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NUCLEAR
Iran's nuclear program: The Russians may be ready to help
Weapons story called `all a lie'
Chalabi: Defectors Gave Arms Information
Rumsfeld Says Iran Is Developing Nuclear Arms
Iran 'seeking covert nuclear aid'
Iran says its has no hidden nuclear facilities
United States Denies Secret Talks with N.Korea
S Korea enhances defence budget to counter North
11 Nations to Discuss Blocking Shipments of Weapons Materials
U.S. Vows to Maintain Nuclear Weapons Preeminence
Bunker Buster Said Won't Renew Arms Race
US Senate votes to guarantee nuclear power loans
A needed nuclear boost
Iran working on nuclear bomb, says Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld for transatlantic struggle against WMDs
In Germany, Rumsfeld Mum on Strained Ties
Powell Says It's Time for More Pressure on Myanmar
GOP lawmakers rule out hearings on Iraq war intelligence
Hill GOP Rejects Wider Iraq Intelligence Probe
White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel
Bush Under Fire in Congress for Criticizing Israel
Suppose You Wanted to Have a Permanent War
War intelligence and Democrats' risky responses
POWELL BLAMED FOR 'MISTAKE' IN MY LAI MASSACRE
MILITARY
Suicide bombers' being trained in Afghanistan
US accuses British over arms deal bribery bid
US marines to join war games
UK troops caught unawares by war
Irish take Britain to The Hague over nuclear plant
Army Backtracks on Halliburton Contract
Clashes In Iran Intensify
U.S. Ready to Begin Rebuilding Iraq Army
A Soldier's Business Deal Aims to Aid Baghdad Security
Robert Fisk Reports from Occupied Territory
Ex-Iraqi army soldiers try to storm gov't building in Mosul
Top adviser backs debt forgiveness
U.S. Official for Iraq Leaving New Constitution Up to Iraqis
coalition warns foreign diplomats remain in Iraq at own risk
4,000 G.I.'s Circle a Hussein Bastion to Foil Attacks
US could face worsening quagmire in Iraq, analysts warn
Israel Presses Its Assault on Hamas, Killing Leader in Gaza
Israeli Forces Take Aim at Hamas for Third Strike in 24 Hours
Dead, the people who tried to help
Powell to Try Patching Mideast Truce Plan
Israeli 'Targeted Killings' in Spotlight
Widespread landmines pose danger to returnees
Saudi Defends Aid to Suicide Bombers, Faults Israel
Belgian Law May Force U.S. to Stop Attending NATO Meetings
NATO to Slash Bases in Global Security Role Drive
NATO in Afghanistan
NATO Agrees to Reshape Forces
Rumsfeld Says Belgian Law Could Prompt NATO to Leave
U.S. probes Iraq POW death
CIA Rejects Blame for Bush's Iraq Uranium Claim
CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data
Pentagon planning for long-term safari
Intelligence Officer Challenges Bush Administration
Saddam or No Saddam, Iraqi Press Will Always Have Censors
WMD: Intelligence without brains
Read No Evil: A Textbook Case of Censorship
Croatia: Will Not Sign Court Deal with U.S.
Hague Tribunal Orders Serbia to Handover Key Files
Fierce Clashes as Serbia Seizes War Crimes Suspect
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Senators Question FBI's Propensity to Investigate Agents
U.S. Expands Plan for Cargo Inspections at Foreign Ports
U.S. Expands Monitoring of Foreign Ports
U.S. Widens Push to Secure Foreign Ports
Airport Finds That More Screeners Are Questionable
Rounding up the Arabs
O.A.S. Votes Against U.S. Candidate for Human Rights Group
U.S. sanctions face 15 countries for not acting to end human trafficking
ENERGY AND OTHER
Australians Would Pay More for Clean Energy
Scottish Power close to UK wind farm go-ahead
Greenspan - US should explore nuclear, coal options
INTERVIEW - Cameco CEO predicts comeback for nuclear power
Fewer new power plants may ease natgas crunch
Excess Nitrogen Affecting Human Health
ACTIVISTS
Cuba Plans Protests at European Embassies
Iranian student protests spark clashes
Iran's students plan more protests as July anniversary looms
Iran Leader Urges No Protest Intervention
S. Koreans Protest at U.S. Base on Eve of Rally
Code Orange for Liberty
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran's nuclear program: The Russians may be ready to help
Brenda Shaffer
IHT
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/99245.html
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts Iran's nuclear energy program will be at the top of the agenda when the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors meets in Vienna next week. This time, Russia may be more inclined to cooperate with efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
For more than a decade, Washington has unsuccessfully worked to sway Moscow from its cooperation with Iran in areas that can help Tehran develop weapons of mass destruction. Recent revelations by Iranian leaders and officials, however, are prompting the Russians to reassess their cooperation with Iran.
President Mohammed Khatami of Iran recently disclosed that Iran has been mining uranium and pursuing technologies to reprocess the spent nuclear fuel from its reactor in Bushehr. "We need to complete the circle from discovering uranium to managing remaining spent fuel," he said.
Iran has also declared that the spent fuel, which can be used to make nuclear weapons, may not be returned to Russia. Tehran further confirmed the existence of an uranium enrichment facility and plutonium production plant, making fuel supply from Russia eventually unnecessary. The announcements suggest that Tehran is coming close to being able to make nuclear weapons, with or without outside help. These disclosures contradict Iranian commitments to Russia, as well as commitments made by Moscow to Washington.
A decision by Tehran actually to construct nuclear weapons, however, would be influenced by several strategic considerations. The prospect of losing Russia's support at the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international organizations, for example, could still have a major impact on Iran's next moves. There are also hundreds of Russian scientists and engineers in Iran whose withdrawal could seriously hamper the civil nuclear program - and who are in a position to know what equipment or technology Iran still lacks.
Recent statements by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the head of Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, Alexander Rumyantsev, indicate that Moscow is starting to view Iran's nuclear program with concern. "While Russia is helping Iran to build its nuclear power plant, it is not being informed by Iran of all the other projects that are currently under way," Rumyantsev said.
Now Moscow is urging Tehran to sign the additional inspections protocol advocated by the IAEA, and it recently announced a decision to delay the signing of an agreement with Iran on spent nuclear fuel. Several articles in the Iranian press also suggest that Russia is beginning to give Iranian officials the cold shoulder on nuclear cooperation.
All this indicates that Russia is re-examining its nuclear cooperation with Iran. It may be ready now, instead, to cooperate with Washington.
Departing from previous lines of disagreement with the Putin announced following the summit meeting in St. Petersburg, that "The positions of Russia and the US on the issue are much closer than they seem." Putin has also taken a number of steps as president to take control of the various foreign policy and national security apparatuses that had a free reign in a number of fields during the Yeltsin era. Most important, Putin sacked Yevgeni Adamov in 2001 as head of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and replaced him with own appointment. In his dealings with the United States, Putin bargains hard, but has generally shown that he know how to implement the agreements he makes.
In order to succeed, the United States should work quietly with Putin and not give the impression that it is pressuring Moscow. Beyond demanding that Tehran sign the IAEA inspections protocol, Moscow must insist that Iran return the spent reactor fuel to Russia in accordance with its previous commitment. Russia should also join international efforts to demand that Iran halt its uranium enrichment and plutonium production programs, which are clearly beyond the requirements of a civil nuclear program, and condition further cooperation on this. Finally, Russia should encourage its scientists and engineers in Iran to provide information on their projects.
Iran is at a critical juncture in its nuclear program, and the loss of Russian backing will influence its next steps as well as the actions of European states in international forums. We need Russia at this crucial stage.
The writer is research director of the Caspian Studies Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
-------- iraq / inspections
Weapons story called `all a lie'
Former Saddam aide says there are no banned arms Blair refuses to appear before committee
HASSAN HAFIDH
Jun. 12, 2003
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1052251811476&call_pageid=1045739058633&col=1045739057805
BAGHDAD-Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were all destroyed years ago, a former senior official at the Iraqi information ministry during Saddam Hussein's rule said yesterday.
Amir al-Helou, previously editor-in-chief of the Baathist government weekly Alif Baa magazine, has resurfaced since the U.S.-led war as a contributor to Iraq's mostly widely read newspaper, the London-based daily Azzaman.
"The story of weapons of mass destruction is all a lie and the Americans know that very well," Helou said.
No such weapons have been found since the United States and Britain attacked Iraq on March 20 to oust Saddam. They also targeted for destruction his suspected arsenal of chemical and biological poisons.
The failure to find the arms the two powers cited as the main justification for the war has fuelled controversy over whether they misled the world over the threat posed by Iraq.
"We swallowed the (U.S.) bait and launched a campaign to defend ourselves against accusations that we had weapons of mass destruction," Helou said.
Although he now writes articles critical of Saddam's government, he reiterated its line on banned weapons.
"Iraq used to have weapons of mass destruction in 1991 but did not use them against the (U.S.-led) coalition forces in the war that drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait."
All such weapons, he added, had been destroyed either by U.N. arms inspectors or U.S. air strikes during the 1991 war.
"Washington and London knew all about Iraq's banned weapons because the West helped Iraq to acquire them," Helou said.
It was not clear how much access Helou had enjoyed in the past to information on Iraq's arms programs.
Helou lost his old job, as did more than 5,000 staff, when Iraq's U.S.-led administration dissolved the information ministry last month. He criticized the decision, saying many employees had nothing to do with Saddam's media machine.
Helou's columns now appear in Azzaman, owned by Saad al- Bazzaz, a former information ministry director-general, who broke with Saddam a few years ago and defected to Britain.
In other developments:
U.S. troops staged a crackdown north of Baghdad on suspected Saddam loyalists believed to be behind a spate of attacks on Americans, the U.S. Central Command said, adding 397 suspects had been arrested in a sweep near the town of Balad, 65 kilometres north of Baghdad. Assailants fired rocket-propelled grenades at a weapons collection checkpoint outside Baghdad, killing one U.S. paratrooper and wounding another.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said neither he nor his staff will appear before a parliamentary committee investigating the use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Yesterday, he said there is not "a shred of truth" in allegations the government manipulated evidence about Iraq's weapons programs to make a stronger case for war, Associated Press reported.
The U.S. military is investigating whether American troops were responsible for the death of an Iraqi prisoner of war. U.S. authorities found the corpse of a 52-year-old prisoner Friday at a camp run by the 1st Marine Division near Nasiriya. The man had been held in the camp since his capture May 3.
----
Chalabi: Defectors Gave Arms Information
June 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq-Chalabi.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- An Iraqi exile leader said Thursday his group had introduced U.S. officials to three defectors who provided information on Saddam Hussein's banned weapons.
Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, told reporters that he believed the United States would find the weapons -- and the toppled Iraqi president -- if it worked more closely with Iraqi groups that had opposed Saddam's government.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, asked in an Associated Press about Chalabi's assertions, said, ``I can't substantiate his claims. He makes new ones every year.'' Powell said he does not know if Saddam is alive. ``And if Mr. Chalabi knows that he is alive and knows where he is, I would suggest that Mr. Chalabi tell us about it,'' he said.
Chalabi spoke after meeting with a group of about 30 lawmakers. Congressional Democrats are pushing for an investigation of intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. Leading Republicans rejected the request Wednesday, saying there is no evidence of wrongdoing and that routine, closed-door oversight procedures are sufficient to determine if the intelligence was flawed.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said Republican plans are inadequate.
``If we want the public to have confidence in our decisions, if we want them to have confidence in our intelligence, there has to be a more open look into it,'' she told reporters.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., and the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of California, said they would begin closed hearings next week as part of their review. On Wednesday the committee will hear about current efforts to locate weapons of mass destruction; on Thursday it will hear testimony about an October 2002 intelligence review of Iraq's weapons programs.
In a statement outlining their plans, they said future hearings will allow committee members to question senior administration officials about the weapons intelligence. Hearings will be open ``as appropriate.'' The review will include a final written report, with an unclassified summary.
Harman said in an interview that ``this is an investigation with real tools and this is what we should be doing.''
Goss considered the proceedings a review, not a formal investigation, said his spokeswoman, Julie Almacy.
Democrats, citing the inability to find the weapons and noting errors in the Bush administration's evidence, have questioned whether intelligence was steered to support the case for war. Questions have been raised about whether agencies relied too much on exile groups for information about weapons programs.
Chalabi said ``there was no hyping of information.''
``There was no information that was given that was not substantiated,'' he said. ``And the record will speak for itself.''
Chalabi said he told lawmakers about three defectors who had provided the U.S. government with information on Iraqi weapons programs.
One was an engineer ``who built sites for the weapons storage areas.'' He was presented to the U.S. government on Dec. 17, 2001, and entered into the witness protection program, Chalabi said.
The second exile told the United States about mobile biological labs, he said. U.S. officials believe two truck trailers it seized in Iraq were likely those labs. But no traces of biological weapons have been found.
The third exile spoke only briefly to U.S. officials. Chalabi said he was involved in the isotope separation program for nuclear weapons.
Chalabi is a former banker who recently returned to Iraq after 45 years abroad. Supporters credit him with keeping U.S attention on Iraq in the past decade and some U.S. officials see him as a potential future leader of Iraq.
But it is unclear how much support he has in Iraq, after spending most of his life in exile. Critics have also questioned his credibility, noting that a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement in 1992.
Chalabi has insisted that Saddam is alive, has $1.3 billion in cash and has put a bounty on U.S. soldiers. He said forces under Saddam's control were responsible for shooting down a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter Thursday in western Iraq.
``It is not useful to deny that Saddam is coordinating these activities. I believe he is,'' he said.
The American administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, told the House Armed Services Committee, via satellite video hookup Thursday, that there was no evidence of a central command and control in recent attacks against U.S. troops.
-------- iran
[Same excuse used against Iraq]
Rumsfeld Says Iran Is Developing Nuclear Arms Under Guise of Civilian Program
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/middleeast/12RUMS.html
GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany, June 11 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned today about Iran's nuclear activities and called on the Atlantic alliance to find new ways of combating "the nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction," which he called the biggest threat facing the countries of both "old" and "new" Europe.
Speaking in this resort town in the Bavarian Alps, Mr. Rumsfeld struck a mostly conciliatory tone, shaking hands warmly with the German defense minister, Peter Struck, who was here to greet him.
"Like a family, sometimes we don't agree on everything and sometimes we have debates, but when we are threatened or challenged, we need to come together, as we did after Sept. 11," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
One such threat, Mr. Rumsfeld said to a group of students before his formal remarks, is Iran's development of nuclear weapons, which Washington says Tehran is doing under the guise of a civilian nuclear program. "The intelligence community in the United States and around the world currently assess that Iran does not have nuclear weapons," he said. "The assessment is that they do have a very active program and are likely to have nuclear weapons in a relatively short period of time."
In Washington, a senior United States official said the administration had asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer the issue of Iran's suspected nuclear arms program to the United Nations Security Council at a board meeting on Monday. He cited a "devastating" report by the agency that he said was "consistent with our theory, our belief, that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program."
The agency's report found, among other things, that Iran had failed to declare the existence of facilities, including a heavy water research reactor, that could enable it to produce nuclear weapons.
In his remarks, Mr. Rumsfeld exhibited some of his customary combativeness, continuing to draw a distinction between the "old" Europe, particularly France and Germany, and the "new," made up mostly of former Soviet bloc countries. He made it clear that the countries of "new" Europe understand what he called "the new threat" better than some of countries of "old" Europe.
"The distinction between old and new in Europe today is not really of a matter of age or size or even geography," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It is a matter of attitude, of the vision that countries bring to the trans-Atlantic relationship.
"It is no surprise that many of the nations with fresh memories of tyranny and occupation have been among those most willing to face the new threats, and contribute to dealing with them," he said. "This attitude is why, a decade after the cold war ended, NATO has now invited 10 new allies to join the Atlantic alliance. They are bringing new vision and new vitality to our old alliance.
"Let me be clear: those countries have not been invited as junior partners, allowed to join the grown-ups' table so long as they sit quietly," Mr. Rumsfeld continued. "No, they have been invited to lead."
Mr. Rumsfeld is on a four-stop tour that began in Portugal and is due to end at a NATO meeting in Brussels on Thursday. It will be the first since the end of the Iraq war. He stopped for a few hours in Germany to attend the 10th-anniversary celebrations of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a joint institution of the German and American military establishments, which holds seminars and classes for government officials from former Communist countries in Europe and Asia.
The site, now a complex of stately cream-colored stucco buildings, was first used by the United States in 1945 as a prisoner-of-war camp for officers. Later it was used to train American officers in Russian and Soviet studies, while a part of it was the headquarters for a mountain division of the German Army.
The meeting here, attended by ministers of defense from several former Communist countries, including Albania, Azerbaijan, Slovenia and Ukraine, was not for a major policy address by Mr. Rumsfeld. Still, the presence of so many senior officials from the former Soviet bloc seemed to underscore the American enthusiasm for countries like Poland and Romania, as opposed to Germany and France, which opposed the war in Iraq.
The text of Mr. Rumsfeld's speech, given to reporters only minutes before the ceremonies began, made reference to countries that want to "define themselves by their opposition to the United States" - an unmistakable reference to France - but Mr. Rumsfeld omitted the reference in his actual remarks.
While Mr. Rumsfeld praised first Poland, for its military involvement in Iraq, and then Romania, for sending an infantry battalion to Afghanistan, he did not mention the fact that Germany, though opposed to the war in Iraq, also has troops in Afghanistan and supported the United States in the Kosovo war.
In a brief statement made during a photo session after his speech, Mr. Rumsfeld did express condolences to Germany for the four German soldiers killed in a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan over the weekend.
Overall, the atmosphere was far more cordial on this trip than on Mr. Rumsfeld's last visit to Germany, for a security conference in Munich, where a direct verbal confrontation on Iraq took place between Mr. Rumsfeld and the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer.
Mr. Rumsfeld, in his speech today, cited as the greatest of the "new dangers" facing the world the growing arsenals of rogue states, the trade among them in materials related to weapons of mass destruction and their connection with terrorist networks.
"If our free nations do not come to grips with the proliferation problem," Mr. Rumsfeld said, "it is possible that not so many years from now, when we gather for the 20th anniversary of this center, we could be living in a world with as many as twice the number of nuclear powers - and a number of those new nuclear powers being terrorist states."
----
Iran 'seeking covert nuclear aid'
By Colin Joyce and Anton La Guardia
12/06/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$T0OVMVSSWTA1RQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/06/12/wran12.xml/
Iranian nuclear experts made three secret visits to North Korea earlier this year, possibly to consult on ways to fool international inspectors, a Japanese newspaper said yesterday.
The claim came as the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, issued a warning that Iran was making swift progress in attempts to build a nuclear bomb.
Quoting an unnamed "Korean peninsula source" Sankei, a respected national daily, said two Iranian experts visited Pyongyang in March, staying for several days, with further visits in April and May.
The report suggested that the visits "may have been intended to ask North Korea for know-how on how to act when accepting inspectors".
Iran is developing what it says is a civilian nuclear reactor with Russian help, but America and Britain believe this is a cover to develop a nuclear bomb. The Americans argue that Iran, as a major oil producer, has no need for nuclear power. Iran's nuclear programme began under the former shah, a US ally, with apparent encouragement from Washington.
Mr Rumsfeld, who is visiting Germany, said: "The assessment is that they are likely to have nuclear weapons in a relatively short period of time."
Iran is a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is under pressure to sign an "additional protocol" to allow intrusive inspections of nuclear sites.
This year, the International Atomic Energy Agency visited previously unknown facilities to enrich uranium. Washington said the agency's report was "deeply troubling".
North Korea is believed to have clandestinely continued to develop nuclear weapons while undergoing IAEA inspections since 1992.
----
Iran says its has no hidden nuclear facilities
Story by Parisa Hafezi
REUTERS IRAN:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21147/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
TEHRAN - Iran denied having any hidden nuclear facilities that should have been declared to U.N. inspectors, following a critical U.N. report of Tehran's nuclear programme which Washington called "deeply troubling".
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report accused Iran of failing to declare the import of uranium in 1991 and of failing to show where and how it was processed.
"We do not have any site in Iran which is necessary to declare to the Agency based on its regulations," Atomic Energy Organisation chief Gholamreza Aghazadeh told a news conference.
"In the era of satellites, how could such huge facilities be hidden?" he asked. "The IAEA was informed of our activities even months before it should have been."
Washington has accused Iran of violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Tehran has signed, by using undeclared nuclear material to test a uranium enrichment system.
Uranium must be enriched for use, either slightly enriched for nuclear fuel or heavily enriched for a bomb.
Iran said this year an enrichment plant would be built in Kashan in central Iran with fuel from Isfahan, where a uranium conversion facility (UCF) is nearing completion.
"We have no other uranium enrichment plant except one in Kashan," Aghazadeh said. Oil and gas-rich Iran insists its nuclear programme is purely for civil energy purposes.
But the Atomic Energy Organisation chief admitted Iran had imported uranium in 1991, a shipment the IAEA said in its report should have been declared.
"Some 1,800 kg (3,960 lbs) of uranium was imported from China 12 years ago for a UCF," Aghazadeh said. However 1,000 kg of the uranium from the shipment remained intact, while another 800 kg had been subject to tests, he said.
"The tested material is under the supervision of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation," he added.
The IAEA, United States, Russia and the European Union have all called on Iran to sign an additional protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing more thorough inspections of its nuclear facilities with little fore-warning.
But Iran insists U.S. sanctions should first be dropped and other countries should assist its nuclear programmes.
"As a signatory of the NPT, we expect to get some benefits. Commitments are mutual and should be clarified," Aghazadeh said. "Then we will be ready to sign the additional protocol."
Iran says its first nuclear power plant, under construction with Russian help in the southern port city of Bushehr, is due to be completed next year.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is due to formally present the agency's report in Vienna next week.
-------- korea
United States Denies Secret Talks with N.Korea
June 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-powell.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday denied that a U.S. envoy held secret talks with North Korean representatives in New York and proposed a compromise on the format for talks between Washington and Pyongyang.
Sources with close ties to the reclusive communist state told Reuters in Tokyo earlier that U.S. envoy Jack Pritchard held the meeting at the United Nations last week in preparation for another round of talks on North Korea's nuclear program.
Pritchard floated the idea of allowing North Korean negotiators to hold one-on-one talks with U.S. counterparts at the same time as a five-way gathering, one source said.
But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: ``Mr. Pritchard and others in this building do meet from time to time and exchange communications from time to time with the North Koreans through the New York channel, but actually Mr. Pritchard hasn't had any meetings for about two weeks.''
``It's not true that he made any kind of proposal for bilateral discussions,'' he added.
The United States wants to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. North Korea said this week it needed nuclear weapons as a deterrent and to cut the cost of maintaining its large conventional forces.
North Korea prefers direct bilateral talks with the United States while the United States wants to broaden the forum as much as possible so that other countries have a stake in ensuring the North Koreans stick to any agreement.
A five-way gathering would bring together North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking earlier on Thursday, outlined an approach to eliminate North Korea's nuclear programs based on increasing the pressure on the government and finding a way to help it ``out of the box.''
``I still remain confident that a diplomatic solution is possible,'' Powell said in a speech at the State Department.
Speaking to a group of diplomats and international financiers, he hinted at some flexibility. ``I am confident that, with increasing pressure and with the clear way for the North Koreans to get out of the box that I believe they are in, a solution can be found,'' he said.
``We are working with our friends in the region -- South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Australia, others -- to make sure the North Koreans realize that the challenge they are presenting is not just a challenge to the United States, but a challenge to their neighbors,'' he added.
North Korea and the United States last held formal talks in Beijing in April, with China as a partner. The discussions ended without any evident agreement.
----
S Korea enhances defence budget to counter North
Thursday June 12, 2003
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2003-daily/12-06-2003/world/w1.htm
SEOUL: South Korea announced plans Wednesday to boost defence spending that will include the acquisition of interceptor missiles to counter the threat from North Korea's military arsenal.
The Defence Ministry called for 22.35 trillion won (18.6 billion dollars) in its budget for fiscal 2004, up 28.3 percent from this year's military expenditures.
The 2004 budget includes 8.1 trillion won for the long-term acquisition of new equipment such as missiles, surveillance planes, a military satellite and an Aegis warship and powerful radars.
"The increase in our defence spending reflects our plans to acquire new equipment," a ministry spokesman told AFP, adding the military would re-launch its SAM-X project to buy new US Patriot missiles.
The project to bolster South Korea's defence capabilities against North Korean missiles was suspended in February when South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun took office, vowing to step up inter-Korean rapprochement.
"We are not free of threats by North Korea's long-range artillery and missiles," Deputy Defence Minister Cha Young-Koo said recently, suggesting South Korea could buy Patriot missiles.
"Patriot missiles are not the only such missiles in the world but we know they are good ones," he said. Next year's defence budget accounts for 3.2 percent of South Korea's gross domestic product, other military officials said, up from 2.7 percent this year.
It reflects the increased burden placed on South Korea's defence capabilities by the relocation of US forces away from the inter-Korean border.
North Korea has criticised the additional US spending and on Wednesday complained that US pressure on the Stalinist state since the Iraq war had gone beyond a "danger line".
"A war is neither a sports match nor an amusement game. It is a life-and-death battle," said Rodong Sinmum, North Korea's ruling party mouthpiece. "If the Bush bellicose forces ignite the second Korean war ... they will know what a real war is like and only death and doom will await the aggressors."
In the mean time, Australia has begun talks with Japan and the United States about a campaign for multilateral action to stop North Korea smuggling drugs, missiles or nuclear material by sea or by air.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Wednesday officials of the three countries were currently discussing the issue in Tokyo and an international conference due to open Thursday in Madrid would consider collective action to halt the Stalinist state's illicit trading and nuclear proliferation.
The moves follow North Korea's confirmation this week of long-standing international suspicions that it is seeking nuclear weapons to counter what it sees as a threat posed by the United States.
-------- treaties / diplomacy
11 Nations to Discuss Blocking Shipments of Weapons Materials
U.S.-led talks in Madrid seek ways to stop such trade by 'rogue' countries or terrorists.
By Sonni Efron and Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
June 12, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-norkor12jun12,0,7492509.story
WASHINGTON - Officials from the United States and 10 other countries will meet in Madrid today to discuss how they can use or change international law to prevent shipments of weapons of mass destruction or their delivery systems.
The meeting is the Bush administration's attempt to create a multilateral setting - outside the United Nations - to explore ways to stop such countries as Iran and North Korea from importing or exporting nuclear materiel, ballistic missiles or other such weapons technologies.
President Bush has repeatedly asserted the U.S. right to act, with other nations if possible but alone if necessary, to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of "rogue" states and terrorists. But he has had trouble persuading other nations to sign up for enforcement duty.
The Madrid meeting is a first, informal gathering of "a small group of like-minded countries" interested in expanding international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, as part of the "Proliferation Security Initiative" proposed by Bush in a May 31 speech in Krakow, Poland, a senior State Department official said Wednesday.
Mid-level officials from the U.S., Britain, Italy, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, the Netherlands and host Spain will attend the seven-hour meeting, according to Ramon Santos, political counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Washington.
The U.S. hopes that the meeting will improve intelligence-sharing to intercept weapons and nuclear materiel, the State Department official said.
Among the questions to be discussed is whether new international legal authority is required to prevent transfers of weapons that are not banned under international law, diplomats said.
"We're still working on whether there needs to be some change to international law to facilitate these types of interdictions, to stop illicit trade," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Australian radio Wednesday.
Downer said there was no talk "at this stage of imposing a blockade on North Korea," but Australia, he said, is discussing with the United States and Japan possible changes in international law that would make it easier to stop vessels suspected of carrying illicit goods.
But another source familiar with the Bush administration's thinking on North Korea said, "They are tightening the noose without calling it sanctions."
The effort was spurred by the case of the Sosan, a North Korean ship that was discovered carrying a cargo of Scud missiles to Yemen in December.
At the request of the United States, Spanish authorities boarded the ship and determined that its cargo was indeed weapons, not cement, as the captain claimed. But the North Korean short-range missiles are not banned under international law. When the Yemeni government said it had ordered the weapons, the Spanish had no choice but to let the ship continue on its way.
North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, declared that it has nuclear weapons and threatened to export them if the Bush administration does not address its security concerns. Washington also accuses Iran of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program, and is attempting to rally other nations, including Russia and China, to pressure Tehran to stop.
The United States would like to pressure both North Korea and Iran - and try to keep the world's most dangerous weapons from spreading even faster around the globe - by intercepting objectionable cargo. Such a move is seen as an alternative to imposing economic sanctions.
But without careful legal basis, seizing ships or airplanes could be deemed an act of war.
At the first discussion, the official said, "we want to talk about our mutual understanding of the rules of the road, what the permissible bases for interdiction are."
For example, international maritime law allows nations to board suspect ships with the permission of the country under whose flag the ship is sailing, or to board stateless ships flying without a flag, he said.
"One thing we're going to explore is whether those authorities need to be supplemented," the official said.
A major problem for those who wish to bottle up the nuclear genie is that there is nothing illegal about nations who are not signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty shipping nuclear material to each other, said Jon B. Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
One approach to making such transfers illegal is to pass a U.N. Security Council resolution "authorizing states to board and inspect any vessel or vehicle if there is reason to believe they are carrying weapons of mass destruction," nuclear nonproliferation expert Henry Sokolski argued in the latest issue of Arms Control Today.
After its bruising in the Security Council over the Iraq invasion, however, the Bush administration seems to be taking a more gradual approach to expanding the interpretation of international law to ban transfers of weapons of mass destruction and building up a common understanding that such interceptions are permitted, Wolfsthal said.
"The fact that the U.S. is willing to explore the legal basis for this is better than simply saying: 'We have the right to do this under self-defense, and we don't need to cooperate or get anyone's opinion,' " Wolfsthal said.
Sanctions or a blockade on North Korea have been ruled out for now because they are opposed by its immediate neighbors China, South Korea and Russia. Proponents of the policy that some are calling "selective interdiction" believe that it will be far more palatable to the international community if it involves enforcement of existing laws.
Efron reported from Washington and Demick from Seoul. Times staff writer Mark Magnier in Tokyo contributed to this report.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
U.S. Vows to Maintain Nuclear Weapons Preeminence
June 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-usa-nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will maintain its preeminence in nuclear weapons and could resume testing under certain circumstances, but it is not lowering the threshold for using atomic bombs, a key U.S. official said on Thursday.
Linton Brooks, who heads the agency that maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, said the Bush administration has no current plans to end a decade-long moratorium on nuclear testing or develop new types of atomic arms.
Brooks defended administration proposals to allow research into possible new, low-yield nuclear weapons that could incinerate enemy biological weapons or destroy deeply buried bunkers, and into converting two existing larger bombs for use against underground targets.
The administration won congressional support for the measures in May. Lawmakers must work out differences between House of Representatives and Senate versions before final passage.
``We're not going to restart the arms race,'' Brooks, under secretary of energy for nuclear security and chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told a briefing with defense reporters.
He said he would recommend to President Bush that nuclear testing be resumed if he learned of ``a significant problem in an important weapon in the stockpile where I thought I needed testing to either confirm the problem or confirm that it had been fixed.'' He did not specify the nature of such a problem.
U.S. lawmakers have backed a proposal to cut the time required before conducting a nuclear test from three years to 18 months. The United States has observed a nuclear testing moratorium since 1992.
``There is no condition in the stockpile that would call for a resumption in nuclear testing. I'm pretty sure that will be true next year and the year after that,'' Brooks added.
``But if there were a situation in which there were a problem with a significant weapon in the stockpile, then I think that it would be irresponsible not to test the weapon.''
The Defense Department also said last month that with an aging U.S. atomic stockpile, ``there are scenarios that could cause the secretary (Donald Rumsfeld) to recommend that the U.S. consider testing.'' The Pentagon said the average age of a bomb in the stockpile is about 20 years.
Brooks took issue with arms control advocates and some in Congress who argue that the administration is looking to make nuclear weapons more usable, thus lowering the nuclear threshold.
``I think crossing the nuclear threshold remains probably one of the most awesome decisions any president will ever make. And I don't know of anything we are doing that will make that an easier decision for the president or his advisers,'' Brooks said, rejecting critics' charges that the administration's moves on nuclear arms could encourage global proliferation.
He said potential adversaries should not feel they would be better off by acquiring nuclear arms. But he said ``our allies should draw the correct inference that the United States intends to remain preeminent in this area.''
Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials have pointed to an emerging class of enemy targets -- deeply buried bunkers and stockpiles of germ warfare agents -- that cannot be destroyed by existing conventional weapons.
Brooks said he favors learning whether a nuclear answer is possible. ``Do I want the president to have options? Sure I do,'' he said.
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Bunker Buster Said Won't Renew Arms Race
June 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bunker-Busters.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A nuclear bunker-busting bomb will not lead to a renewed arms race, an Energy Department official insisted Thursday, while acknowledging the device probably would spread radioactive fallout worldwide.
Energy Undersecretary Linton Brooks said the Bush administration wants to develop such a bomb and conduct research on a low-yield nuclear weapon ``to preserve the capability to adapt to changing times'' and new threats.
``We're not going to restart the arms race,'' said Brooks, director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, adding that the administration's intentions have been misinterpreted. His agency within the Energy Department oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and nuclear warhead research.
The development of nuclear ``bunker buster'' bombs and ``mini-nukes'' of five kilotons or less has led many Democrats to question whether such projects are undermining efforts to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons.
The Senate last month included funds for continuing research on the bunker-busters and rescinded a 1993 ban on studying the development of the low-yield warheads. But it also said Congress still would have to approve full-scale development of new generation weapons.
A version in the House would authorize money for the bunker-busters and remove the ban on research into the new programs. Lawmakers have yet to resolved differences in the two bills.
Brooks, in a meeting with a group of reporters, disputed suggestions that development of low-yield weapons, or a nuclear weapon that would penetrate deep into the ground, might make it easier to actually order the use of a nuclear device.
Using a nuclear warhead is ``an incredibly serious business,'' said Brooks, a former nuclear arms reduction negotiator, and even if a device is smaller, a decision to use it will not be made easier.
