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NUCLEAR
Dutch MPs and SFIR troops not Informed about use of depleted uranium
Here We Go Again... Unintended medical consequences?
War's unintended effects
CNY families worry about those in Iraq
Are American soldiers in Iraq dying due to depleted uranium?
U.N. Nuke Experts Begin Talks With Iran
Iran Closes in on Building Nuke Bomb - Report (Reuters)
Iran's Khamenei to Have Last Say on Nuclear Checks
Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb (LA Times)
US will press Pyongyang at talks
We will start testing nuclear bombs, says defiant N Korea
North Korea bans Bolton from talks
N. Korea Seeks to Exclude U.S. Official From Talks
Pentagon Nuclear Arms Session Worries Critics
Uranium oxide: Yellowcake not all it's cooked up to be
NRC approves restart of South Texas nuke
Report Says Powell to Step Down in 2005
Calling for Candor
MILITARY
Taliban Are Killing Clerics Who Dispute Holy War Call
West Africans set to deploy
First Contingent of African Peacekeepers Arrives in Liberia
Peace Force Set to Land In Liberia 300 From Nigeria Are Expected Today
Israeli firm wins public telephone contract in Iraq
Israeli High Tech Targets U.S. Security Market
Jobs here, there, everywhere
Comparing the US and the EU Constitutions
Mission to Iraq rattles Poles
Meet the New Boss ...
Iraqi president looks forward to exit of Americans
Who will police the police?
With Iraqi Courts Gone, Young Clerics Judge
New Iraq Army Recruits to Begin Training
Iraqi Shiites fighting war 'of the soul'
State proposes cut in Israel loans
Security more important than human rights in marriage law: minister
Israeli Prisoner List Disappoints Palestinians
In Israel, Settlers Resist
Nato to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed: ISAF
Danger begins when guns amnesty runs out
Pakistani Spokesman Blasts U.S. Official
More than 5,000 prisoners in Iraq: US military police
The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded
War casualties overflow Walter Reed hospital
How To Sell a War
Poll: Britons Trust BBC More Than They Trust Blair
Whistleblower on Niger uranium claim accuses White House
Bush's WMD Flimflams
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Republicans Put Immigration Laws Back on Political Agenda
Pentagon rules keep lawyers away from military trials
Illuminating D.C.'s Darkest Corners
Initiatives Aim to Halt Cycle of Felons Returning to Jail
Ashcroft: Al Qaeda Remains a Threat
OTHER
House Democrats Question President's Clear Skies Claims
ACTIVISTS
Get involved now, Ralph Nader tells college activists
I Was Detained by Airport Cops
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Dutch MPs and SFIR troops not Informed about use of depleted uranium in south Iraq
Maarten H.J. van den Berg,
RISQ, 4 August 2003
Electronic Iraq
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1006.shtml
As Dutch peacekeepers are arriving in the Southern province of Al Muthanna to join the UN-backed 'stabilisation force' in Iraq (SFIR), the government has unduly assured MPs that no DU ammunition was used in the area during the recent conflict. If this information comes from US officials, as the Dutch government claims, it has been deceived--and misinformed parliament.
This is the conclusion of a report by RISQ Associate Maarten H.J. van den Berg. Already, the report has led Dutch MPs to pose questions to the Minister of Defence, and a television program in which one of the US soldiers mentioned in the report reaffirms that the use of DU ammunition in the area was "standard procedure". Report Summary:
As the UN-backed 'stabilisation force' in Iraq (SFIR) is taking shape, Dutch marines are arriving in South Iraq. The troops, 1100 in total, will be stationed in the southern province of Al Muthanna. Apart from the Netherlands, other countries that have agreed to participate in SFIR include Poland, Italy and Japan whereas India recently decided not to sent any troops, unless a more explicit UN mandate were to materialize. Of course, the mission is not without risks. As the ongoing assaults on US troops in and around Baghdad and the recent killing of six British troops indicate, post-Saddam Iraq is all but stable and secure. Nonetheless, the Dutch government assured concerned MPs, "the security situation in the South of Iraq may be described as reasonably stable".
Some MPs raised questions about the use of DU (depleted uranium) during the war, and its repercussions for the safety of civilians and army personnel in the area. On this issue, too, the government assured, there was no cause for concern as "no significant fighting has taken place in the province of Al Muthanna". Besides that, according to Minister of Defence, no DU ammunition was used in the area during the recent conflict.
The assertion that no significant fighting took place in the area is so blatantly belied by open sources, that one wonders if any of the Ministers ever reads a newspaper. The capital of the province, As Samawah, is strategically located on the road from Basra to Baghdad, providing access to a bridge over the Euphrates river. Consequently, on its march to Baghdad, the US army anticipated some resistance there. In fact, it would encounter rather fierce resistance both from Iraqi forces, including Saddam Feyadeen paramilitaries and Baath party militias, as well as a group of Syrian volunteers, according to American officers . Reportedly, it took just one day to take the bridge but more than a week before the town and the road were cleared of all 'pockets of resistance' . 112 civilians, most of them inhabitants of As Samawah, were killed in the battle.
Despite such incidents, the Dutch government persists in depicting Al Muthanna as a remote, barely inhabited desert where no noteworthy events have occurred. In fact, as far as recent military activities are concerned, it was part and parcel of the 'theatre of operations'.
For that matter, the assertion that "no DU ammunition was deployed in Al-Muthanna" is also unfounded. If this assertion is based on information it received from US officials, as the Dutch government claims, it has been deceived. On the 12th of March, about a week before his troops set foot on Iraqi soil, Major General "Buff" Buford Blount III, commander of the US army 3rd Infantry Division already conveyed in an interview with Le Monde that "if we receive the order to attack, final preparations will only take a few days. We have already began to unwrap our depleted uranium anti-tank shells." That order came shortly, and as the Division advanced to Baghdad along the Euphrates, its Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles (BFVs) did not leave their unwrapped DU-shells sit idle on the way. On March 26, at CENTCOM Headquarters, General Brooks admitted as much, although he stressed that only "a very small portion of our munitions [contain] depleted uranium".
Be that as it may, it is a fact that DU-ammunition has been widely used during operation "Iraqi Freedom", also in Southern Iraq. Al Muthanna is no exception: the usage of DU-ammunition in and around the capital of the province, As Samawah, has been confirmed by US troops and 'embedded' journalists. In a widely distributed field message, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Cooper reports that the weapon systems used by the 3rd Infantry 7th Cavalry en route to As Samawah and on to Najaf, "are performing well, especially the 25mm DU and 7.62" . In a letter sent home, E. Pennell, crew member on a BFV of the 1st Infantry Battallion, 41st Infantry regiment, describes how his crew fires a 25 mm DU-round as they encounter seven enemy troops in the town of As Samawah: "We fire five rounds. The first one is a depleted uranium due to standard operating procedures". Such reports suggest that DU ammunition was routinely employed in encounters with armoured enemy vehicles, also in urban environments.
Whereas the deployment DU ammunition on the ground may have been subject to some operational restrictions, airborne DU ordnance has been fired less discriminately. The aircraft of choice for close air support to ground battles has been the A-10 "Wharthog" jet, notorious for its anti-tank missiles and its lethal 30 mm cannons that can fire up to 4200 rounds per minute. Accordingly, the aircraft is designed to carry lots of ammunition, both DU as well as 'conventional', high explosive (HE) rounds, typically fed into its guns in a mix of 5/6 or 5/8 (DU/HE) . Data released by the US Air Force recently, establish that the Warthogs have shot 311,597 rounds of 30 mm ordnance during the war , which would suggest that they have delivered at least 194,748 DU rounds. As each cartridge contains just over 300 grams of depleted uranium, this amounts to a minimum release of 58,814 kilograms of DU.
In Southern Iraq the Warthogs have played an important, supporting role in efforts to control strategic locations such as Tallil airbase and the bridges over the Euphrates. In the battle of Samawah, too, Warthogs have been called in to help ground troops mob up resistance and capture the two bridges there. In one of the incidences, vehicles of the 3rd Infantry 7th Cavalry reportedly drew friendly fire from Warthog aircraft, during a strike on a junk yard in town.
Since the US government has so far not disclosed any exact numbers, it is yet unknown just how much DU has been used in the war. The British government has been a bit more forthcoming, admitting that British Challenger tanks expended 1.9 tons of DU (approximately twice as much as in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict) . On the basis of the available information Dan Fahey, an independent DU expert, estimates that 100-200 tons of DU may have been released during combat . If true, this would be significantly less than the total of approximately 290 tons shot in 1991. However, as Mr Fahey and others note, this time a larger share of the expenditure appears to have occurred in or around urban areas and, thus, increasing the potential for civilian exposure to DU.
Indeed, all over Iraq, the remains of spent DU shells and DU-contaminated debris have been found littering the streets in urban areas. Some wrecked vehicles have been towed away, and the most obvious contaminated sites are marked. However, most locations have not even been identified let alone cleaned, even though there is a widely shared consensus that DU contamination can be a potential health hazard.
After all, DU is a radioactive and toxic heavy metal which, like any other metal, is disposed to corrode and may, therefore, end up in the water supply or food chain . Apart from that, DU ammunition and armour ignites on impact, resulting in a very fine, radioactive and toxic dust that can be inhaled or ingested. Once in the body, DU may cause harm due to the exposure of internal organs to its chemical toxicity, radiation or the combined effects of both.
As of yet, though, little is known about the long-term health effects of exposure to DU contamination. To minimize the risk of exposure, US and UK troops have been instructed to stay away from potentially contaminated areas as much as possible or to wear, at least, respiratory protection and gloves when it is inevitable to enter such sites .
We may assume that Iraqi civilians stand to bear the same health risks as US or UK troops. However, there is no indication that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has properly informed the population about DU contamination. The British Ministry of Defence merely affirms that Iraqi locals have been warned "that they should not go near or touch any debris they find on the battlefield" . Perhaps this would have sufficed, were it not for the fact that quite a few battles have been fought in densely populated areas, where it is virtually impossible for residents to avoid all remnants of war. It is thus indispensable that DU contaminated debris is clearly marked, fenced off or, preferably, cleaned up, and that citizens receive proper safety instructions.
Now, at least the British government has agreed to provide details of UK DU firing locations to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and directly to recognised non-government organisations working on location . It has also assumed some responsibility for clean-up and decontamination . In contrast, the US government has so far denied any responsibility for DU clean-up in Iraq. To date, it has also refused to disclose any information about the quantities and locations of DU expenditure or allow a UNEP Post Conflict Assessment Unit to study the environmental impact of DU contamination.
In fact, if we are to believe the Dutch government, the only specific information that the US authorities have disclosed so far is that no DU-ammunition has been used in the province of Al Muthanna. As we have demonstrated, there is ample evidence to the contrary. Consequently, either the Dutch government has deceived parliament or it has been misinformed by US authorities. Either way, the question remains as to how much DU has been fired and where exactly-both in Al Muthanna as well as Iraq at large. As long as such basic issues are not addressed, it is not possible to assess the health risks of DU contamination, let alone claim that these are negligible.
Of course, the lack of reliable information bears, before all, on concerns about the health and safety of the Iraqi population but it also implicates coalition troops and the newly arriving SFIR units. The main problem is that the troops only know of areas contaminated more than ten years ago, during the Gulf War in 1991. About areas that have been contaminated recently, they have received no information.
----
Here We Go Again...
Agent Orange, Gulf War Illness, and now....?
By Geoff Metcalf
http://www.sierratimes.com/03/08/04/metcalf.htm
http://www.americandaily.com/nucleus/plugins/print/print.php?itemid=1894
Associated Press reports, "The Army is trying to figure out what is causing a rash of serious pneumonia cases, including two fatalities, among soldiers serving in Iraq." A team of specialists has been sent to Iraq to investigate over a dozen cases of pneumonia sufficiently serious to put the soldiers on ventilators to breathe and to be evacuated from the area.
The Army reports that two soldiers have died, nine recovered and three are still hospitalized. Is this normal? The Army Surgeon General says, given the number of troops deployed, 100 cases "do not exceed expectations."
Maybe...But who's expectations and based on what data?
- Are expectations based on forecasting statistics for depleted uranium munitions exposure?
- Or assorted vaccines?
- Are the pneumonia incidents routine?
- Or statistical anomalies?
For at least 72 years our government has engaged in highly questionable (unethical) medical experimentation. The same kind of stuff they make movies out of and that we have vilified the Japanese and Germans for doing, our government has done (and arguably continues to do).
I wrote about this back in January, "The Mushroom Policy: Human Experimentation", but it bears repeating.
It is easy to "pooh-pooh" any "mad scientists" suggestions as mere "conspiracy theory" hogwash. However, a litany of FACTS should disabuse a reasonable person of the conspiratorial fiction line when you review history.
Washington Post Matriarch the Late Katherine Graham once said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
The list is too long to chronicle but here is an incomplete (edited) generational overview:
The 30s:
- Starting in at least 1931 "Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with cancer cells."
