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NUCLEAR
Expert: 'Depleted uranium use is a war crime'
AMERICANS TO TEST SUPERGUN IN SCOTLAND
Why Did the United States Use Cluster Bombs in Iraq?
New U.N. Team Enters Iran
A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein's Weapons
North Korea Hides New Nuclear Site, Evidence Suggests
N. Korea may use two nuke plants
North moved weapons toward border, Seoul says
Top Democrat Criticizes Bush on N. Korea Policy
White House Didn't Gain CIA Nod for Claim On Iraqi Strikes
Uranium Claim Was Known for Months to Be Weak
Iraq Uranium Claim Hounds White House
The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link
MILITARY
Where the Enemy Is Everywhere and Nowhere
US Says Kills Up to 24 Attackers in Afghanistan
Rebels Push Toward Heart of the Capital in Liberia
Kelly warned of 'dark actors playing games'
'Long march toward a new army'
Iran Missiles Capable of Reaching Israel
Iran Arms Revolutionary Guards with New Missile
U.S. Moved Early for Air Supremacy
U.S. to Create Security Force of 7,000 Iraqis in 45 Days
U.S. Air Raids in '02 Prepared for War in Iraq
Britain Tried First. Iraq Was No Picnic Then.
Sharon and Abbas Meet in Jerusalem
U.S. Asks Turkey to Send Troops to Iraq
Iraqi money ordered to protect POWS
The Departments of Disinformation
Peacekeeping Is Back, With New Faces and Rules
The War After the War
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
F.B.I. Is Accused of Bias by Arab-American Agent
OTHER
Pot paradox
ACTIVISTS
God's work facing man's judgment
Women in Black: in an hour, a silent witness for peace
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
UNITED STATES: Expert: 'Depleted uranium use is a war crime'
BY JAMES PATTON
From Green Left Weekly,
7/20/03.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/546p17.htm
Major Douglas Rokke joined the US Army in 1967 and served in Vietnam. In 1986. he became a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare instructor. After 1990, Rokke worked extensively with depleted-uranium (uranium-238) weapons, becoming one of the Pentagon's foremost experts in the field.
In 1991, Rokke received a US Army Commendation Medal Citation for outstanding work as a health physicist in the area of uranium contamination clean up and medical care to Gulf War veterans. In 1995, the US Army highly praised Rokke's work as director of the Depleted Uranium Project, commending him as the army's "expert on the effects of depleted uranium on the battlefield". Rokke was praised as an "outstanding officer" and its recommendation was to "promote him immediately".
Rokke is now one of the world's most outspoken critics of the dangers of depleted uranium (DU) munitions, and some in the US military have now tried to discredit him. He has suffered threats and intimidation for his courageous stance. Rokke recently toured Australia to explain the dangers.
Rokke labels the use of DU weapons as a war crime and a crime against humanity. During his Australian lectures he passionately argued that the health and environmental consequences of DU weapons are so great that they should be banned from being used anywhere, and he believes that Australians must insist that US warships never enter our territorial waters.
Internal documents show that the US Department of Defense (DoD) has known about the harmful environmental and health consequences of radioactive weapons since 1943. Despite this, the DoD has denied medical care to people exposed to DU, refused to clean up the environmental mess left behind by the weapons and has continued to lie about the adverse health effects for people exposed to depleted uranium.
The purpose of this cover-up is to ensure the continued use of uranium munitions in combat and during training and testing, and to escape legal liability for the damage caused. Rokke warns that Australian personnel involved in combat during the 1991 Gulf War (where it was first used on a large scale by the US military), the Balkans conflicts during the 1990s and most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, may already be sick.
The harmful effects of DU exposure include respiratory and neurological problems, rashes, cancers, kidney and lung damage, joint and muscle pain, fibromyalgia, cataracts, memory loss, changes in the RNA in DNA, causing genetic birth defects, and a host of other conditions associated with exposure to heavy metal toxicity and radiation.
Potentially, hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and other places are already sick or will become sick due to exposure to DU contamination.
Rokke himself is on a 40% disability pension and has been diagnosed as having "reactive airways disease due to his occupational exposure to U-238". Tests showed that he has 5000 times the normal level of radiation in his body; he also has problems with his breathing, immune system and one eye. He has had 15 surgical operations to his liver. Thirty members of his DU clean-up team have died.
Rokke emphasised that the purpose of war is to kill and destroy enemies, with little regard for long-term environmental or health consequences. DU munitions use a solid rod of uranium-238 as a high velocity, kinetic energy penetrator. They can pierce tank armour "like a hot knife through butter". The DU ignites upon impact, resulting in a shower of burning DU which causes secondary explosions, fires, injuries and death; 60% of the U-238 penetrator remains as a solid piece of uranium which can be picked up by children or adults.
In the 1950s, the US DoD became interested in using DU metal in weapons because of its extreme density. The US military uses DU in M-16 machine gun rounds, cluster bombs, tank shells and even in the huge "bunker-buster" bombs. DU weapons are also contaminated with plutonium, neptunium and americium. An A-10 "tank buster" aircraft can fire over one tonne of deadly DU into its targets every minute.
Depleted uranium is the by-product of the uranium enrichment process during which fissionable U-235 is removed from natural uranium to make nuclear bombs and reactor fuel. The remaining uranium waste is 99.8% uranium-238.
While the term "depleted" implies it isn't particularly dangerous, in fact it is a chemically toxic heavy metal (like lead or mercury) and is also radiologically hazardous, as it burns on impact, creating tiny aerosolised particles that emit alpha, beta and gamma radiation. These particles can be so tiny that even the most modern gas masks cannot prevent them from entering a victim's lungs. They can be carried by the prevailing winds over long distances, have a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years, and pose a long-term threat to human health and the environment by contaminating air, soil and water.
More than 15 countries are known to have DU weapons in their military arsenals, including Britain, USA, France, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, Thailand, Iraq and Taiwan. DU weapons are rapidly spreading to other countries.
Rokke revealed that DU weapons have also been used on training ranges in Vieques (Puerto Rico), Okinawa (Japan), Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, within the US, and now may be being used on the training range in Lancelin, Western Australia.
Rokke was tasked to head a team to clean up the contamination left behind by depleted uranium during the 1991 Gulf War. What he found was a toxicological and radiological mess beyond comprehension. He discovered that doctors and nurses didn't know how to handle the medical cases they were seeing, and there simply was no way to treat all the victims or to clean up the mess left behind. "How do you bury all of Iraq in a hole?", he asked. "How do you bury all of Afghanistan in a hole?"
Of the 700,000 US troops who were in the Gulf during 1991 war, more than 200,000 are disabled from effects of Gulf War Syndrome, a condition believed to be caused by exposure to DU radiation, as well as factors including exposure to chemical agents, biological agents, pesticides, immunisations against anthrax and other diseases, and exposure to pollutants from oil-well fires.
During the 1991 war, US forces blew up Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, which, according to Rokke, was like "smashing an ice cube with a hammer". Deadly nerve agents blew back over the US troops and anyone who had the misfortune to be in the way.
The US does not want to lose DU munitions from their arsenal, Rokke states. A 1991 internal US Army memorandum recognised how effective these weapons were against Iraqi armour, but warned that if the health and environmental impact of these weapons become widely known, their use may become politically unacceptable and they could be removed from the arsenal. Therefore, the memo concluded that this "sensitive issue should be kept in mind when after action reports [on DU] are written". Rokke's interpretation of this is that the Pentagon is directing its staff to lie.
Rokke says he will not lie. He describes himself as a patriot who loves his country and a military man who will carry out his charge to clean up the DU mess. As such it is his duty to continue to speak out about the dangers of depleted uranium.
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has categorised DU weapons, alongside nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, napalm and cluster bombs, as a "weapon of indiscriminate effect". Iraqis are already suffering a host of health problems due to DU, and these will only increase over the coming decade.
[For more information on the dangers of depleted uranium, go to <http://www.google.com> and enter the keywords "Rokke depleted uranium".]
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page. http://www.greenleft.org.au/
----
AMERICANS TO TEST SUPERGUN IN SCOTLAND
7500mph shell can kill five miles away
FURY OVER PLAN TO FIRE SHELLS AT MoD BASE
Jamie Macaskill Exclusive,
July 20, 2003
UK Sunday Mail
http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/content_objectid=13196042_method=full_siteid=86024_headline=-AMERICANS-TO-TEST-SUPERGUN-IN-SCOTLAND-name_page.html
AMERICA is to test a new secret supergun at a defence base in Scotland.
The electromagnetic gun (EM gun) will be tested at an experimental weapons range in Dumfriesshire.
The US Department of Defense believes the range at Dundrennan, near Kirkcudbright, is the only suitable location to test the new supergun.
But the move has sparked fury among concerned locals.
South of Scotland MSP Alasdair Morgan, an outspoken critic of the weapons range, yesterday slammed the US military's plans.
He said: "It is not as if America has a shortage of areas in its own country where they could test their latest weapons. I find it bizarre they need to do it here."
The MoD has faced complaints over its use of the range to fire thousands of shells coated with depleted uranium into the Solway Firth. There are fears the tests could be damaging the health of locals and the environment.
The EM gun is seen as a halfway measure before the US can perfect laser weapons.
Powerful magnetised coils create an electric pulse which can fire a shell at 7500mph - around two miles a second - and kill a target more than five miles away.
It's more than double the speed of shells fired by British and American tanks in the Gulf - regarded as the world's most effective - whose shells travel at around 3000mph.
The Dundrennan supergun tests emerged during a briefing in the US by America's top military scientist Mike Andrews. He told delegates at a military conference the EM gun would begin trials in Scotland.
He said: "One of the things we've been lacking is full-scale testing.
"You don't know how effective it will be until you load it up at full power.
"We'll be doing some full-scale testing in probably the only place in the world you can do that - Kirkcudbright."
The new superweapon relies on its incredible power for destruction.
Because of the tungsten shell's speed - it moves five times quicker than Concorde - it can tear through armour and buildings, even though it is only about a foot long and as narrow as a broom stick. Because of its small size, scientists believe tanks will be able to carry three times as many shells.
Three months ago, a senior scientist with the MoD revealed British defence chiefs were also interested in the EM gun.
David Hague, of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, said in a paper: "The MoD wants to see an EM weapon system that we can use on the battlefield in 20 years.
"If we don't look into the use of EM launch technology we are in danger of becoming complacent.
"It's a high-risk technology but with a high pay-off if done correctly."
Details of the supergun are top secret although it is thought the US military favours a design by American arms giant Lockheed Martin. Under the George Bush presidency, funding for new super weapons was increased and Lockheed has been given research funding until 2007.
Development started under Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative - nicknamed Star Wars - in which the US military and scientists proposed using EM guns on satellites to shoot down enemy missiles.
Although shelved by Bill Clinton, research continued and the Dundrennan tests will mark the final phase of the weapon's development.
The US military hope to have the gun ready to use within five years.
A spokesman for the US Marines added: "It doesn't look like we're going to get enough destructive power with a laser beam. Will we have that in 2030? Probably."
----
Why Did the United States Use Cluster Bombs in Iraq?
by Delinda C. Hanley, news editor,
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, page 13
June 2003 Special Report
By Delinda C. Hanley
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/june2003/0306013.html
Iraqis will find it hard to forget the second U.S.-led war on their country in little more than a decade. While the debris and scorched wreckage eventually will be cleaned up and rebuilt, the lives lost and national treasures and government records looted are irreplaceable.
It is still too early to count human losses. Many Iraqi villagers buried their dead without obtaining official death certificates because travel to cities was risky. We may never know the exact figures, or the "collateral damage" to civilians who were not targeted but ended up as casualties.
It was inevitable that the U.S., with its weapons and resources, would win a war against a country only twice the size of Idaho-one already weakened and disarmed by a more than a decade of U.N. sanctions. Unless Iraq had used weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons, which it appears it did not even possess, the war was a rout before it even began.
Why, then, did the U.S. use cluster bombs in population centers? These 1,000 pound, 14-foot-long weapons explode and release hundreds of smaller bomblets the size of soda cans, which can then scatter over an area the size of a football field. Each bomblet can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They are designed to saturate a large area with explosives and flying shards of metal. So much for precision.
Sometimes cluster bombs land intact and blow up later. Most of the deaths and injuries Iraqis suffered were caused by cluster bomb shrapnel. "We saw them," Abdul-Illa al-Kaabi, a surgeon at Iraq's Najaf General Hospital, told a Reuters correspondent. "Some were not exploded and children picked them up and they were killed and injured."
When a 7-year-old discovered an unexploded bomblet and gave it to American soldiers, U.S. Army Sergeant Troy Jenkins of Repton, AL, threw himself on the cluster bomb to save his 101st Airborne companions and the Iraqi child.
In the past 12 years, 1,600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians have been killed, and 2,500 injured, by leftover bomblets. A year after the war in Kosovo, there were 150 cluster bomb casualties. Human Rights Watch and others have called for a ban on cluster bombs, similar to the ban on antipersonnel land mines. The U.S. has refused to sign the land mine agreement. Will it adopt a different stance with regard to cluster bombs?
The Pentagon did not resort to using the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" bomb, a full-power hydrogen bomb that throws up a cloud of radioactive dust as it destroys weapons or people hidden deep beneath the earth. It did, however, use lethal "bunker-buster" bombs in its March 20 attempt to kill former Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.
"During the war in Iraq, thousands of rounds of munitions made with depleted uranium have been fired from Abrams battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Attack aircraft," according to an April 28 Voice of America report. "The uranium hardens the tips of bullets and artillery shells and greatly improves their ability to penetrate armored targets."
Apparently the Defense Department wasn't worried about the health risk to Iraqis-or to U.S. occupation forces. Pentagon health official Michael Kirkpatrick says depleted uranium is not a major health concern of U.S. military officials right now, although he acknowledges that fragments of depleted uranium penetrators embedded in the ground could pose a threat to soil and water. In postwar Iraq, he says, "proper sewage, sanitation and clean water are far more urgent health issues, and should be addressed first."
When will the U.S. government address its own use of weapons of mass destruction in population centers?
-------- iran
New U.N. Team Enters Iran
July 20, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/middleeast/20TEHR.html
TEHRAN, July 19 - Iran said a team of International Atomic Energy Agency representatives began a new round of inspections of Iran's nuclear sites today, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
The team arrived to start its work "within the framework of the nonproliferation treaty," said the spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Khalil Moussavi. A previous team, accompanied by the agency's head, Mohamed ElBaradei, left on Wednesday, he said.
-------- iraq / inspections
A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein's Weapons
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20SEAR.html
On paper, the Pentagon's plan for finding Iraq's unconventional weapons was bold and original.
Four mobile exploitation teams, or MET's, each composed of about 25 soldiers, scientists and weapons experts from several Pentagon agencies, would fan out to chase tips from survey units and combat forces in the field. They would search 578 "suspect sites" in Iraq for the chemical, biological and nuclear components that the Bush administration had cited time and again to justify the war. The Pentagon said the weapons hunters would have whatever they needed - helicopters, Humvees in case weather grounded the choppers, and secure telecommunications.
But the "ground truth," as soldiers say, was this: chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among various military units, and shortages of everything from gasoline to soap plagued the postwar search for evidence of Iraq's supposed unconventional weapons.
To this day, whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown. It is the biggest mystery of the war and a thorny political problem for President Bush. His administration has expanded the hunt and has urged patience, expressing the belief that some weapons may still be found. Others believe that to be increasingly unlikely.
Interviews with soldiers and government officials over three months with the Pentagon's 75th Exploitation Task Force, known as the XTF, identified a number of problems that might explain why the search has produced so little. The flaws are serious enough, according to some participants, that the searchers might indeed have overlooked weapons or their components - if they were there to be found.
Some participants said the Bush administration used flawed intelligence to plan and conduct the search. They said planners had assumed that either chemical or biological weapons would be used against American forces in the field, proving their existence to the world. Or they assumed that if the armaments were not used, they would be easy to find.
Some said that promising sites were looted - or cleared of evidence - before Americans could search or secure them.
"Because we arrived at sites so late, so often," said Capt. J. Ryan Cutchin, the leader of the team known as MET Bravo, "we may never know what was there, and either walked or was taken away by looters and Baathist elements under the guise of looting."
A senior Iraqi military intelligence official, a source some of the weapons hunters considered their most promising find, said Mr. Hussein had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons, continuing the destruction up until a week before the war.
Several officials asserted that bureaucratic rivalries were partly to blame. There was strife between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, and arguments between the MET weapons-hunting units and their commander; and some said that Special Operations forces alienated potential Iraqi sources through midnight raids and other harsh tactics.
Underlying those problems, experts and soldiers said, was the Pentagon's reluctance to make the mission an urgent priority as the risky occupation of Iraq unfolded.
"Though it may be now, I don't sense that this was much of a priority," said Fred C. Ikle, an under secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.
By the middle of June, according to weapons experts and administration officials, the searchers had interviewed only 13 scientists among some 200 people on the government's black list of "high-value targets" or among the thousands of midlevel people on the so-called gray list. Collectively, those people could have had extensive knowledge of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs.
Only after the administration came under political fire for failing to find the weapons and was accused of distorting intelligence to build a case for the war did the White House put David Kay, a former international weapons inspector and envoy from the C.I.A., in charge of invigorating a task force that had already been restructured once.
Several analysts said that although the task force's weapons-hunting teams were highly motivated and innovative, the Pentagon initially erred in putting a field artillery brigade in charge of the hunt.
"Unlike Marine or infantry units, field artillery units are full of procedures, lists and box-checking," said a veteran military analyst. "They are not known for flexibility."
Col. Richard R. McPhee, 47, a West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, said he learned only in late December that his brigade had been selected to lead the search, leaving him only a month to prepare.
Drawing Up the Plan
The plan for the hunt, drawn up mainly by United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., with the Defense Intelligence Agency, put too much emphasis on site searches, officers said. In September, defense planners, former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, and officials from several Pentagon offices, including Central Command, had concluded in a secret session at the Pentagon-run National Defense University that while compiling a definitive list of suspect sites to be surveyed was important, recruiting Iraqis involved in unconventional weapons programs was the key to success.
They also agreed that financial and other incentives, like lenient treatment, should be offered to induce cooperation from wary Iraqi scientists and military officers. Finally, participants said, they agreed that former inspectors from Unscom, especially those who had interviewed Iraqis involved in the program, should be involved in the hunt.
But the task force had virtually no inspectors and few analysts who knew Iraq or its weapons programs well, said Richard Spertzel, a former weapons inspector who had helped assemble a list of more than 20 former American inspectors who were ready to help. No financial incentives for cooperation were offered until recently.
The number of MET teams hunting for unconventional weapons was reduced to two from four before the war was even over, lowering the number of active weapons hunters to fewer than 50 from 100, far fewer than the 200 United Nations inspectors.
"To seize and secure facilities took time and manpower, and they did not want to do it," said Master Sgt. Thomas Boon, a weapons hunter traveling with the Third Infantry Division. By the time Sergeant Boon's team reached Karbala in late April, the soldiers had turned up nothing at the 38 sites they had surveyed, sometimes hastily, as the maneuvering forces pressed on to Baghdad, team members said.
Most sites had already been heavily looted by the time the forces arrived, Sergeant Boon said.
Interviews vs. Searches
Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, the head of MET Alpha, said in a recent interview that he became convinced of the need to concentrate on human sources, rather than site visits, after his unit secured the cooperation of two senior Iraqi participants in Iraq's unconventional weapons programs.
One of them, Dr. Nissar Hindawi, a leading figure in Iraq's biological warfare program in the 1980's, said in an interview in April that the explanations he and other scientists had continued giving the United Nations about Iraq's efforts to produce poisons and germ weapons were lies. He said, for instance, that he told inspectors that he was the head of a single-cell protein plant which, he said after the war, actually had made botulism toxin and anthrax.
Administration officials said MET Alpha's second source - a man who originally identified himself as a scientist but who turned out to be a military intelligence officer who said he oversaw part of Iraq's chemical weapons program - remained one of the highest-ranking Iraqis to volunteer to help the United States government in its search for unconventional weapons. Col. McPhee called his recruitment a "turning point" for the task force.
According to officers and officials interviewed in Baghdad and Washington, the Iraqi asserted not only that stockpiles of banned weapons had been destroyed from 1995 to a few days before the war, but also that the weapons programs were devised to continue research and development after the chemical stockpiles were gone. Military experts and administration officials who confirmed that the military spent hours debriefing the Iraqi said similar claims had also been asserted by other deposed Iraqi officials now in detention. But they declined to comment on what proportion of the stockpiles he said had been destroyed early on or why the intelligence agencies did not know of the stockpile destruction.
On April 24, less than a week after the Iraqi met with American officials in Baghdad and White House officials were given a report about his claims, President Bush said publicly for the first time that the military might not find Iraqi unconventional weapons stockpiles because they they might have been destroyed.
A White House spokesman declined comment on whether Mr. Bush's statement was a result of the Iraqi source's assertions, but officials in Iraq and Washington confirmed that White House officials had hotly debated the Iraqi's assertions, which they said had startled them.
"The Iraqi remains a cooperating source whose life would be endangered were his identity known in Iraq," a senior administration official said.
Despite the discovery that Iraqis like the military intelligence officer were willing under the right circumstances to cooperate, the MET units were ordered to stick to searching the list of suspect sites.
"We said this is useless," said Captain Cutchin of MET Bravo. "It's toilet paper for us."
Faulty Leads and Frustration
The intelligence on sites was often stunningly wrong, one senior officer agreed.
"The teams would be given a packet, with pictures and a tentative grid," he said. "They would be told: `Go to this place. You will find a McDonald's there. Look in the fridge. You will find French fries, cheeseburger and Cokes.' And they would go there, and not only was there no fridge and no McDonald's, there was never even a thought of ever putting a McDonald's there. Day after day it was like that."
Throughout their mission, MET units members expressed frustration that they were not permitted to discuss with Iraqi scientists and security officials either the amnesty for war crimes or the sizable monetary rewards that had been authorized to offer in exchange for cooperation, despite the Iraqis' obvious reluctance to participate as long as Mr. Hussein might be alive. Then the MET units were sent home two months before a normal rotation, though they had volunteered to stay.
Officials charged with cultivating Iraqis as sources remained unhappy with raids by Special Forces on their potential sources' homes in the dead of night. "Knocking down a scientist's door at 3 a.m., putting a bag over his head, and flex-cuffing his family while you search for hidden weapons or documents is hardly a way to induce his cooperation," one weapons expert said.
On Friday, Colonel McPhee said he was proud that his teams had inspected more than 350 sites "without getting a single soldier killed" and had provided a smooth transition for the 75th XTF, which was merged into a larger, supposedly more agile task force known as the Iraq Survey Group. The number of weapons hunters and support troops has grown to more than 1,500 from 1,000. Once expected to be operating in May, officials said the new group would not be fully operational until August.