``It is unlikely that you can develop a penetrator (nuclear device) that is useful ... without creating fallout.''
Asked if you can build a low-yield weapons without global fallout, Brooks replied, ``almost certainly not.''
Brooks also said he knows of no problem with the nuclear weapons stockpile at this time that would suggest a need to resume underground nuclear testing. Still, he said it's critical that the lead-time needed to prepare for such tests be reduced to 18 months.
He said he would recommend to the president to resume testing only if it is found that there is a problem with a significant nuclear weapon that needs to be fixed. He said he sees no such problem on the horizon, at least ``next year or the year after that.''
Underground nuclear tests were suspended in 1992, although they could be resumed should they be needed to verify that readiness of the U.S. weapons arsenal.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
US Senate votes to guarantee nuclear power loans
Story by Charles Abbott
REUTERS USA:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21141/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The Senate voted to provide $10.5 billion or more in loan guarantees for a new generation of U.S. nuclear power plants despite a warning by a nonpartisan congressional report of a high risk of defaults.
Senators voted 50-48 to keep the loan guarantee language in a comprehensive energy bill under debate. It would expand use of renewable fuels and subsidize a natural gas pipeline from Alaska among other steps.
Under the bill, the Energy Department could issue loan guarantees to cover up to half of the cost of constructing seven nuclear power plants with a capacity of 1,100 megawatts each, together enough power for nearly 8 million homes.
No new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States since the partial meltdown of the reactor core of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.
Supporters said the loan guarantees would assure a variety of energy sources and reduce pressure on natural gas supplies.
Critics said loan guarantees were not necessary for an established industry and carried a high chance of significant costs to taxpayers if an owner went broke.
"Never before were the taxpayers on the hook from the get-go," said Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, who called the guarantees unprecedented.
The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan entity, said in May it considered "the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high - well above 50 percent" because a plant would be "uneconomic to operate."
Construction costs are higher than conventional plants, not to mention the risks of being the first nuclear power plant in 25 years and potential delays in getting a federal license.
Energy Committee chairman Pete Domenici told reporters that "an alternative like clean nuclear power" was needed to alleviate a potential pinch on natural gas supplies.
"Just today, we had Mr. Economics himself, Dr. Alan Greenspan, say that there is not going to be enough natural gas for our needs, especially in electricity, which is growing exponentially," Domenici said, referring to the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan testified at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on rising natural gas prices.
Nuclear plants generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity.
Earlier in the day, the Senate also:
- Voted 99-1 to set a goal of reducing U.S. oil consumption by 1 million barrels a day, or 5.3 percent, by 2013 through whatever mix of approaches the president thought best.
- Agreed 67-32 on the goal of getting 100,000 U.S. hydrogen-powered cars in use by 2013 and 2.5 million by 2020.
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[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
A needed nuclear boost
June 12, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030611-093250-6294r.htm
On Tuesday, the Senate narrowly gave the nuclear industry a much needed energy boost. By a 50-48 vote, it rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, that would have stripped the power plant loan guarantees from the omnibus energy bill.
It was a wise decision, despite the potential cost of the measures. Under the bill, championed by Energy Committee Sen. Pete Domenici, the government would grant loan guarantees of half the cost of at least six advanced design nuclear power plants, enough to add 8,400 megawatts of electricity to the grid. The bill would require the government to buy electricity from those plants, but, if the construction projects default, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that taxpayers could be left with a $16 billion tab. The bill also authorizes $1.1 billion for the government to build a demonstration nuclear co-generation plant that would produce both electricity and hydrogen.
That plant could be dismissed as mere pork, but it actually represents an important practical link between nuclear power and a hydrogen-based economy (which admittedly remains very much conjectural). Such plants have long been championed by Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University in New York, as a reasonable means to supply the clean-burning fuel that Americans will need - especially if the administration's hydrogen car initiative succeeds.
The energy bill passed by the House authorizes neither the loan guarantees nor the co-generation project. However, like the Senate bill, it provides $1.7 billion in funding for nuclear energy research and commercial development activities.
While the final numbers can be settled in conference, it is essential that Congress give the nuclear industry some sort of stimulus. A new power plant hasn't been ordered in 25 years, and some of those plants took over a decade to build. Still-untested streamlining provisions in the 1992 Energy Policy Act could reduce power plant construction times to three to four years, but that is far from certain.
Moreover, as Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham pointed out in an interview with editors and reporters from The Washington Times, America is headed for a sharp drop-off in nuclear power between 2025 and 2050, as licenses expire and old reactors are shut down. Since 2000, 16 of the 104 nuclear reactors in operation have received 20-year license extensions. Fourteen other reactors have filed for such extensions, and, over the next six years, 20 more reactors are expected to do so.
Some of that fall-off might be made up for in increased capacity at other plants. However, they will be hard-pressed to make up for the loss of up to half of existent reactors, much less sate America's increased energy needs. According to the 2003 estimates from the Energy Information Administration, electricity demand will grow by 1.8 percent each year between now and 2025. Yet, while energy needs are increasing, energy options are continuing to narrow. Even natural gas, the fuel favored by environmentalists, is in short supply.
Nuclear energy is an important part of the diversified energy portfolio that Americans depend on for both national security and economic development. Notwithstanding the potential cost of the loan guarantees, the Senate has done well to encourage the revival of the nuclear industry.
-------- us politics
Iran working on nuclear bomb, says Rumsfeld
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Jonathan Steele
Thursday June 12, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,975496,00.html
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday tapped into deepening international concern about a clandestine nuclear programme in Iran, warning that Tehran was actively working to develop a bomb.
Mr Rumsfeld's remarks, delivered during a visit to Germany, appeared to be aimed at exerting pressure on Tehran and the UN's nuclear monitoring agency, which meets next week in Vienna to decide how to respond to Iran's failure to honour nuclear safeguards.
His intervention also appeared to advance the next project of Pentagon hawks: regime change in Tehran.
There have been signs that Washington is stepping up international pressure on Tehran and feeding internal unrest. Several dozen protesters were arrested in the capital yesterday after thousands of people took to the streets in the biggest demonstrations against the government this year.
The protests began on Tuesday over plans to privatise some universities, but soon widened as some students carried banners calling for political prisoners to be freed and others demanded that the reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, resign.
Witnesses said the protests turned violent when riot police with batons tried to disperse the demonstrators, beating people who failed to move away quickly enough. Several motorcycles were set on fire and the windows of shops and a state bank were smashed.
High unemployment affecting graduates as well as other sectors of society, plus disap pointment with the pace of the reforms Mr Khatami originally promised six years ago, have led to widespread discontent.
"The intelligence community in the United States and around the world currently assess that Iran does not have nuclear weapons," Mr Rumsfeld said during a visit to the southern German town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
"The assessment is that they do have a very active programme and are likely to have nuclear weapons in a relatively short period of time."
The defence secretary went further than experts from the UN's monitoring agency, the international atomic energy agency (IAEA) who visited Iran last week.
However, there has been deepening international alarm about previously undiscovered Iranian nuclear facilities, and its rapid progress in enriching uranium.
The report of the IAEA inspectors, which is to be formally presented next week, faults Iran for failing to declare uranium imported from China in 1991.
Although the quantity of nuclear material was relatively small, Iran has compounded the IAEA's concerns by also failing to account for what happened to the uranium, or even where it was processed.
Mr Rumsfeld also accused Tehran of seeking to infiltrate its clerics into Iraq and undermine the US occupation administration.
"We're going to actively oppose any Iranian influence in that country that attempts to make Iraq an Iran-type model and we'll do it with words to start with and we'll do it energetically," Mr Rumsfeld said. The US backs a number of exile groups, including Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah, who uses a satellite TV station in Los Angeles to beam anti-regime views into Iran.
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, told CNN on Sunday that Washington was working to persuade Iranians to force change from within to make Iran what he called a less troublesome member of the world community.
The US war on Iraq has undoubtedly unsettled Tehran's leaders. President Khatami acknowledged this week that there was a danger Iran could be next.
Fundamentalism and ter rorism would provide "enemies" with an excuse for invasion, the newspaper Entekhab quoted him yesterday as saying in a veiled warning to the hardliners and to Washington.
Student demonstrations at various universities last autumn went on every day for several weeks. At that time the protests remained on campus and did not spill on to the streets.
Many students used the protests to call for power to be taken from Iran's clergy and given to secular leaders.
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Rumsfeld for transatlantic struggle against WMDs
Thursday June 12, 2003
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2003-daily/12-06-2003/world/w5.htm
GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called on US allies in Europe to unite, despite bruising differences over Iraq, to confront the looming dangers of weapons of mass destruction, rogue states and terrorism.
In a speech to a Pentagon-run studies centre here, Rumsfeld said the new NATO countries were taking the lead in injecting a fresh vision to the old Atlantic alliance.
"It is really a matter of attitude, of the vision the countries bring to the transatlantic relationship and to the challenge we all face in the years ahead," he said in his first visit to Germany since the Iraq war.
"Many nations in Europe, but not all, correctly see the nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction as the biggest threat and recognise that transatlantic unity is more critical than ever if we are to successfully deal with that threat. "Most see the value of a robust transatlantic relationship. It is, I believe, compatible with European integration. It certainly is critical to our mutual security," he said.
The text of the speech also included a stern warning against challenges to US power, but it was dropped in the delivery: "Some want to define themselves by their opposition to the United States -- as some sort of 'counterweight' to America."
He did not allude directly to France, one of the fiercest opponents of the Iraq war, in the speech. But he acknowledged "bumps on the road" in relations with Paris.
Rumsfeld was speaking at a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the George C. Marshall Centre for Security Studies, where mid-level officials from former Soviet bloc countries have been trained for leadership roles in their defence establishments.
Relations between Washington and Berlin have been gradually on the mend since the war, which Germany adamantly opposed. Struck addressed the split over Iraq in his speech to the gathering, but said "a friendship like ours can bear it".
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In Germany, Rumsfeld Mum on Strained Ties
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003; Page A36
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47295-2003Jun11?language=printer
GARMISCH, Germany, June 11 -- In his first visit to Germany since the end of the war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld thanked the German government for its help in running a U.S. defense education center here but said nothing about restoring U.S.-German relations badly strained by the conflict.
Speaking at ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies here, Rumsfeld said that "from time to time we don't agree on everything." But beyond that, he had little to say about the state of U.S.-German relations, which many analysts consider at their worst point in half a century.
Since the fall of Baghdad two months ago, the German government has made repeated public overtures to Washington to repair relations. Today, Defense Minister Peter Struck, speaking after Rumsfeld, renewed that effort, talking about "our American friends" and the long history of cooperation between the two governments.
"We had different points of view as far as Iraq was concerned," Struck said. "but a friendship such as ours can weather such a storm. We are now looking ahead."
He and Rumsfeld addressed several hundred military officials at the institute, which helps train officers from former communist countries. The two men chatted cordially during the ceremonies.
At a news conference after his speech, Rumsfeld said he wanted to "pause and say how deeply I regret and our country regrets the loss of four German soldiers killed in Kabul" five days ago when a car loaded with explosives blew up next to a bus carrying the troops in the Afghan capital.
But, in his speech, he had little to say about German troops. He lauded Poland for preparing to lead a multinational peacekeeping division in southwestern Iraq and credited Romania for deploying a combat battalion to Afghanistan. There was, however, no reference to Germany's current leadership of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan or its deployment of advanced chemical and biological weapons detection units to Kuwait during the Iraq war.
In places, however, Rumsfeld departed from his prepared text in ways that made the speech less provocative. While the text compared the United States and its allies to a family whose members "may annoy each other from time to time," Rumsfeld instead said, "From time to time, we don't agree on everything."
And he deleted a line from the text that said, in apparent reference to France: "Some want to define themselves by their opposition to the United States as some sort of 'counterweight' to America."
Karl Kaiser, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said it was "disappointing" that Rumsfeld said nothing about restoring the German relationship. "The German side is making quite an effort at practically every level," he said.
Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former Clinton administration official, said in a telephone interview that Rumsfeld should move beyond differences with Germany over Iraq. He added that, at least, the secretary should acknowledge Germany's contribution to the war, which he said exceeded that of any allied country except Britain and Australia. He also said that Germany should be commended for its peacekeeping leadership in Afghanistan.
He also noted that Germany contributed the chemical and biological detection unit to Kuwait, sent troops to operate Patriot missile batteries in Turkey and to fly AWACS radar missions. In addition, 2,500 Germans have been guarding U.S. bases in Germany.
During a meeting with a group of students, Rumsfeld made a pointed reference to France, which led international opposition to the war. When asked about the strength of transatlantic relations, Rumsfeld said he thought they were "pretty good," then added that "for decades, the United States and France have been in marriage counseling."
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Powell Says It's Time for More Pressure on Myanmar
Thu June 12, 2003
(Reuters)
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=2916267
SINGAPORE - Secretary of State Colin Powell turned up pressure on Myanmar's military rulers over the detention of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, saying he would seek action from their Asian neighbors at a meeting next week.
Powell's comments, in a signed article published in the Asian Wall Street Journal on Thursday, were the latest expression of international outrage over the treatment of the pro-democracy activist, who is now in her 13th day of detention.
"The junta that oppresses democracy in Burma (Myanmar) must find that its actions will not be allowed to stand," he said in the commentary in which he called for financial measures against Myanmar's military rulers.
The junta took Suu Kyi into what it called "protective" custody during a trip to the north on May 30 after a violent clash between her supporters and government henchmen.
"The administration agrees with members of the U.S. Congress... that the time has come to turn up the pressure on the SPDC," Powell wrote, referring to Myanmar's ruling State Peace and Development Council, the body that detained Suu Kyi.
The U.S. Senate voted 97-1 on Wednesday to approve a bill to ban all imports from the Southeast Asian nation in response Suu Kyi's detention.
Suu Kyi and about two dozen senior members of her National League for Democracy have been held at locations in or outside the Myanmar capital, sources told Reuters in Yangon. Some of the locations are undisclosed.
Powell said that he would use a trip to Asia next week for an annual meeting of the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) Regional Forum to push Myanmar's neighbors to bring pressure to bear.
"I will press the case in Cambodia next week when I meet with the leaders of Southeast Asia despite their traditional reticence to confront a member and neighbor of their association," he wrote.
Diplomats say ASEAN, which operates under the principle of not interfering in the internal affairs of its members, may be forced to discuss Myanmar -- but in closed-door forums and preferring to keep the issue under the table.
Powell proposed a series of measures that could be taken to pile pressure on Myanmar, already hit by numerous sanctions.
He suggested a ban the assets of the ruling military and on remittances to Myanmar so that the government could not benefit from foreign exchange.
Legislation could be used to place restrictions on travel-related transactions that benefit the SPDC, he wrote.
"We should further limit commerce with Burma which enriches the junta's generals," he said, stressing the need for consistency with international obligations to such bodies as the World Trade Organization.
The Senate bill would ban imports of anything mined, made, grown or assembled in Myanmar. It would freeze Myanmar government assets held in the United States, bar former and present leaders from traveling to the United States and require the Treasury Department to oppose World Bank or International Monetary Fund loans.
The House of Representatives International Relations Committee is scheduled to vote on Thursday on a similar bill.
U.S. imports from Myanmar totaled $356 million in 2002 and American exports amounted to $10 million.
Powell dismissed the explanation from Myanmar's rulers of the incident in which Suu Kyi was taken back into custody, saying investigations by U.S. embassy staff showed members of the military government had directed and staged the riot.
"Our response must be equally clear if the thugs who now rule Burma are to understand that their failure to restore democracy will only bring more and more pressure against them and their supporters," he said.
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GOP lawmakers rule out hearings on Iraq war intelligence
June 12, 2003
By James G. Lakely
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030611-115121-8466r.htm
The top Republican lawmakers on defense and intelligence issues yesterday ruled out immediate public hearings on the intelligence that led to war in Iraq.
Some Democrats are attempting to exploit the failure so far to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"While I believe some of the criticism leveled on the intelligence community has been understandable ... some of the attacks have been simply politics for political gain," Mr. Roberts said. "I will not allow the committee to be politicized or to be used as an unwitting tool for any political strategist. That is not good for the committee, and it's not good for our national security."
Mr. Roberts made his claim at a press conference flanked by Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Porter J. Goss, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Mr. Warner said he knew of no evidence that White House officials "hyped or cooked or embellished" prewar intelligence on Iraq. He also said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, backed the decision against quick public hearings.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat and new member of the Armed Services Committee, said Republicans are using accusations of partisanship as a distraction.
"I don't think you should hide behind charges of it being partisan in order to avoid the inquiry that should lead to answers that the American people deserve to have," Mrs. Clinton said.
Mr. Roberts said he plans to continue "our ongoing oversight of the intelligence agencies" in closed-door hearings because much of the information shared with Congress is classified.
"In terms of a joint, formal investigation [involving both the Intelligence and Armed Services committees] ... I think, is very premature," Mr. Roberts said, though he did not rule out eventually holding public hearings. "Let's do our homework first."
Mr. Roberts said his committee will begin holding classified hearings next week and "we'll go about this in a very deliberate and bipartisan manner."
"When the committee deems it appropriate, we will make whatever public statements that are necessary," he said.
Mrs. Clinton and other prominent Senate Democrats had hoped Mr. Warner would break with Mr. Roberts and convene public hearings soon.
"This is a case where the public has many questions that deserve answers," Mrs. Clinton said. "I don't think this is the last word. I don't think it's sustainable to not have some public appearances by some of the key people."
Mr. Warner, however, stood squarely behind Mr. Roberts yesterday, and asked the public to be patient in its desire for answers.
"I just urge the American public to give us time and to feel a sense of confidence that those of us here in the Congress are proceeding, as we've done for many years on issues not unlike this one, to assess the facts," Mr. Warner said. "Then, at such time as we're ready, [we will] let the members of the committee, hopefully in a hearing status, express their views on the ultimate findings after we've done our homework."
That plan did not satisfy Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. He warned yesterday that he will use his status as co-chairman to force the issue.
"What [Mr. Roberts and Mr. Warner] appear to be doing is entirely inadequate and slow-paced," Mr. Rockefeller said. "I'm not sure they really want to get all the facts about what happened. ... I'm not at all sure that they have any intention of talking to any CIA analysts who disagree" with the Bush administration.
Mr. Rockefeller said he refuses "to have this become a partisan fight" and is meeting with Mr. Roberts regularly to press his case. Mr. Rockefeller would not divulge what steps he would take if a deal can't be reached, but his co-chairmanship gives him power to force hearings if he gains the support of five senators.
Mr. Rockefeller said he would do all he could to avoid such a step, because it would cause the process to "sink into the swamp" of partisanship.
Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said he has proposed pooling the committee staff from both parties to produce a credible, bipartisan report.
"This has everything to do with the security of this nation and nothing to do with politics," Mr. Levin said.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush welcomes the review of prewar intelligence reports.
"We always work together with Congress on dealing with the threat of Iraqi possession of [weapons of mass destruction]," Mr. Fleischer said. "And we will continue to work with Congress on the facts that led previous administrations, Democrats, Republicans alike, to know that [Saddam Hussein] had [weapons of mass destruction]."
Mr. Roberts implied that many of the Democrats raising questions about the veracity of intelligence before the war don't have enough information to make that assessment.
"The next time a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee expresses an opinion on this topic, I encourage you to ask them if they have done their homework," Mr. Roberts said. "As chairman, I intend to do mine."
The sharpest criticism of the Bush administration's use of intelligence has come from Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a member of the Intelligence Committee and a Democratic presidential aspirant.
Mr. Graham accused the Bush administration Monday of trying to quell opposition to the war within the government and dismissing intelligence reports that did not support the case for going to war.
"[Bush kept] America in the dark," Mr. Graham told a group of Iowa Democrats.
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Hill GOP Rejects Wider Iraq Intelligence Probe
By Helen Dewar and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 12, 2003; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46651-2003Jun11?language=printer
Congressional Republicans yesterday spurned Democrats' demands for a full-blown probe into whether the Bush administration manipulated prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs, saying Congress's current oversight operations will suffice.
Key Democrats called the GOP plan "entirely inadequate" and accused the administration of "hyping" intelligence data, as the debate over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction -- which until now has focused on the White House, CIA and State Department -- found full voice in Congress.
At a news conference that appeared aimed at quelling mounting Democratic criticism, Senate intelligence committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said the committee continues to review intelligence documents on weapons and plans to focus on them in closed-door hearings starting next week.
"We are going to complete a very thorough review of all the documentation" supplied by intelligence agencies, he said. "It seems sensible to do that kind of homework before you talk about a formal investigation of this or that or the other thing."
Roberts said some of the criticism of intelligence operations is politically inspired. "I will not allow the committee to be politicized or to be used as an unwitting tool for any political strategist," he said.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) said his panel has been holding hearings and reviewing evidence for some time. He joined Roberts and House intelligence committee Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) in rejecting a broader probe at this time.
Some leading Democrats have demanded an aggressive inquiry to determine whether the intelligence cited by the administration to build the case for war against Iraq may have been inaccurate or skewed to serve administration interests. In the months leading to the March invasion of Iraq, President Bush repeatedly said Saddam Hussein's government had significant chemical and biological weapons capabilities that threatened the United States.
Pressure for a congressional probe has been fueled by the inability to find chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or manufacturing facilities in Iraq and by allegations from some intelligence analysts that they felt pressure from the administration to tailor their assessments to fit official policy.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), senior Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, said the GOP plan to limit the inquiry to closed hearings and administration-supplied intelligence documents is "entirely inadequate and slow-paced." Committees should be able to request additional documents, interview officials, hold open hearings and report their findings, he said.
"Iraqi WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were the primary justification offered for the war in Iraq," Rockefeller said. "Even while the search for WMD continues, the American people need and want to know whether our government was accurate and forthcoming in its prewar assessments."
Rockefeller and Roberts said they are seeking a bipartisan agreement on how to proceed.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the Bush administration "hyped" its intelligence on WMD to build public support for a war to overthrow Hussein. He said the practice threatens U.S. credibility in dealing with weapons threats in Iran and North Korea and called for a "big push" to learn how the administration handled what it knew.
"They took a truth and they embellished it," Biden told reporters. "What I'm accusing them of doing is hyping it. They created a false sense of urgency." He said the administration presented "a questionable and hard-to-sustain tie with terrorist organizations" and exaggerated Iraq's capacity to use illegal weapons against U.S. troops. He said the administration also exaggerated how close the Iraqis were to building nuclear weapons.
Roberts, the GOP chairman, said an inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks faulted intelligence agencies for "failing to put together a picture that seemed all too obvious after the fact." Now, he said, "there seems to be a campaign afoot by some to criticize the intelligence community and the president for . . . putting together a picture that seemed all too obvious before the fact."
Several Democrats said the committees are relying on documents volunteered by the intelligence agencies, but Roberts said the intelligence panel is seeking all relevant information.
Roberts, Warner and Goss said they have not heard from any intelligence officials complaining of undue influence on their work on Iraqi weapons. All three said the Bush administration had not pressured them to avoid a public inquiry.
Warner said he has seen no evidence of tampering with intelligence information. "The evidence that I have examined does not rise to give the presumption that anyone in this administration has hyped or cooked or embellished such evidence to a particular purpose," he said.
Meanwhile, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said U.S. officials pressured him to use stronger language when reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons programs before the war. In an interview published yesterday in London's the Guardian newspaper, he said: "By and large my relations with the U.S. were good. But toward the end the administration leaned on us."
In a surprise move, CIA Director George J. Tenet announced yesterday that David Kay, who was chief nuclear weapons inspector for the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq in 1991 and 1992, would become his special adviser for the current search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Kay will supervise the WMD strategy employed by the Defense Department's new Iraq Survey Group, which is headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the deputy Defense Intelligence Agency director. Tenet described Kay, who was a vocal critic of Blix's approach during the previous inspections, as being knowledgeable of "past Iraqi efforts to hide WMD [and] will be of inestimable help in determining the current status of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons."
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
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White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel Six Months Before War
by Jason Leopold
June 12, 2003
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold6.html
Six months before the United States was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S.
But the dissenters were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House because the Bush administration had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, interviews and documents have revealed.
The most vocal opponent to intelligence information supplied by the CIA to the hawks in the Bush administration about the so-called Iraqi threat to national security was David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and the president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. based group that gathers information for the public and the White House on nuclear weapons programs.
With the likelihood of finding WMD in Iraq becoming increasingly remote, new information, such as documents and interviews provided by Albright and other weapons experts, prove that the White House did not suffer so much from an intelligence failure on Iraq's WMD, but instead shows how the Bush administration embellished reams of intelligence and relied on murky intelligence in order to get Congress and the public to back the war. That may explain why it is becoming so difficult to find WMD: Because it's entirely likely that the weapons don't exist.
"A critical question is whether the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and other governments in playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen public support for war," Albright said in a March 10 assessment of the CIA's intelligence, which is posted on the ISIS website.
John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, wrote in a column this week that if President Bush mislead the public in building a case for war in Iraq, a case for impeachment could be made.
"Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness," Dean wrote this week. "A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation."
In September, USA Today reported that "the Bush administration is expanding on and in some cases contradicting U.S. intelligence reports in making the case for an invasion of Iraq, interviews with administration and intelligence officials indicate."
"Administration officials accuse Iraq of having ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and of amassing weapons of mass destruction despite uncertain and sometimes contrary intelligence on these issues, according to officials," the paper reported. "In some cases, top administration officials disagree outright with what the CIA and other intelligence agencies report. For example, they repeat accounts of al-Qaeda members seeking refuge in Iraq and of terrorist operatives meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials, even though U.S. intelligence reports raise doubts about such links. On Iraqi weapons programs, administration officials draw the most pessimistic conclusions from ambiguous evidence."
In secret intelligence briefings last September on the Iraqi threat, House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said administration officials were presenting "embellishments" on information long known about Iraq.
A senior Bush administration official conceded privately that there are large gaps in U.S. knowledge about Iraqi weapons programs, USA Today reported.
The concerns jibe with warnings about the CIA's intelligence information which Albright first raised last September, when the agency zeroed in on high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq was trying to obtain as evidence of the country's active near-complete nuclear weapons program.
The case of the aluminum tubes is significant because President Bush identified it during a speech last year as evidence of Iraq's nuclear weapons program and used it to rally the public and several U.N. countries in supporting the war. But Albright said many officials in the intelligence community knew the tubes weren't meant to build a nuclear weapon.
"The CIA has concluded that these tubes were specifically manufactured for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium," Albright said. "Many in the expert community both inside and outside government, however, do not agree with this conclusion. The vast majority of gas centrifuge experts in this country and abroad who are knowledgeable about this case reject the CIA's case and do not believe that the tubes are specifically designed for gas centrifuges. In addition, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have consistently expressed skepticism that the tubes are for centrifuges."
"After months of investigation, the administration has failed to prove its claim that the tubes are intended for use in an Iraqi gas centrifuge program," Albright added. "Despite being presented with evidence countering this claim, the administration persists in making misleading comments about the significance of the tubes."
Albright said he tried to voice his concerns about the intelligence information to White House officials last year, but was rebuffed and told to keep quiet.
"I first learned of this case a year and a half ago when I was asked for information about past Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the disagreement reflected the typical in-fighting between US experts that often afflicts the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised when the administration latched onto one side of this debate in September 2002. I was told that this dispute had not been mediated by a competent, impartial technical committee, as it should have been, according to accepted practice," Albright said. "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet."
Albright said the Department of Energy, which analyzed the intelligence information on the aluminum tubes and rejected the CIA's intelligence analysis, is the only government agency in the U.S. that can provide expert opinions on gas centrifuges (what the CIA alleged the tubes were being used for) and nuclear weapons programs.
"For over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum tube story, despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United States and abroad," Albright said. "His opinion, however, obtained traction in the summer of 2002 with senior members of the Bush Administration, including the President. The administration was forced to admit publicly that dissenters exist, particularly at the Department of Energy and its national laboratories."
But Albright said the White House launched an attack against experts who spoke critically of the intelligence.
"Administration officials try to minimize the number and significance of the dissenters or unfairly attack them," Albright said. "For example, when Secretary Powell mentioned the dissent in his Security Council speech, he said: "Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher." Not surprisingly, an effort by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's comments before his appearance was rebuffed by the administration."
Moreover, former scientists who worked on Iraq's nuclear weapons program and escaped the country also disputed the CIA's intelligence of the country's existing nuclear weapons program, saying it ended in 1991 after the first Gulf War. However, some Iraq scientists who supplied the Pentagon with information claim that Iraq's nuclear weapons program continues, but none of these Iraqis have any direct knowledge of any current banned nuclear programs. They appear to all carry political baggage and biases about going to war or overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and these biases seem to drive their judgments about nuclear issues, rendering their statements about current Iraqi nuclear activities suspect, according to Albright, who said he was privy to much of the information being supplied to the Bush administration and the CIA.
Another example of disputed intelligence used by the Bush administration to build its case for war is Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of another secret nuclear weapons program. Bush, in his State of the Union Speech in January, used this information as an example of a "smoking gun" and the imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S. But the information has since been widely discounted.
"One person who heard a classified briefing on Iraq in late 2002 said that there was laughter in the room when the uranium evidence was presented," Albright said. "One of (the) most dramatic findings, revealed on March 7, was that the documents which form the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq are not authentic."
Iraq's attempts to acquire a magnet production plant are likewise ambiguous. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 that this plant would produce magnets with a mass of 20 to 30 grams. He added: "That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War." One US official said that because the pieces are so small, many end uses are possible, making it impossible to link the attempted acquisition to an Iraqi centrifuge program."
One piece of intelligence information that seemed to go unnoticed by the media was satellite photographs released by the White House last October of a facility in Iraq called Al Furat to support Bush's assertion that Iraq was making nuclear weapons there.
But Albright said that Iraq already admitted making such weapons at Al Furat before the Gulf War and that the site had long been dismantled.
In addition to Albright, other military experts also were skeptical of the intelligence information gathered by the CIA.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence, in an interview with London's Guardian newspaper last October.
Cannistraro told the Guardian that hawks at the Pentagon had deliberately skewed the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration.
Last October, Bush said the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."
"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," Bush said.
U.S. military experts had confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern European trainer jets into UAV's, but with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the U.S.
"It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory," said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, also in an interview with the Guardian last October.
In true Bush fashion, however, the administration had long believed it was better to strike first and ask questions later.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who sits on the intelligence committee, sent Bush a letter Sept. 17, 2002 requesting he urge the CIA to produce a National Intelligence Estimate, a report that would have showed exactly how much of a threat Iraq posed, Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Adviser, said in the post 9-11 world the U.S. cannot wait for intelligence because the Iraq is too much of a threat to the U.S.
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," Rice said.
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Bush Under Fire in Congress for Criticizing Israel
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/middleeast/12DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, June 11 - Supporters of Israel in and out of Congress assailed President Bush today for criticizing Israeli attacks on Palestinian militant groups as the administration worked to protect its Middle East peace initiative from a new cycle of violence.
On a day of new attacks and counterattacks by Israeli and Palestinian militant forces, diplomats said there was concern in the administration that without dramatic improvement of some kind, the peace initiative known as the road map could founder.
A day after he criticized Israel for its attempt to kill a militant Palestinian leader, Mr. Bush today denounced a suicide bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem that killed 16 people and wounded more than 100.
"I strongly condemn the killings," he said, "and I urge and call upon all of the free world, nations which love peace, to not only condemn the killings, but to use every ounce of their power to prevent them from happening in the future."
At a hearing of the House International Relations Committee, Representative Gary L. Ackerman, said that Mr. Bush's rebuke might lead his critics "to think of the word hypocrisy."
"How can we take certain actions in response to terrorism, and then tell others that when they do the same exact thing that it is not helpful?" Mr. Ackerman, a New York Democrat, said during questioning of William J. Burns, the State Department's senior diplomat for Middle Eastern affairs.
The influential pro-Israel lobbying group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as Aipac, issued a rare criticism of Mr. Bush, if only obliquely. Israel, it said, "will and must take the responsibility to fight terrorist organizations" and "it should be the policy of the U.S. to support" such actions.
The bombing today was an apparent retaliation for Israel's attempt to kill Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a top leader of Hamas, on Tuesday. It happened at about the same time as an Israeli missile attack in Gaza.
Despite the violence, senior administration officials said that the peace initiative was still alive.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general met and urged calm.
"There are those who do not wish to see the Palestinian people achieve a state living side by side in peace with Israel," Mr. Powell said. He called on Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab nations in the region to "remain steadfast, to continue moving down the path that was laid out at Aqaba last week by the leaders who were assembled."
Mr. Powell was referring to a summit meeting in Jordan last week attended by Mr. Bush, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr. Annan called on the Israelis and Palestinians to "stay the course."
But there was an unusual quality to the statements given the inflamed situation. If there was a new wrinkle to the day's developments, it was the criticism directed at Mr. Bush for his rebuke of the Israeli government on Tuesday.
Reflecting dismay that a new round of violence might undermine the spirit achieved in Aqaba and Sharm el Sheik, Mr. Bush said the attack on the Hamas leader would not help Israel's security. His statement drew fire from those saying that Israel had carried out the attacks to defend itself, just as the United States has done.
Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, said Israel's use of military force to protect itself against "a ticking time bomb factory" was "100 percent justified."
Representative Tom Lantos of California, the ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, defended Israel's right to protect itself, saying that the Palestinian Authority under Mr. Abbas was unable to do the job. If the Palestinians will not disarm terrorists, "then Israel clearly will do so," he said.
"We would do so," he continued. "Any self-respecting society will do so. People in government have to defend their citizens."
Appearing before the committee, Mr. Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, acknowledged under sharp questioning from Democrats that Mr. Abbas would probably have to take forceful steps to disarm and dismantle terrorist groups if the peace initiative were to succeed. "I believe he is committed to doing the hard things that are going to be required to make that possible," Mr. Burns said.
But a diplomat in touch with the administration said that the situation was so perilous that Mr. Abbas could be ousted from power if the cycle of violence did not abate. He said that there would be a meeting in Europe later this week of envoys focusing on the Middle East.