- In 1932 there was the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
- Three years later The Pellagra Incident.
The 40s:
- In 1942 Chemical Warfare Services started mustard gas experiments on approximately 4,000 servicemen.
- A few years later "Program F" is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production.
- In 1947 the CIA started to study LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) are used with and without their knowledge.
The 50s:
- One of the most outrageous experiments was conducted in 1950. The purpose was to determine how susceptible an American city would be to biological attack. To find out, the U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Francisco. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.
- A year later the Department of Defense began open-air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests lasted through 1969.
The 60s:
- In 1960 The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence authorized field-testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East.
- Five years later prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange used in Viet Nam.
The 70s:
- In 1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirmed that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included
- San Francisco
- Washington, D.C.
- Key West
- Panama City
- Minneapolis
- St. Louis.
The 80s:
A 1986 report to Congress revealed that the U.S. Government's (then) current generation of biological agents included: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines.
The 90s:
- In 1990 over 1500 six-month old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.
- Another report was issued in 1994 by Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances.
- Just six years ago eighty-eight members of Congress signed a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.
Benjamin Franklin said, "A nation of well informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights that God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins!"
----
War's unintended effects
Use of depleted uranium weapons lingers as health concern
By LARRY JOHNSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER FOREIGN DESK EDITOR
Monday, August 4, 2003
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/133581_du04.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The ideal legacy of the war in Iraq is a free and democratic society, but a sinister legacy of another kind is possible as well -- cancers and birth defects.
Depleted uranium weapons used by the U.S.-led forces in the war have left battle sites throughout Iraq contaminated with abnormally high levels of radiation.
A war-damaged Iraqi tank near a school in Baghdad
Zoom Dan DeLong / P-I
A war-damaged Iraqi tank rests along the highway next to a school on the outskirts of Baghdad. Depleted uranium weapons were used in populated areas in Iraq.
Although there is no firm consensus, nuclear experts and laymen alike generally agree that depleted uranium, which is toxic as well as radioactive, is at the very least a potential cause of cancers and birth defects. Some Iraqi physicians and others blame depleted uranium weapons used in the 1991 Gulf War for a major increase of cancers and birth defects that occurred a few years later. It is also a prime suspect for the Gulf War Syndrome that has sickened and killed thousands of U.S. veterans.
The Pentagon and United Nations estimate that U.S. and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium during attacks in Iraq in March and April -- far more than the estimated 375 tons used in the 1991 Gulf War.
U.S. tanks, Bradley fighting machines, A-10 attack jets and Apache helicopters routinely used depleted uranium rounds, but in the recent war, the ammunition was used in and near heavily populated areas, not just in the desert.
There are some studies under way that could shed more light on the effects of depleted uranium, a highly complex and poorly understood subject. Critics say DU shouldn't be used until the studies have been completed, while supporters, primarily the military, say it is critical to success on the battlefield.
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., has introduced legislation requiring the U.S. government to conduct studies of DU's effects on health and the environment, and cleanup of DU contamination in the United States. The bill, co-sponsored by 23 other Democrats, remains in committee.
He said DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.
"We continue to get these sporadic reports of various places where a lot of people are getting sick, and nobody is willing to connect the dots yet," he said. "I'm afraid we're going to have a lot of people get sick before they finally admit that depleted uranium really causes a problem for us (U.S. veterans and their families) as well as for the Iraqis."
After NATO's use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe parliamentarians called for a worldwide ban on the manufacture, testing, use and sale of weapons using depleted uranium, asserting that NATO's use of DU weapons would have "long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations." The call went unheeded.
An independent policy analyst on the use and effects of DU, in a June 24 report, was critical of both the British and the Americans for not doing more to protect their troops and civilians from DU in Iraq. But the report held criticism for those on all sides of the DU issue.
"What is clear ... is that elements of the U.S. government will manipulate information and even lie about the health of U.S. combat veterans to avoid liability for DU's health and environmental effects," said Dan Fahey, who has testified on DU at a number of congressional hearings. "Equally as clear is the willingness of some anti-DU activists to promote theories as fact, fabricate data and manipulate statistics, and exploit the suffering of people to further political or financial interests."
'A well-established risk'
In June, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer conducted tests at six sites from Basra to Baghdad, and found elevated levels of radiation at all of them. One destroyed tank near Baghdad was 1,500 times more radioactive than normal background radiation. Another was 1,400 times more radioactive than background.
To get additional evidence that DU was used on these tanks, the P-I used swabs of cloth to gather samples of residue from the blackened bullet holes on two tanks on the outskirts of Baghdad, and from the black ash on a tank in Kut.
Bruce Busby, radiation safety officer for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle analyzed the swabs. Although stressing that far more sophisticated equipment and tests are required to positively identify DU and precisely measure contamination levels, he was able to determine that the swabs had elevated levels of radioactive contamination, consistent with DU. Still, Busby is not convinced it is a severe problem in Iraq. " ... Considering all the other hazards those people are exposed to, this is a small risk," he said.
Others were more alarmed by the P-I findings.
"... if you found it (DU), it's possible kids could get it on their hands by playing on tanks, and adults could inhale re-suspended dust if salvaging equipment," Fahey said.
Tedd Weyman, deputy director of the Uranium Medical Centre, an independent research group in Canada and Washington, D.C., was also concerned about DU in Iraq.
"... Alpha emitters -- DU is one -- are carcinogenic and . . . inhalation exposure of low quantities of low-level radioactive material is a well-established risk," Weyman said. "Externally, the radioactivity travels a very short distance -- centimeters -- before fully releasing all its energy and disintegrating, (But) if inhaled and lying adjacent to cells in the body, it is a serious hazard."
Although the Pentagon has said depleted uranium is the material of choice because its density allows it to slice through heavy tank armor, the Army is currently looking at an alternative. A Florida company, Liquidmetal Technologies, says it can get comparable performance from ammunition using an exotic alloy of tungsten, and if the Army decides to switch, the new rounds could be in service within two years.
The Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, saying there have been no known health problems associated with the munition. At the same time, the military acknowledges the hazards in an Army training manual, which requires that anyone who comes within 25 meters of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection, and says that "contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption."
According to the Army Environmental Policy Institute, holding a spent DU round would expose a person to about 200 rem per hour. That's a level of radiation equivalent to receiving eight chest X-rays per hour, said to Tom Carpenter, director of the Government Accountability Project's Nuclear Oversight Campaign. That's also twice the annual radiation exposure limit allowed by the Washington state.
The Environmental Protection Agency Web site says, "There is no firm basis for setting a 'safe' level of exposure (to radiation) above background. Most regulatory and advisory bodies around the world (including EPA) assume that any exposure carries some risk and that the risk increases as the exposure increases."
The April issue of New Scientist magazine reported that Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., has discovered the first direct evidence that radiation from DU can damage chromosomes. "The chromosomes break, and the fragments reform in a way that results in abnormal joins. Both the breaks and the joins are commonly found in tumor cells," the article says. The implication is that it could cause cancer.
Miller's work suggests that the toxic nature of DU, combined with its radioactivity, could produce effects more dire than either of those characteristics acting alone.
"I think that we assumed that we knew everything that we needed to know about uranium. (But) This is something we have to consider now when we think about risk estimates," the article says.
Cancer on the rise
Researchers aren't the only ones concerned.
The U.S. and British use of DU during the latest conflict, also alarms doctors in Iraq. Cancer had already increased dramatically in southern Iraq. In 1988, 34 people died of cancer; in 1998, 450 died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths. The rate of birth defects also had risen sharply, according to doctors in Iraq.
Now, doctors in Iraq say, the number of cancers and birth defects may be "devastating."
"This is the right time for active support to help prevent the catastrophic effects of the bombing," said Dr. Alim Yacoub, on his last day as dean of the Al Mustansiriya Medical School in Baghdad.
"It is the right time for our U.S. friends to alleviate the consequences of depleted uranium and dirty weapons," he said.
"If there isn't a centralized health plan soon, the consequences could be devastating," said Yacoub, the foremost Iraqi authority on the effects of DU. Yacoub has tracked the rise of cancer in Iraq for years, and places the blame squarely on DU.
"For the past 12 years, we have only been able to watch what's going on in this country, now it is time for a comprehensive health plan for cleaning up DU and for treating cancer," he said. Yacoub has carefully preserved his studies and is eager to present them to other researchers.
From the cancer ward at the Mother and Child Hospital in Basra, Dr. Janan Ghalib Hassan has also tracked the rise in cancer in Iraq, primarily in the south, for years. It is a phenomena that she also says is most likely caused by the DU used by U.S. forces in the Gulf War in 1991.
"I worked here in this hospital in 1980 and never saw so much cancer, but after 1991, I started to see many more cancer cases," Hassan said.
She said that because the incubation period for cancer is about five years, the effects of the latest war should start showing up in 2008. "I think the number of cancer cases will be as much as 10 times or more higher," she said. "It is a crime; a crime."
FOR MORE INFORMATION
DEPLETED URANIUM
WHAT IT IS:
Depleted uranium is a highly dense, toxic and radioactive metal that is the byproduct of the process during which fissionable uranium used to make nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is separated from natural uranium. The U.S. uses it for bullets and shells.
WHAT IT DOES:
Depleted uranium contains the highly toxic U-238 isotope, which has a radioactive half-life of about 4.5 billion years. As U-238 breaks down, an ongoing process, it creates protactinium-234, which radiates potent beta particles that may cause cancer as well as mutations in body cells that could lead to birth defects.
HOW IT SPREADS:
When a depleted uranium round hits a hard target, as much as 70 percent of the projectile can burn on impact, creating a firestorm of depleted uranium particles. The toxic residue of this firestorm is an extremely fine insoluble uranium dust that can be spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain. Once in the soil, it can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.
Photo: Outside Kut in southern Iraq, two young Iraqi men remove parts from one of the many tanks in the area. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20030804/226DUiraqXX_mentank.jpg
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Dan Fahey report: http://www.antenna.nl/~wise/uranium/dissgw.html#DFIQ03
New Scientist article: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993627
Uranium Medical Research Centre: http://www.umrc.net
U.S. Department of Defense: http://www.defenselink.mil
National Gulf War Resource Center: http://www.ngwrc.org/Dulink/du_link.htm
A P-I special report on Iraq: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/iraq2003
P-I foreign desk editor Larry Johnson can be reached at 206-448-8035 or larryjohnson@seattlepi.com
----
CNY families worry about those in Iraq
August 04, 2003
By Pedro Ramirez III
Syracuse NY Post-Standard Staff writer
Thttp://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1059986121202614.xml
Tuesday, Maj. Thomas Downs asked nine recruits if they were ready to be sworn into the United States military.
It's a rite of passage into the nation's Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps that Downs oversees nearly every weekday. On this day he reflected upon another - Oct. 4, 2002 - when he inducted his son in the same second-floor room in downtown Syracuse into the service of the U.S. Army.
Next week, Downs' son, who is in the Army's 22nd Signal Brigade, heads to Iraq.
"They've said the compound that they're on over there does receive mortar fire every other night," Downs said.
His son's orders forced the two to have a talk parents prefer to avoid.
"If you die and your body comes back, what do you want me to do with it?" Downs recalls asking.
"I don't know. I haven't given it much thought," his son replied.
Downs suggested burial at a national cemetery because they don't have a family plot.
"That was probably the most unpleasant conversation I had to have with him," Downs said.
But Downs' faith that his son will survive is as firm as his salute.
"The odds are that he'll be OK," he said. "I got him raised. You send him off into the world, and you let God take care of the rest of it."
Sarah Lamanna remembers Downs. He swore in both her sons.
Spc. Brian Taisey is in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne.
His younger brother, Colin, leaves for training next spring.
"I don't know how much shooting's going on, but it doesn't seem very good," she said.
Her son works at checkpoints, patrols rooftops at night, ensures people don't plant explosive devices, and transports detainees, Lamanna said.
Taisey has helped pick up bodies of American soldiers and others, his father said.
They hear from Taisey about once a month.
"He told us he's doing well and not to worry," he said.
But a foolish child is a mother's grief. So Sarah Lamanna often reminds her son to refrain from foolishness over there.
"Most of my letters have the acronym for 'Don't do anything I'll have to slap you upside the head for,' " she said.
Seven to 10 recruits from Central New York ship out from Syracuse to basic training every weekday.
During the first Gulf War, U.S. forces fired about 320 tons of depleted uranium munitions.
Herman Bieling, of LaFayette, has two sons in the Army. One is safely back in the United States. The other, Staff Sgt. Daniel Bieling, is in Baghdad.
"I'll admit. I'm in denial," he said. "I just really, really couldn't handle it if I thought about it, or worried about it every minute."
Herman Bieling is a self-proclaimed pacifist. He protested the Vietnam War, and he's carried picket signs against this one. But he doesn't burden his son with it.
"I walk a real tightrope because I've got to keep the kid's head up," he said. "I just got to keep his spirits up, keep telling him I love him and appreciate him doing things for the country."