But MET Alpha's final mission underscores the continuing problems that plague the hunt. Sent to Basra to investigate what senior Iraq Survey Group intelligence and weapons experts called highly suspicious equipment that could be components for a nuclear weapons program, the team collected what turned out to be oil production equipment and a handful of large, industrial-scale vegetable steamers. The contents of the crates containing the suspect equipment were all clearly marked, in Russian.
-------- korea
North Korea Hides New Nuclear Site, Evidence Suggests
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
July 20, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/asia/20KORE.html
WASHINGTON, July 19 - American and Asian officials with access to the latest intelligence on North Korea say strong evidence has emerged in recent weeks that the country has built a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium, complicating both the diplomatic strategy for ending the program and the military options if that diplomacy fails.
The discovery of the new evidence, which one senior administration official cautioned was "very worrisome, but still not conclusive," came just as North Korea declared to the United States 11 days ago that it had completed reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, enough to make a half dozen or so nuclear weapons.
American officials have said they cannot verify that claim, though they confirm that sensors set up on North Korea's borders have begun to detect elevated levels of krypton 85, a gas emitted as spent fuel is converted into plutonium.
What concerns American, South Korean and Japanese analysts, however, is not simply the presence of the hard-to-detect gas but its source. While American satellites have been focused for years on North Korea's main nuclear plant, at Yongbyon, the computer analyses that track the gases as they are blown across the Korean Peninsula appeared to rule out the Yongbyon reprocessing plant as their origin. Instead, the analysis strongly suggests that the gas originated from a second, secret plant, perhaps buried in the mountains.
American officials have long suspected that North Korea would try to build a second plant to protect itself against a pre-emptive strike by the United States. The United States even demanded an inspection of one underground site five years ago, only to find it empty, but this is the first time evidence has emerged that a second plant may be in operation.
"This takes a very hard problem and makes it infinitely more complicated," said one Asian official who has been briefed on the American intelligence. "How can you verify that they have stopped a program like this if you don't know where everything is?"
Indeed, there may now be at least two hidden facilities with the capacity to produce material for nuclear weapons. In October, confronted with American evidence, North Korean officials admitted that they had clandestinely built a plant intended to produce uranium, another fuel for a bomb. (It is the same approach Saddam Hussein tried in the early 1990's, and that Iran is pursuing today.) American officials say they have never found that plant, though they believe it is still a few years away from full-scale production.
If it turns out that the current evidence is being properly interpreted, and a second plutonium plant also exists, President Bush may not even have the option that President Bill Clinton briefly considered in 1994: using a military strike or sabotage to prevent North Korea from producing significant amounts of weapons-grade material. Still, Mr. Bush has vowed that he "will not tolerate" a nuclear North Korea.
American intelligence officials say they are wary about making any final judgments about the new evidence. They are keenly aware that C.I.A. assessments of Iraq's nuclear program have touched off a national debate over whether intelligence was exaggerated, and have made all the agency's findings suspect.
That issue has also put the White House at odds with George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who knows that the White House is going to extraordinary lengths to avoid calling the nuclear confrontation with North Korea a crisis. So far, White House officials have been told only informally of the new evidence and have not been fully briefed about its potential implications, administration officials say.
But each week the White House's effort to sound low-key is being undercut by both North Korea's aggressive statements and new evidence that the country is now driving toward production. On Friday, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who angered the White House by questioning its evidence about Iraq, expressed grave concerns about North Korea.
The situation in North Korea "is currently the most immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime," he said from his headquarters in Vienna. It is not clear if he was aware of the newest evidence when he spoke.
North Korea's stance regarding its nuclear program is strikingly different than Iraq's was. After the North Korean government threw out I.A.E.A. inspectors on New Year's Eve, its government acknowledged - even boasted of - its nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration has suspected that some of the claims amount to bluffing, an effort by North Korea to force the world to give it aid on its terms in return for re-freezing, or perhaps dismantling, its program. Mr. Bush has called the country's efforts "blackmail," and he said he would not give in.
But behind the scenes, the North Korean declarations have hardly been dismissed. American intelligence officials have been pouring tremendous resources into solving a mystery: how could North Korea claim that it has reprocessed all of its 8,000 rods if the one known reprocessing plant, at Yongbyon, has been operating only sporadically?
At the C.I.A. and the National Security Council, senior officials have long expressed concern that they could be missing something, that a second plant could be buried somewhere, though that would pose a number of technical challenges. Those fears have been heightened by reports from South Korean intelligence that one of its agents - whose reliability is unknown - reported the existence of a second plant, northeast of Yongbyon.
North Korea has an estimated 11,000 to 15,000 deep underground military-industrial sites, according to one American intelligence estimate, and the nation's leadership has a history of constructing duplicate facilities for such important capabilities as tank production or command-and-communications systems.
"If you follow their logic, if we find a second reprocessing location, maybe there are more," said one American official. "It is a reasonable assessment, given North Korea's proclivity to have multiple facilities for every critical aspect of its national security infrastructure."
Similar logic, of course, led the American intelligence agencies to some of their conclusions about Iraq. But North Korea has a far more sophisticated nuclear program, built over the years with the help first of China and Russia, and in the case of uranium production, Pakistan.
China has now become fully engaged in trying to come up with a diplomatic solution that would not cause chaos on its border with North Korea, or an influx of refugees. A senior Chinese official, Deputy Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo, who has long experience with North Korea, spent an unusually long time - two and half hours - meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other American officials on Friday. He also saw Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney.
The issue is the administration's demand that South Korea and Japan be part of any negotiations with North Korea, which wants to deal only with the United States.
But some administration officials, especially at the Pentagon, believe that negotiations, while necessary, will ultimately prove fruitless. They do not believe that North Korea will ever trade away all of its nuclear program, the only card the starving country has to play to compel the world's attention.
Mr. Bush has said he would not settle for another nuclear freeze, like the one Mr. Clinton approved in 1994, and he has insisted that all North Korean nuclear facilities must be dismantled. Mr. Bush has also come under increasing criticism for letting the problem fester too long as he dealt with Iraq, a view voiced by former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry this week.
Yet it is unclear what Mr. Bush may consider if diplomacy fails. He is already organizing more intrusive inspections of ships and planes, hoping to step up economic pressure on North Korea.
But for military planners, should Mr. Bush decide that American security requires a pre-emptive attack, any confirmation of additional weapons facilities vastly complicates the work of singling out those facilities, since there may be no certainty that all of the important locations have been found.
If any secret facilities have been operating, their production of fissile material may have already spread in small quantities to any number of other locations. The C.I.A. concluded in the early 1990's that North Korea might possess two crude weapons already, but it has never confirmed that.
Such uncertainties remain. The worst case is that the spent fuel rods have been moved to a previously undiscovered reprocessing plant, where the plutonium has been extracted and already shipped around the nation in five- to eight-kilogram packages for weapons production.
----
N. Korea may use two nuke plants
July 19, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030719-100057-2370r.htm
NEW YORK -- Evidence from monitors on the border suggest North Korea has more than one plant capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions that American and Asian officials with access to the latest intelligence say the North may have built a second processing plant, perhaps hidden in mountainous territory.
Tell-tale wisps of krypton 85, a gas emitted as spent fuel rods are converted into plutonium, have apparently been sourced away from North Korea's main nuclear plant at Yongbyon, analysis has shown, the newspaper said.
One administration official was quoted as saying the evidence was worrisome but not conclusive.
In fact, in October North Korean officials said they had secretly built a plant intended to produce uranium fuel for a bomb. Five years ago the United States demanded an inspection of an underground site but it turned out to be empty.
----
North moved weapons toward border, Seoul says
July 20, 2003
By Christopher Torchia
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030719-101316-8149r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea has moved heavy artillery closer to the tense border with South Korea and last year deployed more missiles that are capable of reaching Japan, officials in the Defense Ministry in Seoul said yesterday.
They released the report during a flurry of diplomatic efforts led by China to convene another trilateral meeting of China, the United States and North Korea to seek a peaceful resolution to the latest nuclear standoff on the peninsula.
For decades, North Korea has deployed much of its conventional military force close to the border, and it would be capable of inflicting devastation on Seoul in the early stages of any conflict. However, the South Korean military did not alter its alert posture in response to the report on the North Korean artillery and missiles, indicating that a major escalation of tension is not imminent.
Armies on both sides of the border have been in a high state of vigilance since the 1950-53 Korean War.
North Korea "has increased the threat on South Korea's capital by moving forward 170 mm and 240 mm long-range artillery," the South Korean Defense Ministry said in its policy report. It did not specify when the redeployment occurred nor how many guns were shifted.
North Korea's artillery and rocket launchers could quickly shower thousands of shells on Seoul, 37 miles south of the border. Yet most residents of Seoul have grown up with the threat, and there was no sense of alarm in the capital.
The South Korean Defense Ministry also said that in June 2002 the North deployed a "battalion" of No Dong missiles, which can hit targets as far away as 810 miles. That includes Japan, a crucial U.S. ally in the region. But it did not say how many missiles were in the battalion nor where they were deployed.
North Korea shocked the region in 1998 by test-firing a Taepo Dong-1 missile over Japan and into the Pacific. The North said it was an attempt to insert a satellite into orbit.
It was not clear why South Korea released what seemed to be old intelligence about the North Korean missiles at such a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula. The Defense Ministry sometimes appears hawkish on North Korea in comparison with other government ministries, which espouse reconciliation with the North.
In diplomacy on the nuclear issue, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other U.S. officials in Washington after talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il last week.
U.S. officials said they told the envoy that Washington would agree to another three-way meeting but that there must be a clear prospect for an expanded forum that would include Japan and South Korea.
The first trilateral meeting was held in Beijing in April.
North Korea has demanded one-on-one discussions with the United States because it says the nuclear issue is bilateral. However, the Bush administration says the issue is regional and wants multilateral talks.
The nuclear dispute flared in October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to having a clandestine nuclear program, in violation of its international agreements.
----
Top Democrat Criticizes Bush on N. Korea Policy
July 20, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top Senate Democrat said on Sunday that the Bush administration did not have a coherent policy on North Korea, which U.S. officials suspect may have built a second secret facility for producing weapons-grade plutonium.
``There is no policy,'' said Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''
``I am at a loss to understand why this administration insists that we have the situation in North Korea under control,'' Biden added.
North Korea has told Washington that it has reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, enough to produce about a half dozen nuclear weapons. In addition, U.S. officials confirmed late Saturday a New York Times report that Pyongyang may have built a second, secret facility to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Asked what the United States should do about North Korea, Biden replied, ``We launch a pre-emptive diplomatic effort now, which we have not done. We sit down and talk and privately, unabashedly, lay out to them what it's going to require for them to be brought into the international community, and what's going to happen if, in fact, they do not cease and desist.''
Biden said a multilateral approach, which President Bush has called for, was desirable but Washington should hold direct talks with the North. ``Why is that not the process?'' he asked.
Biden said he had been asked many times before the invasion of Iraq in March whether Baghdad or Pyongyang posed the bigger threat. ``Every time, I said North Korea.''
-------- us politics
White House Didn't Gain CIA Nod for Claim On Iraqi Strikes
Gist Was Hussein Could Launch in 45 Minutes
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17424-2003Jul19?language=printer
The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.
The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."
The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public "dossier" on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable.
The White House embraced the claim, from a British dossier on Iraq, at the same time it began to promote the dossier's disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.
Bush administration officials last week said the CIA was not consulted about the claim. A senior White House official did not dispute that account, saying presidential remarks such as radio addresses are typically "circulated at the staff level" within the White House only.
Virtually all of the focus on whether Bush exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's weapons ambitions has been on the credibility of a claim he made in the Jan. 28 State of the Union address about efforts to buy uranium in Africa. But an examination of other presidential remarks, which received little if any scrutiny by intelligence agencies, indicates Bush made more broad accusations on other intelligence matters related to Iraq.
For example, the same Rose Garden speech and Sept. 28 radio address that mentioned the 45-minute accusation also included blunt assertions by Bush that "there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq." This claim was highly disputed among intelligence experts; a group called Ansar al-Islam in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who could have been in Iraq, were both believed to have al Qaeda contacts but were not themselves part of al Qaeda.
Bush was more qualified in his major Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati, mentioning al Qaeda members who got training and medical treatment from Iraq. The State of the Union address was also more hedged about whether al Qaeda members were in Iraq, saying "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."
Bush did not mention Iraq in his radio address yesterday. Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), delivering the Democratic radio address, suggested that the dispute over the uranium claim in the State of the Union "is about whether administration officials made a conscious and very troubling decision to create a false impression about the gravity and imminence of the threat that Iraq posed to America." Levin said there is evidence the uranium claim "was just one of many questionable statements and exaggerations by the intelligence community and administration officials in the buildup to the war."
The 45-minute accusation is particularly noteworthy because of the furor it has caused in Britain, where the charge originated. A parliamentary inquiry determined earlier this month that the claim "did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source." The inquiry also concluded that "allegations of politically inspired meddling cannot credibly be established."
As it turns out, the 45-minute charge was not true; though forbidden weapons may yet be found in Iraq, an adviser to the Bush administration on arms issues said last week that such weapons were not ready to be used on short notice.
The 45-minute allegation did not appear in the major speeches Bush made about Iraq in Cincinnati in October or in his State of the Union address, both of which were made after consultation with the CIA. But the White House considered the 45-minute claim significant and drew attention to it the day the British dossier was released. Asked if there was a "smoking gun" in the British report, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on Sept. 24 highlighted that charge and the charge that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.
"I think there was new information in there, particularly about the 45-minute threshold by which Saddam Hussein has got his biological and chemical weapons triggered to be launched," Fleischer said. "There was new information in there about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium from African nations. That was new information."
The White House use of the 45-minute charge is another indication of its determination to build a case against Hussein even without the participation of U.S. intelligence services. The controversy over the administration's use of intelligence has largely focused on claims made about the Iraqi nuclear program, particularly attempts to buy uranium in Africa. But the accusation that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack on a moment's notice was significant because it added urgency to the administration's argument that Hussein had to be dealt with quickly.
Using the single-source British accusation appears to have violated the administration's own standard. In a briefing for reporters on Friday, a senior administration official, discussing the decision to remove from the Cincinnati speech an allegation that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger, said CIA Director George J. Tenet told the White House that "for a presidential speech, the standard ought to be higher than just relying upon one source. Oftentimes, a lot of these things that are embodied in this document are based on multiple sources. And in this case, that was a single source being cited, and he felt that that was not appropriate."
The British parliamentary inquiry reported this month that the claim came from one source, and "it appears that no evidence was found which corroborated the information supplied by the source, although it was consistent with a pattern of evidence of Iraq's military capability over time. Neither are we aware that there was any corroborating evidence from allies through the intelligence-sharing machinery. It is also significant that the US did not refer to the claim publicly." The report said the investigators "have not seen a satisfactory answer" to why the government gave the claim such visibility.
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
----
Uranium Claim Was Known for Months to Be Weak
Intelligence Officials Say 'Everyone Knew' Then What White House Knows Now About Niger Reference
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17407-2003Jul19?language=printer
The White House repeated a familiar retort last week to defend itself against allegations that President Bush used discredited information in his State of the Union speech about Iraq shopping for uranium oxide in Africa: "If we knew [then] what we knew today, we wouldn't have done it," as a White House official, demanding anonymity, said to a roomful of reporters Friday.
But recent revelations by officials at the CIA, the State Department, the United Nations, in Congress and elsewhere make clear that the weakness of the claim in the State of the Union speech was known and accepted by a wide circle of intelligence and diplomatic personnel scrutinizing information on Iraqi weapons programs months before the speech.
"Everyone knew" the letters purporting to prove Iraq's effort to acquire uranium in Niger "were not good," said one senior administration decision-maker who otherwise supported the president's decision to go to war in Iraq. "The White House response has been baffling. This is relatively inconsequential. Why don't they tell the truth?"
Inconsequential or not, even the Italian journalist who gave the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome nine months ago told reporters yesterday that when she returned from a trip to Niger to check them out, she told her editor that "the story seemed fake to me" and published nothing on it.
Elisabetta Burba, a foreign correspondent for the Italian news magazine Panorama, said in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, "I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that's exactly why I was very worried. If it turned out to be a hoax, and I published it, I would have ended my career."
For the past weeks, White House efforts to explain how that hoax, and other information about African uranium purchases, ended up in government releases and speeches have contradicted information from other U.S. officials involved in verifying the president's remarks before he speaks.
For instance, on Friday the White House briefer said that the only statement CIA Director George J. Tenet had successfully persuaded deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to take out of the president's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati was a reference to "over 500 tons of uranium." He said that was removed because it was "single-sourced" intelligence.
But yesterday, a senior administration official with knowledge of the Tenet-Hadley conversation disputed the White House version. "The line he asked to take out wasn't about 500 tons of uranium or a single source. It was about Africa and uranium," the official said. Even the broader assertion about Africa "wasn't firm enough. It was shaky."
Technically, the Niger documents were publicly declared to be forgeries on March 7 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. agency that had monitored Iraq's nuclear-related activity and had received the documents from U.S officials a month earlier, on Feb. 5.
But "long before the journalist came up with the documents," said the senior administration official, "there were broader concerns that the government couldn't verify."
Those concerns dated from late 2001, when U.S. intelligence officials obtained information "from two western intelligence sources" and other overt sources, according to an April 29 letter to Congress from the State Department "on behalf of the President."
In February 2002, the CIA dispatched former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a 23-year career diplomat with postings in Africa and Iraq, to check out those reports. He returned unconvinced, and the CIA cabled his doubts around the intelligence community and to the National Security Council on March 9, 2002. While not definitive, Wilson's assessment fit with the skepticism already existing on the subject. Wilson's report was "not memorable" because it confirmed previously held doubts, said several U.S. officials.
In September 2002, the story of Iraq's interest in uranium from Africa was first made public in a British government dossier on Iraq's weapons program. Tenet and top aides, who appeared days later before two congressional committees, were asked about the British claim.
Tenet told lawmakers that there were reports of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium but that there were doubts about the reports' accuracy. Not a week later, the CIA circulated a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. Neither allegation -- that Iraq sought uranium in Africa or Niger -- made it into the document's "key judgments" section, according to portions of the NIE made public Friday.
On page 25, however, the NIE stated that a foreign government had reported that Niger "planned to send several tons of pure uranium (probably yellowcake) to Iraq. . . . We do not know the status of this arrangement." On the same page, it cites reports indicating Iraq's approaches to Somalia and Congo. "We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources," the NIE stated.
On page 84, the State Department's intelligence bureau, in a dissenting analysis, said "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are . . . highly dubious." No references to Iraq seeking yellowcake from Niger, Congo, Somalia or anywhere else appeared in the NIE that was publicly released on Oct. 4.
One reason for the public omission was the widespread skepticism about the claims, described by the senior official as "so much for so long."
Days after the Italian journalist Burba handed the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on Oct. 11, intelligence officials had nearly completely discounted their substance, which mirrored the reports Wilson and others had discounted eight months earlier. In fact, when the State Department's intelligence branch distributed the documents on Oct. 16 to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it included a caveat that the claims were of "dubious authenticity."
Similar caveats were included by the U.S. Mission to the IAEA in Vienna when the documents were turned over there on Feb. 5, said an official familiar with documents submitted.
Four months later, in June, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted that the White House had been unaware of these previous doubts. "We wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now," Rice said. "I can assure you that the president did not knowingly, before the American people, say something that we thought to be false. It's outrageous that anybody would claim that."
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
----
Iraq Uranium Claim Hounds White House
July 20, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Defending-Bush.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House defense of President Bush's now-disavowed claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa has evolved over the last two weeks: blame others, stonewall, bury questions in irrelevant information and, above all, hope it will go away. So far, none has worked.
In question: Sixteen words in Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union speech: ``The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''
At issue: The credibility of the president's allegation that Saddam was rebuilding a nuclear weapons program. The assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium was a key component of that claim -- and a key piece of Bush's justification for war.
The flap started on July 6, when an envoy sent by the CIA to Africa last year to investigate the uranium claim contended that the Bush administration ignored -- and possibly manipulated -- his findings. In a New York Times op-ed article, Joseph Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, said it was highly doubtful that any transaction took place.
The next day, the White House acknowledged that Bush should not have made the claim because of concerns about the intelligence behind it. The documents allegedly showing an Iraq-Niger uranium connection turned out to be forgeries.
Then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tried to shut down the story in its tracks, insisting it was old news.
In a way, it was.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice had said almost a month earlier that Bush was wrong to include the uranium claim in his speech, but that the White House had not known about intelligence doubts until afterward. Her acknowledgment received little attention.
That changed with Wilson's statements. Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail demanded an investigation into whether Bush purposedly exaggerated intelligence.
With its press staff unable to quell the controversy, the White House brought in bigger guns -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Rice, the president himself and even, later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But, after two weeks, a White House usually adept at controlling stories merely by dismissing questions and waiting them out has had no luck.
The central questions -- asked over and over -- were not changing:
--Who knew what when -- especially the president?
--Why was it so important to include the statement in the speech?
--Who was responsible for putting it in?
--Why has the president refused to take responsibility for uttering it?
Only the White House's explanations shifted -- often contradicting themselves in the process.
There was the ``no big deal'' approach. Four days into the controversy, as Bush was dogged with questions while visiting Africa, Powell said there was no intention to deceive and called the outcry ``overwrought and overblown and overdrawn.'' His defense was a bit backhanded -- the president's statement, he said, had been determined to be ``not totally outrageous.''
With that tack unsuccessful, the next day was blame the CIA day.
First Rice, then Bush pointed fingers at the CIA for not removing the claim while vetting the speech. CIA Director George Tenet, back in Washington, completed the well-scripted mea culpa by accepting full responsibility and absolving Bush.
But Democrats still weren't letting it go.
Rice appeared on three Sunday talk shows to offer a new explanation: Bush's remark was technically accurate because he correctly described what the British government had reported.
And who knows, Fleischer emphasized the next day, the British could be right. ``We don't know if it's true,'' he said, ``but nobody -- but nobody -- can say it is wrong.''
Scott McClellan, who succeeded Fleischer as chief spokesman, also tried to dismiss questions. Over four days, he told reporters 20 times that the particular question they were asking had already been ``addressed.''
On July 16, he said claims of White House exaggeration were ``nonsense'' and accused skeptics of trying to ``politicize this issue by rewriting history.'' He read five-year-old statements by Democratic Sens. John Kerry -- now running for president -- and Carl Levin urging action to confront Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction.
At the same time, the White House tried to redirect the debate onto the overall danger posed by Saddam's chemical and biological weapons -- uranium or not -- and onto Bush's resolve in acting to confront that threat.