The envoys - from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia - are to prepare for a higher-level meeting attended by Secretary Powell in Jordan on June 22. The group, known as the quartet, devised the step-by-step plan to end violence and establish a Palestinian state in three years. The plan was endorsed by the Palestinians and, in a qualified manner, by Israel last week.
Despite the hopeful words from many sides, the fast-changing situation was putting new pressure on Mr. Bush to get more involved in saving the peace negotiations.
On one hand, Israel sought today to dispute the American analysis that led the Bush administration to condemn the attack on the Hamas leader. Israeli officials said that far from being a mere political spokesman for Hamas, Dr. Rantisi was part of a faction within Hamas that advocated attacks on Israel as a means to destroy Mr. Abbas, who is also known as Abu Mazen.
"There has been an ongoing debate within leadership circles in Hamas over the last few days about how to approach Abu Mazen," an Israeli official said. "One faction has said we have to fight against Abu Mazen and intensify terrorism. This faction lies outside Hamas itself - in Damascus, Jordan and elsewhere. Rantisi is one of their most vocal forces."
But other diplomats said the Israelis had to know that the attack would provoke a new cycle of violence and make it impossible for Mr. Abbas to keep what little support he has among Palestinians.
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Suppose You Wanted to Have a Permanent War
by Robert Higgs
The Independent Institute
June 12, 2003
http://www.independent.org/tii/news/030612Higgs.html
I'll concede that having a permanent war might seem an odd thing to want, but let's put aside the "why" question for the time being, accepting that you wouldn't want it unless you stood to gain something important from it. If, however, for reasons you found adequate, you did want to have a permanent war, what would you need in order to make such a policy viable in a democratic society such as the United States?
First, you would need that society to have a dominant ideology--a widely shared belief system about social and political relations--within which having a permanent war seems to be a desirable policy, given the ideology's own content and the pertinent facts accepted by its adherents. Something like American jingo-patriotism cum anti-communism might turn the trick. It worked pretty well during the nearly half century of the Cold War. The beauty of anti-communism as a covering ideology was that it could serve to justify a wide variety of politically expedient actions both here and abroad. The Commies, you'll recall, were everywhere: not just in Moscow and Sevastopol, but maybe in Minneapolis and San Francisco. We had to stay alert; we could never let down our guard, anywhere.
Second, you would need periodic crises, because without them the public becomes complaisant, unafraid, and hence unwilling to bear the heavy burdens that they must bear if the government is to carry on a permanent war. As Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Harry Truman in 1947 at the outset of the Cold War, gaining public support for a perpetual global campaign requires that the government "scare hell out of the American people." Each crisis piques the people's insecurities and renders them once again disposed to pay the designated price, whether it takes the form of their treasure, their liberties, or their young men's blood. Something like the (alleged) missile gap, the (alleged) Gulf of Tonkin attacks on U.S. naval vessels, or the (actual!) hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran will do nicely, at least for a while. Crises by their very nature eventually recede, and new ones must come along--or be made to come along--to serve the current need.
Third, you would need some politically powerful groups whose members stand to gain substantially from a permanent war in terms of achieving their urgent personal and group objectives. Call me crass, but I've noticed that few people will stay engaged for long unless there's "something in it for them."
During the Cold War, the conglomeration of personally interested parties consisted of those who form the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC). The generals and admirals thrived by commanding a large armed force sustained by a lavish budget. The big defense contractors enjoyed ample returns at minimal risk (because they could expect that should they screw up too royally, a bailout would be forthcoming). Members of Congress who belonged to the military oversight and appropriations committees could parlay their positions into campaign contributions and various sorts of income in kind. Presiding over the entire complex, of course, the president, his National Security Council, and their many subordinates, advisers, consultants, and hangers-on enjoyed the political advantages associated with control of a great nation's diplomatic and military affairs--not to speak of the sheer joy that certain people get from wielding or influencing great power. No conspiracy here, of course, just a lot of people fitting into their niches, doing well while proclaiming that they were doing good (recall the ideology and the crisis elements). All seeking only to serve the common public interest. Absolutely.
The foregoing observations have been widely accepted by several generations of students of the Cold War. Yet, now, you may protest, the Cold War is over, the USSR nonexistent, the menace of communism kaput. Under post-Cold War conditions, how can we have a permanent war? Well, all we need to do is to replace the missing piece.
If the ideology of anti-communism can no longer serve to justify a permanent war, let us put in its place the overarching rationale of a "war on terrorism." In fact, this substitution of what President George W. Bush repeatedly calls "a new kind of war" amounts to an improvement for the leading actors, because whereas the Cold War could not be sustained once the USSR had imploded and international communism had toppled into the dust bin of history, a war on terrorism, with all its associated benefits, can go on forever. After all, so long as the president says that he has intelligence information to the effect that "they" are still out there conspiring to kill us all, who are we to dispute that the threat exists and must be met? The smoke had scarcely cleared at Ground Zero when vice-president Dick Cheney declared on October 19, 2001, that the war on terrorism "may never end. It's the new normalcy."
Just as during the Cold War hardly any American ever laid eyes on an honest-to-God Commie, although nearly everybody believed that the Commies were lurking far and wide, so now we may all suppose that anyone, anywhere might be a lethal terrorist in possession of a suitcase nuke or a jug of anthrax spores. Indeed, current airport-security measures are premised on precisely such a belief--otherwise it makes no sense to strip-search grandma at Dulles International.
Potential terrorists are "out there," no doubt, in the wonderful world of Islam, an arc that stretches from Morocco across North Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia to Malaysia, and on through Indonesia to Mindanao, not to mention London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. And that's good, because it means that U.S. leaders must bring the entire outside world into compliance with their stipulated rules of engagement for the war on terrorism. It's a fine thing to dominate the world, an even finer thing to do so righteously.
Better yet, the potential omnipresence of the terrorists justifies U.S. leaders in their efforts to supercharge the surveillance-and-police state here at home, with the USA PATRIOT Act, the revival of the FBI's COINTELPRO activities, and all the rest. Adios Bill of Rights. The merest babe understands that these new powers will be turned to other political purposes that have nothing whatever to do with terrorism. Indeed, they have been already. As the New York Times reported on May 5, 2003, "the Justice Department has begun using its expanded counterterrorism powers to seize millions of dollars from foreign banks that do business in the United States" and "most of the seizures have involved fraud and money-laundering investigations unrelated to terrorism."
The war-on-terrorism rationale has proved congenial to the American public, who have swallowed bogus government assurances that the so-called war is making them more secure. Much of this acceptance springs, no doubt, from the shock that many Americans experienced when the terrorist attacks of September 11 proved so devastating. Ever alert, the president's national security adviser Condoleeza Rice asked the National Security Council immediately afterward "to think seriously about 'how do you capitalize on these opportunities' to fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world in the wake of September 11." The president's most powerful and influential subordinates--Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and their coterie--then set in motion a series of actions (and a flood of disinformation) to seize the day, measures that culminated in the military invasion and conquest first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq, among many other things. Public opinion polls continue to show exceptionally high approval ratings for "the job the president is doing," so at the White House everyone is merry indeed.
Likewise, the military component of the MICC has entered into fat city. During the fiscal year 2000, before George Bush had taken office, Department of Defense outlays amounted to $281 billion. Just four years later, assuming that Congress gives the president what he has requested for fiscal year 2004, the department's budget will be at least $399 billion--an increase of 42 percent. No wonder the generals and admirals are dancing in the corridors at the Pentagon: all this loot and wartime citations and promotions to boot!
The flush times for the officer corps have spilled over handsomely onto the big arms contractors, whose share prices have been bucking the trend of the continuing stock-market meltdown nicely during the past couple years. With only a single exception, all the major weapons systems have survived funding threats, and their manufacturers can look forward to decades of well-paid repose as they supply models B, C, D, and so forth, as well as all the remunerative maintenance and repairs, operational training, software upgrades, and related goods and services for their Cold War-type weaponry in search of an suitable enemy. In the immortal words of Boeing vice-president Harry Stonecipher, "the purse is now open." As the Wall Street Journal reported, "The antiterror campaign is making for some remarkably flush times for the military, and the need for hard choices on weapons systems has all but evaporated."
Congress savors this situation, too. In the current circumstances, the members can more easily use spending on guns to grease their own reelection skids. "In a bipartisan voice," reported the New York Times, "lawmakers on Capitol Hill are telling the Pentagon that they want to increase spending on conventional big-ticket weapons programs, particularly warships and planes." Moreover, many members continue to maneuver to stop or delay base closures that might save the Pentagon billions of dollars in expenses that even the generals regard as pointless.
Amid the all-around rejoicing, however, the power elite appreciate that nearly two years have elapsed since September 11, 2001, and the public's panic has begun to subside. That won't do. Accordingly, on June 9 the government released a report that there is a "high probability" of an al-Qaida attack with a weapon of mass destruction in the next two years. If no such attack should eventuate, of course, then the authorities will have to release another such terrifying report at the appropriate time. Got to keep people on their toes--"vigilant," as the Homeland Security czar likes to say.
So there you have it: the war on terrorism--the new permanent war--is a winner. The president loves it. The military brass loves it. The bigwigs at Boeing and Lockheed love it. Members of Congress love it. The public loves it. We all love it.
Except, perhaps, that odd citizen who wonders whether, all things considered, having a permanent war is truly a good idea for the beleaguered U.S. economy and for the liberties of the American people.
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and its Center on Peace & Liberty and editor of its scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He is also the author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and the editor of Arms, Politics and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism.
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War intelligence and Democrats' risky responses
Candidates already divided on Iraq revive a clash that could sway '04 vote.
By Liz Marlantes
Christian Science Monitor
June 12, 2003
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0612/p02s01-uspo.html
WASHINGTON - Questions surrounding the administration's handling of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war are ripping through the Democratic presidential campaign, reviving the party's painful debate over the war itself - and further widening the gap between pro- and antiwar candidates.
With the Senate holding hearings on whether the administration misrepresented intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs - and as the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq drags on with no significant discoveries - antiwar Democrats are seizing on the issue to challenge President Bush's credibility. Sen. Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, is accusing the president of "a pattern of deception and deceit," while former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has taken to asking: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
The issue is creating an awkward situation for Democrats who supported the war, forcing them to pass on an opportunity to attack Mr. Bush, or to imply that they may have been misled, too. Rep. Dick Gephardt, for example, has essentially defended the administration's representation of the threat, telling CBS News: "There is a long line of evidence, going back to the early '90s, that Saddam Hussein had lots of weapons of mass destruction."
The danger of looking foolish
But while antiwar Democrats may gain some momentum among liberal voters on the issue, they run the risk of looking foolish if weapons eventually turn up.
"It's a potentially big boon for [antiwar candidates like] Dean and Graham, but also one rife with land mines," says independent pollster John Zogby. "Dean's antiwar stance and Graham's issue of how good is our intelligence raise some serious issues for Democrats," he says. But "if they go way out on a limb, and then weapons are found, that could be terribly embarrassing."
The ongoing potency of the Iraq debate on the Democratic campaign trail some two months after the fall of Baghdad is not surprising, given how deeply it divided the party, and the various problems that US troops have encountered in the wake of the war. But many antiwar Democrats believe the weapons issue could have an even bigger impact than the war itself, by casting doubt on administration's truthfulness.
"This turns the presidential race upside down," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, a strong opponent of the war, who has introduced a resolution in the House demanding the administration turn over intelligence to support its claims. Not only does it indicate "a carefully crafted policy of misinformation" on the part of the Bush administration, he says, but the Democratic Party is also confronted with "major candidates who supported a war that was not based on truth."
Probing a credibility question
Kucinich has largely hung his candidacy on his antiwar stance - and is the most dovish Democrat in the field. He believes that the war in Iraq will continue to resonate throughout the 2004 campaign, saying it "changed the direction of this country," both ideologically and financially.
Other candidates are downplaying their antiwar stances, but portraying the weapons issue as the gravest example of a series of White House deceptions. In particular, Senator Graham, who voted against the war resolution because he felt it would distract from the war on terror, has challenged the administration's honesty on everything from energy to economic policy.
"Lying to the American public is not something you should play around with," says Karl Struble, a strategist for Graham. "It's one thing to misrepresent a tax cut; it's another to put American lives in harm's way."
Still, Mr. Struble acknowledges that while the issue may resonate with liberals, it has not taken hold with the public. Polls show most Americans do not see weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for war - and do not believe the administration deliberately misled them. Democratic voters have "shifted on the war," says Mr. Zogby: A majority in Iowa and New Hampshire now say that pro-war candidates are more credible.
But as Democrats probe the issue, Struble says it may grow. "The question is, will the media be responsible and report it?"
--------
POWELL BLAMED FOR 'MISTAKE' IN MY LAI MASSACRE
by Joe Shea
American Reporter - Los Angeles, Calif.
Vol. 9, No. 2116
June 12, 2003
An A.R. Exclusive
http://www.american-reporter.com/2116/113.html
LOS ANGELES, Calif., March 13, 2003 -- A former White House covert operations official has told The American Reporter that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, then a military aide to the U.S. Army command staff in Vietnam, misunderstood a general's instructions and mistakenly ordered the notorious March 16, 1968, My Lai massacre, and successfully covered up his error until now. The former official's allegations concerning the events, whose 35th anniversary occurs on Sunday, could not immediately be confirmed.
"He [Powell] made a stupid mistake," said the official, now a retired and wealthy civilian, in a wide-ranging three-hour interview last week.
A State Dept. spokesman, Jo-Anne Prokopowicz, said she would forward questions about Powell's possible role to officials at the Dept. of State. "I don't even know if he was in Vietnam at that time," she said. "We don't usually comment on military matters." News reports have placed Powell in Vietnam no earlier than June 27, 1968, about two months after the massacre occurred.
The source, who said he would deny the information if he was named in this story because he has suffered several heart attacks and might not survive the controversy his charges could create, said that he had been asked by then-President Richard Nixon to see if the sentence received by Lt. William "Rusty" Calley for the Vietnam War massacre could be reduced.
In the course of that investigation, the source said, Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to July 1968, told him that Powell had mistaken his orders to subdue the village as an order to wipe out its inhabitants, and relayed the mistaken order through an Army major to Calley, who was court-martialed and sent to jail for murder.
He was released after serving only part of his sentence as the result of his findings, the source said. Westmoreland left Vietnam to become Army Chief of Staff just four months after the incident and before Calley was court-martialed. The source said he did not talk with Powell about the incident, but did talk with the major through whom the orders were relayed to Calley.
According to various reports, some 347 unarmed men, women and children were wiped out in the village, which was actually named Son My. Several officers were charged with covering up the incident, and five were court-martialed. Lt. Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 22 unarmed civilians. His sentence was reduced to 10 years, and in 1974 a Federal court judge reversed the conviction and freed Calley.
Powell, a major and deputy assistant chief of staff for operations G-3 at Americal Division headqurters in Chu Lai, was assigned eight months later to investigate rumors of the the incident and wrote a controversial 1969 official report that cleared American soldiers of any serious wrongdoing.
After the incident became public in the Fall of 1969, a friendly biographical account says, "Powell sided with the American Division General during the court martial proceedings" against Calley. Powell has been heavily criticized in later years for not using his position on the command staff to prevent the massacre at the time it occurred. The major through whom Gen. Westmoreland allegedly relayed the order is dead, and the source said many but not all of those who had firsthand knowledge of Powell's role are no longer living.
The source said he is a liberal Democrat who was a CIA officer for many years before accepting a military commission from President Reagan. He also was a military liaison to Saudi Arabia's royal family and said he was responsible for the destruction of a satellite-bearing Russian rocket on a launch pad in Russia, and was shot during that operation.
The source, a high-ranking retired military officer who said he had served Presidents Nixon and Reagan, said an unexpurgated transcript of the secret proceedings of a military tribunal that convicted Calley would reveal Powell's role. The transcripts remain classified, he said.
Powell's role in the My Lai massacre has been the subject of many articles over the years, but until now there has been no suggestion made that he was responsible for ordering it. Powell was unavailable for comment, but in an autobiography said he did not learn of the incident until two years after it occurred.
"Senior officers who were in Vietnam at the time are quietly skeptical of [Powell's] account," Newsweek reported on Sept. 11, 1995. "They point out that word of the massacre - which did not become public until November 1969 - quickly spread through the region, and to the Americal Division's headquarters."
The magazine, in a lengthy article, said Powell never talked to the soldier who first reported the incident to command staff, and his claim that he didn't know of the incident until after it became public is at odds with his report's dismissal of rumors about the massacre.
Calley was convicted in a court-martial in Septermber 1969, before the incident became public, when a soldier named Tom Glen wrote to Westmoreland's successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, and told him American soldiers in the field were killing Vietnamese civilians. Powell's report failed to confirm that allegation.
Powell was implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair as the official who provided information to the National Security Council about Iran's request for missiles in a scheme to trade them for the release of hostages taken at U.S. Embassy in Teheran in 1979. He was also criticized for failing to send an American rescue mission to help U.S. soldiers pinned down in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the events pictured in the film "Black Hawk Down."
At the same time, he has served four U.S. Presidents, successfully directed the 1991 Gulf War as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is a frequently-mentioned possible black candidate for the nation's highest office. In 1999, he was endorsed in advance of any declaration of his candidacy by this newspaper in the event he should seek the presidency in 2000. He later decided not to run, citing family obligations.
-
Powell, of course, is the current administration's knight in shining armor, the trusted figure who commands the respect even of the European leaders who cannot stomach Bush. But give a listen to Peter W. Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and now professor of national-security studies at the National War College in Washington, D.C.:
"The Kurds have not forgotten that Secretary of State Colin Powell was then the national security adviser who orchestrated Ronald Reagan's decision to give Hussein a pass for gassing the Kurds."
http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2002/1215/coverstory_entire.htm
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Suicide bombers' being trained in Afghanistan
Ireland Online - online.ie
12 Jun 2003
http://www.online.ie/viewer.adp?article=2030828
Suicide bombers are being trained to carry out attacks on foreign troops deployed in Afghanistan, the Interior Minister said today.
Ali Ahmad Jalali issued the warning just days after four German peacekeepers were killed by a man who crashed a taxi packed with explosives into their bus. Twenty-nine German peacekeepers were wounded.
"There are efforts underway to train suicide bombers in order to be used in Afghanistan against foreign troops," Jalali said in Kabul. He gave no details of who was training them, or where.
Germany's defence minister said yesterday that Saturday's attack on the bus was carried out by a member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
Peter Struck said the bomber also links to renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Afghanistan's former Taliban regime - three groups staunchly opposed to Afghanistan's new government and President Hamid Karzai.
About 5,000 international peacekeepers have been deployed in Kabul since December 2001 to bolster security in the capital.
Large numbers of foreign aid workers, helping Afghanistan rebuild after nearly a quarter of a century of war, are also based in the city.
Another 11,500 coalition troops, most of them Americans, are in the country to hunt down fighters still loyal to the Taliban and their allies.
-------- arms sales
US accuses British over arms deal bribery bid
Rob Evans and Ian Traynor in Prague
Thursday June 12, 2003
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,975645,00.html
The US has accused Britain's biggest weapons company, BAE Systems, and its British government sponsor of "corrupt practice" over a Czech arms deal, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.
The American government made the accusation after receiving reports from the CIA and rival firms. A Guardian investigation in Prague has obtained first-hand evidence confirming bribery attempts on behalf of the BAE deal.
The bribery of foreigners is now a criminal offence under British law. However, the Ministry of Defence's permanent secretary, Sir Kevin Tebbit, to whom Washington's accusations were made personally last year, failed to call in the police to investigate the allegations.
Instead, Sir Kevin claimed in a letter to the US state department assistant secretary, Anthony Wayne, that the complaint had been investigated and was groundless. The MoD told the Guardian this week that the allegation "has never been substantiated by any evidence whatsoever".
In Prague, the allegations are well-documented. The bribery attempts to promote the BAE deal were confirmed by the Czech police, although BAE flatly denies authorising any such attempt.
Two senior Czech politicians separately claimed they were offered bribes last summer in an attempt to prevent them voting against the £1bn deal to buy Gripen fighter jets from a BAE-Saab joint venture.
Those attempts were directed at opposition politicians, but it is also claimed in Prague that larger sums of money went to people linked to politicians in the governing Social Democrat coalition. "I am convinced that money went to the Social Democrats," a senior Czech government official said.
BAE admits that it offered corporate financial favours to the head of a Czech television station which it wanted to support its campaign in 2001. British laws banning corrupt acts abroad only came into force the following year.
Prague sources say BAE Systems had a £1.5m annual lobbying budget to influence Czech opinion.
Four rival companies, two of them American, pulled out of the bidding in May 2001 in a coordinated protest against what they alleged was a rigged deal in favour of BAE.
The disclosure of the US confrontation with Britain is particularly serious because both Tony Blair and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, flew to Prague and lobbied the Czechs unsuccessfully on BAE's behalf. The deal is currently shelved.
An email obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act in the course of a major Guardian investigation into British arms sales describes the clash in July last year between Sir Kevin and Mr Wayne, a senior state department official in charge of US-foreign business deals.
After Mr Wayne made his accusations of bribery, Sir Kevin wrote rejecting them. On September 6, a commerce department official, Thomas Barlow, emailed a colleague, William Denk, telling him of Sir Kevin's "sharp response".
The letter expresses surprise at being "confronted... with repeated but unsubstantiated allegations of corrupt practice by BAE Systems in the dealings with the Czech Republic... [and that he] is satisfied that all reasonable steps have been taken to investigate US claims... [and that] unless you have any information to provide in the form of firm evidence, we need to draw a line under this subject".
The MoD could not tell the Guardian of any steps Sir Kevin took to investigate the claims. It said: "If anyone believes they have evidence to support this allegation, they should present it to the police. If MoD had received any such evidence we would certainly have reported it to the police. We have not."
BAE said: "BAE Systems did not pay bribes in the Czech Republic in order to influence any decisions in Gripen's favour. Nor did BAE Systems ever authorise or direct anyone to pay bribes to that end."
-------- australia
US marines to join war games
By CAMDEN SMITH
June 12, 2003
The Australian
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6581640%5E13569,00.html
Up to 1000 US marines are coming to Darwin for a joint defence exercise with the RAAF over the next three months.
The first marines are expected to arrive here on Sunday.
They will take part in practice bombing exercises at Delamere bombing range, 200km south-west of Katherine.
The 1000-strong contingent is part of Marine Aircraft Group 12, based in Japan.
Major Bill Shannon, who is in Darwin preparing for the arrival of the marines, said their presence in Australia coincided with Operation Southern Frontier.
He said the marines would fly bombing missions over Dellamere in their FA-18 Hornets.
They will be stationed at RAAF Darwin and about 300 officers will be rotated between Australia and Japan on a monthly basis.
Major Shannon said the exercise was unrelated to speculation of an increased US military presence in Australia, including the establishment of bases.
He said there would not be the type of sophisticated technology used in America's recent war against Iraq.
``We'll mainly be doing a run to Delamere range expending ordinance,'' Major Shannon said.
``The focus is really on squadron training.
``There's nothing like what you would have seen or heard in the war in Iraq. We're not shooting those high-speed type bombs.''
Meanwhile, Chief Minister Clare Martin has written to Prime Minister John Howard asking the Federal Government consult with the Territory if it receives a formal request from the United States to establish a defence base in the Territory.
The Government has yet to receive a response from the Prime Minister.
Northern Territory News
-------- britain
UK troops caught unawares by war
(BBC)
Thursday, 12 June, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2941836.stm
When the United States gave the order to go in the Iraq war, the UK was caught on the hop - military planners had expected an extra day's preparation before invading, a landmark BBC series can reveal.
Soldiers in gas masks Fears of a biological or chemical threat proved unfounded It was a sight that marked the first day of the war, and that day alone: correspondents in gasmasks reporting live from desert, their voices muffled, their faces hidden.
Throughout that day in northern Kuwait, shouts of "gas gas gas" rang out as the Iraqis fired in retaliation for an attempted strike on Saddam Hussein. The coalition forces - and the journalists embedded with them - proved an easy target, bunched as they were on the border.
The war had started a day early, and the troops had not had time to move into position. This left them vulnerable to attack, particularly had Saddam ordered a chemical, biological or nuclear strike as feared.
The day before, 3,000 miles away in an underground command bunker at the Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, Middlesex, military planners received the revised order from Qatar. No reason was given by the Americans. That night came the so-called surgical strike against Saddam.
Unique insight
This order - and the British military's scramble to revise its plans - is documented in Fighting the War, a series for which the BBC was granted unparalleled access to troops, politicians and military planners.
This level of contact was granted on condition that material gathered not be broadcast until after the war. The resulting seven-part series, made from 400 hours of footage, provides a unique behind-the-scene account of how the war was fought.
Events are still familiar in people's minds - what this series does is bring home what's going on underneath Simon Ford co-executive producer
It took executive producer Neil Grant more than two years to negotiate access for his team of 31 journalists and camera operators, two-thirds of whom were embedded.
"The series is modelled on one from the 1990s - In Defence of the Realm - which went inside the MoD. I began discussions in earnest for this one in 2000 without knowing when or where there might be a war.
"Eventually we were granted access not only to the armed forces, but for the first time to command control in Middlesex and to the Secretary of Defence, Geoff Hoon."
Thus when an RAF crew was dispatched on an ill-fated mission, each facet of the incident is recounted: from take-off to when the alarm is first raised; from commanders establishing that the men have been shot down by a Patriot missile, to Mr Hoon mourning those killed by friendly fire.
Royal Marines behind flames Soldiers spoke candidly about their experiences on camera And prophetic words are spoken by Lieutenant Colonel Nick Anthony, the commander of the Royal Marine's 539 Assault Squadron, on day one of the war.
"Do not underestimate the enemy. We've heard lots of good things about how their morale is low and they won't fight. But there are some out there who will fight. If you're like me, and your luck is like mine, you'll be the one who finds them."
Indeed his men did encounter fierce resistance, in an ambush on the Faw Peninsula recounted later in the series.
Lighter moments are to be had, notably the sight of correspondents struggling to put up tents in the desert, and soldiers using toy tanks to practice how to spot friendly forces.
Simon Ford, the co-executive producer, hopes Fighting the War will provide a deeper understanding of the conflict.
"Events are still familiar in people's minds - they remember the UN resolutions, the failure to take Basra, the statue falling in Baghdad. What this series does is bring home what's going on underneath. If we waited a year to look back at the war, people will have forgotten these landmark moments."
----
Irish take Britain to The Hague over nuclear plant
Story by Paul Gallagher
REUTERS NETHERLANDS:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21152/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
AMSTERDAM - Ireland mounted a fresh bid this week to force Britain to shut down a controversial nuclear fuel manufacturing plant by taking its concerns about pollution to an international arbitration tribunal in The Hague.
Ireland accuses Britain of breaching a global maritime convention by building the Sellafield MOX plant on England's northwest coast in the 1990s and says it is concerned about radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea.
Ireland has asked a panel of five international arbiters at the Permanent Court of Arbitration to decide if Britain breached the United Nation's Law of the Sea Convention when it decided to build the plant. The panel will hear both sides this month.
"The case was taken when the strongly held objections of the Irish government to the commissioning of this plant, conveyed many times and over many years to the United Kingdom, were disregarded," Irish Environment Minister Martin Cullen said.
Britain emphatically rejected the Irish claim that it had breached the convention and said the European Commission had ruled the plant did not pose an environmental threat to Ireland.
"The fact is that the Sellafield MOX plant does not generate any significant radioactive waste and has virtually no impact on radioactive discharges," British Energy Minister Brian Wilson said, adding that the Irish case had no basis in fact or law.
State-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) started operating the plant after seeing off a series of legal challenges from the Irish government and environmental groups. Britain says the plant meets the highest international safety standards.
The latest Irish legal move is seen as part of a long-term strategy to put pressure on London to close the plant, which mixes plutonium with uranium oxides to produce MOX (mixed oxide) for use in nuclear reactors.
The arbitration proceedings are the second international legal action taken by Ireland over Sellafield in recent months.
Last year Dublin asked the Permanent Court of Arbitration for access to information about the plant's viability that Britain says is commercially sensitive. Britain is obliged under international law to ensure the plant is commercially viable.
A ruling in that case is expected later this year.
-------- business
Army Backtracks on Halliburton Contract
Thu Jun 12
By LARRY MARGASAK,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&ncid=536&e=8&u=/ap/20030612/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/halliburton_contract
WASHINGTON - Halliburton's no-bid work to revive Iraq's oil industry is likely to last longer than originally estimated, the Army has acknowledged, and the cost to the government has more than doubled in the past month.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this week backed off estimates that a fully competitive replacement contract would be awarded by August.
There will be no second contract if the oil restoration mission is completed before another company can take over, or if the Iraqis make their own arrangements for additional help, the Corps said.
"We're not going to try to discuss a specific timetable," a Corps spokesman, Lt. Col. Eugene Pawlik, said. Asked about the Corps' earlier August estimate, Pawlik said, "I would be very surprised if that would be in the timetable, with all the requirements that are out there."
While the Army delays its decision, the government cost of the noncompetitive work awarded to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company is ballooning. The total as of last week was $184.7 million, up from $76.7 million a month ago, shortly after the assigned work expanded significantly.
Several members of Congress have invoked Cheney's name to raise the hint of favoritism in a contract originally described as a bridge between emergency repair and longer-term assistance to restore full oil production.
Cheney's office repeatedly has said he had no role in the award, which was given to Halliburton's KBR subsidiary. Cheney left the company in August 2000.
Halliburton's spokeswoman Wendy Hall said, "KBR is proud to assist with the restoration of Iraq's oil infrastructure, which is the fuel for the country's economic recovery."
The Houston firm's oil industry assistance in Iraq is only part of the more than $600 million in military work received by Halliburton in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the Army's sole provider of troop support services, KBR has received work orders totaling more than $500 million under a 10-year contract with no spending ceiling.
Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., the chief House critic of the Halliburton oil contract, reminded the Corps in a letter last week that the Army expected to advertise for bids by the spring or early summer.
Writing to Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers, the Corps commander, Waxman asked whether the Corps "has done an about-face and is poised to give additional benefits to Halliburton under its no-bid contract."
Waxman cited a Dow Jones news story in which Gary Loew, planning director for the Corps oil restoration project, said there might not be time to award a second contract and still meet deadlines for restoring the industry.
Flowers responded that the Corps was moving ahead with plans for a replacement contract "if needed."
He also said the Iraqis had the choice of obtaining services elsewhere. "The competitively awarded contracts will be one of the many sources available to the Iraqi management team; the Iraqis will not be required to make use of the contracts," Flowers said.
Flowers contended KBR was the only practical choice when, in February, the Corps was given the prewar contingency mission of keeping the Iraq oil industry afloat after fighting ended.
"With only weeks to be prepared to execute, full and open competition was not feasible," Flowers said.
Halliburton shares fell 24 cents to close at $24.63 on the New York Stock Exchange.
On the Net:
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: http://www.usace.army.mil
Halliburton: http://www.halliburton.com/
-------- iran
Clashes In Iran Intensify
By Ali Akbar Dareini
Associated Press
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47257-2003Jun11?language=printer
TEHRAN, June 11 -- Riot police and hard-line vigilantes clashed with teenage demonstrators who denounced the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as protests in Iran grew in intensity today.
Dozens of hard-liners riding motorbikes chased down about 300 protesters, beating them with sticks in the streets outside a Tehran University dormitory. The protesters chanted "Death to Khamenei" and threw stones at police, who threw them back.
About 200 students in the dormitory compound threw stones and molotov cocktails at the police after officers joined the vigilantes in attacking the protesters. Several people were seen being carried away with head injuries.
The protests began peacefully Tuesday when a small student gathering against privatization of universities turned into the largest demonstration against Iran's political leadership since November. Then, students protested a death sentence imposed on Hashem Aghajari, a history professor at a Tehran teachers college who questioned the need to obey the Islamic clerics' every edict.
Police had arrested about 80 protesters before the clashes broke out. In Iran, criticism of Khamenei is punished by jail, and hard-liners say Khamenei's powers are unlimited and cannot be questioned.
Before the clashes broke out today, security officials warned that further demonstrations against the political leadership would not be tolerated.
"These people have been provoked by extremists inside the country and elements outside the country to chant illegal slogans," state-run television quoted Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi as saying.
He was apparently referring to satellite channels owned by Iranian opposition groups in exile that have encouraged Iranians to rise up against the ruling clerics. Although satellite dishes are officially banned, many Iranians still use them.
The protesters Tuesday night shouted slogans against the political and religious leadership.
"The clerical regime is nearing its end!" the demonstrators chanted. "Vigilantes commit crimes, the leader supports them."
In an unusual twist, demonstrators also called for the resignation of Mohammad Khatami, the popularly elected reformist president, accusing him of not introducing enough reforms.
-------- iraq
U.S. Ready to Begin Rebuilding Iraq Army
By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50048-2003Jun12?language=printer
WASHINGTON - The task of building a new Iraqi military will get under way in the next few weeks at selected training and recruiting sites, the American administrator of Iraq said Thursday.
Speaking over a satellite video hookup from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer said the project will serve not only to restore a necessary element of Iraq's long-term security but also address the short-term problem of hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers being without work since the war.
Unemployment more broadly is a "tremendous problem" in postwar Iraq, Bremer said, with far more than half the working-age population jobless. He said a recently announced $100 million emergency construction program was the most efficient way of getting people back to work quickly.
"This is where our greatest challenge lies, and we must now create jobs for Iraqis," Bremer said in a 30-minute question-and-answer session with reporters at the Pentagon. He made the same point earlier Thursday in a similar session with members of the House Armed Services Committee.
"This economy was flat on its back before the war and it's in even worse shape now," he told committee members.
The problem for members of Iraq's former conscript army, which Bremer disbanded along with the better-trained Republican Guard and other elements of the Iraqi military, is especially acute.
Bremer said there were about 375,000 Iraqi conscript soldiers before the war. Some number of those who survived will undergo U.S. training, probably starting in July, and a portion of those will be selected to provide security at facilities currently being guarded by U.S. troops, he said.
