicised international diplomatic activities.
As the only Christian among the Sunni Muslim clique that controlled the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, Aziz has always been regarded as an outsider since he came to Saddam's attention in the 1970s for his staunch anti-Communist views, which he regularly aired in the columns of al-Thawra (The Revolution), the Ba'ath Party newspaper that he edited.
In recent years Aziz had been sidelined following his appointment as deputy prime minister, although he managed to retain his position on the all-important RCC, the Ba'athists' main decision-making body.
The only reason that Aziz managed to survive this period is that Saddam continued to rely on his expertise in foreign affairs, where his urbane charm enabled him to make an impact in countries that were eager to develop lucrative trade ties with Baghdad.
In the late 1990s, when Aziz failed to persuade the United Nations to lift the sanctions imposed on Iraq at the end of the Gulf war, Saddam briefly imprisoned the politician's eldest son as punishment.
In the weeks preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom, Saddam ordered the detention of several members of Aziz's family following suspicions that he was preparing to defect to the West.
When, shortly after the conflict started, however, Washington officials dropped heavy hints that the Iraqi official had defected, Aziz appeared before journalists in Baghdad angrily denouncing the claims, saying that he would "rather die" than be taken into custody by the Americans.
Aziz's surrender is undoubtedly an enormous propaganda coup for coalition commanders as he would never have contemplated surrendering if he thought there was any chance that Saddam or his two sons, Uday and Qusay, could continue to pose a threat.
Indeed, given his proximity to the regime, coalition commanders will be hoping that Aziz will be able to provide them with details of the fate of Saddam's family.
Whether he can bring any light to bear on the all-important issue of where Saddam's weapons of mass destruction arsenal is located is another matter.
Throughout the 30 years that Aziz worked for Saddam, he was never a member of the Iraqi dictator's inner circle and it is unlikely that he enjoyed a detailed knowledge of Saddam's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes.
Con Coughlin is the author of Saddam: The Secret Life (Macmillan).
----
CIA spirits away Aziz to secret site
IAN MATHER
Sun 27 Apr 2003
The Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=480242003
HIS arrest was announced amid a blaze of publicity but his whereabouts now are as shrouded in secrecy as those of the fellow members of Saddam's regime who are still on the run.
The arrest of Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy prime minister, was a major coup for the United States. The 67-year-old is the most senior of the 12 members of the Iraqi leadership to have surrendered or been captured by American forces.
Like the 11 who came before him, Aziz has been spirited to a secret location. Like them, the nature of his interrogation at the hands of the CIA is a mystery, as is the full extent of his co-operation with American efforts to find the 43 other most wanted members of the former Iraqi regime or their weapons of mass destruction.
Last night it was reported that Aziz had told his interrogators he had not seen Saddam since the devastating cruise missile attack on the dictator's bunker, which marked the beginning of the war. He is also said to have claimed the former Iraqi leader was, at the very least, seriously wounded in the attack.
Although Central Command in Qatar and the Pentagon are refusing to divulge the location of the Iraqi prisoners, Aziz and the other prisoners are believed to have been taken to one of two suspected interrogation centres.
The first is Camp Freddy, a large prisoner of war camp near Iraq's port of Umm Qasr, where the US is holding non-Iraqi prisoners of war while considering what to do with them. The second is one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad, occupied by the US military.
If the Iraqi leaders are being held in Camp Freddy, it raises the possibility that the US intends to follow the model it has established in Afghanistan. There, the CIA is using the converted Soviet base at Bagram as an interrogation centre for al-Qaeda suspects.
Bagram has acquired a sinister reputation amid accusations that prisoners are subjected to torture carried out by non-US nationals under CIA auspices.
So-called 'stress and duress' techniques - which involve keeping prisoners naked, forcing them to maintain uncomfortable positions for hours on end, sleep deprivation and disorientation - are said to have been used.
Post mortem examinations on two prisoners who died at Bagram in December suggest the interrogations may have gone further. The reports found they had suffered 'blunt force injuries' and both deaths were classified as homicides.
However, sources say this is unlikely to happen in Iraq. It appears the Iraqi prisoners have been co-operating in the hope of being spared prosecution and possibly given safe passage to another country in return for information.
It has been claimed that Aziz has offered to give up all he knows about Saddam's regime in return for a new identity and a new life in the UK.
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "You can be certain that the people who we have reason to believe have information are being interrogated by inter-agency teams, and they are in fact providing information that's useful."
Steven Aftergood, director of the intelligence project at the American Federation of Scientists, a Washington-based intelligence and defence industry centre, said he would not be surprised if deals were being cut with the prisoners.
"If they provide information, we might provide leniency for criminal activity. We might provide financial rewards. We might provide assistance in relocation. So there are deals to be made that could serve the interests of both sides," he said.
Aftergood's view is shared by retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel Rick Francona, who spent 20 years in intelligence.
"To convince them that it's in their best interest, you offer them deals. There are ways to get the information."
The International Committee of the Red Cross says civilians arrested should be covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the military by the Third Geneva Convention.
However, the US has refused to be drawn on the prisoners' status. Spokesmen at both the Pentagon and Central Command in Qatar said it had not been determined.
Al-Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay are regarded as 'unlawful combatants' by the White House and are therefore not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.
Rumsfeld has said that no decision had been taken as to whether any of the senior Iraqi officials being held by American-led forces would face criminal charges.
However, he said none - "regardless of what they are characterised as" - would be sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where 660 al-Qaeda suspects are being detained.
Dan Plesch, of the Royal United Services Institute in London, believes the fact that Iraqi police are now back on the streets suggests that coalition policy in Iraq fundamentally differs from that in Afghanistan. "Without a blush the Baghdad police have been transformed into Dixon of Dock Green," he said.
"There is no way that the Stasi in East Germany would have been allowed to take over law and order again, or the Gestapo in 1945.
"Coalition policy is clearly a lot more grey than we were led to believe, and it raises questions as to what other deals and arrangements are going on, even up to and including some of the top 55. What is the point of going after the 55 if the Gestapo are back on the streets? The US seems to be making it up as it goes along."
Nevertheless, the US has said that those facing war crimes will be tried either in America or in Iraq once an Iraqi legal authority is established.
American officials have pledged that as far as possible Iraqis will take the lead in bringing their own to justice. But Washington reserves the right to punish those responsible for crimes against its troops during this war and the 1991 Gulf war.
That raises the possibility that the US will follow the pattern set after the Second World War when the allies tried the Japanese and German high command and left lower-level officials to be tried by their own countries.
Yet of the 55 Iraqis on America's top wanted list, only nine are specifically named as war criminals. Even though they were wanted "dead or alive", the rest are in a legal limbo as murky as their current whereabouts.
A British official added: "You have to make a distinction between nine regime leaders, including Saddam himself, who are wanted for various crimes, and the rest, who are likely to escape such charges. The latter group may well decide that there is no point in trying to hide any longer." As the Americans and the British consolidate their hold on the country and the forces of law and order re-establish themselves, allied officials believe that the noose is tightening around the necks of the remaining fugitives.
Major Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokesman at Central Command's war headquarters in Qatar, said: "We are confident that the Iraqis themselves are taking control, and as they take control it is very probable they will turn in more people."
Mohammed Mohsen Al-Zubaidi, a former Iraqi exile who has declared himself governor of Baghdad, has claimed he gave the Americans the information that led them to arrest Aziz and his family.
Other former members of Saddam's regime have also been turned in by fellow Iraqis and some have chosen to give themselves up in the hope of carving out deals with the United States.
--------
THE POLICE
Dressed Up Amid Disorder, Unarmed Officers Stand Idle
April 27, 2003
The New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27POLI.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 - Warrant Officer Muhammad Shaqeer Abdul Razzaq, his black police beret in one hand and an ornately carved walking stick in the other, did not flinch at the crack of a dozen gunshots half a block away from the Althamiya Police Station, where he has worked for 30 years.
At an intersection up the road, a man wearing a red head scarf and belt cinched around a long white shirt waved a Kalashnikov rifle in the air, firing aimlessly to force cars to clear a path for the large orange truck he was trying to maneuver through a knot of afternoon traffic.
"We have no radios, no telephones, no guns," Mr. Razzaq said today with a shrug. "How can we face armed people if we don't have weapons ourselves?"
Outside the partly burned-out police station, a man holding a piece of gauze to his bloodied nose and mouth got out of a car to report to some of Mr. Razzaq's colleagues that he had just been shot at and assaulted. The police officers, dressed in olive-green uniforms and lounging in the shade, explained that there was nothing they could do.
"Where is the security that the Americans promised to provide the Iraqis?" the man said angrily before storming back to his car.
Baghdad's police force is being slowly reorganized after it disbanded earlier this month in the face of the American military advance. A small fleet of white police cars gathers each morning at the National Police College near the center of the capital, where the new "emergency police" get their orders before embarking on patrols across the city.
But the city's neighborhood police stations, which once provided residents with a reliable local presence, are still mostly unarmed and waiting for their orders.
Mr. Razzaq walked a visitor through the station's empty jail cell behind a white, steel-barred door. The half-dozen prisoners who had been locked up there were sent to a prison a few miles away as the sound of American gunfire drew near, and there are no plans to fill up the cell again anytime soon.
"We don't have the authority to arrest anybody," Mr. Razzaq said, limping from a shrapnel wound in his thigh, which he said came from an American missile that hit his home. "The Americans first have to establish a judicial system before we can start enforcing the law."
Mr. Razzaq said the police station operated normally until April 8, when American troops began moving through the city. When he came to work on April 9, he said he found the station empty, and he threw away his gun on the way home for fear of being shot by American soldiers.
Looters took the rest of the weapons left locked up in the station house, he said, showing a visitor where the armory door had been torn away. The room is now empty except for scorch marks from the fire that subsequently swept through part of the building.
Mr. Razzaq and his fellow officers returned to work last Tuesday after being told that the police force was being restored. So far, though, there hasn't been anything for them to do but dress up and wait. An American military patrol came by on Friday, Mr. Razzaq said, and told them to take off their uniforms, but only a few complied.
So they pass their day drinking tea and watching the traffic jams that form on the street outside, turning away those few who come by to make a complaint. They follow the news on a small radio and wait for the occasional notes that arrive by courier from the police college, where the force is based.
The neighborhood officers say their main concern is not security so much as salaries. Before the war, Mr. Razzaq earned about 60,000 dinars a month, or about $30 at the current exchange rate, and he was paid in advance for April.
But like most police officers in the city, he said, he rents his home. "If we don't get paid, we'll be out on the street," he said.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel to hold first issue of U.S.-backed bonds in July 2003
By Eytan Avriel,
27/04/2003
Haaretz
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=287607&contrassID=1&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Israel plans to hold its first issue of bonds backed by American loan guarantees in July 2003, TheMarker has learned from sources near the subject.
Altogether Israel is entitled to raise up to $9 billion in American-backed debt, at a pace of $3 billion a year. The sum involved is substantial, and allows the government to reduce its fund-raising efforts on the domestic market by tens of percent a month.
The price of the bonds will range from 40 to 60 basis points above ordinary American T-bills of the same period to maturation.
American government bonds today trade at yields of 3.9%. The yield on the Israeli government bonds should therefore range from 4.3% to 4.5%.
The U.S. has already agreed that Israel issue debt backed by the federal government, but the language of the guarantees has yet to be finalized. The issue at stake is strings the Americans mean to attach, such as an Israeli pledge not to use the proceeds of U.S.-backed bonds for investment in settlements.
The Americans also want Israeli assurances regarding the extent of the government's budget deficit, but the ceiling on the deficit, and how the deficit will be calculated, have yet to be stipulated.
Last week an Israeli treasury team headed by director-general Ohad Marani and deputy accountant-general Elded Frecher flew to Washington for talks with the American team, led by Gary Edson, deputy to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Once the strings have been spelled out, the Israeli and American teams can discuss the technical issue of the fundraising on the American capital market. Meanwhile, the Israelis are in talks with potential underwriters. The Finance Ministry says that the lead underwriter has not been chosen yet.
Because of the rock-bottom bond yields on the American market, the timing of the guarantees could not be better, from Israel's perspective. The Israeli government stands to save some NIS 900 million compared with the alternative - raising capital through "regular" bonds.
-------- mideast
U.S. Wants to Keep Persian Gulf Presence
April 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Rumsfeld.html
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- The United States wants to keep using military bases in friendly Persian Gulf countries, including a high-tech command center in Qatar where planners directed the war in Iraq, U.S. officials said Sunday.
Officials are considering moving the air operations center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which ran the Iraq air war. One possibility is a shift to the Qatar base, Camp As Sayliyah.
Gen. Tommy Franks, the top war commander, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld met with officials in the United Arab Emirates on the first stop of a tour of the region. After talks with the UAE's defense minister and chief of staff, Rumsfeld and Franks said American military forces were not going to leave any time soon.
``We assured them that the United States intends to do what is necessary to make sure there is a secure environment in Iraq,'' Rumsfeld said.
