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NUCLEAR
Hiroshima mayor denounces U.S. use of depleted uranium
Health of soldiers leaving Iraq to be monitored
Heavy Weapons
EU Should Consider Force with WMD States - Greece
Indian premier promises third but final bid for peace
Iraqis Won't Admit to Banned Weapons
MILITARY
Maoist rebel wary of Bush
Chinese Submarine Accident Kills 70
EU to Draft First Common Security Strategy
Few Signs Emerge of U.S.-Iran Thaw
Mobile lab might be for Iraqi arms
Bush plans to carve Iraq into three sectors
Troops Detain 3 Top Iraqi Officials
Saddam is Gone, But What About His Weapons?
Tension seen on Iraq rebuilding
Iraqis hold mixed feelings on Americans
Fears over move by Shias based in Iran
U.S. Is Now in Battle for Peace After Winning the War in Iraq
Baghdad battle 'killed 2,300'
Details of U.S. peace plan for Iraq
Israel Plans Palestinian Statehood In Jordan
Hamas Fighters March in Defiance at Gaza City Funeral
Artists, writers defend Castro
Powell set to take hard line with Syria
Powell demands end to Syrian support for anti-Israel groups
Syria Must Crack Down on Terror Groups, Powell Says
India Announces Steps in Effort to End Its Conflict With Pakistan
India Makes Gesture to Pakistan
Powell Wants Pentagon to Act on Detainees
U.S. Plans to Reduce Forces in Iraq, With Help of Allies
White House defends trip to carrier
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
New Agency Sets Ethics Rules to Avoid Conflicts of Interest
A Survivor Recounts Horrors Of N. Korea's Prison Camps
Air Attack on U.S. Consulate Foiled
U.S. Reports Plot to Fly a Plane Into U.S. Consulate in Pakistan
OTHER
White House Monitoring SARS
ACTIVISTS
Pope Urges Youth to End Spiral of War, Terror
Thousands Protest N.Y. Education Cuts
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Hiroshima mayor denounces U.S. use of depleted uranium
Saturday, May 3, 2003
Japan Today (Kyodo News)
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=258684
HIROSHIMA - Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba on Friday denounced the use of depleted uranium arms in Iraq by the U.S. military and said Washington has to prove the country was hiding weapons of mass destruction prior to its invasion.
Akiba said in a statement, "People in Hiroshima and the world over have wished for the end of military action in Iraq, but it is deeply regretful that the United States used depleted uranium weapons and Iraqi citizens suffered greatly."
----
Health of soldiers leaving Iraq to be monitored
The Defense Department says blood samples are to be taken from troops leaving Iraq, under a law aimed at screening for Gulf War Syndrome.
Saturday, May 3, 2003
(AP)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/05/03/sprj.irq.soldiers.health.ap/
WASHINGTON -- The Defense Department, following a law meant to detect Gulf War Syndrome in returning troops, said this week it will collect blood from soldiers leaving Iraq and then conduct more comprehensive health evaluations.
Blood samples will be taken within 30 days of the soldiers' departure from countries where troops went as part of the war effort, the Pentagon said.
The department also said it has improved its process for assessing soldiers' health after they were sent to the Gulf region.
Soldiers will complete a 21-question health survey and then answer six questions in an interview with a trained health provider. Questions include whether they developed medical problems during deployment or have concerns about possible "exposures or events" during the war.
A soldier will be further evaluated if needed, the department said.
Veterans groups, though happy about the blood samples, said the Pentagon still is not complying with a 1997 law intended to prevent some of the problems experienced by first Gulf War veterans.
Several veterans who returned with strange illnesses, such as chronic fatigue and memory problems, blamed exposures to pesticides, oil fires, depleted uranium and other substances or believed vaccines were at fault. But lack of information on their health and on their exposures has made linking their illnesses difficult.
"They never collected any data," said Paul Hayden, Veterans of Foreign Wars deputy director of legislation.
An exam before deployment can provide a snapshot of the soldiers' health, said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.
"Let's complete the picture and do the predeployment survey," he said.
Usefullness debated
The Pentagon said little is learned about abnormalities from a cursory exam, particularly when so many soldiers who are relatively healthy. Because soldiers are routinely examined every five years, more is learned through health records and health surveys, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of the department's Deployment Health Support office.
But Rick Weidman, president of Vietnam Veterans of America, said active duty soldiers, such as Gulf War veterans, will not be forthcoming about physical or medical problems because that could end their military careers.
Kirkpatrick said the blood samples will provide limited information because there is no diagnostic test to show whether a person was exposed to something harmful. The blood can be examined for antibodies to determine if a soldier has an infectious disease, he said.
The 1997 law says that a health tracking system created by the defense secretary "shall include the use" of medical exams, including blood samples and a mental health assessment, before and after deployment. The exams are meant "to accurately record" soldiers' medical condition before deployment and any changes during that assignment.
At a House hearing in March, Rep. Chris Shays, R-Connecticut, said the Defense Department was not following the law because soldiers were not getting physical exams before deployment.
As the Iraq war was getting under way, Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to track soldiers' exposure to toxins and environmental hazards and share the data with his agency. Principi said much of the controversy over health problems experienced by Gulf War veterans would have been avoided if similar steps had been taken then.
Shays said in a statement Wednesday the usefulness of the exams will be determined by how well the Pentagon kept medical information on soldiers, monitored the environment and charted troop location data during the war.
--------
Heavy Weapons
The Army's Depleted Uranium Shells Pierce Armor-And Also Make People Sick
By Ed Ericson,
E Magazine,
May 3, 2003
http://www.emagazine.com/may-june_2003/0503curr_army.html
Early in Operation Desert Storm's four-day ground war, the story goes, an American Abrams M-1A1 tank got bogged down in Iraqi mud. Its fast-moving unit, the 16,000-member 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, continued its push toward Basra, leaving the beleaguered tank behind to await a rescue vehicle. This Abrams M-1A1 tank is equipped with depleted uranium (DU) armor and weaponry, making it a fearsome foe-and also a health hazard.
Suddenly, three Iraqi T-72 tanks attacked. The Abrams-built for speed-was a sitting duck before the Soviet Union's most advanced armor. But because the American tank was equipped with armor-piercing shells made from depleted uranium (DU, a waste product of the process that produces enriched uranium for use in atomic weapons and nuclear power plants), it was able to destroy all three of its attackers.
This story may not be true. Although it is widely posted on the Internet, mentioned in the compendium From Shield to Storm and cited in an anti-DU book called Metal of Dishonor, an extended search of Lexis-Nexis finds no reference to it before 2000. Calls to the U.S. Army's public information office brought no further clarification. Metal of Dishonor author Dan Fahey says he regrets citing the incident.
But the story is plausible. Although many accounts of the Gulf War credit U.S. air bombardment with the lopsided American victory, the overwhelming superiority of U.S. and allied tanks, armor and DU ammunition were also factors. U.S. and coalition ground forces destroyed 1,000 Iraqi tanks and thousands of armored personnel carriers during the ground war. Iraqi forces destroyed zero Abrams tanks.
The mystery behind the three-to-one incident mirrors the larger controversy enveloping depleted uranium weaponry. Despite its success on the battlefield, in the past decade DU has been implicated in health problems suffered by thousands of U.S. soldiers and blamed for a five-fold increase in the cancer rate among civilians in Southern Iraq. Since the U.S. military's widespread use of DU in the Gulf became known in 1991, the Pentagon has struggled to suppress mounting evidence that DU munitions are simply too toxic to use. It has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own experts, ignored their advice, impeded scientific research into DU's health effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the issue.
"The cover-up started with the infamous Los Alamos memorandum sent to our team in Saudi Arabia during March 1991," claims Doug Rokke, a retired health physicist who the Army tasked with the clean up of the nine U.S. tanks and 15 Bradley Fighting Vehicles that had been destroyed by "friendly fire" from DU shells. The memo suggested to Rokke that he downplay any environmental dangers or health hazards he might find. "There has been and continues to be concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment," the memo says. "Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal."
Rokke, the Army's lead expert on DU in the 1990s, directed the cleanup effort and then developed a rigorous, 12-hour training program in DU safety and handling for U.S. soldiers. But the military never implemented the program. Between 1991 and 1996 Rokke also urged the military brass to test veterans for exposure to DU, and treat and monitor those who had been exposed. He says the Pentagon ignored him, along with many other military medical experts and a 1993 congressional order. He was fired from his post. Rokke blames his own persistent respiratory problems and a cataract on DU exposure.
Rokke wants DU banned, as do many Gulf War vets, peace and environmental activists around the globe. In 1996 a United Nations subcommittee passed a resolution urging that its use be banned, along with other weapons of mass destruction. The measure was adopted by a vote of 15 to one, with the U.S. the sole dissenter.
In 1999, the European Parliament voted to urge NATO to suspend the use of DU munitions. The request was ignored. In March, 6,000 activists rallied in Hiroshima, Japan, calling on the U.S. not to attack Iraq again and to stop using and selling depleted uranium weapons. Protestors used their bodies to spell out the words "NO DU."
The U.S. has had DU ammunition since the 1970s, but never used it on the battlefield until the Gulf War. The U.S. and allied British fired 340 tons of DU in anti-tank shells in that conflict, by their own accounting. Tons more were used in the Balkans and Afghanistan.The 1990s saw a tremendous proliferation of DU munitions around the world. In 1991 only the U.S., Great
Britain and (probably) Israel had DU; by 1999, it was in the arsenals of a dozen countries. Both the U.S. and Russia sell depleted uranium weapons on the world arms market, providing a lucrative outlet for what had been expensive-to-dispose-of nuclear waste.
In the U.S. arsenal, DU is used not only in armor penetrators, but also in large bunker-buster bombs, cruise missiles and, according to Rokke, even light arms. "We have these things down to machine gun rounds," he says. "This concept that DU is only used against tanks is totally wrong. It works great against any soft targets. When it comes out of the barrel it is already on fire." That radioactive firestorm is the reason DU is so effective at piercing armor. It is also the reason DU is so dangerous to soldiers and civilians after the battle. The uranium ignites on impact.
When DU burns through a target, between 40 and 70 percent of every penetrator turns into fragments, smoke and uranium oxide dust. The dust, with particles as small as one micron, settles out on the ground and, studies show, can be carried by the wind as far as 25 miles away. These tiny particles can stick to hair and skin, and get swallowed or inhaled, where they lodge permanently in the lungs. Recent research suggests that DU's chemical toxicity damages the brain. It also emits alpha and beta radiation, which can damage lungs, kidneys and other soft tissues, especially the digestive tract.
The Pentagon admits that it should have given soldiers better training on how to avoid or deal with DU contamination, but claims the effects were unknown before the war, and at any rate are known to be mild today. "There just isn't any scientific foundation to draw a connection between exposure and incidence of cancer or birth defects," says Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of deployment health support at the Pentagon. But a military-funded report released just months before the Gulf War warned of DU's potential health effects.
For years, the Iraqis have claimed that allied DU rained on Iraqi forces has caused elevated rates of cancer and horrific birth defects. The Bush administration has dismissed these stories as propaganda. A request by the World Health Organization to study the problem was rebuffed by Saddam Hussein.
Retired Army colonel Dr. Andras Korenyi-Both says he "unintentionally opened a Pandora Box" by researching the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. Although nearly 28 percent of all returning Gulf War veterans-more than 200,000 of them-have filed claims that they are sick, he says all of the medical research has garnered "not a single positive result."
Rokke says the Army ignored his work on the health effects of DU "because this sucker is awesome at killing." Korenyi-Both is more measured. "I do not believe [it is a] government conspiracy. I do believe it is government insensitivity and cowardice," he says. "My youngest boy is a first lieutenant serving his country in the same sandbox. He gets the same protections we got. That concerns me."
-------- europe
[Maybe Europe and the US should disarm their WMD's]
EU Should Consider Force with WMD States - Greece
May 3, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-eu.html
KASTELLORIZO, Greece (Reuters) - European Union president Greece challenged its partners on Saturday to consider backing the use of force as a last resort against ``irresponsible nations'' that build weapons of mass destruction.
Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou raised the sensitive issue on how to deal with states developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons at a meeting of EU foreign ministers, several of whom opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
``Weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation are probably as historically destabilizing as the invention and spread of gunpowder,'' Papandreou said, according to speaking notes obtained by Reuters.
``If our efforts at peaceful enforcement do not work, are we willing to establish a doctrine for the use of force?'' he asked.
He was addressing a working session of the 25 current and future EU member states aboard a luxury cruise liner, moored in the natural harbor of this tiny Greek island, 800 moff the coast of Turkey.
The ministers agreed on the first day of informal talks in Rhodes on Friday to put differences over Iraq behind them and seek a common assessment of new threats.
Papandreou's comments underlined how far the EU has been pushed to review its aversion to military action by Washington's aggressive stance on so-called ``rogue states.''
The United States attacked Iraq, accusing it of hiding weapons of mass destruction. So far, none of the suspected weapons has been found, although numerous suspicious sites are being tested.
Papandreou urged the ministers to consider what the bloc would do, for example, if Iran were to develop a nuclear bomb.
``Our choices at present seem to be either to conduct polite conversations which rarely work or to accept the logic that leads to pre-emptive use of force,'' he said.
DIFFERENCES ON IRAN
Stronger international verification and new legislation to enforce arms control offered a potential alternative way.
``The reality is that we usually end up dealing with governments that are brutal and undemocratic. We apply sanctions but they still find the money to develop WMD,'' he said.
Analysts say Iran is potentially the next point of friction between Washington, seeking to isolate and pressure Tehran over its nuclear program, and the EU, which believes in engagement and is negotiating a trade agreement with Iran.
EU officials said they were pressing the Iranians to accept more intrusive international inspections of what Tehran insists is a peaceful nuclear research effort. Washington says the Islamic republic is masking a drive to produce atomic weapons.
The issue of weapons of mass destruction is at the heart of a debate over whether the EU needs a joint strategy to avoid future damaging diplomatic splits like the Iraq fiasco.
``What Iraq has brought out is other deeper issues. I think we are in urgent need of a European strategic concept. We must assess and agree on the threats that exist,'' said Papandreou.
He called for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to be mandated to draw up such a plan for the bloc, set to expand from 15 to 25 members next May.
Several ministers from countries with strong neutral or pacifist tendencies expressed unease at the idea of developing a doctrine that could involve the use of force.
``Sooner or later we'll have to deal with it but perhaps not now,'' Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller told reporters.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said it should be possible to develop a European security strategy for the 21st century, but evaded questions about the use of force.
Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh said there was a growing threat of chemical and biological weapons falling into the hands of well-organized terrorist networks unless effective export control mechanisms and inspections were implemented.
``We do not shy away from using force when justified and necessary, but it shouldn't be the first option,'' Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja told Reuters.
-------- india / pakistan
Indian premier promises third but final bid for peace with Pakistan
SANJEEV MIGLANI IN NEW DELHI
Sat 3 May 2003
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=502952003
THE Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, yesterday promised a third and final attempt to make peace with Pakistan - the "last in my lifetime".
Mr Vajpayee, 78, who held two failed peace summits with Pakistan in 1999 and 2001, announced his government would restore full diplomatic ties with Islamabad, and re-open air links.
It was the clearest signal yet of thawing relations between the two countries, whose brinkmanship over the disputed territory of Kashmir last year brought fears of a nuclear conflict in South Asia.
"How long will we keep fighting with Pakistan? We want to give Pakistan one more chance, not out of weakness but out of self-confidence," Mr Vajpayee told the Indian parliament.
"The third attempt will be decisive and will be the last in my lifetime," he added.
The countries' relations went into free-fall after an attack on India's parliament in December 2001, which India blamed on Pakistan-based militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.
Pakistan denied involvement, but a military stand-off ensued. The two countries, which both have a nuclear arsenal and have gone to war three times, dispatched hundreds of thousands of troops to their border.
Pakistan yesterday welcomed the Indian move. The foreign minister, Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, said his country was ready to hold "meaningful discussions on all outstanding issues between the two countries including that of Jammu and Kashmir". Pakistan would respond in "concrete terms", he said.
Both countries have been under pressure from the United States, backed by Britain, to reduce tension. They have not held formal talks since a failed summit between Mr Vajpayee and the Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, in July 2001.
The United States' Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has congratulated both countries for taking the " promising" first steps to peace.
-------- inspections
Iraqis Won't Admit to Banned Weapons
May 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-The-Scientists.html
Before the war, the Bush administration pressured U.N. inspectors to question reluctant Iraqi scientists as part of the hunt for unconventional weapons. Once Saddam Hussein was removed, U.S. officials expected the scientists and others would feel free to reveal secrets about Iraq's suspected hidden arsenal.
But few have come forward. And U.S. officials say those in custody are sticking to their stories -- that Iraq hasn't had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs in years.
While the major combat has ended, one of the war's main goals -- disarming Iraq of any weapons of mass destruction -- has yet to be achieved.
Washington has not given up. ``We'll find them, and it's just going to be a matter of time to do so,'' President Bush said Saturday. He expressed impatience with captives like Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who ``still doesn't know how to tell the truth.''
A military official involved with a small group of U.S.-led search teams in Iraq said they were under ``intense pressure from Washington to come up with something.'' The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the teams were overwhelmed with work and looking forward to planned reinforcements.
The teams are visiting suspect sites and testing for the presence of any weapons or indications that ingredients may have been destroyed there. Some are sifting through documents and intelligence reports for clues.
But those involved in what is known as ``site exploitation,'' aren't interviewing the hundreds of Iraqi scientists whom U.S. officials have said would be the key to finding any banned weapons.
Two experts involved in the planning for the weapons hunt said a handful of top scientists already in U.S. custody are being questioned by intelligence officials, not by weapons experts or interrogators with strong scientific backgrounds.
Some senior working-level scientists and researchers have been interviewed by reporters in their Baghdad homes or at their offices. But few, if any, have been visited by Americans.
One reason may be that the current search teams are limited in their mission, expertise and staff, forcing them to wait for scientists to volunteer information rather than seeking them out.
In an effort to reach the larger scientific community, coalition radio in Iraq called on Iraqi scientists and engineers to come forward with any details that could prove useful.
``Anyone who provides information regarding weapons programs will be treated with respect and dignity to ensure Iraq's complete and comprehensive disarmament.''
There is concern that some scientists are afraid to speak out.