Sites for military training and recruiting have been identified, and former Iraq soldiers will be hired to clear and prepare them for use, Bremer said in his remarks to the House committee.
"So we plan to move out rather smartly in trying to stand up this new Iraqi army," he said.
Many of the questions Bremer took from the Armed Services Committee members focused on the security problems facing U.S. troops and the prospects for turning Iraq over to the Iraqis.
Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the ranking Democrat on the panel, said he is deeply troubled by the security situation.
"Not a day goes by when one of our soldiers isn't killed, and we need a plan for security in Iraq, in part to protect our troops but also to bring stability to the Iraqi people," Skelton said. He demanded the administration spell out the size and duration of the U.S. troop commitment there.
"Providing security is a long-term commitment; we know that," Skelton said. "We need a plan for how many U.S. troops will be needed - how many months, how many years to come."
Bremer told Pentagon reporters there is no way to know how long the United States will have to remain involved in Iraq's reconstruction. The key, he said, is getting to the point where a new Iraqi constitution is written and ratified and national elections are held.
"My guess is that it's going to be a substantial amount of time but whether that's in maybe months or years, it would depend on developments. I don't think we should set any artificial deadlines," he said.
Bremer made these other points:
- It probably is too early to hold a national reconciliation conference. "My impression in conversations I've had so far is that the Iraqis are simply still too understandably emotionally delighted to be rid of Saddam and the Baathists that they may not yet be ready to undertake that step."
- The nature of the economic system that Iraq establishes will be entirely up to the Iraqis. "If they choose socialism, that will be their business. My guess is that's not going to happen."
- The failure so far to capture or otherwise account for Saddam Hussein has hurt the U.S. occupation effort. "I think it does make a difference because it allows the Baathists to go around in the bazaars and in the villages, which they are doing, saying Saddam is alive and he's going to come back," he said. "The effect of that is to make it more difficult for people who are afraid of the Baathists - and that's just about everybody - ... to come forward and cooperate with us."
----
A Soldier's Business Deal Aims to Aid Baghdad Security
Keeping Shops Open And Criminals Away
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46701-2003Jun11?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 11 -- In the end, it was a simple promise, sealed with a handshake between a feisty Iraqi merchant and an equally spirited U.S. Army sergeant, that brought part of Palestine Street back to life at night.
For the past three weeks, 1st Sgt. Benjamin Moore and three fellow soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division had been trying to persuade shopkeepers in Baghdad's Mustansiriya neighborhood to stay open after sunset, figuring that commercial activity would help to deter the criminals who had been trolling the streets at night.
But the merchants kept balking. "Everyone is too scared" to brave the dark, said Ikram Obeidi, co-owner of the Shamender Internet Cafe, located in a large second-floor room in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood.
So late last week, Moore struck a deal with Obeidi. "If you remain open at night," he said, "I'll be there to protect you."
She stayed. He returned. They ate chocolate cake together and argued about whether crime was worse in Atlanta or Baghdad. And now, several shops in the neighborhood are open after nightfall.
After weeks of looting and unchecked criminal activity, the U.S. effort to improve security in Baghdad has helped bring signs of normality to this city of 5 million people. As the Americans deploy thousands more soldiers and assign many of them to neighborhood patrols, merchants not only are keeping their doors open longer, they also feel confident enough to stack televisions, air conditioners and other high-priced goods on the sidewalk. Cars zip around until the 11 p.m. curfew imposed by the U.S. military. Parents have begun to let their children walk to school in the daytime.
Nobody is keeping crime statistics in postwar Iraq, but Iraqi police and U.S. officials maintain that security has improved. Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who is in charge of rebuilding Baghdad's police force, said there has been a "substantial improvement" over the past few weeks.
The U.S.-led occupation authority has also made significant headway in restoring other basic services in the city. A decision by U.S. officials to truck in fuel from neighboring countries has shortened lines for gasoline, which stretched for miles two weeks ago but are down to only a few cars in many places. Electricity now is being supplied to most of the city for an average of 20 hours a day, the same as before the war, according to U.S. officials.
Conditions in Baghdad are "dramatically better," L. Paul Bremer III, the top U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, said in an interview. "I'd be the last to say that we've succeeded. But we have made a lot of progress. The trash is getting picked up. More police are out on the streets. There has been an explosion of retail activity."
Nevertheless, many Iraqis remain deeply fearful about crime. U.S. officials acknowledge that the number of daily carjackings and robberies is almost certainly higher than it was before the war, when a fear of lengthy prison sentences for minor infractions served as a major deterrent. But Iraqis also maintain that kidnapping, rape, murder and many other serious offenses are on the rise, although Kerik and other U.S. officials said they had no evidence to support those claims.
"Every day we hear reports of someone who was kidnapped or who had their car stolen," said Mohammed Hussein, the owner of an electronics shop off Palestine Street. "I know there are more soldiers here, but people are still very scared."
For weeks, those sentiments had bedeviled Moore, the 3rd Infantry sergeant. Assigned to patrol the Mustansiriya neighborhood in an M-113 armored personnel carrier, he and his men were unable to persuade residents to resume their old routines.
"There aren't enough soldiers," said Ali Zaman, the owner of a market near Obeidi's Internet cafe. "If they were here all the time, if we could see them regularly, then we'd feel safe."
Moore knew he did not have enough soldiers to stake out every corner. A more effective solution, he reasoned, would be for residents and merchants to reclaim the streets at night. "They need to show the thieves they're not afraid of them," he said.
Whenever he asked people to heed his advice, he initially received polite responses but little action. "Nobody wanted to be the first," he said.
By the time he entered the Internet cafe on Thursday, he did not even bother to broach the subject with Obeidi. All he wanted was to purchase some credits for a portable satellite phone his men were using to call their families in Georgia.
Because local telephone lines were down and she had no way to connect her 15 computers to the Internet, Obeidi turned her cafe into a glorified phone booth. Workers recently installed a large antenna on the roof that allows her to offer international calls at the cost of about $1 a minute.
It has been immensely popular. With few other ways to contact relatives and friends outside Iraq, a steady procession of nearby residents has dropped in to make calls.
Discovering that Obeidi spoke fluent English, Moore decided to put in a plug for the U.S. military's drive to get firearms off the street. Then, on a lark, he asked: "So, why do you all keep your shops closed at night?"
"We're afraid," said Obeidi, 40, who studied electrical engineering and has traveled in Europe. "We're not safe. You Army people aren't on the street."
Moore, 37, a black Muslim from Waycross, Ga., bristled. "We're doing a lot of patrols now," he protested. "We're trying to tell the Iraqi people: 'Don't close your shops. Don't be afraid of the thieves.' "
"I don't want to be a victim," Obeidi shot back.
"If you left your shop open after 8 p.m., I guarantee you the next night others would open, too," he said.
"You have to show us security first," she retorted. "I'm afraid to send my children to school. I'm afraid they will get kidnapped."
"We have those same problems in America, too," Moore said.
Obeidi laughed. "When Saddam Hussein was here, we didn't have these problems," she said.
"Oh, come on!" Moore chortled. "Don't give me that. I'm sure people were getting robbed when the Saddam regime was here."
"You need to show more power, even if it's not true," she told Moore. "Show that you will kill people, you will hang them. The criminals will be afraid. Fear is useful."
After arguing with her for 15 minutes, he threw up his hands. "Let's make a deal," he groaned. "If you stay open tonight, and you convince some of the other shops here to stay open too, I'll come by on patrol," he said.
He returned at 8 p.m., as the setting sun cast an apricot glow over Palestine Street and merchants across the street were bolting their doors. Obeidi was staying open, as were a barber, a fruit vendor and a used-car salesman on her block.
As Moore drove up in his M-113, accompanied by three other soldiers from the 3rd Infantry and three from the 1st Armored Division, which is assuming responsibility for the neighborhood, Obeidi jumped up and clapped her hands. "Ooh," she said. "You brought the whole Army!"
But just as they were relaxing, digging into a chocolate cake Obeidi bought for the soldiers, a portly taxi driver in a traditional ankle-length tunic burst into the Internet cafe. He had seen the M-113 parked on the street and wanted help.
"My car has been stolen!" the taxi driver, Nazar Shuhail, shouted in Arabic. As Moore looked on, unable to understand what was going on, Shuhail told Obeidi that three men had climbed inside his car down the block a few minutes earlier. As soon as they were inside, one pulled out a handgun and demanded that Shuhail get out of the car, he said.
"They told me that if I didn't get out, they would kill me," he said. "I shouted, 'Help me! Help me!' But nobody helped."
After Obeidi translated the story, Moore paused to consider his options. There was no way to give chase in his M-113. He eventually sent a few soldiers to get on the radio and ask other patrols in the vicinity to be on the lookout for Shuhail's 1982 Toyota. But he did not hold out much hope the car would be located.
As Shuhail waited outside the cafe, he fumed. He has eight children and three wives. He had been a supervisor at a government factory that manufactured tents for the army. With the factory closed after the war, he turned his car into a taxi to make money to feed his family.
"If the Americans leave, only then will peace come," he said angrily. "They are the reason for this. They opened the door to thieves. We used to have only one criminal -- Saddam. Now every Iraqi is a criminal."
After Shuhail departed in a huff and the last traces of light disappeared from the sky, Obeidi paced the cafe, waiting for customers. None arrived.
"Everyone still is scared," she said. "Nobody is walking along the street as they used to."
Nevertheless, she promised to stay open late the following night -- and those after that -- even if Moore was not there to stand guard. "The customers will come soon," she said. "We have to start somewhere."
At 9:30, after more conversation and sweets, Moore and his men drove off in their M-113. As they roared away, the lights went out on the block.
Obeidi, who had been planning to stay another half-hour, hurried to close the cafe.
"The Americans have gone," she told her employees. "It's time for us to go."
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Robert Fisk Reports from Occupied Territory
By Amy Goodman,
Democracy Now!
June 12, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16154
On June 11, 2003, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman interviewed Robert Fisk, reporter with the Independent newspaper of London. He recently left Iraq where he was chronicling the rising resistance to the U.S. occupation. Ten American soldiers have been killed in ambushes across Iraq in the past 15 days including one yesterday in Baghdad who was attacked with rocket propelled grenades. Fallujah has been a hotbed of Iraqi resistance since April when U.S. troops fired into large crowds of civilians twice killing at least 18 people.
This is a rush transcript.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, can you talk more about what you found there?
ROBERT FISK: I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of an army that thought it was an army of liberation and has become an army of occupation. It's important perhaps to say - I did mention it in [a recent] article that a number of those soldiers who were attached to the 3rd infantry division who were military policeman, American ordinary cops like one from Rhode Island, for example - they had a pretty shrewd idea of what was going on. You got different kinds of behavior from the Americans. You got this very nice guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive towards people, didn't worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them candies. There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and he said, 'If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck,' and there was quite a lot of language like that as well. There were good guys as well as bad guys among the Americans as there always are in armies, but the people who I talked to, the sergeants and captains and so on - most of them acknowledge that something had gone wrong, that this was not going to be good.
One guy said to me, every time we go down to the river here - he was talking about the river area in Fallujah - it's a tributary of the Tigris - it's like Somalia down there. You always get shot at and you always get stoned, I mean, have stones thrown at them. Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me - I heard twice before in Baghdad itself, once from a British Commonwealth diplomat and once from a fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the coalition, C.P.A., the Coalition - for the moment forces or whatever it's called - Authority, the authority that's hanging on there until they can create some kind of Iraqi government - they all say that Baghdad airport now comes under nightly sniper fire from the perimeter of the runways from Iraqis. Two of them told me that every time a military aircraft comes in at night, it's fired at. In fact some of the American pilots are now going back to the old Vietnamese tactic of cork screwing down tightly on to the runways from above rather than making the normal level flight approach across open countryside because they're shot at so much. It's a coalition provisional authority I'm thinking of, the C.P.A., previously an even more long fangled name. There is a very serious problem of security.
The Americans still officially call them the remnants of Saddam or terrorists.
But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organized resistance and not just people who were in Saddam's forces, who were in the Ba'ath Party or the Saddam Fedayeen.
There was also increasing anger among the Shiite community, those who were of course most opposed to Saddam, and I think what we're actually seeing, you can get clues in Iraq, is a cross fertilization. Shiites who are disillusioned, who don't believe they have been liberated, who spent so long in Iran, they don't like the Americans anyway. Sunni Muslims who feel like they're threatened by the Shiites, former Sadaam acolytes who've lost their jobs and found that their money has stopped. Kurds who are disaffected and are beginning to have contacts, and that of course is the beginning of a real resistance movement and that's the great danger for the Americans now.
GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, whoís just come out of Iraq. There's a front page piece in The New York Times today, "GI's In Iraqi City Are Stalked By Faceless Enemies At Night,' and Michael Gordon writes about how organized the resistance is, how it seems to come alive at night and that what's clear, he says , is some attacks are premeditated, involve cooperation among small groups of fighters including a system of signaling the presence of American forces: talking about the use of red, white and blue flares when forces come and then the attacks begin.
FISK: Yes, I've heard this. I also know that in Fallujah, for example, there's a system of honking the horns of cars: when the vehicles approach, the American convoy approaches, there's one honk on the horn. When the last vehicle goes by the same spot, there's two honks on the horn, and the purpose is to work out the time element between the first hooter and the second because by that, they know how big is the convoy and whether it's small enough to be attacked. That comes from a sergeant in the military police in Fallujah taking part in this actual operation which I described to you just now, which you read out from my report.
One of the problems with the Americans I think is that the top people in the Pentagon always knew that this wasn't going to be 'human rights abuses ended,' flowers and music for the soldiers, and everyone lives happily every after and loves America. You may remember when Rumsfeld first came to Baghdad, something your president didn't dare to do in the end, he wanted to fly over in an airplane.
He made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather sinister in the big hanger at Baghdad airport. He said we still have to fight the remnants of Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq, and I thought, hang on a minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to realize I think what he was doing, he was laying the future narrative of the opposition to the Americans. I.E when the Americans get attacked, it could be first of all laid down to remnants of Saddam, as in remnants of the Taliban who seem to be moving around in Afghanistan now in battalion strength, but never mind. It could be blamed on Al Qaeda, so America was back fighting its old enemies again. This was familiar territory.
If you were to suggest that it was a resistance movement, harakat muqawama, resistance party in Arabic, that would suggest the people didn't believe they had been liberated, and of course, all good-natured peace loving people have to believe they were liberated by the Americans, not occupied by them. What you're finding for example is a whole series of blunders by Paul Bremer, the American head of the so-called coalition forces, at least coalition authority in Baghdad.
First of all, he dissolved the Iraqi Army. Well, I can't imagine an Army that better deserves to be dissolved. But that means that more than quarter of a million armed men overnight are deprived of their welfare and money. Now if you have quarter of a million armed Iraqis who suddenly don't get paid any more, and they all know each other, what are they going to do? They are going to form some kind of force which is secret, which is covered; then they will be called terrorists, but I guess they know that, and then of course they will be saying to people, why don't you come and join us.
It was very interesting that in Fallujah, the young men came out to see me from a shop just after the American searches there had ended and said some people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked me to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. I met a Shiite Muslim family in Baghdad who moved into the former home of a Saddam intelligence officer. This family had been visited three nights previously by armed men who said, you better move out of this house. It doesn't belong to you unless you want to join us. The guy in Fallujah said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him to join the resistance had weapons, showed their mukhabarat intelligence identity card and said, we're still being paid and we are proud to hold our I.D. cards for the Ba'ath Party. So, now you have to realize that Fallujah and other towns like it are very unlike Tikrit, are very much pro-Saddam. Fallujah is the site of a great munitions factory, it gave people massive employment. They all loved Saddam in the way Arabs are encouraged to love dictators or go prison to otherwise. But nonetheless, there is an embryo of a serious resistance movement now.
On top of this, you can see the measure of what I think is basically desperation. I've been writing about this in The Independent this morning in London, well, last night for this morning's paper, and Paul Bremer now asked the legal side of the coalition provisional authority to set up the machinery of Iraqi press censorship. In other words, Iraqi newspapers are going to be censored. Controlled I think is the official word they use, but that means censorship.
That is the kind of language that Saddam used. Iraqis are used to a censored press; after all, they lived with it for more than 20 years under Saddam Hussein.
Now when you question the Americans about it, first of all they deny it. Then the British half accept it; then other people involved in the coalition say well it's probably true, yes, it is true.
But the problem is the wild stories appearing in the Iraqi press. Now, of course there's no tradition of western style journalism in Iraq. There are those that say it's a good idea, no tradition for example of letting the other side have a say, checking the story out, going back on the ground and asking the other side for their version of events. It doesn't exist. It's a little bit, but not much. What you get after saying that Americans are going with Iraqi prostitutes, American troops are chasing Iraqi women, that Muslim women are being invited to marry Christian foreigners, that this is worse than it was under Saddam. I'm actually quoting from one particular newspaper called The Witness, which is a Shiite Muslim paper, basically that had its first issue the other day. Other newspapers carry reports of American beatings; and the opening of mass graves. They're not totally one sided against the Americans.
But you can see how the occupation forces, let's call them by their real name, are troubled by this kind of publication because it seems to them to provoke or incite animosity towards the liberators of Iraq, which it is not meant to do. But of course the problem is that the Imams in the mosques are saying the same thing about the Americans. Now, the last quote I read from American official said that it may be necessary to control what the Imams were saying in the mosques; well, this is preposterous. I sat on Rashid Street in Baghdad a few days ago and listened to the loud speaker carrying the sermon of the imam from within the mosque.
I think he was saying the Americans must leave immediately, now. Well, under the new rule presumably he's inciting the people to violence. What are we going to do? Arrest all the Imams in the mosques, arrest all the journalists who won't obey, close down the newspapers? I mean what Iraqi journalists need are courses in journalism from reporters who work in real democracies.
You can come along and say, look, by all means criticize the Americans and put the boot in if you want to, but make sure you get it right. And if you also do that you have to look at your own society and what is wrong in it and how Saddam ever came about. He didn't just come about because America supported Saddam which my goodness they did. But Bremer is not interested in this. What Bremer wants to do is control, control the press, control the Imams, and it doesn't work. A lot of the incidents taking place now, the violent incidents are not being divulged. A colleague of mine went the other day.
GOODMAN: Robert, you were just talking about a lot of the attacks we're hearing about - what seems like a good number, a lot of the attacks - on U.S. forces are not being reported.
FISK: I have a colleague, for example, who went down to Fallujah before the incident I was describing to you earlier, after two gunmen, one American had been killed in the fire fight, he reported, I spoke to both sides. On his way back he was traveling past the town of Abu Garab a rather sinister place where the huge prison is where Saddam executed so many prisoners, including an Observer journalist back in the late 1980's.
As we were, as the colleague was passing by the town, he saw a young man come up and throw a hand grenade at American troops in the Humvee.
The grenade missed them and exploded in the canal and wounded six Iraqi children, a very clear account of what happened. I rang the coalition forces, the telephone didn't answer as it very often doesn't do. And no report ever emerged except in my paper that this incident had occurred.
Now, over and over again we keep seeing things, seeing small incidents occur, soldiers threatening people outside petrol lines because people are trying to jump the line and steal. And it just doesn't make it back into the coalition record of what's actually happening in Iraq. The danger here is not so much that we're not being told about it because we can see and find out for ourselves. The danger is that the United States leadership in Baghdad, and of course, especially back in the White House and Pentagon is also not being told about it. Or if it is, information is only going to certain people who can deal with that information.
It's very easy to say, well Iraq's been a great success we've got rid of a dictatorship, the weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist have now been destroyed or whatever interpretation you want to put on that. Human rights abuses have ended, certainly the Saddam kind. But if you try and if this information goes up the ladder every bit of it to people like Bremer, I'm not sure it all is - I think it should be - then you can see how the coalition doesn't represent the reality.
One of the big problems at the moment is the Americans and, to some extent the British, particularly the Americans in Baghdad. They're all ensconced in this chic gleaming marble palace, largest, most expensive palace. There they sit with their laptops trying to work out with Washington how they're going to bring about this new democracy in Iraq. They rely upon for the most part former Iraqi exiles who never endured Saddam Hussein, who are hovering around making sure that they get the biggest part of the pie if possible. When they leave the palace, when they go into the streets of Baghdad, the dangerous streets of Baghdad, they leave in these armored black Mercedes with gunmen in the front and back, soldiers, plain clothes guys with weapons and sunglasses.
One Iraqi said to me the other day, who did you think was the last person we saw driving through town like [this]? I said, Saddam Hussein? They all burst out laughing, of course, they said, exactly the same.
We are used to this just like they're used to press censorship. I think it's difficult - you need to be in Baghdad to understand the degree to which there's been this slippage of ambition and slippage in the ideological war. I was in small hotel called the Al Hama the other day - it has a swimming pool, 24-hour generators. Just going down to have a meal in the evening, I came across two westerners, one with a pump action shotgun, the other with a submachine gun passing me in the hallway.
I said, 'Who are you?'
He said, 'Well, who are you?'
'I'm a guest in the hotel. You have guns. Who are you?'
He said, 'We work for D.O.D'.
'Department of Defense, right?' (But he was obviously English - he had a British accent.) 'Hang on a second you're not American.'
'No, we're a British company that is hired to look after D.O.D. employees in Baghdad. That's why we're armed.'
I said, 'Who gives you permission to have weapons?'
He said, 'The coalition forces, we're here protecting them.'
Now, how often have Iraqis seen armed plain clothes men moving in and out of hotels, they have for more than 20 years, now seeing them again. Well these guys are not going to string them up by their fingernails and electrocute them in torture cells. But again, the image, the picture is the same. The armored escort, limousines in the street, soldiers kicking down the doors searching for, 'terrorists.' The press censorship plans. Plain clothes armed men going into a hotel asking who you are immediately by asking them who they are, same system as before. It has this kind of ghastly ghostly veneer of the old regime about it The Americans are not Saddam, they're not murdering people - they're not lining up people at mass graves, of course they're not. But if you see through the eyes of the Iraqis, it doesn't look quite that simple.
GOODMAN: We are talking to Robert Fisk, just came out of Iraq but you've also written about the so-called road map to peace. I just wanted to get your response to what happened yesterday in Gaza, with the Israeli helicopter gun ships attempting to assassinate the political leader for Hamas, Abdel Azziz Rantizzi. And also Bush strongly criticizing the attempted assassination on the part of the Israel.
FISK: First of all he didn't strongly criticize them, he mildly, rather pathetically and rather cowardly criticized the Israelis. This was an attack which was meant to kill the political head of Hamas. And in the ghastly role which the Palestinians and Israelis play in their bloody and useless conflict, I can understand why the attack was made in that context.
But that attack did not kill Rantizzi, it killed a little child of five and a young woman. Now your president said that that was 'troubling'. That isn't troubling that's a shameful act, that's a despicable thing to do. But there was no strong condemnation from Mr. Bush, he just said it was troubling. If a Palestinian had attacked Israeli forces or Israeli political leader involved in encouraging violence, had killed a little Israeli girl, and a young innocent Israeli woman Mr. Bush would not have called it troubling. He would have said it was a shameful, terrorist act, which it would have been How can it work when the most powerful president of the most powerful state in the world, United States of America, can be so gutless and cowardly in condemning the killing of two innocent people.
It is not troubling. It is an outrage that those two innocent people died. Just as it would be if the Palestinians had done it. Just as it is when the Palestinians do do it. [For Bush] It is not an outrage. Not a tragedy. Not shameful. It is merely troubling. Like a flood is troubling or a heavy rainfall that kills people or a storm is troubling. In that context how can this new peace possibly work.
It's called a road map, who invented the phrase road map? I suppose the poor old State Department and all the journalists dutifully used the word road map. They can't use peace process because that's associated with Oslo and that failed. You remember the cliche for the peace process, always had to be put back on track. I suppose peace process was a railway line or a railway train so it presumably always has to be put back on the main road or back on the highway that is the cliche.
What has Sharon done? he's closed down a few empty caravans on hilltops.
At large and continuing to expand Jewish settlements, the Jews and Jews only in occupied Arab land. What have the Palestinians done? Mahmoud Abbas says I'm going to finish terrorism, there's going to be no more violence by the Palestinians and, bang, there immediately is. We have the three main violent groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa immediately carrying out the suicide bombing.
And then praised by Rantizzi, I remember thinking, he's praising them, that's against the road map so Israelis have got a green light to knock him off and they tried and failed. I remember interviewing Rantizzi along similar lines about six months ago in Gaza, as I was talking to him I saw an Israeli helicopter emerge in the window and his body guard looked around very nervously and I thought, oh, no, please go away and so I finished the interview.
But I always thought he was a target, he always had two gunmen with him all the time. That's not the point. Rantizzi is a very tough Hamas man, a very ruthless man. He was one of the Palestinians who was illegally deported from Israeli prisons into Lebanon in 1992. I actually met him there in the southern Lebanon in the hills, when he was living rough, months after months in a tent.
This is a very rough character, very tough guy - grew up the hard way in guerrilla warfare as well as politics.
But when you're going to have a situation where you have an Israeli prime minister who doesn't want to end the settlements, who is indeed the creator of the settlements, and a Palestinian prime minister who can't stop the intifada and a U.S. president who is so gutless he can only call a killing of a woman and a child troubling, what chance is there for a road map or peace process or any other kind of agreement in the Middle East?
GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, who is just come out of Iraq and who has reported extensively on the Middle East for more than 30 years.
I wanted to end, back in Iraq. CNN is reporting today that Ahmed Chalabi who has addressed the Council on Foreign Relations is saying that Saddam Hussein is moving in an arc around the Tigris River starting northeast of Baghdad. He said finding Saddam would just be a matter of knowing whom to talk to. He says based on information from credible sources, he believes the former Iraqi president wants revenge and has obtained two suicide bombing vests for attacks on U.S. forces. Chalabi says Saddam is paying bounty for every U.S. soldier killed. Your response?
FISK: I long ago gave up putting any credit in anything that Ahmed Chalabi says. The real issue is not where is Saddam Hussein, he could be sitting in Minsk or Belarus or he could be sitting in Tikrit or in the Iraqi countryside somewhere. Obviously there were plans to hide him in advance. You know this goes back to another issue of the degree of real effort to find him. Just look back, the Americans wanted to arrest Valadich and put him in the Hague. We were going to capture Osama bin laden, he's still on the loose. We were going to capture Mullah Omar, he's only got one eye, not difficult to identify. But he's still on the loose. We can't get vice president Ramadan in Iraq or Uday Hussein, the sons of Saddam. We can't get Saddam himself. Can't get Naji Sabri the foreign minister.
I was sitting in a restaurant in Baghdad a week and a half ago, at the next table next to me was Saddam's personal translator. I sort of did a double take, I said, hi, how are you? I knew the guy. I'd known him for years and years. I said, are you okay? Fine, fine no problem, he was having a beer with friends. And he walked out. This is the same restaurant that later on I saw Paul Bremer walk into with several special forces men to protect him and his guests for dinner. I have to ask myself sometimes what's going on. Ahmed Chalabi says that Saddam is moving in an arc, he maybe moving in a circle or square for all I know but it's clear he's still alive. That's the point.
GOODMAN: Well, Robert Fisk, thank you very much for being with us. Robert Fisk of the Independent of London just out of Iraq.
Democracy Now! is a national listener-sponsored radio and television program.
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Ex-Iraqi army soldiers try to storm gov't building in Mosul
Thu Jun 12
AFP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030612/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_unrest_mosul_030612123818
ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) - Violent clashes erupted in Mosul as several hundred former members of the Iraqi army demanding their salaries tried to storm the government building in the northern Iraqi town.
US helicopters circled overhead as the ex-soldiers traded fire with local police and residents, the witnesses told AFP after arriving in this Kurdish city north of Mosul.
They said they saw ambulances rushing to the scene to ferry wounded, but could not say whether anyone had been killed.
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Top adviser backs debt forgiveness
By James Harding in Washington
June 12 2003
Financial Times
Richard Perle, the influential Pentagon adviser, on Wednesday called for the complete forgiveness of Iraqi national debt, an act which would teach banks the risks of lending to a "vicious dictatorship". Advertisement
Voicing a widely held but largely private view of many within the Bush administration, Mr Perle also endorsed preferential treatment for companies from the US, UK, Australia and Poland in the competition for Iraq reconstruction contracts.
"Some countries opposed the liberation of Iraq. France opposed the liberation. Germany opposed liberation. So did Russia," said Mr Perle. "You could forgive the Iraqis for not rushing into business contracts with companies from countries who, had their policies prevailed, would have left Iraq in the hands of Saddam Hussein."
Elaborating on the point, Mr Perle said that if a future Iraqi administration had to choose between competing bids from Alcatel, the French telecommunications group, and a British concern, it would likely lean away from the French. "There will be a natural disinclination to reward a company from a country which opposed the liberation of Iraq."
The first priority in the reconstruction of Iraq, Mr Perle said, should be the elimination of the Iraqi debt. Estimates of Iraq's national borrowings vary, but the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Washington-based think-tank, estimates debt at $60bn-$130bn (£36bn-£78bn).
The leading creditors to Iraq are the Gulf states, Russia and Japan, and a host of commercial banks.
"If the French banks, the German banks and some American banks are unhappy about that [debt forgiveness," Mr Perle said, then they would have learnt a lesson about the "moral hazard. . . of lend[ing] to a vicious dictatorship." Mr Perle, a member of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, was not speaking on behalf of the US administration, but in a personal capacity.
Mr Perle, a dogged advocate of regime change by force both within the corridors of the administration and on the television news networks, also took the chance to defend the Bush administration against allegations that it has manipulated intelligence.
Insisting that US-led forces in Iraq will, eventually, find evidence of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Perle dismissed as "lies" suggestions that the Bush administration and the Blair government in London had massaged the information they received on Iraq's weapons programmes.
The Associated Press has published a calculation of civilian casualties in the war based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals. The estimate is that at least 3,240 people died, including 1,896 in Baghdad.
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U.S. Official for Iraq Leaving New Constitution Up to Iraqis
June 12, 2003
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/worldspecial/12CND-BREM.html
WASHINGTON, June 12 - The American administrator for Iraq described a hands-off approach today to the writing of a new constitution for the country, saying that if the Iraqi drafters favor even a return to socialism, "that will be their business."
The administrator, L. Paul Bremer, also said that there was no evidence of any "central command or control" behind the recent attacks on American-led troops in Iraq, and said that the size of the United States troop presence there - around 145,000 - was "about right" for now.
Most of the recent attacks, he said, appeared to have been launched by groups of five or six militants "who have spontaneously come together." The result, however, is that "we still have a war zone in parts of the country." At least 43 Americans have died in Iraq since May 1, the date that President Bush declared an end to major combat operations.
Mr. Bremer made his comments in a news conference from Baghdad carried by video hook-up to Washington, and in video testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.
Just over a month into his Iraq mission, Mr. Bremer described considerable progress in restoring basic services: electricity now flows 20 hours a day in Baghdad, all 12 hospitals are open, 8,000 police officers patrol the capital and commerce is reviving.
But Iraq has also suffered from joblessness that Mr. Bremer described as "without precedent" anywhere in recent times. Unemployment, probably higher than 50 percent under Saddam Hussein before the war, has gone even higher with the closing of state enterprises and the demobilization of the army.
The imminent creation of a smaller Iraqi army, drawing on remnants of the estimated 375,000 prewar conscripts, would ease unemployment and improve security, Mr. Bremer said. The reconstituted army would help protect ministries, oil facilities and other sites, freeing American troops to do more to restore order.
A new $100 million construction program would create mostly low-level building jobs for Iraqis.
Beyond that, Mr. Bremer said, "job creation is going to require much deeper economic reform."
"It's going to require us to create a private sector, which can in turn create jobs," he said, and this is a "more difficult and longer-term problem."
Even while calling it "their business" if the drafters of an Iraqi constitution call for a socialist system, he said that that seemed highly unlikely. Baathist socialism, he said, had "left the country really flat on its back."
If the constitutional conference called for an Islamic state, he said, "we would, of course, be much more comfortable if it also established freedom of religion," but he said he doubted that that would be a problem.
Mr. Bremer was asked, as he often is, how long the United States will retain a significant presence in Iraq. He said that once security was re-established, "the pacing issue will be how fast the Iraqis can write a constitution, get it ratified by the Iraqi people and then call elections."
He said a constitutional conference of several hundred participants would be convened in six to seven weeks, with the speed of its work up to its members. "If they write it fast, that's fine; I get to go home earlier," he said. "If it takes them longer, then we'll just stay here longer. I don't think we should put ourselves in any deadline boxes."
Mr. Bremer also said that it was probably too early to hold a national truth-and-reconciliation conference, as South Africa did to examine its apartheid past. With Iraqis "simply still too understandably emotionally delighted to be rid of Saddam and the Baathists," he said, "they may not yet be ready to undertake that step."
And he said the failure to find Mr. Hussein and contain Baathist loyalists had hurt the American-led occupation effort.
"It allows the Baathists to go around in the bazaars and in the villages, which they are doing, saying Saddam is alive and he's going to come back," he said. "The effect of that is to make it more difficult for people who are afraid of the Baathists - and that's just about everybody," to "come forward and cooperate."
Mr. Bremer also declared that whether Iraq remained in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was a matter for a new Iraqi government to decide.
----
US-led coalition warns foreign diplomats they remain in Iraq at own risk
Thursday, 12-Jun-2003
AFP / Sammy Ketz (via ClariNet)
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/bq/Qiraq-us-diplomats.RGdn_DuC.html
BAGHDAD, June 12 (AFP) - The US-led coalition warned foreign diplomats Thursday that they remain in Iraq at their own risk, and that they would only be able to deploy troops or guards for their own safety with prior coalition authorization.
The stark warning was contained in a circular the foreign ministry began distributing to "foreign liaison offices" in Baghdad Thursday.
Around 30 such missions have been established here despite the coalition's refusal to grant the representatives of overseas governments diplomatic immunity.