``There's no question but that the people of this region are safer today than they were when the Saddam Hussein regime was in power.''
Rumsfeld is in the region to meet with U.S. troops involved in the war in Iraq and to discuss America's role after overthrowing Saddam. Rumsfeld also plans to visit Afghanistan this week to see government leaders and U.S. troops.
The defense secretary has said the United States is considering reducing or rearranging its presence in the Persian Gulf region now that the threat from Iraq is over.
But Franks said a possible reduction in the American use of ports and air bases in the UAE did not come up Sunday. He said the issues needs more study.
Franks said the U.S. military presence in the region might increase, at least in the short term, as stability and humanitarian relief missions in Iraq and Afghanistan continue.
The United States also wants to keep using the Qatar command center built just before the war and used by Franks as his headquarters for the Iraq campaign.
``We do know that we want to use it, now that we have it,'' Franks said.
Rumsfeld and Franks said they are pleased with progress in the search for top members of Saddam's government. Ordinary Iraqis are a big help, Franks said.
``They want these people out of their country,'' Franks said.
U.S. forces announced Sunday they had captured Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, Saddam's chief contact with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Amin was No. 49 on the U.S. list of 55 most wanted Iraqis. His capture brings to 13 the number of officials on that list whom U.S. officials have acknowledged as being in custody.
Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz seems to be cooperating with his American interrogators but his claims must be checked to see if they are true, Franks said. Aziz turned himself in to U.S. forces in Baghdad on Thursday.
``How cooperative and how truthful he is, we'll have to see over time,'' Franks said.
The general said the United States will have to search several thousand sites for evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. American forces started the war with a list of about 1,000 suspect sites, and for each site on the list, Iraqis tell Americans about one or two others, Franks said.
U.S. troops found about a dozen 55-gallon drums in an open field in northern Iraq, and initial tests indicated one of them contained a mixture of a nerve agent and mustard agent, an American officer said Sunday.
Iraq is becoming more stable and secure every day, Franks said, but it is up to President Bush and Rumsfeld to decide when to declare that major combat is over. Tensions inside Iraq still simmer, he said.
``There is a great deal of uncertainty. There is a great deal of fear,'' Franks said. ``There are tribal animosities. There are religious animosities.''
In Abu Dhabi, Rumsfeld and Franks said they thanked the UAE leaders for their war help, which included sending troops to Kuwait and humanitarian aid to Iraq.
UAE officials did not speak to journalists or issue a statement after the talks.
Franks and Rumsfeld met with Crown Prince Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the son of the UAE president. The UAE's defense minister, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and chief of staff of the armed forces, Lt. Gen. Sheik Mohammad Zayed Al Nahyan, also participated.
U.S. troops have used bases in the UAE since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which the UAE joined the coalition to oust Saddam's invading forces from Kuwait. American aircraft using the al-Dhafra air base near Abu Dhabi have included U-2 and Global Hawk surveillance planes as well as refueling tankers.
The UAE government has not indicated it wants to close off its bases to the United States, a U.S. official said Sunday. The UAE's concerns include a territorial dispute with Iran over three small islands in the Persian Gulf.
U.S. officials say the UAE also has helped in the war on terrorism, and a top former Iraqi nuclear weapons scientist, Jaffar al-Jaffer, turned himself in to authorities in the UAE after fleeing Iraq through Syria.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Seizes Huge Arms Cache Near Afghan Border
April 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-raid.html
PESHAWAR (Reuters) - Pakistani authorities seized a huge cache of arms in a Sunday morning raid near the border with Afghanistan but made no arrests, an official said.
The raid took place about 124 miles south of Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), in a semi-autonomous tribal area.
Assistant Political Agent Kafayatullah told Reuters by telephone that among the mortar shells, remote-controlled mines, missile fuses and mortar guns were 99 Russian missiles and about 64 guns of every variety conceivable.
``The owner of the store where the arms were kept managed to flee across the border into Afghanistan,'' he said.
Kafayatullah said the political administration had given locals a 24-hour deadline to produce the suspect, if he were still in Pakistani territory.
``Otherwise, we will be forced to take action,'' he said.
Guns and ammunition are easily available in the rugged NWFP hinterland of steepling mountainous countryside which is thought to have provided an easy route out of Afghanistan for escaping remnants of the hardline Taliban regime ousted late in 2001.
-------- puerto rico
Vieques ready to celebrate Navy's exit
BY MARIKA LYNCH mlynch@herald.com
Sun, Apr. 27, 2003
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/5726226.htm
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -On May 1, the people of Vieques are planning a large party -- a four-day, 'round-the-clock fiesta of fireworks and salsa music -- to celebrate a landmark event: the official end of the tiny island's existence as a target range for the U.S. Navy.
The Navy's departure is both a milestone in Puerto Rican history -- the Navy's presence on Vieques dates back to the 1940s -- and an opportunity for residents to celebrate because they blame the range for crippling the economy, spoiling the fish stock and making children sick.
Residents who once threw themselves in the line of fire as Vieques waged a campaign to oust the Navy will be feted as guests of honor.
Meanwhile, seven miles away by boat on the main island of Puerto Rico, the sprawling Navy base that once served as headquarters for Vieques training is shrinking dramatically -- if not disappearing altogether -- and few in Puerto Rico would consider that a reason to celebrate.
Nearly half of Naval Station Roosevelt Roads' employees are shipping out, leaving one of the island's largest employers ripe for closure. And a day after the Vieques range becomes the Caribbean's largest national wildlife refuge, an important U.S. Army command in charge of Latin America operations will begin to leave its base near San Juan for Texas.
Though the decision to move to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio was based on cutting costs and boosting living standards, the protesters who often closed his bases' gates made soldier life in Puerto Rico uncomfortable, said Maj. Gen. Alfred Valenzuela, who leads U.S. Army South.
''There were some occasions these demonstrations got a little bit dicey,'' Valenzuela said. ``Attacks in the newspaper, that doesn't hurt me. But what does hurt me is when you throw rocks at my school buses.''
After the U.S. Southern Command left Panama in 1997, its headquarters moved to Miami-Dade, but Puerto Rico became the hub for the largest concentration of U.S. military forces in Latin America and the Caribbean. Now hundreds of millions of dollars in military spending on the island could be lost.
Although no precise payroll numbers are available, about half of the estimated 3,700 active-duty military and 3,800 civilians who support them will be leaving because of reductions at Roosevelt Roads and the departure of Army South, according to Southcom.
Gov. Sila Calderón, who fought to get the Navy out of Vieques, says her government also will work hard to keep the military at Roosevelt Roads.
`GOOD POSSIBILITY'
But if that battle is lost, Calderón eyes the property optimistically. Perhaps it could be the site of the island's second international airport, a cruise ship pier, a center for eco-tourism in eastern Puerto Rico, she said recently.
''We have to see it as an opportunity, not with worry, but as a good possibility,'' Calderón said.
But some, like Mimi Lopez Ceperos, who live near the eastern Puerto Rico base in Ceiba, say otherwise. Since 1961, Lopez has glued together Styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners to make souvenirs she sells to draw visitors to her dress shop. But fewer sailors stop by since training abated a few years ago.
''The biggest mistake in the world would be to close that base,'' Lopez said. ``We would die of hunger.''
LONG HISTORY
Since 1898, the U.S. armed forces have had a presence in Puerto Rico, a strategic post situated at the opening to the Caribbean Sea. Later, the Navy began to gobble up land on Vieques, forcing families to move, and at one point owned up to 80 percent of the land.
Relations worsened in 1999, after a Navy pilot training for a mission in Kosovo veered off course and dropped a bomb on an observation tower, killing 35-year-old civilian guard David Sanes Rodrķguez. That same year, the Navy admitted a Marine fighter jet mistakenly dropped 263 shells tipped with depleted uranium on the range and that it had previously used napalm in training. Over the years more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested, and such figures as actor Edward James Olmos, singer Marc Anthony and Robert Kennedy Jr. have taken up the cause.
The debate also fueled Puerto Rico's independence movement, whose followers say the island is strangled by its ''colonial'' relationship with the United States.
But Puerto Rico still has the highest recruitment rate nationwide for the Army, and the highest retention rate for the Reserves. Troops say the military gives them a shot at an education and other opportunities.
At Roosevelt Roads, the closing of the Vieques range has caused a ripple effect. Without the bombing range, the Navy is cutting 60 percent of its $100 million base budget, leaving many other base tenants without the infrastructure they need to operate. An elite Special Operations command will return stateside. The 400-person naval hospital will close, and an aerial counter-drug operation will fly away.
CLOSURE TARGET
Whether Roosevelt Roads -- which the military says contributes $300 million a year to the local economy -- closes will be up to Congress in 2005, when it evaluates installations nationwide. Roosevelt Roads' saving grace may be its deep-water port and airfield -- the only ones on U.S. soil in the Caribbean.
Navy Capt. John R. Warnecke, Roosevelt Roads' commanding officer, said the cutbacks aren't about retribution, but finances.
''I know the accusations in the paper are that the Navy is trying to get back at Puerto Rico for driving us out of Vieques. That couldn't be farther from the truth,'' Warnecke said. 'Downsizing is the right thing to do with the U.S. taxpayers' dollar.''
HAPPY WITH RESULT
Meanwhile, the Atlantic Fleet training facility will move to sites in northern Florida and North Carolina. In Vieques, a nature reserve will replace the bombing range, which makes Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz very happy.
Guadalupe was one of the first arrested in an anti-bombing range protest in 1979. His son, also named Ismael, is in jail for storming the bombing range in January.
The people won, he said, but there is still much work to do. He and others want to make sure the U.S. government sticks to its promise to clean up its former range of undetonated bombs and napalm it once used. But Guadalupe will be there when the party begins at midnight, cheering with hundreds of others.
At that moment, Warnecke, Roosevelt Roads' commander, says he'll likely be asleep. But he has one concern about the fireworks show:
``I hope they don't start fires. Because there won't be a Navy fire department there to put it out.''
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia's Putin pledges stronger Tajik ties but warns of drug flow
AFP
Sunday April 27
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030426/1/3ahlr.html
Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to strengthen ties with Tajikistan but warned that the flow of Afghan drugs into Russia via the central Asian republic was a serious obstacle.
Russia's military presence in Tajikistan is "an important factor for security" along the southern border of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the loose grouping of 12 former Soviet republics, Putin said after talks with his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rakhmonov.
Tajikistan's southern border with Afghanistan is guarded by some 11,000 Russian troops, and it has around 8,000 other troops based in the impoverished republic.
Russo-Tajik border cooperation "is an irreplaceable element in the fight against international terrorism and drug trafficking," Putin stressed, noting that the legal status of the Russian troops in Tajikistan had formed part of the two leaders' discussions.
"Further strengthening of our ties must raise our partnership to a new level," he said of Russia's strategic partner in the region.
"Unfortunately Tajikistan is a drug transit point for western Europe and Russia, and this is of concern to both our countries," he said.
Putin stressed that Russia "has an interest in receiving Russian-speaking workers in areas of the economy where there is a shortage of labour," and said he hoped an agreement on immigrant labour could be reached between the two countries next month.
Many Tajiks, seeking economic opportunities in relatively prosperous Russia, figure among the approximately 3.5 million illegal immigrants in Russia. Last November Russia deported 190 immigrants back to their homeland within the space of two weeks, drawing protests from Dushanbe.
Russian police have cracked down on immigrants in Russia particularly hard since last October's hostage-taking in a Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels.
Tajik immigrants also suffer discrimination by association with flow of drugs from Afghanistan, the world's leading supplier, much of which transits into Russia via Tajikistan.
Rakhmonov stressed that the flow of drugs through his country was "a headache as much for us as for Russia," but said that Russian and Tajik intelligence services had been working closely together in recent years.
On Sunday, the two leaders are to be joined by the presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan -- which like Tajikistan are all former Soviet republics -- for a summit of the regional Eurasian Economic Community.
On Monday, the five Eurasian leaders plus President Robert Kotcharian of Armenia, another former Soviet state, will hold a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (DKB).
The summit comes as the United States, through its "war on terrorism," has been able to set up military bases in several of the central Asian states, which have long been seen as part of Russia's zone of influence.
-------- spies
Company Man
'A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency' by Richard Helms with William Hood
Reviewed by James Bamford
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32359-2003Apr24?language=printer
A LOOK OVER MY SHOULDER A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency By Richard Helms with William Hood Random House. 478 pp. $35
Richard Helms was back among friends. On a crisp and tranquil late November morning, tinged with the musty scent of dried leaves and old bark, the man who was arguably America's most famous spy since Nathan Hale descended into eternal darkness. Buried with him, beneath a gently sloping hill at Arlington National Cemetery, was a lifetime of mystery, secrets and controversy. Nearby, sharing the same hallowed ground, were the graves of his old friend Frank Wisner, a specialist in covert action, and Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, a mentor and fellow former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
But before he made his final exit last year at the age of 89, Helms left behind a packet of long-held secrets, like a spy loading a dead drop and then disappearing into the cold. They are contained not in a moldy tree trunk but in his posthumous autobiography, A Look Over My Shoulder.