Bieling recently attended a lecture on the harmful effects of depleted uranium munitions. The lecturer told Bieling that when his son comes home he may be sick from exposure to the radioactive material.
"It worries me," Bieling said. "I wonder how much depleted uranium was used in the current conflict."
The United States and its coalition partners have put 30,000 Iraqi policemen on duty.
Nancy Mitchell's husband arrived in Iraq around the time the United States announced the major fighting was coming to an end. Col. Terry Mitchell is helping rebuild postwar Iraq.
"The big bomb-dropping, and all that, may be over," Nancy Mitchell said, "but I think we still need the infantry over there."
Letters from her husband confirm her fears.
"I'm sad to report that our command suffered more casualties yesterday," her husband wrote on July 14.
Two civil affairs soldiers were wounded when an explosive device was thrown at their Humvee, he said. One soldier's leg was so badly mangled from the knee down they couldn't save it.
The soldiers returned fire and killed one attacker, he said.
"The SAW (squad automatic weapon) gunner was a female soldier," he said, "she fired off about 200 rounds at the attackers. . . . The days of women being excluded from combat are gone."
She last spoke to her husband a week ago.
"It was just nice to talk to him, hear his voice and know he's OK," she said.
The Mitchells' two youngest sons live at home and often ask mom if she's heard from dad, especially when they hear news of more casualties.
"They kind of do not want to talk about it too much," she said.
Letters provide some comfort, but not enough, she admits.
"You get a letter and the letter is two to three weeks old," she said. "It's news to you, but still, anything could have happened in that time frame."
Coalition forces on Tuesday conducted 51 raids, 953 day patrols and 737 night patrols.
Tammy Gower, originally of Baldwinsville, keeps the worry demons at bay by staying busy where she lives in Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, Ky.
"I work 40 hours a week. That helps," she said. "You just live day by day."
Her husband, Sgt. Mark Gower, of the 101st Airborne, is in Mosul where Saddam's two sons Odai and Qusai were killed July 22.
Sometimes he goes out in convoys. Tammy Gower signs onto CNN.com a few times a day, so she knows convoys are targets.
"He says . . . where before they'd have 10 trucks, they're now having 20," she said. "I say (to him), 'That makes no sense. You're just giving them a bigger target.'
"He says 'no,' " she said.
Attackers target smaller convoys with fewer troops to shoot back.
That serves as little consolation.
"Just stay in your room. Don't go outside. Don't show your face," she tells him.
The bad news keeps coming: soldier killed in land mine attack; soldier dies in traffic accident; one killed, three wounded in convoy attack; three killed, four wounded in grenade attack.
"Until you've walked a mile in our shoes, you don't know," she said. "You check e-mail . . . which is always great when you hear something bad has happened, and then you get an e-mail from him . . . you know he's OK."
There are nearly 200,000 U.S. and coalition troops still in Iraq.
At least 12 U.S. service members were killed and 16 wounded in Iraq between July 24 and July 31.
Last week brought good news for a change to Karl and Bonnie Novak, of Cicero. Their son, 1st Lt. Jason Novak with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, is coming home.
The Novaks don't know exactly when their son is returning to Fort Stewart, Ga. The Army gave them a window of Aug. 6 to 12.
On July 14 when Jason Novak was in Al Fallujah, Iraq, he e-mailed his mother to let her know he was fine and nobody in his unit had been killed.
"The very next day I turn on the news and a soldier in Al Fallujah had been killed," she said. "It was like, 'Oh, no!' I freaked out."
Throughout this whole ordeal, Bonnie Novak's dread often lasted up to 24 hours.
"They can't release the name until they notify the family," she said. "The scary thought is what if I'm the family?"
So the hours go by. The Army releases a name, and it's not he.
"Then you feel guilty for being relieved," she said. "It's been my cycle ever since it all began in March."
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Are American soldiers in Iraq dying due to depleted uranium?
By James Conachy
4 August 2003
WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/du-a04.shtml
The office of the US Army Surgeon General informed the media July 31 that teams of medical specialists have been dispatched to both Iraq and the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany to investigate why a pneumonia-like condition is striking down American military personnel who took part in the invasion of Iraq. At least 100 soldiers have been hospitalized with severe respiratory problems since March 1. Fifteen have been so ill they have required ventilator support to stay alive. Two have died, while three reportedly remain under close supervision at Landstuhl.
Three of the critical cases occurred in March, three in April, two in May, three in June and four in July. Fourteen were Army personnel and one was from the Marines. A localized epidemic has been ruled out. The troops who have fallen ill belong to diverse units and were operating in different areas of Iraq and in at least one case in Kuwait. An Army official told reporters: "It is pneumonia. The question is, what is the cause?" According to the Army, there is no evidence that any of the cases have been caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or environmental toxins.
It is not the number of cases that is concerning the military hierarchy. According to the spokesperson of the US Army Surgeon General, there are normally nine cases of pneumonia per 10,000 US soldiers per year that are serious enough to require hospitalization. Based on that statistic, 100 cases of pneumonia in five months among the several hundred thousand army and marine personnel who were involved in the war on Iraq are only slightly higher than average.
The dispatch of the experts therefore raises disturbing questions. There is clearly something about either the nature, or the severity, of the cases the Army Surgeon General feels warrants investigation.
On July 16, the News-Leader site operating out of Springfield, Missouri published a detailed report describing the symptoms of one of the soldiers who has died from the alleged pneumonia. Josh Neusche, a 20-year-old, fit and healthy Missouri National Guardsman, collapsed in Baghdad on July 2. He was evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany. His family was informed he was suffering from pneumonia caused by fluid in his lungs. According to his mother, his liver, kidneys and muscles then began to break down. He was placed on dialysis, but fell into a coma and died on July 12.
For anyone familiar with the research into the medical effects of exposure to depleted uranium, the details of Josh Neusche's death would have to ring alarm bells. The 2001 World Health Organization report into the issue notes: "Brief accidental exposure to high concentrations of uranium hexafluoride has caused acute respiratory illness, which may be fatal." [Full report available at http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/ir_pub/en/]
Scenarios that could cause a "brief, accidental exposure to high concentrations of uranium hexafluoride" definitely would include being in the vicinity of a vehicle or building struck by depleted uranium munitions; traveling in or being in the vicinity of a vehicle that is armored with depleted uranium and sustains damage; or being involved in the cleanup of such a vehicle. The organs most affected by exposure are the lungs and kidneys.
In a July 30 article on US casualties in Iraq, the World Socialist Web Site reported the unconfirmed allegation in the July 17 Saudi newspaper Al-Watan that three US servicemen had been evacuated from Iraq suffering symptoms of depleted uranium exposure.
The WSWS noted that if this proved true, it would not be surprising. Thousands of US troops in Iraq are likely to have been exposed to DU to some degree, absorbing it either by inhaling contaminated dust or ingesting it from contaminated water, food and soil. Initial estimates are that between 100 and 200 tons of DU munitions were used in Iraq and that at least 17 incidents took place during the combat phase that would most likely have resulted in US and British personnel being exposed to high concentrations of DU particles. [See http://www.antenna.nl/~wise/uranium/pdf/duiq03.pdf]
On July 28, as part of the research for the July 30 article, "America's maimed come home from Iraq," this WSWS correspondent submitted a list of questions to the US Department of Defense, addressed to media@defenselink.mil. One of the specific questions we asked of the Department of Defense was: "Have any US military personnel been medically evacuated from Iraq due to the possible side-affects of exposure to depleted uranium?" To date, the WSWS has received no reply.
See Also:
America's maimed come home from Iraq [30 July 2003] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/maim-j30.shtml
Another US war crime: the use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq [29 May 2003] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/depu-m29.shtml
Ongoing consequences of the Gulf War: Casualties increase from use of depleted uranium [8 September 1999] http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/sep1999/gulf-s08.shtml
Depleted uranium weapons used in Balkan War expected to cause thousands of fatal cancers [5 August 1999] http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/du-a05.shtml
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail - editor@wsws.org
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U.N. Nuke Experts Begin Talks With Iran
August 4, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Experts from the U.N. nuclear watchdog began talks Monday aimed at getting Tehran to permit unrestricted inspections of its nuclear facilities even as a published report said Iran was moving toward developing a nuclear weapons capability.
The three-member legal team from the International Atomic Energy Agency was meeting Iranian government lawyers, said Saber Zaeimian, spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
The United States has accused Iran of running a clandestine nuclear weapons program and wants the IAEA to declare Tehran in violation of the non-proliferation treaty. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful, electrical power purposes.
But in a report Monday, the Los Angeles Times said Iran ``appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.''
The Times said its three-month investigation found that Iran has been involved in a pattern of activity that has concealed weapons efforts from international inspectors.
The newspaper -- citing sources ranging from previously secret reports, international officials, independent experts and Iranian exiles -- reported that Iran made use of technology and scientists from Russia, North Korea, China and Pakistan to bring it closer to building a bomb than Iraq ever was.
Among its findings, the paper said a confidential French report concluded that ``Iran is surprisingly close to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb.''
The paper also reported that samples of uranium taken by arms inspectors in June tested positive for enrichment levels high enough to be consistent with an attempt to build a nuclear weapon.
Commenting on reports of Iranian nuclear efforts, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the government is ``working with the IAEA to make sure that they do not continue on this course, which is unacceptable.''
Iran has said it would agree to unfettered inspections if it is granted access to advanced nuclear technology as provided for under the treaty. Tehran says Washington is keeping Iran from getting that technology.
In recent weeks, conservatives in Iran's Islamic establishment have said Iran would withdraw from the treaty altogether if the IAEA forces Iran to sign the protocol.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi has said Iran's withdrawal was out of question.
Monday's talks focus on an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing open inspections that the IAEA is pressing Tehran to sign, the official Islamic Republic News Agency cited Zaeimian as saying.
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Iran Closes in on Building Nuke Bomb - Report (Reuters)
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-report.html
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Iran appears to be in the late stages of building a nuclear bomb and has sought help from scientists in Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.
Citing its own three-month investigation into Iran's clandestine nuclear capacity, the Times said it had strong evidence Iran's commercial program masked a plan to become the world's next nuclear power and it was ``much closer to producing a bomb than Iraq ever was.''
Iran has consistently denied it has plans to build nuclear weapons and has said its program is for peaceful civilian use.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States was working closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure there were more thorough inspections of Iran and its weapons program.
``It is a matter that remains a serious concern. We're working with the international community. We're working with the IAEA to make sure that they do not continue on this course, which is unacceptable,'' McClellan told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush was vacationing.
The Times, in the story from Vienna, said it was unclear when Iran might produce its first atomic weapons. Some experts thought two to three years was likely while others believed the Iranian government had probably not given a final go-ahead.
In Vienna, a spokesman for the IAEA declined to comment on the story. ``We do not comment on media reports,'' spokesman Lothar Wedekind told Reuters.
The story cited a confidential report by the French government in May it said concluded Iran was ``surprisingly close'' to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb.
Reuters last month reported that U.N. nuclear inspectors found traces of enriched uranium in environmental samples taken during recent inspections in Iran.
Foreign intelligence officials told the Times the CIA had briefed them on a contingency plan for U.S. air and missile attacks against Iranian nuclear installations.
``It would be foolish not to present the commander-in-chief with all of the options, including that one,'' one of the officials was quoted as saying. The CIA declined comment on such a plan to the paper.
The newspaper said North Korean military scientists were recently monitored entering Iranian nuclear facilities and were assisting in the design of a nuclear warhead.
A Middle Eastern intelligence official was also quoted as saying Pakistan's role in helping Iran develop a nuclear program was ``bigger from the beginning than we thought.''
Russian scientists, sometimes traveling to Iran under false identities and working without their government's approval, were also helping to complete a special reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium, the paper said.
Tehran had also imported 1.8 tons of nuclear material from China in 1991 and processed some of it to manufacture uranium metal, the report said.
Another indicator Iran was in the late stages of weapons development was the fact that Tehran recently approached European companies to buy devices that could manipulate large volumes of radio-active material, technology to forge uranium metal and plutonium and switches that could trigger a nuclear weapon.
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Iran's Khamenei to Have Last Say on Nuclear Checks
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will have the final say on whether Tehran agrees to tougher U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities, a government spokesman said on Monday.
International pressure has been mounting on Iran to sign an Additional Protocol of the nuclear-Non Proliferation Treaty which would allow more intrusive, short-notice inspections of nuclear sites in the country.
Iran denies any plans to build nuclear weapons and the question of whether to sign the protocol has ignited fierce domestic debate.
``The decision about joining the Additional Protocol will be taken based on (our) national interests,'' government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told a weekly news conference.
``The matter will be discussed in the government. The decision will be made in the Supreme National Security Council and after the (Supreme) Leader's approval it would be implemented,'' he said.
Khamenei, who succeeded the founding father of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, is Iran's most powerful political figure.