With that came the Bush and Blair show, first with Blair's speech to a joint meeting of Congress last Thursday and then at a news conference with the president.
The two leaders defended their decision to go to war and said their prewar claims about Iraq's weapons would ultimately be proven right.
On Friday came the document dump.
The White House took the rare step of declassifying and releasing eight pages of the 90-page top-secret National Intelligence Estimate that was used to write the questioned portions of the State of the Union address.
But instead of putting a lid on the controversy, the documents were likely to raise more questions -- as they also showed prewar divisions within the U.S. intelligence community. The State Department, for instance, termed the reports that Saddam was shopping for uranium in Africa ``highly dubious.''
As for Bush, he has addressed the matter only in broad terms, saying he is confident in his decision to go to war. Once, he praised the intelligence he relied on as ``darn good.''
``We will find the truth,'' Bush said beside Blair. ``And that'll end all this speculation.''
Only time will tell.
--------
OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By DANIEL BENJAMIN and STEVEN SIMON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/opinion/20BENJ.html
In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to terrorists.
The invasion of Iraq, after all, was billed as Phase II in the war on terror that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But was there ever a credible basis for carrying that battle to Iraq?
Don't misunderstand - we should all be glad to see the Iraqi people freed from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and the defeat of Iraq did spell the demise of the world's No. 4 state sponsor of international terrorism (Iran, Syria and Sudan all have more blood on their hands in the last decade). But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the organization that made catastrophic terrorism a reality, seems more uncertain than ever.
In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's followers over the years, there was no strong evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.
But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.
In the 14 weeks since the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces have not brought to light any significant evidence demonstrating the bond between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Uncovering such a link should be much easier than finding weapons of mass destruction. Instead of having to inspect hundreds of suspected weapons sites around the country, military and intelligence officials need only comb through the files of Iraq's intelligence agency and a handful of other government ministries.
Our intelligence experts have been doing exactly that since April and so far there has been no report of any proof (and we can assume that any supporting information would have quickly been publicized). Of the more than 3,000 Qaeda operatives arrested around the world, only a handful of prisoners in Guantánamo - all with an incentive to please their captors - have claimed there was cooperation between Osama bin Laden's organization and Saddam Hussein's regime, and their remarks have yet to be confirmed by any of the high-ranking Iraqi officials now in American hands.
Indeed, most new reports concerning Al Qaeda and Iraq have been of another nature. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two highest-ranking Qaeda operatives in custody, have told investigators that Mr. bin Laden shunned cooperation with Saddam Hussein. A United Nations team investigating global ties of the bin Laden group reported last month that they found no evidence of a Qaeda-Iraq connection.
In addition, one Central Intelligence Agency official told The Washington Post that a review panel of retired intelligence operatives put together by the agency found that although there were some ties among individuals in the two camps, "it was not at all clear there was any coordination or joint activities." And Rand Beers, the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council who resigned earlier this year, has said that on the basis of the intelligence he saw, he did not believe there was a significant relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
The Congressional oversight committees evaluating the administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have said they will also examine whether the administration manipulated information regarding Iraq's involvement in terrorism. The terrorism issue must not be given short shrift because of the current controversy over claims of Iraq's unconventional weapons. The truth is, we knew for decades that Iraq had nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs - yet it was only after 9/11 that these programs were viewed as an intolerable threat that necessitated a regime change.
This is not only a question of political accountability - it also bears on our nation's fundamental approach to security. United States policy changed dramatically when the Bush administration, lacking compelling evidence of an Iraq-Qaeda link, decided to base the Qaeda part of its pro-war argument on a hypothetical situation. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in October. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
But this scenario is extremely unlikely. For years now the world's leading state sponsors of terrorism have had no confidence that they could carry out attacks against the United States undetected. That is why this brand of terrorism has been on the wane.
After it became clear to Libya that the United States could prove its responsibility for the 1988 attack on Pan Am 103 - and United Nations sanctions were imposed - it got out of the business of supporting attacks on Americans. After American and Kuwaiti intelligence traced a plot to kill former President George H. W. Bush in 1993 to Baghdad, the Iraqi regime also stopped trying to carry out terrorist attacks against America. And when the Clinton administration made clear that it knew Iran was behind the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, Tehran ceased plotting terrorist strikes against American interests.
Because of America's intelligence and law enforcement capacities, the world's outlaw states know that they will pay a high price for sponsoring terrorists act against us - and an overwhelming one should they assist in attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. That is why Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and some 20 other countries with chemical and biological weapons have never, as far as we know, given one to terrorists.
Of course, the return of state-backed terror against America cannot be ruled out. And we are right to be concerned that North Korea, the world's most unpredictable regime, might sell a nuclear weapon to terrorists. But this much is clear: all states, even rogue ones, have a strong conservative impulse for self-preservation.
American policy must recognize this clear division between the old state-sponsored terrorism, which we have shown we can deter, and the new, religiously motivated attacks. First, we should think long and hard before seeking regime change as a means of behavior modification. Those who chafe to topple the mullahs in Iran, for example, court unforeseen consequences that may ultimately damage America's interests.
If we were to confirm that extreme elements like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are harboring Qaeda operatives, we would need to press hard diplomatically, economically and even be prepared to threaten military action. But a concerted effort to upend the regime could well backfire, ending the slow but nonetheless clear evolution of Iran into a genuine democracy.
Second and most important, the Bush administration should focus more on Al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that poses an imminent, undeterrable danger. New instability in Afghanistan and the continued spread of jihadist ideology in the Islamic world mean that the prospects for another 9/11 are growing. America has been fortunate in capturing some high-ranking terrorists, but we still lack a comprehensive program to deal with a growing global insurgency and the long-term threat of radical Islam, for which intelligence and law enforcement will not suffice.
Rogue regimes are bad for the world and worse for the people forced to live under them. Over time, we can use diplomacy - including coercion - and deterrence to bring about change. For now, however, the direst threat to Americans comes not from the mullahs of Tehran, but from the mass-murderers of Al Qaeda.
Daniel Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Steven Simon, an analyst at the Rand Corporation, are authors of ''The Age of Sacred Terror.''
-------- MILITARY
------- afghanistan
Where the Enemy Is Everywhere and Nowhere
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By DANIEL BERGNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/magazine/20ALQAEDA.html
Stones and scrap metal are laid out on the sand. The officers gather for what they call the rock drill, a last session of planning. Strips of white cloth, along with the rocks and metal, form a map of Lowri Kariz, the village the troops will search, hunting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Steel bars split the village into quadrants. Squads will cover each section, making sure no suspect can shift from one to another -- making sure no suspect can edge away.
In a few hours, after nightfall, the soldiers will leave their Kandahar base. They have been warned to anticipate resistance. The search zone is tight to the border; the frontier is an enemy refuge. Ambushes might be sprung and mortars might be launched, and then there are the old, unmarked minefields and others that might be newly laid. After the rock drill, platoons meet between the tents. With a quiet, cursing indifference that mitigates fear, they talk through the responses to assaults, to mines. If someone in their units takes an unlucky step and gets his body blasted into fragments, the men will squat down and inch toward the victim, using their bayonet blades to stab delicately at the desert floor.
This is America's war on terror, in the southern and least stable part of Afghanistan, over a year and a half since that war began. ''This mission,'' Charles Flynn, the Army lieutenant colonel in charge of tonight's operation, tells me, ''I expect to apprehend enemy.'' Then the convoy of trucks and Humvees moves out, lurching and jouncing through cratered terrain, Afghanistan's powdery sand rising from the tires, coiling and unfurling like mist, radiant in the headlights. All is obscure behind it.
Resolute strike, Valiant Strike, Carpathian Lightning: the names of recent United States military operations in Afghanistan. And beginning with the name that encompasses them all, Operation Enduring Freedom, there have been victories to go along with the grand, triumphal language. American missiles, in the fall of 2001, annihilated Al Qaeda training camps where men like Ramzi Yousef and Mohamed Atta had taught and learned. Afghan militias directed by Army Special Forces crews drove the Taliban from power and destroyed, in less than two months, the terrorist sanctuary Al Qaeda had found under the Taliban's extremist rule. It's a crucial word, sanctuary. It's one-third of the way the American military -- with about 8,500 troops on the ground, aided by 3,000 coalition soldiers -- defines its aims in the country. Kill. Capture. Deny sanctuary. These are the measures of the war's success as the 300 Americans ride out tonight on Vigilant Guardian, hoping that Flynn's prediction is more than a wish.
The troops doze, bodies packed crushingly into the open beds of the trucks. Turreted gunners peer out through night optics above each cab; for the rest, jolting at eight miles per hour through hostile territory on a scarcely marked track, closer and closer to the border, the tension of possible ambush is gradually overcome by the pain of entangled, contorted limbs and torsos. Sleep may be dangerous, but it is escape.
The best chance at killing or capture may have been deep in the past. Below the white peaks of the Spin Ghar near the Pakistani line, Osama bin Laden was spotted, in late November and early December 2001, along with at least 1,000 of his Qaeda fighters. The American high command believed this was it but didn't want to put its soldiers -- even Delta Force, renowned for risk-taking -- in severe danger; didn't want British special forces -- who also had teams in the area, eager to move in -- to claim the war's greatest prize; and couldn't compel Pakistan to close off the frontier. (Why the Americans didn't block the frontier themselves has never become clear, though the perils of landing helicopters at high altitudes in terrible weather probably played a part.) Without much support on the ground, with only the troops of Afghan warlords to rely on, a bombardment from American jets merely chased bin Laden between the ridges, most think, and across the border. He may well have bought the warlords off and been allowed to escape. He may well have had the help of the region's Pashtuns, the ethnic group most loyal to his Taliban collaborators. Months later, Canadian coalition soldiers dug up bodies from a cluster of graves that had become a local shrine, bodies from December's bombing. The hope was that one would be bin Laden's. None were.
The next time, the military chose to take more risks. In March 2002, farther southwest along the frontier, an unmanned surveillance plane, guided by C.I.A. technicians, sent back photographs of Al Qaeda fighters massing. About 200 enemy troops seemed to have gathered in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, with ''H.V.T.'s'' probably among them. High-Value Targets was now the military's preferred term; after bin Laden's December escape, it no longer liked to speak of him or other terrorist leaders by name. That put too much stress, and focused too much public judgment, on the killing or capturing of specific figures.
More than a thousand coalition soldiers, most of them American, surrounded the screes of Shah-i-Kot. When Al Qaeda fled, it would be cut off. But this time, Al Qaeda didn't flee right away. It crippled Special Forces helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades and tore men apart with heavy machine guns. And the C.I.A.'s high-tech intelligence had been far wrong. There weren't 200 enemy fighters waiting behind the crags; there were more like a thousand. When two weeks of fighting wound down, 8 American and 3 Afghan coalition soldiers had been killed, about 80 wounded. No H.V.T. bodies were found. American commanders claimed 800 enemy dead, but estimates quickly shrank to less than half that. And ever since, the military has been reluctant to talk of success in terms of body counts. ''You mean for the bad guys?'' Maj. Bob Hepner, a public affairs officer, asks when I request casualty figures going back to the start of the Afghanistan campaign. ''We don't have them. Because a lot of times you can't match the parts. We just know we've got a lot of legs and hands.'' He smiles as he speaks, implying that the enemy has been blown to smithereens.
But according to terrorism experts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based policy group devoted largely to world security, the estimates run something like this: about 20,000 jihadic soldiers had graduated from Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan as of October 2001, when the American-led war began there. Up to 10,000 of those were inside Afghanistan at the time. Since then, the coalition campaign has killed or captured around 2,000. Ninety percent of bin Laden's forces, and more than half of his top commanders, remain free. And no one is quite sure where they are. Some of the Arabs among them have probably made their way back to the Middle East. Many of the rest seem to straddle the frontiers of Afghanistan, Pakistan and neighboring Iran. Al Qaeda is, the institute judges, ''more insidious and just as dangerous'' as before the 9/11 attacks.
Two weeks before the Vigilant Guardian convoy crosses the desert, a tape has surfaced, probably made recently, since it refers to the war in Iraq. ''If you started suicide attacks, you will see the fear of Americans all over the world,'' the voice, which seems to be bin Laden's, preaches. The tape was given to The Associated Press by a source who said he had come from the Afghan borderlands, where many believe the tape was recorded.
When the soldiers reach the search zone at dawn, when they scour the village of Lowri Kariz for caches of rockets, for hidden grenade launchers, for signs of enemy safe houses, Capt. Kevin (Kit) Parker will be in charge of collecting intelligence. He will seek out village headmen, greet them and declare America's good intentions. He will try somehow to befriend them, gather whatever leads he can coax from them and whatever evidence his men turn up -- possibly pointing to Al Qaeda or Taliban suspects who might prove the missing link to finding the highest-ranking terrorist figures. He has learned to expect little. He explains that we haven't managed in the least to understand the country, let alone transform it, to keep it from serving again as an easy terrorist sanctuary as soon as we leave. Afghanistan, he says, ''has a level of complexity that is almost unfathomable.''
Tall and lean but with a slightly cherubic, sun-pinked face, Parker was in the reserves before 9/11. His civilian life consisted -- after a doctorate in physics from Vanderbilt and postdoctoral work in pathology and biomedical engineering at Harvard and Johns Hopkins -- of research into treatments for cardiac arrhythmia. Right after 9/11, he got himself switched to a unit that he guessed would be leaving soon for Afghanistan. But intricate lab work can seem simple compared with the intricacies of this country. He talks of the vicious rivalries among the country's seemingly infinite subtribes, how often the tips the Army receives are the attempts of one clan to spur the Americans against an ancient enemy. He speaks of the way such ethnic anarchy brought the Taliban to power and gave Al Qaeda its haven. He talks about the landscape itself, with its countless outcroppings and caves and desiccated gulches, so hard to navigate, so easy to hide in. And he tells of spending Christmas day with a village leader he felt he could trust, a man whose information he relied on. ''We were sipping tea and burning dung to keep warm,'' he recalls. The leader told him there was no suspicious activity in the area. Soon after, Parker learned that stockpiles of weapons were moving through the village.
Vigilant Guardian's trucks and Humvees come to a stop at Lowri Kariz. Dawn barely suggests itself at the horizon, a low line of faint blanching. A few miles away, Spinbaldak, a town on the border, shows a ragged spine of lights, thinly spread.
Here and across Afghanistan, the work of ''humint,'' as the Army calls human intelligence, has been badly frustrated. Christopher Langton, a retired British colonel and military attache in Central Asia, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, speaks of the attempts to befriend and the attempts to pay. The paying hasn't bought much in the way of trustworthy information, and a psychological operations officer on Vigilant Guardian tells me that the Army has mostly abandoned it. The befriending hasn't worked well either, because, Langton says, the Americans have failed ''to capture the virtual territory, the territory of the mind of the population.'' The troops on missions like Parker's, operations that set out from American bases every two weeks or so, should pick up the kinds of details that form the foundation of military intelligence. But the troops are handicapped, Langton explains, because the people sense a shortsighted American involvement, a powerful wish to be gone.
The Afghans feel that the Taliban, with Al Qaeda behind it, could take hold again in the country as soon as the Americans go home. For the villagers, survival when that happens could depend on keeping their mouths shut now.
And without the help of the people, Langton adds, the beaming from all the satellites and unmanned planes in the sky can be futile. The jagged terrain creates blind spots, and what the high-tech systems can photograph they can't interpret. They can't calibrate for local sympathies or even, as happened in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, determine sheer numbers of bunkered, armed enemy soldiers.
''I'm not optimistic,'' Captain Parker says, thinking forward five years. ''The smart terrorist in Afghanistan will simply wait us out, wait for us to lose interest, lose will.'' Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader who has kept himself so mysterious and secreted that, the military's top officers acknowledge, he could drift through their bases without any chance of being recognized, sends out edicts against the invading infidels, demanding their deaths. Three weeks before Vigilant Guardian, a Special Forces convoy dipped through a gulley and found itself under ambush, taking machine-gun fire. Two soldiers were killed and one was critically wounded before the attackers disappeared.
American casualties in Afghanistan haven't been high, with about 60 dead and about 245 wounded since the beginning of the war. But the casualties -- and the forces that want America gone -- show no sign of letting up. Parker's sense of the future echoes what I've heard from another captain, Mike Gonzalez, who will be running security as the truckloads of men enter the alleys of Lowri Kariz to start searching. ''As long as we're here,'' Gonzalez says, ''it will be all right. But when we go. . . . '' His voice drifts off, the implication clear: sanctuary will be waiting -- ample freedom, as before, to train jihadic soldiers and to launch their missions.
Now squads of a dozen troops take up positions, lying prone on the night-chilled sand, the guns of the different groups pointing in different directions, all on guard, all waiting for orders to step across what may be a minefield. A hundred yards away, the mud village begins with a compound's wall, everything behind it concealed. Reports say the Taliban or Al Qaeda have either been coming through the area or made themselves at home. That's about as specific as the military's information is, going in. Just behind the village surge hills where, three months before, shots exchanged with suspects sparked a gun battle that was fought cave to cave and boulder to boulder. ''It's a big cat-and-mouse game,'' the soldier lying next to me says, with a mixture of nervousness and exhausted resignation.
And everyone is aware of the border close by. Within 70 miles of Spinbaldak lies the Pakistani city of Quetta, where rumors have placed bin Laden and Omar in the past few months. Plenty of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters have fled to Quetta and the surrounding mountains since October 2001. Whether or not the top leaders are there, the area around Spinbaldak is a frontier transit spot for weapons and instructions aimed at breaking American will in Afghanistan. Yet beyond small-scale, discreet operations -- like the C.I.A.-aided arrest in Pakistan of one of bin Laden's lieutenants, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- the Americans can't venture into that country to reach the elusive enemy. They fear stirring more anti-American hatred than already exists and jeopardizing Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, who is at least somewhat compliant to American desires.
In Quetta, after 9/11, thousands chanted ''Death to America.'' Musharraf's government has little control in the region. More than one American officer, asking to be nameless on this sensitive point, compares the situation to the war in Vietnam, to the way enemy bases in neighboring Cambodia and Laos compounded the immeasurable problems America faced. Lieutenant Colonel Flynn, leading Vigilant Guardian, says he worries about the Taliban or Al Qaeda emissary who meets his Afghan contact around Spinbaldak and tells him, ''Deliver these guns in Afghanistan, lay these mines in Afghanistan, set these explosives in Afghanistan.'' Then Flynn imagines the attack on his troops that might follow. ''You'll never see it coming,'' he says.
Northeast of Spinbaldak, near the Shah-i-Kot, a Special Forces commander, Chris Allen, lives in a fort made of sun-bleached mud, thickened and flecked by bits of straw. His fort sits in a Pashtun region that has been among the most hostile to the Americans, the most hospitable to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Like so many of the structures of Afghanistan, its architecture seems to rise from the Dark Ages. Its low-ceilinged rooms look inward upon a square courtyard, not outward at all; to gaze outward, you have to tunnel up along a twisting set of mud stairs. Then, from the level of the parapets, you can duck into one of four guard towers to peer across the valley and keep watch for your enemy.
Allen takes boyish pleasure in the fort's storybook feel. But the enthusiasm that animates his round face goes beyond his headquarters, which include a second fort beside his home, both rented from a local owner. With unrelenting good cheer, he believes that in time, the United States military will ''bring light to Afghanistan.'' He predicts that the Americans will be able to reduce their forces and eventually return home entirely without leaving behind a haven and cultivating ground for terrorists. Partly, he says, this will happen through the training of a national army, a program meant to instill not only new battlefield techniques but also new values -- an allegiance to the moderate, American-backed government whose power now does not extend far outside the capital. The program's implementation has been painfully slow; after a year, there have been just 4,500 graduates toward a goal of 70,000. Yet his optimism depends, too, on small outposts like his own.
He speaks of himself as a ''baby hugger,'' hoping to bring aid to civilians in order to win Langton's ''virtual territory,'' to convince the people of America's long-term commitment, to draw them away from past allegiances. He wants to build schools and health clinics, to start the job of reconstruction, which foreign-aid workers still feel too unsafe to begin. But he has little budget for such things; the Pentagon has allotted just $12 million for Army-run reconstruction projects throughout the country. So his soldiers grind their Humvees and 4-by-4's around the valley, handing out crayons to children clambering over ruins to reach them (the ruins left by Russian shells from the era before the Russians were worn down and driven away, the ruins left by American bombs last year). They talk to village elders about building schools -- projects, the soldiers have to emphasize, they may not be able to carry out.
And meanwhile, Afghanistan's children suck on bin Laden candies, sugary balls in wrappers showing the leader's face, his pointed finger and the tip of a rocket.
Rockets have been shot at Allen's base about 80 times since December. They have been poorly aimed -- not the work of top Al Qaeda operatives but apparently of low-level members or sympathizers. The rockets have struck within a hundred yards of the fort walls, exploding at thunderous volume, spewing shrapnel. So far they have done no harm. Allen can't retaliate because he can't be sure exactly who has been launching the attacks. ''The hard part about intelligence here,'' he says, ''is for every report saying this guy's Al Qaeda, there's another saying this guy's a saint.'' A mine recently blew up a vehicle driven by a soldier from one of the forts. A foot was lost, a face ravaged.
Between explosions, the local police often take potshots at Afghans the Americans have hired to help guard Allen's base. On a pair of round hills, a tribal warlord, with a militia of a thousand at his call, has -- or had, until lately -- two mud forts overlooking Allen's. Because the warlord is an enemy of the American-backed provincial governor and because the Americans suspect he may be supported by Al Qaeda, the superior elevation of his hilltop stations made Allen uneasy. So Special Forces raided one of the forts, chasing off the warlord's troops or -- depending on who is telling the story -- choosing a time when the place was unmanned and blew up its weaponry along with its walls. In Afghanistan, the Americans can seem lost within the world they are trying to transform and stabilize. They can seem as if they are just one more militia, staking and defending small claims. On poles atop the guard towers of Allen's fort, American flags ripple above his portion of the valley.
'So we ain't got no terps?'' a soldier asks, after the troops of Vigilant Guardian, fingers poised on trigger guards, cross the sand and walk into the sprawling village of Lowri Kariz. The entire operation -- with team after team disappearing into separate compounds, and with officers like Captain Parker trying to find local elders and glean intelligence -- has just two ''terps.'' There are mixed feelings about having many Afghan interpreters along. They can distort answers or aid ambushes. ''We can't tell if they're loyal,'' Captain Gonzalez says, telling of one the Army recently arrested for running information and instructions back and forth over the border.