"The ministry wishes to inform foreign liaison offices in Baghdad that the coalition provisional authority (CPA) has announced that members of foreign liaison offices in Iraq enter and remain in Iraq at their own risk," said the circular, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
"Coalition forces generally undertake to protect the property of foreign governments in Iraq consistent with the overall need to maintain security in Iraq. The CPA cannot, however, guarantee the security of a foreign liaison mission or its personnel."
The circular added that, despite the coalition's inability to guarantee safety, foreign missions would not be allowed to bring in or recruit their own security personnel without prior coalition authorization, and that any that did would be subject to new weapons controls that come into force on Sunday.
"Foreign liaison officials may bring into Iraq/and or maintain their own security forces only in full coordination with and with the agreement of coalition forces, including compliance with the procedures established pursuant to Order Number Two on weapons control," the circular said.
The order, issued late last month, makes it an offence for anyone to carry weapons outside their homes or businesses without a permit from the coalition.
It outlaws the carrying of concealed weapons and restricts the firearms which authorized personnel are allowed to carry on the streets to pistols and automatic rifles up to 7.62 mm calibre.
Some foreign missions here have security provided by secret servicemen. They will now all be obliged to seek coalition permission to continue carrying weapons of any sort outside their places of residence.
A coalition spokesman said no particular checks were planned against foreign security staff when the new controls come into force on Sunday.
"I don't think there is a specific policy to target them but under the terms of that weapons policy ... there will be no exemptions for their security personnel," the spokesman said.
The ministry circular insisted that, despite the restrictions, the representatives of "friendly governments" were still welcome in Iraq.
But the phraseology amounted to a veiled warning to countries not supporting the US-led coalition to stay away.
"Notwithstanding the above, the CPA welcomes the initiative of friendly governments to send officials to participate in the coalition or to contribute to coalition efforts to rebuild Iraq's institutions and infrastructure," it said.
The coalition spokesman denied that there was any intent to exclude diplomats from countries not supporting the coalition.
"They will be able to reside here if they fulfil the normal requirements of immigration policy," he said.
The circular was issued in the name of the Iraqi foreign ministry, but it is under the effective control of its senior US advisor, Ambassador David Dunford.
All of the ministry's top personnel have been dismissed as part of the coalition's crackdown on former senior members of Saddam Hussein's now banned Baath party.
A caretaker steering committee has been set up under the former head of the Africa, Asia and Latin America department, Ghassan Hussein, the ministry's senior non-Baathist. In all, 10 percent of the ministry's staff, or 144 out of 1,400 personnel, have been dismissed for their Baathist links, steering committee member Akila al-Hashimi told AFP.
----
4,000 G.I.'s Circle a Hussein Bastion to Foil Attacks
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE with MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/worldspecial/12ATTA.html
DHULUIYA, Iraq, June 11 - American forces are carrying out their largest single military operation in Iraq since the end of major fighting, officials said today, with more than 4,000 soldiers surrounding a 30-square-mile area just north of Baghdad said to harbor Baath Party loyalists planning and carrying out attacks on American troops.
Brief gun battles erupted when American forces surrounded this belt of rich green farmland, created by a broad curve in the Tigris River, early Monday, American commanders said. Four Iraqis died, four Americans were wounded and 375 Iraqi men were detained, the Americans said.
Iraqi civilians bitterly complained that the operation was excessive. They said American soldiers handcuffed women and children, beat one man to death and allowed another to die of a heart attack. American officials called the accusations "absolutely false."
The sheer scope of the operation - a pilotless drone, F-15 fighters and AC-130 gunships circled overhead as dozens of armored vehicles and patrol boats cut off escape routes - suggested the seriousness of a new American effort to quell nascent armed resistance in areas north and west of Baghdad dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The area, known as the "Sunni triangle," was a bedrock of support for Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim himself. It has been the center of a recent surge in attacks that have left 10 American soldiers dead and dozens wounded in the last 15 days.
American officials said they had intelligence that senior Baath Party officials were hiding in the area. A released Iraqi detainee said he was asked about Ali Hassan al-Majid, a senior Baath military commander known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in using chemical weapons against the Kurdish minority. American military officials had speculated that he was killed by American bombs in April, but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that he might still be alive.
American officials said a major general and a colonel were detained along with 40 to 50 men believed to be involved in the attacks. The officials said the Army believed that much of the resistance north of Baghdad is supported, financed and coordinated by anti-American elements hiding out in the area.
"There have been a growing number of former regime loyalists, Baath Party officials, fedayeen and Iraqi Intelligence Service type people who exist up there and continue to hire individuals to come in and attack Americans," said Brig. Gen. Daniel A. Hahn, the chief of staff for the V Corps, which oversees Army forces in Iraq.
Col. Frederick Rudesheim, the commander of the operation, which involved soldiers from the Third and Fourth Infantry divisions and paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, said senior Baath Party officials, including Mr. Hussein, were not the primary target. He said he had no information corroborating recent reports by Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, that Mr. Hussein was alive somewhere north or west of Baghdad and offering $200 to anyone who killed an American.
American officials said their goal was to end attacks by gunmen using techniques such as firing flares, turning on lights in houses and ambushing convoys in remote areas.
The American assessment is that Tikrit, Kirkuk and Baiji, which are farther north of Baghdad, are relatively secure. But the American military command has been concerned about resistance in a swath of territory around the towns of Balad, Taji and Baquba, roughly 30 miles north of Baghdad. Only several hundred Americans have been patrolling them.
Gauging the intensity of the surge in attacks has been difficult. American military officials disclose the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq but do not routinely publicize every attack on American forces. Military officials declined a request this week to produce figures totaling the number of attacks on Americans forces over the last six weeks.
Conversations with soldiers in the area, where the Tigris creates an island of green in a bleak brown desert, suggested that the level of attacks north of Baghdad had been intense.
Soldiers said convoys were routinely fired on in the area at night, with bullets striking the first and last vehicles and rocket propelled grenades whizzing over gunners' heads and between jeeps.
"We are just lucky they are bad shots," said Staff Sgt. John Williams, who was involved in the operation. He said his patrol recently killed 10 armed Iraqis preparing an ambush.
Soldiers said they were now firing back at attackers, and Colonel Rudesheim said there have been no attacks in the two nights since the operation was launched.
But residents complained today that American soldiers broke windows during searches, handcuffed women and children and roughed-up detained men. Relatives of Jassem Rumyad, 52, accused American soldiers of preventing them from giving medication to him before he collapsed and died of a heart attack.
Hella Khalif, Mr. Rumyad's 80-year-old mother, said American soldiers handcuffed and gagged her when she and Mr. Rumyad's wife and daughter shouted that he needed his heart medication. "They put tape over my mouth," she said.
American officials said the account was false and that they allowed the women to give Mr. Rumyad his medication before he suddenly died.
But one American officer said American soldiers in one location handcuffed women and children. The officer said he immediately ordered the handcuffs removed.
A second family accused American soldiers of beating to death Mehedi Ali Jassem, 53, with their rifles and ransacking his house. They showed a mattress that they said was covered with his blood.
American commanders denied the charges and said Mr. Jassem had a cut on his head and his house had been damaged when they arrived to arrest him. They said he stumbled out the door, collapsed and died, apparently of a heart attack.
----
US could face worsening quagmire in Iraq, analysts warn
Thursday, 12-Jun-2003
AFP (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/bo/Qus-iraq-attacks.Rae3_DuC.html
WASHINGTON, June 11 (AFP) - US troops could face a worsening situation in their bid to stamp out armed resistance in Iraq, and Baghdad is fast resembling a Middle Eastern Belfast, Charles Heyman, Editor of Janes World Armies, said Thursday.
Talking to AFP by telephone from Britain, Heyman said the rising level of US troop casualties shows the US military campaign to gain firm control of Iraq could last for many more months.
"My guess is that things could get worse. Thirteen since May 1st, if it continues at that rate, say 10 to 12 a month, that means you're going to see 120 dead in a year or so, and five times that number seriously wounded," Heyman said in reference to US troop deaths since May 1.
A total of 45 US troops have died in Iraq, 13 from hostile fire and 32 from accidents since President George W. Bush declared major combat operations were over May 1, according to the Pentagon.
A US Apache attack helicopter was shot down by hostile fire 90 miles (145 kilometers) west of Baghdad Thursday -- its crew were rescued by coalition forces -- as US forces launched a renewed ground and air assault against Saddam Hussein loyalists to the north of the Iraqi capital.
Some 150,000 US troops are currently deployed across Iraq. The Pentagon today identified Private Gavin Neighbor, 20, from Ohio as the latest confirmed fatality.
Neighbor, who served with 82nd Airborne Division, was killed in a grenade attack in Baghdad Wednesday.
Heyman, a former British army officer, said: "It's too early to say for certain, but there is now a strong likelihood of a rather nasty, messy, what we would call a low-intensity campaign going on for months."
"You could say that Baghdad could resemble a Middle Eastern Belfast, and suck in a lot of casualties over a long period," he cautioned.
Tim Eads, a retired US Army former special operations Lieutenant-Colonel said: "They cannot change the way they are doing business over there. They don't want to get into a situation where they worry so much about protecting themselves that they don't take risks and forget about the mission."
"Otherwise we're going to have a Lebanon situation where the marines hunker down in the barracks and make themselves a huge target, that's the critical concern as far as I'm concerned," Eads said.
Heyman said the current situation will not enable the US to start withdrawing troops from the theatre any time soon as large numbers of troops will be needed on the ground to quell the ongoing resistance.
Eads believes there are enough troops on the ground but he said specialist troops should be used in surgical strikes to clamp down on those organising the attacks.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said former Baathists, members of the Fedayeen Saddam and special Republican Guard troops are likely behind the recent spate of attacks against US troops in and around Baghdad.
Paul Bremer, the US overseer of Iraq, said today that he has seen no evidence that the ongoing attacks on US troops north and west of Baghdad are being orchestrated. "We don't yet have evidence of central command and control. "
The Saddam loyalists appear to be searching out vulnerable targets such as small US patrols and attacking at night rather than in daylight, analysts said.
Analysts estimate there are currently some 15,000 US troops patrolling the greater Baghdad area. Some analysts say more troops are needed to control such a large district effectively.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Presses Its Assault on Hamas, Killing Leader in Gaza
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/middleeast/12CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, June 12 - Israel pressed ahead with airstrikes against Hamas militants today as helicopters blasted a car with rockets in Gaza City, killing seven people, including a Hamas leader who was targeted, along with his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
Today's attack came as Israelis buried their dead from Wednesday's suicide bombing by a Hamas militant, who struck on a bus traveling along one of Jerusalem's main commercial arteries, killing 16 civilians and wounding about 100.
This week's bloodshed has been some of the worst in months and has imperiled the Middle East peace plan that was formally rolled out just last week at a summit meeting in Jordan.
In a grimly familiar pattern, signs of diplomatic progress have been greeted almost immediately with an escalation in attacks by extremists throughout the 32 months of violence.
Hamas, which has always opposed peace talks with Israel, rejected the latest peace plan and has renewed its efforts to carry out violence, bringing forceful Israeli reprisals.
A week ago, Israeli and Palestinians leaders had toned down their rhetoric and were speaking with hope about how to begin implementing the peace plan, known as the road map. Today, they are again trading bitter recriminations, with each attack increasing the likelihood that more will follow.
The Israeli helicopters appeared in the clear skies over Gaza City only hours after an Israeli cabinet meeting in which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government vowed to "completely wipe out" Hamas.
"Hamas leaders have no immunity, especially when this organization is doing everything it can to scuttle the political process," Tzachi Hanegbi, the minister for internal security, told the Israeli Army radio.
The Israelis struck in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood in northern Gaza City, a Hamas stronghold, and the target was Yasir Taha, described as a senior militant by Israel.
Four helicopters fired at least six missiles at his white Opel car, engulfing the vehicle in flames and leaving it a blackened skeleton. The three people in the car Mr. Taha, his wife and daughter were killed, along with four people on the street, according to witnesses and officials at Shifa Hospital.
About 25 people were injured, the hospital said.
Mr. Taha is part of a well-known Hamas family, and his father and brother are currently being held in Israeli prisons.
As the burnt-out car was being removed from the scene, a man on a mosque loudspeaker declared: "This is a result of the road map. We will cut off the hand of anyone who tries to stop the resistance."
In the last three days, Israel has carried out five helicopter strikes against Hamas militants traveling in cars in and around Gaza City.
Altogether, more than 20 Palestinians have been killed and more than 100 wounded. While the wanted Hamas men have been among the casualties, most of the dead and wounded have been Palestinian civilians.
This evening, an Israeli man, described in his 40's, was found dead in the West Bank near Jenin, his car and body riddled with bullets. The Israeli Army said the man, who was not identified, had been buying charcoal from Palestinians. His body was discovered by an army patrol.
Meanwhile, both Israelis and Palestinians mourned their dead from Wednesday's carnage. Two Israeli helicopter attacks in Gaza left 10 dead Wednesday.
In Gaza City, funerals were ending and some of the mourners were in the streets this afternoon near the area of today's attack.
Israel launched its latest campaign against Hamas on Tuesday, two days after Hamas took part in shooting attacks on Sunday that killed five Israeli soldiers.
Hamas called on foreigners to leave Israel for their own safety. "The Jerusalem attack is the beginning of a new series of revenge attacks," the group said in a statement faxed to Reuters. "We call on international citizens to leave the Zionist entity immediately to preserve their lives."
Just a week ago, the overall level of violence was down, and the discussion was focused on the initial phase of the road map, which calls for Palestinian security forces to act against militants, and for Israel to withdraw troops from Palestinian areas.
Israel said it was prepared to pull back in places where the Palestinians could resume control. But the Palestinians say they have been badly weakened by Israeli military operations during the months of fighting and are not yet in position to take over.
Avi Dichter, head of Shin Bet, Israel's security service, said the Palestinians still have 15,000 security personnel, most of them in Gaza and under the control of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, Israel radio reported.
Mr. Dichter said that this number was sufficient for the Palestinians to keep areas calm, and that Israel should not accept the Palestinians' position that they are unprepared to act. He said Mr. Arafat has not relinquished control of the security forces to Mr. Abbas and his government.
----
Israeli Forces Take Aim at Hamas for Third Strike in 24 Hours
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/middleeast/12CND-SHAR.html
A new round of violence erupted in the Mideast today as Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a car in Gaza City, killing a senior official of the militant group Hamas and at least six other Palestinians, news agencies reported.
The official was identified by Palestinian officials as Yasser Taha, Reuters said, adding that Mr. Taha's wife and 3-year-old daughter were among those killed. A baby bottle and child's shoes were among items pulled from the burning car, The Associated Press said.
The last of six missiles exploded among bystanders who had rushed to help the vehicle's passengers, injuring more than 40 people, witnesses and security officials told Reuters. A 3-year-old, unconscious and burned, was taken to Shifa Hospital in Gaza and died there, medical officials said.
The attack came after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel today repeated his determination to hunt down Palestinian militants.
At the same time, Hamas, which took responsibility for a suicide bus bombing in Jerusalem on Wednesday that killed 16 people, vowed that it would carry out more attacks and warned foreigners to leave Israel.
The sequence of attacks and counterattacks seemed to further dash hopes for peace in the region that grew after a meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, of Palestinian and Israeli leaders with President Bush. The participants committed themselves to the so-called road map for peace, which is backed by the United States, but since then the violence has increased rather than lessened.
The White House, which rebuked Israel on Wednesday for trying to assassinate a Hamas leader, today blamed Palestinian militants for the violence.
"The issue is not Israel, the issue is not the Palestinian Authority," Mr. Fleischer told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush in Connecticut, "the issue is the terrorists who are killing in an attempt to stop the process."
"The issue is Hamas, the terrorists are Hamas," he said.
At a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Mr. Sharon called Palestinian leaders "crybabies who let violence run rampant," news agencies quoted a cabinet official as saying.
Mr. Sharon also called the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, a "chick that hasn't grown its feathers yet," adding that "We have to help him fight terror until his feathers grow," the agencies said. Mr. Sharon said Israel would not stand by while Mr. Abbas tried to get the militant groups to end the violence. The Palestinian leader has said he prefers dialogue over force to rein in the militant groups.
Hamas, however, struck a determined note of its own, saying in a statement sent to news agencies that the Jerusalem suicide bombing "is the beginning of a new series of revenge attacks."
It said it had ordered "all military cells" to carry out further attacks and warned foreigners "to leave the Zionist entity immediately to preserve their lives."
Today's attack was the fourth in Gaza in three days. On Tuesday, the Israelis failed in an attempt to assassinate Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader, in retaliation for a weekend attack by militant groups that killed four Israeli soldiers. Two others attacks were made on Wednesday, killing nine people, including four militants.
----
Dead, the people who tried to help
Furious crowds cry out for revenge in city's streets
Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem
Thursday June 12, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,975582,00.html
The news of the Jerusalem suicide bombing had not even hit the streets of Gaza City when between three and six missiles slammed into a line of slow-moving cars in the Saja'iya district of the city.
Nobody expected a second Israeli rocket attack so soon after the previous day's failed attempted assassination of Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, a senior political leader in Hamas.
The streets were filled with people going to the market to buy food for their evening meals as Gaza City came to life again after sheltering from the mid-afternoon heat.
The market and the streets around it are among the busiest places in Gaza City. When the attack occurred, thousands of people were milling around and cars were jammed around the market place.
The target - part of Israel's ongoing operations against Hamas leaders - was a small Fiat car carrying Tito Massaoud, 35, a bodyguard of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and another Hamas member, Sohil Abu Nahel, 29.
Their car was in a traffic jam when it was hit by missiles from an Israeli Apache helicopter. Instinctively, crowds rushed to the burning wreck to see what had happened and to try to help.
Two more missiles hit the car or its immediate vicinity, killing three men and two women standing near it.
At this point, the crowds began running away from the burning wreck and the danger of more attacks.
The vehicle was stuck in a traffic jam, said shopkeeper Massoud Ramadan, 65, who witnessed the strike.
"When we started trying to evacuate them from the car, another missile attack took place while a huge number of people were gathering trying to help the wounded." Mr Ramadan, who was wounded by shrapnel, was among a number taken to hospital.
"Two missiles hit the car. I stopped my car to help them but the Israeli helicopters fired four more missiles at us," Mohammed, a Palestinian in his 40s who was wounded in the attack, said at a nearby hospital.
"When they took the bodies out of the car, I cannot tell you how they looked. It was terrifying," added Abu Raed Hmeid, who was one of the first to rush to the scene.
"The helicopter fired missiles at a car and left it to burn," another witness said. "Pools of blood, cut-off body parts, cut-off heads - this is what I saw."
The wreck was unrecognisable as a car and the corpses were unrecognisable as human beings, said witnesses.
Hundreds of people, chanting for revenge, rushed to the scene as a fire truck poured water on the car. Many chanted: "No to Abu Mazen's peace, yes for resistance."
Jamil Hamdia, 35, cried as he carried his 11-year-old wounded cousin in the hallway of Shifa hospital. "Where is Abu Mazen to come and see?" wailed Hamdia, referring to the new Palestinian prime minister by his nickname. "Are we cheap, to be killed like this?"
Dr Moawiya Hassanain, director of Shifa hospital, told the Associated Press news agency that seven people were killed and 30 wounded in the missile strike. Among the wounded were eight children under the age of 14.
An Israeli official said the rocket attack was not in retaliation for the bus bombing, but was a planned effort to kill Hamas militants.
The Israeli official said Mr Massaoud, 36, was in charge of producing and firing homemade rockets into Israel.
Palestinian security sources said he was the commander of the Hamas military wing in northern Gaza and had served as a personal assistant to Hamas military leader Salah Shehadeh - who was killed by Israel last July - and masterminded several attacks against Israeli targets in Gaza and elsewhere.
----
Powell to Try Patching Mideast Truce Plan
June 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Mideast.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell plans to meet in Jordan with leaders of Russia, the European Union and the United Nations in an effort to repair the tattered road map for peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians.
The meeting will be held at the end of a trip Powell will take next week to Cambodia for an Asia conference and to Bangladesh, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. Amman, the capital, is the likely site in Jordan, he said.
In the meantime, Powell telephoned Foreign Ministers Silvan Shalom of Israel, Ahmed Maher of Egypt, Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia and Marwan Muasher of Jordan to appeal for help in stemming the violence in the region, Boucher said.
Powell will arrive in Jordan from Bangladesh June 19 and while there will attend the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea city along with Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative.
It was in Jordan last week that Bush reached agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to proceed with the peacemaking blueprint that had been prepared jointly by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
Powell will be joined in Jordan by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and senior officials of the European Union.
The informal group, known as a Quartet, devised the road map that calls for an end to 33 months of conflict, establishment of a Palestinian state by 2005 and other measures designed to settle the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Approval of the road map raised hopes that Israel and the Palestinians would at least begin taking steps to resolve their differences.
Sharon, for instance, promised to dismantle settlement outposts on the West Bank, to free scores of Palestinian prisoners and said he accepted the idea of a Palestinian state.
Abbas, for his part, said force no longer would be used in a continuing Palestinian uprising against Israel.
But beginning on Sunday, with Palestinian militants killing four Israeli soldiers in Gaza, violence recurred, with damage to any reconciliation that may have been achieved at Aqaba.
Bush has scolded Israel for trying to assassinate a Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, in Gaza and deplored a bloody attack on a bus in Jerusalem for which the group, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, took responsibility.
The president on Wednesday urged all nations ``to fight off terror, to cut off money to organizations such as Hamas, to isolate those who hate so much that they're willing to kill to stop peace from going forward.''
Bush said the terrorists were trying to undercut the desires of Abbas and others for a peaceful solution.
On Capitol Hill, House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-Texas, said Israel has the right to defend itself. ``If (Abbas) doesn't destroy terrorists and their infrastructure, Israel must,'' he said. ``And make no mistake: America must stand by Israel as it fights its own war on terror.''
At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer said terror groups were enemies of both Israel and Abbas and ``are trying to stop a hopeful process from moving forward,''
``The issue is Hamas,'' he said.
Boucher said ``the violence must be stopped,'' but in the meantime Israel and the Palestinians should carry out the provisions of the road map.
The Israeli government, apparently willing to risk the strong support it has received from Bush, was not deterred by the president's expressed concern about the impact its strikes might have on his peacemaking effort and on the standing of Abbas, who is backed by the administration as a moderate committed to peace with Israel.
In the third Israeli airstrike in 24 hours, Israeli helicopters on Thursday fired several missiles at the car of a Hamas fugitive, killing seven people, including the wanted man, his wife and 2-year-old daughter.
Sharon said Wednesday he would not let up in his assault on terror groups. Israel will ``continue to pursue until the end the terrorists and those that send them,'' he said.
----
Israeli 'Targeted Killings' in Spotlight
June 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Targeted-Killings.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel calls them targeted killings, attacks using pinpoint accuracy to liquidate Palestinians preparing terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Palestinians say Israeli missile strikes are crude assassinations carried out in crowded streets that often kill the innocent.
Israeli missile attacks that killed 20 Palestinians in three days -- more than half of them civilians -- have reopened debate over the morality, effectiveness and political wisdom of Israel's strategy.
Israel considers the strikes a prime tool in its effort to destroy Palestinian militant groups, but critics say the assassinations have done little to stop terror.
``This is immoral, totally ineffective and it doesn't fit a democracy,'' said Yossi Beilin, the former justice minister who opposed the policy when it was adopted in November 2000. ``These assassinations are capital punishment without trial.''
From November 2000 until May 31, Israel killed at least 103 targeted people and 53 bystanders, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem. Since Tuesday, 20 more people died in four strikes -- at least a dozen of them bystanders.
Former Cabinet minister Ephraim Sneh says the strikes are the most effective way to combat terror and wreck the infrastructure of militant groups.
``They are targeted. They are surgical, in most of the cases ... they are pinpointed toward the real masterminds, the organizers of the terror activity,'' he said. ``These are the ones who ... brainwash the suicide bombers, these are the ringleaders, these are the people who gather the intelligence.''
There is uncertainty about the attacks' effectiveness, and little evidence they have cowed militants. Generally the militant group Hamas carries out revenge attacks -- as it did this week, when a suicide bomber killed 17 people in a Jerusalem bus blast.
However, many Israelis have concluded suicide attacks would continue in any case, and the militants must be fought.
Israel has long said it was targeting ``ticking bombs'' -- militants bound for terror attacks. But some targets have been top militant leaders, and in a few cases, the Palestinians claim they were politicians.
Israelis counter the title politician should not protect those inciting murder.
The new round of attacks began Tuesday with a failed effort to kill Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader Israel accuses of recent involvement in attacks.
It came less than a week after Israeli and Palestinian leaders launched the ``road map'' peace plan with President Bush, and two days after Palestinian militants killed five Israeli soldiers.
The strike against Rantisi was roundly criticized -- by Bush and by Israeli and Palestinian leaders -- as contributing to the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
On Wednesday, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a Jerusalem bus, an attack Hamas said was revenge for the strike against Rantisi.
Less than an hour later, an Israeli helicopter fired on a car carrying two Hamas militants in Gaza. The car exploded and Palestinians moved in to try to help. The helicopter returned and launched more missiles, killing seven other people, witnesses said.
``Is that the peace that they are talking about? Killing children, mothers and old men and leaving an open wound inside our hearts that will never be closed?'' asked Nawal Daloul, who lost two cousins in the attack.
``Yesterday closed the small window of hope that I used to look forward to a good future,'' said Daloul, who was wounded along with her 3-year-old daughter Manel.
On Thursday, the helicopters struck again, hitting a car and killing two Hamas militants and five other people, including the wife and 2-year-old daughter of one of the militants.
Israeli military spokeswoman Maj. Sharon Feingold expressed regret at the civilian casualties from the Thursday attack. She said the wife and child ``were not targets.''
Feingold said Israel has called off many attacks for fear of civilian deaths.
B'tselem says the strikes are extrajudicial assassinations and the overwhelming force Israel often uses is out of proportion to the tactic's benefits.
``Israel and the government and the army do have the obligation to protect Israeli civilians, but they have to do it under the law,'' said Yael Stein, B'tselem's research director.
Israel's policy came under sharpest attack last July when an F-16 plane fired a laser-guided bomb into a building in Gaza City, killing Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh and 14 other people, including eight children.
Attacks like this degrade Israel's moral authority, Beilin said.
``When you take the liberty of assassinating these people, there is a big question about the limits. Where does it begin, where does it stop and who is the judge? Who decides who should be killed?'' he asked.
-------- landmines
Widespread landmines pose danger to returnees
Report, IRIN,
12 June 2003
http://electroniciraq.net/news/884.shtml
ERBIL - Twenty-year-old Nafis Tahir will never walk again. He will find it difficult to find a job, and perhaps never marry. Two months ago, however, the picture was very different.
In the middle of preparations for final high school exams, Nafis made a routine visit to his parents, who live in a village some 40 km from the northern city of Kirkuk.
"When I arrived, my uncles called me to the front of the house to join them for tea. While walking towards them I noticed a shiny object on the ground. Not realising what it was, I kicked at it. My parents told me there was then a loud noise and a lot of blood, but I can't remember that. I think I must have fainted," he told IRIN.
As a result of the explosion, Nafis had to have both his left leg and right foot amputated. But the young man remains determined to go back to school. "I know it will not be the same, but I want to finish my last year at school. I worked very hard for that," he said.
Often having served as the battlefield for international and internal conflicts, northern Iraq is considered to be one of the most landmine-infested regions in the country. Since the end of the latest war almost two months ago, humanitarian groups have seen a rise in the number of mine-accident victims.
At the NGO-run Emergency Surgical Centre for War Victims (Emergency) in Erbil all the beds are occupied. Since 4 April, the NGO has assisted almost 470 mine victims.
"In most cases, people were injured while travelling on foot between cities. Often they decide to take alternative routes that are not entirely safe. A large number of the people we have treated in the last two months had been living in Kirkuk for years, and after the war decided to come to Erbil to see if conditions were better," an Emergency field officer, Donatella Faresa, told IRIN.
She added that another group at risk was shepherds since most mines were found in rural parts of the region.
Funded by the UNOPS Mine Action Programme (UNOPS MAP), Emergency has since March 1995 provided much-needed support for victims of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Iraq's northern, largely Kurdish-populated region. Alongside the two surgical centres it operates in the Sulaymaniyah and Arbil governorates, the NGO has a network of 22 first-aid posts that provide out-patient treatment for less urgent cases.
However, an integral part of the treatment is the rehabilitation of patients who "often feel that lives are over after the injury", Faresa said.
For six months after the prosthetic fitting, patients are provided with vocational training such as tailoring, carpentry and shoemaking. It is hoped that this training will improve their chances of finding employment.
Mine contamination affects some 1,100 communities across northern Iraq, with reported accidents averaging nearly 30 per month.
Since 1995, UNOPS MAP, funded by the Oil-For-Food Programme, has cleared over 10,500 antitank and antipersonnel mines, and destroyed over 78,000 items of UXO.
"Much has been accomplished since the start of the programme, but it must be admitted that it would be virtually impossible to clear all the landmines. So we concentrate on clearing those areas of land most used by people on a daily basis," Harasha Gunawardene, a MAP spokesman, told IRIN.
One of MAP's priorities in the next six months will be to access the five-kilometre strip extending into Iraq from the border with Iran which, under the former government, was off limits to mine-clearance groups. "Our research has shown us that the five-kilometre zone is infested with landmines. This is extremely dangerous, especially for Iraqi refugees in Iran who are using the back roads to get back into the country," Gunawardene said.
IRIN-Asia, Tel: +92-51-2211451, Fax: +92-51-2292918, Email: IrinAsia@irin.org.pk
-------- mideast
Saudi Defends Aid to Suicide Bombers, Faults Israel
Thu June 12, 2003
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2921275
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top Saudi official on Thursday defended Saudi aid to the families of suicide bombers and faulted Israel's recent attempt to assassinate leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
As the White House branded Hamas the major obstacle to Mideast peace amid a wave of bloodshed that has thrown a U.S.-backed peace plan into turmoil, Adel al-Jubeir, adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, condemned terrorism, but refused to condemn Hamas directly, and focused his criticism on Israel.
"Our view has been and remains that we are against targeted assassination of individuals. We believe it is morally wrong," he told a news conference.
"They do not achieve any objective other than further fueling hate and provoking reactions and responses, which in turn provoke more reactions and responses, which in turn keeps the cycle of violence going and accelerated," he said.
The region has been engulfed in a wave of retributive violence this week, including a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed 16 in Jerusalem on Wednesday and lethal Israeli attacks in Gaza.
After failing in an attempt to kill a Hamas leader on Tuesday, an Israeli missile strike on Thursday killed a senior Hamas militant, his wife and one-year-old daughter, among a total of seven dead
Al-Jubeir denied the Saudi government gave money directly to Hamas, saying it provided assistance to impoverished Palestinians through the United Nations, the International Red Crescent and the Palestinian Authority -- just as the United States does.
But he acknowledged Hamas may run some institutions receiving the aid and that individual Saudis may help finance the organization.
Saudi government aid to Palestinian families, including relatives of suicide bombers, was justified, he insisted.
With more than half of all Palestinians living below the poverty level, "we give money to Palestinian families in need...Are some of those families, families who have had a suicide bomber? Yes. But do we give the money because their son or daughter was a suicide bomber? No. Is that money an incentive for them to commit acts of terrorism? No," he said.
Al-Jubeir said families in need should not be punished because a son did something you disapprove of, arguing: "I think morally, guilt should not transfer." Al-Jubeir noted that Israel's assassination attempt came amid efforts to broker a cease-fire among Palestinian militants groups and after a last week's U.S.-Israel-Palestinian summit raised hopes of a peace deal.
"When you engage in assassination attempts in the midst of efforts to try to broker an agreement that I would think would be beneficial to the Israelis, that's not wise leadership," he said.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the Wednesday suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus. Asked if he condemned Hamas, Al-Jubeir, said: "We condemn terrorism in all its forms...whether it's perpetrated by one side or the other."
He described new controls imposed on Saudi banks to combat financing of extremist groups and reported that more than 1,000 individuals have been questioned and 300 arrested since the May 12 terrorist bombing in Riyadh that was blamed on al Qaeda.
Washington also blames Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda group for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people.
-------- nato
Belgian Law May Force U.S. to Stop Attending NATO Meetings
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service,
June 12, 2003
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2003/n06122003_200306125.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that American officials may stop attending NATO meetings in Belgium because of a law that allows "spurious" suits accusing American leaders of war crimes.
Rumsfeld said the United States will withhold any further funding for a new NATO headquarters building here until the matter is resolved. He spoke during a press conference following the NATO defense ministerial.
The problem stems from Belgium's Universal Competence Law. Under this law, U.S. Central Command chief Army Gen. Tommy Franks has been charged with war crimes for his actions in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Former President George H.W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired Army Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, former CENTCOM commander, have also been charged for their roles in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The law gives Belgian courts the power to try citizens of any nation for war crimes. "These suits are absurd," Rumsfeld said. He said Franks went to great lengths to spare civilian lives during the war in Iraq.
"The point is this: By passing that law, Belgium has turned its legal system into a platform for divisive, politicized lawsuits against officials of its NATO allies," Rumsfeld said.
The secretary said that it's not for outsiders to tell the Belgian government what to do. "We respect their sovereignty," he said. "We respect it even though Belgium appears not to respect the sovereignty of other countries."
But, he said, Belgium must understand there are consequences. "We will have to seriously consider whether we can allow senior uniformed and civilian officials to come to ... Brussels," he said.
"Certainly until this matter is resolved we will have to oppose any further spending for construction of the new NATO headquarters in Brussels. Until we know with certainty that Belgium intends to be a hospitable place for NATO to conduct its business."
This is not the first time that U.S. officials have complained about the law. Joint Chiefs chairman Air Force Gen. Richard Myers commented on the law during a visit to NATO in April.
In March, Secretary of State Colin Powell also complained about the law.
U.S. Embassy officials said there have been discussions in the Belgium government about the law and its unintended consequences.