``People we've heard from are scared of a situation like Guantanamo Bay'' -- that they will be imprisoned under austere conditions like those faced by terror suspects captured in Afghanistan, said Corey Hinderstein, senior analyst at the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
U.S. officials said this week that senior figures in custody -- including Amer al-Saadi, Saddam's alleged point man on chemical and biological agents; Amer Rashid, Iraq's oil minister and a top missile expert and Jaffer Jaffer, the father of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program -- denied Iraq had any unconventional weapons in recent years.
The officials said they believe many of the prisoners are lying to protect themselves. Some may be trying to cut deals before agreeing to reveal information.
There has been discussion in the Bush administration and among disarmament experts about what to do with the scientists. Some feel that those who served at the very top could be prosecuted for war crimes but many believe the vast majority should be reintegrated into society and even prevented from leaving Iraq.
``They could work for other proliferators or terrorist groups if they're allowed to leave,'' said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. inspector and a bioweapons expert now at the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Tucker and others said it was imperative that those involved in the weapons search start looking immediately for scientists who are known to have been involved in programs in the past.
``The U.S. made such an important point of getting the U.N. to talk to the scientists, and the fact that we seem, in a certain sense, not to be following our own advice is perplexing,'' said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard.
The government is in the process of beefing up the weapons search and plans to send in more than 1,000 people from the military and civilian sectors to help analyze new information, interrogate prisoners and scour suspicious sites. Known as the Iraq Survey Group, they will take control of the roughly 200 experts already on the ground.
But thus far, some of the former inspectors have said the U.S. teams are too small and lack sufficient expertise and equipment.
In November, it took U.N. inspectors only two weeks to be fully operational in Iraq and within days they were conducting multiple searches across the country. With more than 100 inspectors working at any given time, the U.N. teams were conducting up to 20 inspections a day by January.
United Nations inspectors were also better equipped, with their own helicopters, a fleet of vehicles and extensive onsite laboratories.
Still, they were unable to find any evidence to support the administration's claim that Iraq was concealing weapons. As it became clear they weren't finding the weapons the administration said were there, France suggested beefing up the teams but the United States opposed it.
U.S. officials now say the weapons are either well hidden or were destroyed in the run-up to the war. There is no firm evidence they were moved to other countries, they say.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, under questioning before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, predicted prisoners would yet help U.S. forces find weapons.
``They will be found,'' he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- asia
Maoist rebel wary of Bush
May 3, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030503-67223774.htm
Baburam Bhattarai, ideological head and No. 2 leader of the Maoist rebels in Nepal, recently surfaced in public for the first time in seven years to lead the Maoist negotiating team at talks last Sunday with the government in Katmandu. This was his first live interview with a foreign reporter, Washington Times special correspondent Campbell Spencer of Australia.
Q: The cease-fire came as a surprise to most people in Nepal, following some of the bloodiest incidents in the seven-year insurgency. What were the key factors for agreeing to a truce?
A: We had reached a position where the two armed powers in the state had reached a strategic balance, so we agreed to explore a solution to the situation through dialogue. The time was right to move to the next phase and complete the revolution and bring about a lasting change for the people of Nepal. It was the people's will that we entered into talks with the crisis-ridden old regime.
Q: You have indicated recently that the sensitive geopolitical environment was a key factor in agreeing to hold talks with the government.
A: We are very aware of the current geopolitical environment. Our country is sandwiched between the two superstates of our region [India and China], and we must maintain very balanced relations with them both. We cannot tilt on one side or the other.
Now there is a third power, the United States, led by Mr. George Bush, who thinks the whole world belongs to him. He can do anything he likes as no rule applies to him. He is intervening everywhere. So if he intervenes here, that will bring in other parties, and if all these people muddle in our affairs, they will create a big mess
Q: Dev Gurung, a member of your negotiating team, has said Maoist leaders believed the United States was sizing up Nepal after it finished with Afghanistan.
A: The United States is embarking on an imperialistic crusade. As I said before, Mr. George Bush is intervening everywhere, and it is our duty to protect our national sovereignty from any intervention by an outside force.
Q: Critics say you are just aiming for a soft landing into mainstream politics, and the political parties charge that this is why you have rushed into negotiating directly with the king.
A: No, this is not true. We have moved to the next phase of the revolution - the political struggle. There will be substantial changes, the people's voice will be heard and we are confident that this will happen. We will not return to the status quo, that I can assure you. ...
Q: Recent comments from State Department officials indicate that they do not wish to see the Maoists prevail, as Nepal would be turned into an absolute communist regime that would be overtly hostile to American interests, and this would destabilize the wider region.
A: This is quite unfortunate. We are a small, backward country. We must maintain good relations with everybody. In today's world, we cannot hope to be self-sustained, so we must have good relations with everyone, including the United States.
Politically, we are bringing about a democratic revolution, so they shouldn't be threatened or overly suspicious that we are forcefully implementing some communist project. ... We read that one American official tried to link us with [the late Cambodian communist strongman] Pol Pot. We are not Pol Pot, we have had no relations with Pol Pot, and only those foreign powers themselves had relations with Pol Pot.
They are trying to stretch things too far by saying we are like the Khmer Rouge. We are our own party, we follow Prachanda Path, which has taken the science of Marxism and adapted it to the concrete realities of Nepal.
Ideology is at one level, this is the long term. But at the practical, immediate level, the political level, we are not talking of imposing a communistic agenda. A country like ours, a backward country where there has been no true democratic revolution, we are in a precapitalist era. As a movement, we are trying to complete the capitalist revolution.
We are talking of creating multiparty democracy, rule of law, army under the control of the elected representatives, and a constitution made by the people's representatives in the constitutional assembly - these are not communist slogans, these are democratic slogans which were practiced in the American Revolution.
I think people are confused by the fact that it has fallen to the communists to complete the democratic revolution in Nepal. Our political agenda is not communism but democratic revolution, but ideologically we are guided by Marxism.
The West is having problems understanding between the short-term and long-term goals of our movement.
Q: Do you believe that Nepal poses a special challenge to the West as, in the words of one commentator, yours is the most successful communist movement since the death of communism?
A: It is quite difficult for people in the West to digest - how come after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communists are raising their heads again?
As long as there are divisions, as long as there is inequality there is bound to be struggle - what we call class struggle. The class struggle may be slower at times, it may appeared to have died down, but it hasn't died down. As long as there is inequality and oppression, the struggle goes on.
The basic ideology of Marx and Engels, further developed by Lenin, Mao and other revolutionaries, remains valid but there have been problems with implementing this ideology very mechanistically, very dogmatically in other countries ... and this has led to the collapse of the socialist project. This doesn't mean the struggle has ended, it has taken on new forms. ...
I think that the problem with the whole communist movement is that they have not been able to galvanize this regiment of people who want change the system. In the case of Nepal, we have very practically been able to lead the regiment of people along a very systematic political program.
-------- china
Chinese Submarine Accident Kills 70
Report Offers Few Clues to What Caused Overcrowded Vessel to
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5037-2003May2.html
BEIJING, May 2 -- An accident aboard an overcrowded Chinese submarine operating off the country's northeast coast has killed 70 officers and crew members in the worst known peacetime military disaster in Communist Chinese history, according to reports today.
The official New China News Agency said in a brief dispatch that the accident occurred "recently" in the Yellow Sea between the Shandong and Korean peninsulas. The diesel-powered craft, Navy Submarine No. 361, was involved in an exercise when the accident occurred, and "because of a mechanical malfunction, the 70 crew members on board died," the news report said. The submarine, which is believed to have belonged to the East China Fleet, was towed to port, possibly in Lushun, just south of Dalian, U.S. military analysts said.
"The officers and sailors of 361 remembered their sacred duty entrusted by the Party and the People," said former president Jiang Zemin in an announcement about the accident. Jiang is chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the military. "They died on duty, sacrificed themselves for the country, and they are great losses to the People's Navy."
The accident is the worst reported submarine accident since the August 2000 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk that killed all 118 men aboard.
"This is something of a first," said Bernard D. "Bud" Cole, an expert on the Chinese navy at the National War College in Washington. "This is a major disaster."
China's military cloaks itself in secrecy and it is not clear why it decided to release the report today, while the government was dealing with the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome. China's mishandling of the SARS outbreak, particularly its acknowledgement that it concealed information about the epidemic's extent and spread, has caused a crisis of public trust.
"The most startling thing about this episode is that they issued a public report," said Evan Medeiros, a China specialist at the Rand Corp. "Maybe Jiang Zemin just judged that in this crisis of faith and accountability it would be better to get out in front of something like this."
Another possible catalyst, said David L. Shambaugh, an expert on the Chinese military at George Washington University, is that China's military learned from the furor caused by Russia's release of information after the Kursk disaster.
Military experts identified the vessel as a conventional Ming class submarine, built about 20 years ago based on early Soviet submarine designs. Cole said it had a capacity of 57 men, including 10 officers, and would have been "packed" if it carried 70 men.
The Ming, Medeiros said, "is a second-generation Chinese vessel. It's better than a German U-boat but not by much." Medeiros said one of the first Mings built was apparently scrapped because fire broke out on board.
It was unclear from the reports exactly what happened aboard Submarine 361. "But if the sub was towed back to port, as the Chinese report suggests, that means it didn't actually sink," Shambaugh said. "I doubt very much the Chinese have the ability to raise a sub from the bottom of the ocean floor. So the cause of the deaths remains a mystery? Torpedoes? Engine? Chemical? Who knows? There are more questions to be answered."
The most likely cause of the accident was an outpouring of deadly chlorine gas that killed the crew, said a U.S. military intelligence expert on the Chinese navy. That is a well-known hazard on electric submarines, and is caused by seawater mixing with acid in the boat's batteries.
Experts said the accident illustrated the problems in China's military modernization program, which is focused on two main tasks: retaking Taiwan and denying the U.S. military the chance to interfere in a battle over the island. From 1989 until this year, defense spending increased by more than 10 percent a year. This year, at the annual legislative session in March, the government announced that defense spending would increase 9.6 percent. China says it spends about $22 billion a year on defense, but experts say the real figure is closer to $80 billion.
Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Eric McVadon, a former naval attache in Beijing, said the disaster was another in a long line of problems faced by China's submarine forces. Other incidents included the reported explosion of a Xia class nuclear submarine during construction, continued problems with noise on China's five Han class nuclear attack submarines and troubles with batteries on the four Kilo class diesel-powered submarines purchased from Russia, he said. China is believed to have about 65 submarines, about 50 of which are thought to be seaworthy.
McVadon said that when he was posted to China in the 1990s, it was unclear to him and other attaches why the country continued to manufacture the Ming. "It was a puzzle to many of us," he said. "It was such old technology and noisy." The last Ming is believed to have been completed in 1998.
Cole said that China only recently began allowing its submarines to venture farther from the coast because of concerns about the seaworthiness of the fleet. Now submarines have begun to conduct joint exercises with air power and surface ships, although the military is in the early stages of experimentation with joint operations.
Starting in 1999, China's East Sea Fleet and South Sea Fleet of submarines began to undertake "long" patrols -- 45 days for diesel-electric submarines and 60 days for nuclear-powered submarines.
Australian naval officers said the eastern fleet's submarine has made it as far as the east coast of Taiwan, while Ming class subs from the southern fleet have been active off the southern tip of Taiwan.
In recognition that a submarine deficit could hurt Taiwan, the United States has agreed to sell eight diesel powered vessels to Taiwan -- although it has yet to find a company willing to carry out the sale.
It was unclear what kind of exercise Submarine No. 361 was engaged in or when the accident occurred. Chinese news reports have mentioned two exercises in that area in recent months, one in February and one in early April. The February exercise involved practicing a rescue of a submarine that had sunk to the bottom of the Yellow Sea.
-------- europe
EU to Draft First Common Security Strategy
May 3, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-eu-foreign.html
KASTELLORIZO, Greece (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers agreed on Saturday to draft the bloc's first common European security strategy in a bid to avoid future damaging diplomatic rifts like the Iraq crisis.
Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou announced the plan after ministers from 25 current and future member states debated European defense and strained transatlantic relations aboard a luxury cruise yacht moored on the Greek island of Kastellorizo.
``We all agree that, yes, there is a crisis or at least a problem in our transatlantic relationship,'' Papandreou said.
``We arrived at a very important proposal: that we should set up a European security concept. If we want to have a substantive discussion with the United States, we first and foremost have to agree what our own priorities are,'' he told a news conference.
The ministers mandated EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to produce a first draft before a summit in Greece in mid-June, as well as proposal for closer European defense integration and on EU cooperation with NATO's planned rapid reaction force.
The aim is to reach a common threat assessment of issues such as weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, failed states, regional conflicts and refugee flows, enabling Europe to anticipate future crises better and ultimately to have a joint doctrine on when the use of force may be appropriate.
Ministers said the two-day informal gathering had shown a strong will to put divisions over Iraq behind them. There was no discord over plans, announced by a U.S. defense official as they were meeting, for six EU states to take part in a U.S.-led post-war stabilization force, apparently without a U.N. mandate.
EUROPE DIVIDED
The volunteers do not include anti-war France, Germany or Russia, which were not invited to a 16-nation London planning meeting last Wednesday.
Poland's foreign minister informed his colleagues of Warsaw's intention to join the force, but ministers admitted they learned details of the plan to carve Iraq into three zones run by the United States, Britain and Poland from the media.
On Friday, the EU ministers agreed to the return of senior diplomats from their countries to Baghdad in an effort to push forward the reconstruction of Iraq.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose country was Washington's chief partner in the invasion, said it was wrong to speak of a transatlantic rift.
``It is a matter of history that the Iraq issue created divisions within Europe. It was not between the United States and Europe but fundamentally within Europe,'' he said.
EU external relations commissioner Chris Patten defended the right of allies to differ while appealing for a less divisive transatlantic dialogue on rebuilding Iraq under a U.N. umbrella.
``I hope the bloodletting has stopped on both sides of the Atlantic and we can start talking about what we have in common and stop talking about punishments and disagreements,'' he said.
In a sign of how the common defense issue can divide Europe, the 25 current and future EU member states first had to clear the air over a controversial plan by four of them to set up the nucleus of a joint military planning unit separate from NATO.
The initiative by the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, which all opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, included a plan to give Europe its own planning-and-command staff for operations in which NATO is not involved.
An EU source said the issue was swiftly dealt with when both British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, often at loggerheads during the Iraq crisis, agreed it was a storm in a teacup.
Diplomats said the Solana report should make it possible to quietly bury the disputed headquarters idea once this month's Belgian general election is over.
Some senior EU officials are worried that the United States is deliberately playing EU countries off against each other and encouraging splits in the bloc, which will grow from 15 to 25 member states in one year's time on May 1, 2004.
Papandreou said Europeans had to recognize their high level of social welfare had been bought to an extent by the United States taking care of their military security.
When the use of force had come up in the past to back diplomatic efforts to solve world conflicts, ``the United States has been left with the hard choices,'' he said.
The ministers met their Turkish, Romanian and Bulgarian counterparts later for lunch and were to sail aboard the private yacht across a narrow strait for a symbolic friendship visit to the neighboring Turkish town of Kas later.
-------- iran
Few Signs Emerge of U.S.-Iran Thaw
Iraq War Backing Fails to Yield Diplomatic Gains
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7710-2003May2?language=printer
TEHRAN -- Iran and the United States show few signs of rapprochement in the wake of the ouster of a common enemy, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Iran complained that its reward for opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan was to be lumped with North Korea and Iraq in what President Bush dubbed an "axis of evil." Now, after supporting many of the U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition factions and passively backing the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, Iran is being accused of orchestrating unrest among Iraq's Shiite Muslim population.
In response, Iran has blasted what it calls the "vile colonial objectives" of the United States.
Yet the rhetorical broadsides appear to carry scant threat of hostilities, according to diplomats, analysts and officials from both countries. The U.S. victory in Iraq has inspired a senior ayatollah to publicly float the possibility -- widely sought among Iran's population of 65 million -- of reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States.
But as both sides return to postures hardened over a quarter-century of mutual mistrust, observers in Iran speak of opportunities missed, citing as an example the Bush administration's public complaints that Iran is trying to influence Iraq's restive Shiite majority.
Despite the U.S. protests, one diplomat said, "Our impression is they're behaving fairly well so far."
Iran has regarded itself as the leader of the world's 120 million Shiites since the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the CIA had installed in a 1953 coup.
A theocracy was installed, in which religious leaders maintain ultimate power over any other office, including a popularly elected president and parliament. Some hard-liners in Iran embrace the idea of Iraq adopting a similar system.
"Of course, this is our utmost wish," said Hossain Shariat Madari, editor of the ultraconservative government newspaper Kahyan.
Yet as a Foreign Ministry official pointed out last week, Iran's government has called for nothing of the sort. Analysts said Iran effectively abandoned the policy of exporting Islamic revolution after losing a million men and boys in its eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. The policy was formally overtaken after the 1997 election of President Mohammad Khatami, who invited a "dialogue between civilizations."
In the case of Iraq, several analysts said Iran scarcely needs to interfere or risk the wrath of the United States. Iran's official policy on Iraq calls for basic democracy -- one man, one vote. Iraq is at least 60 percent Shiite.
Mohammad Javad Larijani, a leading conservative theoretician, said that although "the Iran experience is not possible to be duplicated in Iraq," majority rule would likely suit Iran's ends.
"If there's democracy in Iraq, a lot of Iranians' friends, people with sympathy to Iran, definitely will be in power. And we can't complain about that," Larijani said.
The Shiite branch of Islam began in what is now Iraq, home to Shiism's two holiest cities, Najaf and Karbala. Pilgrims from Iran, which is almost entirely Shiite, have crossed an otherwise hostile border to visit their shrines, and clerics historically have found refuge in one country from hostile rulers in the other.
"At the religious level it's practically one country," a diplomat observed. "It's interesting. The deeper the religion of the people, the less important a nation, which after all is a secular concept."
Some analysts cite potential risks to Iran if it supports a Shiite-ruled theocracy in Iraq, saying it could isolate Iraq's Shiites from the country's minority populations.
Iran's rapidly advancing nuclear program is also a continuing obstacle to better relations with the United States. The Iranian government has maintained it is pursuing a nuclear program solely for the purpose of meeting a rapidly escalating demand for electricity.
However, John. S. Wolf, the assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, has said that Iran has an "alarming, clandestine program" to produce nuclear weapons. "Iran is going down the same path of denial and deception that handicapped international inspections in North Korea and Iraq," he said.
More immediately, conservatives and reformers in Iran have united in demanding that U.S. forces in Iraq disarm and repatriate to Iran members of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or People's Mujaheddin, an Iranian exile group that has fought Iranian governments since the 1970s and was armed and supported by Hussein since the Iran-Iraq war.