But even without a common language between them, the villagers seem to know what the Americans have come to do. Silently, turbaned men in long gray tunics open doors in compound walls for five- or six-man groups of helmeted men in desert camouflage. The wooden doors are cracked, withered. The courtyards behind them hold low mud homes and lush gardens of pink and white poppies. The troops don't bother with the opium-producing crop. There's too much else to worry about. They pat down the men. (The mission's few female soldiers mutely frisk the men's sisters and wives, who have been quartered in dark chambers.) They poke through cellars, peer for signs of trick walls and compartments full of grenade launchers. They find nothing. They smash with a gun stock into a mirrored cabinet when the owner can't find his key. The owner doesn't cry out as shards of glass hit the dirt floor. The cabinet is more or less his only piece of furniture, yet he seems to have gestured that the door should be smashed through. All seems accepted: in bitter helplessness against what the Americans are doing or -- as the Americans hope -- in gratitude for the American defeat of the repressive Taliban. It is impossible for the soldiers to know. Gonzalez speaks of trying to guess the sentiments of the locals not by their smiles but by the firmness of their handshakes. His soldiers say the compounds could be full of terrorists, and they might have no clue.
A report comes in over the radio: at Shkin, to the east along the frontier, the sighting of 20 men, armed with rifles and R.P.G.'s, draws an American platoon. In a gun battle, the Americans believe they kill three combatants. Two Americans die. The enemy vanishes over the border.
Parker stoops on plunging stairs, at the start of Vigilant Guardian's second day. He climbs down into a narrow cellar, dug beneath the desert floor of a compound on the outskirts of Lowri Kariz. Troops wait above. He sits in a cool underground chamber on a carpet of red and blue. A high portal gives a shaft of light. Beside it hangs a framed painting in the style of hotel art: white stallions prancing through a marsh of reeds. This is the meeting room of a figure Parker has been asking to see since yesterday, the village leader -- or someone representing himself that way. Nothing is clear. All that's certain to Parker and Gonzalez, and to the three other officers who accompany them, is that they feel suspicious. The headman -- features sharp as mountain ridges between beard and turban -- has avoided them throughout their first day in the village. Only now has Parker been allowed a meeting. And the man lives well beyond the perimeter of the village, with armed guards posted on each corner of his roof, above the crypt the Americans now sit inside, surrounded by Pashtun faces they cannot read.
The rooftop guards in themselves aren't unusual. It's yesterday's avoidance and the position of the compound that unnerves, as though this figure and his guards don't really belong, as though they're Taliban or Al Qaeda who have just lately taken up residence and taken on local power.
''We've got a target on this place,'' Gonzalez assures the other Americans, all sitting on scarlet cushions. Gonzalez assumes no Afghan except the two ''terps'' can understand. ''We'll level this place if anything happens.''
He has radioed in his coordinates. An American helicopter and plane, he says, circle overhead. The Americans may not be able to comprehend the men they face, or the circumstance they're in, or the country that surrounds them, and they may not be able to prevent their own deaths, but if they are slaughtered, the aircraft will rocket and bomb the compound into oblivion, bodies to bone chips, headquarters to dust.
Parker starts his questioning. Everyone sips tea and nibbles biscuits. All is polite, but the headman's answers, about battling Al Qaeda in the hills to the east, strike Parker as attempts to distract. ''There are no bad guys here,'' Parker's interpreter says repeatedly, translating the leader's replies. The man claims that his militia, most of it based in Spinbaldak, has chased all the nearby enemy fighters over the border. The reports of Taliban and Al Qaeda being in this village are lies. ''Other tribes are fighting against us. They are giving you bad reports.'' They are using the Americans. Because of this, his own men have been arrested elsewhere in the area -- even after they have fought Al Qaeda so well. They should be freed. Please, can their freedom be arranged? ''There are no bad guys here.''
All is polite; the headman's claims are plausible. But an hour later, by the time everyone emerges upstairs and outside, a helicopter gunship swoops 40 feet above the headman, joined by his guards who have come down off the roof and been replaced by American soldiers. The switch has occurred peacefully. The gunship, banking and diving, its missile launchers so close and the throb of its blades so loud, has guaranteed that.
Almost wordlessly, the headman points out and relinquishes a stock of weapons. It is kept covered in the back of a pickup truck parked in his yard: a few grenade launchers, a light machine gun. Without protest he surrenders himself and his guards. They are ''pucked,'' a new verb used by the American soldiers, taken from the military phrase ''persons under control.'' The Americans cuff their wrists and cover their heads in burlap sacks. Maybe because of my presence or because of their uncertainty about this arrest (could the weapons, as the man says, have been used to fight Al Qaeda?), the Americans lower the hoods with a measure of delicacy. They guide the captives toward a Chinook transport helicopter. Hoods quiver in the rotor gust. The men step into the bay with such thorough compliance, such calm, I wonder if they are thinking, as Parker does, that the smart terrorist will simply wait the Americans out.
The chopper lifts off, flying to a base the Russians built in another time. The Americans now run it. There, in a dingy Soviet-style concrete block where no reporter is allowed inside, the men will be held indefinitely and interrogated, plied for information that might somehow show the way to Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders, that might somehow point to bases or hint at terrorist plots, that might somehow change everything.
That afternoon, Parker moves on with his troops to another village. He finds no suspects, but he and another officer give away three bright yellow radios, powered by hand crank, in this abject settlement where batteries scarcely exist. The radios are gestures of outreach for Parker and, for the military, tokens that might bring leads later on. Then the vehicles head for a landing zone where some of the officers will be flown back to their Kandahar base. The zone's coordinates are clear. It's a 20-minute drive, at most. An amber dusk falls over the land. We drive and drive. The Afghan desert, sectioned off by ridges and ravines, can be a bewildering place. The sky blackens. The stars appear in all their extravagance. We can't find the landing zone. For hours we search, hunting the way out, circling and retracing our route in the sand.
Daniel Bergner is the author of ''In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa,'' which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October.
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US Says Kills Up to 24 Attackers in Afghanistan
July 20, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-afghan-fighting.html
SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Sunday its forces had killed up to 24 fighters who attacked a coalition convoy in southern Afghanistan.
The convoy came under fire from unknown attackers on Saturday near the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border, but no soldiers were hurt, U.S. spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Lefforge said.
``The coalition forces drove through the kill zone, requested close air support and engaged the enemy forces, killing approximately five enemy and pursuing the remaining forces into the surrounding hills,'' he said in a statement.
AH-64 Apache attack helicopters had strafed the area, killing 17 to 19 more enemy fighters, he said.
Lefforge said the attack took place near the U.S. firebase at Spin Boldak. Two rockets landed near the base on Friday night but caused no casualties, the military said.
Earlier, Afghan officials said U.S. aircraft struck positions of Taliban guerrillas after they attacked a government checkpoint six km (four miles) east of Spin Boldak on Saturday night.
Spin Boldak District Commissioner Sayed Fazaldin Agha said two government soldiers were killed in the attack, but witnesses reported seeing four dead.
Speaking by telephone from an unknown location, Taliban official Mullah Abdul Rauf said at least 20 government soldiers were killed in the fighting, which involved 200 guerrillas.
``One of our comrades was also killed,'' he said. ``The Taliban fighters later left the area.''
BLOODIEST CLASHES SINCE JUNE
The accounts of the fighting suggested they were the bloodiest since June, when government forces reported killing 40 Taliban fighters in the Spin Boldak area.
Khalid Khan Achakzai, a senior local official with the Foreign Ministry, said Saturday's fighting lasted about five hours and U.S. forces had sent armored vehicles in support.
Achakzai said the clash involved at least 75 Taliban fighters led by a former minister, Mullah Abdul Razzaq, commander Hafiz Abdur Rahim, and Rauf, a former provincial governor. He said the guerrillas came from the Pakistani side of the border.
Rauf said Taliban fighters had also attacked a U.S. base, but it was unclear how much damage had been inflicted. He said the attacks were planned in a meeting three days ago with the shadowy leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar.
An official with Pakistan's border security force, Major Shaukat, said Pakistan had beefed up security along its border.
On Friday, eight government soldiers were killed in the southeastern province of Khost in a suspected Taliban attack.
More than 100 Afghan soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded across the south since the start of the year.
Afghan officials say most of the strikes have been organized by the Taliban and allied militants based in Pakistan, although Islamabad says it is doing its best to seal the border.
Elsewhere in the country, four Italian soldiers and their Afghan translator were wounded on Sunday in a missile attack on their convoy, a local source and Italian officials said.
Amanullah Zadran, a former minister in the U.S.-backed government, said the attack on the Italians took place on a road to the southeastern town of Gardez. The wounded were evacuated in U.S. military helicopters.
It brought to nine the number of troops from the 11,500-strong coalition wounded since Friday.
Foreign troops have been in Afghanistan since 2001, when a U.S.-led force overthrew the fundamentalist Taliban which had sheltered Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Al Qaeda is blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
-------- africa
Rebels Push Toward Heart of the Capital in Liberia
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/africa/20LIBE.html?hp
MONROVIA, Liberia, July 19 - Rebels advanced swiftly into this capital city today, shelling buildings, scattering bullets and sending fresh streams of angry, anxious civilians searching for safety where there was none.
"Anywhere we go, they say place full," said Mary Warner, 28, who had run from home early this afternoon with her 4-year-old son on her back. She had pressed against the gates of a United Nations compound today and waited outside a yard owned by the United States Embassy.
"We don't have anywhere to go," she said. "Nowhere. No safe area."
Fighting continued late this afternoon for control of two narrow bridges leading into the capital's main commercial artery, Broad Street.
Late into the evening, there were loud explosions and steady bursts of gunfire downtown. It was unclear whether the gunfire was because of fighting between government and rebel forces, or whether it was a prelude to looting.
The injured, victims of gunshot and shrapnel wounds, trickled into makeshift clinics run by international aid groups. A French photojournalist was wounded by gunfire but was listed in stable condition this evening.
The attacks come as rebels who have been fighting to oust President Charles G. Taylor and have twice attacked the city in the last six weeks face a string of frustrations. Mr. Taylor, who has promised to step aside once international peacekeepers arrive, has yet to do so, and peacekeepers are nowhere in sight. The Bush administration has promised to play an active role in bringing stability to Liberia, but it has not yet said what specifically it is willing to do.
In a radio address this evening, Mr. Taylor urged his fighters to defend the city and vowed to remain until peacekeepers arrive "in sufficient quantities that I can no longer worry about how many of you will die."
He pointed an accusing finger at the United States.
"This blood is also on your hands because you have prevented me, the president, from providing adequate assistance and adequate protection to my people."
The American ambassador, John W. Blaney, called on the rebels to stop advancing into the city, respect human rights and continue to take part in peace talks in nearby Accra, Ghana.
Officials with the rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy could not be reached for comment this evening.
Earlier in the day, as rebels were still beyond the city limits, thousands of civilians flooded the streets, angrily confronting government militias to demand an end to the fighting and looting.
The midmorning demonstration brought out desperate Liberians with nothing left to lose. They ran toward Monrovia's port, buoyed by a false rumor that West African peacekeepers had arrived. When they learned the disappointing truth - West African peacekeepers are not ready to deploy - they ran up and down a street bristling with militiamen, shouting for peace, threatening to run to the front line to push back the rebels themselves and angrily taunting pro-Taylor forces.
"They all want to loot," chanted the unarmed civilians, running with fists raised.
The people's jubilation at the false promise of peacekeepers, combined with their audacity in confronting the armed men in their midst, spoke volumes for how weary Liberians are of their misfortunes - and how desperate they are for foreign soldiers to bring relief.
"That is the only time, they feel, their life will be guaranteed," said Philip Sandi, a reporter for the Roman Catholic Church-run Radio Veritas, who, like everyone else, had run to the port. "They're coming, rejoicing, hoping troops are on the ground. Actually, there is no confirmation of this."
Mr. Taylor has accepted an offer of exile in Nigeria but has refused to leave office until peacekeepers arrive. West African troops have agreed to come first, but their deployment has been held up by talks over support from Washington.
As the people demonstrated this morning on the road from the front line, hundreds of government fighters in plastic sandals and tattered T-shirts chewed on fried chicken and blew clouds of marijuana smoke. Several of them grumbled privately about the lack of pay and ammunition, before their commander approached and asked journalists to leave them alone to concentrate on their mission.
"We want to fight for the Liberian people," said Young Kadafile, 34, a 15-year veteran of the Liberian Army who said he had not been paid in two and a half years. "But there will be an obstacle. You might be angry. You might be hungry. Nobody wants to fight without getting paid."
Defense Minister Daniel Chea warned the demonstrators of the dangers they faced. Mortar shells had fallen just two and a half miles from the port, he said. Rebels could slip into the crowd.
Besides, he told reporters on hand, there was the danger of an uncontrolled crowd provoking already rattled soldiers. "Anytime you have soldiers, anything can happen," he said. "We don't want some misfortune."
-------- britain
Kelly warned of 'dark actors playing games'
JEREMY WATSON
Sun 20 Jul 2003
The Scotsman
http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/uk.cfm?id=786212003
THE e-mail to a friendly American reporter appeared routine but there was one telling phrase.
The impassioned writer spoke of "many dark actors playing games". Moments later Dr David Kelly left his home on his final walk into his beloved Oxfordshire countryside. The respected scientist and father of three had decided to leave his fellow actors behind and exit the stage he had so reluctantly been forced to mount.
The e-mail was sent on Thursday morning to Judy Miller, a New York Times writer who had used Kelly as a source for a book on biological terrorism. It was one of his last communications before leaving his 18th-century cottage in the village of Southmoor, his home for 20 years, and setting off to die.
Miller, a long-term friend of the family, holds the belief, based on earlier conversations with Kelly, that his reference to "dark actors" seemed to refer to people within the Ministry of Defence and Britain's intelligence agencies with whom he had often sparred over interpretations of intelligence reports.
It also emerged that Kelly believed he had been put "through the wringer" by MoD officials, and that he felt "betrayed" when his name was released to the press.
Last night, a statement was released on behalf of his family - widow Janice, daughters, Sian, 32, and twins Rachel and Ellen - saying that all those involved in the events of the last few weeks should "think long and hard" about the circumstances of his death.
"We are utterly devastated and heartbroken by the death of our husband, father and brother," the family said. "Events over recent weeks made David's life intolerable."
Kelly's daughter, Ellen Wilson, 30, who lives on the outskirts of Torryburn, in Fife, also complained that he had encountered "a total lack of support" from his bosses at the MoD. But she said his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee was a particularly painful experience. "Being called 'chaff' and a 'fall guy' didn't help either," she said.
Those remarks were made by committee member Andrew Mackinlay who apologised yesterday, saying: "I deeply regret Doctor Kelly's death. I am sorry for any of the stress that, albeit unintentionally, I may have caused him during his questioning before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee."
There were no clear indications on Thursday that events would take such a tragic turn.
Janice, who suffers from painful arthritis, was unconcerned when he left at 3pm. Although she knew her 59-year-old husband was deeply upset, his mental state did not seem to be too down. Walking was a hobby and he often disappeared for up to two or three hours. There were family matters to look forward to, such as the marriage of one of his daughters in October.
"After lunch, he went out for a walk to stretch his legs as he usually does," Janice told the New York Times yesterday.
She had no indication that her husband was contemplating suicide.
Only when he had not returned in the early evening - he had no coat and was only wearing a thin cotton shirt even though the weather was dull and showery - did concern start to mount. When he had not returned by 11.45pm, his wife dialled 999.
The last person to see him alive is believed to be farmer Paul Weaver, who saw the familiar figure of Kelly make his way down a footpath shortly after 3pm. He was heading north towards Harrowdown Hill, a local and secluded beauty spot. It appears that once there, about two miles from his home, he used a well-worn track into a cluster of oak and ash trees.
Concealed from the view of any passers-by, the distinguished scientist and government official took out a batch of painkillers and a knife.
Shortly after police were alerted on Thursday night, a search began. With no success overnight, police appealed for help from neighbours at 8.20am on Friday morning. Weaver was among those who turned out to search, as were friends from the village pub where Kelly, despite being teetotal, was part of the cribbage team.
An hour later, Kelly's body was found curled up in the dense woodland.
Yesterday, Oxfordshire police confirmed Kelly had bled to death. Speaking on the steps of Wantage police station, acting superintendent David Purnell said:
"A post-mortem has revealed that the cause of death was haemorrhaging from a wound to his left wrist. The injury is consistent with having been caused by a bladed object.
"We have recovered a knife and an open packet of Co-Proxamol tablets at the scene. Whilst our enquiries are continuing there is no indication at this stage of any other party being involved."
Co-Proxamol are painkillers that are prescribed to people with arthritis. There was speculation last night that Kelly may have used his wife's medicine in his suicide.
A leading forensic expert said last night that Kelly may have taken the tablets in an initial suicide attempt, possibly when he first went out for his walk.
He probably cut his wrist later after the drugs failed to kill him quickly enough.
-------- france
'Long march toward a new army'
July 20, 2003
By Andrew Borowiec
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030719-101315-8502r.htm
PARIS - This year's brilliant Bastille Day parade delighted the French with precision marching and freshly painted armored vehicles, but it was seen by some as camouflage for France's significant military difficulties.
The conservative Paris daily Le Figaro described the situation as the "long march toward a new army."
The spectacular display Monday led to a national debate on how effective the country's "new army" really is.
Although Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie praised the army's recent transformation, some French commentators and senior cadres remain skeptical.
French newspapers quoted an unnamed general as saying: "Our materiel is insufficient. We have nothing that moves satisfactorily. And whatever you say, I know we didn't go to Iraq because of that fact."
Officials invariably point to the positive side of the shift in the armed forces from the draft to an all-volunteer army, navy and air force - now in its third year.
The number of units has been drastically reduced; army divisions have become brigades. But despite budgetary restrictions, equipment is on order.
However, one military source said, "We have to realize that our armed forces are far from being equipped with state-of-the-art material comparable to that of the Americans or even the British."
Military sources say orders for weapons are behind schedule, citing Giat Industries, which manufactures the highly regarded Leclerc tank, and Panhard, which makes light armor.
It is said that the firms give priority to deliveries for Arab countries, particularly the United Arab Emirates.
To equip up-to-date brigades of 6,000 personnel capable of quick intervention in "brush-fire wars," one general said, the shortage of modern equipment is such that "to ready one brigade for action, the weapons of five others have to be cannibalized."
Whatever the difficulties, France has sent army and air force units to NATO deployments in Bosnia and Macedonia, and, for the United Nations, to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Its Foreign Legion and army paratroops intervened in the conflict in Ivory Coast and served in Afghanistan.
Still, officials acknowledge that this year's defense budget of about $15 billion, up 11 percent from 2002, is not sufficient to modernize the army and deploy its elements in far-flung places. Per capita defense spending in France is $800, compared with more than $1,000 in the United States.
Although plans call for the ability to muster 50,000 troops for crisis intervention, officials say that if the government had agreed to join the coalition against Saddam Hussein, the French contribution could not have exceeded 5,000 troops.
Mrs. Alliot-Marie, the defense minister, argues that the military transformation into an all-volunteer force was a great success and that 30,000 young French men and women volunteer every year. More and more women are joining, she says, and the army's aim is to raise their number to 12 percent of the nearly 300,000 personnel.
However, army sources complain of slow recruitment of qualified personnel, citing in particular computer-literate candidates.
Old army leaders also say that with the recent reductions in strength, the armed forces will soon lack adequate trained reserves and that the "links between the army and the nation" are weakening.
A frequently expressed opinion is that many of the volunteers serve for pay and not for their country.
The public at large is barely aware that there are any problems with the military, and the nearly 4,000 troops and 350 tanks, jeeps and other vehicles on display for Bastille Day as 70 warplanes roared overhead could hardly have looked better to a layman.
The shortcomings exist in every branch of the armed forces, and particularly in the much-publicized "Eurocorps" of the European Union - a French idea. A small detachment of 150 Eurocorps troops led Monday's holiday parade along the Champs Elysees, under the command of a German, Gen. Holger Kammerhoff.
The July 14 celebration commemorates the 1789 storming of the Bastille, a medieval fortress used as a prison and symbolizing the king's might, by a Paris mob, beginning the revolution that overthrew the monarchy and created the French republic.
Five EU member nations out of 15 have so far agreed to provide troops to the Eurocorps. France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Luxembourg, have agreed, though Luxembourg has only a token military force.
Strong opposition to the Eurocorps idea has come from Britain, Italy and various NATO members, who say it duplicates the aims and tasks of the alliance.
France, a political member of NATO but not of its military arm, says the Eurocorps would offer its services to NATO when it becomes operational with 60,000 troops.
At its headquarters in the French border city of Strasbourg, officers say that different military traditions and concepts have yet to be overcome. To facilitate contacts among its multinational components, English - the main language of none of its five members - was chosen as the "operational language" of Eurocorps.
-------- iran
Iran Missiles Capable of Reaching Israel
July 20, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Missile.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran equipped its elite revolutionary guards Sunday with a locally made ballistic missile -- the Shahab-3 -- capable of reaching Israel and U.S. forces stationed in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
The missile was inaugurated during a military parade before Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is in charge of the country's armed forces, state-run Tehran television reported.
``Today, the Iranian nation and armed forces ... is prepared to stand up to the enemy with a firm resolve anywhere,'' Khamenei was quoted as saying.
The missile's inauguration comes as the United States is accusing Iran of working to build nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the claims, saying its nuclear program is to produce electricity not weapons.
The Shahab-3 has a range of about 810 miles, making it able to reach Israel and U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this month that the missile's recent testing was its most successful of seven or eight launches during the past five years.
The last time Iran declared a test of the missile was in May 2002 when Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said the country conducted a test to ``enhance the power and accuracy of (the) Shahab-3 missile.''
The missile technology is allegedly based on North Korea's No Dong surface-to-surface missile, but Iran says it is entirely locally made. ``Shahab'' means shooting star in Farsi.
U.S. intelligence officials have said Iran can probably fire several Shahab-3's in an emergency, but that it has not yet developed a completely reliable missile.
Iran launched an arms development program during its 1980-88 war with Iraq to compensate for a U.S. weapons embargo. Since 1992, Iran has produced its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles and a fighter plane.
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Iran Arms Revolutionary Guards with New Missile
July 20, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-missile.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Sunday its Revolutionary Guards had been armed with a new medium-range missile, which analysts say could hit Israel or U.S. bases in the Middle East, after successful tests of the weapon.
The deployment of the Shahab-3 missile, announced by state television, comes as Iran faces mounting scrutiny about a nuclear energy program which Washington says may be a front for a covert bid to make atomic arms.
State television showed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who heads Iran's Islamic power structure, attending a military parade where at least one Shahab-3 was on display.
Iran announced earlier this month it had successfully completed tests on the Shahab-3, which analysts say is based on the North Korean Nodong-1 missile but has been improved with Russian technology. Its range is about 1,300 km (800 miles).