Over the years, I occasionally shared a meal with the legendary spymaster at one of his favorite haunts, Washington's Sulgrave Club, where his wife, Cynthia, was a member. Tall and lanky, with thin lips pursed together as if sealed with a zipper, he once told me that he had always vowed never to write about his life in the shadows. He even refused to read books he perceived as biased against him or the agency, such as Thomas Powers's well-received The Man Who Kept the Secrets, published in 1979. Then, while on vacation once during the mid-1990s, he brought along Powers's book and finally began turning the pages. Pleasantly surprised by the author's accuracy and fairness, he gradually made the decision to at last unseal a bit of his cipher-locked past.
It is too bad he did not make the decision much earlier, when many of the words, the events, the emotions, the colors and the details would still have been fresh in his mind. Writing at such a long remove in time is a little like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Compounding his difficulty was the lack of access to still-classified documents and a rigid agency review process. The result is a book with too much flat history and too few new insights and revelations. Nevertheless, the opportunity to at last see much of the 20th century through Helms's probing eyes is well worth the price.
While offering few new details in recounting some of the major events of his long tenure at the CIA -- he saw no indications of conspiracy during the Kennedy assassination, for example -- Helms sometimes does come up with surprises. One involves the deadly Israeli attack on the American electronic surveillance ship USS Liberty during the Six Day War in 1967. Thirty-four American sailors were killed, and 171 were wounded in the incident. Although at the time Israel claimed it was a mistake, and an "interim" CIA intelligence memorandum agreed, that view later changed. "I had no role in the board of inquiry that followed," Helms writes, "or the board's finding that there could be no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack." This is consistent with the views of some members of the administration at the time, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the director and deputy directors of the National Security Agency, which was in charge of the ship.
Overshadowing all else during Helms's years as director were the Vietnam War and the domestic protests it spawned. Among the operations Helms was most proud of was the CIA's very secret paramilitary role in Laos, attempting to resist a government takeover by communist forces. Until America pulled out of Vietnam, the operation succeeded in fighting back the guerrillas and largely maintaining the status quo. "We had fulfilled our mission and we remain proud of it," he writes. "We had won the war!" Vietnam, however, was a different story.
But it was the war at home that long haunted Helms. "Nothing in my thirty-year service brought me more criticism," he wrote, "than my response to President Johnson's insistence that the Agency supply him proof that foreign agents and funds were at the root of the racial and political unrest that took fire in the summer of 1967." The agency's response was given the apt cryptonym CHAOS. "CHAOS," he admits, "was my responsibility." In the process of giving Johnson the answer he was not expecting -- there was "no trace" of foreign involvement -- the agency for the first time began secretly treading on domestic soil, "a violation of our charter," Helms confesses.
If Helms is remembered for the controversy of CHAOS, he should also be remembered for the courage of standing up to President Nixon's attempt to tar the CIA with the brush of Watergate. Shortly after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the arrest of those involved, Nixon had his White House lawyer, John Dean, put pressure on Helms's deputy, Vernon Walters. "Dean had one request," Helms writes. "The White House wanted money from CIA to make bail for the burglars." Helms refused, telling Walters, "There was no way that the [CIA] could furnish secret funds to the Watergate crowd without permanently damaging and perhaps even destroying the Agency." Five months later, Helms got the boot.
If Helms thought that he was finally out of harm's way once he turned in his cloak and dagger, he couldn't have been more mistaken. Nominated to become ambassador to Iran, he was called before an open Senate committee for confirmation and was asked whether the CIA played a role in a coup in Chile that brought down the government of Salvador Allende. Rather than tell the truth and expose the CIA's involvement or ask to answer the question in closed session, Helms simply lied and said no.
Years later the answer came back to haunt him. He was charged with failing to testify "fully and completely" before the committee and pleaded no contest. Following a sharp tongue-lashing by the judge, who told Helms he stood before the court "in disgrace and shame," he was sentenced to two years in prison and a $2,000 fine. The judge then suspended the jail time. Helms turned ashen. But upon leaving the courthouse he claimed that the conviction represented a "badge of honor" for having lied to protect an agency operation. Six years later, he received the National Security Medal, the highest award in the intelligence community, from President Ronald Reagan for "exceptional meritorious service."
As the horse-drawn caisson waited to carry Richard Helms to his final resting place on that chilly fall morning, the man who must now keep the secrets paid tribute. "Wherever American intelligence officers strive to defend and extend freedom," said George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, "Richard Helms will be there." •
James Bamford is the author, most recently, of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
----
Cleaning House
'Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby'
by John Prados
Reviewed by David Wise
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32360-2003Apr24?language=printer
LOST CRUSADER The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby By John Prados Oxford Univ. 380 pp. $35
William Colby, a quintessential cold warrior all his life, probably saved the CIA from self-destructing three decades ago by coming clean -- well, relatively clean -- with Congress about the agency's past abuses.
For this he was rewarded with a whispering campaign suggesting he was a Soviet mole -- which, as Lost Crusader makes clear, was utter nonsense -- and was ostracized by many of his colleagues, in whose eyes he had violated Langley's code of omertą, and ultimately fired by President Gerald Ford. This is the central and accurate theme of John Prados's in-depth biography of the late CIA director.
It is surprising that no one previously attempted a biography of Colby, because his story is in many ways also the story of the CIA. From Italy to Vietnam and the controversial Phoenix program, to the military coup in Indonesia, to Watergate, the prosecution of Richard Helms, the congressional investigations of CIA assassination plots, the drugging and surveillance of unwitting Americans, Colby was there, on the ground or deeply involved at headquarters.
Although written in generally dry, academic style, Prados's study is richly detailed (sometimes overwhelmingly so), and he has mined newly declassified documents and scores of interviews to reveal some previously undisclosed gems. For example, the minutes of a secret 1975 meeting of the National Security Council attended by President Ford reveal Henry Kissinger grumbling, "It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination." Apparently Ford was not convinced; a year later, amid disclosures of how the CIA had hired mafiosi to try to poison Fidel Castro, he issued his executive order banning assassination.
Prados, a historian and author of 10 other books on national security, has difficulty deciding whether to draw his portrait of Colby in black or white. Which may be understandable, since the CIA director was so low-key, contained and self-effacing a figure that he fit and indeed tried to personify his own concept of the perfect spy -- a "gray man."
Born in Minnesota in 1920, Colby as a boy spent three years in China, where his father, a U.S. Army officer, protested the murder of a black soldier at a cost to his own career. At Princeton, Colby was too poor to join an eating club; he waited on tables in the cafeteria.
When World War II came, Colby joined the OSS, precursor of the CIA. He had learned to ski as a high-school student in Burlington, Vt., and parachuted into Nazi-occupied Norway as head of a 100-man sabotage unit. After the war, he went to Columbia Law School, then joined the Wall Street firm of Gen. William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, who had been head of the OSS. There, the ambiguity that characterized so much of Colby's career surfaced when, as a Donovan associate, he befriended the widow of George Polk, a CBS journalist who was murdered in Greece in 1948. Prados implies, but does not quite say, that the CIA may have been murkily involved in Polk's death and that Donovan was assisting in a coverup. Colby, the book says, was "bothered" by the affair.
Not long after, a former OSS pal recruited Colby into the fledgling CIA, where he ran so-called stay-behind nets in Scandinavia. This was a program to cache weapons and radios for an underground that was supposed to materialize if the Soviets overran Western Europe. While ostensibly serving as a foreign service officer in the Stockholm embassy, Colby recruited 1,000 or more Swedes for the network. Posted to Rome, he clashed with James J. Angleton, who later became chief of counterintelligence, and whom Colby, as CIA director, fired two decades afterward. It was the early 1950s, and the CIA was spending hundreds of millions on political action to shore up Italy's Christian Democrats.
By 1960, Colby was station chief in Saigon and then head of the entire CIA operation in Vietnam. According to Prados, Colby thought the United States could win the war by supporting President Ngo Dinh Diem, but the Kennedy administration thought otherwise and encouraged the generals who overthrew and killed him. The intrigue in Washington, Langley and Saigon surrounding the 1963 coup was a rat's nest; Prados struggles manfully, with only partial success, to penetrate it.
By 1965, with Colby now head of the CIA's Far East division, the military in Indonesia overthrew Sukarno, bringing about a regime change long favored by the agency. In the bloodbath that followed, Amnesty International estimates that more than a million people died. "The full panoply of CIA assistance to the Indonesian military remains shrouded in secrecy," Prados writes. But the United States turned over hundreds of names to the military, and he quotes an unnamed CIA officer as saying that a secret review by the agency "admitted much broader engagement in the bloodbath." The CIA described these events as "one of the worst episodes of mass murder of the twentieth century, ranking with Germany's Holocaust against the Jews."
But it was back in Vietnam, to which Colby returned in 1968 as director of "pacification," that he became forever tarred by the Phoenix operation, a dark page in the history of the Vietnam war. Phoenix was a program aimed at "neutralization" of the Viet Cong network in South Vietnam, a euphemism that all too often meant torture and murder. Although Colby testified to a House investigating committee in 1971 that Phoenix was "not a program of assassination," Prados makes clear that "there was plenty of killing in Phoenix" and "success was defined by locking people up or killing them." Still, Lost Crusader misses an opportunity to define the Phoenix program and Colby's precise role in it clearly once and for all.
Back in Langley, Colby became CIA director Richard Helms's chief subaltern in trying to contain the Watergate scandal for Richard Nixon. (The fiction has since taken root that Helms staunchly opposed the White House coverup, but in the beginning he supinely went along with it, urging the FBI to limit the investigation to the burglars arrested in the Watergate office building.)
In 1977, Helms was prosecuted and convicted for misleading Congress about the CIA's role in Chile; it was Colby who had referred the matter to the Justice Department, an act for which the CIA's old guard never forgave him. Then, during the Church and Pike committee investigations of the intelligence agencies, Colby, albeit reluctantly, gave up the "Family Jewels," a 693-page compendium of CIA abuses that totally alienated him from his buttoned-down and button-lipped colleagues. He waved a CIA dart gun at a Senate hearing, and he talked. That led Kissinger to chide Colby, who was a Catholic: "Bill, you know what you do when you go up to the Hill? You go to confession."
There is an irony here because, while Colby did reveal the agency's sometimes felonious misdeeds, the truth, as Prados points out, is that he "cooperated just enough" to save the institution to which he had devoted his life. He died in 1996 on the Maryland shore, drowned while canoeing alone one April evening, adding a slight touch of mystery to the end of a clandestine life.
If at times Prados is too admiring of his subject, there was nevertheless much to admire in the courage that Colby showed when he parachuted behind Nazi lines in World War II to blow up rail lines in Norway, and when he opened the Pandora's box of CIA abuses to public scrutiny. He paid dearly for revealing the agency's transgressions, but he was comforted by the knowledge that what he did was right for his country and his conscience. By portraying William Colby's life in all its nuances, Lost Crusader makes an important contribution to intelligence literature. •
David Wise is the author of "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America."
-------- us
Army shakeups clear path for Rumsfeld's vision
By Joseph L. Galloway,
Knight Ridder European edition,
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Stars & Stripes
http://www.stripes.osd.mil/article.asp?section=104&article=14547&archive=true
WASHINGTON - The shakeup came suddenly. Late Friday, Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White abruptly resigned without explanation after a meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
White's departure and the coming retirements of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki and Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane will clear the way for Rumsfeld to install his own handpicked Army leaders and put his stamp on the Army's force structure, doctrine and training.
Pentagon officials told Knight Ridder that Rumsfeld plans to offer the Army chief of staff job to Gen. Tommy Franks, the tall Texan who commands U.S. Central Command and led coalition forces to swift victory in Iraq. If Franks accepts the job, Rumsfeld would replace him at Central Command with Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, Franks' highly regarded, Arabic-speaking deputy.
The officials said Rumsfeld has not yet asked Franks if he would accept the chief of staff job.
From the day he arrived in the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has been at war with the Army's top generals - veterans of combat in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Mogadishu, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and with some of the top leadership of the other services, as well. Navy Secretary Gordon England has left to become deputy secretary of homeland security, and Air Force secretary James Roche has also had a number of bruising encounters with Rumsfeld, who Pentagon officials said has a habit of publicly ridiculing those who disagree with him.
Rumsfeld's relations with White, a retired Army brigadier general who had a second career as an executive in now-bankrupt Enron Corp., were strained last year when Rumsfeld decreed that the Army's $11 billion Crusader artillery system would be killed, and White and other Army leaders were accused of lobbying Congress to overturn their boss's decision.
Relations between Rumsfeld and the Army became even frostier in late February, when senators pressed Shinseki at a hearing to estimate how many soldiers he thought it would take to secure the peace in postwar Iraq. Shinseki reluctantly testified that he thought it might require "several hundred thousand," based on his experience as commander of peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz publicly called that estimate grossly exaggerated.