The State Department considers the People's Mujaheddin a terrorist organization, but after bombing its positions in Iraq for several days, the U.S. Central Command negotiated a cease-fire that will allow the group to retain most of its arms, at least temporarily.
The cease-fire agreement has drawn a strong rebuke from Iranian officials. The head of the Iranian military's Revolutionary Guard last week said U.S. treatment of the group would test the consistency of the war against terrorism.
Mostafa Tajzadeh, a key strategist in the country's reform movement, suggested that if the United States handed over members of the group to Iran, Iranian hard-liners might be persuaded to turn over several relatively senior members of al Qaeda who fled Afghanistan and found refuge in Iran, as well as leaders of Ansar al-Islam, a Muslim guerrilla group that was driven out of northern Iraq by U.S. forces.
During the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Iran's cooperation with the United States amounted to what one diplomat described as "mostly a matter of what they didn't do." Iran closed its border to members of Ansar al-Islam. Violations of Iranian airspace by U.S. warplanes and even errant missiles were scarcely protested. Iran played co-host to Iraqi opposition groups backed by the Bush administration.
The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group headquartered in Tehran since 1980, is Iran's closest ally among the anti-Hussein groups.
But opposition figures say Iran also has close relations with Iraq's two main Kurdish parties and with the Iraqi National Congress, whose chairman, Ahmed Chalabi, is championed by Pentagon officials.
"Maybe this is a big joke of history," Saeed Laylaz, an editor at Norooz, a reformist newspaper, said. "We had our two worst neighbors on either side of us," he said, referring to the deposed Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. "And the United States destroyed both of them in two years.
"Whatever government the U.S. installs in Iraq, it will be better than what was there -- like Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan, who's much better than the Taliban. But you understand our position," Laylaz said with a smile. "We cannot show that we are glad."
-------- iraq
Mobile lab might be for Iraqi arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 3, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030503-6087871.htm
U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating a mobile laboratory discovered recently in northern Iraq that appears to be a transportable biological or chemical weapons facility, defense officials said.
Additionally, investigators in Iraq also have discovered what appear to be chemicals used in making chemical weapons, according to defense and intelligence officials.
The mobile lab was discovered near Mosul, in the north, last week and matches the description of Iraq's mobile weapons laboratories that were highlighted by senior Bush administration officials in the buildup to the war in Iraq.
Military forces manning a checkpoint seized the truck after discovering it was filled with equipment.
"It appears to be a road-mobile weapons laboratory," said a senior U.S. official on the condition of anonymity.
"It's still being evaluated," said a defense official, who noted that the results of the evaluation are expected soon.
The lab was described by officials as a tractor-trailer vehicle outfitted with equipment.
The Bush administration has held off from going public with the recent find because of several cases in which suspected weapons of mass destruction were found to have been unrelated to Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program.
Several drums of chemicals and other equipment, including buried shipping containers, turned out to have been harmless, even though initial tests showed signs of chemical or biological weapons.
The recent discovery of 12 55-gallon drums and suspected weapons labs near the town of Baiji turned out to be a decontamination facility and storage containers used for other purposes.
The Los Angeles Times first reported the van discovery on Tuesday.
Officials said the vehicle appears to be one of the 18 mobile laboratories mentioned by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during a presentation to the United Nations Security Council before the war in Iraq.
One official said the mobile lab appeared not to have been put into use by the Iraqis.
However, officials said they were optimistic that the van could be the first proof of Iraq's covert weapons program.
In London yesterday, British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon said the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will be difficult because the now-ousted regime of Saddam Hussein has hidden its banned arms.
"We've always made clear that the effort to locate and precisely identify weapons of mass destruction would take some time," Mr. Hoon told reporters during a meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Powell said in a detailed intelligence briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York on Feb. 5 that Iraq's mobile laboratories are "one of the most worrisome signs" regarding Iraq's effort to make biological weapons.
"We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile, biological agent factories," Mr. Powell said. "The truck-mounted ones have at least two or three trucks each. That means that the mobile production facilities are very few - perhaps 18 trucks that we know of. There may be more. ... Just imagine trying to find 18 trucks among the thousands and thousands of trucks that travel the roads of Iraq every single day."
Mr. Powell said the mobile biological laboratories were based on rail flatcars and on trucks and "are designed to evade detection by inspectors."
He said the mobile laboratories were described by at least three eyewitnesses in Iraq, including an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of the vans.
The engineer "actually was present during biological agent production runs," Mr. Powell said. "He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents."
Mr. Powell said the Iraqis wanted to use the mobile labs in order to conceal them and to be able to move them easily by disguising them as trucks that can be parked in garages, or moved on the thousands of miles of Iraqi roads and railroad tracks.
Mr. Powell said the mobile labs were "sophisticated facilities" that could be used to make anthrax or botulinum toxin.
"In fact, they can produce enough dry, biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people," he said. "A dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings."
----
Bush plans to carve Iraq into three sectors
May 03, 2003
timesonline
From Tim Reid in Washington
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-667763,00.html
THE Bush Administration is planning to divide Iraq into three military sectors overseen by US, British and Polish troops and bolstered by forces from six European countries.
At the same time, the United States and Britain are drafting a resolution to present to the United Nations Security Council that would give the UN a humanitarian but not a peacekeeping role in Iraq.
The six European countries - Spain, Italy, Denmark, Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Netherlands - have agreed to contribute troops to the British and Polish sectors, the Bush Administration said last night.
The troops forming the stabilisation force will be sent to Iraq as soon as possible, officials said, and will work to restore and maintain order and supervise humanitarian projects. They will augment rather than replace the 135,000 American troops already in Iraq.
Representatives of the six countries will meet British officials next week and Polish officials on May 22 to determine what forces each country will contribute and whether they will be put under British or Polish command.
The US element of the force is expected to number 20,000, but the strength of the other two sectors has yet to be determined. The force would be under General Tommy Franks, the US war commander.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said yesterday that the more troops other countries contribute, the fewer US troops will be needed in Iraq. Planning for both the UN resolution and the stabilisation force did not involve France, Germany and Russia, who opposed the war in Iraq.
The draft resolution limiting the UN role is likely to face opposition from Security Council members who favour a more prominent role for the UN in post-Saddam Iraq.
Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, said this week, however, that the UN has no interest in policing a postwar Iraq, although it could contribute to the political revival of the country. "Take the question of security. I don't think the UN would want to take on that," he said. "There has been a suggestion that the UN wanted to take over the whole Iraq and run it, which was also not the case." What the UN could contribute beyond humanitarian assistance was "political facilitation", he said.
Mr Rumsfeld discussed the resolution yesterday with Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, as he returned to the United States from a tour of Afghanistan and the Gulf. Mr Rumsfeld said afterwards that he hoped the UN would play a role but did not discuss the draft resolution outlining that role.
----
Troops Detain 3 Top Iraqi Officials
Captives Include Arms Development Chief
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7596-2003May2?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 2 -- U.S. officials said today that occupation troops have detained three more of the 55 most-wanted officials from former president Saddam Hussein's government, including a director of weapons development. Their detention brings to 18 the number of wanted officials taken into custody since Hussein's Baath Party rule collapsed April 9 as U.S. troops poured into Baghdad.
The detention of Abd Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, director of the Military Industrial Organization, could aid investigators in their hunt for information about suspected programs to produce biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. The Military Industrial Organization was the primary agency responsible for developing Iraq's most destructive weapons. Huwaysh was No. 16 on the most-wanted list.
Also taken into custody were Taha Muhyl Din Maruf, one of Iraq's two vice presidents and a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, and Mizban Khidir Hadi, another Revolutionary Command Council member who had been an aide to Hussein for two decades.
Maruf, number 42 on the list, was the only Kurd to attain a high position in the Baath Party. His appointment as vice president was widely perceived as a way to placate Iraq's Kurdish minority, and his influence was minimal. He rarely made public appearances, although he traveled to Morocco and Italy last fall looking for support against the looming war.
Hadi was promoted a year ago to oversee military defense in a southern region that included the cities of Karbala and Najaf. He had received decorations for his service in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Shiite rebellion that ensued after Iraq was routed from Kuwait. He was No. 41 on the list.
The U.S. military offered few details about the circumstances in which the three were taken into custody. Hadi was captured in Baghdad on Thursday, the Army said, but it did not indicate whether the other two men had surrendered or been captured.
U.S. soldiers raided several houses today in Tikrit, Hussein's home town and still a bastion of support for the former president. Many residents celebrated his birthday last week with street protests in which they waved his photograph and chanted his name. One Iraqi was killed during the raids when he attempted to grab a rifle from an American soldier, U.S. military officers said.
The raids occurred in a residential district a little after midnight as soldiers forced their way past gates and into homes. Military officers said they recovered weapons and about $3,000 that had been stashed in the houses. About 20 men were led away blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs.
In Najaf, a Shiite Muslim city about 100 miles south of Baghdad, a group of gunmen fired automatic weapons and tossed hand grenades outside the shrine of Imam Ali, a site revered by Shiites as the burial spot of the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. Most escaped, but two men were arrested. They were later identified as suspects in the killing of Abdul Majid Khoei, a Shiite cleric who was hacked to death last month by a mob at the shrine.
At Friday prayers in the beleaguered city of Fallujah, where seven soldiers were wounded in an early morning attack on Thursday, preachers at some mosques used their sermons to decry what they called the "betrayers" and "intruders" among them who had instigated violence during anti-American demonstrations Monday and Wednesday in which 18 Iraqis were killed and dozens wounded.
The clerics and the U.S. military sought to calm tensions in the town, about 30 miles west of the capital. A planned demonstration was canceled. Humvees drove through the streets of town with a taped address broadcast over a loudspeaker imploring residents to stop the attacks.
"Allied forces are here to bring peace to Iraq and Fallujah and to rebuild Iraq," the announcement said. "Don't throw stones. Don't try to hurt them. Thank you for your cooperation."
At the Funqan mosque, Sheikh Abdelhamid Jumaily urged residents to refrain from protests and to remain calm.
"If we have demonstrations, we want them to be peaceful," he said. "We had a peaceful demonstration before, but some of the betrayers fired their guns so the Americans thought they were being attacked, and shot us and killed us."
At the Hadaya Mosque about 300 yards from the military compound, the imam said that "intruders who don't even pray" had instigated the clashes between residents and U.S. troops.
Taha Bedaiwi Alwani, whom U.S. occupation authorities recognize as Fallujah's mayor, has announced that he wants the troops to move out of the city. But Capt. Bren Workman, a public affairs officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, said the mayor has made no such request to the Army.
"He didn't ask that we leave," Workman said. "He asked for the stability and security of the area."
But large banners posted throughout town and on the gate of city hall left no ambiguity. "Sooner or later US killers we'll kick you out," said one.
----
Saddam is Gone, But What About His Weapons?
Unless the U.S. is able to find banned weapons in Iraq, its credibility could suffer
By TONY KARON,
Thursday, May. 01, 2003
Time
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,448830,00.html
Speaking at his monthly news conference, Tony Blair says he remains confident that evidence of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq
The Iraq war is over, remarkably quickly and with remarkably few coalition casualties. Of course, continuing hostility to U.S. troops among substantial sections of the Iraqi population suggests that tens of thousands of American soldiers may have to remain there on a protracted and often messy stabilization mission. But even though Saddam Hussein and most of his inner circle remain at large for now, the regime has been destroyed, and the U.S. has begun rebuilding Iraq. The casual TV viewer could be forgiven for forgetting all about the ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction whose elimination was the ostensible purpose of the war.
Not that the U.S. hasn't been trying to find them. An almost weekly rhythm of widely reported false alarms is a reminder that the Pentagon has deployed hundreds of its own personnel to find the banned weapons that had eluded UN inspectors before war. Last weekend, it was announced that the number of U.S. inspectors would be increased to 1,500 - five times the number of deployed by Dr. Hans Blix's UN team. But so far, no "smoking gun" has been found.
That's not surprising, say coalition chiefs, urging patience and projecting confidence. Saddam had years to practice the art of concealment, but the truth will eventually come out. Banned weapons will be found, insisted Secretary of State Colin Powell on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Britain's prime minister Tony Blair made the same assurance to Britons. And President Bush last week suggested that the banned weapons may even have been destroyed ahead of the invasion, but added that the U.S. would nonetheless eventually prove that a WMD program had existed.
Although many U.S. combat teams were trained to look out for signs of banned weapons in facilities they overran, the dedicated inspection teams sent in by the Pentagon as the fighting died down initially focused on the 150 "hottest" suspected WMD sites identified by U.S. intelligence before the war - and that searches of the first 90 sites on that list had proved fruitless. That has reportedly prompted a switch to a far wider search in the hope of turning up unexpected evidence, and a greater effort to track down and interrogate individuals who may have been involved in such programs. The senior Baathist officials currently being interrogated by coalition officers are uniformly denying that the regime had weapons of mass destruction before the war - although coalition commanders believe the captives are lying to protect themselves.
Still, the absence of WMD finds and the changes in the work and composition of the inspection team has raised questions about the strength of prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. Sidelined chief UN inspector Hans Blix has taken to chortling publicly that the U.S. and Britain launched a war on the basis of "shaky intelligence."
Even as they urge patience, coalition leaders are also dampening public expectations of "smoking gun" finds. The weapons were moved or perhaps destroyed ahead of the invasion, some say. Key evidence may have been removed and destroyed under cover of looting. Another official warns that coalition forces are unlikely to find actual weapons, but more likely the means to assemble such weapons.
And, with "smoking gun" evidence proving as elusive now as it was before the invasion began, some coalition officials are trying to shift attention away from the search and onto the coalition's achievement in ousting Saddam. Administration officials even told ABC's Nightline that weapons of mass destruction were not actually the primary reason for going to war; instead, they became the focus of Bush administration efforts to win domestic and international backing for an invasion whose objective was to establish a beachhead for democracy against terrorism in the Middle East. "We were not lying," one official told the network. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."
Similarly, Tony Blair told a press conference on Monday that finding weapons of mass destruction is a lesser priority than stabilizing Iraq. Such reasoning may play well in the U.S., where a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 57 percent of voters believe the war was worthwhile even if no banned weapons are ever found. But Blair's own electorate may be more inclined to hold him to his prewar insistence that the invasion was necessitated by an imminent unconventional weapons threat. And the danger that such weapons could have been transferred to terrorists would certainly require that they be found as a matter of urgency in the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.
Russia's antiwar president Vladimir Putin appeared to be enjoying Blair's predicament during a joint press conference, Wednesday, sarcastically suggesting that Saddam may be hiding in a bunker filled with weapons of mass destruction, waiting to blow up all of Iraq, and that such weapons would have to be accounted for before Russia could agree to the lifting of UN sanctions. Blair stoically insisted that evidence of the banned weapons would emerge.
Of course, President Bush's domestic political handlers have no reason for concern over the whereabouts of Saddam's unconventional weapons. But substantiating his prewar claim that Saddam's regime possessed upwards 100 tons of terror weapons making it an intolerable threat to international security remains an important test of U.S. credibility on the world stage.
After all, it was not for failing to topple a brutal dictator that U.S. officials chided the United Nations, but for failing to respond to an imminent WMD danger. To that end, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a detailed indictment of Iraq at the UN Security Council on February 5. But so far, little evidence has emerged to back up some of his allegations. Powell had warned, for example, that the Iraqi military had, last November, dispersed rocket launchers and warheads containing biological weapons to various locations in Western Iraq, where they were hidden in palm groves and moved every four weeks to avoid detection. None of these have yet been found. Nor have checks of some of the other locations mentioned by Powell in his presentation yet divulged any evidence. Other administration officials had said, prior to the U.S. advance on Baghdad, that Special Republican Guard units around the capital had been issued chemical weapons. Again, none have materialized, so far.
Such materials may well have been hidden or destroyed ahead of the invasion, and they may well emerge in the weeks and months ahead, with the help of intelligence gleaned from interrogations. Meanwhile, President Bush noted last week, "One thing is for certain: Saddam Hussein no longer threatens America with weapons of mass destruction." The successful overthrow of a barbarous dictator may be enough for the U.S. electorate. But in much of the wider world, the jury may stay out until evidence is produced affirming the existence of such a threat on the eve of the war.
--------
Tension seen on Iraq rebuilding
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff,
5/3/2003
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/123/nation/Tension_seen_on_Iraq_rebuilding%2B.shtml
WASHINGTON - Showing strains within the Bush administration over rebuilding Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld responded testily yesterday to reports that a civilian former diplomat would be brought in to lead reconstruction efforts, outranking a retired general he had handpicked for the job.
US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that L. Paul Bremer III, a former ambassador in the Reagan administration, would soon become the civilian administrator for Iraq - a move supported by the State Department. Retired General Jay M. Garner has been leading reconstruction efforts since the fall of Baghdad with assistance from Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior official at the National Security Council.
Reacting to the news reports in a terse statement, Rumsfeld said, ''Jay Garner is doing a truly outstanding job for the nation. Any suggestion to the contrary is flat untrue and mischievous. The White House has made no announcement regarding other appointments.''
Earlier, at a press conference at Heathrow Airport with Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon of Britain, Rumsfeld said, ''there is not only no unhappiness with respect to General Jay Garner, there is a great deal of pleasure in the fact that this man has undertaken and performed superbly for our country and for the coalition.''
The dispute over Bremer's appointment is the latest battle between the Defense and State departments, especially as Pentagon officials attempt to expand their powers into diplomatic areas long considered the territory of the secretary of state. State Department officials had claimed a victory with Bremer's anticipated appointment.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, en route to Damascus, refused to discuss Bremer's expected appointment. A State Department spokesman in Washington also declined to comment.
Rumsfeld's sensitivity on the matter is not only about internal tussles with Powell and his senior staff on the makeup of the US team overseeing Iraqi reconstruction, but also over the possibility that the person Rumsfeld chose to lead the effort was being supplanted a month into the operation.
Throughout Iraq, many residents have expressed great unhappiness with the US job, complaining about the slowness of providing security, getting aid into the country, delivering clean water, and restoring electricity. Sectarian unrest has flared up. And in many places, including Baghdad, self-declared leaders have been forced to step down.
The unhappiness may be due in part to high expectations, which have been fed by senior US officials - including President Bush - who promised swift delivery of aid, analysts say. Specialists also noted the extraordinary difficulties in the task and many cautioned it was too early to judge Garner or the US effort as a whole.
''These are daunting problems,'' said Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington, and a former Pentagon spokesman. ''But there's also been confusion in the administration about appointments. There may be a certain amount of perceived disorganization at this stage.''