Khamenei, who is often viewed as siding mostly with hardline clerics in Iran's internal power struggle between reformers and conservatives, has made no public statements recently about whether Iran should join the Additional Protocol.
Reformists allied to President Mohammad Khatami's government have begun speaking out in favor of tougher inspections.
Reformist MP Hossein Afarideh, the head of parliament's Energy Commission, was quoted on Monday as saying Iran should sign the protocol to ease international pressure on the country.
``If Iran does not join the protocol, then possibly its case will be sent to the United Nations' Security Council and then naturally the country will face more difficulties,'' he told the Seda-ye Edalat newspaper.
Hard-liners oppose signing the protocol and have even suggested Iran should pull out of the NPT altogether rather than cave in to international demands.
``If the West puts more pressure on Iran, we will withdraw from the NPT. This holds no problem for us,'' Mohammad Javad Larijani, international affairs adviser to the hardline judiciary, was quoted in the Resalat newspaper on Sunday.
A team from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency was due in Iran this week to explain to Iranian officials the benefits of signing the Additional Protocol.
Ramazanzadeh said Iran had a ``positive view'' on the talks. Tehran has insisted it should get access to Western nuclear technology to develop atomic energy in return for signing the protocol.
----
Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb (LA Times)
Tehran's reactor program masks strides toward weapons capability, a Times investigation finds. France warns against exports to Islamic Republic.
By Douglas Frantz,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 4, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nuke4aug04,1,7536926.story?coll=la-home-headlines
VIENNA - After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.
Iran insists that like many countries it is only building commercial nuclear reactors to generate electricity for homes and factories. "Iran's efforts in the field of nuclear technology are focused on civilian application and nothing else," President Mohammad Khatami said on state television in February. "This is the legitimate right of the Iranian people."
But a three-mont investigation by The Times - drawing on previously secret reports, international officials, independent experts, Iranian exiles and intelligence sources in Europe and the Middle East - uncovered strong evidence that Iran's commercial program masks a plan to become the world's next nuclear power. The country has been engaged in a pattern of clandestine activity that has concealed weapons work from international inspectors. Technology and scientists from Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan have propelled Iran's nuclear program much closer to producing a bomb than Iraq ever was.
No one is certain when Iran might produce its first atomic weapon. Some experts said two or three years; others believe the government has probably not given a final go-ahead. But it is clear that Iran is moving purposefully and rapidly toward acquiring the capability.
Among the findings:
. A confidential report prepared by the French government in May concluded that Iran is surprisingly close to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb. The French warned other governments to exercise "the most serious vigilance on their exports to Iran and Iranian front companies," according to a copy of the report provided by a foreign intelligence service.
. Samples of uranium taken by U.N. inspectors in Iran in June tested positive for enrichment levels high enough to be consistent with an attempt to build a nuclear weapon, according to a foreign intelligence officer and an American diplomat. The Reuters news service first reported the possibility that the material was weapons-grade last month.
. Iran is concealing several weapons research laboratories and evidence of past activity at a plant disguised as a watch-making factory in a Tehran suburb. In June, U.N. inspectors were refused access to two large rooms and barred from testing samples at the factory, called the Kalaye Electric Co.
. Tehran secretly imported 1.8 tons of nuclear material from China in 1991 and processed some of it to manufacture uranium metal, which would be of no use in Iran's commercial program but would be integral to weapons production.
. As early as 1989, Pakistani generals offered to sell Iran nuclear weapons technology. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear scientist regarded by the United States as a purveyor of nuclear secrets, has helped Iran for years. "Pakistan's role was bigger from the beginning than we thought," said a Middle Eastern intelligence official.
. North Korean military scientists recently were monitored entering Iranian nuclear facilities. They are assisting in the design of a nuclear warhead, according to people inside Iran and foreign intelligence officials. So many North Koreans are working on nuclear and missile projects in Iran that a resort on the Caspian coast is set aside for their exclusive use.
. Russian scientists, sometimes traveling to Iran under false identities and working without their government's approval, are helping to complete a special reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. Moscow insists that it is providing only commercial technology for the civilian reactor under construction near the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr, an assertion disputed by Washington.
. In recent months, Iran has approached European companies to buy devices that can manipulate large volumes of radioactive material, technology to forge uranium metal and plutonium and switches that could trigger a nuclear weapon. European intelligence sources said Tehran's shopping list was a strong indication that Iran has moved to the late stages of weapons development.
Regional Impact
A nuclear-armed Iran would present the United States with a difficult political and military equation. Iran would be the first avowed enemy of Israel to possess a nuclear bomb. It also has been labeled by the Bush administration as a state sponsor of international terrorism.
Iranian nuclear weapons could shift the balance of power in the region, where Washington is trying to establish pro-American governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of those nations border Iran and are places where Tehran wants to exert influence that could conflict with U.S. intentions, particularly in Iraq.
The Bush administration, which partly justified its war against Iraq by stressing concerns that Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear weapons program, calls a nuclear-armed Iran unacceptable. At his news conference Wednesday, President Bush said he hopes international pressure will convince the Iranians that "development of a nuclear weapon is not in their interests," but he added that "all options remain on the table."
Foreign intelligence officials told The Times that the Central Intelligence Agency, which has long contended that Iran is building a bomb, has briefed them on a contingency plan for U.S. air and missile attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. "It would be foolish not to present the commander in chief with all of the options, including that one," said one of the officials.
A CIA spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny that such a plan has been drafted. "We wouldn't talk about anything like that," she said.
There is precedent for such a strike. Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed a French-built nuclear reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 shortly before it was to go online. The attack set back Iraq's nuclear program and drove it underground.
Taking out Iran's nuclear infrastructure would prove tougher, said Israeli military planners and outside analysts. For one thing, the facilities are spread around the country and small installations are still secret. At least one key facility is being built to withstand conventional airstrikes.
Contacts between Washington and Tehran are very limited, and analysts said U.S. decision-making is still dominated by a distrust of Iran rooted in the taking of American hostages during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and an ideological aversion to negotiating with a regime regarded as extremist.
"The administration does not have a strategy because there is a fight in the administration over whether you should even deal with this government in Iran," said George Perkovich, a nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Inspections' Challenge
For now, the Bush administration is pinning much of its hopes of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions on the same international inspection apparatus that it blames for failing to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So far, the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency, based here in Vienna, has preferred negotiation to confrontation with Iran.
In a June 16 report to the 35 countries represented on the agency's board, its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, criticized Iran for concealing many of its nuclear activities. But he resisted U.S. pressure to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was created in 1968 to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
Inspections are continuing along with Iranian roadblocks to a thorough examination, according to officials monitoring the progress. Still, IAEA officials hope to have a clearer picture of Iran's nuclear program by Sept. 8, when a follow-up report to the board is due.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not respond to telephone requests for interviews or to written questions for this article. Iran said last year that it plans to build six civilian reactors to generate electricity for its fast-growing population of 65 million. Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi has said that allegations that Iran is concealing a weapons program are "poisonous and disdainful rumors" spread by the United States.
Iran's civilian nuclear energy program started in 1974 and was interrupted by the Islamic Revolution. It got back on track in 1995, when Russia signed an $800-million contract to complete the commercial reactor at Bushehr, which is scheduled to come online next year.
Russia also promised to sell Iran the uranium fuel to power the reactor. But Iran maintains that it wants to develop its own nuclear fuel-making capability, a position that has roused international suspicions.
Typically, nations with civilian nuclear programs buy fuel from the countries that export the reactors because the fuel-making process is complicated and expensive. In the most common way to make the fuel, uranium ore is converted to a gas and pumped into centrifuges, where rotors spinning at twice the speed of sound separate isotopes. The process concentrates, or "enriches," the uranium to the point that fission can be sustained in a reactor, which pumps out heat to drive electrical turbines.
The same enrichment process can concentrate fissionable uranium at greater levels to produce material for a bomb.
Countries that try to enrich their own uranium or manufacture plutonium in special reactors are immediately suspected of trying to join the elite nuclear arms club. Israel, India and Pakistan developed their own plants for producing fissile material for bombs under the guise of commercial reactors.
Iran agreed not to produce nuclear weapons when it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, which opened the door for it to acquire civilian reactors. The treaty does not prohibit Iran from producing or possessing enriched uranium but requires it to submit its nuclear facilities to international monitoring to ensure that materials are not diverted to weapons use.
Iran has permitted inspections of its declared commercial nuclear facilities. But last year, an Iranian exile group pinpointed a secret underground enrichment plant outside Natanz, a small mountain town about 200 miles south of Tehran known for its bracing climate and fruit orchards.
In December, the Institute for Science and International Security, a small think tank in Washington, published satellite photos of Natanz from the archives of a commercial firm, DigitalGlobe. The photos showed large-scale construction inside the perimeter of a security fence. Among the buildings were a pilot centrifuge plant and two underground halls big enough for tens of thousands of centrifuges, the institute said.
Pressure mounted to allow international monitors into Natanz, and senior IAEA officials visited the plant in February. They found 160 assembled centrifuges and components for 1,000 more. Moreover, the equipment was to be housed in bunkers 75 feet deep, with walls 8 feet thick.
The level of centrifuge development at Natanz already reflects thousands of hours of testing and advanced technological work, experts said. By comparison, Iraq had tested a single centrifuge for about 100 hours when IAEA inspectors began dismantling Baghdad's nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"They are way ahead of where Iraq was in 1991," said a U.N. official who is familiar with both programs.
Once it is up and running, Natanz could make enough material for a bomb within a year and eventually enough for three to five bombs a year, experts said.
Nuclear Neighbors
The Iranian exile group also revealed a secret site near Arak, a city of 400,000 in western Iran known as a historic center for weaving fine Persian carpets. Under international pressure, Iran conceded in February that it plans to build a special type of reactor there that will generate plutonium for research. Plutonium is the radioactive material at the heart of some of the most powerful nuclear bombs.
The disclosures cast previous Iranian government statements in a new light.
Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of an influential government council and president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, gave a speech on Dec. 14, 2001, that has been interpreted widely as both a signal that Iran wants nuclear weapons and a threat to use them against Israel. Describing the establishment of the Jewish state as the worst event in history, Rafsanjani warned, "In due time the Islamic world will have a military nuclear device, and then the strategy of the West would reach a dead end, since one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel."
Rafsanjani has since stepped back in his rhetoric, noting in a sermon on Friday that "because of religious and moral beliefs and commitments that the Koran has created for us, we cannot and will not pursue such weapons that destroy humanity."
On July 20, Iran unveiled a missile based on a North Korean design that brings Israel within range and hailed the event as an important step in protecting the Palestinians. Experts said the new missile could be armed with a small nuclear warhead, and Iran is developing a version that will carry a heavier payload.
"Today our people and our armed forces are ready to defend their goals anywhere," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said in a ceremony unveiling the missile.
Many outside experts as well as Iranians say that even reformers linked to Iranian President Khatami believe that Iran needs a deterrent against its nuclear neighbors - Israel, Russia and Pakistan - and possibly against the United States.
"These weapons would guarantee the territorial integrity and national security of Iran," Nasser Hadian, a professor at Tehran University who is aligned with the reformers, said in a telephone interview from New York, where he is teaching at Columbia University. "We feel that we cannot possibly rely on the world to provide security for us, and this is felt by all the factions."
At a symposium in Rome in early July, ElBaradei told the audience that stopping the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons depends greatly on eliminating the incentives for states to possess them. "It is instructive that the majority of the suspected efforts to acquire WMD are to be found in the Middle East, a hotbed of instability for over half a century," he said.
A senior U.N. official said he is not sure that Iran is developing a bomb. But the different fates of Iraq and North Korea, the other members of what Bush called the "axis of evil," demonstrate why countries out of favor with the United States might want a nuclear weapon, he added.
Iraq did not have a bomb and was easily invaded, he said, while North Korea claims to have a bomb and is trying to use it as a bargaining chip with the U.S. for security assurances and possibly increased aid. "If a regime has the feeling that it is not on the right wavelength with the United States, its position is to have a nuclear weapon," he said.
Iran faces numerous technological obstacles before it can produce a nuclear bomb, according to intelligence officials and independent experts. Once those problems are solved or close to being solved, some experts said they expect Iran to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty, as North Korea did, and close its doors to IAEA inspectors.
"They have made the decision to develop a breakout capability, which will give them the option to leave the treaty in the future and complete a nuclear weapon within six months or a year," said Gary Samore, director of nonproliferation programs at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former Clinton administration security official. "I think the program is probably unstoppable through diplomatic means."
Others disagree.
"I don't believe they have passed the point of no return," said Perkovich, the nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment. "We should try to reverse Iran's direction by providing better, low-cost options to fuel the Bushehr electricity plant and by easing the security concerns that make Iranians, reformers and hard-liners, interested in getting a bomb."
Diplomacy has proved an imperfect solution in the past. The Clinton administration persuaded China not to sell nuclear items to Iran in the mid-1990s. Administration officials later used sanctions and negotiations to convince Russia to curb technology transfers to Iran's civilian program that U.S. intelligence believed were being diverted to weapons work.