----
NATO to Slash Bases in Global Security Role Drive
Thu June 12, 2003
By John Chalmers
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2917566
BRUSSELS - NATO was set to agree on a 40-percent reduction of its military bases on Thursday as part of a drive to remodel the Cold War alliance to tackle new security threats worldwide.
Officials said that after haggling by Mediterranean allies over plans to scrap up to nine bases, there was an agreement in principle on the alliance's radical command structure revamp just hours before a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels.
"It seems we've got a deal. At 40 percent this is a major reduction. It will make us more agile and give us greater reach," said one alliance official.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was among the first to arrive at the Brussels headquarters of the 19-nation alliance, which was plunged into the deepest crisis in its 54-year history just four months ago by sharp differences over the Iraq war.
In Germany on Wednesday he sought to heal the rift with Berlin but again drew a line between "old" and "new" Europe, repeating the phrase that fueled the transatlantic rows in the run-up to the U.S.-led conflict.
His German counterpart, Peter Struck, sought to play that comment down as he arrived for the defense ministers' meeting, telling reporters that Rumsfeld "didn't speak about it in the way that he did previously."
"We are now in a situation where Europe is coming together ...facing the same challenges of asymmetric threats," he said.
Diplomats said they hoped the meeting would help rebuild trust and focus minds on how to gear NATO for missions beyond the borders it defended during the Cold War.
CAPACITY TO ACT
The alliance has already agreed to take command of peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan on August 11 and it will provide support to a Polish-led stabilization force in Iraq.
"After our near-death experience in February...NATO has made a quite dramatic comeback with these two decisions," a senior U.S. official said. "But if we want NATO to go out of area we have to have the capacity to do it."
He said the United States would brief allies in Brussels on lessons learned from the Iraq war, one of which was that with speed and agility there is no need for huge numbers of troops.
The streamlining of NATO's cumbersome command structure, little changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was launched at the alliance's summit in Prague last November.
Along with a drive to improve military capabilities and build a rapid response force, it is part of a program designed to make NATO relevant for new global challenges such as failed states, terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
The aim is to move away from the static military posture of the Cold War and enable NATO to do what it could not do after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America: strike quickly when an ally is attacked by a distant foe.
Struck said several allies would sign a letter of intent on Thursday to lease Antonov-124 military transport planes from Ukraine as part of a stop-gap plan before the first deliveries of Airbus A400Ms in 2009.
The United States has over 200 strategic lift aircraft and Britain leases four but the rest of the alliance has none.
Such planes are crucial to get troops, kit and supplies to distant hotspots, and without them Europe cannot hope to be an equal partner with the United States as NATO focuses on threats beyond its own borders.
----
NATO in Afghanistan
June 12, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030611-093259-4871r.htm
NATO defense ministers gather today in Brussels to discuss the alliance's latest challenge: In August, NATO will take over the peace-keeping mission in Afghanistan, in what could be a turning point not only for the country, but for the alliance as well.
NATO and U.S. officials remain clear-eyed about the challenges that the alliance will face in Afghanistan, given the ongoing (and perhaps escalating) lack of security. Last Saturday, four German peacekeepers were killed and seven seriously wounded when in a suicide bomber in a taxi collided with their bus. Tribal chieftains continue to control the country outside Kabul. How much of this violence and instability is NATO expected to contain, and what changes is the alliance expected to implement?
The Bush administration is more optimistic about the alliance's ability to bolster global security, given NATO's willingness to operate beyond Europe. The United States is pushing NATO to become a mobile force, and would like to see that agility in play in Afghanistan. It is still unclear, though, if the international community is expected to allocate much more than the $5.2 billion already pledged. Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently asked for an additional $15 billion in aid. Increased aid and a broader peace-keeping mandate could help solve some of Afghanistan's problems. But more dollars channeled to the federal government could also trigger a violent contest among tribal chieftains for control of the kitty.
By and large, securing Afghanistan boils down to managing these chieftains. And here, America's political and military goals have conflicted. Most political efforts have been geared toward fortifying Mr. Karzai's rule. But the U.S. military has dealt with tribal chieftains, first to oust the Taliban, and subsequently for help in finding terrorists and thwarting their efforts to find refuge. This has heightened tribal leaders' sphere of influence. To the degree NATO can make political and military goals more symmetrical, it could become more successful.
This will require an adjustment in expectations and strategy. Establishing order will hinge on regional autonomy and establishing democracy incrementally. The international community's goal of holding democratic elections next year looks too ambitious. Instead, donor countries should facilitate peacekeepers' tasks by gearing aid to first establish order and quell violence, subsequently deliver crucial services and ultimately usher in democracy.
This can be achieved by establishing an incentives-based aid program, where regions would receive greater aid by establishing order, a recognizable rules or law-based structure and respect for women and ethnic, religious minorities. Tribal chieftains would presumably profit from, or at least highly influence, aid, but their cooperation would be co-opted. Those regions that attract minorities through their equitable treatment will receive more aid to cover greater needs.
The United States and NATO have a great stake in bringing Afghanistan stability. If the alliance is successful, it could embark on similar missions in the future. Already, NATO defense ministers are discussing the possibility of playing some role in the Middle East peace process.
The key to the alliance's success in Afghanistan will be preparation. Defense ministers in Brussels today certainly have their work cut out for them.
--------
NATO Agrees to Reshape Forces
June 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NATO-Transformation.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- NATO defense ministers agreed Thursday to overhaul the military alliance, reducing command centers and creating more agile forces to shift the focus to the fight against terrorism and other unpredictable threats.
The changes will ``profoundly reshape'' the 54-year-old alliance and enhance its capabilities, said NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson, who has advocated the overhaul of an organization formed as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
``This is a new NATO, a NATO transformed,'' Robertson said.
Separately, Spain agreed to help Poland run a peacekeeping zone in central Iraq, contributing some 1,100 troops to a multinational force, Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski said.
Soldiers from three Latin American nations will also join the force, as well as troops from Ukraine and other European nations, Szmajdzinski said.
Both Spain and Poland supported the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein. The operation is considered a major test for Poland, which only joined NATO in 1999 and has struggled to modernize its armed forces.
NATO also has agreed to assume peacekeeping duties in the Afghan capital, Kabul, in August.
The alliance's worldwide operational command will remain at its European headquarters in southern Belgium under U.S. Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the former commandant of the Marine Corps.
Its Atlantic command, at Norfolk, Va., will become a ``transformation headquarters'' overseeing the military modernization led by U.S. Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani, who also heads the U.S. Joint Forces Command.
The number of NATO regional and sub-regional command posts will be cut from 20 to 11 to change a grid of commands dating back to the Cold War. The allies also agreed that first elements of an elite rapid response force should be up and running by October.
Robertson and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld urged the allies to make more progress in other areas where they have been slow to improve such as developing surveillance planes, secure communications and protection from biochemical and nuclear attacks.
Rumsfeld later warned Belgium that war crimes lawsuits against the Iraq war commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, and other U.S. officials threatened the country's role as NATO host.
``This law calls into serious question whether NATO can continue to hold meetings in Belgium,'' Rumsfeld said at a news conference. ``It's perfectly possible to meet elsewhere.''
He said the United States would oppose any further spending on a new NATO headquarters in Brussels, which is due to open at the end of the decade at an estimated cost of at least $351 million.
U.S. officials have been outraged by complaints brought against Franks, who commanded American forces in the Iraq war, under laws that allow Belgian courts to try war crimes wherever they are committed around the world.
The case was filed by a left-wing lawyer on behalf of a group of Iraqis injured or bereaved in the war.
Belgian Defense Minister Andre Flahaut said he was surprised by Rumsfeld's warning, insisting the Franks case had been rejected by Belgium and they were evaluating a case against former President Bush.
The intention of the overhaul was to give teeth to a NATO doctrine developed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks under which the alliance agreed to act against threats to the security of the 19 allies.
``There are no more traditional wars. We have to ... develop a concept to fight terrorism,'' German Defense Minister Peter Struck said.
Several members of the alliance also planned to sign accords Thursday agreeing to lease cargo ships and transport planes to increase their ability to participate in NATO missions.
Robertson said he would push the Europeans to make more progress in other areas where they have been slow to improve capabilities, notably ground surveillance planes, secure communications and protection from biochemical and nuclear attacks.
``There will be a pretty blunt message for the Europeans to do more,'' he said in an interview with The Associated Press before the meeting. ``You have to be more brutal if you want to get results.''
The 19 NATO defense ministers were joined on the first day of a two-day session by their counterparts from seven former Soviet bloc nations due to join the alliance next year: Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
--------
[maybe the US-NATO should stop committing war crimes]
Rumsfeld Says Belgian Law Could Prompt NATO to Leave
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/europe/12CND-RUMS.html
BRUSSELS, June 12 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld effectively threatened Belgium today that it risked losing its status as host to NATO's headquarters if it did not rescind a law that has been used to lodge accusations of war crimes against American officials.
"We will have to seriously consider whether we can allow our civilian and military officials to come to Belgium," Mr. Rumsfeld said, adding that NATO could easily hold meetings elsewhere.
The blunt language served to stir up resentment against the United States here just as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was mending internal divisions over the war in Iraq.
Mr. Rumsfeld made his remarks at an evening news conference at which he said the United States would withhold financing for a new NATO headquarters building as long as the Belgian law remained on the books. His criticism, diplomats complained, was sure to fuel nationalist sentiments here and complicate the Belgian government's efforts to unwind the legislation.
Mr. Rumsfeld's comments overshadowed the progress that the military alliance's defense ministers have made in revamping NATO into the faster-acting and farther-reaching organization that Washington has demanded. The ministers agreed on a streamlined command structure and the formation of a rapid-reaction force later this year.
The Belgian law, passed in 1993 and revised this year, allows virtually anyone to bring war crimes complaints in Belgian courts against any country's national leaders.
The law gives Belgium "universal jurisdiction" to try people accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, even if there is no Belgian connection to the events, the victims or the perpetrators.
Most recently, a Belgian lawmaker used the law to file a complaint against Gen. Tommy Franks, the American commander of the Iraq campaign, that seeks to hold him responsible for civilian casualties during the conflict in Iraq. Former President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have also been accused by various groups under the law, prompting complaints from Washington.
All NATO countries are concerned about the effects of the law, diplomats here said, though many complained that Mr. Rumsfeld's approach had only muddied the waters. All of the diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Rumsfeld, a former American envoy to NATO himself, set Europe on edge earlier this year by casting differences over Iraq policy as a debate between "old" and "new" Europe. True as that may have been, many diplomats say his language was divisive and served to deepen resentments and harden positions.
While the alliance's defense ministers and their NATO ambassadors have worked hard to ease lingering tensions over the fractious Iraq debate, some said Mr. Rumsfeld seemed determined to keep those tensions alive.
"When the French or German ministers spoke, he would make a show of not paying attention, reading notes or talking to his neighbors," one senior European diplomat said. "He went out of his way to show he doesn't care."
Despite the controversy over Mr. Rumsfeld, the defense ministers managed to make striking progress on restructuring the alliance along the lines agreed to during a NATO summit in Prague last year.
-------- prisoners of war
U.S. probes Iraq POW death
ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 12, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030611-113028-2852r.htm
The military is investigating whether U.S. troops were responsible for the death of an Iraqi prisoner of war, officials said yesterday.
The criminal investigation is the first involving the death of a prisoner in U.S. custody in Iraq. The British are investigating both the deaths of two Iraqis who were under British control and accusations of beatings and torture of prisoners by British troops.
U.S. authorities found the corpse of a 52-year-old prisoner Friday at a camp run by the 1st Marine Division near Nasiriyah, officials said. The man had been held at the camp in southern Iraq since his capture May 3, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.
Officials said the prisoner was not one of the 55 Iraqis most wanted by the Americans. More than half of the former Iraqi officials on that list have been captured and are being interrogated by American forces.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the death, suggesting there is evidence the prisoner was killed.
Military officials would not say how the prisoner died. They refused to identify him or say whether he had been cooperating with American authorities. Officials also did not say whether the prisoner could have been attacked by other prisoners at the camp.
Killing POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international law - as well as the United States' Uniform Code of Military Justice. Any findings of criminal wrongdoing in the Iraqi prisoner's death could result in court-martial proceedings against those involved.
Pentagon war-crimes investigators are looking into whether Iraqis executed American troops after taking them prisoner during fierce fighting in Nasiriyah in late March.
American forces are holding more than 2,000 of the thousands of Iraqis captured during and after the U.S.-led war to topple dictator Saddam Hussein. Hundreds of other Iraqis have been released.
The Pentagon also is investigating the December deaths of two prisoners at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. Military coroners ruled the two deaths were homicides, finding that both men had been beaten and one had a blood clot in his lungs.
-------- spies
CIA Rejects Blame for Bush's Iraq Uranium Claim
June 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters06-12-120451.asp?reg=MIDEAST http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-intelligence.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA rejected any blame on Thursday for the use of a faulty intelligence report by President Bush as he built his case for war against Iraq.
A spokesman, Bill Harlow, voiced confidence that ``a careful reading'' of documents supplied to congressional oversight committees would show the spy agency ``did not withhold information from appropriate officials'' about Iraq's purported attempt to buy uranium in Niger.
The Central Intelligence Agency, he said, had shared hundreds of pages of material with the panels looking into charges, from lawmakers and others, that the administration and the intelligence community oversold the weapons threat to foster public support for ousting President Saddam Hussein.
The latest challenge to the CIA involved a claim in Bush's State of the Union address that Saddam had been trying to buy ``significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''
Bush aides have given somewhat conflicting accounts of how this claim made it into the speech. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said intelligence officials declared the charge incorrect ``as the information was received.''
On Sunday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said ``someone may have known'' the information was false 11 months before Bush's speech, but the White House believed it to be true at the time.
But she said the claim, attributed in the speech to the British government, was what ``the intelligence community said we could say.''
CIA MISSION
The uranium tale had been disputed by a CIA-directed mission to Niger early last year, the Washington Post reported in its Thursday edition.
The CIA did not pass on the results of this mission to the White House or other government officials, the Post reported, citing unnamed senior administration officials and a former government official.
Any such CIA failure to share fully what it knew would have helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve of the March invasion of Iraq.
The supposed uranium quest in Africa first surfaced in a now widely contested Sept. 24, 2002, report on Iraq released by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The claim was quickly embraced by the Bush administration, though many mid-level intelligence officials knew it was bogus, several people with first-hand knowledge told Reuters.
``I remember being told to discount the information about uranium purchases in Africa in our own assessments of Iraq's nuclear weapons capabilities,'' said David Albright, a nuclear physicist and former U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq who heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
He said he had been told the story was wrong in late September by people who had access to classified intelligence information.
The CIA declined comment on the Washington Post report, which said the spy agency sent a retired U.S. ambassador to investigate in February 2002 the purported Iraqi bid to buy uranium in Niger.
After returning, the envoy reported to the CIA the uranium purchase attempt story was false, based on talks with Niger officials purportedly involved, said the Post.
Thirteen months later, on March 7, Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the Security Council his agency had reached the same conclusion and that the underlying documents were ``not authentic,'' an assessment that U.S. officials have not disputed.
But the spy agency put out the denials by Niger officials in a March 2002 intelligence report that was ``widely disseminated throughout the U.S. government,'' a U.S. intelligence official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat seeking to pin down why Bush cited forged evidence about Iraq, said: ``We must find out whether the CIA deceived the president ... or whether it is deceiving the public now to protect the president and the vice president.''
----
CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data
Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46957-2003Jun11?language=printer
A key component of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program -- its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger -- was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies, the officials said.
The CIA's failure to share what it knew, which has not been disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated evidence.
A senior intelligence official said the CIA's action was the result of "extremely sloppy" handling of a central piece of evidence in the administration's case against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But, the official added, "It is only one fact and not the reason we went to war. There was a lot more."
However, a senior CIA analyst said the case "is indicative of larger problems" involving the handling of intelligence about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda, which the administration cited as justification for war. "Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized," the analyst said.
As the controversy over Iraq intelligence has expanded with the failure so far of U.S. teams in Iraq to uncover proscribed weapons, intelligence officials have accused senior administration policymakers of pressuring the CIA or exaggerating intelligence information to make the case for war. The story involving the CIA's uranium-purchase probe, however, suggests that the agency also was shaping intelligence on Iraq to meet the administration's policy goals.
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and a candidate for president, yesterday described the case as "part of the agency's standard operating procedure when it wants to advance the information that supported their [the administration's] position and bury that which didn't."
Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.
During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.
However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador's report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken place, a senior administration said.
"This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends," a senior intelligence official said, describing the agency's view of the mission. "He relayed back to us that they said it was not true and that he believed them."
Thirteen months later, on March 8, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, informed the U.N. Security Council that after careful scrutiny of the Niger documents, his agency had reached the same conclusion as the CIA's envoy. ElBaradei deemed the documents "not authentic," an assessment that U.S. officials did not dispute.
Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation have described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in Niger. The documents had been sought by U.N. inspectors since September 2002 and they were delivered by the United States and Britain last February.
The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of nongovernment experts that is reviewing the handling of Iraq intelligence, is planning to study the Niger story and how it made its way into Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28. In making the case that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program, Bush declared that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
That same month, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also mentioned Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium, and the story made its way into a State Department "fact sheet" as well.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee and a leading administration critic, wrote the president June 2 asking why Bush had included the Niger case as part of the evidence he cited against Iraq. "Given what the CIA knew at the time, the implication you intended -- that there was credible evidence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa -- was simply false," Waxman said.
The CIA's decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney's staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.
Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter, but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials, never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an administration official.
When the British government published an intelligence document on Iraq in September 2002 claiming that Baghdad had "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the former ambassador called the CIA officers who sent him to Niger and was told they were looking into new information about the claim, sources said. The former envoy later called the CIA and State Department after Bush's State of the Union speech and was told "not to worry," according to one U.S. official.
Later it was disclosed that the United States and Britain were basing their reports on common information that originated with forged documents provided originally by Italian intelligence officials.
CIA Director George J. Tenet, on Sept. 24, 2002, cited the Niger evidence in a closed-door briefing to the Senate intelligence committee on a national intelligence estimate of Iraq's weapons programs, sources said. Although Tenet told the panel that some questions had been raised about the evidence, he did not mention that the agency had sent an envoy to Niger and that the former ambassador had concluded that the claims were false.
The Niger evidence was not included in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's Feb. 5 address to the Security Council in which he disclosed some intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons programs and links to al Qaeda because it was considered inaccurate, sources said.
Even so, the Voice of America on Feb. 20 broadcast a story that said: "U.S. officials tell VOA [that] Iraq and Niger signed an agreement in the summer of 2000 to resume shipments for an additional 500 tons of yellow cake," a reference to the uranium. The VOA, which is financed by the government but has an official policy of editorial independence, went on to say that there was no evidence such shipments had taken place.
-------- us
Pentagon planning for long-term safari
By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
June 12, 2003
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=AFRICABASE-06-12-03&cat=II
WASHINGTON - Little noticed among the Pentagon's plans to radically reshape the U.S. military presence overseas is the groundbreaking possibility of basing thousands of American troops in or around West Africa.
Under discussion: everything from positioning a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group off Africa's vast west coast to establishing one or more forward operating bases in Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Equatorial Guinea or the tiny island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.
The spurs for what may prove an unprecedented U.S. military beachhead in sub-Saharan Africa are the region's instability, potential attractiveness to terrorists and, most pivotal, its rich oil resources, Pentagon officials and Africa experts say.
As much as 15 percent of America's oil now comes from West Africa - about the amount imported from Saudi Arabia. By next year, the West African portion is expected to jump to 20 percent.
Citing what he described as "large, ungoverned areas ... that are clearly new routes of narco-trafficking, terrorism and a hotbed of instability," U.S. Gen. James Jones recently signaled the Pentagon's new focus on West Africa.
"I think Africa is a continent that is going to be of very, very significant interest in the 21st century," Jones, who is head of the U.S. European Command, told a Senate panel in May.
J. Stephen Morrison, top Africa expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, echoed that assessment. He noted that terror kingpin Osama bin Laden in his last major speech exhorted his followers to mobilize in Nigeria, a West African nation with a large Muslim population.
"I think the Pentagon is correct in sensing this is a region of increasing importance," Morrison said this week, while cautioning the administration to devote more effort to understanding the extraordinarily complex dynamics of the continent before jumping in.
Dan Volman, director of the Washington-based African Security Research Project, agreed, noting the region has extremely fragile political systems and a high degree of ethnic and religious conflict. "You're fishing in very dangerous waters there," he said.
The new focus on Africa comes as the Bush administration embarks on a wholesale re-shuffling of America's military posture around the world to reflect the post-9/11 war on terrorism. U.S. troops already are leaving Saudi Arabia and moving farther from the front lines in South Korea, while others are expected to leave Germany for new outposts in Bulgaria and Poland, and for stateside assignments.
It also comes as the Bush administration moves toward more engagement with Africa, a continent then-candidate George W. Bush dismissed in 2000 as a place that "doesn't fit into the national strategic interests as far as I can see them."
Now, however, Africa is capturing more White House attention, primarily because it looms as an increasingly important source of oil and its potential as a breeding- or training-ground for terrorists, Africa experts said. Bush has endorsed a massive assault on AIDS in Africa and is slated to visit the continent next month.
The Pentagon's first focus has been on the Horn of Africa and its eastern reaches, where Sudan had served as a base for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, while Kenya and Tanzania had been the sites for al Qaeda-related terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies. Yemen was used as a staging area for an attack on the USS Cole destroyer.
Reflecting that, the Pentagon in May established a command base, with more than 2,000 U.S. troops, in the East African nation of Djibouti.
Now, attention is shifting to West Africa. One plan under consideration would establish skeleton bases in several nations where U.S. military materiel could be stored for quick retrieval by U.S. troops rushed in during a crisis.
Gen. Jones also indicated that a sea-based presence also is likely.
"The carrier battle groups of the future and the expeditionary strike groups of the future may not spend six months in the (Mediterranean Sea), but I'll bet they'll spend half the time going down the west coast of Africa," Jones said.
-------- propaganda wars
Intelligence Officer Challenges Bush Administration on 'Why They Hate Us'
Gary Thomas
10 Jun 2003
VOA News
http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=D65BA316-CA8F-4A99-AAAF9AB069C712F0
Washington = In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, one question has been heard repeatedly among Americans: why do they hate us so? One U.S. intelligence official has what he thinks are some answers to that question, and has written a book about it.
In reply to the question, "Why do Osama bin Laden and his followers hate Americans," the answer from U.S. President George W. Bush has been clear-cut and unequivocal: "They hate us because we love freedom. They hate us because we love and hold dear the idea that anybody can worship an almighty God in any way he or she sees fit. They hate the idea of a free press, free political discourse. That is what they hate. And so long as we love our freedoms, they will try to harm our country."
But in a new book entitled Through Our Enemies' Eyes, one senior American intelligence officer, simply dubbed "Anonymous," sharply disagrees with that view.
"There are a lot of people who say he hates our freedoms, as you said, or hates our liberties, and hates us for what we are, rather than what we do," said the author. "That is a very common piece of analysis, and I think it is entirely wrong. Bin Laden has resonance in the Muslim world because he has focused his dislike for the things we do, not what we are."
The book was cleared for publication by the Central Intelligence Agency, and the author remains anonymous to the reading public. However, he is a senior intelligence officer of more than 20 years experience, much of it in Afghanistan and South Asia.
Anonymous agreed to be interviewed by VOA and the interview request was cleared by U.S. intelligence officials. Under the ground rules, he remains unnamed. Anonymous says that, contrary to the portrait of Osama bin Laden as simply a crazed terrorist, the al-Qaida leader is a complex figure.
"I believe that the genius of bin Laden lies in the fact that he has not resorted to saying 'we hate America's freedom and we have to attack them.' Or 'we hate America because they let women go to work and go to school and we need to attack them for that,'" the author explained. "He has not identified our culture, our society, as the main enemy or as the main reason to fight us. What he has identified are specific U.S. foreign policy actions and activities that have a resonance among Muslims all over the world."
Anonymous said Osama bin Laden has a clear political agenda. He says that agenda includes reducing U.S. support for Israel, a withdrawal of all American troops from the Arabian Peninsula, an end to what Osama bin Laden labeled as aggression against Iraq, and a halt to what Osama bin Laden viewed as Western exploitation of oil and natural gas resources of Muslim countries.
"It is a very clear policy," said the unnamed author. "None of it has to do with ephemeral things or slogans. It has to do with very clear-cut, concrete things. And I think that is why he is so effective in the Muslim world. He has picked a number of items that, whether you are, however you term it a moderate, a conservative, or a liberal Muslim, there is a certain amount of sympathy for the goals bin Laden has enunciated."
Anonymous said al-Qaida has taken some significant damage from Western anti-terrorist efforts. But, he adds, Osama bin Laden's strategy is to spur on attacks by individual groups, rather than leading a coordinated terrorist effort.
"His [bin Laden's] goal all along is to instigate other Muslims to attack the United States," said Anonymous. "He would give them assistance, he would give them training, he would give them some money perhaps. But the best of all possible worlds for him would be for Muslim groups around the world to attack us with no contact with him."
Anonymous said his views are controversial among his colleagues in the U.S. intelligence community. But, he said, understanding Osama bin Laden's motivation is key to defeating him.
"Understanding does not necessarily, and in this case does not, connote sympathy. It simply is an effort to portray the enemy as he is, and therefore give our country the best chance possible to counter and defeat it," he said.
The senior U.S. intelligence officer said that while American politicians refuse to characterize the conflict as a religious war, that is certainly the way Osama bin Laden and his followers look at it.
----
Saddam or No Saddam, Iraqi Press Will Always Have Censors
Robert Fisk,
The Independent,
12 June 2003
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=27319&d=12&m=6&y=2003&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion%22
BAGHDAD - Paul Bremer has ordered his legal department in Baghdad to draw up rules for press censorship. A joke, I concluded, when one of the newly-styled Coalition Provisional Authority officials tipped me off last week. But no, it really is true.
Two months after 'liberating' Iraq, the Anglo-American authorities and their boss Paul Bremer - whose habit of wearing combat boots with a black suit continues to amaze his colleagues - have decided to control the new and free Iraqi press. Newspapers which publish 'wild stories', material deemed provocative or capable of inciting ethnic violence will be threatened or shut down.
It's for the good of the Iraqi people, you understand. A controlled press is a responsible press - which is exactly what Saddam Hussein used to say about the trashy newspapers his regime produced. It must seem all too familiar to the people of Baghdad.
Now let's be fair. Many stories in the emerging newspapers of Baghdad are untrue. There is no tradition of checking reports, of giving opponents the opportunity to be heard. There are constant articles about the behavior of American troops. One paper has claimed that US soldiers distributed postcards of naked women to schoolgirls - they even published the pictures, with Japanese script on the cards. Even the most cynical Westerner can see how this kind of lie can stir up sentiment against Iraq's new foreign occupiers.
"The people of Iraq have fallen," Waleed Rabia, a19 -year-old student, wrote in the new paper 'Al-Mujaha'. "Invaders are in our country. The wild animals of this jungle called a world are trying to rip us apart. We've been through hard times under the old regime, but we were better then than we are now...Look at those girls who are having sex with the Americans in their tanks, or in the bathrooms of the Palestine Hotel...What about those Muslim girls marrying Christian foreigners? No one can accept this as a true Muslim or true Iraqi..." It isn't difficult to understand the fury that this kind of article might arouse - and the idea that the Anglo-American presence is as awful as Saddam's torturers betrays a truly eccentric mind - though it would help if certain Iraqi police officers were not admitting that they were arranging 'dates' for US troops.
What the Iraqis need, of course, is journalistic help rather than censorship, courses in reporting - by experienced journalists from real democracies (rather than the version Bremer seems set on creating) - rather than a colonial-style suppression of free speech, which is what censorship will become. But we're now hearing that imams in the mosques may be censored if they provoke unrest - this would obviously include the imam of the Rashid Street mosque in Baghdad outside of which I heard him preaching last week.
The Americans must leave, he said. Immediately. Subversive stuff. Definitely likely to provoke violence. So good-bye in due course, I suppose to the Rashid Street imam. And of course, we all know how the first pro-American Iraqi government of 'New Iraq' will treat the laws. They will enthusiastically adopt the Western censorship law, just as former colonies almost always take over the repressive legislation of their former imperial masters.
I can obviously see the kind of stories that must be, at the least, discouraged. Take last week's extraordinary UN announcement - mercifully ignored in most of the Western press - that Afghanistan is once more the world's No. 1 producer of opium. The hateful Taleban banned all poppy production under their vicious rule, cutting off the Northern Alliance warlords from their narcotics production. But since America's 'success' in routing the Taleban, the drug barons - the very same Northern Alliance lads who were US allies in the 'war on terror' - have gone back into business. Not one American official dares to comment on this shameful fact. Quite a memorial to the thousands who died in the international crimes against humanity of Sept.11 ,2001 .
As for the Iraqis, what lessons are they to draw? If the Americans can let the narco-terrorists rule again in Afghanistan, why should they be any more moral in Baghdad where drugs are reappearing for sale on the streets, courtesy - you guessed it - of the Afghan drugs trade. So censor the story.
Then we have German UN arms inspector, Peter Franck, telling 'Der Spiegel' magazine that Colin Powell's evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction which he presented to the UN Security Council in February was merely 'a big bluff'. Former UN inspector Scott Ritter - who all along told audiences before the war that Saddam had no WMDs - appears to have been telling the truth. Saddam, he says, "couldn't have destroyed weapons of mass destruction without leaving traces." So much for Donald Rumsfeld's cheerful suggestion that the Iraqi dictator had got rid of his nasties just before the Americans and British staged their illegal invasion. "Britain and the United States should admit they lied," Ritter now suggests. Censor the story.
Out at Baghdad airport, the Americans are now holding3 , 000prisoners without any intention of putting them on trial or charging them with offenses. Where is Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister? The Americans say they have him. But we don't know where. What's he being asked? About Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Or - my own guess - how much he knows about America's close relations with Saddam after1978 ? In fact, Aziz knows far too much about that shameful alliance; after all, he met Donald Rumsfeld several times. One thing's for sure. They'll be no trial for Tariq Aziz. Keeping him silent will be the first priority. But that's not something the Iraqis should learn about. Censor the story.
While we're still on the subject of Baghdad Airport, it's important to note that American forces at the facility are now coming under attack every night - I repeat, every night - from small arms fire. So are American military planes flying into the airbase. The pilots have seen the gunfire directed at them - some US air crews have now adopted the old Vietnam tactic of corks crewing tightly down onto the runways instead of risking sniper fire during a conventional final approach. The source is impeccable (it's within the Third Infantry Division, if the int. boys want to know). But what will that tell the Iraqis? That the Americans cannot keep order? That a resistance movement is well under way? Censor the story.
Then we have Paul Wolfowitz - or 'Wolfie, as George Bush likes to call him - blowing the whistle on America's motives for the invasion of Iraq. Asked at a Singapore conference why the (real) threat of North Korean nuclear weapons was being treated differently from Iraq's (less real) threat, Wolfie was reported in 'Die Welt' to have given a truly revealing reply. "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." This, by the way, comes from the same man who told Vanity Fair that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: Weapons of mass destruction."
For Iraqis, this is incendiary material. The one suspicion held in common by both Saddam's former Baathists and Saddam's bitterest opponents in Iraq is that Britain and America invaded their country, not because of chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, not because of human rights abuses, but for oil. Clearly, Wolfie's words are highly provocative, could give valuable propaganda to Saddam's 'remnants' - who are becoming as lethal as the now famous Taleban 'remnants' - and stir up disorder among the vast majority of peace-loving Iraqis who trust the Americans. Censor the story.
And what to print? Well, there's the charnel house of mass graves being discovered every day, the visits to the Saddamite torture rooms, the continued and uproarious memoirs of the man who claims to have been Saddam's double - anything, in fact, which will remind the people of how awful Saddam truly was and take their mind off what is really being done to their country. Bremer is trying to quick-fix his new 'consultative' council of wise Iraqis prior to the famous democratic election which has been briefly postponed. And meanwhile he's fired a quarter of a million Iraqi soldiers from their jobs - ready, no doubt, to join the nascent resistance movement. Yes, it truly is time for press censorship in Iraq.
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WMD: Intelligence without brains
Alan Reynolds
June 12, 2003
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/alanreynolds/ar20030612.shtml
The Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating whether intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were full of honest or dishonest mistakes, or whether temperate CIA reports were hyped by administration officials to gain support for the war.
I wrote about WMD in February, citing an October 2002 CIA report on "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" that is readily available at www.cia.gov. This report contains no top secrets, but it illustrates very well the sorts of evidence later cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others.
The opening summary stated that "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents." Later, this turns out to mean "Iraq has the ability of produce chemical warfare (CW) agents" and "gaps in Iraqi accounting and current production capabilities strongly suggest that Iraq maintains stockpiles of chemical agents." The report also said, "Chlorine and phenol ... have legitimate civilian uses but also are raw materials for the synthesis of precursor chemicals used to produce blister and nerve gas."
The report repeatedly relies on things "unaccounted for" such as chemical precursors and "about 550 artillery shells filled with mustard agent." But precursors are not weapons and artillery shells are of no use to terrorists -- particularly if filled with useless mustard gas left over from the war with Iran.
Iraq and Iran both used gas against each other from 1983 to 1988, but even information from that period is murky. The CIA wrote, "Although precise information is lacking, human rights organizations have received plausible accounts from Kurdish villagers of even more Iraqi chemical attacks against civilians ... in areas close to the Iranian and Turkish borders." Approximate casualties from the infamous gas attack on "his own people" at Halabjah in March 1988 are listed as "hundreds" in the CIA report and included Iranians, not just Kurds.
What about biological weapons (BW)? The summary said "Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles (and) aerial sprayers ..." As with CW, to be capable of making BW is not the same as having a stockpile anybody will ever find. What Iraq had, the report explains later, is "the capability to convert quickly legitimate vaccine and biopesticide plants to biological warfare (BW) and it may have already done so." Any country producing chlorine, pesticides or castor oil could thus be accused of plotting to produce precursors for WMD.