Russian-built Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot close support aircraft, attack and transport helicopters were also handed over on Sunday to the Revolutionary Guards, which is separate from Iran's regular army and reports directly to Khamenei.
Television did not say how many new missiles, aircraft and helicopters were now at the Revolutionary Guards' disposal.
The armed forces ``are ready to confront the enemy with a strong will wherever it is necessary,'' television quoted Khamenei as saying at the ceremony.
The news came as government officials continued to deny reports that United Nations inspectors had found enriched uranium in environmental samples taken in Iran.
``We strongly deny the existence of any kind of enriched uranium in Iran,'' government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told a news conference.
ADVICE FOR WASHINGTON
Diplomats have told Reuters that initial analysis of samples taken in Iran showed uranium enrichment levels possibly consistent with an attempt to make weapons grade material.
Iran insists its nuclear facilities are geared to producing electricity and the diplomats cautioned the presence of enriched uranium in the samples could be the result of contamination.
``We advise the Americans and our opponents not to get too excited by this report to avoid a repeat of what happened in Iraq,'' Ramazanzadeh said in reference to the now widely questioned Western intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, asked in a Sky News interview about the reports on enriched uranium in Iran, said:
``Now this is really dangerous. If states such as this acquire a nuclear weapons capability that is a huge threat to the region they are in and to the wider world.''
Asked whether concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to another war in the Middle East, Blair said: ``No, but we must apply a lot of pressure on them.''
Switzerland's Ambassador to Iran, Tim Guldimann, who represents U.S. interests in Tehran, said in an interview published on Sunday that Iran felt threatened by the close proximity of other nuclear states such as Pakistan and Israel.
``It is clear that Iran is conducting nuclear activities that in the West's estimation could lead to producing atomic weapons,'' he told the SonntagsBlick Swiss newspaper.
Iran has so far resisted calls for it to agree to tougher nuclear inspections, arguing it wants access to nuclear technology in return. But Guldimann said there were signs that Iran would eventually agree.
``It looks like progress could be achieved in the months ahead,'' he said.
-------- iraq
U.S. Moved Early for Air Supremacy
Airstrikes on Iraqi Defenses Began Long Before Invasion, General Says
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17357-2003Jul19?language=printer
NELLIS AFB, Nevada -- As early as the autumn of 2001, U.S. military authorities took steps to increase surveillance of southern Iraq and then to systematically bomb Iraq's command posts, air defense weapons and communication links in anticipation of possible war, according to the American general who commanded the air campaign.
The intensified airstrikes, which got underway in earnest in the summer of 2002, were justified publicly at the time as a response to increased Iraqi targeting of U.S. pilots patrolling a no-fly zone. But providing new details about how the operation -- dubbed "Southern Focus" -- was conceived and executed, Lt. Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley said the fact that the United States had put more planes in the air over Iraq may have prompted the Iraqis to shoot more.
"So there is a chicken and an egg thing here," he said in an interview.
Moseley said the attacks, which were portrayed as enforcement of U.N. resolutions, eliminated the need for a long bombing campaign. They ultimately afforded Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the top U.S. commander in the region, greater flexibility in moving Special Operations forces and conventional ground troops into Iraq early when the decision was made to invade, Moseley said.
Although Bush administration officials have maintained that war was not inevitable and the decision to invade Iraq was not made until March this year, Moseley's comments make clear that military commanders started planning for stepped-up action soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and launched an operation to pick apart Iraq's air defense system about nine months before the war.
Moseley's remarks came as military officers who managed the air war completed an extensive "lessons learned" review here last week. Moseley and a senior aide delivered their summary assessments to about 300 American and allied military officers on Thursday.
They portrayed the campaign as a significant advance over any the United States had waged before, one that not only featured far greater use of overhead imagery and all-weather precision munitions, but also that saw an unprecedented degree of coordination between air and ground forces. The result was an intense, sustained air assault on Iraqi forces that knocked out enemy air defenses, kept Iraqi warplanes from flying and cleared the way for the speedy advance of U.S. ground troops into Baghdad.
But the review also shed new light on the confusion and conflict that existed between U.S. air and ground commanders over procedures for striking Iraqi troops without endangering American forces. It disclosed that shortages in reconnaissance aircraft and bad weather severely crimped the ability of U.S. forces early in the war to gauge the damage being done to Iraqi ground troops. And it revealed that the amount of bandwidth -- or frequency channels -- available to U.S. forces was insufficient, hindering the relay of targeting information and other urgent communications.
Responding to criticism that the air campaign, widely dubbed "shock and awe," ended up pulling too many punches that delayed the downfall of President Saddam Hussein's government, Moseley defended the decision to avoid power plants, public water facilities, refineries, bridges and other civilian structures in the interest of facilitating Iraq's postwar economic recovery and keeping down the number of civilian deaths.
Moseley said he had not expected the initial airstrikes, which focused on pummeling Hussein's palaces, security operations, intelligence services and Baath Party buildings, to topple the government but to help weaken the protective screen around the Iraqi leader.
"I do think the airstrikes are one of the deciding factors in setting the conditions for the regime to go away," he said.
He revealed that the decision to bomb targets in Iraq that military planners had estimated could result in the deaths of 30 or more noncombatants had been reserved for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. About 40 or 50 targets fell in this category, including broadcast facilities in Baghdad and some government ministry buildings. All of these targets were eventually struck during the war, he said, but U.S. forces have not determined how many noncombatants died in the process -- and have no plans to do so.
Moseley blamed poor information from Iraqi sources for the strike on the first night of the war against a compound at Dora Farm on the outskirts of Baghdad suspected of sheltering Hussein and his two sons. Despite getting a precise description of a bunker there, Moseley said, no bunker has been found in a postwar investigation.
Nonetheless, the general defended the attack, saying he remains convinced some Iraqi leaders members were present when U.S. bombs and cruise missiles blasted the compound. He said that strike, as well as another against a residential Baghdad building also suspected -- apparently falsely -- of housing Hussein, demonstrated U.S. resolve and capabilities.
Moseley said he approached Franks about intensifying the airstrikes in southern Iraq in November 2001, after taking over as the top air commander in the Middle East. Four months earlier, he said, the Bush administration had denied a request from Moseley's predecessor, Gen. Charles Wald, to take more aggressive action against antiaircraft batteries and mobile surface-to-air launchers that Iraq had massed south of Baghdad. The weapons, Moseley recalled, were posing a heightened risk to U.S. pilots, creating a no-fly zone for American planes within what was supposed to be a no-fly zone for Iraqi military aircraft.
As a matter of self-protection, U.S. pilots were refraining from flying beyond a line that ran roughly northwest to southeast along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Moseley said, and they were limiting their strikes to Iraqi guns and radars. Franks approved Moseley's request to begin looking at ways to widen the strikes to other elements of Iraq's air defense system.
Using surveillance satellites, U2 aircraft and Global Hawk drones, U.S. military authorities undertook a more extensive mapping of Iraq's air defense network. By the summer of 2002, strike aircraft began expanding their target sets to include operational centers and support facilities. They also bore in on repeater cable stations along Iraq's underground network of fiber-optic communication lines. The stations -- in effect, maintenance portals -- are similar to manhole covers and thus more vulnerable to attack than the buried lines.
Although U.S. military commanders could not be sure there would be a war, Moseley said, part of the motivation for more airstrikes was to lay the groundwork for it.
"We were just thinking in terms of, what if something happens in the region," he said.
From June 2001 to March 19 of this year, when the war began, U.S. planes dropped 606 munitions and struck 349 targets in southern Iraq, according to Air Force figures. All in all, Moseley said, the months of prewar strikes "provided a set of opportunities and options for General Franks" that meant he did not need to initiate "a preliminary air effort" before launching the war.
The intensified effort also afforded U.S. forces what Moseley called "science projects." This included arming Predator reconnaissance drones with Stinger antiaircraft missiles and firing on Iraqi jets. In one such episode, about three months before the war, a Predator was knocked out of the sky by an Iraqi MiG-25, but not before it was able to fire two of its own missiles and send video imagery of the Russian-made plane. This imagery provided useful intelligence about the ability of the MiG's radar to maintain a track on such a small target, Moseley said.
In the year before the war, Moseley said, he and other U.S. commanders ran through more than a dozen potential war plans with nicknames such as "Running Start," "Generated Start," "Blue, White and Red," "Hybrid" and "Line of Scrimmage." In the end, the guidance that Franks gave him for prosecuting the war came down to this: "Make it fast. Make it final."
The air war involved 1,800 U.S., British and Australian aircraft flying from 36 bases and five aircraft carriers. From March 19 to April 18, a total of 29,199 bombs and missiles were fired, 68 percent of them precision-guided.
Two decisions that Moseley made in the early days of the war are credited with hastening its end, although both raised risks to pilots. One came on the third day when he ordered that instead of just trying to jam Iraqi air defenses around Baghdad, U.S. aircraft should attempt to locate and destroy them. The other occurred a couple of days later when Moseley started pushing tankers and surveillance aircraft, which had been staying south of Iraq, north nearer to Baghdad to facilitate strikes on Republican Guards ringing the capital.
Moseley said major combat could have ended even more quickly had Turkey allowed U.S. land and air forces to use its territory to attack from the north. But he said the speed at which Baghdad fell surprised him.
The rapid advance of Army and Marine ground forces in the first days of the invasion led to some confusion and friction, particularly with Army commanders, over when to activate some "kill boxes" in which U.S. warplanes could bomb more freely. These 30-square-mile areas had been mapped out before the war to facilitate air support of ground forces.
Despite such tensions, Moseley, who has been nominated for a fourth star and the job of vice chief of the Air Force, said cooperation between air and ground forces marked considerable improvement over the past. He noted that 78 percent of strike sorties were flown in support of ground troops.
The general acknowledged particular frustration over the dearth of reliable bomb damage assessments early in the war. Asked in a question-and-answer session here with officers what he would have done differently, Moseley said he would have arranged for the earlier dispatch of an Air National Guard unit in Richmond that flies F-16 fighter jets equipped with reconnaissance pods.
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U.S. to Create Security Force of 7,000 Iraqis in 45 Days
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20CND-WOLF.html?hp
BAGHDAD, July 20 - The United States is creating a new Iraqi civil defense force within the next 45 days that will free up thousands of American troops for anti-guerrilla missions and put an Iraqi face on the coalition's postwar security efforts, two top American generals said today.
The immediate goal is to field about 7,000 American-trained Iraqi militia in several areas around the country to protect coalition supply convoys and replace American troops that are now guarding buildings like power plants and ammunition depots.
"These are not forces intended to conduct offensive operations," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander of all American forces in Iraq, told reporters in a lunch interview today. "They will be on patrol with us. They will be on fixed sites."
Eventually these Iraqi forces may also help American soldiers carry out raids against remnants of Saddam Hussein's security forces, foreign fighters and terrorists, military officials said.
The new Iraqi civil defense force reflects the Pentagon's urgent priority to quell the steady attacks on American troops, particularly in and around Baghdad, and do it in a way that involves Iraqis until a new Iraqi army is ready over the next several months and years.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, visiting here in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq today as part of a five-day visit, has heard repeatedly from Iraqi tribal and civic leaders the coalition must empower more Iraqis in governing and securing the country for the American-led effort to have credibility with the Iraqi public.
The new Iraqi governing council has strongly supported the idea of an Iraqi militia, which appears to well beyond a proposal under consideration at the Pentagon to hire private contractors to provide site security.
Today Mr. Wolfowitz said recruiting Iraqis for security and intelligence tasks was essential. "We need more of these people," he said in the luncheon interview.
Under the American plan, eight battalions, each with about 850 Iraqi militia would train with and then work under Army division commanders in various regions around the country. After 45 days, a second group of nearly 7,000 militia could be recruited and trained, General Sanchez said.
Each unit would draw from the population of that region and would include men and women. Prior military service would not be required. The militia, who would be recruited with the help of local leaders and organizations, would receive basic training on human rights, weapons handling and patrol techniques.
"Probably the most important contributions they will bring will be putting an Iraqi face on the security problem for the country and ensuring that wherever our soldiers are, Iraqis are contributing to that security," General Sanchez said.
Many details still need to be worked out and even General Sanchez and his boss, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, which oversees the Persian Gulf region, seemed to have slightly different ideas on the force.
While General Sanchez said the force would focus on more basic duties like convoy protection at least initially, General Abizaid said the militia would likely take on more challenging offensive missions in the months ahead.
"Over time, as confidence increases in working with these guys, we will ask them to do more and more complicated things," General Abizaid said at the lunch. "And it's important we do."
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U.S. Air Raids in '02 Prepared for War in Iraq
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20MILI.html
LAS VEGAS, July 19 - American air war commanders carried out a comprehensive plan to disrupt Iraq's military command and control system before the Iraq war, according to an internal briefing on the conflict by the senior allied air war commander.
Known as Southern Focus, the plan called for attacks on the network of fiber-optic cable that Saddam Hussein's government used to transmit military communications, as well as airstrikes on key command centers, radars and other important military assets.
The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government.
Indeed, one reason it was possible for the allies to begin the ground campaign to topple Mr. Hussein without preceding it with an extensive array of airstrikes was that 606 bombs had been dropped on 391 carefully selected targets under the plan, General Moseley said.
"It provided a set of opportunities and options for General Franks," General Moseley said in an interview, referring to Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then head of the United States Central Command. While there were indications at the time that the United States was trying to weaken Iraqi air defenses in anticipation of a possible war, the scope and detailed planning that lay behind the effort were not generally known.
The disclosure of the plan is part of an assessment prepared by General Moseley on the lessons of the war with Iraq. General Moseley and a senior aide presented their assessments at an internal briefing for American and allied military officers at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada on Thursday.
Among the disclosures provided in the internal briefings and in a later interview the General Moseley:
¶New information has shown that there was not a bunker in the Dora Farms area near Baghdad, where American intelligence initially believed Mr. Hussein was meeting with his aides. The site was attacked by F-117 stealth fighters and cruise missiles as the Bush administration sought to kill Mr. Hussein at the very onset of the war. Still, Iraqi leaders were believed to be in the Dora Farms area, General Moseley said.
¶Air war commanders were required to obtain the approval of Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed, and all of them were approved.
¶During the war, about 1,800 allied aircraft conducted about 20,000 strikes. Of those, 15,800 were directed against Iraqi ground forces while some 1,400 struck the Iraqi Air Force, air bases or air defenses. About 1,800 airstrikes were directed against the Iraqi government and 800 at suspected hiding places and installations for illicit weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles.
¶Allied commanders say precision-guided weapons made up a greater percentage of the strikes than in any previous conflict. But the military experienced great difficulty in obtaining reliable battle damage assessment about attacks against Iraqi ground forces. There were also differences between Army and Air Force commanders about the best procedures for carrying out the strikes. As a result, airstrikes against Iraqi forces that fought the Army were not as effective as commanders would have liked.
The air campaign began as a response to the Iraqis, who deployed additional surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery south of Baghdad beginning in the late 1990's. Their maneuvers thickened the defense of the Iraqi capital. The air defense systems had the range to hit allied planes that were patrolling some portions of the southern no-flight zone.
Gen. Charles Wald, General Moseley's predecessor as the top American air commander in the Middle East, proposed a major attack to disable the beefed-up Iraqi defenses in early 2001. But the newly inaugurated Bush administration was not looking for a confrontation with Iraq at that time, and General Wald's recommendation was not approved.
After General Moseley assumed command toward the end of 2001, however, the American strategy began to change. General Moseley and General Franks believed that the American military needed a plan to weaken the Iraqi air defenses, initially because of the threat to the allied patrols and later to facilitate an offensive.
The first step was to use spy satellites, U-2 planes and reconnaissance drones to identify potential targets.
One major target was the network of fiber-optic cable that transmitted military communications between Baghdad and Basra and Baghdad and Nasiriya. The cables themselves were buried underground and impossible to locate. So the air war commanders focused on the "cable repeater stations," which relayed the signals. From June 2002 until the beginning of the Iraq war, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq and attacked 349 targets, including the cable stations.
"We were able to figure out that we were getting ahead of this guy and we were breaking them up faster than he could fix them," General Moseley said of the fiber-optic cables. "So then we were able to push it up a little bit and effectively break up the fiber-optic backbone from Baghdad to the south."
During that period before the war, American officials said the strikes were necessary because the Iraqis were shooting more often at allied air patrols. In total, the Iraqis fired on allied aircraft 651 times during the operation. But General Moseley said it was possible that the Iraqi attacks increased because allied planes had stepped up their patrols over Iraq. "We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more," he said. "Then the question is whether they were shooting at us because we were up there more. So there is a chicken and egg thing here."
The air campaign also provided an opportunity for American war commanders to try new military technologies and tactics.
One experiment involved arming Predator reconnaissance drones with Stinger antiaircraft missiles so they could engage in dogfights with Iraqi planes. A few months before the war, an Iraqi MIG-25 jet fighter fired two missiles at a Predator in one engagement and managed to shoot it down.
The remotely controlled Predator also fired two missiles before it was destroyed. It also transmitted video of the engagement. American officers were impressed that the Iraqi pilot was able to attack such a small target and did not turn away after he was fired upon.
As full-scale war approached, the air war commanders had five goals. They wanted to neutralize the ability of the Iraqi government to command its forces; to establish control of the airspace over Iraq; to provide air support for Special Operations forces, as well as for the Army and Marine forces that would advance toward Baghdad; and to neutralize Iraq's force of surface-to-surface missiles and suspected caches of biological and chemical weapons.
Once the war began, air war commanders adopted an aggressive posture to keep up the pace of the attack. Unarmed refueling tankers and radar planes flew into Iraqi airspace early on, and combat search and rescue teams set up bases inside the country. For the first three weeks of the air war, there were never fewer than 200 aircraft aloft.
According to the internal briefing, 73 personnel were rescued who would have died if they had not been extracted.
Problems in obtaining reliable bomb damage assessment, the fast pace of the Army advance and differences between the Army and the air war commanders about the best way to provide air support limited the effectiveness of the strikes carried out on behalf of the Army's V Corps, according to internal assessments.
Improving bomb damage assessment, coming to a common understanding with Army commanders about the best procedures for providing air support and increasing the capacity to provide digital information to aircraft on targets would improve the performance of air power in future conflicts, air war commanders say.
The American air campaign had a vulnerability that the Iraqis failed to exploit: a four-mile-long line of fuel trucks outside one Persian Gulf base. They were in a region in which Al Qaeda was believed to operate but they were never attacked.
--------
REMAKING HISTORY
Britain Tried First. Iraq Was No Picnic Then.
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By JOHN KIFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20KIFN.html
The public, the distinguished military analyst wrote from Baghdad, had been led "into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor."
"They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information," he said. "The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows."
He added: "We are today not far from a disaster."
Sound familiar?
That was T. E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - writing in The Sunday Times of London on Aug. 22, 1920, about the British occupation of what was then called Mesopotamia. And he knew. For it was Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence and the intrepid British adventuress Gertrude Bell who, more than anyone else, were responsible for the creation of what was to become Iraq. A fine mess they made of it, too.
During the First World War, Lawrence had been present at the birth of modern Arab nationalism and fought alongside its guerrillas to victory against the Ottoman Empire, only to see the same guerrilla tactics turned against the British in a rebellion in Iraq.
It is perhaps instructive to look back on that earlier effort by the leading Western power to remake the Middle East as the American occupation of Iraq appears increasingly beset.
It has not been going well, especially in Sunni-controlled central Iraq. Rather than being hailed as liberators, the American troops face "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" there that is increasingly organized, their new regional commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said last week. A Pentagon-approved independent body of experts criticized the lack of postwar planning. Soldiers of the Army's Third Infantry Division, have been told they are not going home as planned. The cost, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld now says, is running about $3.9 billion a month, nearly twice earlier estimates, and tens of thousands of troops may have to remain for years to come.
At the same time, the rationale for war is increasingly questioned. Terror weapons have not yet been found in Iraq, nor have links to Al Qaeda. The Bush administration is scrambling to explain how allegations based on forged documents purporting to show Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger found their way into the State of the Union address. All this has not helped build global support: last week, India rejected an American request to send some 17,000 peacekeeping troops.
Meanwhile, clashes and increasingly sophisticated ambushes have been running at a rate of a dozen a day; by week's end, at least 33 American soldiers had been killed in hostilities since May 1, the date when President Bush declared that major combat was over.
Ominously, Iraqi crowds have emerged to dance and cheer around burned-out American Humvees.
Many American officers had sensed trouble ahead. As their armor clanked north to Baghdad, officers in the First Marine Division said over and over that the war was no problem; the difficulties would come with the rebuilding of Iraq. Indeed, in the face of American might and technology, the enemy, for the most part, simply did not show up for the big battles. The British had a tougher time of it in World War I; they lost thousands of troops - most of them Indian - in a five-month Turkish siege of Kut. But they regrouped and captured Baghdad on March 11, 1917. Maj. Gen. Stanley Maude greeted the populace with a speech that could have been written today: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."
Well, not quite, General.
When World War I began in 1914, most Arab lands were under the decaying Ottoman Empire, whose ruler, the caliph, was also Islam's supreme authority. The Ottomans were Germany's allies, and Britain saw a chance to seize the Middle East; its interests were to command the trade routes to India and, as it would develop, to control the emerging resource of oil. Lord Kitchener, the war minister, wanted to set up his own caliph - an Arab - as Britain's ally among the Muslims. Attention focused on Hussein ibn Ali, who as sherif of Mecca was the guardian of Islam's holiest sites.
Enter the Arab Bureau, a special intelligence unit set up in Cairo. It had little expertise, and its early efforts to inspire an Arab revolt failed. Then Lawrence, a young captain at the time, volunteered to take a look on his vacation time. He recruited Hussein's second son, Feisal, as the charismatic leader of what became known as the Great Arab Revolt. His raiders crossed the desert to capture the port of Aqaba from the rear, repeatedly blew up the Turks' railroad tracks and harassed their troops, and finally entered Damascus in triumph (although this had to be staged because the Australian cavalry got there first).
The British had promised Feisal that he would be king of the Arabs in Damascus and he arrived at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as the chief Arab spokesman. But Britain and France had secretly agreed to divide up the Middle East, and Feisal's reign in Damascus lasted just months - until the French came over the mountains from Lebanon.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for the British in Mesopotamia. Bell was arbitrarily drawing lines on the map to make a new country out of three former Ottoman provinces - Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the center and Basra in the south. The districts were composed, respectively, of Kurds, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, all of whom hated each other - and the British even more. For one thing, the British were more efficient than the Turks in collecting taxes.
By 1920, the country was in full rebellion, from Shiite tribesmen in the south to Kurds in the north. There were some 425 deaths on the British side and an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 among the Iraqis.