When White was asked about Shinseki's estimates, he cited the general's experience in such matters. Published reports at the time said Rumsfeld wanted to fire White on the spot for supporting the Army chief of staff.
Rumsfeld and his spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, could not be reached for comment.
Rumsfeld has made it plain that he considers the Army's senior leaders cold war dinosaurs unable to adapt to a 21st Century environment and thinks the Army is too big, too heavy and too slow to respond to rapid developments abroad.
Nearly two years ago, the defense secretary's civilian aides tried to table a plan to take two more divisions and a corps out of the Army, which already had been reduced to 480,000 soldiers by a decade of manpower cuts. Shinseki successfully argued that it would be foolish to take the Army below 400,000 men and women, even as he continued to promote transforming the Army into a lighter, more agile force.
Senior military officials said that Shinseki began remaking the Army a year before the Bush administration took office. He ordered the creation of six rapidly deployable brigades equipped with the Stryker wheeled fighting vehicle. At the time, the Stryker wasn't even on the drawing boards. The Army streamlined its acquisition process and fielded the first Strykers for testing in just over two years.
One retired Army general charged that Rumsfeld and his aides "have made the Army a second-class citizen, denigrating its chief in public and ignoring the counsel of uniformed leadership."
The general, who asked that he not be identified, said he feared that Rumsfeld, once he has appointed his own selections to Army leadership posts, will renew his attempt to take the Army down by two or possibly even four divisions, along with similar cuts in the Army National Guard.
Another retired Army general said, "I fear that we will dismantle the Army based on ideology and then, 10 years from now, lose a war against the North Koreans or someone else who can fight." He also spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Rumsfeld and his civilian aides believe that Afghanistan and Iraq are the models for all future conflicts: The Air Force and Special Operations forces can defeat the enemy with rapid action and precision munitions, leaving the Army to police and secure the ground. In this view, there's little or no need for heavy M1 Abrams tanks, heavy artillery and other forces that are hard to transport quickly.
"He would move the Army away from war fighting," one retired general said. "His is clearly a vision of transformation that ignores the lessons of history."
The Air Force and the Marine Corps, the general added, also have tried to marginalize Army leaders and persuade Rumsfeld that the Army is now a supporting service and no longer the centerpiece of land warfare.
Both active duty and retired officers also charge that Rumsfeld has imposed an unprecedented degree of civilian control over the military services' selection of flag officers, generals and admirals. Military officials said Rumsfeld has demanded that all the services send up the names of at least two or three candidates for every promotion to three- and four-star rank and all nominations to the Joint Staff. The candidates are personally interviewed by a Rumsfeld staffer and by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Peter Pace.
Secretaries of defense traditionally have had the prerogative to nominate four-star generals and admirals, but have left the selection of one-, two- and three-star officers to each service's normal selection and promotion procedures.
"This is an incredibly dangerous politicizing of the flag officers," one retired general said. "It's Rumsfeld's way or the highway, but what if he is wrong?"
White House officials privately said Rumsfeld isn't loved there, either. They cite his arrogance and propensity for saying whatever he thinks in public. But one well-placed official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Rumsfeld's poll numbers were "too high to get rid of him now." With an approval rating of 71 percent, Rumsfeld's numbers are better than President Bush's.
Retired and serving general officers, not just those in the Army, say that not since Robert S. McNamara was secretary of defense has there been so determined an effort to isolate and marginalize the military's uniformed leaders. McNamara took the United States into the quagmire that was the Vietnam War over the objection of some of his top generals.
The selection of a successor to Shinseki as Army chief of staff has been up in the air for months. Eighteen months ago, Rumsfeld's office leaked word that the Army vice chief, Shinseki's deputy, Keane, had been chosen to succeed Shinseki. It was said that Rumsfeld hoped that by making Shinseki a lame duck long before his four-year term was due to expire, he would force Shinseki to resign. Shinseki, a West Point graduate who has served 38 years on active duty and lost a foot in Vietnam, didn't budge.
Now that Shinseki's term is ending, Rumsfeld's office has leaked word that Keane would not be taking the top job.
Military officials told Knight Ridder that Rumsfeld has considered only two of the 11 serving four-star Army generals, Franks and Forces Command commander Gen. Larry Ellis, to succeed Shinseki. Lt. Gen. Richard Cody, now the Army deputy chief for operations, has been mentioned as a replacement for Keane in the vice chief's job.
----
U.S. Wants to Keep Persian Gulf Presence
Donald Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks Say They Want to Maintain U.S. Military Presence in Persian Gulf
The Associated Press,
April 28, 2003
http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20030427_661.html
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates April 27 - The United States wants to keep using military bases in friendly Persian Gulf countries, including a high-tech command center in Qatar where planners directed the war in Iraq, U.S. officials said Sunday.
Gen. Tommy Franks, the top war commander, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld met with officials in the United Arab Emirates on the first stop of a tour of the region. After talks with the UAE's defense minister and chief of staff, Rumsfeld and Franks said American military forces were not going to leave any time soon.
"We assured them that the United States intends to do what is necessary to make sure there is a secure environment in Iraq," Rumsfeld said.
"There's no question but that the people of this region are safer today than they were when the Saddam Hussein regime was in power."
Rumsfeld is in the region to meet with U.S. troops involved in the war in Iraq and to discuss America's role after overthrowing Saddam. Rumsfeld also plans to visit Afghanistan this week to see government leaders and U.S. troops.
The defense secretary has said the United States is considering reducing or rearranging its presence in the Persian Gulf region now that the threat from Iraq is over.
But Franks said a possible reduction in the American use of ports and air bases in the UAE did not come up Sunday. He said the issues needs more study.
Franks said the U.S. military presence in the region might increase, at least in the short term, as stability and humanitarian relief missions in Iraq and Afghanistan continue.
The United States also wants to keep using the Qatar command center built just before the war and used by Franks as his headquarters for the Iraq campaign.
"We do know that we want to use it, now that we have it," Franks said.
Rumsfeld and Franks said they are pleased with progress in the search for top members of Saddam's government. Ordinary Iraqis are a big help, Franks said.
"They want these people out of their country," Franks said.
U.S. forces announced Sunday they had captured Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, Saddam's chief contact with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Amin was No. 49 on the U.S. list of 55 most wanted Iraqis. His capture brings to 13 the number of officials on that list whom U.S. officials have acknowledged as being in custody.
Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz seems to be cooperating with his American interrogators but his claims must be checked to see if they are true, Franks said. Aziz turned himself in to U.S. forces in Baghdad on Thursday.
"How cooperative and how truthful he is, we'll have to see over time," Franks said.
The general said the United States will have to search several thousand sites for evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. American forces started the war with a list of about 1,000 suspect sites, and for each site on the list, Iraqis tell Americans about one or two others, Franks said.
U.S. troops found about a dozen 55-gallon drums in an open field in northern Iraq, and initial tests indicated one of them contained a mixture of a nerve agent and mustard agent, an American officer said Sunday.
Iraq is becoming more stable and secure every day, Franks said, but it is up to President Bush and Rumsfeld to decide when to declare that major combat is over. Tensions inside Iraq still simmer, he said.
"There is a great deal of uncertainty. There is a great deal of fear," Franks said. "There are tribal animosities. There are religious animosities."
In Abu Dhabi, Rumsfeld and Franks said they thanked the UAE leaders for their war help, which included sending troops to Kuwait and humanitarian aid to Iraq.
UAE officials did not speak to journalists or issue a statement after the talks.
Franks and Rumsfeld met with Crown Prince Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the son of the UAE president. The UAE's defense minister, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and chief of staff of the armed forces, Lt. Gen. Sheik Mohammad Zayed Al Nahyan, also participated.
U.S. troops have used bases in the UAE since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which the UAE joined the coalition to oust Saddam's invading forces from Kuwait. American aircraft using the al-Dhafra air base near Abu Dhabi have included U-2 and Global Hawk surveillance planes as well as refueling tankers.
The UAE government has not indicated it wants to close off its bases to the United States, a U.S. official said Sunday. The UAE's concerns include a territorial dispute with Iran over three small islands in the Persian Gulf.
U.S. officials say the UAE also has helped in the war on terrorism, and a top former Iraqi nuclear weapons scientist, Jaffar al-Jaffer, turned himself in to authorities in the UAE after fleeing Iraq through Syria.
----
American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super
By GREGG EASTERBROOK
April 27, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/weekinreview/27EAST.html?ei=1&en=f282f41720212998&ex=1052410338&pagewanted=print&position=
Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle - the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.
Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.
Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.
North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from American military force, other nations - Iran is an obvious next candidate - may place renewed emphasis on building them.
For the extent of American military superiority has become almost impossible to overstate. The United States sent five of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for the Iraq assault. A tenth Nimitz-class supercarrier is under construction. No other nation possesses so much as one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines.
Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of an American supercarrier, and has such a poor record that it rarely leaves port. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China decided against building one last year.
Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's would be pointless, after all, because if another nation fielded a threatening vessel, American attack submarines would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine is essentially the futuristic supersub of "The Hunt for Red October" made real.) Knowing this, all other nations have conceded the seas to the United States, a reason American forces can sail anywhere without interference. The naval arms race - a principal aspect of great-power politics for centuries - is over.
United States air power is undisputed as well, with more advanced fighters and bombers than those of all other nations combined. The United States possesses three stealth aircraft (the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the F-117 fighter) with two more (the F-22 and F-35 fighters) developed and awaiting production funds. No other nation even has a stealth aircraft on the drawing board. A few nations have small numbers of heavy bombers; the United States has entire wings of heavy bombers.
No other nation maintains an aerial tanker fleet similar to that of the United States; owing to tankers, American bombers can operate anywhere in the world. No other nation has anything like the American AWACS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the sky above battles, or the newer JSTARS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the ground.
No other nation has air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground smart munitions of the accuracy, or numbers, of the United States. This month, for example, in the second attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, just 12 minutes passed between when a B-1 received the target coordinates and when the bomber released four smart bombs aimed to land just 50 feet and a few seconds apart. All four hit where they were supposed to.
American aerial might is so great that adversaries don't even try to fly. Serbia kept its planes on the ground during the Kosovo conflict of 1999; in recent fighting in Iraq, not a single Iraqi fighter rose to oppose United States aircraft. The governments of the world now know that if they try to launch a fighter against American air power, their planes will be blown to smithereens before they finish retracting their landing gear. The aerial arms race, a central facet of the last 50 years, is over.
The American lead in ground forces is not uncontested - China has a large standing army - but is large enough that the ground arms race might end, too. The United States now possesses about 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks, by far the world's strongest armored force. The Abrams cannon and fire-control system is so extraordinarily accurate that in combat gunners rarely require more than one shot to destroy an enemy tank. No other nation is currently building or planning a comparable tank force. Other governments know this would be pointless, since even if they had advanced tanks, the United States would destroy them from the air.
The American lead in electronics is also huge. Much of the "designating" of targets in the recent Iraq assault was done by advanced electronics on drones like the Global Hawk, which flies at 60,000 feet, far beyond the range of antiaircraft weapons. So sophisticated are the sensors and data links that make Global Hawk work that it might take a decade for another nation to field a similar drone - and by then, the United States is likely to have leapfrogged ahead to something better.
As The New York Times Magazine reported last Sunday, the United States is working on unmanned, remote-piloted drone fighter planes that will be both relatively low-cost and extremely hard to shoot down, and small drone attack helicopters that will precede troops into battle. No other nation is even close to the electronics and data-management technology of these prospective weapons. The Pentagon will have a monopoly on advanced combat drones for years.
An electronics arms race may continue in some fashion because electronics are cheaper than ships or planes. But the United States holds such an imposing lead that it is unlikely to be lapped for a long time.
Further, the United States holds an overwhelming lead in military use of space. Not only does the Pentagon command more and better reconnaissance satellites than all the rest of the world combined, American forces have begun using space-relayed data in a significant way. Space "assets" will eventually be understood to have been critical to the lightning conquest of Iraq, and the American lead in this will only grow, since the Air Force now has the second-largest space budget in the world, after NASA's.
This huge military lead is partly because of money. Last year American military spending exceeded that of all other NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research group that studies global security. This is another area where all other nations must concede to the United States, for no other government can afford to try to catch up.
The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That's a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.
The United States military reinforces its pre-eminence by going into combat. Rightly or wrongly, the United States fights often; each fight becomes a learning opportunity for troops and a test of technology. No other military currently has the real-world experience of the United States.
There is also the high quality - in education and motivation - of its personnel. This lead has grown as the United States has integrated women into most combat roles, doubling the talent base on which recruiters can draw.
The American edge does not render its forces invincible: the expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq. More important, overwhelming power hardly insures that the United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is just one aspect of international relations, while experience has shown that military power can solve only military problems, not political ones.
North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be a world in which Washington has historically unparalleled power, but often cannot use it.
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of The New Republic and a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His next book, "The Progress Paradox," will be published this fall by Random House.