Among the confusing signals from the Bush administration: Defense officials have put on hold several appointments to the reconstruction team advanced by the State Department; the uncertainty, played out publicly, over whether James Woolsey, a former CIA director, would get a top job; and suggestions over the last several months that Rumsfeld's initial choice to oversee reconstruction would be replaced by a civilian without Pentagon ties.
Bremer, 61, a former head of the State Department's counterterrorism efforts and a former ambassador to the Netherlands, is considered an ally to neoconservatives in Washington. He worked as aide in government to Henry A. Kissinger, and later become managing director of Kissinger Associates from 1989 to 2000.
He also became known as an expert on terrorism and warned the Clinton administration as far back as 1996 that it had to more aggressively fight terror groups.
But Bremer has no experience in the Middle East, which even his admirers said could hinder his ability. Bremer's closest geographic assignment was in Afghanistan in the early 1980s.
''He's a tough guy, and this is a job that is going to require real strengths, but also require a very astute person who has a well-tuned instinct for politics of Iraq,'' said Philip C. Wilcox Jr., another former head of counterterrorism at the State Department. ''He doesn't have any background for Middle Eastern affairs, so I assume he was chosen because of his impeccable conservative views and his management skills.''
Meyrav Wurmser, a conservative Middle Eastern analyst at Hudson Institute, said Bremer ''was not like one of those ideological State people who work against the president, so people are basically happy'' in the administration's conservative circles.
Bacon said many nongovernmental organizations also will be glad to see a civilian not associated with the military as head of the reconstruction.
''The NGOs have complained that putting Garner in command makes it look like they are working for the Pentagon,'' Bacon said, adding that such organizations did agree to have Garner oversee the US Agency for International Development, which in turn directed the private charities.
Bacon said it would be important for Bremer to build some support in Washington for his operations before heading to Iraq.
''One of the difficulties here was that Garner didn't, or wasn't allowed to, brief his plans to Congress, or to meet with the NGOs, or build much of a relationhsip with the [United Nations] or the press. As a result, he never really explained his plans very well and nor did he have a chance to build institutional support outside the Pentagon.''
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.
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Iraqis hold mixed feelings on Americans
May 3, 2003
Washington Times
By Betsy Pisik
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030503-21305458.htm
FALLUJAH, Iraq - Now that President Bush had declared the hostilities here all but over, the Iraqi people have two overwhelming concerns: that the Americans will never leave; and that they will leave too soon.
Terrified by persistent looting and frustrated by the continued lack of basic utilities and services, the Iraqi people seem to be growing impatient with U.S. presence in their country.
"How could we hear Bush's speech, we have no electricity," shouted an elderly man in the market here yesterday. "He says the war is over, but I say where is the electricity? Where is the water? Where is the gasoline?"
The industrial city of Fallujah, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, this week has been the site of violent anti-American demonstrations. U.S. troops shot 15 persons in two incidents on Monday and Wednesday and seven soldiers were wounded in a grenade retaliation late Thursday.
It was quiet in Fallujah yesterday, after the imams appealed for calm in their weekly sermons.
But elsewhere in Iraq, gunmen shot automatic weapons and threw a hand grenade outside the central shrine in the holy city of Najaf, and the U.S. military said it was holding two more of deposed President Saddam Hussein's top aides, including one who helped direct his weapons programs.
Two men were arrested in Najaf - and turned out to be suspects in the brutal killing of an Islamic cleric at the same spot last month. The U.S. military said Abdul Tawab Mullah Hwaish, head of the military industrialization ministry that oversaw the development of weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s, was taken into custody Thursday. He was No. 16 on the U.S. list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis.
Mr. Hwaish was held along with Taha Mohieddin Ma'rouf, an Iraqi vice president and member of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council, and No. 42 on the list.
The continued looting and perception of lawlessness has continued to vex Iraqis, who blame U.S. soldiers for failing to provide security in the cities and channel the political currents that are feeding organized unrest in places like Najaf and Fallujah.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in London that insecurity remained rife in Iraq. "It would be a terrible mistake to think that Iraq is a fully secure, fully pacified environment. It is not, it is dangerous," he said after meeting British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the end of a victory tour to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In some of Baghdad's more isolated neighborhoods, residents say, young men with guns and lumber set up impromptu checkpoints. Motorists who surrender cash and watches generally escape quickly and unharmed. But the fear is real, and it is growing.
"I cannot go out, my family is afraid," said Kassem Ahmed, 23, who was held up Wednesday on one of Baghdad's busiest shopping streets. Four men with light machine guns stole 25,000 Iraqi dinars ($12) from the one-armed Mr. Ahmed, who earns slightly less than that each day for fixing car bumpers.
"Why is there no security? Where are the police?" Mr. Ahmed said yesterday, while he was waiting for a pair of shoes to be repaired by a cobbler with no power. He seemed underwhelmed by Mr. Bush's pledge to send hundreds of civilian police to Baghdad to train the local police.
Yet, many people here seem afraid that coalition forces, in fact, will not be leaving quickly - if ever.
In his Thursday night address, Mr. Bush said, "The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq."
Although the administration's message has been consistent, there is deep suspicion here of larger motives and grander schemes.
"If Saddam is gone, the Americans should follow," said Jabar al Duleem, a primary school teacher in Fallujah who speaks at least four languages. "They came to liberate us, and now they can go."
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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Fears over move by Shias based in Iran
By Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Qom
May 3 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051389726265&p=1012571727172
Thousands of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia forces have crossed into Iraq from Iran after about 20 years of exile, in a move that could increase US worries about Iranian interference in postwar Iraq.
The Badr brigade, estimated to number between 12,000 and 15,000 in Iran, is the armed wing of the main Shia opposition group, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), under the command of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim.
"Most of Badr forces returned to Iraq during the past weeks through Iran's borders, leaving behind their heavy artillery, including tanks," a source in the holy city of Qom - whose seminary has been Sciri's clerical base - told the FT.
"Only a small number of them are still in Iran, most of whom will leave with Ayatollah al-Hakim soon."
No further details were given.
Ayatollah al-Hakim is expected to leave for Najaf, after 23 years of exile, on Wednesday or Thursday. Most members of the 12-man Sciri central council have already returned home. The families, however, will stay.
While Iran's clerical establishment hopes to secure its interests in neighbouring Iraq through opposition groups, the strong presence of armed Shia forces could exacerbate US concerns over Iran's role in postwar Iraq.
The US, branding Iran as part of "the axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea, has warned Tehran not to interfere in postwar Iraq through opposition forces, particularly Muslim Shias in the south.
Iran has been host to the main armed Shia and Kurdish opposition groups since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
But analysts believe that Ayatollah al-Hakim will not be able to garner sufficient support for the establishment of an Islamic government in Iraq.
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U.S. Is Now in Battle for Peace After Winning the War in Iraq
May 3, 2003
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/international/worldspecial/03IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 2 - The war in Iraq has officially ended, but the momentous task of recreating a new Iraqi nation seems hardly to have begun. Three weeks after Saddam Hussein fell from power, American troops are straining to manage the forces this war has unleashed: the anger, frustration and competing ambitions of a nation suppressed for three decades.
In a virtual power vacuum, with the relationship between American military and civilian authority seeming ill defined, new political parties, Kurds and Shiite religious groups are asserting virtual governmental authority in cities and villages across the country, sometimes right under the noses of American soldiers.
There is a growing sense among educated Iraqis eager for the American-led transformation of Iraq to work that the Americans may be losing the initiative, that the single-mindedness that won the war is slackening under the delicate task of transforming a military victory into political success. "Real freedom is organized and productive," said S. S. Nadir, a prominent art critic in Baghdad. "It is productive with real institutions of civil society that can do work. It needs groups of smart, educated, free, liberal people who can build projects."
"The Iraqi people have always been prepared for freedom," he said. "But we need help, and we are not sure the Americans can provide that."
Of course, little time has passed, and it is clearly too early to say how well a plan as ambitious as America's in Iraq - the foundation of a federal democracy in a place that has never known such a thing - will work. But some of the initial signs are mixed.
Anti-American sentiment remains palpable. West of Baghdad, United States troops this week shot dead 18 or more anti-American protesters.
Faced by such violence, no one American or one Iraqi currently seems to lead the country. Various figures with uncertain powers work for the Pentagon, the State Department or others. Jay Garner, a retired American lieutenant general who heads the civilian reconstruction authority, has been virtually invisible to Iraqis in the two weeks since he landed here.
Up to now, General Garner has appeared to lack the resources to promote that promised democracy. He presides over a tiny staff that lacks phones, e-mail or even minimal security to travel around the country. His future and his authority appear uncertain now that L. Paul Bremer, a former counterterrorism director in the Reagan administration, is expected to direct the selection of a transitional Iraqi government.
Alongside General Garner stands Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of all ground forces. Last week, amid looting and political turmoil, General McKiernan took the bold move of issuing a "proclamation to the people of Iraq" declaring, essentially, that he was in charge.
"As the head authority in Iraq," he wrote, "I call for the immediate cessation of all criminal activity to include acts of reprisal, looting and attacks on coalition forces."
But the proclamation, in English and Arabic, did not receive wide distribution. Some senior military officials suggested that the commander's statement was too strong. General Garner's men, charged with passing out the flyers, could summon neither the resources nor the energy to do it.
"Do you think we have hundreds of people to go around the city plastering things on walls?" one of General Garner's assistants asked.
The dilemma facing American officials is complex: they must assert authority, it seems, in order to stop disorder, but avoid doing so in a manner that suggests to Iraqis that the United States has come to dominate the land and its oil. Suspicions of such American ambitions are rife in this conspiracy-filled country.
The suspicions are fueled by the United States' relative isolation. Although the Bush administration plans to broaden the military administration of postwar Iraq by bringing in nations like Poland that supported the war, it appears more vulnerable because it finds itself acting for the moment without a United Nations mandate and without the support of major NATO allies like Germany and France.
Holding Back the Kurds
The United States also faces a tremendous challenge in trying to dampen the ardor of the Kurds for their own state, and in managing the resurgence of the largest religious group, the Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population.
For now, the Kurds seem willing to play loyal friend to the Americans, who have guaranteed the virtual autonomy of their territory in northern Iraq since 1991, and to wait and see if some kind of acceptable federal structure emerges.
Like the Roman Catholic clergy in Communist Poland, Shiite leaders in Iraq became the main font of resistance to Mr. Hussein's repressive government, and were long persecuted for their stand. Now that Mr. Hussein is gone, the Shiites appear to have an undisputed moral authority in wide areas. Across Iraq, including large parts of Baghdad, Shiite leaders have begun to assert control and take up essential public services.
For many of these Shiite leaders, their efforts represent the genesis of an Islamic state, modeled in no small way on their Shiite-majority neighbor, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Such a project is clearly incompatible with the American quest to install a democracy. Some of the leading Iraqi clerics have issued proclamations expressing intense hostility toward the United States, viewed as an infidel power whose temptations will ultimately corrupt the kingdom of Islam.
Still, despite such hostility, America has made some short-term headway. The looting and chaos of the early days have subsided. The rhythms of daily life are returning. Police officers are walking the streets of the capital, and shops and restaurants are slowly beginning to open. Large stores of ammunition, an omnipresent danger to Iraqis, have been destroyed.
For all the complaining, Iraqis still seem willing, for the moment, to give the Americans the benefit of the doubt: to wait for the schools to reopen, for instance, and American promises of democracy to emerge.
For now, General Garner seems hard pressed in trying to deliver on American promises. In his first three days, he did tour around, but mostly in the Kurdish north, where he was already known and liked for helping to organize crucial aid after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
Without electricity, hardly any Iraqis could watch television footage of that trip. When he returned to Baghdad, he disappeared with his team of American and British officials into the Republican Palace, once the innermost sanctuary of Mr. Hussein.
General Garner meets in tight security with selected groups of Iraqi officials, has video conferences several times a week with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and speaks with his own team of former American generals and ambassadors. Since his first tour, there has been no sign of him walking the streets or even driving through neighborhoods. In the dozen or more new newspapers appearing on Baghdad's streets, there have been no Garner interviews, no Garner photographs.
On the key question of a future Iraqi government, American officials have called for a meeting in a month to chose an interim authority. The messy reality will probably result in some difficult balance among the groups competing for power.
Balancing the Parties
Two of those groups already have established a fair share of authority: the Kurds in the north, who have lived in de facto autonomy since the gulf war in 1991; and the Shiites in the south and in parts of Baghdad, who have a large, devoted following and have already taken over some public services.
There will also be Sunni Muslims, scores of home-grown political parties that have cropped up in the last three weeks and, most contentiously, the many Iraqi exiles who have returned home with the hope of some share of power.
Many Iraqis worry that a pragmatic balancing of those forces may prove elusive and the freedoms the Americans promised illusory.
Since the Americans and their allies deposed Mr. Hussein's government, their progress in restoring life's basic necessities has been uneven. In some parts of the country, like Basra, electricity and order have returned to large areas, drawing shoppers to the city's central market well into the evening.
Abbas Mustafa Hussein, a 42-year-old juice vendor who had just reopened his stand in Baghdad after 26 days, seemed to speak for many when he spelled out his feelings about the Americans, saying: "I don't want the Americans here forever. But if they left in the next couple of days, there would be even more chaos."
But for now in Baghdad, heaps of garbage pile up in the streets. Electrical power and running water are still absent much of the time. Across downtown, many merchants are still too frightened to open their shops.
Part of the explanation lies in the relatively small number of American troops being asked to control the country. Only 12,000 American soldiers have been assigned to Baghdad, a city of 5 million people. Only 150,000 American soldiers are being asked to maintain order across all of Iraq, population 25 million, and that number may be substantially reduced by the fall.
A week ago, a reporter driving across the length of Baghdad at 2 a.m. spotted only a handful of American soldiers, and those were standing around the Sheraton Hotel.
Apart from Baghdad's police force, hastily brought together amid the rioting and looting, 20 ministries lie in ruins. The Americans have begun to identify the employees of government departments and to cull those believed to have maintained close ties to Mr. Hussein's government. Otherwise, there is very little activity apparent in the ministries.
Without a central authority, many Iraqis are answering the calls of self-appointed leaders. Earlier this week, several hundred people stood outside a Baghdad social club that had been used only days before by Muhammad al-Zobeidi, a businessman who had proclaimed himself mayor.
The Americans had arrested Mr. Zobeidi, and he and all of his men were gone. But still the crowd came, heeding his earlier promise to put Iraqis to work.
The result was pandemonium, with hucksters selling bogus job applications and absconding with the cash.
"I am just doing what everyone else is doing," said Nawfal Abdul Razaq, 23, who had just bought a phony application. "I just want a job."
Scapegoating Americans
In such chaos, increasingly, the Iraqis - overwhelmingly glad to be rid of Mr. Hussein - are finding scapegoats in the Americans.
On Thursday, in the west Baghdad district of Alawi Hilla, an explosion at a gas station set off by celebratory gunfire over the return of electricity to the area turned rapidly into an anti-American fracas. One Iraqi man was killed in the explosion, and dozens were injured, but the subject that galvanized the locals was the American presence in Iraq.
"First it was Saddam's fault for bringing the Americans here," said Abbas Hatu, 23, a demonstrator. "Then the Americans' fault for not providing security for these poor people. They are only concerned about their soldiers' safety."
Often, the American authorities seem out of touch. In a meeting with Western news reporters this week, a senior member of General Garner's team expressed complete ignorance of an incident that was then some 40 hours old - the first altercation involving American troops in the town of Falluja, in which 15 Iraqis were killed.
"I am operating in something of a news void," the official said apologetically. "I just did not know about it."
If there is no single American who firmly governs Iraq, there is no single Iraqi who does so either. The man who has received the most attention is Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile known here as "America's man" for the long support he has received in Washington. That association does not necessarily help his ambitions here, nor nurture a favorable image of America.
The scion of a wealthy Shiite family, Mr. Chalabi left Iraq in 1958. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud in Jordan over the operations of bank he founded there; he denies those charges, saying they were fostered by the Iraqi government. Since his return to Iraq last month, the behavior of his entourage has outraged many Iraqis, and even some Americans.
"What we have done is import mafias into Baghdad," said one American official, who insisted on anonymity.
The official was referring to the takeover of many of Baghdad's best houses by groups of men claiming to have formed new political parties. Kurdish parties have taken over a Baath Party headquarters and the engineering building of Mr. Hussein's office. Some have set up roadblocks and established militias, sometimes saying they are operating with the authority of the American military.
An early expropriator was Mr. Chalabi, whose supporters seized the elite Hunting Club, apparently with the permission of American soldiers. Various groups associated with him took over other expensive houses in the same area.
Last weekend, General Garner appeared to give tacit approval by dining with Mr. Chalabi at the club. All that, critics here say, has only encouraged other groups to go house-taking.
"What right does Chalabi have to take over these clubs?" asked Saif Hikmet al-Dujaili, a 25-year-old pharmacist who was thrown out of the Hunting Club.
General Garner emphasized last week that Mr. Chalabi was "not my candidate, not the candidate of the coalition."
The problems of managing Mr. Chalabi pale, however, in comparison with the difficulties of curbing the Shiite religious revival. In a recent fatwa - a religious pronouncement - Kadhem al-Husseini al-Haeri, one of the most influential Iraqi clerics, urged his followers to spurn their American occupiers.
"People have to be taught not to collapse morally before the means used by the Great Satan, if it stays in Iraq," the fatwa read, referring to the United States. "It will try to spread moral decay, incite lust by allowing easy access to stimulating satellite channels, spreading debauchery to weaken peoples' faith in schools, governments and homes."
Already, Shiite leaders loyal to Mr. Haeri claim control over much of Najaf, Karbala, the sprawling Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad and a string of other Iraqi cities.
To date, the Americans say they are fostering "Islamic democracy," a hybrid that might satisfy the American desire for Western institutions while dulling the harder edges of an Islamic republic. In practice, the Americans have engaged even the more radical of Shiite clerics, while trying also to strengthen those like Ayatollah Ali al-Sisteni, who appears to support a democratic, parliamentary system.
Offering ID Cards
The potential pitfalls of the American approach seemed to reveal themselves in a recent conversation between a young American soldier and an Iraqi man in Sadr City, a neighborhood of Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City.
The soldier, Maj. Kelly Ward, was trying to pass out American identification cards to a group of about 20 Iraqis who had been trying to maintain security in the area. The cards carried an inscription declaring the bearer to be "recognized as a local guard by the Cougar Squadron commander."