But Russia is committed to the Bushehr reactor, which generates 20,000 jobs for its beleaguered nuclear industry. The project also allows hundreds of Iranians to train in Russia, raising concerns within the intelligence community that knowledge and hardware for weapons work will slip through.
Officials in Moscow, outside experts and foreign intelligence officials said economics are driving continuing Russian assistance to the Iranian weapons program and that it is probably occurring without government approval. They said thousands of Russian physicists, mathematicians and other scientists are unemployed or paid a pittance at home, pushing them to sell their expertise elsewhere.
"Russian scientists are freelancing, leading to a leakage of expertise, and you can't control that," said Bobo Lo, a former Australian diplomat and associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. "That's where it gets really messy with the Iranians."
Multiple Sites
"Iran has made tremendous progress during the last two years, and according to our estimates it could reach a technical capability to create a nuclear device by 2006," said Anton Khlopkov, a nuclear expert at Moscow's Center for Policy Studies in Russia. "The problem is neither Russia nor the U.S. nor the IAEA had a clear understanding about real Iranian achievements in the nuclear field."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed the sentiment in March, saying on a CNN program, "It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders, if they really are determined to do it."
Plants as large as Natanz are not necessary to build a bomb. Once the technology is developed, as few as 500 centrifuges can enrich enough uranium for a small weapon, experts said. Hiding that number would be easy, said an IAEA official, which is why intelligence officials are concerned about several smaller, still-secret plants throughout Iran.
For example, officers from two foreign intelligence agencies said weapons research is being conducted at a plant outside Kashan. One of the intelligence officials said the plant was involved in nuclear fuel production in two large halls constructed 25 feet underground.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Paris-based exile group that revealed the Natanz and Arak sites, said in July that it had pinpointed two more weapons research locations in a rural area called Hashtgerd about 25 miles northwest of Tehran. The group is the political arm of the Moujahedeen Khalq, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group, but independent experts said its information from inside Iran has often been accurate. IAEA inspectors' requests to visit the Hashtgerd sites have been refused by Iranian authorities.
This spring, after considerable pressure from the IAEA, Iran reluctantly allowed inspectors to visit a nondescript cluster of two warehouses and smaller buildings tucked into an alley in the Tehran suburb of Ab-Ali. The place, called the Kalaye Electric Co., claimed to be a watch factory, but Iran conceded it had been an assembly point for centrifuges.
When the IAEA team arrived in March, they were refused access to the plant. A second trip in May was slightly more successful - inspectors entered the buildings, but two large rooms were declared off limits, according to new information from U.N. officials.
On June 7, inspectors returned to Iran for four days of probes at various sites. This time authorities refused to let them near Kalaye, U.N. officials said. They also were barred from using sophisticated testing equipment the team had brought from Vienna.
Such tests could detect a particle of enriched uranium within a huge radius and determine whether its concentration exceeded the 2%-to-5% level generally used in civilian reactor fuel. One IAEA official compared the ability of a swipe to detect enriched particles to finding a four-leaf clover in a field of clover 6 miles long, 9 miles wide and 150 feet deep.
But during their trip in June, IAEA inspectors took samples from an undisclosed location in Iran that tested positive for enriched uranium at a level that could be used in weapons, according to diplomatic and intelligence sources. IAEA officials refused to comment on the report.
Chinese Uranium Ore
Officials from two foreign intelligence services said Iranian scientists used nuclear material from a secret shipment from China to help enrich uranium at Kalaye and elsewhere.
China had long denied rumors about transferring nuclear materials to Iran. Early this year, U.N. officials said in interviews, the Chinese admitted selling Iran 1.8 tons of uranium ore and chemical forms of uranium used in the enrichment process in 1991.
Faced with a letter describing China's admission, Iranian authorities acknowledged receipt of the material, said the officials. At the same time, Iran said some of the chemicals were used at Tehran's Jabr ibn Hayan laboratory to make uranium metal, which has no use in Iran's commercial program but is a key part of a nuclear weapon.
In addition to China and Russia, Pakistan and North Korea have played central roles in Iran's nuclear program, according to foreign intelligence officers and confidential reports prepared by the French government and a Middle Eastern intelligence service.
North Korean technicians worked for years helping Iran develop the Shahab-3 missile, unveiled last month in Tehran. A foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer said the Koreans are now working on a longer-range Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.
The foreign intelligence official said high-ranking North Korean military personnel have been seen at some of Iran's nuclear installations. A hotel is reserved for North Koreans in Tehran and a resort on the Caspian Sea coast northwest of Tehran has been set aside for their use, according to one of the sources and a U.N. official.
The centrifuges seen by IAEA officials at Natanz in February were based on a Pakistani design, according to intelligence officials. The design and other new evidence point to Pakistan as a bigger supplier of nuclear weapons technology to Iran than initially thought, said foreign intelligence officers, Iranian exiles and independent experts.
While U.S. intelligence is aware of Pakistan's help to Iran, the Bush administration has not pushed the issue with Islamabad because of Pakistan's role as an ally in the battle against the Al Qaeda terrorist network and Afghanistan's Taliban, outside experts and foreign intelligence officials said.
Signs of Pakistani Aid The most convincing sign of Pakistan's role in Iran comes from what several people described as the long involvement in Iran of Khan, the scientist regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
The CIA concluded in a top-secret analysis last year that Khan shared critical technology on centrifuges and weapons-test data with North Korea in the late 1990s. The agency tracked at least 13 visits by Khan to North Korea over a span of several years, according to a January article in the New Yorker magazine.
Two former Iranian officials and American and foreign intelligence officials said Khan travels frequently to Tehran to share his expertise. Most recently, two of these people said, he has worked as a troubleshooter to iron out problems with the centrifuges and with weapons design.
Ali Akbar Omid Mehr, who was in charge of Pakistani affairs at Iran's Foreign Ministry in 1989 and 1990, said he came across Khan as he prepared what is known as a "green book" detailing contacts between Tehran and Islamabad.
"I saw that Mr. A. Q. Khan had been given a villa near the Caspian Sea for his help to Iran," Mehr said in an interview in Denmark, where he and his family live under assumed names since he defected in late 1995.
His account of the villa was supported by other Iranian exiles.
Khan might have played a role in a previously undisclosed offer from Pakistani military commanders to sell nuclear weapons technology to Iran in 1989, two former senior Pakistani officials said in separate interviews describing the episode.
According to their accounts, soon after Rafsanjani's election as president of Iran in 1989, he took Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan, aside at a reception in Tehran and told her about the proposal from her generals.
Rafsanjani was commander of Tehran's armed forces at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, and one of his goals as president was to reestablish his country as a regional power. He told Bhutto that the Pakistani generals wanted to transfer the technology secretly, on a military-to-military basis, but he wanted her to approve the transaction, the former Pakistani officials said.
Earlier that year, Bhutto had appeared before the U.S. Congress and promised that Pakistan would not export nuclear technology. Bhutto often bucked the generals, and the two officials said she blocked the transfer - at least until she was ousted in 1996.
Current Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with The Times that his country never provided nuclear assistance to Iran, before or after he took office in a military coup in October 1999. "Zero," the general insisted. "Never worked - even before - never worked with Iran. This is the first time this has been raised, ever."
Pressured by the United States, Musharraf removed Khan as head of Pakistan's nuclear program nearly two years ago. Since then, Musharraf said, Khan has been retired and his travel is not monitored.
Other intelligence officials and governments disputed Musharraf's denial.
"There are convincing indications about the origin of the technology - it is of Pakistani type - but Iran undoubtedly controls the manufacturing process of centrifuges and seems even able to improve it," said the French government report on Iran's nuclear program, which was delivered in May to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an organization of governments with nuclear programs.
A growing body of evidence suggests that Iran is simultaneously pursuing another way to produce material for a bomb.
This alternative is a heavy-water reactor, which could breed weapons-grade plutonium. In the initial stage of the program, Iran is building a plant to distill heavy water near the Qareh Chay River, about 35 miles from Arak. Heavy water, which is processed to contain elevated concentrations of deuterium, allows the reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel and produce plutonium.
This type of reactor is used in some places to generate electricity, but it is better known as a means of producing plutonium for weapons that bypasses uranium enrichment and its many technical obstacles. As a result, the presence of a heavy-water reactor is often regarded as a sign that a country is trying to develop a weapon.
American spy satellites had detected construction at Natanz before its existence was made public last year. But the work near Arak had remained secret because the plant under construction looked like any other distillery or similar factory, according to intelligence officials and U.N. authorities.
After exiles revealed Arak's existence, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the president of Iran's atomic energy organization, informed the IAEA that the planned reactor was strictly meant for research and producing radioisotopes for medical use.
To many experts, however, the project raises another red flag. "For Iran, there is no justification whatsoever to have a heavy-water plant," said Samore of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Echoing him, a senior U.N. official said, "The heavy-water plant sticks out like a sore thumb."
Iran first tried to buy heavy-water reactors as turnkey projects from China and India in the mid-1990s, according to a previously undisclosed dossier prepared by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to The Times. Blocked on that front by the United States, according to former U.S. officials, Iran decided to build its own and turned to two Russian institutes.
The United States learned of the cooperation through telephone intercepts and imposed sanctions on the Russian institutes in 1999. The sanctions remain in effect, but officials with foreign intelligence agencies and the CIA said there is evidence that Russian scientists are still providing expertise for the project.
Khlopkov, the Russian nuclear expert, said he thinks it is unlikely that Russian scientists are helping Iran with any of its weapons programs. Still, he said, the recent disclosures about the Iranian program surprised Moscow and might cause Russia to cancel a second planned reactor unless Iran agrees to stricter international inspections of its nuclear facilities.
'Industrial Scale'
Despite Iran's progress, most experts said it is unlikely to develop a weapon without more outside help, particularly in procuring specialty technology. That is why some said they were alarmed by Iran's recent attempts to buy critical dual-use technology, which has military and civilian applications.
In November, German authorities blocked an attempt by businessmen allegedly working on behalf of Iran to acquire high-voltage switches that could be used for both breaking up kidney stones and triggering a nuclear weapon.
French authorities reported that French firms with nuclear expertise have received a rising number of inquiries from suspected Iranian front companies for goods with military uses.
In a previously undisclosed incident, French authorities recently stopped a French company from selling 28 specialized remote manipulators for nuclear facilities to a company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that the authorities said was a front for Iran's nuclear program.
Because the manipulators were designed to handle heavy volumes of radioactive material, intelligence authorities suspected they were destined for a plant in which uranium or plutonium would be reprocessed on a large scale.
"Such intent is indicative of a willingness to move from a laboratory scale to an industrial scale," said a European intelligence official who is familiar with details of the attempt.
The pattern of attempted purchases and the discovery of previously secret nuclear installations led the French government to conclude in May that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program to conceal a military program.
"Iran appears ready to develop nuclear weapons within a few years," said the French report to the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
-------- korea
US will press Pyongyang at talks
N. Korea relented Friday to multilateral meetings, and the US plans to push for nuclear inspections.
By Robert Marquand
The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0804/p06s01-woap.html
TOKYO - Seizing on North Korea's agreement to hold six-party talks, the Bush administration is already moving toward a tough position that will stress verification and cessation of the North's nuclear programs through inspections. The US could disengage from the meeting if the North appears to "lack seriousness," say highly placed US officials.
At the same time, six-party talks with Asian neighbors will allow South Korea, Japan, and China to explain in detail a series of "carrots," including energy, access to loans, and normalized relations with Japan, should the North cooperate. The time and place of the negotiations are not yet known.
For months, Kim Jong Il's military dictatorship has engaged in a standoff of threats and provocations. US officials now say those months have been a "test" of US and Asian resolve - that the North hoped the US would buckle and agree to bilateral talks, meanwhile gaining sympathy from key quarters in Russia and China.
"I think the North sees their strategy is going nowhere," says a source intimately familiar with current negotiations. "They've been probing, trying to test how firm the White House is, how firm [South Korean president] Roh is. And there hasn't been much give. Kim thought Russia and China might close with him. But just the opposite took place. Now it is August and they haven't got anywhere to go. They played skillfully. But there are no tricks left."
Underscoring a tough US opening position, Japanese news sources Sunday said US and Japanese officials are discussing nuclear inspection teams, not from the United Nations, but drawn from all five negotiating partners. The North has steadily warned, and did so again Saturday, that any efforts to bring its case to the UN Security Council would be a prelude to war.
The newly proposed inspections teams would enter North Korea to check on the status of plutonium and secret uranium programs. Some experts doubt that Kim Jong Il will allow such teams to enter his closed society, even with participants from erstwhile allies like Russian and Chinese.
For talks to work, the "right atmosphere" must be created for the North, argues Ralph Cossa of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Honolulu branch. That means: "Kim must be persuaded that there are a lot of benefits to dismantling his program, and that nuclear weapons will make a collapse of his regime more likely. Right now, he thinks the opposite."