Hoping to restore order, the British, at the urging of Bell and Lawrence, switched Feisal's franchise to Iraq in 1921, although he had never set foot there. In a rigged plebiscite, the new king got 96 per cent of the votes. King Feisal and his strongman prime minister, Nuri as-Said, managed to solidify Sunni minority control over the rest of the country. But there was frequent turmoil.
IN response, the British turned to technology, with their air force commander, Arthur (Bomber) Harris, boasting that his biplanes had taught Iraqis that "within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or wounded." Winston Churchill, who, as colonial secretary, presided over the creation of Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Palestine, called Iraq an "ungrateful volcano."
Still, it took 35 years for the disaster that Lawrence predicted to become total. Iraq gained independence in 1931, but the British-sponsored monarchy hung on and guarded British interests until 1958, when the royal family was murdered and dragged through the streets. That ushered in a period of successive military and Baath Party coups, all brutal, and by 1979 Saddam Hussein had assumed total control.
Like the Arab Bureau, neoconservative policy makers in the Defense Department, who have long been the most prominent advocates of removing Mr. Hussein, have a vision of the Middle East and a candidate. The vision is of a democratic Iraq that would be an example of change to other, undemocratic, Arab nations - the kind of change they believe would remake the region and make easier an Arab-Israeli peace.
They have promoted as a leader Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite from a wealthy family that had been close to the old monarchy, even though some Middle East specialists in the State Department distrust him and consider him ineffectual. As the head of the Iraqi National Council, Mr. Chalabi recently returned to Iraq after living in exile for decades. The American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has appointed a 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, with Mr. Chalabi among them.
One other thing about Colonel Lawrence. While some of his exploits are doubtless exaggerated, his guerrilla tactics are still much studied. He came to realize that when a small band faced more powerful conventional forces, its strength lay in avoiding direct battles and instead conducting stealthy raids. His own guerrilla force, he wrote in his memoir, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," had "a sophisticated alien enemy, disposed as an army of occupation in an area greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts. It had a friendly population, in which some 2 in the 100 were active, and the rest quietly sympathetic to the point of not betraying the movements of the minority."
That larger army could be demoralized and worn down, its patrols and sentries made nervous and drawn, waiting for the next attack and never sure from where it would come. It is a feeling the weary soldiers of the Third Infantry Division are coming to know well.
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon and Abbas Meet in Jerusalem
July 20, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel agreed to free hundreds more Palestinian prisoners on Sunday, disappointing Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's hopes for a full amnesty but keeping a U.S.-backed peace ``road map'' in motion.
Abbas met Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at his Jerusalem residence and was promised that several hundred prisoners would be released, Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Amr told reporters, adding: ``This is positive progress.''
An Israeli government source confirmed the number of candidates for release but said the list would be finalized after Sharon and Abbas hold separate meetings with President Bush in Washington later this month.
The road map aims to end a 33-month-old Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with the promise of statehood by 2005. Abbas has said the release of all 6,000 Palestinian prisoners is vital to boosting grassroots support for the plan. The reformist Palestinian premier is also under pressure to satisfy militant groups from whom he coaxed a three-month truce on June 29. His efforts were not lost on ex-general Sharon.
``The prime minister told his counterpart that Israel cannot ignore the fact that recently (Palestinian) terrorism and incitement have diminished significantly,'' Sharon's office said.
But it added that Sharon had insisted Abbas dismantle militant groups before further Israeli withdrawals from reoccupied West Bank cities. Israel quit the West Bank city of Bethlehem and areas of Gaza this month in security handover deals that have so far proven successful.
PRISONERS' FATE CENTRAL TO TRUCE
Abbas has vowed to punish anyone who violates the truce, but has avoided a crackdown for fear of sparking civil war. Militants in turn say the prisoner issue could be the spark for a resumption of attacks. ``If they (Israel) release some of the prisoners, it's not satisfactory,'' said Ismail Abu-Shanab, a leader of the Islamic group Hamas.
With the list of prisoners for release not yet final, Israeli officials said earlier Sharon might relax criteria to enable members of Hamas and kindred group Islamic Jihad who were not involved in anti-Israeli attacks to go free.
Israel has ruled out releasing Palestinians ``with blood on their hands'' -- involved in attacks on Israelis. Some government sources said these add up to around half of the 6,000 prisoners, suggesting more releases could be in store. Sunday's meeting was Sharon's fourth with Abbas since the Palestinian prime minister assumed the post in April as part of sweeping reforms demanded by the United States. The move sidelined Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, whom Israel accuses of fomenting violence. He denies it.
During their meeting, Abbas asked Sharon to lift restrictions on Arafat as well as easing travel conditions for Palestinians in general. Sharon's office said Israel would weigh removing some checkpoints, but made no mention of Arafat.
-------- mideast
U.S. Asks Turkey to Send Troops to Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS
July 20, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/middleeast/20CND-TURKEY.html
ISTANBUL, July 20 - The Bush administration has asked Turkey's leaders to send troops to Iraq to help stabilize the country, the Turkish prime minister said today.
Such a request, if confirmed, would come during a period of exceptional tension between the two longtime allies. Earlier this month, American soldiers detained 11 Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq on the suspicion that they were trying to kill an American-backed Iraqi official.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today in a speech that the United States had asked the Turks to send soldiers into Iraq as part of a proposed multinational force to help the Americans maintain order there.
Mr. Erdogan offered few details of the request, or whether his government would be inclined to grant it. Hurriyet, a leading daily newspaper here, said today that the Americans had asked the Turks to send a force of 10,000 to Iraq. The report cited unidentified sources.
An American official in Ankara, the capital, would not confirm Mr. Erdogan's assertion but said officials from the two countries had discussed the issue in a visit by senior American military officers here last Friday.
With more than 140,000 American troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has been searching for allies to pick up some of the burden there. Last week, the government of India said it would not sent peacekeeping troops to Iraq unless they operated under the auspices of the United Nations. The French government rejected a similar request.
Relations between the United States and Turkey, NATO allies since the 1940's, have been through their roughest spell in years. In March, the Turkish parliament rejected an American request to allow thousands of troops to use the country as a base from which to launch a northern front against the government of Saddam Hussein.
-------- prisoners of war
Iraqi money ordered to protect POWS
July 20, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/aroundnation.htm
A federal judge ordered the government to retain for now more than $650 million from assets taken from the Iraq government to guarantee compensation for 17 American former Persian Gulf war POWs tortured by their Iraqi captors.
A Treasury Department spokesman said yesterday the order, restricting almost half the roughly $1.4 billion in Iraqi money still held in a New York account, will have no affect on transfers to Baghdad already scheduled as operating expenses for the emerging Iraqi government.
District Judge Richard W. Roberts of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued the temporary restraining order late Friday after hearing arguments from attorneys for the former prisoners of war and the government. The order is to continue for 10 days as the two sides present further briefs.
-------- spies
BLACK OPS
The Departments of Disinformation
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By MILT BEARDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20BEAR.html
There is agreement on what the world's oldest profession is. But there's uncertainty over the second oldest. It could be spycraft. In the scriptures, remember, before Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, he spied out the countryside.
But it is the third oldest profession - the business of misdirecting and fleecing the second - that deserves critical attention today. Bogus intelligence, a nuisance to spies and policymakers alike, has taken on grave importance since intelligence now weighs so heavily on why and when America will go to war.
Fabricated intelligence comes from all directions today. There are the con artists out for a quick buck. These peddlers know Washington's needs, and cook information to order. Intelligence from such fabrication mills is bothersome, but not usually harmful.
The state-sponsored intelligence forgers, operating as part of a nation's security apparatus, are more dangerous and have the most lasting impact. Black operations always begin with a deep understanding of the weaknesses, prejudices and predispositions of the target. The goals of disinformation are broad - anything from embarrassing a foreign government to finessing a sovereign country into doing what you want. Among the most gifted at this disinformation have been the Russians (before and after the Soviet interlude), the British, the Chinese, the Americans (a little later in the game) and the Israelis.
The best black operation can become immortal. Even when debunked, it can live on, driving policies in wildly shifting directions. And don't dwell on the flaws. In this sort of forgery, flaws are often intentional, designed to smudge the fingerprints of the artists or otherwise obscure the origins of a fake.
A case in point is the furor over the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq was buying uranium from the African state of Niger. The storm over how the information found its way into President Bush's State of the Union speech is still playing as a Washington whodunit.
At some point, however, the debate will get around to the other crucial issue: that someone has taken the time and creative energy to cook up a forgery designed to drive American policy.
It will be important to learn who was behind the fake Niger document and why, and what other information driving American policies might carry their fingerprints. It is prudent to assume that additional bogus information has slipped into the mix. The sourcing on the special aluminum tubes purported to reveal Iraq's reconstituted nuclear program might be re-examined, and the chain of acquisition of the information on the mobile biological weapons labs that is still in dispute might again be vetted. Intelligence fabrications are like deer crossing the road - there is almost never just one.
My earliest experience with fabricated intelligence came in the 1960's, when I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Hong Kong. Intelligence mills feeding the China-watching industry had evolved into an art form. The phony data on China was no less beautifully crafted than Ching dynasty fakes of Ming dynasty blue and white porcelain. But these mills were mostly entrepreneurs out for a buck, and the C.I.A. learned to filter their phony, but benign product.
Later in Africa, however, I confronted more dangerous forgeries. In 1982, in Nigeria, a set of bogus letters surfaced, exposing a supposedly secret American plan to assassinate Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a revered personality on the rambunctious Nigerian political scene. The plans all had the forged signature of Thomas R. Pickering, then the United States ambassador to Nigeria. They were just crude enough to allow their K.G.B. drafters (the agency's conclusion but, typically, never proved) to deny having anything to do with them, but not so crude as to be dismissed by volatile Lagos politicians. Ambassador Pickering and I moved quickly to debunk the documents, and may have headed off serious repercussions. But as with all good black operations, the allegations, once made, lingered.
A few years later, after AIDS appeared in Africa, the K.G.B. (we got them this time - they were betrayed) loosed a well-crafted volley of forgeries and whispered innuendo that the United States had created the deadly virus and was experimenting with it in Africa. The story has survived for almost two decades.
Turnabout was fair play. While I managed the C.I.A.'s covert war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the mid-1980's, I came upon the enduring myth of the Soviet army's use of booby-trapped toys designed to attract and then kill or mutilate Afghan children. While gratified by the grief this story was causing the Soviets, I shared my skepticism about it with C.I.A. headquarters.
Langley's response was swift. The toy bomb story, I was told informally, though not an American creation, was a favorite of both the C.I.A. director, William J. Casey, and President Ronald Reagan. It fit their view of the evil empire and fell in the same category as the story of the K.G.B. plotting the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II - too good a yarn to check or dispute. So we ran with it for three more years. I even had copies of the Toys "R" Us catalog sent anonymously to the local K.G.B. chief.
The remnants of cold war disinformation linger on. The Russians are still angered by the toy bomb stories, while Americans in Africa have to deal with the AIDS disinformation even as they talk about leading an effort to fight the disease.
But the most durable black operation of modern times must be "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a late-19th century concoction of the Okhrana, the Russian czar's secret police. Plagiarized from a 19th-century anti-Semitic German novel, the forgery was designed to trace all the troubles of Nicholas II to an international Jewish plot to take over the world. Though authoritatively debunked in the 1920's and 1930's, the forgeries nonetheless thrived in the darkness of the Third Reich - not to mention as a favored citation of Henry Ford. Today they still generate hatred, as any search of the Internet can demonstrate.
An important distinction between cold war black operations and the fake intelligence today is that the old gamesmanship was unlikely to have turned a cold war hot. All that has changed; bogus intelligence is a now a deadly serious component in developing policy. Some could be coming from opposition groups against regimes on the to-be-changed list. Washington will have to be vigilant regarding the intelligence flow on Iran, Syria and even America's Turkish allies in northern Iraq.
In addition, Washington should expect serious misdirection from the adversaries who devised the Sept. 11 attacks. They know America as well as any of its old enemies and are probably convinced they can make Washington dance like a puppet on a chain by simply inserting creative flourishes into the much cited levels of chatter.
The stakes couldn't be higher, since intelligence can now lead the nation to war, not just prevent it.
Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, served as senior manager for clandestine operations. He is the co-author with James Risen of "The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.'s Final Showdown with the K.G.B."
-------- un
Peacekeeping Is Back, With New Faces and Rules
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20BARR.html
UNITED NATIONS - Peacekeeping is no longer a dirty word in Republican Washington. The United States is appealing to other countries to share the military burden of the occupation of Iraq, and President Bush is also signaling his willingness to send American troops to West Africa to help pacify Liberia.
But as peacekeeping, like bell-bottoms, comes back into fashion, it is now cut from a different fabric than before. The missions are longer, and the troops are more likely to come from developing countries.
In its original missions, United Nations troops were likely to be the first force on the ground, after combatants had agreed to step back.
But in the last four years, urgent humanitarian crises in the eastern Congo, Sierra Leone and East Timor have required new tactics. Military action is needed more quickly than a United Nations blue-helmeted force can be authorized and deployed. In these knotted conflicts, ad hoc multinational forces have taken the lead, with the United Nations' blessing, and they have been led by developed countries - the British in Sierra Leone and the French in the Ivory Coast, for example.
Their tenure tends to be measured in weeks or months, while the tenure of United Nations' forces, which follow the multinational forces, tends to be measured in years. The United Nations' forces also tend to come from countries with less substantial economies, though they usually have substantial militaries. On June 30, the top contributors to peacekeeping missions were Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana. Together, they contributed 13,826 troops, military observers and policeman.
The five permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - together contributed a total of 2,097, less than all the individual countries but Ghana.
Does it matter? After all, the countries with the most robust economies are paying most of the bills. The United States, in the current fiscal year, is paying 27 percent of the United Nations peacekeeping budget of $2.17 billion.
"There are countries that support peacekeeping in a big way, with a lot of money, and countries that support it with flesh and blood," said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the United Nations under secretary general for peacekeeping operations, in a recent interview.
While the movement in this direction has been going on since at least the mid-1990's, "I do hope we are in a trough, not a trend," he said. This divide "could create some resentment."
Indeed, if the military intervention is to have any meaning, it must display international backing of all sorts, said David Rudd, the president of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies.
"It's all well and good to support an operation financially," Mr. Rudd said, but "if you subscribe to the notion of some form of global community, this demands and equitable sharing of the risks."
But Paul F. Diehl, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the increasing dominance of developing countries is not a major issue if their forces have the military capability and are seen as legitimate, not interlopers with their own agenda. (Which makes Nigerian forces a problematic presence when it comes to West African peacekeeping.)
For the major troop contributors, there are rewards - peacekeeping dividends, if you will. Pakistanis and Indians believe "that peacekeeping adds to the military experience," Mr. Guéhenno said. "To be able to hold fire in a difficult situation requires a lot of training."
And then there is a more tangible dividend: Mr. Guéhenno's office reimburses the countries that provide troops at the rate of $1,100 per soldier a month. Often, the cost to the country providing the troops is significantly less. "Generally, it is a substantial and generous differential," said Tariq Chaudhry, a peacekeeping specialist at Pakistan's mission to the United Nations. "But that's not why we go into it. We are actually quite proud of our record, proud that we've got peacekeeping right."
Economic incentives may become more explicit. In Iraq, the Pentagon is considering a plan to train private Iraqi security force to guard pipelines, government buildings and other sites. And now, most of the 500-strong police force the United States has serving in Kosovo are employees of a private firm, DynCorp.
Indeed, the notion of privatizing peacekeeping is getting more attention. In the June and July issue of Policy Review, published by the Hoover Institution, P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote that the growing industry of private military firms could be tapped to protect humanitarian aid workers or to intervene "whenever recalcitrant local parties break peace agreements or threaten the operation." They could even take over the whole operation, as a coalition of private security companies offered to do in the Congo, for $100 million or more.
Privatization, unsurprisingly, has many critics. In his article, Mr. Singer warned that "outsourcing also entails turning over control of the actual provision of service. For peacekeeping, this means the troops in the field are not part of national armies, but private citizens hired off the market, working for private firms. Security is now at the mercy of any change in market costs and incentives."
For his part, Mr. Guéhenno said he was worried that privatization offered the wrong message. "With private troops, the first signal you send is: This is important, but not important enough to risk our own people," he said.
-------- us
The War After the War
Soldiers' Battle Shifts From Desert Sands to Hospital Linoleum
By Anne Hull and Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16510-2003Jul19?language=printer
First of two articles
The taxicab pulls up to the curb of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Pfc. Garth Stewart slides into the back seat. A nurse stows his duffel bag in the trunk, offering her last advice. "Move your leg around on the flight," she says.
The American flag hangs slack on the flagpole. Garth lays his crutches across his lap. The lanky 20-year-old soldier from Minnesota rubs the place where his leg was amputated. The throbbing alternates with jolts that feel like electrical shocks. Two Percocets are in his pocket for the plane ride home.
As the cab cuts through Rock Creek Park, Garth rolls down the window to smell the forest. After weeks of hospital food and disinfectant, he breathes deeply. He rips the plastic hospital ID bracelet from his wrist and crumples it in a ball.
The bed that Garth left behind on Ward 57 will be filled by day's end. Even though major combat operations in Iraq are over, the wounded keep arriving. Twice a week, transport planes land at Andrews Air Force Base, bringing fresh casualties. Accidents, ambushes, pockets of resistance. Nearly 650 soldiers have passed through Walter Reed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than half of them since the conflict was officially declared over.
On TV, the war was a rout, with infrared tanks rolling toward Baghdad on a desert soundstage. But the permanent realities unfold more quietly on Georgia Avenue NW, behind the black iron gates of the nation's largest military hospital.
Here, the battle shifts from hot sand to polished hallways, and the broad ambitions of global security are replaced by the singular mission of saving a leg. Ward 57, the hospital's orthopedics wing, is the busiest. High-tech body armor spared lives but not necessarily limbs.
The night President Bush declared the end of major combat, the soldiers on Ward 57 slept, unaware of victory.
Garth Stewart was curled in a miserable ball of blue pajamas.
First Lt. John Fernandez, the West Point graduate, was beginning married life from a wheelchair.
Pfc. Danny Roberts was wishing for Faulkner instead of a glossy guide about adapting to limb loss.
Their war was not yet over.
Walter Reed has been treating wounded soldiers since the beginning of the century, expanding and contracting with the rhythms of war. During World War I, the number of patient beds grew from 80 to 2,500 in a matter of months. Three generations later, the soldiers from Operation Iraqi Freedom arrive, some so fresh from the battlefield they still have dirt and blood beneath their fingernails.
Each morning, across the sprawling grounds of the 147-acre compound, reveille is sounded at 6. But up on the hospital's fifth floor on Ward 57, the fluorescent dawn is indistinguishable from the fluorescent night. Two long halls flank the nurse's desk, the command center of the ward. Doctors begin their morning rounds at dawn.
In Room 5714, Garth Stewart is sleeping when three doctors arrive. One of them reaches for a light switch, and before Garth can shield his eyes, his room is flash-blasted in white.
"Can we take a look at the leg?"
Garth flips back the bedsheet. His desert tan has gone sallow. His GI buzz cut is a woolly disgrace. Even in this condition, he wishes for a decent soldier's haircut. The drugs have made his stomach cramp so much that he stays curled on his side. Now, with the doctors hovering, he tries to straighten out his 6-foot-4 frame. His amputated leg won't lie down. It trembles in midair.
A doctor works quickly, unwrapping the bandage and then the white gauze. Garth watches as they probe the black caterpillar of sutures on his bulbous stump. He moans. The stump begins to shake violently. "I'm gonna get sick," he says.
"You want your bucket?"
Garth reaches for the container. "I can't do this much longer," he says, holding his hand over his eyes.
"We're almost finished," the doctor tells him.
"No," Garth says, "not that, everything. I can't take it any more."
They leave him in darkness, with his bucket. Only four weeks earlier, Garth was a mortar man with the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. "You get out of high school and you join the Army, or you get out of high school and live in your parents' basement," he says. He chose Fort Benning over Stillwater, Minn.
For someone who signed up for four years of regimen and order, Garth was unusually iconoclastic. Tattooed on his chest was a line from the novel "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." And yet he loved the discipline of Army life. At Fort Benning, he competed on the martial arts team. Because he was a Minnesotan who called sodas "sweet fizzies," some of the guys nicknamed him "Sweet Fizzies, King of Fighters."
Garth was so eager for the fight in Iraq that he bought a high-powered custom scope for his rifle. He used it only once, to shoot out some factory windows. But Iraq turned out to be messier than he thought. He saw charred bodies, and a grotesque assemblage of dead Iraqi soldiers who had barreled their car into an American tank.
On April 5, his unit was on the Karbala highway when some of the guys stopped to pose for a picture in front of a sign that said "BAGHDAD." Garth and a buddy decided to inspect a nearby bunker. The explosion blew both of them down. Garth's left boot was a wreck, and a chunk was missing from his lower leg. His other leg had a softball-size hole in the calf. A medic told him he'd probably lose a big toe.
He had surgeries in Kuwait and Germany, each time losing more of his foot. At Walter Reed, the orthopedic team decided that his leg needed to be amputated at mid-shin so he could fit into the highest functioning prosthesis.
Now, Dilaudid drips through his intravenous line, along with so many other drugs that he is too sick to eat anything but crackers.
Scenes from the war drift through his head. When he was in Iraq, an Army general came up to his company and said, "Man, we gotta stop Saddam. He boils little girls in acid." The statement struck Garth as "hilarious propaganda."
But lying in bed, he can't stop remembering all the Iraqi people who came out of their houses to shake the hands of the American troops.
Garth tries to make sense of things. "Any beautiful and scornful poem you read about war, it's about the horrible randomality of war," he says. The same Special Forces medic who treated Garth and his buddy after they stepped on the land mine was shot by a sniper two days later south of Baghdad. Now that same medic is on Ward 57, minus his right leg. Ironies of War
Even with the war officially over, Ward 57 is filled to capacity. Officers are forced to share rooms with enlisted soldiers. "I've got a full-bird colonel in with a private," the charge nurse says one morning, scanning the room assignments with frustration. "Out of respect, he should have his own room."
"Oh, cry me a river," another nurse says.
The famous POW, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, is in a private room at the end of a hallway on 57, with a military police officer seated outside her door. In the rest of the ward, doors are open, visitors flowing in and out. All day long, soldiers buzz the intercom at the nurse's station.
Yeah, when you get a chance, I just spilled something over me.
Yes, ma'am, I need a Percocet.
Uh, can I have a blanket, please?
Yes, ma'am, I was using the urinal and . . . I need a new pair of pants.
In his room, Danny Roberts squints through eyeglasses that survived Iraq without a scratch. The aspiring English teacher in him has to appreciate such irony, same with the half-finished copy of William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" he had in his truck the day his feet got blown to pieces. Reading helps break the boredom now. Danny props himself against the pillows and jots reminders in a green spiral notebook: Call bank to replace the ATM card blown up in Iraq with his wallet; order tickets for the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert; get checked for anemia.