The Iraqi men, who carried their own ID cards issued from an influential council of clerics called the Hawzah, were resisting. They believed that they were acting under divine authority.
"This is to prove to us that you are volunteers working with the coalition forces," Major Ward insisted, pressing his ID cards on the men.
One Iraqi said they had ID's from the Hawzah, "We want to use those," he said. "Why can we not use these?"
"We cannot do that, because then we would not recognize you," Major Ward replied. "If we found weapons with anyone, we might start shooting."
"But we submit to the Hawzah," the Iraqi man said with finality, "and we have to carry the ID's that represent the Hawzah, and not the coalition forces. We do not take orders from anyone else."
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Baghdad battle 'killed 2,300'
May 3 2003
AP
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/03/1051876891254.html
The battle for Baghdad cost the lives of at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, according to records at the city's 19 largest hospitals.
The civilian death toll was almost certainly higher.
The hospital records say that another 1,255 dead were "probably" civilians, including many women and children.
Uncounted others who died never made it to hospitals and now are buried in shallow graves that have been dug throughout the city - in cemeteries, back yards, hospital gardens, city parks and mosque grounds.
More than 6,800 civilians were wounded, the hospital records show.
A Pentagon spokesman called even one civilian death too many, but military historians said that, compared with past wars, the death toll was relatively low.
The numbers, gleaned from archives that separated military from civilians, include those killed between March 19, when the US air war began, and April 9, when the city fell to American forces.
The biggest number of deaths appears to have occurred April 5 and 6 when US troops began fighting their way into the city.
At the Shaheed Al Adnan Hospital in central Baghdad, for example, the ledger showed 44 civilian deaths in the first 17 days of the war, then 41 for the last five days, including 24 on April 5 and 12 on April 6.
Iraqi doctors acknowledge that the records may not be perfect.
Although it was a fairly simple task to categorise women and children as civilians, men presented a different challenge, especially in the final days of the war.
Some loyalists to Saddam Hussein reportedly fought in civilian clothes, and some soldiers shed their uniforms in retreat.
But the doctors said they were able to separate military from civilian by relying on age and other factors. In general, if a person was dressed in civilian clothes and carried no military identification the doctors assumed he was a civilian. They said that many soldiers did present military ID at the hospitals.
The records make no effort to determine whether the dead were killed by American or Iraqi fire, although the doctors believe that US weapons produced most of the casualties.
"Was our record-keeping perfect?" said Dr Basim Al-Shaeli, a general surgeon at Al Kharama in the city's southwest sector.
"During the invasion, I was performing 10 major operations a day, staying here around the clock. While I was doing this, the shooting would be going on, bullets would be crashing into the hospital around us, and we could hear the tanks outside the gates.
"I was performing surgery on an injured neck, an injured head or face, and I was insisting that they be taken home the next day, because the demand for beds was so great, and even so we were always overcrowded. And this wasn't just me; every doctor here worked like this.
"So no, our records are not perfect. But I believe they are accurate."
The Baghdad death toll also does not include the hundreds of civilians who died in other parts of Iraq.
Tabulations have not been made in many of Iraq's cities, but available information indicates hundreds of civilians died during the US assault.
In Najaf, for example, the Najaf Teaching Hospital reported that as of Sunday it had treated 286 civilian dead during the war. During the same period, the hospital counted 57 military dead.
The Bush administration says it will make no effort to tally Iraqi dead, either civilian or military.
The Iraqi Red Crescent Society says it will have no report on civilian deaths ready until mid-May.
So the hospital records provide what appears to be the first credible, if imperfect, starting point for determining how many civilians in the capital perished in the war.
The Red Crescent said these 19 hospitals were the likeliest to have received dead and injured during the war.
The records show 1,101 deaths that doctors felt were clearly those of civilians, 845 of which were recorded at three hospitals - Al Kharama, Al Askan and Yarmuk - near the Baghdad airport.
An additional 1,255 dead probably were civilians, doctors say, all reported at the same three hospitals near the airport. At Al Kharama, 30 per cent of 450 such bodies belonged to women and children, doctors said.
Others were men without identification in civilian clothes who the doctors believed were civilians. But a final determination was not made, in part because of the enormous volume of bodies to be dealt with.
By contrast, 125 American service personnel and 31 British were killed in the entire war. The last official estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths - based on Iraqi government claims before Baghdad fell - totalled about 1,250.
Dr Ameer K Daher, a general surgeon who was trapped near his home by the fighting, recalled that when cluster bombs smashed nearby houses, he and his neighbours set up a field hospital in a secondary school.
"We buried 10 people in the mosque and treated 45 more with what supplies we had in our homes," he said. "We were not the only people forced to do this."
Pentagon spokesman Lt Col James Cassella said "even one civilian death is one civilian death too many."
Others noted that civilian deaths vary widely from war to war. Civilian deaths in the first Gulf War in 1991 were estimated at 3,500 from bombing and other "direct war effects," said Beth Osborne Daponte, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Historic conflicts such as World War II caused millions of civilian deaths.
Mark Burgess, a research analyst with the Centre for Defence Information, an independent think tank in Washington, said the Baghdad numbers appear low when placed in the context of previous civilian death tolls. He cited as examples the US firebombing of Tokyo or the bombing of Dresden, Germany, both during World War II. Those episodes killed tens of thousands.
"Considering the amount of ordnance dropped on Baghdad, it probably could have been a lot worse," he said. "Clearly these are a lot of casualties, and any civilian casualty is regrettable and should be examined, but looking at the number of casualties historically gives us a clearer picture."
American officials have always said that they hoped to minimise civilian casualties, and in the days before US troops moved from Kuwait into Iraq, most troops were given extensive training on so-called rules of engagement intended to minimise civilian casualties.
But in the days after US troops entered Iraq, the lines between Iraqi combatants and civilians blurred as US supply lines came under attack by Iraqi loyalists dressed in civilian clothes. A suicide bombing at an army checkpoint near Najaf that killed four soldiers heightened tensions, as did reports that those loyal to Saddam Hussein were driving white pickup trucks, a vehicle also common among Iraqi civilians. News accounts reported several incidents of US soldiers firing on cars, only to learn that their occupants were families trying to escape the fighting.
US air bombing maps included several dozen "NFAs," or no-fire areas, in Baghdad, large red circles centred on clearly civilian targets such as hospitals, power plants, hotels, schools and some government ministries.
But Saddam placed his forces in schools, deployed tanks and anti-aircraft artillery in residential neighbourhoods and hid rocket launchers under bridges, knowing the American reluctance to attack such places.
Drive the streets of Baghdad today and it becomes clear that the city is not London or Berlin after World War II, where bombing destroyed large stretches. The bombing damage is spotty, occasional.
Still, in many neighbourhoods, residents are quick to point out exactly where American bombs ended the lives of neighbours and friends.
Doctors at several hospitals alleged that some civilians died because American soldiers were not allowing civilian ambulances into neighbourhoods near the battles.
Two pregnant women were killed when an American tank shelled their ambulance on the way to Yarmuk Hospital on April 7, doctors there say. The driver and a doctor along to provide care were both injured. They add that soon afterward, shells hit the hospital's diabetes centre, destroying an entire floor, which volunteer workers have been working to repair since.
Perhaps the most graphic image of the death toll is the 150 graves dug into the garden around the Al Askan Hospital.
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Details of U.S. peace plan for Iraq
Associated Press
Sat, May. 03, 2003
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/5779195.htm
Bush administration officials have set out a plan for peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts in Iraq that envisions an international military force to stabilize the country. The details include:
# The division of Iraq into three zones, with the United States, Britain and Poland each controlling a section. Troops in each zone will work to restore and maintain order and supervise humanitarian efforts.
# Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Denmark, the Netherlands and Bulgaria have committed troops to serve under British or Polish supervision. Other countries have offered logistical and other support.
# The United States will commit a division - about 20,000 troops - for its sector.
# At least at the start, the new troops will augment and not replace the 135,000 American troops currently in Iraq, who will focus on rooting out remaining forces of the old regime and other armed elements.
# All troops will report to Gen. Tommy Franks, the American military commander.
# The French and Germans, opponents of the U.S.-led war on Iraq, are excluded. The United Nations role is limited to humanitarian efforts.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Plans Palestinian Statehood In Jordan
By Ahmad Abdullah, IOL Staff
May 3, 2003
IslamOnline.net & News Agencies
http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2003-05/03/article07.shtml
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, May 3 - Jordan can be the new homeland of Palestinians in return for allowing it to have lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq, revealed an Israeli plan Saturday, May3 .
Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon left last night for the United States, where he will present the U.S. officials with the plan based on naturalizing the Palestinians in Jordan and that a Palestinian state in the spirit of President George Bush's vision will only feed terrorism and that Jordan is Palestine, Israeli daily Haaretz said.
The plan came three days after an international "roadmap" envisioning the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was finally released to the Palestinian and Israeli premiers Wednesday, April30 . The roadmap was drafted by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
However, Elon, known for his close relations with fundamentalists and evangelical Christians, will try to convince Washington that the Palestinian Authority should be dismantled and that Israeli sovereignty should be applied from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea, the Israeli paper said.
Five-Stage Plan
Admitting he is opposed to President Bush's "vision," calling for Palestinian and Israeli states to exist side by side, Eilon claims his solution is also a two-state formula, saying that Jordan fulfils all the criteria of a Palestinian state.
Amman had earlier repeatedly rejected similar calls by the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government members.
Elon's plan consists of six stages; the first of which is that the Palestinian authority should be dismantled immediately as it represents "an entity without a future, and whose existence prevents the end of the dispute."
The second state calls on Israel to use its military and political power to destroy "all the Palestinian terror infrastructure," tear down refugee camps and deport what it call 'terrorist groups'.
As for the third stage, Israel, the U.S. and the international community "will recognize Jordan as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that Jordan will grant citizenship to all Arabs of the West Bank, Gaza and other Palestinians who want it".
The international community will in return concentrate efforts on long-term development of Jordan, to enable it to "absorb a limited number of refugees. The assistance includes giving Jordanian companies part of the lucrative subcontracts in the rebuilding of neighboring Iraq.
"After that, Israel and Jordan-Palestine will declare the end of the dispute and establish neighborly and cooperative relations, and act together toward normalization between Israel and the Arab states," read the last stage of Elon's plan.
--------
Hamas Fighters March in Defiance at Gaza City Funeral
May 3, 2003
The New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/international/middleeast/03MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Saturday, May 3 - In a show of defiance directed at Israel and the new Palestinian government, hundreds of masked and armed fighters from the militant Hamas movement marched through the streets of Gaza City Friday in a funeral procession for 12 people killed in an Israeli raid on Thursday.
The funeral drew thousands of Gazans, many of them calling for retaliation or chanting slogans against the first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who took office on Tuesday. Mr. Abbas, who is known as Abu Mazen, wants to restrain the armed uprising. "You, Abu Mazen, are a collaborator of Israel and America," some shouted.
A 13th person killed in the incursion, a 2-year-old boy who was shot in the head, was buried Thursday.
Palestinian officials and some Israeli analysts criticized the raid as timed to undermine Mr. Abbas and the new international peace plan known as the road map, which was released on Wednesday.
Israeli officials said the Gaza raid was necessary to capture three brothers from Hamas involved in firing mortar bombs and rockets at Israeli targets. The incursion touched off a gun battle with Hamas fighters that lasted for hours in a dense neighborhood of Gaza City.
Mr. Abbas has been trying to persuade Hamas to agree to a truce and to join the Palestinian political process, competing against his own Fatah faction for leadership in the governing Palestinian Authority. Hamas, which opposes any negotiation with Israel, has shunned the Palestinian Authority as a compromised creature of the Oslo peace process.
Mr. Abbas says that he wants pluralism in politics but that the Palestinian factions can have only a single leadership when it comes to arms. But top Israeli security officials say they want to see Mr. Abbas crush Hamas, not reach a truce with it. They say that a truce would only give the group time to rearm.
So far, Hamas leaders have rejected Mr. Abbas's offer, as have militants from within Fatah.
The raid followed a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv jazz bar early on Wednesday that killed three bystanders. The bombing, carried out by a British citizen, was claimed by Hamas and a Fatah-linked group, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades. Early this morning, antiterror police in Britain said they had arrested five people in connection with the bombing. Israeli police are searching for another British citizen, Omar Sharif, 27, who they say was the bomber's accomplice.
The Hamas fighters in the funeral procession Friday carried semiautomatic rifles, not the mock-ups of explosive belts, rockets and mortars they have paraded in the past. Hamas uses explosives, rockets and mortars against Israel, so the show of rifles appeared to be directed more at the security branches of the Palestinian Authority.
Members of Al Aksa Brigades, appearing in the funeral procession as well, also spurned Mr. Abbas's demands, saying they would not surrender their weapons. Mr. Abbas has said he will collect illegal weapons, a step demanded by the peace plan.
The plan calls for both a Palestinian security crackdown and an easing of Israeli military actions. Israel is also supposed to remove the dozens of settlement outposts built since March 2001.
But Israel says it will not make any concessions on security or settlements until Mr. Abbas acts decisively against terrorism.
William J. Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is expected to arrive here on Saturday to begin consultations with Israelis and Palestinians over how to proceed with the plan, which envisions a comprehensive peace and a Palestinian state in three years.
The plan was developed by the so-called quartet of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. Israel is seeking to minimize the role of the American allies, regarding them as biased toward the Palestinians. It sought significant changes in the plan before it was announced, without success, and is again pressing proposed changes.
The quartet representatives are trying to establish four monitoring panels to gauge progress in discrete areas like security and economic assistance. Israel wants only the Americans to sit on the security panel.
During his visit, Mr. Burns is expected to address this matter, which the quartet is trying to resolve before proceeding further. That in itself amounts to a significant change in the plan, which says that during the first phase the quartet should begin "informal monitoring" by "relying on existing mechanisms and on-the-ground resources."
In an interview published Friday in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said, "It is extremely important that Israel respond positively to the establishment of the post of prime minister in the Palestinian Authority."
Troops Kill British Cameraman
GAZA, Saturday, May 3 (Reuters) - Israeli forces in the southern Gaza Strip shot dead a British television cameraman on Friday, military officials and Palestinian witnesses said.
The cameraman, James Miller, who was in the refugee camp of Rafah making a documentary, died after being evacuated by Israeli forces for treatment.
The Israeli Army said that troops were not trying to hit Mr. Miller but were returning fire while searching for smuggling tunnels and that Mr. Miller was hit in the exchange.
-------- latin america
Artists, writers defend Castro
May 3, 2003
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030503-95018311.htm
HAVANA - Singer Harry Belafonte, who recently called Secretary of State Colin L. Powell a "house slave," has joined actor Danny Glover and more than 160 artists and intellectuals to defend Fidel Castro's government against criticism over its recent crackdown on dissent.
The group issued a two-paragraph declaration denouncing the war in Iraq and condemning U.S. "harassment" of Cuba, which it calls a "pretext for invasion."
Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez announced the declaration Thursday at a May Day celebration in Havana, Reuters news agency reported.
It was also signed by Latin American Nobel laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rigoberta Menchu, Aldolfo Perez Esquivel and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, also a Nobel prize winner.
The two-paragraph declaration is titled: "To the Conscience of the World."
"A single power is inflicting grave damage to the norms of understanding, debate and mediation among countries," the declaration says, referring to the United States and the war in Iraq.
"At this very moment, a strong campaign of destabilization against a Latin American nation has been unleashed. The harassment against Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion."
Mr. Castro's government has come under unprecedented international criticism from friends and foes after sentencing 75 dissidents to prison terms of up to 28 years last month and executing three men who hijacked a ferry in a failed attempt to reach the United States.
Havana has said the crackdown was in response to a U.S. plot to topple the Castro government after more than four decades of failed efforts to do so.
Mr. Belafonte has emerged lately as one of Hollywood's most fervent critics of the Bush administration by attacking its two most senior black officials.
He likened Mr. Powell to a "house slave" who curries favor in the conservative Bush administration "to come into the house of the master."
He has also criticized National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for working for President Bush.
His defense of Mr. Castro's regime, along with others who signed the declaration, comes at a time when Cuba's government is being criticized by foreign writers and artists.
Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago, a longtime supporter of Mr. Castro, wrote last month that, "from now on, Cuba can follow its own course, and leave me out," saying Cuba had cheated his illusions.
At the Thursday rally, Mr. Castro told critics, particularly on the left, that their words could be used to justify a U.S. invasion.
The intellectuals who signed the declaration defending Cuba apparently agree, though they did not specifically express support for Mr. Castro's policies.
The declaration concludes with a call to governments and others to "uphold the universal principles of national sovereignty, respect for territorial integrity and self-determination, essential to just and peaceful co-existence among nations."
Mr. Gonzalez did not say who originated the declaration but that it would continue to be circulated among cultural figures around the world.
While Latin America's revered left-wing intellectuals are abandoning Mr. Castro in horror at the recent crackdown on dissidents, Mr. Garcia Marquez continues to stand by the Cuban leader, an old friend.
The 1982 Nobel Prize-winning author, whose novel "Autumn of the Patriarch" has been acclaimed as the classic account of the Caribbean strongman, refuses to join the likes of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in condemning Mr. Castro.
The Colombian writer defended himself in Tuesday's edition of the daily newspaper El Tiempo after U.S. feminist writer Susan Sontag told reporters that it was "unpardonable" for him not to have spoken out over the recent Cuban crackdown.
"I don't answer unnecessary and provocative questions," said the author, whose sympathies for the Cuban revolution go back decades.
Moral support from such respected figures as Mr. Garcia Marquez is highly valued by a Cuban government whose material resources have dwindled since the Soviet collapse.
"I myself could not calculate the number of prisoners, dissidents and conspirators that I have helped, in absolute silence, to emigrate from Cuba over no less than 20 years," Mr. Garcia Marquez, 76, said in his defense.
"As to the death penalty, I don't have anything to add to what I have said in private and publicly for as long as I can remember: I'm against it in any place, for any reason, in any circumstances," said Mr. Garcia Marquez who lives in Mexico and Los Angeles.
Mr. Castro in 2002 wrote a glowing review of Mr. Garcia Marquez's recently published memoirs.
"In my next reincarnation, I would like to be a writer, and, on top of that, I'd like to be one like Gabriel Garcia Marquez," the communist leader wrote in the Colombian magazine Cambio.
-------- mideast
Powell set to take hard line with Syria
May 3, 2003
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Nicholas Kralev
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030503-91537489.htm
DAMASCUS, Syria - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell challenged Syria yesterday to accept the region's "new strategic dynamic" with Iraq's Saddam Hussein gone and a fresh Israeli-Palestinian peace effort under way.