----
Rulers of the air
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030427-10772613.htm
Allied commanders had Iraq's number. In fact, they had thousands of them. In the world's first ultramodern air war, where a record seven in every 10 munitions were "smart," air planners assigned a number to each building in Baghdad, whether one of Saddam Hussein's palaces or a Shi'ite slum.
Bombing by the numbers for the first time helped pilots find targets fast. In one case, a B-1B bomber crew needed only 20 minutes to change mission and hit a building thought to hold Saddam.
"I knew Baghdad almost like the back of my hand - more than I ever wanted to," said Marine Corps Maj. Mike Cederholm, an air planner at the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
"We always believed from the start the center of gravity was Baghdad and the regime in Baghdad," said Air Force Col. Mace Carpenter, also of the CAOC and chief architect of the air plan.
The CAOC is a marvel of technology hidden in an isolated desert outpost. From there, personnel and computers directed more than 46,000 individual air missions, or sorties, and controlled nearly 2,000 warplanes.
In the end, the air campaign played a pivotal role in destroying Saddam's ground troops and capturing Baghdad on April 9, the war's 22nd day, with limited civilian deaths.
Now, some planners are describing how they did it.
"We knew where the cultural centers were," said Maj. Cederholm, who worked at the Marine base in Quantico, Va., before being summoned by U.S. Central Command to help map the war. "We knew where the schools were. We knew where hospitals were. And we avoided them. We were extremely cognizant of where they were."
Giving each building a number was one new wrinkle in a new kind of air war that put a premium on using precision-guided munitions and on sparing so-called "dual use" facilities such as electric power stations and bridges.
"We developed thousands of more targets than we struck," said Col. Carpenter, who in Desert Storm 12 years ago flew the now-retired F-111s, one of that war's few precision bombers.
Setting records
The war in Iraq also ushered in the largest urban close air support operation ever conducted, as hundreds of planes buzzed Baghdad, a city as big as Los Angeles.
"We never really conducted close air support [before] in a city the size of Baghdad," Maj. Cederholm said.
The conflict saw a record 13 of the Air Force's 21 B-2 stealth bombers fly missions from Missouri and from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Air planners developed a new way to hunt mobile ballistic missiles.
In the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq launched Scud missiles into Israel, while the United States fruitlessly hunted for the launchers. In this war, planners mapped out 6 million acres of possible sites, then blanketed them with B-1B bombers, F-16 fighters, A-10 tank-killing jets and an array of surveillance planes. The Iraqis failed to launch a single missile into Israel.
"I think they knew there was no way they could get it set up and get a shot off without being killed," a senior allied officer said.
In all, the allies dropped 27,000 munitions at more than 20,000 "aim points," as strategists call a single target or multiple points within a target. More than 18,000 of the munitions were precision-guided, or nearly seven in 10, compared with one in 10 in the Gulf war.
In the 1991 conflict, only about 15 percent of strike aircraft were capable of dropping precision-guided munitions, compared with 100 percent in this war. A major advancement came with the Joint Direct Attack Munition, the first satellite-guided bomb. It zeroes in on coordinates provided by a global positioning system and can be reprogrammed in flight.
Col. Carpenter dubbed his campaign "mass precision."
"We put more precision firepower on the enemy than in any point in history," he said.
Air planners believe that an objective study will show that the air operation killed fewer civilians than any previous comparable operation.
The United States, for example, worried so much about collateral damage it allowed Iraqi TV to continue broadcasting propaganda because its satellite dishes were located near civilians. Eventually, it did strike a cluster of dishes using the smallest warhead possible - a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone.
'What we can do'
The war to oust Saddam began in an unorthodox way March 19: one strike on one target, followed by a waiting game to see whether the dictator was killed and the regime would collapse quickly.
The target, a bunkered Saddam complex called Dora Farms, was the center of intense discussions between Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley in the CAOC in Saudi Arabia and Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, in the White House.
By secure telephone, Gen. Myers relayed the suddenly acquired intelligence and President Bush's decision to act on it. Gen. Moseley told the White House what planes stood ready to penetrate Baghdad air defenses, which had not yet been taken down by air strikes.
"This is what we can do, and this is what we've got," is how one military source described Gen. Moseley's message. "This was when Baghdad was still a supermissile engagement zone of the highest order."
Gen. Moseley, Central Command's senior Air Force officer, eventually chose two F-117A stealth fighters. The boxy aircraft sneaked inside Baghdad's air defenses and dropped four 1-ton bombs on the bunker.
After a day of waiting, the war began in earnest. British and American troops based in Kuwait pushed across the border March 20, and the next day the CAOC unleashed massive bombings on Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.
From that point, the air war took on a classical structure. Strike planes went after leadership compounds, communications and air defenses to separate commanders from the Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad. By the second week, the balance of strike sorties started to shift toward field forces.
By March 28, the Republican Guard was the prime target. Some divisions lost half their tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery before the first major ground clash April. 1.
In this regard, the war reverted to the lessons of Desert Storm: Degrade ground forces from the air to the point that the Army and Marines can smash the remaining enemy, and suffer fewer lost lives.
Pushing the envelope
Gen. Moseley, who worked in the Pentagon on September 11 when al Qaeda terrorists flew a hijacked airliner into the building, is credited with doing something at which other Air Force officers had failed: He won the trust of Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the allied commander.
Some in the Air Force fighter fraternity do not believe Gen. Franks, an artillery man by profession, fully appreciates air power. During the 2001 war in Afghanistan, Gen. Franks grew increasingly angry at certain Air Force officers for sniping at his target strategy.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded "jointness" - the four branches working and operating together. Gen. Moseley, who took over as Central Command air commander at the midpoint of the Afghanistan war, understood Mr. Rumsfeld's message.
Gen. Moseley is described by colleagues as "offensive minded." He pushed his tanker pilots to move perilously close to Baghdad so jet fighters spent less time traveling from refueling to target. To prove it could be done, he personally went along on one tanker mission from Prince Sultan to within 60 miles of Baghdad.
"He constantly pushed the envelope with decisions like daylight operations from day one, pushing the tankers into Iraq early in the fight, and bringing the fight as low as necessary to support coalition ground forces in Baghdad," said Brig. Gen. Ron Rand, the Air Force's chief spokesman. "Those decisions, based always on his assessment of threat, risk and reward, reflect his offensive, aggressive spirit."
By late March, Air Force and Navy jets swarmed over Saddam's Republican Guard standing between allied troops and Baghdad, the war's main objective or "center of gravity."
Planners divided Iraq into 30-mile-by-30-mile kill boxes, and focused on "keypads" within the boxes that contained Guard units. The operation became known as KICAS, for "kill box interdiction close air support."
"We've laid on these people," Gen. Moseley told reporters April 5, the same day the Army entered Baghdad. "I find it interesting when folks say we're softening them up. We're not softening them up; we're killing them."
Cutting it close
By then, the air war had shifted to urban close air support.
Close air support is defined as hitting enemy troops in close proximity to friendly forces. City streets made the mission all the more difficult. It's one thing to pick out Iraqi troops on the open desert; it's even more demanding to find Saddam's Fedayeen guerrillas among cafes, mosques, schools and hospitals.
To design a plan, Central Command turned to Maj. Cederholm, a Marine "Top Gun" F-18 pilot who had been stuck at a desk in Quantico handling office assignments. He moved to command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., then to the CAOC, and produced a thick addendum to the air campaign called urban close air support.
"We didn't want to do urban renewal," Maj. Cederholm said in an interview. "We wanted to do close air support. ... Our goal was to have a layered response capability resident over Baghdad 24 hours a day, with near-instant enemy targeting ability."
Like the rest of the country, Baghdad was divided into kill boxes. Within them, each building carried a number designation. Maj. Cederholm stacked warplanes in layers over the city, allowing airborne controllers to summon the aircraft and munitions needed to hit a target.
When a sniper harassed Marines from a 10-story apartment building, controllers looked at available planes and weapons. They picked an A-10 Thunderbolt and its 30 mm gun to kill the Iraqi, without hitting civilians in the same building.
"We could have dropped the building, but we didn't," Maj. Cederholm said.
----
OUT ON THE EDGE
American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super
April 27, 2003
By GREGG EASTERBROOK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/weekinreview/27EAST.html
Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle - the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.
Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.
Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.
North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from American military force, other nations - Iran is an obvious next candidate - may place renewed emphasis on building them.
For the extent of American military superiority has become almost impossible to overstate. The United States sent five of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for the Iraq assault. A tenth Nimitz-class supercarrier is under construction. No other nation possesses so much as one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines.
Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of an American supercarrier, and has such a poor record that it rarely leaves port. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China decided against building one last year.
Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's would be pointless, after all, because if another nation fielded a threatening vessel, American attack submarines would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine is essentially the futuristic supersub of "The Hunt for Red October" made real.) Knowing this, all other nations have conceded the seas to the United States, a reason American forces can sail anywhere without interference. The naval arms race - a principal aspect of great-power politics for centuries - is over.
United States air power is undisputed as well, with more advanced fighters and bombers than those of all other nations combined. The United States possesses three stealth aircraft (the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the F-117 fighter) with two more (the F-22 and F-35 fighters) developed and awaiting production funds. No other nation even has a stealth aircraft on the drawing board. A few nations have small numbers of heavy bombers; the United States has entire wings of heavy bombers.
No other nation maintains an aerial tanker fleet similar to that of the United States; owing to tankers, American bombers can operate anywhere in the world. No other nation has anything like the American AWACS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the sky above battles, or the newer JSTARS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the ground.
No other nation has air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground smart munitions of the accuracy, or numbers, of the United States. This month, for example, in the second attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, just 12 minutes passed between when a B-1 received the target coordinates and when the bomber released four smart bombs aimed to land just 50 feet and a few seconds apart. All four hit where they were supposed to.
American aerial might is so great that adversaries don't even try to fly. Serbia kept its planes on the ground during the Kosovo conflict of 1999; in recent fighting in Iraq, not a single Iraqi fighter rose to oppose United States aircraft. The governments of the world now know that if they try to launch a fighter against American air power, their planes will be blown to smithereens before they finish retracting their landing gear. The aerial arms race, a central facet of the last 50 years, is over.
The American lead in ground forces is not uncontested - China has a large standing army - but is large enough that the ground arms race might end, too. The United States now possesses about 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks, by far the world's strongest armored force. The Abrams cannon and fire-control system is so extraordinarily accurate that in combat gunners rarely require more than one shot to destroy an enemy tank. No other nation is currently building or planning a comparable tank force. Other governments know this would be pointless, since even if they had advanced tanks, the United States would destroy them from the air.
The American lead in electronics is also huge. Much of the "designating" of targets in the recent Iraq assault was done by advanced electronics on drones like the Global Hawk, which flies at 60,000 feet, far beyond the range of antiaircraft weapons. So sophisticated are the sensors and data links that make Global Hawk work that it might take a decade for another nation to field a similar drone - and by then, the United States is likely to have leapfrogged ahead to something better.
As The New York Times Magazine reported last Sunday, the United States is working on unmanned, remote-piloted drone fighter planes that will be both relatively low-cost and extremely hard to shoot down, and small drone attack helicopters that will precede troops into battle. No other nation is even close to the electronics and data-management technology of these prospective weapons. The Pentagon will have a monopoly on advanced combat drones for years.
An electronics arms race may continue in some fashion because electronics are cheaper than ships or planes. But the United States holds such an imposing lead that it is unlikely to be lapped for a long time.
Further, the United States holds an overwhelming lead in military use of space. Not only does the Pentagon command more and better reconnaissance satellites than all the rest of the world combined, American forces have begun using space-relayed data in a significant way. Space "assets" will eventually be understood to have been critical to the lightning conquest of Iraq, and the American lead in this will only grow, since the Air Force now has the second-largest space budget in the world, after NASA's.
This huge military lead is partly because of money. Last year American military spending exceeded that of all other NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research group that studies global security. This is another area where all other nations must concede to the United States, for no other government can afford to try to catch up.
The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That's a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.
The United States military reinforces its pre-eminence by going into combat. Rightly or wrongly, the United States fights often; each fight becomes a learning opportunity for troops and a test of technology. No other military currently has the real-world experience of the United States.
There is also the high quality - in education and motivation - of its personnel. This lead has grown as the United States has integrated women into most combat roles, doubling the talent base on which recruiters can draw.
The American edge does not render its forces invincible: the expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq. More important, overwhelming power hardly insures that the United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is just one aspect of international relations, while experience has shown that military power can solve only military problems, not political ones.
North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be a world in which Washington has historically unparalleled power, but often cannot use it.
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of The New Republic and a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His next book, "The Progress Paradox," will be published this fall by Random House.
-------- propaganda wars
Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies
Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war
By Raymond Whitaker
27 April 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=400805
The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. "They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."
UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world.
On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as crude forgeries.
On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the "foreseeable future".
On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile laboratories. He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, without saying that their claims - including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" - had repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.
On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range. No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had been fired during the war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds.
Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end - a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in custody.
Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us". Mr Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.
One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon said that such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled and buried. A later Downing Street "intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarised from three articles in academic publications. "You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is a few strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on Iraq it is being presented as a cast-iron case. That really is not good enough."
Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first pointed out Downing Street's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed before the war to have information which could not be disclosed because agents in Iraq would be endangered. "That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with the evidence," he said. "They lack credibility."
Mr Rangwala said much of the information on WMDs had come from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money for intelligence-gathering. "The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed," he said. "The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort."
Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US and British governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed after the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war - a possibility raised by President George Bush for the first time on Thursday.
This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence". An Iraqi scientist, writing under a pseudonym, said in a note slipped to a driver in a US convoy that he had proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that Iraqi officials had destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.
Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden that they could take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for WMDs to other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units were said to have been assigned to the quest for "unconventional weapons" - the less emotive term which is now preferred.
Mr Powell and Mr Bush both repeated last week that Iraq had WMDs. But one official said privately that "in the end, history and the American people will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".
----
Galloway: 'Now I'm certain ... all these documents are forged'
UK Herald,
April 27, 2003
http://www.sundayherald.com/33356
Allegations that George Galloway received $10m from Saddam have convinced the Glasgow MP that he's the victim of a conspiracy. He explains why to Westminster Editor James Cusick
Accused of pocketing $10 million over 10 years in the payroll of one of history's most hated dictators, most politicians would be on the verge of a breakdown. But for George Galloway the allegations published in a Boston newspaper at the end of a momentous week 'came as a slight relief', ending, he claimed, the lingering doubts that 'maybe someone inside the Iraqi regime itself was pretending to be doing things in support of me and making off with the cash'.
In a script worthy of John le Carrˇ or Len Deighton, reports last week suggested Iraqi spy masters, the Iraqi president, senior Iraqi politicians, an Iraqi general, the president's son and Middle East businessmen had all created a mesh of covert financial intrigue which, if true, will destroy Galloway.
Documents found in Baghdad's bombed foreign ministry and published last Tuesday by The Daily Telegraph claimed the Glasgow MP had effectively been on Saddam Hussein's payroll for a decade and had been given a slice of oil-for-food earnings totalling £375,000.
Days later a Boston newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor (CSM), dwarfed the Telegraph's 'scoop' by claiming documents found in a house belonging to Saddam's son Qusay, showed payments totalling $10m paid to Galloway from 1992 to this year. In the CSM report, Qusay's accounts department is told by him to 'issue the check and deliver to Mr George Galloway -- do this fast and inform me'.
Learning the full content of the CSM report, Galloway says this has moved the case against him 'from tragedy to farce', adding: 'I'm now clear. I am the target of a systematic campaign of forgery.'
Before the arrival of the $10m allegations, Galloway's initial belief that all the Telegraph's documents were forgeries was beginning to slip. He was coming round to the idea that he may have been set up from the inside, and had begun backtracking, considering that the Telegraph's material may have been genuine.
No longer. The CSM account puts Galloway in Iraq in 1992, lists meetings with Qusay Hussein, and talks of issued cheques. Claiming the report is a farce, he adds : 'It talks of cheques. But the whole point of sanctions is that Iraq has no banking facilities. The only way of cashing a cheque is to go to a bank in one of the presidential palaces, so why bother with the cheque? And I never set foot in Iraq till 1993. No-one had heard of me in Iraq in 1992.'
Should it come to court, Galloway's libel action may become one of the most high-profile cases in legal history. If his holiday home in Portugal feels like 'a besieged fortress', as he said, he better get used to the idea. In a telephone interview lasting almost an hour and a half , Galloway reveals that he understands his personal future, his political career, every aspect of his life, public and private -- will be laid bare. All his energy and all his campaigning will go on hold. The bottom line? If he doesn't tell it straight from now, he'll be destroyed.
He says: 'I now face a long and tedious process of putting together my case [he intends to sue The Daily Telegraph and will seek leave in the High Court in London to pursue the CSM outside the jurisdiction of British courts]. And will that hamstring me politically? Of course it will.'
His case preparations, he adds, are not going to begin in Iraq. ' All the people I knew in government in Iraq are either dead or under American custody or missing.'
Galloway -- often referred to as the MP for Baghdad Central -- had, he admits, access to core figures in Saddam's government. He now admits he may have been in Iraq on Boxing Day in 1999.
The Telegraph's document-based account highlights a memorandum from the chief of Iraqi intelligence, the Mukhabarat. It outlines a meeting between Galloway and an Iraqi spy. Galloway 'detailed his campaign plans for the year ahead', according to the account. The contact then wrote to his superior that Galloway 'needs continuous financial support from Iraq.'
Galloway's old passport is at his home in Streatham. It won't be hard for him to verify, but he believes he 'spent Christmas day with Tariq Aziz', the former Iraqi foreign minister who last week surrendered himself to US authorities in Baghdad. The two men attended mass in the capital's Roman Catholic cathedral. Christmas lunch at Aziz's home followed, and a party was held that night.
The implication? If Galloway wanted more cash, he could go straight to the top -- Aziz, even Saddam himself, and not bother with intelligence minions.
Galloway says the British government was aware of where he spent that Christmas and with whom. He says he privately told Peter Hain, the then minister at the Foreign Office for Middle East affairs, and suggested opening a channel of dialogue as a means of resolving the Iraqi crisis. 'Hain agreed we should start such a dialogue.' A month later, according to Galloway, Hain had begun briefing journalists that Galloway was 'close' to Tariq Aziz.
In another of the Telegraph's documents found in the foreign ministry, a letter has Galloway identifying his 'representative in Baghdad on all matters concerning my work with the Mariam Appeal or the Emergency Committee in Iraq'. Galloway's intermediary was Fawaz Zureikat. In the Telegraph letter Zureikat is quoted as effectively pleading for a Galloway pay rise.
So was Zureikat using Galloway's name for financial gain for himself? 'No, I never for a minute suspected he would have. [Zureikat] was a very prominent person in Iraq long before he met me. He'd been doing business in Iraq since 1986. He had no need of me to make him a bigger man.'
Galloway recalls that Zureikat had once shared a prison cell in Syria with Tariq Aziz, the implication being that the two men share a common bond and that Zureikat 'does not need George Galloway'. But Galloway did use the financial help of Zureikat, a man he met through his Jerusalem-born wife, Dr Amineh Abu-Sayyad, a relative of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Galloway separated from his first wife in 1987, and divorced 12 years later. He married Sayyad in 2000 .
The two years before his second marriage will be central to the dissection of Galloway's financial affairs. The investigation that promises to be a key part of the libel case concerns a child lying in a Baghdad hospital suffering leukaemia. In 1998 Galloway launched a public appeal to bring the child, Mariam Hussein, to Britain for specialist treatment. He claimed uranium-tipped weapons used during the Gulf war in 1991 had been a contributory cause to her illness. The high- profile campaign promised to first save Mariam then with residual funds help others in the same situation.
However, from an initial humani tarian appeal Galloway appeared to change its nature into a highly politicised anti-sanctions campaign. And because Galloway had never registered it formally as a charity, there was no public scrutiny of its books.
Now both the attorney-general's office and the Charity Commission have Mariam under the microscope.
The questions are clear enough: did Galloway steer it well clear of formal charitable status to avoid financial scrutiny? And was it used to deliver money from Zureikat that came directly from the Iraqi regime?
Galloway is adamant: 'It was always a political campaign from the very beginning. It was not charitable, it was humanitarian.' He says it was 'preposterous' to claim he never wanted the accounts made public. 'Look at the press treatment when we brought Mariam back. Everyone was accusing me of politically campaigning. No-one was saying, 'Look there's George Galloway bringing this girl back for charitable purposes.''
Zureikat also claims he never traded in oil and never received any Iraqi money that was supposed to be channelled to Galloway.
But openness there will be, especially during the dissections that will legally accompany the libel case. Galloway seems prepared. 'Every single journey [to Middle East countries and beyond made in connection with the Mariam anti-sanctions campaign] now being referred to as a revelation, has been systematically registered in the House of Commons register year after year. And there had not been a whisper of complaint.'
So where did the money inside the campaign come from? Galloway admits that 'not many people gave money' and the 'vast bulk' came from only three sources, one being Zureikat.
He delivers the arithmetic: 'Around £500,000 came from the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia gave £100,000 and, of the total, £900,000 -- the bulk -- came from Zureikat.'
Zureikat, based in Jordan, was recently arrested along with other prominent businessmen who had financial links with Saddam Hussein's regime. He has since been released.
The traditional paranoia of the left emerges when Galloway tries to explain why he didn't want the Mariam accounts out in public display. 'Just like the Socialist Worker Party would not publish its accounts to the Institute of Directors, or open its books to the Daily Mail, neither would we, we are not obliged to.' That privacy will now go. 'In the libel case,' he promises, 'every jot and tittle will be in front of the judge.'
Despite some reports to the contrary, Galloway says Mariam is still being supported. 'She still gets all her medicine, her house, her clothes, her education, her special blind needs [she recovered from the leukaemia, but it left her without sight] her family get fed and clothed, and in addition to all of that she gets $100 a month -- which is three times the average Iraqi wage.'
Asked if there was anyone involved in the running of the appeal who received money from the Iraqi government, Galloway is clear: 'No, never.'
Privacy for Galloway's own finances will also soon go. Asked if he would open all his accounts, he says: 'Don't accentuate the 'all'. I've only got one account in Britain [held at the Co-operative Bank in Glasgow] and one holiday account in Portugal which contains Ū500. There are no hidden accounts in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands.'
On his own assets, he admits only two properties. A house in Streatham in London bought in 1996 for £220,000, with a mortgage of £290,000 (recently valued at £500,000). His home in Burgau on the Algarve cost £82,000 when bought in 1998. It has a mortgage of £76,000 (recently valued at £125,000). 'I have no other houses.'
He drives an N-registration Mercedes (bought from MP Jimmy Wray) and has an N-registration Range Rover kept in Portugal.
He admits to owning one share in a company called AVL Media, described in the Companies House register as a 'motion picture and video production/radio and television activities/news agency activities'.
AVL's director is Ron McKay, a journalist (and occasional Sunday Herald contributor) and long-term friend of Galloway's. McKay's other broadcasting venture is ATV (Arab Television), a London-based satellite channel that filmed and distributed the worldwide rights to the pre-war interview conducted in Baghdad between Tony Benn and Saddam Hussein.
Profit ATV made from that interview has been kept private. Industry sources say that global media interest could have delivered a multi-million pound profit. McKay in a newspaper interview says the figure is below £500,000.
AVL Media is listed with a book value of £35,320. Galloway says: 'I've never made a penny from AVL.' He admits to two salaries: one from being an MP (£50,000 a year) and another from a weekly column in the Mail on Sunday, 'which last year gave me £82,000'. He adds: 'I don't own anything else. There is no cafˇ in Cuba or anywhere else.'
On the Pakistan-sponsored London-based newspaper, East, which Galloway helped set up and staff, he claimed to have 'never received a penny'. An extensive investigation by BBC Newsnight into East -- focusing on 'lobbying' money totalling £360,00 -- eventually determined that despite suspect judgement by Galloway, he received no money for his own benefit.
Similarly, an investigation into the charity War on Want by the Charity Commission in 1991 found 'mis management' during the period when Galloway was general secretary. The report said Galloway lacked 'expertise in crucial areas', had mingled his own funds with the charity funds, and had failed to keep separate accounts. But the charity's own investigation cleared Galloway, saying he had repaid the money spent on his own, rather than the charity's business.
These two episodes highlight Galloway's ability to both get into deep water and to get out of it unscathed.
This time, the allegations against him are on a different scale. He says: 'Michael Foot [the former Labour leader] called me, offering his full support. He said he cannot remember, and he is an old man, any politician who has ever been more gravely libelled.
'Foot was smeared by Sunday Times as a Soviet agent,' recalls Galloway. 'And going back to the Zinoviev letter [a 1924 British intelligence forgery that destroyed the re-election chances for Ramsay MacDonald's Labour-led government], people on the left have been smeared in this way.'
Galloway adds: 'Forgery is salient to the entire Iraq issue, everything from the so-called dossier, to fake invoices for uranium from Niger, now discredited and under investigation by the UN.'
If so, is there more to come? 'Frankly,' shrugs Galloway. 'I don't know what will come next -- illicitly marrying a camel ... who knows?'
----
Galloway: I'm the victim of Blair's revenge
Exclusive: 'It's clear that the war party -- the UK and the US -- want to silence opponents'
By James Cusick, Westminster Editor
UK Herald,
April 27, 2003
http://www.sundayherald.com/33380
George Galloway claims he has been set up by the British and US governments to 'exact revenge' for his high-profile anti-war campaigning over the invasion of Iraq.
In an exclusive interview yesterday with the Sunday Herald, Galloway said: 'What is clear is that the war party, meaning both the US and UK, are determined to exact revenge and to silence the remaining opponents they have for what they have done.'
As evidence of their desire to punish their political opponents, Galloway cited US Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement last week that France would face 'consequences' because of its opposition to the US-led war in Iraq.