In the past, North Korea has used talks to buy time. But if upcoming negotiations are seen as a delaying tactic, sources say - stringing along the partners while at the same time moving quickly to develop atomic capability - the US could lobby to shut down talks.
"They can't drag this out," says one source, speaking of the North.
Yet, that's precisely Pyongyang's strategy in going along with talks, argue some experienced Asia and North Korea watchers.
"North Korea very possibly came to the conclusion already that they [must] have nuclear weapons. If they made that decision, why go along with more talks?" asks Robert Einhorn, a Clinton administration negotiator with the North, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Mr. Einhorn offers two reasons. One, to placate China, which provides the lion's share of energy and food to the North. Two, to "prolong the process, ... forestall pressure for sanctions, ... and present the world with a fait accompli" of nuclear capability.
India and Pakistan, which are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, declared nuclear status in 1998. Kim withdrew from the NPT early this year.
China's role in the crisis is being closely watched. Beijing has been central to bringing Kim to multilateral talks. But if talks break down, worries about instability along its border may make China unwilling to take tougher measures, says Einhorn.
"At this point the Chinese would very much like to see a negotiated solution, so they are working very hard to get the parties to the table," Einhorn adds. "We may have convinced the Chinese they have to act more forcefully.... We also want them to be prepared to adopt coercive measures, but that's unlikely. That could lead to instability, and [the Chinese] don't want that."
One knowledgeable source with North Korean negotiating experience was asked by a reporter if Pyongyang would accept international inspectors with clipboards and four-wheel-drives insisting on access to military zones that have not been open to outsiders in decades. The source paused, and said, "I don't know."
It remains unclear what measures could be applied if talks fail. The US has been pursuing a naval "interdiction" strategy designed to stop illicit sources of cash such as drug sales. There are also UN Security Council sanctions; however the White House appears not to be pushing hard along that track.
During the 10-month crisis, which began when the North admitted to having a secret uranium program - in violation of four agreements, including the NPT - the White House has been divided over the wisdom of further negotiations.
Late last week a leading administration hawk, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, delivered a blistering speech in Seoul. He singled out Kim Jong Il as an inhuman tyrant living in luxury while his country is a "hellish nightmare" where some "400,000 people" have died in prisons since 1972.
On Sunday the often-colorful North Korean media called Mr. Bolton "human scum" and a "psychopath," and said that while the North will still join the talks, it will not agree to negotiate with Bolton.
This weekend, in a possible slap to the US, the official North Korean news agency reported its agreement to conduct six-way talks as the last of 15 items on its website. It appeared below an Aug. 1 item detailing Kim's visit to a goat farm that provisions the Korean army.
• Howard LaFranchi contributed to this report.
----
We will start testing nuclear bombs, says defiant N Korea
August 04, 2003
Pakistan Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-7-2003_pg7_5
WASHINGTON: North Korea has raised the stakes dramatically in its confrontation with the United States by privately threatening to conduct its first underground nuclear test, it emerged on Saturday.
A senior official of the hardline Communist regime warned in New York that his country would take counter-measures, "for example, a nuclear test", if the US did not ease pressure on his isolated country.
The warning, by Han Sung Ryol, North Korea's deputy ambassador to the UN, was delivered to an American official earlier this month, according to reports circulating in Tokyo on Saturday.The test would be conducted inside a tunnel dug into a mountain in the run-up to September 9, the anniversary of the republic's foundation, the respected Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.
Meanwhile North Korea is set to announce that it has become the world's ninth nuclear power, should Washington not offer a non-aggression guarantee in return for abandoning its nuclear programme, say officials in Tokyo close to the Pyongyang regime. -Courtesy ST
----
North Korea bans Bolton from talks
August 04, 2003
By Soo-Jeong Lee
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030804-121425-6611r.htm
SEOUL - Pyongyang, calling a senior American official "human scum" for criticizing North Korea's leader, banned him from U.S.-proposed multilateral talks on its suspected development of nuclear weapons.
North Korea said that it won't deal with U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton because he described communist leader Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical dictator" and said "life is a hellish nightmare" for many North Koreans.
Mr. Bolton made the remarks during a visit to South Korea last week.
"Such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks," said a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman, according to the North's official KCNA news agency.
"We have decided not to consider him as an official of the U.S. administration any longer nor to deal with him," the unidentified spokesman said.
He said, however, that there was no change in Pyongyang's decision to hold six-country talks on the nuclear issue.
The countries involved are expected to be North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea.
The United States said yesterday it was committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff and was not trying to end Mr. Kim's rule.
In an interview with selected U.S. media outlets, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the six-way talks can allay the North's fears of a U.S. invasion.
"Our policy, the president's policy, is to work diplomatically with our partners and the North Koreans to find a diplomatic political solution," Mr. Powell said in the interview, made public yesterday.
Mr. Powell was asked about a previous comment by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that Mr. Kim's administration was "teetering on the edge of economic collapse." Mr. Wolfowitz said that could be used as "a major point of leverage" against Mr. Kim.
"I don't have a basis for saying there is an imminent collapse," Mr. Powell said.
"Right now there is a government there. It's been there for a lot of decades, and that's what I have to deal with," Mr. Powell said. "What the situation would be following a catastrophic collapse, I don't really know. I don't think it's anything that any of North Korea's neighbors at the moment wish to see."
Mr. Powell said the pending talks could lead to more U.S. help for "the people of North Korea." But he denied that the Bush administration used aid for the impoverished state to lure Mr. Kim into accepting the multilateral format.
Pyongyang agreed to the six-way talks despite saying for months it would only consent to bilateral talks with the United States. The North says it will work on the sidelines of the negotiations to push for one-on-one talks with Washington, which has insisted on multilateral talks because it says the North's nuclear program is a regional concern.
No date has been set for the talks, which are expected to be held in China, and no decision has been made on the level of the officials who will attend.
A Japanese newspaper reported yesterday that Washington and Tokyo have begun talks on forming an inspection team to ensure that North Korea eliminates its nuclear program.
Mr. Bolton discussed details of the plan with senior Japanese officials Friday, after the North had agreed to the multilateral discussions, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
The inspectors would likely come from the five countries expected to participate in the talks with North Korea, the newspaper said. The report could not be immediately confirmed, and there was no word on whether Pyongyang would allow the inspections.
The United States and North Korea last held official talks in April in Beijing. They've since had unofficial discussions in New York via North Korean diplomats at the United Nations.
The nuclear standoff began in October, when U.S. officials said North Korea acknowledged having a uranium-based nuclear weapons program.
----
N. Korea Seeks to Exclude U.S. Official From Talks
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16860-2003Aug3.html
The North Korean government, which last week agreed to hold talks with the United States and four other countries over its nuclear programs, yesterday denounced a senior U.S. official in highly personal and florid terms and said he could not be part of any U.S. delegation to the talks.
John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control, last week delivered a tough speech in Seoul that focused on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and his grip on the nation. The speech, titled "A Dictatorship at the Crossroads," described life in North Korea as "a hellish nightmare" and called Kim a "tyrannical rogue."
Bolton, an advocate for a tough approach to North Korea who has allies in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office, mentioned Kim by name 40 times and appeared to make the case for government change. Bolton charged that "while he [Kim] lives like royalty in Pyongyang, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with millions more mired in abject poverty."
Yesterday, North Korea fired back.
In a statement attributed to a spokesman for the North Korean foreign ministry, Pyongyang said: "We know that there are several hawks within the present U.S. administration but have not yet found out such rude human scum as Bolton. What he uttered is no more than rubbish which can be let loose only by a beastly man bereft of reason."
The statement said that Bolton's speech makes "one doubt whether he is a man with an elementary faculty of thinking and stature as a man or not" and casts "a doubt as to whether the U.S. truly wants to negotiate with the DPRK [North Korea] or not." The statement said, however, that North Korea was still committed to attend the talks, noting "a caravan is bound to go ahead though dogs bark." But Pyongyang made clear that "such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks." In fact, the statement added that in light of Bolton's "political vulgarity and psychopathological condition," the government has "decided not to consider him as an official of the U.S. administration any longer, nor to deal with him."
In the two previous high-level meetings between U.S. officials and North Korea, the U.S. delegation was led by Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly. But some of Bolton's allies in the past have pressed for him to lead a U.S. delegation meeting with the North Koreans. The next round of talks, expected to take place next month, will also include representatives from China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Pentagon Nuclear Arms Session Worries Critics
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-usa-nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With the Bush administration pushing to study possible new types of atomic bombs, the Pentagon is set to hold a meeting this week on the U.S. nuclear arsenal as arms control advocates say Washington is only encouraging the global spread of nuclear weapons.
Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday roughly 150 senior officials from the Defense Department and other parts of the government will meet in private on Thursday at Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command near Omaha, Nebraska.
Arms control advocates worried that the Pentagon will use the meeting as a key next step toward creating a new generation of atomic bombs and resuming nuclear testing.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the meeting could produce a formal determination of a military requirement for a new or modified type of nuclear weapon.
``Traditionally, once there has been a stated need by the uniformed military for a new weapon to deal with some contingency or some threat that's out there, that has been the catalyst for design, engineering, development and testing of nuclear weapons,'' Kimball said.
Arguing that new threats such as deeply buried bunkers and enemy chemical and biological weapon stockpiles may require new weapons, the administration has asked Congress to permit research on possible new low-yieldnuclear bombs and on modifying two existing higher-yield ones.
Administration officials, citing concerns about the aging U.S. nuclear stockpile, also have said they can foresee conditions under which they would urge President Bush to resume nuclear testing. America has observed a nuclear test moratorium since 1992.
``Why in the world would we move toward manufacturing small, usable nuclear weapons and show how valuable they are, and then expect that no one will ever try to steal, beg or borrow one and use it against us?'' asked Robert Musil, executive director of the Physicians for Social Responsibility advocacy group.
``It really stirs up proliferation, and that is one of our key concerns,'' Musil said.
Shavers said this week's meeting will be chaired by Pentagon official Michael Wynne. Shavers said others taking part come from the departments of state and energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the White House National Security Council.
``They're going to take a look at the status of the nation's nuclear stockpile, particularly with an eye toward the Moscow Treaty that says we've got to get our stockpile numbers down, and how do we do that in a manner that still allows us to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent,'' Shavers said.
Under this pact, the United States promised to cut the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads by 2012, down from the current 6,000.
The Pentagon has not released specifics of what will be discussed at the meeting. But a leaked document released by a disarmament group, the Los Alamos Study Group, revealed the minutes of a January planning session.
The document said one panel will discuss ``requirements for low-yield weapons, EPWs (earth-penetrating weapons), enhanced radiation weapons, agent defeat weapons (designed to obliterate enemy stocks of chemical and biological weapons) ... What forms of testing will these new designs require? ... What is the testing strategy for weapons more likely to be used in small strikes?''
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Uranium oxide: Yellowcake not all it's cooked up to be
By Christopher Smith csmith@sltrib.com
August 04, 2003
Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Aug/08042003/utah/81085.asp
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's now-discredited State of the Union claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy 500 metric tons of uranium oxide "yellowcake" to develop nuclear weapons has the nation's capital buzzing like a Geiger counter.
But in the nuclear fuel heartland of the Colorado Plateau, those old enough to remember the uranium mining boom of the 1950s are somewhat bemused.
And their reaction has more to do with physics than politics.
"I really poo-pooed the whole thing because yellowcake isn't worth a damn in terms of nuclear weapons," says Sam Taylor, longtime publisher of the Moab Times-Independent in the southeastern Utah redrock town once dubbed the "Uranium Capitol of the World."
"There's a long expensive process between Uranium 238 [the most commonly occurring isotope of uranium when it is dug out of the ground] and Uranium 235, which is fissionable," says Taylor, 70, who ran uranium drill rigs on the plateau as a young man. "Why should they worry about him buying yellowcake when one of the only places that enriches it into U-235 is a government lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn.?"
July was the month that famed prospector Charlie Steen made Moab an atomic boomtown 51 years ago with his historic uranium strike. This year, it was also the month that "yellowcake" leached into America's political lexicon. The term showed up last month in 10 Washington Post stories, seven New York Times stories and two stories each in USA TODAY and the Los Angeles Times. But that's not to say it's gotten currency as the Beltway tag for the White House's current Iraqi nuclear fuel fiasco.
"Scandals require code words, terms that no one ever used before but suddenly are all over LexisNexis: enemies list, dirty tricks, White House plumbers, cancer on the presidency, Deep Throat, arms for hostages, stained blue dress, etc.," wrote Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post, which is asking readers to submit the best nickname for the Bush brouhaha. "So far this one has produced only 'yellowcake uranium' and 'aluminum tubes,' which don't exactly get the pulse racing."
In the heyday of the nuclear arms race of the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission was paying $40 a pound for yellowcake, so named because it looks like powdery yellow cake mix. The price would climb to $50 by the late 1970s, but today, thanks to international production, yellowcake trades for about $11 a pound.