He also accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of breaking a promise two years earlier to shut down an Iraqi oil pipeline through Syria, as required by a U.N. embargo.
Mr. Powell's remarks to reporters as he flew to the Syrian capital set a stern tone for talks with Mr. Assad today.
He said that oil from the Iraqi pipeline, which was cut off by U.S. troops last month, will not flow again until Syria pays market prices to a new Iraqi government.
The secretary said that the United States will be looking for "specific action and performance" from Syria that reflect its "understanding" of the "new strategic dynamic" in the region.
"I will make it very clear to him how the United States views the changed strategic situation in the region with the departure of Saddam Hussein's regime and with the road map," Mr. Powell said, with the latter being a reference to the new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan released this week. "I'll explain to him how these two elements are related."
"I will encourage [the Syrians] to review these changes and take a look at some of their past policies, and see whether those policies seem to be relevant in light of a new, changed situation," he said.
At U.N. headuarters in New York, Syria's U.N. envoy said yesterday Damascus will urge Mr. Powell to support a U.N. resolution calling for the Middle East to be free of weapons of mass destruction.
The Arab-backed resolution, introduced by Syria in the Security Council, is clearly aimed at Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons. Israel refuses to confirm or deny the claim and is not a party to global treaties aimed at controlling the spread of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Ambassador Mikhail Wehbe said Syria believes the time is right for the council to adopt such a resolution because it will spur progress toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, who have just been presented with a new "road map" to settle their long and bloody conflict.
The road map, which calls for a comprehensive peace settlement and the creation of a Palestinian state with final borders by 2005, also includes resolving issues with Syria and Lebanon, where Mr. Powell will pay a brief visit after he leaves Damascus today.
The Bush administration turned up the heat on Syria toward the end of the military campaign in Iraq.
It accused Mr. Assad's regime of aiding Saddam, allowing Arabs into Iraq to fight the U.S.-led forces and providing refuge for fleeing Iraqi officials.
In addition, the administration said Damascus was developing chemical weapons.
President Bush said two weeks ago that there were some indications the Syrians were getting the message.
But Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa told reporters in Damascus on Thursday that his government wants dialogue, not ultimatums, from Washington. "We believe in dialogue, not presenting demands," he said.
Washington has rejected speculation that Syria, which is on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, might be its next target for pre-emptive military action. But Mr. Powell yesterday declined to offer Syria a security guarantee.
He said he did not expect the subject to "come up" during his visit, because there is no "context" for it.
"They know what we are interested in," he said of the Syrians. "They know the things we frankly disapprove of ... . If they don't meet any of them, that will be taken into account as we decide on our future strategy."
On earlier accusations that Iraq had sent weapons of mass destruction to Syria for safekeeping, Mr. Powell said: "We do have some concerns and we have conveyed them through the appropriate channels."
He also planned to call attention to the offices in Syria of several Palestinian factions, including the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which the United States has designated as terrorist organizations.
Mr. Powell, who last month threatened economic and diplomatic sanctions if Damascus does not change its ways, brought up the issue again yesterday.
He cited Congress' 2001 USA Patriot Act, which aims to quash terrorism, as well as the Syria Accountability Act, recently reintroduced by several lawmakers after failing to win passage last year. The secretary did not elaborate on what the sanctions might cover.
He also said he would try to persuade Mr. Assad that having good relations with the new Iraqi government, when it is formed, would produce economic benefits for Syria, which has had extensive trade relations with Iraq.
The secretary said he had not forgotten Mr. Assad's promise regarding the oil pipeline from Iraq through Syria when they first met in 2001, soon after Mr. Powell was named secretary of state.
The oil continued to flow, circumventing U.N. sanctions, and Syria received some of the oil at below-market prices.
"I will always have that in my background software and on my hard drive," Mr. Powell said.
Asked when oil will start flowing to Syria again, the secretary said: "Pay for the oil at market prices, it would seem to me. It would be something the new Iraqi government would be interested in doing, as opposed to letting it go on some concessional basis."
During a stop in Madrid on Thursday, Mr. Powell played down his expectations for the Damascus visit. "There will be a candid and straightforward discussion," he said. "I'm looking forward to it, but I'm not looking forward to any particular deliverables."
Mr. Powell was met at the Damascus airport last night by Mr. Sharaa, who then accompanied the secretary to his hotel, where they shook hands before dozens of reporters.
In Beirut today, Mr. Powell is scheduled to meet with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, Prime Minister Rafiz Hariri and Foreign Minister Jean Obeid.
--------
Powell demands end to Syrian support for anti-Israel groups
Saturday, May 03, 2003 Iyyar 1, 5763
By News Agencies
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/289617.html
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Damascus on Friday demanding Syria stop supporting anti-Israel guerrillas and alter other policies which Washington says do not fit in a changing Middle East.
Powell will meet Syrian President Bashar Assad on Saturday to press Washington's view that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and a possible resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks create a "new strategic dynamic" in the region.
"What I am looking for is... whether or not as a result of the exchange that we have tomorrow we start to see specific action and performance on the part of the Syrian government that would reflect understanding of this new situation and how they are going to respond to it," Powell told reporters.
Asked what would happen if Syria failed to meet U.S. demands, he said: "If they don't meet any of them, that will be taken into account as we decide on our future strategy. These are decisions we will take after we see the performances."
Powell said Damascus should bear in mind members of the U.S. Congress had revived a Syria Accountability Act which threatens sanctions and that some embargo provisions of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 could apply to Syria.
"Frankly Syria would be a lot better off if they would move away from some of these policies of the past... Why hang on to policies that no longer have the same relevance?" he said.
The secretary of state will meet Assad on Saturday to press Washington's point that the ousting of Saddam Hussein and a possible resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks create a "new strategic dynamic" in the region.
Powell said ahead of his arrival Friday he expected a frank conversation with Assad and Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shaara, but no immediate results. "This will be a candid and useful discussion and I am looking forward to it but I am not looking for any particular deliverables," he said.
The United States has a list of grievances against Syria: During the Iraq war, Washington accused Damascus of letting Arab volunteers cross its border into Iraq to fight U.S. forces and said it might be allowing former Saddam aides to escape.
Damascus appears to have satisfied Washington on that count but the presence of Lebanese and Palestinian guerrilla groups and accusations that Syria is working on chemical weapons - denied by Syria - continue to sour the relationship.
"If Syria wants to be part of that comprehensive [peace] solution, then it has to review the policies it's been following with respect to the support of terrorist activities and the control they have over forces in Lebanon that present a threat to northern Israel," Powell said Wednesday, in a reference to the Syrian-backed Hezbollah organization, which is based in Lebanon.
On Thursday, Sharaa said American attention should be focused on Israel's occupation of Arab land rather than on groups that are resisting occupation. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.
But Sharaa also reiterated that Damascus was open to dialogue with Washington in a "spirit that does not emanate out of hostility or one that meets the demands of others."
He also warned Powell in advance not to set demands, saying Syria wanted dialogue, not ultimatums, and that would be the basis of the talks.
The state-run newspaper Al-Thawra said in an editorial Friday that Syria sought a "just, objective and balanced" stand from the United States on the Middle East peace process.
Al-Thawra also said that changes in the region in the wake of the Iraq war "do not constitute reasons that would push Syria into making concessions on land or rights." Any attempts to impose "incomplete settlements" would result in more tensions in the region, it warned.
"Syria is not asking the impossible, but it seeks a just, objective and balanced stand from the United States" on the peace process.
The paper said there should be a "comprehensive evaluation of the reasons that have prevented results" in the Arab-Israeli negotiations over the years.
It is Powell's first sortie into the Middle East for more than a year and a prelude to a longer trip next week that will include talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa greeting Colin Powell at a hotel in Damascus on Friday. (AP)
--------
Syria Must Crack Down on Terror Groups, Powell Says
May 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Powell.html
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- The United States will press Israel to work for peace in the Middle East, but Syria must adapt to the new reality in the region after the war in Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Saturday.
``We want to cooperate with Syria in adapting to that strategic situation and we'll be watching very carefully and anxious to engage with Syria,'' he said after meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Syria opposed the war in neighboring Iraq, and was accused by the United States of aiding President Saddam Hussein and of sheltering Iraqi officials. Syria also borders Israel and maintains a force of thousands of soldiers in Lebanon, which borders on both countries.
Powell met with Assad in Damascus, the Syrian capital, before flying to Beirut, where the secretary spoke with reporters.
Even before those talks, Powell had rejected an Arab idea, which Syria presented Friday in a proposed U.N. resolution, that weapons of mass destruction be declared illegal throughout the Middle East. Israel is the only country in the region assumed to have nuclear weapons, and the resolution was aimed at those weapons. The Jewish state does not confirm their existence.
Powell said clearing such weapons from the region is a long-standing U.S. goal, but now is not the time to deal with that matter.
He said the United States would press Israel to do everything possible to bring peace to the region. Powell said the meeting with Assad was held in a receptive atmosphere but produced no breakthroughs.
Powell said he and Assad discussed ``all of the outstanding issues,'' but the only commitment given was that Syria would continue closing down Damascus offices of groups the United States considers terrorist organizations.
Powell said Assad promised to consider questions such as weapons of mass destruction, turning wanted Iraqis over to the United States, Syria's support for the militant Islamic organizations and sealing of its border with Iraq. Assad said he would deal with them through diplomatic channels, the secretary said.
Powell's first meeting with Assad since April 2001 was largely to sell the Bush administration's road map, or blueprint, for bringing peace to Palestinians and Israelis. The visit was made more urgent by the developments during Iraq fighting.
The Americans were angered when armed people from Syria crossed into Iraq and fought for Saddam. Then, as the outcome became clearer, the United States contends many Iraqi officials and other fighters fled back across the frontier into Syria.
A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Assad spoke at length to Powell about Syria's views and displayed a ``general willingness to cooperate on some issues.''
In Beirut, Powell met briefly with Lebanese leaders and then left for Washington.
On the overall Middle East situation, Powell was noncommittal about whether the administration would try to bring the opposing sides together for a peace conference.
``We will have a conference in due course when circumstances permit,'' he said in response to a question. Lebanese Foreign Minister Jean Obeid, meeting reporters with Powell, stressed that security for Israel can be attained only through a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East.
Before seeing Assad, Powell said he would emphasize that although the road map first addresses the situation between Israelis and Palestinians, it is envisioned as the path to a settlement that also includes the interests of Lebanon and Syria, which has had thousands of soldiers in Lebanon since its bloody civil war during the 1980s.
Saturday's talks were a prelude to a second Mideast trip by Powell this week to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister.
Powell acknowledged the road map does not deal with Palestinian refugees, a major problem in Lebanon, where decades-old camps of Palestinian refugees still exist.
``We fully recognize that (for) a comprehensive solution as we go forward, there has to be another track in addition to the track that was laid out clearly in the road map,'' he said. ``There has to be another track that deals with Syrian concerns, Lebanese concerns, and that of course includes Palestinian refugees who are in Lebanon.''
-------- pakistan / india
India Announces Steps in Effort to End Its Conflict With Pakistan
May 3, 2003
The New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/international/asia/03INDI.html
NEW DELHI, May 2 - Saying he was making one last effort at peace, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced in Parliament today that India would restore diplomatic and air links with Pakistan.
The announcement broke a 16-month stalemate that began after an attack on Parliament here in December 2001. India laid the blame for the attack on Pakistan, which has backed a 14-year Islamic insurgency in the part of Kashmir governed by India.
After the attack, India recalled its high commissioner, suspended air, road and rail links and deployed hundreds of thousands of extra troops along its border with Pakistan. Western diplomats have said the two nuclear-armed nations were twice at the brink of war.
Mr. Vajpayee hinted that the sending of a high commissioner and restoration of civil aviation links could be the first steps of a more ambitious journey.
"The talks this time will be decisive," Mr. Vajpayee, 78, said. "At least in my life this is the last time I will be making an attempt" to resolve the India-Pakistan dispute.
"I am confident I will succeed," he added.
Hours later, Pakistan's foreign minister, Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, said that his country would also upgrade diplomatic relations to their normal status, and that Pakistani officials were ready to start talks "on all outstanding issues between the two countries, including that of Jammu and Kashmir."
Jammu and Kashmir is India's only Muslim majority state, and has been at the heart of the strained relations between India and Pakistan for more than half a century. Both countries claim the border territory of Kashmir in its entirety.
The Indian statement caught many by surprise today. "It's breathtaking," said Naresh Chandra, a former Indian ambassador to the United States.
The move is a rapid and stunning reversal from the hard line that India has taken for months, insisting it would not talk to Pakistan unless it permanently ended the infiltration of militants from its territory into India. The statement provides, for the first time in over a year, an opening to defuse what has become one of the world's most dangerous standoffs.
Last fall, India redeployed the forces it had massed on the border after the attack at Parliament, but the tensions in the subcontinent have remained a continuing source of concern for the United States.
In a trip planned before Mr. Vajpayee's initiative, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage plans to visit both Pakistan and India next week to try to break the deadlock.
Today, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called Mr. Vajpayee's announcement "very, very promising."
A senior Indian official said, "The prime minister has chosen to make one more effort, and one more very well thought-out effort." The decision, he added, had been made "to give it our best shot."
The official said initial steps would be taken to build confidence and trust on both sides, with the assumption that Pakistan would reciprocate. The hope was that these steps would then create the momentum for talks.
The prime minister believed, the official said, that while talks required more patience, they would bring a "more durable and more desirable solution" than any recourse to arms. He predicted a "bumpy road," but a fruitful result.
Two weeks ago, on a visit to Kashmir, Mr. Vajpayee ended months of harsh statements by Indian officials and announced he was extending a "hand of friendship" to Pakistan.
He later reiterated the statement in Parliament, although he insisted that India's conditions of a halt to anti-Indian terrorism coming from Pakistani territory had not changed.
On Monday, Pakistan's prime minister, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, called Mr. Vajpayee to extend his appreciation for the Indian prime minister's words. They discussed ways of improving bilateral ties, including restoring air links.
By making a first move today, Mr. Vajpayee is taking on hard-liners in his own party who have argued for taking action against Pakistan. But in a sign that he has some political cover for now, a leader of the Sangh Parivar - the family of Hindu nationalist organizations to which Mr. Vajpayee's party belongs - suggested on Thursday that they would not oppose a peace initiative.
"He's the one who can get away with it," Mr. Chandra, the former ambassador, said of the prime minister, who has managed both to hold together a coalition government and placate the Sangh Parivar. "I hope Pakistanis see this is the best time."
Twice before, Mr. Vajpayee has reached out to Pakistan, only to be met with what India saw as blatant, even mocking, rebuffs. In February 1999, he visited Lahore, only to have Pakistan begin a miniwar along the line of control that separates the two parts of Kashmir.
In July 2001, he invited President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to a summit meeting in Agra, but the meeting ended in discord, followed by the attack on Parliament six months later.
Mr. Vajpayee said today that he was making his "third and final" effort at peace. "Even for me, it is a decisive and conclusive step," he said. "We are committed to improvement of relations with Pakistan, and we are willing to grasp every opportunity to do so."
In a potentially significant statement, Pakistan's information minister, Sheik Rashid Ahmed, said any talks that took place would be between Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Jamali, not with Mr. Musharraf, whom senior Indian officials now view with distrust. "Soon both prime ministers are going to see each other," Mr. Ahmed said in an interview with New Delhi Television News.
The senior Indian official said a number of factors had motivated the prime minister.
His government had been widely praised for overseeing the first largely free and fair election in Kashmir in many years, resulting in a new government in the state and new efforts to lessen Kashmiris' alienation from India. After his visit to Kashmir two weeks ago, the official said, the prime minister was eager to consolidate the changes he saw there.
He has also alluded several times to the American-led war on Iraq, which India opposed, as containing a warning for poor and developing nations.
The political situation is also conducive for change. This is typically the beginning of "jihadi season," as some call the infiltration of Islamic militants across mountain passes into India. There have been fears that should militants conduct a major attack, as they did with the killing of 24 Hindus in Kashmir in March, India would retaliate with limited airstrikes.
But an Indian defense official speaking on the condition of anonymity said there had been "nothing significant" in terms of infiltration since the end of March, when the snow melts and the rebels' infiltration traditionally begins.
In his comments, Mr. Vajpayee also raised the issue of economic relations, saying India would be looking for concessions from Pakistan. Pakistan still maintains a so-called "negative list" of Indian items it bars from import, and India has long sought most-favored-nation status from its neighbor.
----
India Makes Gesture to Pakistan
Renewal of Full Diplomatic Ties and Airline Links Offered
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7712-2003May2?language=printer
NEW DELHI, May 2 -- India offered today to restore full diplomatic ties and commercial airline links with Pakistan as a possible prelude to direct talks aimed at ending decades of hostility and bloodshed over the divided Himalayan province of Jammu and Kashmir.
In India's most significant peace overture since the two countries nearly went to war last spring, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee pledged in a passionate address to Parliament to make a "third and final" effort to secure a lasting settlement of the half-century-old Kashmir conflict.
"This round of talks will be decisive," said Vajpayee, who has made two previous attempts to reach agreement with Pakistani leaders on the Kashmir issue. "At least for my life, these will be the last."
Vajpayee did not commit to a timetable for talks, and he emphasized that any dialogue with Pakistan depended on its willingness to curb the activities of Islamic militants fighting to eject India from the part of the province it controls. But his speech added to a growing sense of diplomatic momentum that began with his offer during a visit to Kashmir last month to "extend the hand of friendship" to Pakistan after 18 months of unrelenting hostility.
Indian officials accuse Pakistan of sponsoring cross-border terrorism in Kashmir and only a few weeks ago were talking of applying a U.S. model of "preemptive" military action against their neighbor. The abrupt shift in tone since then has prompted speculation among diplomats that Vajpayee, 78, is eager to complete his legacy with a peace accord, perhaps in defiance of hawks in his cabinet.
Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, welcomed Vajpayee's remarks and indicated that Pakistan would reciprocate. "Pakistan is ready to start a dialogue process so as to hold meaningful discussions on all outstanding issues between the two countries," Kasuri said at a news conference.
On Monday, Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali telephoned Vajpayee and proposed resuming sports contacts and discussing the possibility of a summit. It was the first such high-level discussion in more than 18 months.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, during a visit to Albania today, described the diplomatic progress of the past two weeks as "very, very promising at a time when we were beginning to wonder whether . . . we were not going back to the potential of conflict."