Even if Iraq actually had "some" BW, packing such living organisms into bombs or missiles would be an excellent way of killing the biological agents and little else. Besides, Iraq had only "a small force of extended-range Scud-type missiles and an undetermined number of launchers and warhead." So the CIA had to come up with some hypothetical "aerial sprayers" to dispense the hypothetical biological weapons Iraq was "capable of" producing.
"Before the Gulf war," said the CIA, "the Iraqis successfully experimented with aircraft-mounted spray tanks capable of releasing up to 2,000 liters of anthrax simulant over a target area." To be capable of releasing simulated anthrax is not the same as being capable of killing anyone that way. Most biological agents can't survive exposure to sunlight. Anthrax sprayed from aircraft would have to be mixed with water, which evaporates quickly, and only particles of an extremely precise size stand a chance of being inhaled in lethal quantities even at close range (like an envelope), much less after floating around in the wind.
"Before the Gulf War," said the CIA, "Baghdad attempted to convert a MiG-21 into an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)." One attempt, and it failed. In the summary, however, the CIA reported that "Iraq maintains ... several development programs, including for a UAV that most analysts believe probably is intended to deliver biological warfare agents."
That doesn't say Iraq has a UAV, only a program. In the opening summary, however, the report said, "Baghdad's UAV's ... could threaten ... the United States if brought close to, or into, the U.S. Homeland." This was as close as the report (and Powell) ever came to making Iraq appear to be a clear and present danger to the U.S. homeland. Yet the CIA did not really claim to have evidence that Iraq had even a single UAV. Little wonder we didn't find one.
The frequent claim that suspect weapons are too tiny to find does not work for UAVs or for entire factories that were supposedly producing germs and gas. The notion of mobile labs just came from one defecting Iraqi scientist who "admitted to U.N. inspectors that Iraq was trying to move in the direction of mobile BW production." The CIA report showed aerial photos of factories and named a few. The 150 most suspicious sites were surely among the first 300 that have been inspected. We are now playing the longshots.
Writing in the LA Times, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations ponders why Hussein was so uncooperative "in light of the postwar failure to find any WMD stockpiles." He offers just two explanations: Either Saddam "destroyed his stockpile" or "we'll still find it."
A third explanation is that some weapons that were supposed to make Iraq a formidable military threat never existed, such as UAVs or missile warheads loaded with biological agents. Others, such as capacity to produce biological and chemical precursors, were never weapons. The rest, as the CIA put it, was based on "limited insight into activities since 1998," including speculations from private analysts (Tony Blair's dossier reportedly relied heavily on Jane's Intelligence Report). "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons," wrote the CIA. But seeking is not having, and intelligence experts are not necessarily intelligent.
I see no value in Senate committees "investigating" the WMD rationale for the Iraq war. The senators should have read the CIA report last October, and not just the summary. What remains vitally important today, however, is to understand that the hyping of WMD by the CIA and others has been dangerous to homeland security.
On Oct. 2, 2001, The Washington Post ran an important story by Joby Warrick and Joe Stephens, "Before Attack, U.S. Expected Different Hit." They said, "elaborate multi-agency planning exercises with flashy names such as 'Red Ex' and 'Dark Winter' focused overwhelmingly on biological and chemical threats, while experts urging preparations for a simpler, more conventional attack found it difficult to be heard. ... Lots of money poured into research on chemical and biological threats. Entire research institutes were created for it."
We are still focusing far too much on wildly implausible scenarios of biological and chemical terrorism, and too little on bombs and bullets and arson. That high-level WMD obsession is still just as threatening to homeland security as it was before Sept. 11.
Rather than wasting time on the easy task of debunking the CIA report on WMD in Iraq, the Senate should be investigating the whole concept of WMD. Everyone has been hyping WMD, not just the CIA. It reminds me of the folks who tried to sell my parents bomb shelters in the '50s. And I'm not buying this time, either.
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Read No Evil: A Textbook Case of Censorship
'The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn'
by Diane Ravitch
By Jonathan Yardley, yardley@twp.com
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Washington Post; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47254-2003Jun11?language=printer
THE LANGUAGE POLICE
How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
By Diane Ravitch Knopf. 255 pp. $24
It's difficult to exaggerate the importance of this book. Whether "The Language Police" will turn out to be one of those rare books that actually influence the way we live -- Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" -- remains to be seen, but surely one must pray that it does. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, it makes appallingly plain that the textbooks American schoolchildren read and the tests that measure their academic progress have been corrupted by a bizarre de facto alliance of the far left and the far right.
Diane Ravitch got the first hint of this several years ago when she "stumbled upon an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by textbook publishers, testing agencies, professional associations, states, and the federal government." Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998 to a board investigating the possibilities and pitfalls of voluntary national testing, Ravitch soon learned "that it was standard operating procedure in the educational testing industry to submit all passages and test questions to a bias and sensitivity review," and that this was not at all what she had expected it to be.
Ravitch had assumed that any such review would implement "the sensible principle of removing racist and sexist language" from the tests, but in fact that had long since been accomplished. Now, she learned to her horror, "bias" has metamorphosed into "anything in a test item that might cause any student to be distracted or upset." Some of the examples she came across can only be described as absurd: A story about peanuts was eliminated from one test, because "the reviewers apparently assumed that a fourth-grade student who was allergic to peanuts might get distracted if he or she encountered a test question that did not acknowledge the dangers of peanuts," and an "inspiring" story about a blind mountain climber was rejected because, "in the new meaning of bias, it is considered biased to acknowledge that lack of sight is a disability."
The discovery that the most important tests at the elementary and high school levels had degenerated into feel-good exercises in boosting self-esteem by "denying reality" led Ravitch from the tests to the texts, where she learned that activists on the left and the right are "agreed on one point: Children's minds would be shaped, perhaps forever, by the content and images in their textbooks." Preposterous though this notion is, it has achieved the status of gospel among those who write bias and sensitivity guidelines.
Textbook publishers' thirst for the vast amounts of money to be earned when their publications are adopted by California, Texas and a few other disproportionately influential states obviously is far greater than their interest in educating schoolchildren, so they have merrily capitulated to the pressure groups. They give the right-wingers control of topics and content -- nothing about abortion, evolution, divorce, crime -- and the left-wingers control of language, i.e., the weasel words of political correctness. Ravitch writes: "The pressure groups of left and right have important points of convergence. Both right-wingers and left-wingers demand that publishers shield children from words and ideas that contain what they deem the 'wrong' models for living. Both assume that by limiting what children read, they can change society to reflect their worldview."
So much for the old truism that no maiden was ever ravished by a book. The ideologues of right and left have, apparently, bottomless faith in the power of the written word to shape not just the minds of the young but to determine the course of their lives. They believe that to describe something is to endorse it, so they insist that what they do not endorse cannot be described. The spineless textbook publishers and testing companies capitulate with not a peep of protest, indeed with a smile, for the paycheck is very large. "What's left," Ravitch asks, "after the language police and the thought police from the left and right have done their work?" Her answer deserves to be quoted at length:
"Stories that have no geographical location. . . . Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant. Stories in which men are fearful and women are brave. Stories in which older people are never ill. Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved. Stories in which blind people and people with physical disabilities need no assistance from anyone because their handicaps are not handicaps. Stories in which fantasy and magic are banned. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored. Stories about science that leave out any reference to evolution or prehistoric times. Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time."
In a word: Fantasyland, a place so wildly disconnected from reality that it makes Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom seem by contrast a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Edvard Munch. The language police are blissfully oblivious to the inescapable truth that "schools compete for children's attention with far more powerful media." Children are assaulted by "powerful stimuli" on TV, the movies, the Internet, in advertising, in pop music, yet in school they are insulated "from any contact in their textbooks with anything that might disturb them, like violence, death, divorce or bad language." As Ravitch says: "No matter. When the school day is done, they will turn again to the videos and music and movies that feed them eroticized violence and surround them with language that knows no constraints. This is as wacky a combination as anyone might dream up: schools in which life has been homogenized, with all conflicts flattened out, within the context of an adolescent culture in which anything goes."
Bear in mind, though, that American kids are a lot smarter than American adults give them credit for being, especially American adults who live in their own fear-haunted, euphemism-enhanced universes. Surely the principal effect of this bowdlerization of texts and tests is merely to increase students' indifference to and contempt for them and the schools that require them.
A child with a rare disease may have to be put in a bubble, but putting the entire American system of elementary and secondary education into one borders on insanity. Yet that is precisely what has happened. Guidelines imposed by textbook publishers sometimes "require writers and artists to tell lies about history" to placate one interest group or another, with the result that "the sanitizing of world history texts has stripped them of their ability to present a critical, intellectually honest assessment of controversial subjects" and that history texts "constantly moralize about the past, as though everyone in 1850 or 1900 or 1950 should have known what we know today and should have shared our enlightened values."
As for serious literature, forget about it: "Most classic literature is unacceptable when judged by the new rules governing references to gender, ethnicity, age, and disability," with the result that it is either bowdlerized beyond recognition or not taught at all. "Untouched by enduring and inspiring literature," Ravitch writes, "the students are left to be molded by the commercial popular culture. . . . As a result, we are systematically failing to introduce the younger generation to the writers who might enlarge their imaginations, enrich their emotional lives, and challenge their settled ways of thinking."
Ravitch's qualifications for drawing these judgments are impeccable and unassailable. She has worked for national administrations of both political parties and holds the rare distinction of being a visiting scholar at both the conservative Hoover Institution and the liberal Brookings Institution. She has no political axes to grind and no ideological agenda to pursue. She is a lucid writer and an absolutely clear thinker. No doubt the year will see a few books of greater literary distinction than "The Language Police," but it's unlikely to bring forth one of greater importance.
-------- war crimes
Croatia: Will Not Sign Court Deal with U.S.
Reuters
June 12, 2003
http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20030612_369.html
ZAGREB (Reuters) - Croatia refused on Thursday to sign an agreement with the United States exempting U.S. citizens from prosecution by the new world war crimes court, saying it wanted a separate deal with Washington.
The United States has piled pressure on Croatia to sign the deal, threatening to cut off $19 million in military aid unless Zagreb agrees to the accord by July 1.
"Croatia said an open 'No' to the agreement as has been presented, but it also said 'Yes' to further dialogue," Deputy Foreign Minister Ivan Simonovic told state news agency Hina.
American Cancer Society
He said Zagreb was hoping to settle the issue through separate bilateral agreements with Washington. He did not elaborate.
Zagreb officials voiced hope in May that Washington might consider exempting Croatia, together with other former Yugoslav republics falling under the jurisdiction of the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, from signing the agreement.
Croatia claims it would be unfair and immoral to refuse to hand over U.S. citizens, while surrendering its own war crimes suspects, many of whom are considered war heroes at home.
Simonovic held talks on the issue on Thursday with a U.S. delegation headed by senior State Department negotiator Marisa Lino.
Under the terms of the so-called American Servicemembers Protection Act, Washington has vowed to cut off its military equipment and training assistance to countries that do not sign the agreement by July 1.
Their assistance to Croatia amounts to some $19 million, but Simonovic said he believed the aid was already budgeted for this year and would not be immediately suspended. U.S. officials were not available for immediate comment.
Washington, which fears that the new court will expose Americans to politically motivated prosecutions, has already signed non-surrender accords with 38 countries and is negotiating with others.
NATO member countries and major U.S. non-NATO allies are not being asked to sign.
----
Hague Tribunal Orders Serbia to Handover Key Files
Thu June 12, 2003
By Paul Gallagher
(Reuters)
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2918651
AMSTERDAM - The Hague war crimes tribunal has ordered Belgrade to hand over transcripts of Slobodan Milosevic's meetings with senior allies in the 1990s after prosecutors said the documents went to the heart of their case.
The U.N. court told Serbia and Montenegro to deliver stenographic recordings of meetings between the former Yugoslav and Serbian president and other senior politicians during his rule, court documents released on Thursday showed.
Milosevic has been on trial since February 2002 charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. He was elected Yugoslav president in 1997 after two terms as Serbia's president.
"The trial chamber...orders Serbia and Montenegro to produce, within one month, the stenographic recordings of the Supreme Defense Council minutes of meetings identified in the Priority List of Documents," the court said in a ruling.
Participants in the Defense Council meetings included the then presidents of Serbia, Montenegro, the Yugoslav federation, the Yugoslav army chief of staff and Yugoslavia's defense and interior ministers.
Serbia and Montenegro had not given an acceptable reason for failing to hand over transcripts, judges said. Belgrade was obliged under international law to obey the order, the court said.
Belgrade says it needs more specific information about the documents the prosecution wants from its archives. It has also said it does not want to grant unlimited access to its files.
Judges last month set prosecutors a 100-day deadline to complete their case against the former Serb strongman. The proceedings have been disrupted by Milosevic's bouts of ill health, including flu, exhaustion and high blood pressure.
The trial of Hitler's henchmen at Nuremberg after World War II was completed within just eight months thanks to extensive access to archives, prosecutors have argued. Archives were among the best sources to uncover the truth in such cases, they said.
"They (the documents) are very important because they shed light on Milosevic's role but it is also very important because it is supportive material for some of our witnesses," prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said.
----
Fierce Clashes as Serbia Seizes War Crimes Suspect
Thu June 12, 2003
By Julijana Mojsilovic
(Reuters)
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=E1HFBQ2VG2QEOCRBAEOCFEY?type=worldNews&storyID=2922509
BELGRADE - Serbian police commandos stormed a Belgrade apartment early Friday and arrested a top war crimes suspect amid fierce clashes with his hardline nationalist supporters.
A senior Interior Ministry source confirmed that former Yugoslav National Army Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin had been taken into custody.
Sljivancanin is wanted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in connection with the massacre in 1991 of some 200 Croat and other non-Serb civilians following the Army's capture of the Danube river town Vukovar -- one of the most notorious war crimes of Croatia's 1991-95 independence war.
His arrest climaxed a tense 10-hour standoff outside the flat where he had apparently returned to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Several hundred diehard nationalists filled the street on Thursday afternoon when police entered the apartment block, throwing stones and provoking clashes not seen even when former president Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in October 2000.
Police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the hostile crowd and then battered down the armored door of Sljivancanin's flat shortly before midnight.
Protesters again attacked police after the suspect was driven off but were dispersed.
Sljivancanin's arrest comes two days before the United States certifies that Belgrade is cooperating with the tribunal on rounding up war crimes suspects, a step essential for the release of further economic aid worth millions of dollars.
He was one of three top suspects still at large who are indicted by The Hague for war crimes allegedly committed during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999.
Former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and army commander Ratko Mladic are still on the run.
Sljivancanin's two co-accused fellow officers in the Vukovar massacre are already in detention in The Hague awaiting trial.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Senators Question FBI's Propensity to Investigate Agents
Thursday, June 12, 2003,
Fox
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,89269,00.html
WASHINGTON - Three senior senators are raising questions about the FBI's decision to conduct a fourth internal investigation of an agent who aired concerns about the bureau's counterterrorism investigations.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller that the FBI (search) seems quick to launch such probes when agents speak out publicly.
"This sort of knee-jerk reaction manifests an insecurity and weakness that is dangerous for such an important agency in the war on terrorism, and is certain to have a chilling effect on other FBI employees who want to fix problems, or even make their supervisors aware of problems," said the letter dated Thursday.
"With the FBI it has been, hear no evil, speak no evil but, above all, tell no evil," the letter said.
The FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility (search) has already conducted three investigations of FBI Agent Robert Wright, who has claimed during news conferences and television appearances that he was ordered to drop terrorism investigations in the Chicago area by FBI intelligence officials.
Wright contends that he was prevented from pursuing counterterrorism leads, particularly in the area of terrorism financing, that might have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. Other FBI agents have disputed that assertion.
The senators said in their letter that all three previous investigations found no wrongdoing by Wright. An FBI spokesman declined comment on the letter or the earlier probes, saying they involve internal personnel issues.
The letter asks Mueller to provide Senate staffers with a briefing about the Wright case and ensure that the FBI "proceeds with caution and forethought" in dealing with the matter.
-------- customs
U.S. Expands Plan for Cargo Inspections at Foreign Ports
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/middleeast/12HOME.html
WASHINGTON, June 11 - The Bush administration has decided to place teams of American inspectors at major seaports in Muslim nations and other smaller, strategically located foreign ports to prevent terrorists from using cargo containers to smuggle chemical, biological or nuclear weapons into the United States, senior administration officials said.
The inspectors, they said, will be provided with radiation monitors, chemical detectors and other equipment to inspect "high risk" metal cargo containers before they are placed on ships bound for the United States.
The move is the second phase in a government program begun shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to station American customs inspectors overseas to work side by side with their foreign counterparts in searching for unconventional weapons. The first phase focused on 20 large container ports in Europe and Asia, none of them in countries with predominantly Muslim populations.
Officials said the Department of Homeland Security planned to place teams of inspectors that would remain indefinitely in Dubai, the Persian Gulf emirate that is a crucial transhipment point for containerized cargo in the Arab world; Malaysia; Turkey and other Muslim nations. Al Qaeda is believed to have a sizable presence in both Dubai and Malaysia. Intelligence agencies report that Al Qaeda has repeatedly used cargo ships to move conventional weapons and explosives, including the explosives used in the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa.
Human cargo is also a concern. In October 2001, only weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the authorities in an Italian seaport discovered an Egyptian man suspected of Qaeda membership hiding in a shipping container bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia; airport maps and security passes were also found in the container, which he had outfitted with a bed and bathroom. The man disappeared while on bail.
Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of customs and border protection in the Homeland Security Department, said the expansion of the program reflected a continuing concern that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would try to place chemical, biological or nuclear weapons into some of the more than six million containers that arrive in the United States from overseas each year.
"I'm not prophesying anything," Mr. Bonner said in an interview. "But I do have concern that we need to have this security system in place as fast as we possibly can." He said "the system of containerized shipping was vulnerable to terrorist exploitation."
"And you don't have to take my word for it," he added. "Every national security expert I've heard has come to the same conclusion."
The issue of cargo security has become increasingly contentious on Capitol Hill. Many prominent lawmakers from coastal states have accused the administration of failing to provide the money to safeguard ports from terrorist attacks and to prevent terrorists from using cargo ships to transport weapons.
Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, who will announce many of the details of the expanded inspection program in a visit Thursday to Port Elizabeth, N.J., said that "identifying and dealing with high-risk containers at the earliest possible point protects the entire international supply chain and all of the world's major seaports."
He said the posting of customs inspectors abroad, a 17-month-old program known as the Container Security Initiative, had "emerged as a formidable tool for protecting us from the threat of terrorism."
In the first phrase of the program, the Customs Service, which has since been merged into the Homeland Security Department, opened negotiations with foreign governments representing the world's 20 largest cargo ports, as measured by shipments to the United States, to permit American inspectors to be stationed permanently in those ports.
Administration officials said teams of American inspectors would be at work at almost all of those large ports - a list that includes Antwerp, Genoa, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo and Yokohama - by the end of the year.
Mr. Ridge signed an agreement today with the prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, who is visiting Washington, to allow American inspectors to work the giant Thai port of Laem Chabang, which is No. 20 on the list.
But while those 20 foreign ports represent almost two-thirds of the containerized cargo bound for the United States, officials said there was mounting worry that Al Qaeda might try to make use of cargo containers passing through other, smaller ports, especially in Muslim nations where the terrorist group has a strong following.
In the new phase of the program, Mr. Bonner said, the Bush administration would place teams in an additional 20 to 25 foreign seaports, with the ports to be chosen on the basis of both cargo volume and their strategic location in nations or regions where terrorism is believed to be a special threat.
"We will be expanding to important parts of the Islamic world," he said. "We will be looking more strategically."
Administration officials said that the Malaysian government had already agreed to join the program, and that negotiations would begin soon in earnest with both Dubai and Turkey, which are also expected to sign on quickly.
The Department of Homeland Security has already placed 130 inspectors overseas as part of the first phase of the program, with another 170 in training to join them. Department officials said more than $100 million had already been committed to setting up the program.
Mr. Bonner said foreign governments were eager to allow the American inspectors into their ports, if only because it meant that cargo shipped from their ports would face no special delays for inspection when it arrived in the United States. Governments that refuse to join the program would risk having their cargo shipments held up on arrival in this country.
Foreign governments that agree to join the program are required to provide the American inspectors with high-level detection equipment, including radiation monitors that would be used to detect nuclear devices or the components of radioactive weapons.
Mr. Bonner said that while the United States had no intention of buying detection equipment for use in foreign seaports, the administration had asked the World Bank to consider how to help foreign governments raise the money for it.
Under the program, the American teams are expected to carry out inspections of a small sample of cargo containers that raise suspicion - because their shippers are unknown, because their contents are in question or for some other reason. Each team is expected to have about five members.
At the news conference on Thursday, Mr. Ridge is also expected to announce the distribution of $170 million in federal grants to strengthen port security around the country, most of it directed to state and local governments, and $30 million for research and development on cargo security.
--------
U.S. Expands Monitoring of Foreign Ports
June 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-ports.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is expanding a port security plan and will send inspectors to another 20-25 foreign seaports in an effort to keep chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from American shores, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said on Thursday.
Ridge said the second phase of the Container Security Initiative calls for teams of inspectors to be sent to ports in predominantly Muslim countries as well as other strategically located nations.
``We're going to expand this to strategic locations -- some ports in the Middle East like Dubai, Turkey, Malaysia. We're also coordinating agreements with Sri Lanka, key ports in Africa, ports in Latin America as well as others in Asia and Europe,'' Ridge said in a speech at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.
``This is not just a response to terrorism ... it is also a deterrent to terrorism,'' Ridge said in the speech, broadcast to reporters in Washington.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the United States created the Container Security Initiative under which it reached agreements with 19 of the world's 20 major ports to boost security for cargo bound for the United States.
Under the program, U.S. officials work with foreign port authorities to identify, target and search high-risk cargo. Inspectors use a combination of radiation detectors and x-ray-type imaging equipment to inspect the cargo at the ports before it leaves for the United States.
Ridge said the program would now be expanded and with the 20-25 new ports involved will account for more than 80 percent of all cargo containers arriving at U.S. seaports.
``Let me emphasize -- phase two is not merely a sequel, it is a strengthening, it is a broadening of this very important initiative,'' Ridge said.
The second phase focuses on places where Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 hijacked airliner attacks, might try to smuggle out weapons of mass destruction.
Ridge and other top U.S. authorities have often warned of the possibility that groups like al Qaeda may use biological, chemical or radioactive weapons in a future attack on the United States or on U.S. interests abroad.
In his speech Ridge also announced the freeing up of $170 million in port security grants to improve dockside and perimeter security. The new awards will contribute to security upgrades like new patrol boats in the harbor, surveillance equipment at roads and bridges and the construction of new command and control facilities.
--------
U.S. Widens Push to Secure Foreign Ports
June 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Port-Security.html
ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP) -- A program in which American inspectors work abroad to check U.S.-bound ships for dangerous cargo is expanding to include some predominantly Muslim nations for the first time, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Thursday.
The first phase of the Container Security Initiative Program had focused on the 20 largest foreign ports, mostly in Europe and Asia. Ridge said 20 to 25 countries will be added, including Dubai, Malaysia and Turkey.
Under the program, U.S. officials work with foreign port authorities to identify, target and search high-risk cargo before it can reach the United States.
``Those are some critical, strategic locations,'' Robert Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, said of the additional ports.
The department also is near agreements to post U.S. inspectors in Sri Lanka and other nations in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkassa said.
Seven million trailer-truck size containers are unloaded at U.S. ports each year. When the second phase of the program is concluded, 80 percent will be from countries with U.S. inspectors on site. That figure is now 68 percent.
Ridge, who visited the New York/New Jersey port Thursday, also announced some $300 million in new funding for port security projects from Alaska to Florida.
``It's far safer today than it was yesterday,'' Ridge said as he and Gov. James E. McGreevey were shown devices that U.S. Customs agents use to detect hazardous material.
Ridge said the Department of Homeland Security will divide $170 million among 199 state and local governments and private companies under the Port Security Grant Program.
The money will fund security planning and projects to increase security at and near docks, including putting new patrol boats in harbors, upgrading surveillance equipment at bridges and roads, and building new command centers.
An additional $75 million will be distributed by the Office for Domestic Preparedness to 14 ports to pay for recent security improvements, training, planning, information sharing and equipment purchases. The ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach and New York/New Jersey, which includes docks in Elizabeth, each will receive slightly more than $9 million under that program.
Ridge also announced $58 million in funding for a pilot program called Operation Safe Commerce aimed at looking for security gaps in the system of shipping cargo and developing new technologies to fill those gaps. The effort is focused on four of the nation's biggest ports: New York/New Jersey, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif., and Seattle/Tacoma.
The Transportation Security Administration had said it may redirect some of the Operation Safe Commerce money to help offset overspending in other areas, but the Bush administration agreed Wednesday to fully fund it. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., had pledged to delay the confirmation of an administration nominee until the program received all the money.
Specific steps to protect ports include using radiation detectors and dogs to screen suspect containers, and deploying armed helicopters with personnel trained to handle potential terrorist activity.
-------- homeland security
Airport Finds That More Screeners Are Questionable
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47259-2003Jun11?language=printer
Los Angeles International Airport officials have uncovered 12 more airport screeners with felonies or other criminal backgrounds just weeks after the federal government said it "rescrubbed" the backgrounds of its workforce there.
Several of the 12 screeners working for the Transportation Security Administration had criminal records related to "unlawful, use, sale, distribution or manufacture of an explosive or weapon" and held security badges that provide access to secure areas of the airport for more than 200 days in most cases.
The agency fired seven of the screeners and put five on administrative leave, said TSA spokesman Brian Turmail.
The TSA said the airport's findings were not indicative of a widespread problem. The agency has acknowledged that it has yet to finish 1 percent of fingerprint checks on screeners and it needs to complete more thorough checks on 22,000 of its 53,600-screener workforce.
Documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request show 12 screeners who "were certified by the TSA as not having a disqualifying history" were later determined by the airport to "have a disqualifying criminal history." An additional 59 out of more than 2,000 screeners were flagged for further review of their pasts after the airport conducted fingerprint-based checks.
"This shows the value of fingerprint-based background checks," said airport spokesman Paul Haney. "Going forward, we will require our badging office to perform the fingerprint-based background checks prior to issuing an airport badge."
Airport officials began fingerprinting federal screeners last month in response to a troubling trend the airport stumbled across while issuing security badges to the workers. As part of a routine application form for the badge, six screeners acknowledged they had criminal pasts that prevented them from serving as an airport screener. The airport later uncovered two dozen more screeners with questionable backgrounds, a finding that resulted in a congressional hearing and an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.
At a congressional hearing June 3, TSA spokesman Robert Johnson insisted that the agency had gone back and "rescrubbed" its workforce at the Los Angeles facility and at airports serving New York and Chicago, and it found only one screener with a questionable background, who was fired.
Yesterday, the agency instead said the findings at Los Angeles were part of "that final 1.1 percent of screeners who need fingerprint checks completed," Turmail said. "We're taking immediate and appropriate action with these individuals."
----
Rounding up the Arabs
The revised form of the Patriot Act relegates civil liberties to the dustbin of history, writes Negar Azimi
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM,
12 - 18 June 2003
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/642/in5.htm
United States Attorney-General John Ashcroft has recommended a widening of the USA Patriot Act, calling it a crucial tool in the global fight against terrorism. In an address before the House Judiciary Committee last week, Ashcroft espoused the expansion of the landmark Patriot Act legislation to include the death penalty and pre-trial detention provisions for suspected terrorists, as well as guarantees that those who aid terrorist cells as "material supporters" ultimately face charges.
In his 90-minute rhetorically-packed address, Ashcroft noted that the Patriot Act has thus far brought "3,000 foot soldiers of terror" to justice via its beefed-up integration of law enforcement and intelligence capabilities. Ashcroft repeatedly warned of the dangers that continue to face the US at the hands of terrorism, going so far as to read from a fatwa issued by Al- Qa'eda's founders, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman El-Zawahri, effectively declaring war on American civilians.
The attorney-general went on to read out some names of those who died in the attacks of 11 September, as well as those who lost their lives in terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv, Israel, Bali, Indonesia, Casablanca, Morocco and Riyadh.
He called the acts in those cities "bitter reminders that the cold-blooded network of terror will continue to use the horror of their heinous acts to achieve their fanatical ends". Earlier this year, draft legislation that would expand the Patriot Act was leaked to the press, meeting significant criticism from both civil liberties groups and multiple shades of the political spectrum.
The Patriot Act was passed by Congress in October 2001 in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, providing for an unprecedented expansion of powers for law enforcement officials -- ranging from authorising roving wire taps to allowing for the detention of non-citizens for up to seven days without charges, among other measures.
Civil rights activists, in the meantime, have unanimously denounced the act as an attack on the most basic of civil liberties. Only days after Ashcroft's announcement, officials revealed that over 13,000 men of Arab and Muslim descent may face deportation proceedings in the coming months -- an extension of the austere measures imposed by America's immigration system in the aftermath of 9/11.
On the first anniversary of the attacks, the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) launched the National Security Entry Exit Registration System (NSEERS), a programme under which men over the age of 16 hailing from 20 Arab and predominantly Muslim countries are required to register with immigration officials.
Registration involves being interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted by federal authorities, while also requiring men to submit information about their job, visa and student status in routine fashion. 82,000 men have registered under the system since its inception.
Among advocates of Arab-American rights in the US, the response to the proposed mass deportations has been significant. In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly Ali Abunimah, vice-president of the Arab-American Action Network and co-founder of the Internet magazine Electronic Intifada, cautioned against the consequences of such draconian measures. "The fact that the government is moving to deport so many people will potentially harm efforts to fight terrorism, because it will erode trust in the government."
"There are so many reports of abuses and arbitrary treatment with this programme that it is hard to see how people will come forward voluntarily in the future," said Abunimah. The news comes on the heels of a scathing report released by the Justice Department's inspector-general detailing abuses of the federal immigration system in the aftermath of 9/11.
Released on 1 June, the critical report details countless instances of abuse surrounding the treatment of 762 illegal immigrants detained in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the Metropolitan Detention Centre (MDC) in Brooklyn and the Passaic County Jail in Patterson, New Jersey, including massive irregularities in proceedings as well as prolonged detention times, among other problems.
The INS allegedly failed to serve notices of immigration charges within mandated time frames. The report notes that the delays "affected the detainees in several ways, from their ability to understand why they were being held, to their ability to obtain legal counsel, to their ability to request a bond hearing".
The report also details the FBI's repeated failure to distinguish between detainees who were suspected of having terrorist connections and those who were held on other grounds. As a result, the report notes, countless persons were held for prolonged periods on effectively misguided grounds.
Meanwhile, an arduous clearance process took an average of 80 days due to a dearth of human resources and because the process was "not given sufficient priority". Verbal and physical abuse, particularly in the MDC facilities, also figured prominently in the report. Immigrants arrested in New York faced "unduly harsh" detention policies, while 84 detainees were subjected to a 23-hour "lock down" during which they were placed in handcuffs, leg irons and heavy chains any time they moved outside of their respective cells.
If anything, the report reveals that times have changed, going so far as to acknowledge that pre-9/11, illegal immigrants would likely not have been detained in such fashion. Indeed, it seems that the fundamental basis of the American legal system has been suspended as, in the aftermath of the attacks, persons detained on immigration charges have been treated as guilty until proven otherwise.
While most of the 762 illegal immigrants have been deported, not one has been charged as a terrorist. Justice Department officials report that they have already adopted some of the 21 recommendations embedded within the report, though they have been anything but repentant in the face of the report's criticisms.
-------- human rights
O.A.S. Votes Against U.S. Candidate for Human Rights Group
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/americas/12OAS.html
BUENOS AIRES, June 11 - In a symbolic rebuke to the Bush administration, the member nations of the Organization of American States have for the first time voted to exclude the United States from representation on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, considered the most prestigious human rights monitoring body in the Western Hemisphere.
The decision came at the end of the three-day annual assembly of the O.A.S., held this year in Santiago, Chile, and attended by Secretary of State Colin L. Powel. Addressing the conference on Monday, Mr. Powell condemned a recent wave of executions and imprisonments in Cuba and urged the 34-member regional group to help "hasten the inevitable democratic transition in Cuba."
Lou Fintor, a spokesman for the State Department, said today that "the United States is disappointed that our candidate was not elected to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission" but "we remain strong supporters of the commission and the inter-American human rights system in general."
Created in 1959, the commission is an arm of the O.A.S. that observes and investigates human rights conditions throughout the Western Hemisphere and has processed 12,000 complaints or petitions of specific violations in member states. It consists of seven members elected to four-year terms, who are supposed to demonstrate "recognized competence in the field of human rights."
In private, several nations were critical of what they characterized as Mr. Powell's excessive and narrow focus on Cuba at the expense of other issues. The theme of this year's assembly, which ended Tuesday, was "Democratic Governability in the Americas," which most delegations saw as an opportunity to express concern about growing social inequities and flagging economic growth in the region.
"There is a readiness among member states to talk about Cuba, but in a balanced way, and not only about human rights," a senior O.A.S. official said in a meeting with reporters Monday in Santiago. "Many states, some of Latin America and all of the Caribbean," he said, also "want to talk about the isolation of Cuba, the embargo, and all of that.
"That is the problem," the official added. The Bush administration, he said, "has a very strong position, so there really is some difficulty in dealing with the issue of Cuba only in relation to human rights."
But the negative vote also appeared to reflect widespread doubts about the qualifications of the American candidate, Rafael E. Martinez. Born in Cuba, Mr. Martinez is an Orlando, Fla., lawyer best known for his expertise in medical malpractice and health law. He is a brother of Melquiades R. Martinez, the secretary of housing and urban development and a leading fund-raiser for the presidential campaign of George W. Bush among Cuban-Americans in Florida.
"Clearly, the person they put forward, whatever his merits, did not have a very impressive background in human rights," said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington. Mr. Martinez's nomination, he added "showed not just a sort of indifference to a major regional political organization on the part of the administration, but also the growing distrust on the other side about what the U.S. agenda and motives are."