As the online magazine Slate noted last month, "Despite all the hubbub over Saddam Hussein's efforts to buy yellowcake, the stuff is by no means a rare commodity."
But it was the stuff that founded a handful of communities on the plateau, as Northern Arizona University history professor Richard Amundson recounts in his recent book Yellowcake Towns.
"This is my term for a place that was both economically and psychologically depending on uranium processing," Amundson said in an interview. "In Grants, N.M., you can still walk into the Uranium Cafe and order 'yellowcakes' [pancakes]. In Grand Junction, [Colo.] they used to have the Miss Uranium pageant and the winner got a truckload of uranium ore."
Six months after Steen made his improbable discovery that started the uranium rush in July 1952, he was before a congressional committee discussing plans to open the first nonfederal uranium reduction mill to refine mined ore into yellowcake. Every barrel of yellowcake from the Moab mill was purchased by the federal government to make enriched uranium for nuclear power plants and weapons. Although Uncle Sam initially set the price of yellowcake, Steen made $60 million the first year alone.
While Steen had struck a deep bed of nearly pure uraninite, or what some geologists call "pitch blende," most of the yellowcake reserves stockpiled prior to his Mi Vida mine came from shallow deposits of uranium-bearing yellow carnotite rock in the Colorado Plateau.
Those deposits had drawn Madame Marie Curie, who pioneered the use of radium for cancer treatment, to Moab in the 1920s. Sometimes called fool's gold, yellow carnotite was generally considered worthless before the Manhattan Project heralded the atomic age and made uranium the most sought-after element on earth.
"A company in Salt Lake City refined the carnotite and they put it in watch dials," says Raye Ringholz, author of Uranium Frenzy, Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau. "People would hold their watches next to a Geiger counter and it would start ticking."
The late Calvin Black, a colorful San Juan County commissioner who was the inspiration for "Bishop Love" in Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang, used yellow carnotite rock to decorate the exterior and interior walls of his home near Blanding. Black was also fond of wearing a bolo tie fashioned out of yellow carnotite.
"He later said that's what may have given him the cancer," says Taylor of Moab. "I don't know of any uranium miners from that era that are still alive. As Cal once said, 'When we were mining the high grade ore in White Canyon in unventilated shafts, nobody told us about the radon.' "
In the as-ye-sow-so-shall-ye-reap irony of the nuclear west, the yellowcake shipped out of the Colorado Plateau returned as airborne radioactive fallout during the Cold War tests of atomic bombs in southern Nevada.
"The uranium story of the Colorado Plateau has two faces," says Ringholz. "One is a tremendously colorful period of Charlie Steen and the penny stock rage and the boom times. And the other is very tragic; the downwinders, the uranium miners and the health problems."
Steen's mill, bought by the Atlas Corp. in 1956 and operated until 1984, is now a public health hazard due to the mounds of tailings situated next to the Colorado River. The Department of Energy is studying how and where to relocate the mill tailings.
Steen, who lost much of his fortune to a bitter fight with the IRS and lackluster business ventures, is now 83, living in Longmont, Colo., and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He lives with his youngest son, Mark, who is writing a detailed history of the Mi Vida era.
"I want to be remembered as the guy who found the biggest uranium deposit in history," Steen told The Salt Lake Tribune in a 1992 interview in Moab. "It's better to have found it and lost it than to have never found it at all."
-------- texas
NRC approves restart of South Texas nuke
REUTERS USA:
August 4, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21715/story.htm http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2003/2003-08-04-09.asp#anchor4
NEW YORK - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said last week it approved restart of the 1,250 megawatt South Texas 1 nuclear unit, paving the way for the plant's anticipated return to the power grid.
In a statement posted to the agency's Web site, the NRC said it "concluded the plant's operator had taken all the necessary actions with respect to the to bottom-mounted instrumentation penetration leakage issue to support the safe restart" of the plant.
The unit, near Bay City, Texas has been shut since late March when routine refueling turned up tiny boric acid deposits on the bottom of the reactor vessel.
Owners of the plant include CenterPoint Energy's CNP.N Texas Genco Holdings Inc. TGN.N (30.8 percent), Austin Energy the city of Austin (16 percent), AEP's AEP.N AEP Texas Central Co. (25.2 percent) and City Public Service of San Antonio (28 percent).
-------- us politics
Report Says Powell to Step Down in 2005
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his top deputy have reportedly told the White House they will not serve a second term if President Bush is re-elected. (Audio)
Aug 4, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/POWELL?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Colin Powell and his top deputy have told the White House they will not serve a second term if President Bush is re-elected, The Washington Post reported.
But a State Department spokesman vigorously denied the story on Monday. "There's no basis to the story at all," said Philip T. Reeker. "There was no such conversation."
Meanwhile, at the White House, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said "the conversation didn't happen."
Citing "sources familiar with the conversation," the paper said in a story for Monday's editions that Powell deputy Richard L. Armitage recently told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that he and Powell will leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration.
The Post said Powell has indicated to associates that a promise to his wife, rather than any policy disagreements with others in the administration, is a key factor in his intention to serve only one term. Advertisement
Administration officials with possible knowledge of Powell's plans could not be reached Sunday evening, but it has been widely anticipated that he would serve only one term.
That would follow the pattern of recent administrations. Only George Shultz under President Reagan has served more than one term in recent decades. He took office midway through Reagan's first term and then stayed on for the second.
Powell was widely touted as a potential Republican presidential candidate after retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Clinton administration, but announced he would not run even as polls indicated he had overwhelming popularity with American voters.
Although never publicly confirmed, it was widely reported at the time that Powell was bowing to the wishes of his wife that he not be a candidate.
Powell, who turned 66 in April, has consistently declined to respond to speculation about how long he planned to head the State Department, but has made clear that he has many interests beyond government service, specifically a commitment to improving education opportunities for black Americans.
"I serve at the pleasure of the president," he said last month. "That's the only answer I've ever given to that question, no matter what form it comes in."
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Calling for Candor
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A14
Editorial
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17026-2003Aug3.html
IT'S MORE CRITICAL than ever that the administration level with lawmakers and the American people about the likely financial costs of U.S. involvement in Iraq. But it's not happening. The evasion has a familiar feel. In the weeks leading up to the war, the administration treated anyone who had the temerity to ask about cost as a boob who failed to comprehend that such figures were, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "not knowable." Then, five days into the fighting, the administration produced a remarkably precise figure for the size of the check it needed Congress to cut -- instantly. At the same time, the administration waved off questions about the costs of postwar reconstruction, pointing confidently to billions in oil revenue and seized assets. As it turns out, the anticipated oil revenue this year will be a relative trickle, and the amount anticipated for 2004 is far less than needed to get Iraq functioning.
All of which only makes the latest go-round that much more galling and ultimately counterproductive. The United States needs to build public support and understanding for a sustained presence in Iraq, and one precondition will be candor. Sustaining the current level of troops, which administration officials acknowledge will be required for the near future, runs close to $4 billion a month. In an interview with CNBC's "Capital Report," L. Paul Bremer pegged the cost of reconstruction in Iraq at "probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion." While some of the requisite funds will come from Iraqi oil revenue or other countries, the United States is inevitably going to foot a big chunk of the bill.
So you might think that the administration would build some costs for Iraq into next year's budget, now moving through Congress. Or at least provide an estimate of what it will request in a supplemental spending bill later. Or a range of likely costs. Instead, administration officials are back to the "not knowable" dodge. The costs can't be stated, White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the other day, "simply because we don't know what they will be."
Mr. Bolten's response provoked an outpouring of frustration -- and not just from Democrats. "I know there are some uncertainties," said Ohio Republican George V. Voinovich. "But I think you can figure out a conservative number and share it with us." Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Mr. Bolten that failing to come up with reasonable estimates "is going to lead, I believe, to a lot of partisan haggling, bad surprises, whoever is president coming up with supplementals, running out of money unexpectedly. It wasn't unexpected. All of this is fully expected. And so while we are all fully expecting, let us say so."
Administration officials argue that to release estimates now would just set them up for criticism when final costs inevitably diverge and that agencies will inflate their needs to spend the full targeted amount. But those risks hardly outweigh the harm of this hide-the-ball budgeting. A successful mission in Iraq requires the administration to enlist partners: among allies, among lawmakers, among the American people. An honest discussion about costs, even if belated, is an essential prerequisite.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Are Killing Clerics Who Dispute Holy War Call
August 4, 2003
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 - The assassination, witnesses said, was trademark Taliban: two men on a motorbike, the passenger opening fire with a Kalashnikov rifle, the driver making a quick getaway.
But the choice of victim signaled a new turn for the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic movement that was ousted from power and has been running a campaign of attacks against foreign and Afghan government troops in southern Afghanistan for months. This time, the assassinated person was Maulavi Abdul Manan, known as Maulavi Jenab, a member of the local district religious council, shot as he left his mosque last week. He was the third senior Muslim cleric killed by Taliban assassins here in the last 40 days.
In addition, the head of Kandahar's Ulema-u-Shura, or Clerics' Council, Maulavi Abdul Fayaz, narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded in his mosque as he was leading evening prayers on June 30. Twenty-seven people were wounded, 14 seriously, council members said.
Since then two other clerics, also members of their district religious councils, have been shot to death. One, Maulavi Ahmadullah, was killed two weeks ago in his district of Dand, not far from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. On Wednesday evening, another, Maulavi Jenab, was killed in his district of Panjwai, southwest of Kandahar.
The killings come amid increased Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan. Local officials reported capturing 20 Taliban suspects in the last few days in two operations in Kandahar Province, one against a band of Taliban who killed two government soldiers last week. The authorities also caught a Taliban member trying to plant a mine meant to kill the governor of Oruzgan Province, north of Kandahar.
Maulavi Muhammad Haq Khattib, deputy head of the Kandahar Clerics' Council, said the clerics had undoubtedly been attacked by the Taliban. "According to the villagers and local elders, they had no enemies," he said in an interview in his office in Kandahar. "It was because of their support for the government."
The 15-member Kandahar Ulema-u-Shura and its branches in the districts have been vocal supporters of President Hamid Karzai and have welcomed the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan. Appointed by the governor of Kandahar, the council members are clearly allied with the government, but they are also keepers of the city's most hallowed shrines and are among the most senior tribal and religious figures.
By challenging the Taliban movement at the core of its legitimacy - its claim as a religious authority - the Ulema-u-Shura has drawn direct reprisals against its members. "The Taliban are saying they are religious people, but they are using force to get their aims and are using the cover of Islam," Maulavi Khattib said. "But we say this is not Islam. Islam does not support the use of force, and we are telling people not to fight."
Seven months ago, the council issued a religious edict denouncing the Taliban's call for a jihad, or holy war, against the American-led forces in Afghanistan. Unlike the Soviets, whose intervention here in the 1980's was intended to occupy the country and so justified a jihad, the American-led force had come to expel terrorists and bring peace, and had United Nations support, Maulavi Khattib said.
He gave other reasons that a jihad could not be called. He said that the government had been elected, and that a religious council had no right to call a jihad against a government chosen by the people.
The Ulema-u-Shura edict, signed by dozens of clerics, says of the Taliban: "They are saying that foreign troops have captured our country and they are calling to start a jihad against them. Just by using the name of jihad, they are killing as many people as they want."
"Respected Muslim brothers, you know the situation: you are witnesses that the president of our country is a Muslim, and his vice presidents and all members of the cabinet and government authorities are Muslims," the edict reads. "No one has said you should stop going to the mosque or stop praying, so for what reason is this a place of fighting?"
The Taliban have denounced the Clerics' Council, leaving threatening leaflets in mosques and bazaars, Maulavi Khattib said. "They wrote that people who work with the government would be harshly punished, and religious people would be doubly punished," he said. But none of the clerics who were attacked had received specific threats, he said.
It is not clear who commands the most influence with the people of southern Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Maulavi Khattib, whose family has guarded the Mui Mubarak, the Shrine of the Hair of the Prophet, and his deputy, Maulavi Wali Muhammad - whose family for 200 years has been the keeper of Kandahar's most famous shrine, Karqa Mubarak, the Shrine of the Prophet's Cloak - are well respected. They have support from the district councils and plan to open more offices in southern Afghanistan.
But they admitted in an interview that the Taliban have continuing influence in the districts. "In the rural areas, their propaganda is strong and the people are scared of them," Maulavi Khattib said. "Even if they saw something of the murders, they would say nothing."
-------- africa
West Africans set to deploy
August 04, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030803-110553-4984r.htm
The expected deployment today of about 1,500 West African peacekeepers to Liberia is tactically and symbolically significant for the continent, for Liberia and for the United States. Regional leaders are proving that they can address troubles in their neighborhood. Their willingness to do so sends a succinct message to other strongmen on the continent. For too long, Liberians have been caught in the crossfire of warring factions.