The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has poisoned relations between the two countries since their simultaneous birth in 1947 with the end of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent. They have fought three wars, and last year nearly fought another, mobilizing their armies after a terrorist attack on India's Parliament complex in December 2001 that India blamed on militants backed by Pakistan. Both countries have small nuclear arsenals.
After the attack on the Parliament grounds, India downgraded its diplomatic relations with Pakistan and severed air, rail and road links. The two countries stepped back from the brink after Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage last June secured a pledge from Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, to "permanently" end infiltration by Islamic militants across the cease-fire line -- called the Line of Control -- that separates Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir. Armitage is scheduled to return to the region next week.
Indian officials said that infiltrations dropped sharply for two months after Musharraf's pledge but then resumed. They have since maintained that dialogue on Kashmir cannot occur until the infiltration stops and Pakistan dismantles what India claims are militant training camps. Pakistani officials contend that militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir are indigenous and that Pakistan provides them only with diplomatic and moral support.
A senior Pakistani official hinted tonight that diplomatic progress could soon make life easier for Indian forces in Kashmir. "There is no doubt that Pakistan has some influence" over the militants' campaign, the official said, on condition of anonymity. "If Pakistan found a genuine sincerity in the recent Indian moves, the Indian military may get some respite in this peak combat season."
Vajpayee, in his speech to Parliament today, said he had emphasized during his chat with Jamali on Monday "the importance of economic cooperation, cultural exchanges, people-to-people contacts and civil aviation links."
He described Jamali's response as encouraging. "I felt there should be some way out," Vajpayee told the Indian lawmakers. "When there is darkness, nobody stops us from burning a lamp. There is darkness, but I see brightness and I have the courage of conviction."
A senior Indian official cautioned that no decision has been made on whether to enter into direct talks with Pakistan. "What is needed is a conducive atmosphere," the official said. "That necessarily involves an end to cross-border infiltration and the dismantling of infrastructure" used by militant groups.
Special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
-------- prisoners of war
Powell Wants Pentagon to Act on Detainees
Sat May 3, 2003
By PAULINE JELINEK,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=5&u=/ap/20030503/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_dispute_2
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell has told Pentagon officials to move faster in determining which prisoners now held at Guantanamo Bay can be released.
Powell's April 14 letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the U.S. still was questioning some 660 prisoners from 42 countries about al-Qaida and other terrorist activities. The prisoners have been held without trial and do not have access to lawyers.
A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the "strongly worded" letter made it clear that the secretary of state wanted the Defense Department to quickly determine which prisoners could be released.
Human rights advocates also have repeatedly criticized the prisoners' lack of legal help and last month called for the immediate release of juveniles when it was learned that several boys between ages 13 and 16 were being held at the naval base in Cuba.
Since the prison was opened in January 2002, only 22 people are known to have been released. They were all men, including one who was mentally ill and another reported to be in his 70s.
The Defense and State departments, FBI and CIA are all involved in questioning the prisoners. The Pentagon has refused to disclose the exact number of prisoners, their names or any other details.
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Saturday that State and Defense officials have exchanged letters and have met to discuss the detentions.
"The question is how do we resolve their status over time," said the State Department official, who was on the Powell trip to the Mideast.
Citing complaints from eight allies whose citizens are among the prisoners, Powell said in the letter that mishandling the detainees will undermine efforts to win international cooperation in the war on terror, U.S. News and World Report reported.
Powell asked Rumsfeld why it is taking so long to reach "a final determination" on the prisoners' fate, and Rumsfeld later agreed to speed up the release of around 100 detainees sought by the United Kingdom, Russia, Pakistan and Spain, the magazine said.
Rumsfeld has said the prisoners would continue to be held indefinitely until they were determined to pose threat and until interrogators were convinced they were thoroughly interrogated.
Officials have said some prisoners could be released to their countries of origin and that negotiations were underway. No results of those talks were ever announced.
Pentagon officials said Friday they had finished writing the rules for trying terrorist suspects in military tribunals.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the officials said they have some suspects in mind who might be candidates for military trials, but that no final decisions have been made.
It was not known if the suspects included prisoners held at Guantanamo. A number of high-level al-Qaida figures are not being held there, but rather at secret locations elsewhere, officials have said.
-------- us
U.S. Plans to Reduce Forces in Iraq, With Help of Allies
May 3, 2003
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON with ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/international/worldspecial/03STRA.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 2 - The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.
The United States currently has more than five divisions in Iraq, troops that fought their way into the country and units that were added in an attempt to stabilize it. But the Bush administration is trying to establish a new military structure in which American troops would continue to secure Baghdad while the majority of the forces in Iraq would be from other nations.
Under current planning, there would be three sectors in postwar Iraq. The Americans would keep a division in and around Baghdad; Britain would command a multinational division in the south near Basra; and Poland would command a third division of troops from a variety of nations.
The British are organizing a "force generation" conference next week in London to solicit troops for the effort, and another conference is likely to be held later this month in Warsaw.
The Bush administration's aim is to bring most of the American troops here back to their bases in the United States and Europe so they can prepare for potential crises.
The administration does not want substantial numbers of American forces to be tied down in Iraq. It is eager to avoid the specter of American occupation, and it is hoping to shift much of the peacekeeping burden of stabilizing Iraq to other governments.
If the administration plan is carried out, the effect would be to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq from over 130,000 soldiers and marines at present to 30,000 troops or fewer by the fall.
Still, the American troop withdrawal schedule, by all accounts, is ambitious given the continued instability in Iraq and the size of the country.
The guidance given to military commanders is that they should be prepared to assume risks in reducing the American forces just as they did when they fought their way into the country, according to allied officials.
In this case the risk involves leaving some areas of Iraq uncovered or with a minimal troop presence - an approach the military calls "economy of force" - before order is fully restored throughout the country.
American and allied forces would still concentrate on maintaining order in Baghdad, other major cities and the main routes allied forces use to transport supplies and troop movements.
American military officials cautioned that the timetable for rapid troop reductions depended on several conditions and that the withdrawal schedule would be likely to slow down if the conditions were not met.
First, they said, the security situation in Baghdad and Iraq must improve. American officials are calculating that there will be a reduction in criminal activity, paramilitary attacks and general lawlessness as the Iraqi police complete their training and begin to take over patrols. American commanders are also assuming that some sort of transitional Iraqi government will be established in the next two months.
Another condition is that the other nations will provide the necessary troops.
The new troop deployment plans were described today by senior allied and administraton officials. The deployment plan was also a topic of discussion of an unusual meeting here of American and British division commanders and other senior officials.
According to a senior administration official, the goal is to reduce the American force to a single division.
Achieving this goal would depend, in part, on the number of foreign troop contributions. "The larger the number of countries that participate, the fewer the number of forces from the United States will be necessary," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters in London today before flying back to Washington from a seven-nation tour.
Under the planning, the British would maintain a headquarters to command a multinational division to be based in Basra and elsewhere in southern Iraq. That division would be made up of a British brigade and possibly forces from other nations, including Spain and Italy, which are expected to send troops.
Poland would also command a division and has offered to contribute a brigade of troops.
The Australians, who have sent special forces to Iraq, are expected to keep a small military presence in Iraq. Other nations that are expected to contribute troops include Bulgaria, Denmark, Ukraine and the Netherlands.
Three more nations - the Philippines, Qatar and South Korea - have agreed to make other contributions, including field hospitals, engineers, and civil defense and mine-clearing specialists, the official said.
A senior allied official said today there had been discussions about the possibility of troop contributions from India and Pakistan, creating yet another division of troops.
A recent and largely symbolic contribution is the deployment of some 200 Albanian soldiers.
As of now, however, the American-led effort pointedly excludes France, Germany and Russia, three nations that actively opposed the war.
A fierce fight over the role the United Nations will have in postwar Iraq is expected to be fought in Washington, New York and the capitals of Europe and the Middle East over the next few weeks.
The Bush administration's push to withdraw combat forces raises a number of complex issues. American military commanders and administration officials have emphasized that it is not enough to topple Saddam Hussein's government but also vital to consolidate that victory by creating a secure environment for rebuilding the nation's infrastructure and encouraging the formation of a new government.
In his speech on Thursday, President Bush pledged that the allied forces would bring order to parts of Iraq that were still dangerous and would not leave until their mission was completed.
Even so, the allied force that is now deployed is extended to the limit as it seeks to deal with criminal gangs, remnants of Mr. Hussein's government, Iranian agents, suicide bombers, ambitious Iraqi politicians and their militias and other threats to the new order.
It remains to be seen how well the Americans and their allies will be able to carry out this task if American forces are substantially reduced and American and British forces are replaced by troops from Eastern Europe and Asia.
The situation in Iraq is now so uncertain that American forces plan to keep rules of engagement that allow them to initiate offensive operations even as they make the transition to "peace enforcement."
In the weeks leading up to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said that as many as several hundred thousand troops would be needed to bring stability to Iraq. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, put the number at around 100,000.
The force that allied planners seem to have in mind seems closer to Mr. Wolfowitz's figure, though only a fraction of them would be American.
The United States now has a broad array of forces in Iraq. The Army forces here include the Third Infantry Division, which is charged with maintaining order in Baghdad; the Fourth Infantry Division, which is overseeing Tikrit and is patrolling east of capital; and the 101st Airborne Division, which is has headquarters in Mosul.
Other Army forces in Iraq include the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is patrolling the western part of the country, including the town of Falluja. Most of the units of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq are in the process of withdrawing, but some of its troops will remain in Baghdad. The Second Light Cavalry Regiment also has some forces in Baghdad, and more of its troops are to be deployed in Iraq.
A large Marine expeditionary force is charged with maintaining order in the Iraq's southern cities while British forces are in Basra.
The large American component of this force would be reduced by the fall to less than two American divisions and one British-led multinational division, according to the Bush administration's plans. The key American force would be the First Armored Division, which would be based in Baghdad, taking the place of the Army's Third Infantry Division. A division generally totals from 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers depending on the number of support troops.
The success of the redeployment will depend not just on the military's success in hunting down remnants of the old order but also on success in restoring electricity and other services, rebuilding the infrastructure, supporting the formation of a new government and generally securing the support of the Iraqi public.
There is as yet no interim Iraqi administration. Most of the discussions that have been held by senior American officials here on forming one have included representatives of groups that have been in exile abroad as well as representatives of the two main Kurdish factions. Which leaders and exile groups will take part in a temporary administration is still unclear.
But the administration is calculating that these are temporary problems and that political trends will improve and will allow the disengagement of most American troops.
-------- propaganda wars
White House defends trip to carrier
May 3, 2003
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030503-9723986.htm
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - The White House fired back yesterday at Democrats who disparaged President Bush's flight to an aircraft carrier Thursday as nothing more than an expensive photo-op.
"That political criticism is a disservice to the men and women of the military who are worthy of being thanked in person," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters shortly after leaving the USS Abraham Lincoln with Mr. Bush.
"This is not about the president," Mr. Fleischer added. "This is about saying thank you to the men and women who won a war."
The rebuke came one day after a senior administration official told The Washington Times: "The president has never politicized national security nor will he. And I think it would be unfortunate if Democrats did."
The back-to-back remarks signaled a new willingness by the White House to respond to attacks by Democrats. Previously, the administration portrayed Mr. Bush as too busy prosecuting the war in Iraq to respond to the criticisms of Democratic rivals.
But now that Mr. Bush has informally declared victory in Iraq, he is eager to turn his attention to the economy and other domestic issues that will factor in next year's presidential election. The president is also mindful that Democrats are raising their own profiles, beginning with a presidential debate tonight in South Carolina.
As a precursor to that debate, some Democrats condemned the president Thursday for helping pilot an antisubmarine jet that landed on the flight deck of the Lincoln as it brought home combat troops from Operation Iraqi Freedom. The president's landing and subsequent speech to the nation received massive news coverage, prompting grumbling from Democrats that the images would show up in TV ads for the president's re-election campaign.
"The president is going to an aircraft carrier far out at sea with military surroundings, while countless numbers of Americans are frightened stiff about the economy here at home," said presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat.
David Sirota, a spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, agreed.
"Forty million Americans have no health care, 2 million jobs have been lost in two years, child poverty is increasing for the first time in a decade, states across the country are going bankrupt," he told several newspapers. "Yet President Bush has time to take a water-safety class and spend taxpayer money flying out to an aircraft carrier for a stunt photo-op."
Yesterday, Mr. Bush said he was "proud to be with those men and women who wear our nation's uniform." He said it was an honor to address the nation from the Lincoln's flight deck.
The president emphasized that although he spent one night on the Lincoln, "most of the crew had been on there for nine and a half months."
Mr. Bush did not personally respond to Democratic complaints about the trip, but he turned up the heat on his political opponents yesterday by demanding that Congress pass his tax cut to counter rising unemployment.
"Today, we saw some new statistics on employment," he told workers at United Defense Industries Inc. "The unemployment number is now at 6 percent, which should serve as a clear signal to the United States Congress, we need a bold economic package so people can find work."
Mr. Bush said a million jobs would be created by next year if Congress passes his latest tax-cut package of at least $550 billion. The package includes the acceleration of tax cuts that were passed in 2001 but were not scheduled to take effect for several more years.
After his speech, Mr. Bush flew to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with Australian Prime Minister John Howard. The two men will hold a joint news conference today.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- homeland security
New Agency Sets Ethics Rules to Avoid Conflicts of Interest
May 3, 2003
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/politics/03HOME.html
WASHINGTON, May 2 - The Department of Homeland Security said today that it was establishing ethics rules to ensure that lobbyists with personal connections to Secretary Tom Ridge and other senior officials would not receive special favors from the agency.
Department officials said that the rules have been under discussion for months, that they would be similar to conflict-of-interest rules at other federal agencies and that the details would be supplied to Congress when the rules were completed.
In testimony to Congress on Thursday, Mr. Ridge said he was aware that several of his former aides at the White House and on his staff when he was the governor of Pennsylvania had recently registered as domestic security lobbyists.
"I might say that I have known those people for a long time," he said, asked about an article in The New York Times that disclosed the lobbying activities of his former aides.
"But they've also known me for a long time, and if they learned one thing in our relationship, it's that the personal side won't do them any good unless they've got the best product for this country," he said.
At the hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Mr. Ridge said that "one of the first responsibilities" of the department's general counsel would be "our own internal code to deal with potential conflicts."
He added: "I think it's very appropriate that the department have its own set of internal guidelines relating to ethics and conflicts, and we will."
At least four of Mr. Ridge's senior aides at the Office of Homeland Security in the White House now work for firms seeking to capitalize on the booming niche of the Washington lobbying business that is focused on domestic security - and on winning contracts from Mr. Ridge's new, multibillion-dollar agency.
Another former aide, Mark Campbell, Mr. Ridge's former chief of staff in the governor's office, has also registered as a domestic security lobbyist in Washington and travels here regularly from his home in Pennsylvania.
Brian Roehrkasse, a department spokesman, said the ethics rules for the new department were still under discussion. "We do have an ethics program and we are beginning to move forward on other components of it," he said. "A lot of this is not complete, which is not surprising for such a new agency."
He said that the rules would aim for "evenhanded" treatment of companies seeking to sell the department their products or services.
Lobbying registration forms filed in Congress show that Mr. Ridge's former aides are lobbying on behalf of a variety of companies and industries that want domestic-security contracts from the government, including Tyco Electronics and SAP, the European software maker.
Mr. Roehrkasse said he believed the department would move quickly toward completing the new conflict-of-interest rules once the Senate confirms Joe E. Whitley, a former senior Justice Department official who has been nominated as the department's first general counsel.
Even as he questioned Mr. Ridge at the hearing about the lobbying activities of his former aides, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, repeatedly praised Mr. Ridge for having set "a very high ethical standard" at the new department. "We have great confidence that that will be maintained through those guidelines," he said. "We know you well enough to believe that deeply."
-------- prisons / prisoners
A Survivor Recounts Horrors Of N. Korea's Prison Camps
Rebuke by U.N. Rights Commission Reflects Tougher U.S. Stance
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7787-2003May2?language=printer
SEOUL -- Lee's crime was that she was hungry. After years of meager rations in North Korea, the 22-year-old woman with curly hair left her peasant family's home and slipped across the border into China in 1997, hoping to find something to eat. She was caught and sent back, handcuffed, to a North Korean prison camp -- a world of cruelty.
She was worked to exhaustion, forced to run in her bare feet as she carried heavy bricks at a construction site. Her food was a bowl of watery soup every day with cabbage and a few rotten corn kernels.
There was no escape. "I didn't feel anything," said Lee, now 28 and safe after an escape that brought her to Seoul four months ago. Beaten, starved and assaulted by horrors, "you just don't think about anything. You really have no fear of death. At that point, you're just a machine with no emotion."
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights condemned North Korea's human rights record for the first time last month, answering years of demands by activists that the world confront the abuses.
The commission expressed "deep concern" about conditions in the country, including torture, public executions, political executions, use of political prison camps and selective provision of food.
The vote is a response in part to the harsher tone adopted by the Bush administration in dealing with North Korean abuses. Previously, the United States and other countries had been reluctant to push the human rights issue with the prickly North Korean government, arguing that it would have little effect.
But to the dismay of activists, South Korea and its new president, Roh Moo Hyun, a human rights lawyer, abstained from voting.
"South Korea should be ashamed that foreign countries are saying what we are afraid to say on behalf of fellow Koreans," said Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian aid worker who has been jailed in China for his work helping North Koreans escape.
Human rights activists estimate there are about 200,000 prisoners in at least five large North Korean camps, some confined for trying to escape like Lee, others for political offenses that make it likely they will die in prison.
The change in the U.S. line coincides with the appointment in March of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as head of the U.S. delegation to the Geneva-based U.N. commission. Kirkpatrick promptly labeled North Korea as "hell on earth" and presented a new State Department human rights report, alleging that the North Korean government conducts forced abortions, murders of babies in prisons, kidnappings, and experiments using chemical and biological weapons on inmates.
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which meets annually, focuses international attention on human rights violators. The commission can send monitors and investigators, but at its meeting in Geneva it noted that North Korea has not cooperated with U.N. investigators dealing with torture, religious intolerance, arbitrary detention, involuntary disappearances and the right to food. It urged the North Korean government to do so. It also elected to put North Korea on its agenda again next year.
North Korea rejected the U.N. resolution, its U.N. ambassador saying it was "full of fabrications" and the official news agency saying it was "as foolish as trying to sweep the sea with a broom."
Some activists here said the resolution will have little effect on the government. Even the publicity value of its passage was lost in news coverage of the Iraqi war and the nuclear crisis with North Korea.