He's always been pale and skinny, not the brawny soldier pictured on recruiting posters. Still, he loved the Army so much he had a replica of his dog tags tattooed around his neck after leaving active duty and going to the reserves. Civilian life was a tough adjustment. Danny managed a band for a while, then moved to Hollywood, then New Orleans, partied too hard, went home to Wisconsin and started tending bar and going to college part time. Then his reserve unit was activated, and 26-year-old Danny was en route to Iraq.
He was part of a supply convoy, hauling food and water. He went through his brief war listening to New Age music on his headphones to tune out the ugliness around him. There were wild dogs, that searing white heat, enraged Iraqi boys who would mob the slow-moving convoy, hurling bricks at the hated American faces. Danny never so much as chambered a round in his own weapon. And then one afternoon, he stepped on a land mine.
At Walter Reed, surgeons operated four times just to clean out the wounds. Danny's right heel had been torn off and was replaced with a metal plate. Two toes were missing on his left foot, and the others had to be amputated. As he was healing from that surgery, doctors delivered more bad news: The explosive had destroyed tendons, too, causing the left foot to flop uselessly. He would never be able to walk on it, and it would lose circulation and eventually have to come off anyway. A prosthesis would give him far more mobility. It was up to him whether to amputate now or wait it out. Go ahead, Danny told them, then wept alone in his room that night.
Danny is now the model patient, always chipper and polite. Thank you so much, he tells the nurse bringing pain medication. "Awesome work," he congratulates his surgeon. He urges the bleary-eyed residents to get some sleep.
One morning, an intern unwraps his bandages, causing Danny to grip the bed rails in pain. "Oh, Danny Boy," she begins to sing, trying to distract him. He manages an appreciative smile even as he winces. The Honeymooners
By the time he reached Walter Reed, John Fernandez had made a vow. "I'm not going to feel sorry for myself," he swore. Not when three men around him, including the gunner he tried to save, came home in body bags. "I'm here and I'm alive and I'm going to walk out of this place."
His hospital room is the first home he and his 22-year-old wife, Kristi, have shared as husband and wife. Kristi has moved a cot into his room. They hold court bedside, John recounting his story to visiting dignitaries, buddies and hospital staff. "I don't have any problems talking about it," he reassures the curious. His 13th Field Artillery unit was pushing toward Baghdad when an explosion blew John from his cot as he slept by his Humvee the night of April 3, less than 20 miles from the Iraqi capital.
"I woke up. My legs were numb," he recalls. "I took off the sleeping bag and I screamed." His feet were bloody pulp. The Humvee was in flames, spewing fuel. Patches of fire burned around the wounded soldiers. "I crawled away, calling for my gunner. He called back. His legs were bad, pretty much blown off. So I threw my flak vest down on him, put my M-16 on his chest and started dragging him." Help arrived, and the gunner was carried off. Two more soldiers -- just kids, John thought -- appeared through the smoke. The Humvee exploded, throwing all of them to the ground again. His rescuers began to panic.
"Calm down, it's okay," John remembers telling them. "Just grab my legs, not my feet." At the mobile Army hospital, one of the senior sergeants burst into tears. "Don't worry about it," John heard himself saying. "I'm okay."
Arriving at Walter Reed, feet swathed in thick bandages, he figured he was in for some serious reconstructive surgery.
But the wounds were grievous, and infection set in.
Twelve surgeries later, John Fernandez is a double amputee.
Surgeons sawed off one leg just below the knee, the other a couple of inches above the ankle. His wife of three months insists that nothing has changed between them, and talks about dancing together at the big wedding postponed by war. The surgeons agree: Anything is possible. People climb mountains, ski, run marathons on state-of-the-art artificial legs. John had always been an avid athlete -- lacrosse, basketball, soccer, hunting, fishing, you name it.
Kristi had been waiting at the curb when they unloaded John's stretcher at Walter Reed. She remembers seeing his smile first, running to kiss him, to say "I love you" over and over through happy tears.
The honeymooners in Room 5711 quickly became the darlings of Ward 57. Encamped in the small room, they crack jokes in their Long Island accents and beg visitors from back home to bring fresh bagels. They draw a cartoon of John on the nurse's dryboard, with the proclamation: "I am the Spanish Thunder." That was his nickname as captain of the Army lacrosse team. John used to have legs like tree trunks.
The swelling is going down on his two stumps, and doctors hope to start fitting him for artificial limbs soon. The rehabilitation specialist, Jeffrey Gambel, says that John should eventually be able to bear weight on the longer stump, which will mean he won't have to put on both prostheses to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. "It will be very hard to walk on," Gambel cautions, "like a cone."
"Like a pirate," John suggests. He and Kristi burst into laughter, sharing the same ludicrous thought:
"Halloween!" they hoot almost simultaneously. No need to worry about a costume this year. Celebrity City
America is sending cookies and Hickory Farms baskets to Ward 57. Orioles tickets and NASCAR passes arrive. Sheryl Crow brings her guitar and sings for each soldier. Michael Jordan is as fast on hospital linoleum as he is on the basketball court: Here's an autographed cap and whoosh, he's gone. Kelsey Grammer pulls up a chair bedside. They are too young to remember Bo Derek; ("What's '10'?" a soldier asks after being introduced to the movie star.) But they thoroughly appreciate Jennifer Love Hewitt.
The staff on 57 worries about the attention being showered on the soldiers. What happens when they are no longer in the spotlight? Gambel watches as country singer Chely Wright and her entourage give each soldier a yellow rosebud. "They are told they're heroes, and they get home and they don't feel like heroes," Gambel says. "They feel like some dumb guy who stepped on a land mine."
So many celebrities and politicians arrive that a 28-year-old Special Forces medic whose left leg was amputated hangs a NO VISITORS sign on his door. The phrase "Thank you for your sacrifice" has lost its meaning, he says. "It's like someone saying 'Happy Birthday' or 'Merry Christmas.' "
One Sunday afternoon, the nurse's station on 57 gets word that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is coming for a visit. Counters are scrubbed, a hot rod magazine on the front desk gets stashed and nurses patrol the halls, making sure patients and rooms are presentable. An hour later, Rumsfeld cancels. He has a cold. Salvation
Of all the specialists who puzzle over Garth Stewart, of all the expensive drugs dripping into his veins, nothing brings relief. The stomach cramps and constipation persist. Instead of getting better, he's getting worse. And then his magic bullet arrives.
The remedy comes from an unlikely deliverer known as the Milkshake Man. Jim Mayer is a veteran who lost both legs in Vietnam. Several times a week, he brings McDonald's milkshakes to the amputees on Ward 57. The visits are just an excuse to talk and counsel. Mayer arrives this Saturday afternoon but Garth refuses the shake. Too rich. Any chance of a Mountain Dew, he asks. Mayer heads downstairs to the commissary.
The super-caffeinated soda does it. Caffeine! The next day, Garth is sitting up in bed. His blinds are open. "Mountain Dew saved my goddamn life," he says, his voice deep and robust. Suddenly, he is ravenous. "Domino's keeps showing this commercial for Cinna Stix," he says. "You dip them in icing. Man, I want some."
When six Washington Redskinettes push through the double doors of Ward 57, wearing maroon sparkle bras and hot pants, Garth is waiting. "You guys are so cute," he practically shouts. One of the cheerleaders touches his stump. Garth says, "So many people look at this as you are less of a man. You should see the dignity of the guys who come in here to visit me. They roll up pants, and they are standing on plaster."
A day after the Redskinettes visit, Walter Reed's highest commanders come to bestow military honors. After the VIPs leave, Garth sits in bed, a gold medal pinned to his pajama top and an empty delivery box on the sheet beside him.
"Quite a day, man," he says. "Pizza and a Purple Heart."
The next morning, he's wide awake when the doctors arrive for rounds. Freshly barbered, he looks like a soldier again, which is what he wants to be as soon as he can escape the captivity of Walter Reed. He has one question: "When can I get out?"
"I think a week is certainly feasible," a physician, Ken Taylor, says, checking for signs that the skin flap is healing.
Garth says how badly he wants to rejoin his unit in Iraq. "This is something I'm really serious about, doc."
Taylor stays focused on Garth's stitches. "An amputation is not a death sentence as far as the Army's concerned," he says. "We've got two four-star generals with amputations. It's hard for me to say if you'd be a ground-pounder again, an infantryman, but I don't rule it out."
Garth continues to press. "I mean, if someone came and got me, could the Army stop me from leaving?" Taylor pauses, holding the gauze in his hand. The 37-year-old Army major is unshaven. He has worked all night, and his long day in the operating room starts in 45 minutes. But he remains calmly intent on Garth. "You're itching to get out of here, and I'm itching to launch you," he says. "The fact that you're even saying that is fantastic. You were this guy curled up in a ball two days ago who didn't want the light turned on."
"You're on the fence right now," he says gently. "I can't pop your hood and look inside and tell you what's going on today to know what I have to do to get you out of here. The human condition is not like that. We're on your side. You buyin' what I'm sayin'?"
Garth folds his hands behind his head. "Yeah."
When Taylor leaves, Garth comes up with the idea to buy his own plane ticket back to Iraq. He can't stand the idea of the 3rd Infantry Division over there without him. Trip to the Mall
Danny's little green notebook is full of his scrawled reminders now. There's a lot to think about, plans to make. He and his girlfriend, Mindy, will need a new apartment, ground floor. And transportation -- he sold his beater of a pickup truck before going off to war. Will a wheelchair fit in Mindy's Kia? He fantasizes about buying a bass guitar once he gets home to Green Bay, too.
In the haze of painkillers and too many different people trying to brief him on Army policy, the economics of being a disabled reservist confuse Danny. There are forms to complete, boards to convene, hearings to go through before the Army decides what his status will be and what kind of compensation he will get. The process can takes months. His head hurts. He thinks it must be the meds.
"I'm not one to gouge the system," he says, "but everyone's told me I already paid a big price and deserve what I can get."
His mother, Nancy, arrives from Green Bay with Mindy, a blur of hugs and held-back tears. Nancy brings her son's favorite chocolate chip cookies, homemade.
Mindy Bosse, a 20-year-old juggling two waitressing jobs and college, has final exams back home and can only stay the weekend. She'll start hunting for a new place for them to live, but Danny needs to get money for the security deposit out of his Wisconsin bank account, and the bank doesn't seem to understand that his ATM card and identification are now confetti in the Iraqi desert.
Danny remembers what happened to him April 9 with the kind of vivid detail so common among wounded soldiers that doctors have a term for it: flashbulb memory.
His convoy was exploring an abandoned Iraqi air base. Danny kept finding souvenirs: an Iraqi beret emblazoned with an eagle, a gas mask, the blouse from an Iraqi uniform. Best of all, there was a hardcover book with an autographed photo of Saddam Hussein inside.
Wow, he thought, this is my lucky day.
Two hours later, he was having a cigarette with a few buddies. He kept bouncing the heel of one combat boot off the toe of his other boot, an old habit. He figures now that this mindless motion set off the land mine beneath him. Three others were hurt, none as badly as Danny. He can still see the speckles of blood on a buddy's shirt. "It was my fault," he would later sob to doctors, who noted the crying jags in his chart as they transferred him from Kuwait to Germany to Walter Reed.
Now he is getting a fresh cast on his shattered heel.
"Ankle up, ankle up, ankle up," the technician says.
"I'm trying," Danny apologizes. The procedure causes pain not only in the heel but also in the severed nerves that have gone haywire on the opposite stump, where his left foot was amputated just above the ankle. He squeezes his eyes tight and grimaces, but doesn't complain.
He massages his stump.
"Your body gets used to pain," the cast tech offers.
"I've definitely gotten used to pain."
He scores a day pass, and he and his mother head to the nearest mall, in Wheaton. But that first excursion outside the cocoon of Walter Reed leaves Danny depleted physically and emotionally. The wheelchair they have given him was clearly intended for a large and husky man; Danny is neither. Maneuvering through crowds of shoppers, and up and down inclines, is a lot trickier than a hospital's wide, level halls. And then there are the stares. The adults quickly avert their eyes, but the kids ask straight-out what happened to his foot. Accustomed to living in a ward full of amputees, Danny didn't think to cover up the raw red stump when he ventured out.
He returns to Walter Reed bone tired. Nothing to write in the green notebook today. In a small voice, he asks everyone -- his mom, the social worker, the nurses -- to leave him alone for a while.
It's too hard to concentrate, and these headaches won't go away. Worried doctors schedule him for a battery of tests. Discharge
Across the ward, John Fernandez is packing up. His orthopedist, Donald Gajewski, is so pleased with the way John's wounds are healing, and how well John has managed on his day passes outside the hospital with Kristi, that he offers a deal: Discharge to Fisher House, a small inn on the hospital grounds for patients' families. But they need to return for daily dressing changes and physical therapy. The prosthetics lab will be able to start casting John for artificial limbs once his swelling has gone down.
"Take it easy," Gajewski cautions, "you're still healing."
The nurses cluster around as they leave, offering a round of applause.
At Fisher House, they are in the dining room eating lunch when John's grandparents arrive from Long Island.
"Gramps!" "Johnny, Johnny." Frank Fernandez, 81, is a veteran himself, a Navy man who survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor and then had two torpedoed ships sink beneath him. He spent 33 hours in the water and won't go swimming to this day.
Mary Fernandez, 74, bustles through the door.
"I brought cookies from New York!" She kisses John. "How you feel? You're still pale."
"No, I'm great. I'm fine."
"Your eyes. You always have lively eyes. Your eyes are pale."
Frank agrees.
"You need more color," he concludes. "Color, color, color. That's the name of the game. Color! Before you know it, you'll be shootin' baskets. You know, why not?"
John smiles.
"Right now it still hurts," he tells them.
"It has to hurt," his grandmother clucks.
"Let it heal, John," his grandfather says softly. "Let it heal."
John and Kristi excuse themselves for a nap, and only after they leave the room does his grandmother's smile begin to tremble. Tears slip down her face. New Arrivals
Nighttime on Ward 57. The rooms are quiet except for the beep of morphine pumps and the sound of a lone TV.
Downstairs, the triage room is bracing for an influx of new casualties. An hour ago, another medevac plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base.
A gallery of photographs from Walter Reed Army Medical Center by Washington Post staff photographer Michael Lutzky and a video report on Marines recovering from their injuries at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda can be viewed at www.washingtonpost.com/nation.
NEXT: Reconstruction
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- police
F.B.I. Is Accused of Bias by Arab-American Agent
July 20, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/national/20AGEN.html
WASHINGTON, July 19 - The F.B.I.'s highest-ranking Arab-American agent has filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the bureau, charging that he was kept out of the investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings because of his ancestry.
The agent, Bassem Youssef, filed the lawsuit on Friday in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. Mr. Youssef, a naturalized American citizen born in Egypt, said in his complaint that "no other non-Arab F.B.I. employee with similar background and experience was willfully blocked from working 9/11-related matters."
Some of the actions against him had broader implications, Mr. Youssef said in his complaint, undermining important counterterrorism investigations prior to the attacks. "The F.B.I. permitted racism to interfere with national security," Mr. Youssef said in an earlier filing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's equal opportunity office.
In one incident two months before the hijackings, F.B.I. agents in Miami lost a prospective informant on the Qaeda terrorist network because of what Mr. Youssef said was an internal argument about his involvement in interviews with the source. Whatever information might have been learned was lost, he said.
Stephen M. Kohn, Mr. Youssef's lawyer, who has represented F.B.I. whistle-blowers, said Mr. Youssef had risked his career by filing the lawsuit. "Mr. Youssef has placed his career in jeopardy in order to ensure that the F.B.I. can properly protect the public against another terrorist attack," Mr. Kohn said. "F.B.I. discrimination against Middle Easterners is not only un-American, it also undermines the war on terrorism." He said Mr. Youssef could not discuss the case.
A spokesman for the bureau said he could not discuss the charges. "We have received a complaint and the matter is being investigated," the spokesman said. "Some of the information in the complaint is classified and therefore it may take longer to resolve."
In his complaint, Mr. Youssef said a "glass ceiling" existed at the bureau that blocked the advancement of Arab-Americans. The charges come at a time when the F.B.I. is trying to hire Arab-American agents, analysts and translators to help the bureau reshape itself into a counterterrorism agency to respond to international threats.
The bureau is also seeking more agents with experience in the Middle East to expand its law enforcement operations in Arabic-speaking countries. At the same time, senior F.B.I. officials have sought to portray efforts like the thousands of interviews with Iraqis in the United States during the Iraq war as being conducted with discretion and sensitivity.
Mr. Youssef said in his complaint that he had been held back from senior positions even though he was the bureau's only polygraph examiner qualified to conduct examinations in Arabic and had an intimate understanding of Arab culture, politics and diplomacy, knowledge that was rare among F.B.I. agents.
In the mid-1990's, he said, he had received "exceptional" performance evaluations when he worked as the bureau's first representative, or legal attaché, in Saudi Arabia and had been credited by Louis J. Freeh, the former director of the F.B.I., as helping to foster a working relationship between the bureau and the Mabahith, the secretive Saudi security service, in the investigation of the 1996 bombings at the Khobar Towers apartments in Dhahran that killed 19 United States servicemen.
Some agents said in private interviews that Mr. Youssef could be abrasive, but they added that he was hard-working.
In his post in Riyadh, he said in the complaint, he helped the bureau obtain access to six people held in the Khobar Towers case after American officials complained that the Saudis were not cooperating. He also resolved minor disputes, like one that arose when an F.B.I. official was found to have brought liquor into Saudi Arabia, an Islamic country that forbids alcohol.
But when Mr. Youssef returned to F.B.I. headquarters in 2000, according to his complaint, he was excluded from work on counterterrorism investigations, which after the 9/11 attacks became highly sought-after assignments that often led to promotions to the senior executive ranks.
Mr. Youssef is currently assigned at F.B.I. headquarters as the supervisor of a unit that has been translating hundreds of thousands of documents seized from Osama bin Laden's training camps and elsewhere in Afghanistan - a job that Mr. Youssef said undervalued his knowledge and experience as a Middle East counterterrorism expert.
At one point, he was assigned to work alongside employees who had once reported to his subordinates. In his complaint, he said that the F.B.I. had never promoted an American citizen born in an Arabic country in the Middle East to a senior position. At times, he said, agents referred to Arabs using racial slurs.
Mr. Youssef's complaints have circulated in the F.B.I. for many months. Robert S. Mueller III, the bureau's director, was first told of them in June 2002 when he met privately with Mr. Youssef at the office of Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia. After the meeting, Mr. Mueller said he would assign subordinates to review the case.
Mr. Mueller is scheduled to testify on Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Mr. Youssef's complaints are likely to be addressed. Last week, Justice Department officials blocked a request to interview Mr. Youssef made by two senior members of the committee, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.
Asked about the case, Mr. Grassley said: "The F.B.I. can't afford to have discrimination within its ranks against Arab-Americans or anyone else. It's not only wrong, but it hurts the war on terror. If these allegations are true, the F.B.I. has a major problem that must be addressed immediately."
Mr. Leahy said: "We need to make the F.B.I. as effective and as agile and as responsive as it can be, especially for the war on terrorism. We have found that whistle-blowers have been among the most potent catalysts for reform. Mr. Youssef in particular has special skills and a unique background, and we need to know what he has to say."
Among Mr. Youssef's charges is that the bureau's bias against him undercut terrorism investigations. In July 2001, he said in his complaint, an agent in the bureau's Miami office telephoned Mr. Youssef for help interviewing an unidentified Arabic-speaking "walk-in," who approached the bureau with what Mr. Youssef said was "significant information" about Mr. bin Laden.
Mr. Youssef said his fluency in Arabic and experience in terrorism qualified him uniquely to conduct the interview. But, he said, when agents in the bin Laden unit at F.B.I. headquarters learned that he was to be involved, they intervened to exclude him.
Mr. Youssef said that without anyone qualified to conduct the interview in Arabic, "the walk-in stopped cooperating with the F.B.I. and walked out of the field office. Whatever information this walk-in had was lost."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
Pot paradox
July 20, 2003
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030719-114314-7320r.htm
LAS VEGAS
Supported by a teetering prosthetic leg held together with brown mailing tape, John Stargel went to Nevada's Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation seeking job training. But the 53-year-old former construction worker was refused assistance after he noted to his case worker that he is a legal smoker of medicinal marijuana, which voters here approved in 2000.
"So one state agency approves my medicine, and another says that if I take my medicine, I can't get any help. Wow," said Mr. Stargel, whose doctor authorized his marijuana use to offset his chronic pain.
The dismissal of Mr. Stargel's case is one more pot paradox that a growing number of states are facing as voters and legislatures from California to Maryland continue to support doctor-prescribed use of the weed, which was outlawed by the federal government in 1937.
They do so despite the insistence from hundreds of elected officials on both sides of the political aisle that smoking marijuana is not medicine. To say otherwise, in some places, is political poison.
At the same time, a cadre of lawmakers both Republican and Democrat, state and federal, buck their respective party platforms to advance acceptance of marijuana's purported medical benefits.
"There are all these people who want to take the politics out of this fight, but politicians shouldn't be playing doctors," says Republican Don Murphy, a former state lawmaker from Maryland who first introduced the state's medicinal marijuana legislation three years ago.
The bill, which after years of dispute received the state legislature's support, was signed into law by Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich in May. It never went before voters.
"Most elected officials at all levels are content to just toss this issue to the feds and let them handle it," says Mr. Murphy, who now heads the Baltimore County Republican Party.
Federal officials continue to enforce marijuana's ban, even in states that have legalized it, citing the 1937 law that maintains marijuana has no medical value and lists it as a Schedule I drug alongside heroin, LSD and various amphetamine variants. They specifically target for arrest patients with prescribed marijauna and medicinal pot distributors, as well as pot paraphernalia purveyors.
"The medical establishment is not in favor of marijuana as medicine," says Tom Riley, spokesman for White House drug policy director John Walters. "And it is not like there is this drug being kept from sick people. It is not medicine."
Dr. Andrea Barthwell, President Bush's appointee as deputy director for demand reduction in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, notes that voters are voting their emotions when asked to approve medicinal marijuana.
"They aren't being told the whole truth," says Dr. Barthwell, who was confirmed last year with bipartisan support. "These voters are being propagandized."
Besides, she notes, "we recognize that the voters and the states have the right to vote on policy, but federal law trumps them."
Last week, the Bush administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let federal authorities revoke federal prescription licenses from California doctors who tell patients marijuana will help them.
Advocates of medicinal marijuana say such efforts undermine voters' wishes and hinder any hope that the medical cognoscenti in the United States will agree that pot can be good for what ails you.