Galloway believes his leadership role in both the mass demonstrations that saw two million protesters take to the streets and the largest parliamentary revolt in Commons history left him a clear target.
He remains unrepentant for the position he finds himself in: 'I'm obviously hurt and bruised -- but I'm convinced of the political positions I've taken. '
Galloway is this weekend preparing with his lawyers a suit against the Boston-based newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, which last week alleged documents had been discovered by an Iraqi general in Baghdad stating that the Glasgow MP had been paid $10m (£6.25m) by Saddam Hussein's government. The payments were claimed to go back to 1992, the last being this year.
The US claims follow accusations made in The Daily Telegraph, also based on documents found in Baghdad, that Galloway had been paid £375,000 by Saddam's regime for pro-Iraqi campaigning work. It was claimed Galloway was paid indirectly through oil-for-food funding.
Galloway said he was now convinced the documents found were forgeries and that he is the subject of a systematic smear campaign. He said: 'Who did what and who forged what I'm not yet in a position to know and may never be.'
Recent reports revealed that Tony Blair and some Cabinet members were preparing to resign if the vote in the Commons in the run-up to war had gone against the government.
Defence secretary Geoff Hoon also said he had informed his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, of the political significance of the parliamentary vote. According to reports, the US were made aware of the gamble Blair was taking .
Galloway said that smear tactics had been used against outspoken critics before: 'Arthur Scargill was systematically smeared for years over a story that his mortgage had been paid by Libya during the time his members [of the NUM] were out on strike. The story later turned out to be false.'
He added that forged documents had also been used to justify the war against Iraq, most notably the publication of false invoices said to be part of a plan to import uranium from Niger into Iraq. The UN is currently investigating the now discredited claims.
Galloway said the origin of the documents that refer to him was so far impossible to verify and that it was unlikely British intelligence agencies had any direct involvement, instead pointing the finger at the US, the Iraqi National Congress and Israeli intelligence.
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The spooky provenance of the smoking gun that backfired
April 27 2003
The Age (Australia)
By Roger Franklin
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/26/1051316050118.html
Last week in Baghdad, a serendipitous discovery turned up a box of files that nailed Scottish anti-war MP George Galloway as the kept creature of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service. The Glasgow firebrand denies everything, angrily suggesting that the documents were planted.
Perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt - for now. The fact remains that the Iraq war has been a boon for forgers and peddlers of misinformation.
Take the phoney war's great hoax: the dossier that Colin Powell finally presented to the UN in early March as "proof" that Iraq had imported illicit uranium ore from Niger. For months before that, the Bush Administration kept the file close to its chest, citing it constantly, but seldom letting anyone take a closer look.
Now, quietly, quite a few people are paying it a good deal more attention, including a handful of congressional investigators. Far from clearing up the mystery, however, the digging has only deepened it. What investigators have achieved isn't much, having teased just a few tantalising strands of truth from a dark web of deceit - but for laymen, the whodunit is as captivating as a le Carre novel.
"Who falsified this?" chief weapons inspector Hans Blix demanded last week, arguing that his team should be readmitted to occupied Iraq. "Is it not disturbing that the intelligence agencies that should have all the technical means at their disposal did not discover that this was falsified?"
Disturbing indeed. Initially attributed only to vague "intelligence sources", the documents appeared to represent hard proof that Saddam Hussein was in flagrant breach of UN sanctions. As Powell explained, they constituted "an irrefutable smoking gun".
Within hours of being made available to the UN, however, they were exposed as fictions - and not very good ones at that. First, there was the quantity of uranium ore said to be involved - 500 tonnes - which would have represented 20 per cent of Niger's total annual output, a quantity so large it stretches credulity to imagine it being siphoned off unnoticed.
Then there were the documents themselves. One bore the signature of Niger's foreign minister - except that the man in question hadn't held that job for 11 years. Same thing with the letter alleged to have originated in the president's office. A simple internet check by UN officials revealed that the letterhead dated back to an earlier regime.
So who concocted them and why? The New Yorker magazine's Seymour Hersh points the finger at British intelligence, which he suggests may have dummied up the documents to help Bush quell congressional opposition to the looming war.
As a theory, Hersh's scenario fits neatly with the chronology of the march to war. Bush needed persuasive proof and - viola! - it materialised on cue. Yet that could also be the Hersh explanation's fatal flaw: Facts and circumstances dovetail just a bit too well.
The Administration's explanation, such as it is, paints a much murkier picture. The documents came not from a single source but from several, officials have said. Mentioned often as the point of origin is Italy, where one off-the-record Administration explanation insists that they were the work of a jobbing con man in cahoots with a Niger diplomat out to make a quick buck.
From Rome, according to this provenance, the file went to Paris. "The forgeries were sold to an Italian intelligence agent by a con man and passed on to French authorities," investigative reporter Jeffrey Sallot wrote in an unchallenged story in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
But hold on a tick. If the documents were relayed to the intelligence service of the country leading the opposition to the war, why would Jacques Chirac's spooks have distributed them any further? If true, they could only have lent considerable weight to the Bush Administration's argument.
Except, that is, if the people passing them along realised that they would be exposed as frauds. What better way to discredit Washington's case than to see prime exhibits for the prosecution revealed as flimsy frauds?
Thanks to the Bush Administration's eagerness to believe whatever suited its case, that is exactly what happened. When the US spy agency declined to give the Niger documents any credence, the true believers at the White House simply cut the agency out of the loop, as Hersh and others have reported.
The result: a US humiliation at the UN that destroyed its credibility and helped scuttle a Security Council vote authorising military force. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Tony Blair's advocacy of the war was interrupted by the need to put down a revolt within his own party - a revolt in which the bogus evidence figured prominently.
And who gained? Why the French, of course. C'est la guerre.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- homeland security
It Won't Just Go Away
SUNDAY April 27, 2003
Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Apr/04272003/public_f/51463.asp
As The Tribune noted in an editorial, "The Patriot Act" (April 18), the U.S.A. Patriot Act gives the government broad powers, including the ability to access medical, financial, library and other private records. It is such a sweeping law that many Utahns are correctly raising concerns about how federal agents could use its awesome powers to peer into our private lives.
Your editorial misstated one important fact: Only a small percentage of the vast new powers given federal law enforcement actually are scheduled to expire at the end of 2005. Many powers were not covered by the sunsets, including the controversial "sneak and peek" searches that allow the government to search our homes, download our computer files and Internet histories -- all without informing us. What's more, these searches are not restricted to people who are suspected of being terrorists or even having ties to terrorists.
Other measures that will not expire include lowering standards for authorizing certain wiretapping devices and granting the CIA domestic law enforcement powers, which previously were prohibited.
The public, the ACLU and some members of Congress have requested the Justice Department disclose how these powers are being used and if they are effective. Justice has either ignored the requests or offered cursory and incomplete responses.
In fact, the department is drafting legislation to give more powers to federal agents. And if they succeed in passing this draft legislation, most Americans won't know about that either.
Dani Eyer Executive director ACLU of Utah Salt Lake City
-------- terrorism
Explosion hits Indonesian airport
By Sukino Harisumarto
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
April 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030427-125756-2673r.htm
JAKARTA, Indonesia, April 27 (UPI) -- A powerful explosion rocked Indonesia's Sukarno-Hatta International airport Sunday morning, injuring at least 11 people and causing serious damage, police and news reports said.
The blast took place at about 6:30 a.m. local time inside the departure area for domestic flights at Sukarno-Hatta's F-2 gate, just behind a fast-food franchise outlet, eyewitnesses said.
Gate F-2 serves the national flag carrier Garuda Indonesia's domestic and international flight services.
Top security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Indonesia currently faces two different threats. There is the separatist movements in Aceh, known as GAM, Papua in the eastern Indonesia province of Papua, and another smaller scale group in the Mollucas province. And there are terrorist groups. He said the Sunday blast could have been linked to both GAM, the acronym for Free Aceh Movement, and terrorist groups in the country.
"There is a correlation between the explosions to what is going on in the country ... the trial of several (militant Muslim) leaders for their alleged involvement in terrorist acts," Yudhoyono told reporters, commenting on the fresh blast.
He was referring to the beginning of the trial Wednesday of Abu Bakar Baasyir, the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a terrorist group blamed for being behind last October's Bali bombings that left at least 202 people dead, mostly foreign visitors.
National police chief Dai Bachtiar, who inspected to the explosion site, said the blast came from "low explosive" material.
"Several eyewitnesses were under questioning in connection with the bomb," Prasetyo, spokesman of the Jakarta city police, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, the second explosion to rock the Indonesian capital in four days.
On Thursday, a minor explosion behind the United Nations office in Jakarta caused no injury.
One of the 11 people injured Sunday, a 15-year-old girl, lost one of her feet in the blast.
"At the time I and my family were about to check in when there was a big explosion," said Jihan, who suffered a wound to his leg. Jihan, along with his wife have been planning to go to Kalimantan.
Commissioner-General Erwin Mappaseng, chief of the detective and crimes at the national police headquarters, said based on a preliminary investigation that the blast came from a homemade bomb similar to the one that exploded Thursday at nearby the United Nations office.
This week's blasts came after the arrest of at least 18 people -- including two Malaysians -- some of whom were suspected JI members -- for their alleged involvement in various bomb attacks in Indonesia during the past three years.
Analysts have warned that despite the fact authorities have managed to arrest several key suspects of the previous bombings, including the Bali blasts, terrorism remain a serious threat in Indonesia, which is home to the world's largest Muslim population.
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Instruction and Methods From Al Qaeda Took Root in North Iraq
April 27, 2003
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27NORT.html
DARGA SHARKHAN, Iraq, April 22 - The two-inch-thick manual on killing, discovered in an abandoned bomb laboratory here early this month, offers instruction in Al Qaeda's array of lethal demolition skills.
With a text in Arabic complemented by diagrams taken from American military manuals, the document offers lessons for rigging explosives, setting and concealing booby traps, and wiring an alarm clock to detonate a bomb.
The book is a photocopy of one volume of the Jihad Encyclopedia, the technical manual that American officials have said is used by Al Qaeda in its war against the West. Other copies were found in terrorist training camps and guest houses in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. This copy, though, was found not in Afghanistan but in this valley in the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. It was recovered by Kurdish security officials accompanied by a reporter in a training center operated by Ansar al-Islam, a local armed party.
Weeks after Ansar was forced from its territory by American Special Forces soldiers and Kurdish fighters at the end of March, evidence gathered from its bases provides a detailed look at the operations of that band of Islamic fighters.
Documents gathered in 2001 by a correspondent for The New York Times 1,300 miles away in Kabul, the Afghan capital, suggested that Al Qaeda was then helping to unify the Islamic groups that became Ansar and was encouraging them to establish strict Islamic rules in villages they controlled.
The documents spoke of the groups in Iraq and said they should be urged to unite. Kurdish officials and Ansar defectors have said leaders of the groups that formed Ansar went to Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 to meet with Qaeda officials.
American military officials say the new materials indicate that a methodical collaboration has gone far beyond helping Ansar get its start and demonstrate that Al Qaeda has the ability to export its training lessons from place to place.
Interviews with prisoners and translations of internal documents and computer disks show that Ansar possessed manuals from Al Qaeda in printed and digital form, ran two training bases with curriculums strikingly similar to those taught in Afghan camps, and managed its affairs much as Al Qaeda did.
The group also had poison recipes much like those found in Qaeda buildings in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell.
Moreover, Al Qaeda seeded Ansar with experienced fighters who helped organize the group's training, administration and ambitions, American and Kurdish officials say.
A Special Forces officer described the books, posters and lesson plans recovered by Kurds and American intelligence teams as "the Al Qaeda mobile curriculum." Identification cards indicated that some of the fighters came from other countries, and officials expressed concern that they formed part of a core group of militants who could turn up elsewhere in years to come.
Ansar's bases operated like a small Qaeda campus moved to another restless corner of the earth, the documents and interviews indicate.
"They had Al Qaeda instructors with them, they had an Al Qaeda cadre," said a Special Forces officer who helped coordinate the battle against Ansar and who has reviewed the intelligence collected about the group. "One of the problems with Al Qaeda is that it is not a clearly identifiable organization. They don't wear an Al Qaeda uniform or carry an Al Qaeda passport, but they launch out these professionals who train and start groups."
Ansar established itself late in 2001, as the war in Afghanistan was winding down, uniting previously splintered Islamic parties. It occupied a border region in northeastern Iraq that has been out of Saddam Hussein's control since 1991.
The group waged war against the zone's Kurdish government, destabilizing the region with assassination attempts, guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings. The United States has pointed to its activities as one justification for the war in Iraq.
American and Kurdish officials say the group received support from Al Qaeda and coordinated activities through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian identified by the United States as a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden. They also said the group ran a factory that made the poison ricin and a topical cyanide poison and maintained ties with Mr. Hussein.
Evidence collected from the region is still being analyzed, and some American allegations remain publicly unsubstantiated. No clear evidence has emerged of operational links between Ansar and Mr. Hussein's government.