"It's a tiger without teeth," complained Kim Sang Hun, a human rights worker who has helped organize desperate escapes for North Koreans from China. "Why don't we demand to send international inspectors in there, like we do for nuclear weapons?"
"Human rights won't improve significantly until there is a regime change," said Chun. But he said spotlighting the human rights abuses "may help a little bit. North Koreans put a great importance on 'face.' They are very proud." Publicity about public executions of defectors who were caught seemed to stop the killings -- in public, at least, he said.
Rights activists were especially critical of South Korea's position, saying they expected more from South Korea's new government.
"It will go down as a stain on South Korea's history," said Tim Peters, director of Helping Hands Korea, which assists defectors. "There should be outrage toward the government here. Nothing can top the irony of a human rights Nobel laureate [former president Kim Dae Jung], followed by a human rights lawyer, and neither of them raising the issue of human rights."
Roh, in a recent interview with The Washington Post, defended his position.
"Rather than confronting the Kim Jong Il regime over human rights of a small number of people, I think it is better for us to open up the regime through dialogue," he said. "I think this will ultimately bring broader protection of human rights for North Korean people as a whole.
"As in Iraq, I don't think the North Korean human rights conditions can be changed by pressure from international public opinion," Roh added. "If I bring up the human rights [issue], it will not help improve human rights conditions in North Korea. Rather, it will be an obstacle to bringing an 'opening up' or peace in North Korea."
Lee saw the horror of those human rights conditions during her imprisonment in North Korea. The young woman cannot give her full name; her mother and three siblings still in North Korea would be in grave danger. Sitting in an activist's office in Seoul, her pretty smile dissolves into tears at recalling her months in prison. Each night, she said, the 160 women in the camp lined up, heads bowed, as a guard whipped those who had not worked hard enough and slammed the heads of others against the wall. Fifty women were packed into a tiny room, forced to sleep while sitting.
"You go to sleep, and the next morning the person next to you is cold, dead," she said. "The older women would die right away." She said that a fellow prisoner, desperate with hunger, bit off half the ear of a woman who had died, and put it in her pocket to eat later.
Two sisters who tried to escape were caught and brought back to the camp to serve as a lesson. Lee said they were forced to lift a heavy log until it fell, crushing them. Other prisoners were ordered to stomp on the sisters' hands to break their bones. Finally the two women were strapped to a wall to be starved to death.
"After a week their bodies were gone. They had died," said Lee.
Lee became so weak in the camp she was sent home to die. Instead, a trader carried her on his back across the river to China, where she recovered her strength. A Christian activist gave her false papers, and Lee lived illegally for four years in eastern China, despite regular roundups by Chinese authorities to force North Koreans back across the border.
She finally joined the long smuggling route, an "underground railway" for North Koreans, that took her to Mongolia and eventually to South Korea in December. Only when she was safe did she throw away the rat poison she planned to take if she was forced back to North Korea again.
Lee arrived in Seoul to find physical comfort, but also referred to the loneliness that many other defectors describe when they finally reach safety. After two months in South Korea's reeducation camp, the government gave her an apartment and a monthly stipend. She is trying to learn secretarial skills and is contemplating life in a society where her accent and communist education set her apart.
"I thought when I came to South Korea everything would be happy. But I realize that's not true. I didn't know where to go or how to behave," she said.
She is sending money back through the smugglers' route so her mother and siblings can buy food in North Korea. "If my family is hurt, all my hope would be gone," she said.
"To be honest, sometimes I try to forget that happened to me," she said. "Now I realize how revolting it was. There, I was just numb. It's human to try to forget it."
-------- terrorism
Air Attack on U.S. Consulate Foiled
Karachi Arrests Break Up Al Qaeda Plan for Suicide Bombing
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7703-2003May2?language=printer
U.S. and Pakistani authorities have broken up an al Qaeda plan to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a suicide plot reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that shows the weakened terrorist network is still capable of pursuing serious assaults, officials said yesterday.
The plan was foiled by the arrests earlier this week in Karachi of six suspected al Qaeda members, including two who had roles in the Sept. 11 attacks and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, U.S. intelligence officials said. The arrests led to the discovery of hundreds of pounds of high explosives, as well as grenades, assault rifles and detonators hidden in several different caches, Pakistani and U.S. officials say.
The details of the aerial assault plan, which was nearing fruition, came from the suspects themselves during interrogations by the Pakistani intelligence service, two U.S. officials said. One Bush administration official said the group had not yet obtained an airplane, but believed they were close to gaining access to one.
The information prompted an urgent analysis and warning from the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an intelligence clearinghouse run by the CIA, sources said. The Department of Homeland Security, in turn, privately issued an advisory about the plot on Thursday to pilots and airports in the United States.
Authorities said that although there is no information indicating specific plans for a similar attack on U.S. soil, the plot underscores al Qaeda's continued "fixation" on using airplanes as weapons. U.S. officials also note that al Qaeda operatives frequently aim for multiple targets.
"Recent reliable reporting indicates that al Qaeda was in the late stages of planning an aerial suicide attack against the U.S. Consulate in Karachi," said the advisory, which was posted yesterday on the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Web site.
"Operatives were planning to pack a small fixed-wing aircraft or helicopter with explosives and crash it into the consulate," it read. "This plot and a similar plot last year to fly a small explosive-laden aircraft into a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf demonstrate al Qaeda's continued fixation with using explosive-laden small aircraft in attacks."
The advisory also warned that the potential destruction from such an attack would be "the equivalent of a medium-sized truck bomb."
The notice was issued on the same day that the State Department warned Americans to avoid travel to Saudi Arabia because of "credible" information indicating al Qaeda plans for an attack on U.S. targets there. President Bush, in his address to the nation Thursday night from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, warned that "the war on terror is not over" and said al Qaeda is "wounded, not destroyed."
But authorities also said the case is further evidence of the success that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies and their allies have had in thwarting terrorist attacks.
Among the six men arrested in the raid were Tawfiq bin Attash, a Yemeni national who allegedly planned the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden, and Ali Abd Aziz, the nephew of a captured al Qaeda lieutenant who has been identified by the FBI as a key paymaster in the Sept. 11 plot.
Bin Attash, called "a major-league killer" by one CIA officer, also is believed to have played a role in orchestrating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, and attended a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Aziz is the nephew of al Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan on March 1 and is being interrogated at an undisclosed location. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III identified Aziz in testimony last year as the al Qaeda operative who wired nearly $120,000 from the United Arab Emirates to several Sept. 11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta.
Although both men were keenly sought by U.S. officials, neither was considered among al Qaeda's senior leadership until recently, officials said. The increasing number of detentions by U.S. forces has dramatically thinned the ranks of Osama bin Laden's terrorist leaders, experts said.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said the case "takes another couple of experienced al Qaeda people off the street. They don't have that many experienced people left, people who have the background in orchestrating these sorts of attacks."
But Rand Corp. terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman said the plot also shows that "al Qaeda may be down, but it's clearly not out.
"This group is still quite capable of planning reasonably destructive operations," Hoffman said. "It's not September11th level of sophistication, but it shows the enormous capacity of this organization to withstand even the severe kind of punishment we've meted out to it in the last 18 months."
Al Qaeda operatives have long developed flamboyant plans that use airplanes as weapons, a tactic used most successfully in the Sept. 11 jetliner attacks that felled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing 3,000 people. In another example, Khalid Sheik Mohammed helped conceive a foiled plot in the mid-1990s in which terrorists planned to blow up a dozen jetliners over the Pacific and crash a small plane into CIA headquarters in Langley.
The U.S. consulate in Karachi, a city that has been a center of militant Islamic activity, was the target of a car bombing last June that killed 12 Pakistanis but no Americans. About 28 U.S. government employees were in the building at the time. In another plot that was thwarted in December, militants had planned to ram an explosives-laden Volkswagen into another vehicle carrying U.S. diplomats.
Staff writers John Mintz, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
----
AL QAEDA
U.S. Reports Plot to Fly a Plane Into U.S. Consulate in Pakistan
May 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/international/middleeast/03PAKI.html
WASHINGTON, May 2 - The American authorities said today they had uncovered a plot by Al Qaeda to crash a small aircraft loaded with explosives into the United States Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan. In response, the Homeland Security Department warned about possible attacks in the United States.
A department advisory warned that Al Qaeda was in the late stages of planning an attack on the consulate using a small fixed-wing aircraft or helicopter. Such a plot, along with one uncovered last year in which Al Qaeda planned to fly a small plane into a United States warship in the Persian Gulf, demonstrated a "fixation" on using aircraft in attacks, it said.
The warning was issued Thursday to American pilots and airport managers as part of a broader bulletin urging vigilance to guard against similar attacks in the United States.
An American law enforcement official said a plot against the consulate was uncovered with the arrests this week in Karachi of Walid Ba'Attash and five other men accused of belonging to Al Qaeda. About 300 pounds of explosives and a cache of weapons were also seized.
Mr. Ba'Attash is believed to have played a leading role in planning for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and for the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen.
Homeland Security officials said there was no specific evidence about an attack using small aircraft in the United States, but the department's advisory said Al Qaeda could try to use such planes because they are easily available and require less pilot skill than large jets.
The advisory also noted that security procedures are less rigorous for small aircraft, that there would be no need to control a large group of passengers and that such a plane could be rented with a credit card.
"Reliable information obtained last year indicated Al Qaeda might use experienced, non-Arab pilots to rent three or four light aircraft under the guise of flying lessons," it said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
White House Monitoring SARS
Officials Worried About Political and Economic Fallout
By Ceci Connolly and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7490-2003May2?language=printer
President Bush has not publicly referred to SARS, the four-letter acronym that stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome, in the six weeks since the infectious disease has dominated the headlines. But behind the scenes, Bush, Vice President Cheney and top aides are devoting more than a little attention to the deadly epidemic, said a half-dozen administration officials.
Though it has not claimed a life in the United States, the new lung disease is receiving high-level attention at the White House in part because officials fear the political and economic fallout in Asia could have ripple effects here.
"He sees what happened in China, he sees what's happening in Canada and he wants to make sure we are prepared to prevent the same results in America," said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson who has briefed Bush about SARS twice in the past month.
Throughout the administration, both domestic and national security experts have been meeting to assess and closely track the outbreak. Every morning the SARS team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updates White House officials.
The White House, cognizant of the panic that can accompany new contagious diseases, has attempted to play down its concern over SARS while simultaneously taking aggressive steps to ensure it does not erupt into a major health or political problem domestically, administration officials said. The challenge, they say, is preparing for a possible epidemic here without frightening the public.
"We are cautiously optimistic about the progress made here in the States, and we're working hard to make sure that we don't have the same problems that they've had in other countries," one Bush adviser said. "We're concerned about both the health impact as well as the economic impact."
In recent weeks, analysts at the State Department and CIA have prepared classified reports on the potential ramifications of SARS, the Boston Globe first reported this week. Both the National Security Council and National Economic Council have weighed in on various aspects of the epidemic. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has conferred with the White House perhaps two dozen times since SARS came to his attention in early March.
"It's almost the diametrical opposite of China," Fauci said in describing the administration's involvement in SARS. "The atmosphere has been not to panic but to take it very seriously."
Fauci speaks often about SARS to top domestic policy advisers Josh Bolten, Jay Lefkowitz, Margaret Spelling and Carol Kuntz fielding questions, providing updates on the search for a vaccine and why the illness has the "potential of turning into something much more serious."
In his first session with Bush on April 4, Fauci said the president asked the "whole range of questions," including whether the mysterious germ emanating from southeast China could be the work of bioterrorists. During that 50-minute meeting, which included Cheney, Thompson and CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding, Bush agreed to sign an executive order giving federal health authorities the power to quarantine SARS patients arriving from another country.
Thompson said Bush's rapid response -- he signed the order that same day -- illustrates the president's commitment to dealing with the threat. But others noted that aides quietly released the order via e-mail and then labored to characterize it as nothing more than administrative housekeeping.
Even after the executive order was signed, high-ranking administration officials devoted hours to studying whether the CDC has sufficient power to close hospitals and quarantine large numbers of people if needed. Several legal scholars say the nation's patchwork of 50 different state public health laws, many antiquated and possibly unconstitutional, raises serious doubts about that.
During a two-day visit to Toronto this week, Gerberding discussed with the city's health minister "what the government did to support containment" of the deadly virus, she said. "There was a strong interest in having answers to those questions at the White House."
Last month, the administration also added $16 million for SARS to its emergency request for money for the war in Iraq, she noted.
Acknowledging that it can be difficult for public health to compete with major issues such as war and tax cuts, Gerberding said she has been pleasantly surprised by the White House focus on SARS. "When SARS was evolving, we were engaged in the preliminaries to war, and there was a great deal of concern from the standpoint of homeland security and the safety and well-being of our troops," she said. "More recently, there have been a fair number of inquiries about the potential economic aspects of SARS."
Privately, Bush advisers say they are very concerned about the potential impact on the global and U.S. economies, especially given the sluggish conditions that exist at home and abroad. Bush's economic council has added SARS to the list of indicators it monitors regularly.
"Of course, when you have the Asian economy where it is today, particularly in Japan, anything can be disruptive," said one administration source. Thompson said he organized a conference call with high-tech entrepreneurs who were "extremely worried about the impact of SARS."
Several countries have made progress in recent days reining in the virus that causes SARS. The World Health Organization yesterday removed the United States and Britain from the list of countries affected by SARS. The move came because neither country had any reported cases spreading among residents for at least 20 days -- double the estimated incubation time.
As of April 30, the United States reported 56 probable cases and 233 suspected cases, according to the CDC. All recent cases have involved travelers arriving from SARS "hot spots" such as Beijing, Gerberding said. "If we didn't identify additional cases, I would be very concerned our surveillance system is failing," she said. "People need to expect to see new cases until this epidemic in Asia is over."
China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong, Canada, Mongolia and Singapore remain on the list of SARS-affected countries, the WHO said.
Staff writer Rob Stein contributed to this report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Pope Urges Youth to End Spiral of War, Terror
May 3, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pope.html
MADRID (Reuters) - Pope John Paul, making his first overseas trip since the war in Iraq, urged young people around the world on Saturday to work against a spiral of violence and terrorism that he said had sowed hatred and death.
In his appeal to a huge crowd of exuberant youths at a rally at a Spanish airbase, the pope also said they should beware of what he called ``exasperated nationalism,'' an apparent reference to violence by Basque separatists.
``The spiral of violence, terrorism and war causes, even in our day, hatred and death,'' he told the estimated 600,000 young believers on the first day of his weekend trip to Madrid.
``Your response to blind violence and inhuman hate should be the fascinating power of love. Conquer enmity with the force of forgiveness,'' he told the flag-waving crowd, who gave him a pop star's welcome, interrupting his speech at almost every sentence with cheers, applause and chants.
The pope's words were designed to hit home in a country torn by sporadic violence by ETA, western Europe's most active guerrilla group, which has killed over 830 people since 1968 in a campaign for an independent Basque state.
``Shun every form of exasperated nationalism, racism and intolerance. Show with your lives that ideas are not imposed but proposed. Do not let yourselves be discouraged by hate,'' the pope, sitting on a huge elevated white stage, told the crowd.
It was his second appeal for an end to violence on the 36-hour lightning trip -- his first overseas since last August -- whose centerpiece is a canonization ceremony on Sunday.
At his arrival at Madrid airport, the pope said he prayed the world would finally see lasting peace.
He spoke in the presence of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, whose government supported the U.S.-led war the Vatican opposed.
The 82-year-old pontiff, making his 99th trip outside Italy and his fifth to Spain, also said he hoped Spain and Europe would look to their Christian roots and respect traditional values, including the rights of the unborn, as the continent forged ahead with integration and enlargement.
WARM WELCOME
The pope, who turns 83 on May 18 and suffers from Parkinson's disease and arthritis, appeared to be in relatively good condition as he was pushed on a wheeled platform along a red carpet to be greeted by Spain's king and queen on arrival.
He waved from his ``pope-mobile'' to thousands of cheering people who lined his route on a warm, sunny day throwing yellow and white balloons and confetti as he passed.
Young people from around Spain and many other countries waited for hours under the hot sun to hear the pope speak at an evening rally that had a pop festival atmosphere.
``I came so that the pope can bless me, my family, my country. Christ is my whole life, He is happiness,'' said Nelly Perez, a 28-year-old shop assistant from Peru.
``It's our dream to see the pope in person. He's a successor of St. Peter,'' said Maria Teresa Lorejo, 32, from the Philippines.
The pope's visit was surrounded by intense security. His plane was escorted by four F-18 fighters when it entered Spanish airspace and marksmen wearing ski masks were posted on roofs.
Police lined his route to the center of Madrid and bodyguards flanked the pope-mobile as the pontiff passed through a sea of screaming, flag-waving youngsters at the rally.
In his arrival address, read waveringly but clearly in Spanish, the pope touched on some of the concerns he and the local Roman Catholic church have expressed about the moral state of the country, which has modernized rapidly since the death of dictator General Francisco Franco in 1975.
When the crowd chanted ``John Paul II. Everybody loves you,'' the pope departed from his prepared text to quip: ``That may be true in Spain!,'' bringing laughter from the crowd.
``I am a young person aged 83,'' he added.
The pope and the church in Spain -- a country that is nominally 85 percent Catholic -- feel God has been left behind in the secularization of society in recent years.
While the pope said he was happy progress was reaching more people, he added that the real ``development of a nation had to be founded on authentic and permanent values.''
These, he said, included the rights of persons ``from the first instant of their existence.'' Abortion became legal in Spain under relatively strict conditions in 1985.
--------
Thousands Protest N.Y. Education Cuts
May 3, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-New-York-Education.html
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- Thousands of teachers, administrators, parents, students and union leaders descended on the state capital Saturday to protest Gov. George Pataki's proposed education funding cuts.
``We're here to tell the governor not to balance the budget on the backs of children,'' said Peter Giannone, 52, a high school business teacher.
Giannone, who has been a teacher for 31 years, said he traveled from his Rocky Point home on Long Island to Albany because, as an economics expert, he knows there are better fiscal choices for the state.
Organizers said the three-hour demonstration drew about 40,000 people, although state police said the crowd totaled between 12,000 to 15,000.
Hoping to overcome an estimated $11.5 billion deficit without raising taxes, Pataki has proposed cutting school aid by $1.24 billion, leaving about $13.3 billion for public schools.
Under pressure from teachers unions and school boards, the state Legislature this week restored hundreds of millions of dollars to education funding that would be cut under Pataki's budget plan.
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