Proponents are convinced that marijuana, a psychoactive plant that stimulates certain pleasure centers of the brain, can ease the pain of people battling the wasting of AIDS, the nausea of chemotherapy, the tremors of multiple sclerosis and the eye pressure brought about by glaucoma.
Nine states allow medicinal marijuana, seven based on the wish of voters, two based on the move of state lawmakers.
A prominent Nevada Republican acknowledges that, in the solitude of the voting booth, he voted for medicinal marijuana in 2000: "But I would deny it if anyone ever asked me," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Perhaps most revealing are the players who support pot as medication.
"The politics are what makes this so compelling," says Robert DuPont, White House drug chief under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford.
"If it were just a left-versus-right issue, it would simply be sorted out on a partisan basis and that would be it. But a lot of the left is attracted to the legalization issue, and people on the right are attracted to the libertarian argument."
No consensus
Pot foes on both sides of the political aisle castigate any of their own who support medicinal marijuana.
Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, is one of a few who each session tries - always unsuccessfully - to advance such legislation.
His annual States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act, a bill that would call off the feds from state pot initiatives, was introduced with the backing of 16 Democrats and two Republicans - Ron Paul of Texas and Dana Rohrabacher of California - will again languish in committee.
Republicans, in particular, are the party that has built its platform on law and order, and would never give the nod to legalizing the use of marijuana as a controlled substance.
"These so-called Republicans [who support medicinal marijuana laws] are really Libertarians," asserts state Rep. Ron Godbey, a New Mexico Republican. "Libertarians have never had a real platform other than to have limited government, so this is an issue they can grab on to."
He calls pot advocates "druggies," and is prepared to take his fight against the weed anywhere.
"It can be a political issue, it will be a political issue," says Mr. Godbey, a former criminal defense lawyer. "And we will make it one."
Teddy Hiteman is not a Libertarian, but a Republican.
She says so as she sits on an overstuffed couch in the $350,000, six-bedroom home she and her husband, Richard, share in suburban Henderson, Nev., a conservative enclave where gentrification is religion.
"Medicinal pot has been a godsend," she says, using it to treat the multiple sclerosis she has battled since 1992
"I never ever thought I would support pot at all," said the 49-year-old mother of four, a petite, blonde former aerobics instructor. She started smoking four years ago, just before she voted for Mr. Bush and in favor of medicinal pot on the same ballot.
"I wish we had more conservatives who would understand," she says.
There are many, and one of them was elected by voters just across the Mohave Desert, in Orange County, Calif., an area very similar in demographic and appearance to Henderson.
Mr. Rohrabacher, who hails from California's conservative Orange County, also denies any Libertarian affiliation. He favors drug testing in schools, placing him far from such a tag.
He and Texas Republican Ron Paul stand alone - officially - in support of medicinal pot.
"I have no doubt that if there were a secret ballot on this, a lot of Republicans would vote along with Barney Frank," he says, referring to the Massachusetts Democrat who has long lobbied for marijuana reform, medicinal and otherwise.
"Drug legislation has always been the exception to the [state´s rights] rule," says Mr. Rohrabacher. Marijuana is taboo in the party's ranks, he says, "even though medicinal pot is the most defensible of all stances on drugs."
Part of the culture
Mr. Stargel, the amputee construction worker in Las Vegas, is appealing his case. His state-sanctioned medical use of pot should not exclude him from other state services, he says.
"The state says it is legal, as long as a doctor prescribes it," he says, looking at his official medicinal marijuana card, which looks astoundingly like a driver's license. "So this is what the voters' will means to this state?"
Long associated in many circles with stringy-haired hippies toting colorful bongs and red-eyed irresponsibility, pot is now a fixture in American culture.
Surveys estimate that 37 percent of Americans aged 12 and older have smoked pot at least once in their lifetimes. Seventy percent, in repeated polls, approve of medicinal use of the weed.
And in addition to the approved medical status of pot in nine states, 13 states no longer make a habit of putting people in jail for smoking a joint, including Nebraska and Mississippi.
"There is still no agreement about the benevolence of marijuana, though," says Wayne Kramer, who played guitar for Detroit's revolutionary MC5. "And people still don't know what to think about it."
The weed was first outlawed in response to its prevalence among post-World War I jazz musicians and artists, who smoked "muggles," in the day's parlance. The '60s saw pot gain a higher profile with the same counterculture movement that made rock music a cultural icon.
Transcending social favor, though, is the disputed medical value of the illicit herb.
Both sides tout extensive studies of the medical merits of the weed. In one corner, the pro-medicinal lobby trots out a pivotal, government commissioned study by the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report on medical marijuana that found "a potential therapeutic value for cannabinoid drugs."
Prohibitionists cite other government-funded reports explicitly contradicting that finding and espouse a hard line against marijuana that never wavers.
Prosecutors nationwide were alerted in November that "no drug matches the threat posed by marijuana," in a letter from Scott Burns of the White House Drug Policy office. He asserted that marijuana is addictive, linked to violence, and that "marijuana is not a medicine."
The White House and its Justice Department, both Democrat and Republican, have battled with medicinal proponents for years. Dr. Barthwell calls medicinal pot a "medieval form of medicine," and proponents as "snake-oil salesmen."
Meanwhile, her boss has vacillated on medicinal marijuana.
On the presidential campaign trail in 1999, Mr. Bush said, "I believe each state can choose that decision as they so choose," in response to a reporter's question.
There is no room in his administration now for medicinal pot, and the anti-medicinal crusade of his drug policy chief, John Walters, is becoming legendary.
Just a ruse
Perhaps the best national face of the anti-pot cadre is not the podium-pounding Mr. Walters or the prohibitionist elders in Congress, but a former undercover cop who lives right here in Las Vegas.
Many people have seen Todd Raybuck, 34, a narcotics detective for the Las Vegas Police Department, giving his reasoned and sincere disdain for all drugs in public forums, from "Oprah" to CNN's "Crossfire."
Camera-ready and sound-bite smart, Detective Raybuck does away with the anti-weed fervor in favor of his quiet, assured statements.
"The people who are sick are being made into martyrs by these pro-marijuana groups," he says. "The real goal of groups like [National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws] and [Marijuana Policy Project] is to legalize pot, not to provide it just for sick people."
The pro-pot groups have vowed for years to make marijuana legal, but still deny Detective Raybuck's accusation.
"Our support for medicinal marijuana has always been separate from recreational," says Keith Stroup, executive director of the District-based NORML. "We do our best to keep them separate."
Detective Raybuck is aware of the popular voter sentiment in favor of medicinal pot, which is giving, even now, he and his fellow pot-fighters a tough time even getting elected officials on their side.
"They are all worried about getting re-elected, and it is hard to get re-elected when you oppose something that 70 percent of the people are shown to favor," says Detective Raybuck, who is decidedly Republican.
A fiery partisan, Nevada state Assembly member Chris Giunchigliani, a leading architect of Nevada's medicinal law, agreed: The conflict is cultural dressed up in the cloak of politics.
"It's as if it's a battle between those who enjoy a good glass of Chardonnay and people who want to see a new medicine on the market," the lawmaker said. "It really is not a partisan issue at all."
-------- ACTIVISTS
God's work facing man's judgment
As sentencing looms for missile protest, sisters don't regret their 'joyful' disobedience
Eric Gorski,
Denver Post Religion Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E6439%7E1522110,00.html
AP Photo / Al Goldis - Sister Ardeth Platte, left, shares a moment with Sister Sue Eichhorn of Lansing, Mich., after Platte spoke to a group in Grand Rapids about the protest at a Weld County missile silo that resulted in criminal convictions.
http://media.mnginteractive.com/media/paper36/0720sisters.jpg
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - In the basement of their motherhouse, in a section of the red-brick building that once teemed with boarding- school girls, the Dominican sisters maintain a display tracing their 126-year history.
It starts with a picture of a sister in full habit baking bread at an orphanage in the 1940s and ends with the image of a sister in street clothes being arrested after throwing her own blood at the Pentagon.
The one in handcuffs is Carolyn Gilbert, a few years and jail stints ago. With her bookish glasses, she looks like the junior high teacher she once was.
On Friday, Gilbert, 55, and fellow Grand Rapids Sisters Ardeth Platte, 67, and Jackie Hudson, 68, will stand before a federal judge in Denver and be sentenced in a case that has drawn international attention and launched a debate about protest and consequences in a nation on edge over terrorism.
On Oct. 6, 2002, the three sisters cut a chain-link fence and sneaked onto a Minuteman III missile silo in northeastern Colorado, where they drew crosses with their blood on the silo lid and whacked railroad tracks with hardware-store-issue hammers.
Despite the sisters' claim that their actions were symbolic, not destructive, a jury in April found them guilty of obstructing national defense and damaging government property. The maximum sentence is 30 years in prison, but prosecutors have said the sisters likely will face between five and eight years.
U.S. Attorney John Suthers, who is Catholic, said in a statement he hopes the case will serve as a deterrent to the sisters and other activists who break the law.
Nuns in orange prison jumpsuits might be hard to understand for those who grew up with "The Sound of Music." But for the three sisters, the journey from orphanage to missile silo is a natural progression.
"Whatever God asks of us, whatever we have to sacrifice, we will do it, and we will do it with joy," Platte told her fellow sisters during a visit to Grand Rapids.
The sisters believe nuclear weapons are the "taproot" of social and economic injustice because the billions of dollars spent on them could go to programs for the poor and needy. Standing against militarism, they say, is a way to challenge skewed priorities that cause orphanages and soup kitchens to exist in the first place.
Their methods come with risk and, from some quarters, scorn.
Since the 1960s, Catholic sisters have engaged in social activism ranging from civil-rights marches to siding with migrant farmworkers. But relatively few break the law, and some newer conservative religious orders shun activism.
To critics, the three sisters are the last of a generation, part of a culture of rabble-rousing that has contributed to the steep decline in religious vocations. To supporters, they are courageous, dedicated, faithful, wise - even martyrs.
Gilbert, Hudson and Platte took their vows during a different era, when career choices for women were limited and the convent meant freedom.
The three sisters, all of whom grew up in devoutly Catholic communities in Michigan, changed with the times and with evolving notions of Catholic sisterhood.
"These are extraordinary women," said Elizabeth McCalister, the widow of celebrated peace activist Philip Berrigan. "They are game and willing, they work hard, they think deeply and see to the center of issues. They couldn't do all the issues well. They found the one issue that affects everyone."
Also called the "order of preachers," Dominicans are known for simple, austere living. Gilbert, Hudson and Platte often speak of their community's charism, or spiritual gift: the search for "veritas," or truth.
Their vocations began here, on 34 acres set among Douglas firs and a nameless stream, where several of the 80 sisters in residence are confined to nursing-home beds, and the soothing sounds of women saying the rosary float out from the chapel every day.
The Dominican motherhouse sits on the edge of Grand Rapids, a sleepy, conservative city of 200,000 that is home to direct-sales giant Amway, nationally renowned furniture-making companies and a thriving evangelical Christian community that includes Calvin College and the national anti-abortion group Baptists for Life.
As a girl in Saginaw, Jackie Hudson attended a school run by Dominican sisters. Sisters didn't drive then, and Jackie often accompanied her mother taking a sister to a farm to buy eggs and chickens. Her father had attended seminary as a young man and said the rosary on his knees every night.
Ardeth Platte was raised in Westphalia, Mich., a small community of German farmers. Her father was a World War II veteran and a missionary.
"I kept being asked, 'Have you ever thought about being a sister?' I said, 'Always,"' Platte said. "I had this desire to be totally free to serve God and people without restraints."
Carolyn Gilbert grew up in small Traverse City in northern Michigan. She graduated high school in 1965 and became a sister, teacher, liturgist and poet.
"I grew up in an era when the idea was to serve other people, to volunteer your time, to give your life," Gilbert said. "I also grew up at a time when women were stay-at-home moms, and I saw religious women as being at the forefront. They were the principals of schools. They were teachers. I saw them as some of the freest people in the world. They didn't have the responsibility to husband and children. Their responsibility was to the larger community."
All three sisters took up teaching. But their priorities, and those of their church and community, changed.
In the 1960s, religious life in the United States was transformed by church social documents and the second Vatican council, which modernized church practices. The Vatican encouraged religious orders to work on poverty and justice issues and reconsider their missions.
After the council, many sisters stopped wearing habits to knock down barriers with the broader community. Several moved into inner-city neighborhoods or became Latin American missionaries.
Said Platte: "We rejected the patriarchy, and we became a circle, everyone in the circle giving their God-given gifts."
For Platte, that meant running a rape crisis center and a school for dropouts. In 1973, believing that government was a force for change, she was elected to the City Council in Saginaw, Mich.
During Platte's 12-year term, including two as mayor pro-tem, she fought business tax incentives and what she viewed as efforts to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods, said Pamela Leckie, who was elected at the same time.
"She is stubborn, stubborn," Leckie said. "The businessmen would complain about her, and I would say, 'At least you know where Ardeth is coming from.' She never waffled, which I think is admirable."
The other two sisters took less prominent paths. Hudson taught piano and vocals for 25 years before starting her activism by working on behalf of orchard workers in western Michigan. Gilbert followed Platte to Saginaw and helped start the Home for Peace and Justice there.
Their shift to nuclear activism took place when cruise missiles arrived in Michigan in 1983.
The sisters say their stance is grounded in the Ten Commandments: Thou shall not kill, steal, or worship false gods, which in this case were "false Gods of metal."
"If you're going to worship the one true God and believe in God's family, believe in creation, we had to stop all that destroys it," Platte said.
Platte and Gilbert moved to towns outside two Great Lakes missile bases. They distributed leaflets, prayed and served time - from a few hours to six months - in jail.
The closure of the Michigan nuclear sites in the 1990s prompted the moves of Gilbert and Platte to Baltimore's Jonah House activist community and Hudson to Poulsbo, Wash., near a Trident submarine base. Hudson drove a transit bus and tuned pianos to support herself.
In September 2000, the sisters spilled blood and pounded hammers on an $18 million fighter jet at an air show at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Felony charges against them were dropped when it was determined the damage totaled less than $100.
The action was classic Plowshares, an anti-war movement that has staged 75 nonviolent and symbolic "actions" against military targets since 1980. The movement takes its name from passages in Isaiah and Micah that speak of "beating swords into plowshares."
The action at the Weld County silo last October was staged to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the start of the U.S. war against Afghanistan.
The sisters use blood in their actions because of its symbolism: It gives life on one hand, and on the other it is spilled in war. Jesus gave his blood so others could live, the sisters say; so did the sisters, with the help of doctor friends who drew it from their arms.
The sisters prayed and sang for an hour before soldiers with automatic weapons arrested them.
At trial, the judge rejected the sisters' citation of the Nuremberg international war crimes tribunal, which recognized that people have an obligation under international law to break domestic law to prevent their country's crimes against humanity.
The sisters were convicted, and they decided against appeal, which they feared would set legal precedent damaging to other activists.
U.S. Attorney Suthers, in a statement, said: "No other country on Earth provides as many avenues for peaceful and lawful protest as does the United States. But the defendants insist on unlawfully entering onto highly sensitive government installations, damaging government property, and interfering with government operations."
Suthers said the sisters have taken similar actions before and were not deterred by lighter sentences.
The sisters' advocates respond that the prosecution was an attempt to silence criticism of the Bush administration's hunger to wage war. Civil disobedience, they say, is an American birthright dating to the Boston Tea Party.
Yet within the Catholic sisterhood, there is disagreement about whether the sisters went too far.
Sister Mary McGreevy, chair of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, said activism fits with church teaching, but civil disobedience that puts the sisters and others in danger does not.
"Sometimes these actions seem to create stronger polarization and a greater determination on both sides that they're right," said McGreevy, whose group represents 100 more traditional communities in which sisters generally wear habits and focus on teaching and health care. "Without question, there is something inherently wrong in killing one another. But we have to be able to speak in a reasoned way."
The three sisters say their case has invigorated activists, not deterred them. On July 26, activists plan to return to Weld County and "symbolically disarm" another nuclear weapons system.
On the other hand, some Grand Rapids residents upset with their actions have urged people to withhold donations to the community.
"You never know the ripple of an action," Gilbert said. "The important thing is that we brought our spirit of nonviolence to a violent place. Because of our presence for even a short time on that missile silo, I think that spirit is somehow still there."
The sisters' visit to Grand Rapids last month fell on Pentecost Sunday, one of the holiest Christian holidays. At home, the tears came easily.
Platte stood at a podium. She thanked the community that gave birth to her vocation, nurtured her as a teacher, politician and activist, and led her to a Colorado missile silo and a prison cell.
"God," she said, "you can take me now."
----
PROTEST
Women in Black: in an hour, a silent witness for peace
By CHARITY VOGEL,
Buffalo News Staff Reporter,
7/20/2003
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20030720/1026040.asp
Photo: AMY YOUNG/Buffalo News Pat Shelly puts her politics into words during a Women in Black demonstration. The protests often are met with hostility from passers-by.
http://www.buffalonews.com/graphics/2003/07/20/0720pshelly_COLOR.jpg
Jean Dickson stands because her son is Arab-American.
Aimee Goldberg was in New York City on 9/11 and was devastated by the destruction.
Roxanne Amico stands because her father was born in Sicily and lived under fascism before immigrating to Buffalo.
The simple fact that these women are still standing, at all, strikes some people as odd.
After all, the group Women in Black - which stands in a silent vigil for peace on Elmwood Avenue every Saturday - first formed in Buffalo in the grim months after Sept. 11, 2001.
Now that the war in Iraq is largely over, their presence strikes some as incongruous - not to mention unpatriotic.
"They hate the military, these people," fumed Peter Catania, a Buffalo retiree who recently started his own one-man protest of the protesters. He now stands at the intersection every week, too, holding a homemade sign that reads "No more peace groups."
But Women in Black of Buffalo aims to stick around for a while.
And their visibility is about to increase: A documentary film about them will debut in Buffalo this fall.
Ask the members of Women in Black why they stand together for an hour each week, and they explain that their reasons go much deeper than any single military conflict.
They have personal motivations, as well as political ones, for donning all-black clothing and taking up positions on a city street corner.
It isn't pleasant work. They take a lot of abuse.
An hour on the sidewalk watching Women in Black reveals a lot about the members of the group - and a lot about Buffalo itself.
Last Saturday, 23 black-garbed women and seven men gathered on the sidewalk at Elmwood Avenue and Bidwell Parkway, near a coffee shop, a bookstore, and a bustling farmers' market set up on the green.
Sharply at noon, members of the group arranged themselves in a straight line. In silence, they held up homemade signs bearing slogans promoting peace. "Dissent is democratic," read one sign. Another read, "Support our troops, bring them home."
That's the group's main message: peace throughout the world, and an end to U.S. aggression around the globe.
Now an international movement, Women in Black began in 1988 when Israeli and Palestinian women in the Middle East decided to stand together in a wordless vigil for peace - wearing black clothing, a symbol of mourning.
Today there are Women in Black groups throughout the United States, though no national organization unites the groups. Each unit, in that sense, stands alone.
In 2001, the Women in Black movement was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
"There's an element of theater to it," said Amico, a Buffalo resident. "Even without words, there's a message."
And that message creates quite a stir. Of the hundreds of cars that flowed through the intersection during the vigil hour Saturday, some offered a positive reaction - drivers honked their horns or gave a quick peace sign.
But many more of the cars carried people who yelled insults at the group members. The black line got flashed the middle finger over and over. Some people drove around the block so they could buzz past twice, hollering abuse.
During last Saturday's vigil, here is some of what the group heard: "Losers!" "Turncoats!" "People are dying for you!"
The favorite jeer, among members of the group, is this one: "Get a job!"
They demonstrate on Saturday, they point out, because they have jobs during the week.
U.S. peace activism
Women have been involved in promoting peace in the United States for decades, experts said, and in that sense Women in Black is not radically different.
"There's a long history of the women's peace movement, especially going back to World War I, and then after World War I," said Susan K. Cahn, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo. "In the 1920s, women's peace organizations were some of the most common activities women activists engaged in."
A snapshot of women's peace activism through the years reveals:
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1915 by Jane Addams. The Philadelphia-based organization is still in operation.
Women's "peace camps" in the 1970s and 1980s, in which groups of women set up camp near military-related facilities.
Eleanor Roosevelt as a proponent of peace, according to Cahn, who teaches courses on U.S. women's history at UB.
"She was writing and speaking right out about peace," Cahn said. "She really had her own voice."
What makes Women in Black unique is its international reach and its independence.
Groups exist around the world, including in Israel, England, Italy, Spain, Australia and New York City. All are free-standing, independent local movements. Women in Black has no membership roster, no elected leadership and no dues.
In Buffalo, Women in Black protesters occasionally stage a demonstration at a site other than Elmwood. In 2001, for example, they protested at UB on the night former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright gave a speech.
Any woman - men are allowed, too, in the Buffalo group - can just show up and participate, said Amico, the local member.
"Not all of us do it every Saturday," she said, "and sometimes people show up that we don't know."
Individual reasons
Amico said her background as a first-generation American makes her aware that other groups in the United States are not as lucky as her father was when he immigrated from fascist Italy in 1928. He found refuge in Buffalo, she said.
But other immigrant groups are now being investigated and deported in this country, Amico said.
"The same thing could have happened to my father and his family," she said.
David Hamilton, a Buffalo retiree, has stood with the group for 11/2 years. He cares about peace in the Middle East, and he wants his children to know what he stands for - that he's about action, not just words.
"I felt this was a way to raise my voice," Hamilton said. "I have to be able to be a role model."
Tanya Saylor, a graduate student in social work at UB, stands with the group because she wants to participate in an active way in promoting peace - something she hopes to be involved with, on a policy level, when she finishes her degree.
It took a few times observing the group before she felt comfortable participating, said Saylor, a Michigan native.
"I really wanted to make sure it wasn't a confrontational, radical group," she said. "I wanted to make sure it was a peace vigil."
Aimee Goldberg, at 26 one of the group's younger members, lived in New York City for eight years, including during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Seeing that destruction made Goldberg realize "what our bombs do to other people."
Stories like those are some of the reasons a local filmmaker is crafting a documentary about Buffalo's Women in Black group.
Upcoming documentary
The 40-minute film will debut this fall, said Vince Mistretta of the Ricecooker, a Buffalo film company.
He said he has captured great footage over the past several months, including film of a man who turned up one Saturday with a digital camera and proceeded to take close-up pictures of the faces of every woman and man in the line. They don't know who the man was, said Mistretta.
Hopefully, he said, the film will go on to reach audiences around the country, possibly even convincing people in other cities to start their own Women in Black groups.
"It's turning out to be a video about free speech," he said. "People standing with signs can be very threatening to people."
e-mail: cvogel@buffnews.com
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