Mr. Fintor, the State Department spokesman, said, "We don't want to speculate on why he wasn't elected." But he described Mr. Martinez as "a well-qualified candidate."
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U.S. sanctions face 15 countries for not acting to end human trafficking
6/12/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-06-12-human-trafficking_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Fifteen countries, including U.S. allies Greece and Turkey, have made no significant efforts to stop trafficking in humans and may face sanctions, the State Department said Wednesday.
The number of countries cited this year is lower than the 19 accused by the department last year of not doing enough to prevent people from being taken to other countries against their will.
"In our 21st century world, where freedom and democracy are spreading to every continent, it is appalling and morally unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are exploited, abused and enslaved by peddlers in human misery," said Secretary of State Colin Powell as he released the department's third annual report.
The report warned that problems could develop in postwar Iraq. "In many conflict situations, criminal elements have exploited the breakdown of rule of law and the desperation of vulnerable families and abducted, forced or tricked individuals into prostitution," the report said.
The United States is not immune from the problem; the government estimates that 800,000 to 900,000 people are trafficked annually across international borders worldwide, with 18,000 to 20,000 winding up in the United States.
Human Rights Watch criticized the report, saying it failed to meaningfully evaluate governments' efforts to combat trafficking in persons.
"The report gives undue credit for minimal effort and ignores government practices, such as summary deportation and incarceration that effectively punish trafficking victims," the New York-based group said.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who sponsored legislation requiring the report, said progress was being made.
"I am pleased that more countries are taking human slavery seriously, that victims - most of whom are women and children - are being protected and traffickers are being prosecuted," said Smith, a member of the House International Relations Committee. "With sanctions looming, there has been significant progress with a number of nations instituting reforms like new laws and protection policies, especially within the last three months."
For the first time, countries that do not take actions to stop human trafficking could face the loss of U.S. assistance, though the government can waive any penalties. The sanctions would take effect Oct. 1.
In addition to Greece and Turkey, the countries facing sanctions are Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Georgia, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Liberia, North Korea, Sudan, Suriname and Uzbekistan.
Former Rep. Linda Smith, R-Wash., said she expected many of the countries facing sanctions to make strong efforts to meet the anti-trafficking standards.
"The very fact that there is a report is causing changes in behavior," said Smith, now president and founder of Shared Hope International, a nonprofit organization that fights trafficking and tries to rescue girls and women forced to work as prostitutes.
An additional 74 countries did not meet the minimum standards but made "significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance."
Those countries are Albania, Angola, Armenia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Costa Rica, Croatia, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Gabon, Gambia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Krygyz Republic, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia and Montenegro, Sierra Leone, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Uganda, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Described as complying fully with the standards, which include punishing traffickers and making serious efforts to eliminate the problem, are the following 26 countries: Austria, Belgium, Benin, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mauritius, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
The State Department said it couldn't assess the situation in Afghanistan, though the new government there has condemned trafficking, or in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Mauritania, Somalia and Tunisia.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Australians Would Pay More for Clean Energy
SYDNEY, Australia,
June 12, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jun2003/2003-06-12-19.asp#anchor4
A Newspoll commissioned by Greenpeace shows that a majority of Australians surveyed would be willing to pay $3.50 more on their monthly energy bills if it meant that 10 percent of Australia's electricity would come from new renewable sources by 2010.
The Newspoll conducted between May 30 and June 1 asked, "Currently, most of Australia's electricity comes from coal with less than one percent coming from wind and solar energy. A recent analysis claims that to increase the amount of electricity from these and other new renewable energy sources to 10 percent by 2010, would cost the average household approximately $3.50 extra per month. Would you be willing, or not willing to pay an extra $3.50 per month for this purpose?"
Eighty-three percent answered in the affirmative.
When the amount asked for renewable energy went up to $5.50 per month, 64 percent said they would be willing to pay that much more.
Greenpeace climate specialist Catherine Fitzpatrick said, "This clear response is the strongest indication yet that Australians are willing to pay more for clean, renewable energy."
"Climate change is already hurting Australians," she said. "The recent drought, which scientists tell us was made worse by climate change, cost us a quarter of our projected growth in 2002. "The poll gives the Prime Minister a mandate for strong action on climate change and renewable energy."
The federal government is currently reviewing Australia's energy future - a process which will have an impact on all Australians for decades to come. The Panel reviewing the nation's renewable energy target, chaired by former Senator Grant Tambling, is touring Australia gathering input from a wide range of stakeholders.
"Renewable energy is clearly not just about environmental concerns, Fitzpatrick said. "A 10 percent target would create thousands of jobs and draw billions of dollars in investment to regional Australia. We know it's possible. We know it's reliable. And we now know Australians are willing to pay for it. The Panel has no excuses not to recommend a 10% target."
Published estimates for the costs of an increase in the share of renewable energy to 10 percent in 2010, the policy recommended by Greenpeace, range from $0.50 to approx $5.00 per month for the average residential consumer.
----
Scottish Power close to UK wind farm go-ahead
REUTERS UK:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21146/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
LONDON - Scottish Power (SPW.L) said it was close to getting consent for two wind farms as progress had been made in resolving radar interference from turbines at the sites, both near airports.
Objections to wind farms from airport authorities and the ministry of defence because of worries the towering turbines will interfere with radar systems are a major hurdle for the wind power industry.
Scottish Power has commissioned Marconi (MONI.L) to design software which will remove images of the turbines from radar screens.
BAA Plc (BAA.L), which operates the Edinburgh and Glasgow airports, had blocked the company's 300 megawatt Whitelee project, the largest onshore wind farm in the UK with 140 turbines, and the much smaller Blacklaw scheme.
"We are in the final stages of the planning process for both projects. Talks are progressing positively with the BAA and (the Civil Aviation Authority)," a Scottish Power spokesman said.
A spokesman for BAA said it was waiting to review the software which would also have to be approved by the safety review group of the industry's main regulator, the CAA.
"We are optimistic (the software) will be acceptable," said the BAA spokesman.
Scottish Power needs approval from the CAA before the schemes can be given the go ahead by the Scottish Executive.
The government sees wind power as key to meeting its target of generating 10 percent of Britain's electricity from green sources by 2010.
According to industry body the British Wind Energy Association, the ministry of defence has objected to around 30 percent of enquiries to build wind farms.
"This is the single biggest constraint affecting the industry," said Chris Shears, a board member of the association responsible for radar issues.
"If this solution works in Scotland, then it could work elsewhere," he added.
The ministry has blocked offshore wind power projects at Shell Flats and Southport off the north English coast.
-------- energy
Greenspan - US should explore nuclear, coal options
Story by Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21142/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The United States should explore ways to expand nuclear power and coal energy, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told a congressional committee.
But no matter how much the nation diversifies its sources, it will never be free from politically sensitive foreign suppliers like the Middle East, Greenspan told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"I think we are committed irrevocably to a global economy," Greenspan said at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing to address looming U.S. natural gas shortages. "I don't think we have a choice but to deal in a global economy."
The central bank chief said the United States should expand its ability to import liquefied natural gas from countries like Algeria, Nigeria and Russia to create a "safety valve" that can stabilize natural gas prices, which are double year-ago levels.
Congress should also look at ways to increase energy supplies from nuclear and coal, Greenspan said. The two sources together account for about 70 percent of U.S. supply.
"I think a major endeavor to examine this whole program is where we ought to be," Greenspan said, referring to nuclear and coal industries. "At least look at it rather than dismissing it out of hand," he told lawmakers.
The United States has 103 operating nuclear power plants that produce about 20 percent of domestic energy supply. Some utilities have said they are considering seeking permits to build new plants, but optimism has been tempered by lingering national security and plant safety concerns.
No new U.S. nuclear plants have been built since the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant, which had a partial meltdown of its reactor core.
Also this week, the U.S. Senate rejected a Democratic attempt to strip from the energy bill some $10.5 billion in loan guarantees to encourage utilities to build new nuclear plants. The Senate is trying to finalize its version of a broad energy bill this week.
Few new U.S. coal plants have been built because of their high emissions of air pollution and fears that the United States will bow to pressure from Democrats and environmentalists to impose costly controls on carbon dioxide emissions.
Virginia Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher pointed out that the nation has enough coal supplies to last about 250 years.
"We have got to find some fuel alternatives and coal is the most obvious candidate," Boucher told Reuters in an interview.
New "clean coal" technology could be used to build new plants "with little environmental effect," Boucher said.
----
INTERVIEW - Cameco CEO predicts comeback for nuclear power
Story by Rajiv Sekhri
REUTERS CANADA:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21145/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
TORONTO - Nuclear energy's time may have come - again.Touted in the 1950s and 1960s as the answer to the world's energy problems, then vilified for the Chernobyl (1986) and Three Mile Island (1979) disasters, nuclear energy is poised for a comeback, according to Gerald Grandey, chief executive of Cameco Corp. (CCO.TO), the world's biggest uranium producer.
Helping fuel that interest is an ambitious plan by President George W. Bush to reduce the dependence of the United States, the world's biggest energy consumer, on imported oil.
That combines with growing public concern over pollution from fossil-fuel power plants - especially coal-fired generators, Grandey told Reuters in a recent interview.
"We just have people listening now. The public's attitude is beginning to warm up," he says.
Grandey's passion is to tout the environmental benefits of nuclear power.
With growing public pressure for "greener" energy sources, that's where low-pollution nuclear plants "win hands down," he says, unlike coal-fired generators, which "use the atmosphere as a toilet."
Grandey's optimism wins support from Julian Steyn, president of the Washington, D.C.-based consulting company Energy Resources International.
"Demand for nuclear power in this century should be colossal," Steyn said. And Canada will be at the forefront of the boom because "it is the Saudi Arabia of uranium."
Steyn points out that the price of uranium climbed to $11 a pound in May from $7 in late 2000 and could rise to $15 before 2010, as supply concerns grow.
There are already forecasts of a shortfall as early as 2010 as stockpiles - originally built up during the Cold War - dwindle, reactors around the world step up output and mines in Canada, Russia, Australia and Africa exhaust their supplies.
"Even at existing consumption (rates), there is concern about uranium supply," Grandey says.
Of the more than 175 million pounds of uranium used annually, a third comes from established stockpiles and the rest from mines such as the McArthur River mine, in which Cameco has a 70 percent stake.
Located in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, McArthur River is the world's richest uranium deposit. Cameco's stake in McArthur and its 50.25 percent share of Cigar Lake mine, also in Saskatchewan, together hold enough uranium to generate as much energy as nine billion barrels of oil.
Cameco's biggest customer is the United States, where more than 100 reactors generate about 20 percent of the power. But prospects in Asia are growing, with 97 reactors operating, 23 under construction and 14 planned over the next decade.
Grandey, 56, an American, took the reins of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Cameco in January. The 15-year-old company, which produces about 17 percent of the world's uranium, is also a gold producer, with mines in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia and a property in Mongolia. But plans call for it to spin off the gold operations by the end of the year to focus on nuclear power.
Grandey's goal is to transform Cameco into an energy company that invests in idled or unfinished reactors in Canada, the United States and elsewhere.
Cameco recently upped its stake in Bruce Power, northwest of Toronto, to 31.6 percent. It also sells uranium to Bruce, one of the biggest nuclear power plants in North America.
Grandey said investment opportunities in nuclear plants are plentiful because historically investors have shied away from such prospects because of regulatory hurdles.
"What better place than a field where not many people are playing?" he said.
----
Fewer new power plants may ease natgas crunch
Story by Spencer Swartz
REUTERS USA:
June 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21150/newsDate/12-Jun-2003/story.htm
SAN FRANCISCO - While top U.S. officials warn of a looming natural gas crisis, energy analysts point out a steep drop in the number of planned gas-fired power plants could bring relief to the supply crunch that could worsen in the coming months.
"After 2004, construction of gas-fired power plants is going to slow dramatically because of the glut of power generation we currently have," said Kevin Petak, director of Virginia-based consultants Energy and Environmental Analysis.
"There's simply too much power in most regions and it has to be worked off," Petak said.
EEA forecasts 10,000 to 15,000 megawatts of gas-fired power generation to come on line in 2004, an 81 percent drop from the 70,000 megawatts that entered service in 2002.
Gas-fired power generation has been a huge driver behind the rise in demand for natural gas as generators chose clean-burning gas over rival fossil fuels like oil and coal for an estimated nine out of 10 new power plants, pushing the share of gas in the nation's generation market to around 20 percent.
The wave of new gas-fired power plants was also propelled by widespread forecasts at the time that gas would be a cheap, abundant and stable domestic energy source for years to come.
But analysts have warned gas prices in coming months could double from current levels of about $6 per million British thermal units, heading back to the $12 mark briefly hit in February during the depths of the winter heating season.
This compares with an average gas price in the 1990s of about $1.90.
COMMITTEE HEARING
Driving gas prices higher is a steep fall in inventories - down 50 percent from a year ago - following heavy furnace demand during the bitterly cold winter of 2002-03 and lagging production blamed on dwindling output from old gas fields.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is expected to address Congress later Tuesday about the nation's low natural gas supplies, which he last month called "a very serious" problem.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said earlier Tuesday the nation needed to prepare for the threat of shrinking gas supplies and high prices.
"Drilling companies are at work everywhere they are allowed to go," Tauzin said, but "vast areas of land" are off-limits in the Rocky Mountains and offshore.
Critics of the Bush administration's energy policies argue that warnings of an impending gas supply crisis are exaggerated and being used to force open more federal lands to exploration drilling.
FUTURE DEMAND
Analyst opinions, however, differ on how low supplies and higher prices will redraw the landscape in U.S. gas demand.
Manufacturers - the nation's biggest gas users at about a third of the market - have seen their profits squeezed by higher fuel costs, forcing several to cut factory output.
High gas prices have also forced fuel switching away from gas-fired power plants to cheaper oil fuel products.
The Energy Information Administration sharply revised downward its gas demand outlook for 2003 from a rise of 3.7 percent in its March forecast to a drop of 0.8 percent projected in May due to demand loss in both the industrial and power sectors and weaker economic growth.
But analysts say any surplus gas stemming from a loss in industrial gas demand and fuel-switching is likely to be snapped up by power plants.
A report in January by Friedman, Billings & Ramsey predicted industrial gas demand through 2005 will fall 2.8 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd).
But the consultants also predicted the decline would be nearly canceled by a 2.4 bcfd rise in gas-fired power generation demand over the same period.
A UBS report on Monday made a similar prediction, saying continued growth in gas demand from home builders and power plants "should offset the negative impact of industrial demand destruction over time."
UBS boosted its 2003 gas price estimate 70 cents to $5.70 per million British thermal units and raised its 2004 and 2005 projections each by 50 cents to $4.50 and $4.00, respectively. (additional reporting by Chris Baltimore).
-------- environment
Excess Nitrogen Affecting Human Health
BOULDER, Colorado,
June 12, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jun2003/2003-06-12-09.asp#anchor4
The growing use of nitrogen as a nutrient is affecting public health beyond its benefits for agriculture, according to a new University of Colorado (CU) led study.
Alan Townsend of CU-Boulder's Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, the study leader, said changes in the global nitrogen cycle, while beneficial in increasing crop growth, appear to pose a growing health risk. Roughly half of the inorganic nitrogen ever used on the planet has been applied in the past 15 years.
"The major global changes in the nitrogen cycle have occurred because humans now convert more nitrogen to such usable forms than all natural processes combined," Townsend said. "The synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers accounts for most of this change. But the overuse of nitrogen fertilizers can lead to a number of problems, including air and water pollution."
"Ecological feedbacks to excess nitrogen can inhibit crop growth, increase allergenic pollen production and potentially affect the dynamics of several vector borne diseases, including West Nile virus, malaria and cholera," the researchers wrote in their paper which appeared in the June 2 issue of "Frontiers in Ecology."
A positive aspect of using nitrogen as a fertilizer has been an increase in food production in poor nations, reducing hunger and malnutrition, Townsend said.
So far, most nitrogen studies have focused on problems resulting from nitrogen rich runoff from agricultural lands such as losses in biodiversity, increased acid rain and changes in coastal ocean ecology that include oxygen poor "dead zones" like those seen in the Gulf of Mexico.
But excess nitrogen can contribute to respiratory ailments, heart disease and several cancers, said Townsend, who is an assistant professor in CU-Boulder's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department.
"On the bright side, there are solutions to these problems," said Townsend. "Too much fertilizer is being used in developed countries, while in some impoverished countries, additional fertilizer is needed. This is something that can be changed."
In the United States,fertilizer intensive crops are common and more fertilizer than is needed for maximum crop yields often is used. Reducing fertilizer also would lessen crop pollution to our waterways and air, he said.
The use of fertilizer in modern industrial nations is not optimized for the production of the healthiest food, Townsend said. Crops like corn largely become food for domestic animals, leading to further nitrogen losses to the environment, disparities in world food distribution and a growing tendency for unhealthy diets even in wealthy nations, the researchers concluded.
In the United States, more than half of the grain produced is fed to animals, and corn is used much more widely as a sweetener than for human consumption as a grain. Meat consumption by humans has doubled worldwide since 1960, and excess meat consumption has been linked to numerous health issues, including heart disease.
Increased nitrogen pouring into the world's oceans can cause algal blooms that can harm fish, shellfish and humans. On land, ozone, a major pollutant produced with high amounts of nitrogen oxides, causes numerous health problems as well as billions of dollars of crop damage, according to the research team.
"We believe the greatest net health benefits come from using nitrogen at moderate levels," said Townsend. "Making and using it at higher levels does not lead to parallel increases in benefits, but does greatly exacerbate environmental and health problems."
The project was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Co-authors on the paper are from Cornell, Harvard and Princeton universities, the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. Other co-authors are from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the New England School of Acupuncture in Watertown, Massachusetts, and Visteon Corporation in Sterling Heights, Michigan.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Cuba Plans Protests at European Embassies
June 12, 2003
The New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/americas/12CUBA.html
HAVANA, June 11 (Reuters) - Cuba, telling the European Union that it would not tolerate "provocations and blackmail," announced today that protests would be held at the Spanish and Italian Embassies in Havana and warned of more action if Europe maintained support for Cuban dissidents.
The European Union, responding to the Cuban government's toughest crackdown in decades on dissent, decided last week to limit high-level government visits and reduce the participation of its 15 member states in cultural events in Cuba.
The union, Cuba's largest trading partner and foreign investor, said it would further review its policy on relations and would invite opponents of the Cuban government to embassy receptions in Havana celebrating European national days, a measure that particularly angered the Cuban authorities.
President Fidel Castro's government, usually more at odds with the United States, has turned its ire on Europe, threatening to hold big marches on Thursday at the embassies.
"Cuba calmly but firmly issues a warning to the European embassies and to local U.S. government mercenaries that it will not tolerate provocations or blackmail," Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said, referring to the European sanctions.
"European embassies should be conscious of the fact that they will be failing to meet their obligations under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations if they allow themselves to be used for subversion against Cuba," Mr. Pérez Roque added in a statement broadcast live to the nation.
Mr. Pérez Roque accused the European Union, particularly Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain, of joining American efforts to topple the Cuban government.
The European Union helped Cuba overcome political isolation and economic crisis in the 1990's after the collapse of its former benefactor, the Soviet Union. Cuba's relations with Europe have deteriorated since Havana imprisoned 75 dissidents in April and executed three ferry hijackers who had sought to go to the United States. Cuba accused the dissidents, imprisoned for an average 19 years, of working with the United States to undermine its government.
"The mercenaries who try to turn the European embassies in Havana into centers for conspiring against the revolution should be aware that the Cuban people will be quite capable of demanding that our laws be vigorously enforced," Mr. Pérez Roque said, implying they could soon be behind bars, too.
He sharply criticized Mr. Aznar, calling him "a minor ally of the Yankee imperial government" and saying that he was mainly responsible for Europe's "treacherous escalation of aggression." He also expressed concern that other countries might follow Italy's recent decision to cut about $47 million in aid and credit.
--------
Iranian student protests spark clashes
6/12/2003
Associated Press
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2779696,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-06-12-iran-protests_x.htm
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Riot police and hard-line vigilantes clashed with teenage demonstrators who denounced supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Wednesday, as protests mushroomed into Iran's biggest in months.
Dozens of the hard-liners riding motorbikes chased down about 300 protesters, beating them with sticks in the streets outside a Tehran University dormitory. The protesters chanted "Death to Khamenei" and threw stones at police, who threw them back.
About 200 students in the dormitory compound threw stones and molotov cocktails at the police after officers joined the vigilantes in attacking the protesters. Several people were seen being carried away with head injuries.
The protests began peacefully Tuesday when a small student gathering against privatization of universities turned into the largest demonstration against Iran's political leadership since November. Then, students protested a death sentence imposed on Hashem Aghajari, a history professor at a Tehran teachers' college, who questioned the need to obey the Islamic clerics' every edict.
Police had arrested about 80 protesters before the clashes broke out. In Iran, criticism of Khamenei is punished by jail, and hard-liners say Khamenei's powers are unlimited and cannot be questioned.
Before the clashes broke out Wednesday, security officials warned that further demonstrations against the political leadership would not be tolerated.
"These people have been provoked by extremists inside the country and elements outside the country to chant illegal slogans," state-run television quoted Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi as saying Wednesday.
He was apparently referring to satellite channels owned by Iranian opposition groups in exile that have encouraged Iranians to rise up against the ruling clerics. Although satellite dishes are officially banned, many Iranians still use them.
The protesters Tuesday night shouted harsh slogans against the political and religious leadership.
"The clerical regime is nearing its end!" the demonstrators chanted. "Vigilantes commit crimes, the leader supports them."
In a rare twist, demonstrators also called for the resignation of Mohammad Khatami, the popularly elected reformist president, accusing him of not introducing enough reforms.
An Intelligence Ministry official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said the people were arrested for chanting slogans against the ruling political leadership and for participating in unauthorized demonstrations.
The identities of the detainees have not been clearly established, the official said, but most of them did not appear to be students.
The arrests may have also been a warning before July 9, when students plan to commemorate the day four years ago when hard-liners and security forces attacked students protesting media restrictions. At least one student was killed and the clash touched off the worst street battles since the 1979 revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed shah.
----
Iran's students plan more protests as July anniversary looms
By Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran
June 12 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1054966019763
Iranian students yesterday said they would stage further pro-reform protests, after a march by a few hundred students in Tehran on Tuesday night became a spontaneous demonstration against the regime. Advertisement
In achallenge to the Islamic establishment, the students said they would organise protests in universities in the run-up to the anniversary of the July 1999 unrest - the most serious since the Islamic revolution, which was brutally suppressed.
Tuesday night's demonstration began at a Tehran University dormitory. Students gathered to oppose plans to privatise universities and schools. Several thousand people later joined in. Motorcycles were reportedly set alight and windows of some shops and a state bank were smashed. Some 80 people were arrested.
About a dozen US-based television stations run by Iranian opposition groups have been urging people to demonstrate against the clerical system on July 9.
Ali Younesi, intelligence minister, said: "We will use force to prevent illegal actions."
Separately, in Isfahan on Tuesday, students unhappy with the quality of food made soup on the campus until university officials ended the cook-in by seizing their big pots.
"This is a serious alarm bell for the system. These sorts of protests might be small elements, but can create a big crisis, which would be out of control," a senior analyst said.
Iran is under mounting pressure to stop its alleged support for terrorism and efforts to seek nuclear weapons.
The US administration is believed to be considering the scope for encouraging regime change in Tehran through protests - particularly by young people.
Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, said Iran was likely to achieve nuclear weapons "in a relatively short period of time". Iran, a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, denies efforts to achieve weapons of mass destruction. The government is being pressed to sign the "additional protocol" to the NPT to allow enhanced inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran wants to link the lifting of sanctions to signing the protocol.
----
Iran Leader Urges No Protest Intervention
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
Jun 12, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_PROTESTS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged hard-line vigilantes not to intervene in "riots" after two nights of protests against the clerical regime.
"I call on the pious and Hizbollahi guards (hard-line vigilantes) throughout the country not to intervene wherever they see riots," Khamenei said in a speech broadcast on state television.
Tehran state radio originally reported the statement, but misquoted him as calling on vigilantes to intervene. Later state television broadcast the full speech.
Dozens of hard-line vigilantes on motorbikes chased down around 300 mostly teenage protesters on Wednesday night, beating them with sticks in the streets outside a Tehran University dormitory in the city's Amirabad district. Several people were seen being carried away with head injuries.
About 200 students in the dormitory compound threw stones and gasoline bombs at police after officers joined the vigilantes in attacking the protesters. The protesters chanted "Death to Khamenei!"
The protests had begun peacefully Tuesday when a small student gathering against privatization of universities turned into the largest demonstration against Iran's political leadership since November. Then, students protested a death sentence imposed on Hashem Aghajari, a history professor at a Tehran teachers' college, who questioned the need to obey the Islamic clerics' every edict.
Police had arrested about 80 protesters before the clashes broke out. In Iran, criticism of Khamenei is punished by jail, and hard-liners say Khamenei's powers are unlimited and cannot be questioned.
Before the clashes broke out Wednesday, security officials warned that further demonstrations against the political leadership would not be tolerated.
"These people have been provoked by extremists inside the country and elements outside the country to chant illegal slogans," state-run television quoted Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi as saying Wednesday.
He was apparently referring to satellite channels owned by Iranian opposition groups in exile that have encouraged Iranians to rise up against the ruling clerics. Although satellite dishes are officially banned, many Iranians still use them.
An Intelligence Ministry official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said people were arrested for chanting slogans against the ruling political leadership and for participating in unauthorized demonstrations.
The identities of the detainees have not been clearly established, the official said, but most of them did not appear to be students.
The arrests may have also been a warning before July 9, when students plan to commemorate the day four years ago when hard-liners and security forces attacked students protesting media restrictions. At least one student was killed and the clash touched off the worst street battles since the 1979 revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed shah.
----
S. Koreans Protest at U.S. Base on Eve of Rally
Thu June 12, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2917273
SEOUL - South Korean students sneaked into a U.S. military base in central Seoul to stage an anti-American protest on Thursday, the eve of a major rally to mark the first anniversary of a traffic accident that soured U.S.-Korean ties.
The 14 college students climbed over the fence into the base housing headquarters of the U.S. Forces Korea. They chanted anti-U.S. slogans before being rounded up by military police, South Korean activists and the U.S. military said.
"All 14 resisted apprehension and were detained using minimal force," the U.S. military said in a statement.
"There were no injuries to the individuals who illegally entered Yongsan and no damage to Yongsan property," it said, referring to the base.
The left-wing Web site Voice of People, which published photographs of the incursion, said the protesters shouted slogans opposing what they said were U.S. plans to attack North Korea over the communist state's attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
The incident took place a day before activists, some sympathetic to North Korea, plan to rally in central Seoul to commemorate the first anniversary of the deaths of two 13-year-old girls accidentally crushed by a U.S. army vehicle.
Demonstrations last year over the accident turned into sometimes violent anti-U.S. protests that hurt South Korea's economy and led to calls for the removal of the 37,000 U.S. troops based in the country.
Protests in the village where the accident took place spiraled into demonstrations of nearly 300,000 people after the acquittal in November of the two U.S. personnel whose armored vehicle crushed the schoolgirls.
In a fresh incident, a South Korean army officer was killed in a head-on collision with a U.S. Marine Corps truck early on Thursday.
The accident occurred north of Seoul about three km (two miles) from where the schoolgirls were killed.
Last week, Seoul and Washington announced a major realignment of the U.S. troop presence.
The U.S. forces are deployed to defend South Korea from an invasion by North Korea, but they have often been a source of tension with communities.
--------
Code Orange for Liberty
Post-9/11, ACLU Chief Is Alert to New Threats
By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47253-2003Jun11?language=printer
Step inside the hotel room of American Civil Liberties Union executive director Anthony D. Romero and you get the impression of a man with a keen awareness of his time. He begins immediately talking about the irony of being ensconced in the Franklin Roosevelt suite.
Before you've had a chance to settle comfortably onto the sofa, he's talking about how President Roosevelt signed the executive order to hold 120,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps during World War II. "Two-thirds of them American citizens," he says. The ACLU opposed the order, going against nearly half its members, who thought it was crucial to support the decisions of a wartime president.
"We're going to remind people of the great mistake of the FDR legacy," Romero says. Some of the biggest names in American liberalism, he says, "succumbed at a time of enormous crisis to fears and xenophobia and war, and turned our friends and neighbors and co-workers into the enemy."
By this time, it's fairly clear that we're just going to dispense with the pleasantries, although Romero, 37, is an exceedingly pleasant guy. It's just that he gets all caught up in the sweep of history, the judgment of future generations, the post-9/11 challenges of balancing national security with the promises of liberty. The notion that it is his time to work and there is a great deal at stake.
Today is the start of the ACLU's inaugural membership conference in Washington. It is a conference convened, organizers say, because in the last 18 months, membership ranks have grown from 300,000 to 400,000. And it is spurred by what they believe are encroachments on constitutional freedoms by the Bush administration's war against terrorism and by this month's Justice Department report citing "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" against immigrants detained post-9/11. A thousand members have signed up to come and lobby Congress against racial profiling, faith-based initiatives and any amendment banning flag desecration. And they'll urge presidential candidates to work to repeal parts of the USA Patriot Act, enacted in 2001 to broaden the government's powers of surveillance and detention.
It would seem that these are difficult times for such direct action. Times more given to "freedom fries," Old Glory lapel pins and lawmakers upbraiding one another about their patriotism.
But Romero says politicians have misjudged the temperament of the American people. He, too, wraps himself in the flag, says he's part of the American narrative.
Romero is the second-youngest executive director in the 83-year-old organization's history. He's the first Latino and first openly gay leader (he lives in New York with his partner of seven years). He's the son of Puerto Rican immigrants and was raised in the Bronx with a younger sister, now a social worker in Florida, and says he grew up watching Billy Crystal play gay "Jodie Dallas" on the ABC satire "Soap" and feeling less like an all-alone gay kid.
He graduated from Princeton University and Stanford Law School and began to work in public interest activism. A former director with the Ford Foundation's Human Rights and International Cooperation program, Romero took the reins of arguably the nation's most vocal civil liberties organization one week before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. He says he was scared for the country, scared for friends and family in his native New York, but says he had an epiphany about the coming civil liberties debates. And knew that history would be watching.
Right after the attacks, Romero says he was criticized by some who thought he should immediately warn against any curtailing of civil rights. But timing is everything. "9/11 could have made Skokie [when the ACLU supported the Ku Klux Klan's right to march through a heavily Jewish Chicago suburb] look easy," he says. "We possibly ran the risk of alienating all Americans."
So he held his fire. He didn't predict incursions against personal freedoms or warn of dire consequences. "We didn't engage in polemical or rhetorical debates,'' he says. They simply waited to file a series of lawsuits and reports critical of expanded Justice Department powers to wiretap, seize library records and monitor e-mail. And they have had some success. Last year a U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that routinely conducting secret deportation hearings is unlawful.
"Democracies die behind closed doors," wrote Judge Damon Keith.
However, a spokesman for the Justice Department, Mark Corallo, notes that the ACLU lost an appeal of the Patriot Act's provision to conduct surveillance and share information between the law information and the law enforcement community. "We've been affirmed by the courts," he says.
"The Patriot Act was overwhelmingly approved by the Congress of the United States,'' he adds. "In the Senate the vote was 98 to 1. In the House it was 357 to 66. That's a pretty strong bipartisan endorsement of the legislation."
So Romero has aggressively reached across what has been an ideological divide.
In the 1988 presidential campaign, the elder George Bush accused Michael Dukakis of being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Affiliation with the organization was successfully made into a conservative slur.
Yet Romero has worked with prominent conservatives such as the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, former Republican House majority leader Dick Armey of Texas and former U.S. congressman Robert L. Barr Jr. of Georgia, a central figure in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and whom Romero hired as a consultant earlier this year.
Barr advises the group on drafting legislation, making corrections to the USA Patriot Act and how to deal with Republican members of Congress. And for those who think that makes him a strange bedfellow, he invokes the strong libertarian strain in conservative thought. "People now have had a chance to digest what happened on 9/11 and the government response to it, and more and more people are realizing that the government is using the fear of terrorism as a rationale to take away our privacy and our civil liberties," Barr says.
And possibly that is helping Romero expand ACLU membership. A spokeswoman for the organization, Emily Whitfield, says some of its new members are conservatives, including Mike Pheneger, a new ACLU national board member who is a lifelong Republican and retired Army colonel. Romero knows some people find his outreach efforts distasteful, but he is unapologetic: In it to win it, he says now, at this moment in history when he will be judged both in post-9/11 context and against the standard of certain unalienable rights. Now, when wondering what else he should be doing keeps him awake at night.
We "could stand on principle and be totally ineffective," he says. "We have not given up one inch of our values, but we have built alliances concretely, on specific issues like the USA Patriot Act." And those alliances have brought him foot soldiers and maneuvering room and muscle to wrestle with the Republican administration.
"I am pragmatic in my approach, utilitarian in my outlook, opportunistic in my efforts and strategic in reaching my goals," he says in full civics riff.
Add to that a little starry-eyed.
"At the most personal level, I love this country like nothing else," Romero says. "The son of a waiter with a fourth-grade education in most other countries would be a waiter with a fourth-grade education."
So he feels the responsibility that comes with having a chance that wasn't there before. And he indulges the sweet, idealistic Spanish sayings of his childhood.
"La luz en frente siempre ilumina el camino. The light in front is the one that always shines the way," he translates. "It's a little corny."
Trying to keep the country focused on civil liberties post-911 has meant calling reporters every day, talking to politicians, trying to till seeds of democratic debate and dissension where the ground was not soft.
But now he thinks there's been a sea change, and the ACLU no longer has to play John the Baptist, preaching alone in the wilderness. "There's a hunger" in America, he says. "We don't have to so much foment that dissent and debate. We have to channel it." Right now, he says.
Because he's mindful of the time.
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