American officials say an intelligence team has collected cyanide-based compounds from a former Ansar base and is awaiting test results to see if the group managed to concoct a larger selection of poisons.
Also, although proof of Mr. Zarqawi's presence has not been found, wiretaps and telephone records from suspected terrorists in Italy show that five people believed to be his operatives in northern Iraq were in contact by satellite telephone with colleagues in Europe, American and Italian officials said.
The evidence collected at Ansar's bases also suggest collaboration with Al Qaeda. Some of the papers were gathered by journalists, and others were provided by Kurdish intelligence officials before being translated for The Times by a private language institute in northern Iraq.
Textbooks and bomb or poison recipes in Ansar custody were identical to those contained in Al Qaeda's records from Afghanistan, including the bomb manual for the Jihad Encyclopedia and computer files on Western intelligence collection and ways to evade it.
Other documents were strikingly similar in tone or content to Qaeda papers found in Afghanistan, like military training materials.
The curriculum is the product of a detailed collection and translation effort. A Special Forces officer flipped through the Ansar explosives manual found here, noting, as other American officers have, that it included page after page of instructional diagrams from United States Army publications.
He recognized almost every one. "This one is from our improvised munitions manual," he said. "That's from the booby trap manual. This is almost photocopied from our books."
A few documents also promoted social practices reminiscent of those imposed by the Taliban, including a memo forbidding passage of vehicles carrying television sets because they might import immorality to the Ansar villages.
Like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Ansar ran Web sites. They mixed religious invocation and martial gloating, sometimes posting video of the mutilated bodies of Kurds.
The day after Ansar was chased from its strongholds, it posted an announcement from its leadership council declaring that the American assault had failed.
"Thanks to God, all of these billions of dollars were not able to do the smallest harm to our mujahedeen," the declaration said.
Northern Iraq has long had a small cadre of jihad fighters, including some who Kurdish intelligence officials say trained in western Pakistan in the 1980's, when the United States was underwriting the guerrilla resistance against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan.
A few of these men, including one who uses the name Ayub Afghan, were among Ansar's leaders and teachers. The records show that many of the men who fought with Ansar were uneducated local soldiers. One man listed his profession on an Ansar application form as "shepherd."
But the documents also include passports, driver's licenses, identification cards or university transcripts from young men from Algeria, Sudan, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Spain, Italy and Canada.
One record is an identification card from a military hospital in Saudi Arabia; another is from a naval school in Sudan.
"This is the sort of thing that worries us," an American military official said. "We realize that some of these guys can roam and turn up years from now when they are involved in terrorist activity somewhere else."
One man captured near the village of Sarget who gave the name Ahmed Muhammad Tawil, 34, of the Gaza Strip, showed the degree of sophistication that the American official said was cause for concern.
His real identity remains elusive; he had Iraqi and Iranian identification cards and Spanish and Saudi Arabian passports. All bear different names. Dirty and cold in a lightless solitary confinement cell in Sulaimaniya, and with a bullet wound in his left calf, he brightened when three journalists visited his cell two days after he was captured.
He looked at one and said, "Do you know how to make a nuclear bomb?" When the journalist shook his head, he smiled mischievously. "How come?" he said. "You are American. Tell me."
Kurds and American officials refuse to say where he is held now, but they say he seems to have been coached in resisting interrogation, a sign of professional training.
Kurdish officials had estimated that Ansar al-Islam had about 650 members, but American officials now say they believe it had grown to 1,000 or more. The passports collected show that many new international fighters entered on Iranian tourist or pilgrimage visas.
Most of the fighters were killed or scattered to Iran, Special Forces officers and Kurdish officials say. But as many as 200 are thought to be in the mountainous border region, and the leaders and the foreign fighters are believed to have slipped away.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesting 'Patriots'
Town Among Several Vowing to Block Patriot Act Enforcement
ABC News,
April 27, 2003
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WorldNewsNow/patriotact_carrboro030427.html
CARRBORO, N.C. - In this old cotton mill town, the Friendly Barber Shop still cuts hair for a friendly $5.
It hardly seems like the front line in the war on terrorism, but try telling that to some of the town's 17,000 residents.
"We're all patriots," said Allan Spalt, a Carrboro resident. "We're all against terrorism. We all believe in protecting the country."
Local residents are worried the federal government has become too intrusive and that federal agents could sweep into town and violate their constitutional right to privacy.
"It's terrifying," said Lori Hoyt, a social worker from Carrboro.
'Bill of Rights Defense'
Residents have pressured the City Council to pass a "Bill of Rights defense resolution."
The measure requires federal investigators who visit the town to report to city hall and state their business. It also directs local police to stand in the way of any unreasonable searches or seizures.
"It may be David against Goliath, but it's a fight worth fighting," said Carrboro's mayor, Mike Nelson.
Dozens of cities around the country have passed resolutions urging federal authorities to respect the civil rights of local citizens when fighting terrorism. Efforts to pass similar measures are under way in more than 60 other places.
While the resolutions are largely symbolic, many of them provide some legal justification for local authorities to resist cooperating in the federal war on terrorism when they deem civil liberties and constitutional rights are being compromised.
'Sweeping Ramifications'
At issue is an element of the president's homeland security program - the USA Patriot Act.
The rules give the FBI and CIA more authority to wiretap and monitor residents. For example, federal agents no longer need probable cause to monitor mosques or political gatherings. They can also force librarians and county clerks to turn over public records, and jail them if they tell anyone.
Carrboro residents say what concerns them the most is something called the "sneak and peek" warrant. It allows federal investigators to come into your home, without you knowing, search everything, and they have a "reasonable" amount of time to tell you why they were there.
"The Patriot Act passed overwhelmingly in the hysteria following the Sept. 11 tragedy," said Mark Dorison, a local nightclub manager. "I don't think the American public has had a chance to digest the sweeping ramifications."
Are Carrboro residents really concerned that the FBI is going to break into their houses?
"If they can do that to somebody else, they can do it to anyone," said Alex Zaffron, a Carrboro resident.
"I'm an older person now," Hoyt said, "and I've learned not to trust what bureaucracies or big government says."
Civil Rights Terrorists?
Constitutional scholars say the new Patriot Act renews old distrust in federal authority.
"Under this standard of terrorism," said Kimberly Crenshaw of Columbia University, "the civil rights movement, the freedom riders, the sit-in demonstrations, all of these people could conceivably have been prosecuted as terrorists."
All this makes Carrboro Police Chief Carolyn Hutchinson uncomfortable.
She could go to jail if she refuses to cooperate with federal authorities.
"I won't initially run for the hills," she said, "but I will seek legal counsel."
The people of Carrboro say they realize their resolution, their police chief, and their mayor will end up in court, and they're ready for the fight.
ABCNEWS' Steve Osunsami contributed to this report.
----
A Flashback to the 60's for an Antiwar Protester
April 27, 2003
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial2/27PROT.html
COLUMBIA, S.C., April 23 - At the time, Brett A. Bursey says, he seemed to be having a 60's flashback.
There he was at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport with his antiwar sign. There were the thousands of Republicans gathering to welcome a president. There were the police officers arresting him for trespassing.
The first time this happened was in May 1969, before a visit by Richard M. Nixon. The charges against Mr. Bursey were dropped after the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that if protesters were on public property - as the antiwar demonstrators were - they could not be charged with trespassing.
Last Oct. 24, 33 years later and about 100 yards away, the now graying Mr. Bursey was again arrested for trespassing, this time before a visit by President Bush. The charge was soon dropped.
But last month, the local United States attorney, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., brought federal charges against Mr. Bursey under a seldom-used statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas the president is visiting. He faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine.
This being South Carolina, Mr. Bursey's story includes lots of colorful history, old grudges and improbable plot twists, not to mention the Confederate battle flag.
But to some legal experts it is also part of a growing pattern of repression against protesters, demonstrators and dissenters. The American Civil Liberties Union says it has found many examples, like increased arrests and interrogations of protesters and the shunning of celebrities who have opposed the war in Iraq.
"When you connect the dots, you see very clearly a climate of chilled dissent and debate," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the civil liberties group.
In particular, Mr. Romero said, there is a growing practice of corralling protesters in "free-speech zones," which are often so far from the object of the protest as to be invisible. "It's an effort to mitigate the effectiveness of free speech," he said.
And he does not buy the argument that such zones are necessary to protect the president and other officials. "John Hinckley wasn't carrying an anti-Reagan sign when he shot him," Mr. Romero said.
It was just such a "protest zone" that got Mr. Bursey in trouble last fall. A spokeswoman for the airport said officials there had established a protest area on the verge of a highway, a good half mile from the hangar where the president would be speaking. (Airport police are not sure if anyone actually protested at the official zone, she said.)
Mr. Bursey hoped he and some friends could protest somewhere closer, maybe across the road from the hangar, he said. The police in Charleston and Greenville had been accommodating, he said, when he had asked to avoid the protest zones, which he described as being "out there behind the coliseum by the Dumpsters."
It did not work this time.
"We attempted to dialogue for a while, them telling me to go to the free-speech zone, me saying I was in it: the United States of America," Mr. Bursey said. Finally, he said, an airport policeman told him he had to put down his sign ("No War for Oil") or leave.
" `You mean, it's the content of my sign?' I asked him," Mr. Bursey said. "He said, `Yes, sir, it's the content of your sign.' "
Mr. Bursey kept the sign and was arrested; he said he watched Air Force One land from the back of a patrol wagon and spent the night in the county jail.
A Secret Service agent was present at the arrest, Mr. Bursey said, but he added that no one could have seen him and his companions as a security threat. "There was no one under 50 in that crowd," said Mr. Bursey, who is 54. "In my mind, at that time, we didn't pose a security threat; we posed a political threat."
A spokesman for the United States attorney's office, Scott N. Schools, said the message on the sign was not the problem. "It's not the fact of what Mr. Bursey was doing," Mr. Schools said. "The problem was where he was doing it. That's the basis of the prosecution."
Mr. Schools did allow that federal prosecutions of protesters at presidential events had been rare.
Since 1992, only a dozen cases involving this part of the United States Code, Section 1752 of Title 18, have been referred to federal prosecutors by the Secret Service and other government agencies, according to TRACfed, a database of federal enforcement information at Syracuse University.
Most of those referrals were dropped; three resulted in trials or pleas (the best known was the prosecution of a mentally ill and heavily armed man who tried to hand-deliver a letter to President Bush at his Texas ranch).
Mr. Schools said he could not comment on why the government was taking the unusual step against Mr. Bursey, but he said it would become clear at the trial, which is likely to be in the next month or two.
"Nobody's seen a case like this before," said Bill Nettles, a former public defender who is on Mr. Bursey's legal team. "I have to wonder if some of it's not Brett."
By this he means Brett Bursey the local character, professional protester and liberal voice in a conservative state (he's a vegetarian in the land of pork barbecue).
Since 1968, "I've been a political organizer," Mr. Bursey said. "That's been my job, that's been my mission. I've at least been diligent at it."
The son of a Navy dentist, Mr. Bursey has a life story compelling enough to be a novel. And at least some of it appears to be; anyone who has read Pat Conroy's 1995 best seller "Beach Music" will remember the student radicals who tried to destroy a draft board office, only to discover at trial that one of their leaders (and friends) was a government agent.
That happened to Mr. Bursey, and he ended up spending almost two years in the penitentiary for malicious destruction of property - as he puts it, for spraying "Hell No We Won't Go" on walls. But not before he spent some time hiding in New York City (he says his family feared he would be killed in prison). Then he was arrested in Texas for buying 500 pounds of peyote buttons, but beat that charge on a technicality, he said.
Indeed, he has been arrested so often that although he thinks the first time was when he burned a Confederate battle flag, he is not sure. "Lordy, it was such a busy time," he said. "My chronology has been kind of messed up."
Unlike most of his peers, Mr. Bursey never got a nine-to-five job; instead he founded "progressive" organizations and started an alternative weekly newspaper. And he protested against things: nuclear power, nuclear warheads, government corruption and, of course, the aforementioned Confederate battle flag, which until two years ago flew on the dome of the Statehouse here.
Columbia, however, is not exactly a protest-friendly town, especially these days.
Yellow ribbons are everywhere, from the airport to the Statehouse to Angeline's Beauty and Wig Salon on Assembly Street. Instead of advertising sandwich specials, the sign outside a Wendy's reads "Support Our Troops." And plenty of people remember Mr. Bursey's youthful transgressions, including the county sheriff, who arrested him at the airport in 1969.
"I've told Brett that in this climate, in this state, there is a real possibility that he gets convicted," said Mr. Nettles, the lawyer.
In the current case, he plans to argue that the federal statute is unconstitutional as it applies to Mr. Bursey, who he said was not the only person in the area the Secret Service says was restricted; the others, he says, were mostly Bush supporters. And Mr. Nettles said he was surprised that the federal prosecutors had not tried to drop or settle the case, which is attracting attention to his client and his views.
"If they really wanted to torture Brett," he said, "if what they really wanted was to take his voice - they'd dismiss it."
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