For the United States, the West African deployment proves that America need not be the cop on every block. This newspaper has been sending this message, while much of the world seems convinced there is a need for U.S. military intervention. There simply has been no clear or stated national interest that could justify why Americans should be put in harm's way. Indeed, U.S. military intervention might undermine the clout of regional African players and undercut opportunities for psychologically important victories for African policy-makers and keepers of the peace.
West African nations were called on to take the lead in quelling the turmoil in Liberia, and they appear ready to meet the challenge. The leaders of the region deserve applause - especially those in Nigeria, who have have offered refuge to Liberian President Charles Taylor. Their leadership will do more to bolster African stability in the long run than a U.S. military deployment could. As we have maintained, the United States should not put boots on the ground in Liberia, since the White House has not stated a national security interest for doing so.
The United States should continue to help financially. It should continue to provide sea- and airlifts for peacekeepers to strategic African destinations in order to facilitate their entry to Liberia. Also, America and Africans should heed some past lessons, since peacekeeping missions of the past led by West Africans have been partly successful. In Liberia, a deployment led by Nigeria prevented Mr. Taylor, who has been indicted for war crimes, from seizing control of Monrovia in 1990, and paved the way for elections in 1997.
Since Nigeria will probably deploy at least some U.S.-trained peacekeepers, it is hoped that human rights abuses committed by peacekeepers in Africa in the past will be avoided. For the past two decades, some West African peacekeepers have gone on rampages after they didn't get paid. "We spent well over $12 billion, when we were in Liberia and Sierra Leone for well over 12 years," said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo recently. "The world did not acknowledge that, not even in terms of giving us debt relief for the contribution we made." The international community must make sure that experience isn't repeated.
The United States has already contributed $10 million to the current Liberian mission. Also, the Bush administration has asked the United Nations to take over peacekeeping in October, so Nigeria shouldn't be left with the burden for too long. Equally important is the fact that West African leaders are clearly aware of what's at stake with this peacekeeping mission, and are demonstrating resolve and leadership.
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First Contingent of African Peacekeepers Arrives in Liberia
August 4, 2003
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/international/africa/04CND-LIBER.html?hp
MONROVIA, Liberia, Aug. 4 - The first contingent of a long-awaited West African peacekeeping force arrived here today to oversee the departure of President Charles Taylor and to help bring an end to years of rebel conflict.
Two helicopters carrying a total of 40 Nigerian soldiers touched down at the main airport here and about 60 more soldiers were expected to arrive by nightfall. A full battalion of 770 Nigerian soldiers was expected by the end of the week, officials said.
Nigeria has committed 1,500 soldiers to a multinational peacekeeping force that will eventually grow to 3,250 and will include soldiers from other West African countries, including Mali, Ghana and Senegal. The soldiers who arrived today were deployed from a military base in neighboring Sierra Leone.
The 40 Nigerians set up camp at the airport and were not expected to venture anywhere near the front lines today, officials said.
The streets of this capital city were calmer than previous days though intermittent gunfire sounded near the two key bridges that lead into the city center and have been the focus of the fiercest fighting between government troops and rebels trying to topple Mr. Taylor.
Government soldiers positioned on the south side of the bridges, closest to the city center, said they welcomed the arrival of the peacekeepers and said they were eager and anxious to stop fighting. Many of them said they were ready to discard their military fatigues and don white shirts and white gloves to welcome the international force, which is being deployed by the Economic Community of West African States, known as Ecowas.
"The government forces will welcome them and work with them hand-in-hand," said Teeta Wilson, 29, a government soldier and a mother of two.
Another soldier positioned on the government side of the bridge said he was prepared to shed his black T-shirt in a gesture of peace.
"As soon as I see them, I will take off my black and put on my white," said the soldier, Charles Julu, 29, an AK-47 automatic rifle slung from his shoulder.
Still, government soldiers said they would defend their positions to deter any advances by rebels across the bridges.
News of the peacekeepers' arrival was greeted by celebration and relief throughout the city. The Associated Press reported that residents near the city's rebel-controlled port heard cheers and saw the insurgents fire flares over the city to herald the Nigerians' arrival.
On the main road that leads from the airport to the city center, people had gathered this morning in anticipation of the peacekeepers.
But some expressed frustration with the slow response to the crisis by American officials, who have sent a three-ship Navy flotilla carrying about 2,300 marines as well as combat and communications equipment to waters off Liberia but have not said if or when they plan to deploy soldiers on shore.
Two of the ships - the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima and the dock landing ship Carter Hall - had been expected to arrive in the region by the weekend, with the third ship, the amphibious transport dock Nashville, some five days behind. But it remained unclear early today whether the ships had made it on schedule.
"America really let us down," said Charles Okai, 50, who was among a small group of men huddled around a radio listening for news of the peacekeepers' arrival. "We die too much here. We expecting them to come and they don't. We don't trust them."
For more than two weeks, in the third and most bruising attack in less than two months, the capital has been pounded by Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, a rebel group that demands Mr. Taylor's ouster. And for more than two weeks, Mr. Taylor has promised to step aside, but has remained barricaded in the Executive Mansion.
In Rome, the leader of the rebel group promised cooperation with the peace troops, and renewed pledges to turn over the embattled port, with its warehouses, to forces once they were on the ground.
"We are going to work with them," the rebel leader, Sekou Conneh, who is in Rome for talks with an international mediating community, told The Associated Press. "They should be able to provide security for civilians, then we can withdraw."
On Saturday President Taylor agreed to cede power on Aug. 11. It was only the latest in a series of promises he has made regarding his exit. His departure is a condition for any American military involvement in peacekeeping in this country, roiled by 14 years of on-and-off-again war, first with Mr. Taylor as a rebel leader, then as its president.
But Mr. Taylor also said through his spokesman that he would leave the country only when a war-crimes indictment in Sierra Leone was lifted. Mr. Taylor had said in the past that the only condition for his departure was the arrival of peacekeepers.
Mr. Taylor has promised to yield power since June 4, when a joint United Nations and Sierra Leone court revealed the war-crimes indictment against him for supporting rebels there.
The United Nations Security Council endorsed the deployment of the West African force to Liberia on Friday. The deployment is to last two months, and is to be followed by United Nations peacekeepers in October.
The offensive has engendered a worsening crisis here as the fighting has cut off food supplies and water.
The people living in the government-controlled side of the city have grown hungrier - and as a result, sicker and less able to heal from malaria and cholera and surgery. At a clinic run by the aid agency Doctors Without Borders, a boy named Blessing Robert wailed against his mother's breast today. He was 2 years old and he weighed less than 12 pounds. His limbs were reedy and weak. He was fighting malaria.
"They don't have the reserves to heal," said Gary Myers, a surgeon at another clinic run by Doctors Without Borders. "They don't recover as well as you might hope."
The West African peacekeepers have said their first task would be to secure the airport. It remained unclear when they might be able to secure the port of Monrovia, however. The World Food Program's supplies are stuck at the port and may have been looted. There has been no food distribution since mid-July.
Nor was it clear how much rice, if any, was still left in the private warehouses at the port. Residents of the area said the port had been gutted by rebels. Trucks loaded with rice have been seen traveling north toward rebel headquarters.
"This is an S O S call to the international community to come in and secure the port so the residents of the government-controlled area can have access to the relief items," said Raymond Zarbay, a journalist who lives near the port.
In some parts of town, the lucky ones are able to venture out into the mangrove swamps to collect snails - "kiss meat" in Liberian slang, a reference to the sucking required to pull out the flesh. Some people are starting to eat dogs. "I had to keep my dog in, lock him up all day," said Sam Nagbe, the project director of Oxfam, the British antifamine agency. He had been holed up in his house in an eastern suburb for days, unwilling to dodge bullets on his way to the market. Most supermarkets, still stocked with food, remain shuttered for fear of looting.
Even before the latest assault began on July 19, people were hungry - more just on the outskirts of the city than inside. Residents of the sprawling Saigbeh refugee camp, cut off from food aid since March, had already been foraging in the woods for roots and leaves, traveling across a river to work on cassava farms and often having to turn over some of their provisions to hungry government soldiers at gunpoint.
At the camp, it was not unusual in mid-July to see babies starving to death, nor children with reddish hair, puffed-up bellies and skeletal faces - classic signs of severe malnutrition. Plans to start a feeding center for 500 children at Saigbeh had to be put off when the rebel assault began.
Today, Saigbeh and other camps are beyond the reach of aid groups. It is unclear how many people are still in the camps or what they are eating.
On the government-controlled side of Monrovia, a feeding center run by the French aid agency Action Against Hunger nurses back to health an average of 200 severely malnourished children every day and doles out 600 rationed meals for those who are slightly better off. "In a month's time, they are cured," said Frédéric Bardou, the group's director for Liberia. "They go to a place where there's no food. In one month's time, in two month's time, they will get malnourished again."
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Peace Force Set to Land In Liberia 300 From Nigeria Are Expected Today
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16977-2003Aug3.html
MONROVIA, Liberia, Aug. 3 -- The first elements of a West African peacekeeping force prepared today to arrive in Liberia on Monday, with a contingent of 300 Nigerian soldiers scheduled to land at Monrovia's international airport by midday. Click here!
Anxious residents in the capital, where half of Liberia's 3 million people are trapped by fighting, said they welcome the soldiers as long-overdue evidence that promises of international intervention finally are being fulfilled. The soldiers' ranks are expected to swell to 5,000 by the end of the month. But Liberians have continued to plead to President Bush to dispatch U.S. troops as well. Welcome as the West African soldiers will be by many Liberians, memories remain fresh of the last regional force that showed up to keep the peace.
It stayed seven years and left behind a legacy of gratitude laced with bitterness.
"We had a bad image here," said Col. Theophilus Tawiah, the Ghanaian commander of the 10-member advance team for the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, which arrived in the capital Thursday.
The West African force that showed up in 1990 accomplished its immediate mission of restoring peace, at least in the short term. But as the regional forces settled in, commanders went into business for themselves, and in some cases sold weapons to the Liberian factions they had come to police.
The regional force then pulled out before a national army had been established in place of the militias, who soon renewed the fighting that engulfs Monrovia today.
Nigerians, who will make up the bulk of soldiers for the new stabilization force, left with a particularly checkered reputation.
Monrovia residents remember them as effective and sometimes sympathetic soldiers who bested the factions.
"If you were hungry, and they see you, they'd help you," said Louise Hinneh, cradling Big Girl Ray, 6, the niece born to her sister and a Nigerian soldier. "Every food they had they shared with me."
But some Nigerians also traded in looted goods, buying stolen car parts and other merchandise and selling them at a profit, residents said. When they boarded ships to depart in 1998, many soldiers climbed the gangplank under the weight of booty camouflaged as bags of rice.
"The Nigerians? Those people are business people," said Reagan Holder, a fighter with President Charles Taylor's special anti-terrorism unit, a non-uniformed force. "Anybody can convince them to do whatever they want to do. You Americans alone are the only people who can help us. Time is wasting."
Fellow fighter Benedict Monger, 24, agreed. "The Liberians are expecting the Americans to bring peace," he said. "The Nigerians are a cookie-selling people. They won't do the job."
"They were too rough," said Patrick Dukuly, who recalled an impatient Nigerian soldier gathering a length of electrical wire to whip a Liberian driver whose stalled car was blocking traffic.
The problems, however, were hardly restricted to the Nigerian soldiers. In "The Mask of Anarchy," author Stephen Ellis, in his account of recent Liberian wars, wrote that West African peacekeeping forces "did business with every faction at one time or another."
A Ghanaian general, for example, led the regional force that sailed into Monrovia in August 1990. Taylor, who was then a warlord, and his rebel force had swept across the country and were threatening the capital. Regional leaders dispatched an initial force of 3,000, who set up at Monrovia's seaport.
Less than a month later, a warlord named Prince Johnson strolled fully armed past the peacekeepers at the port. They had just disarmed the bodyguards of Liberia's president, Samuel K. Doe, who was visiting the area. Johnson's men slaughtered the bodyguards, took Doe captive and tortured him to death, capturing the horror on videotape.
Few here expect such a debacle this time. The Nigerian troops slated to begin arriving in Monrovia on Monday will arrive from neighboring Sierra Leone, where they have been serving in a U.N. peacekeeping mission. That vanguard battalion, trained by the United Nations, will be joined by another Nigerian battalion by Aug. 14, and finally by small forces from Mali, Senegal and Ghana.
In recent years, those countries, with the exception of Nigeria, have received training from U.S. Special Forces as part of the African Crisis Response Initiative. The program was created by President Bill Clinton in response to the torrent of criticism his administration received for failing to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The program's slogan: "African solutions to African problems."
In Liberia, however, the nascent peacekeeping operation is scheduled to come under the U.N. flag, according to a Security Council resolution passed Friday. That prospect likely ensures international attention regardless of whether Bush, who has deployed three warships to Liberia's coast, chooses to send Marines ashore, as some Liberians believe he now bears a responsibility to do.
The fighting that has driven hundreds of thousands of civilians into central Monrovia began after Bush delivered an ultimatum to Taylor, who faces a war crimes indictment from a U.N.-backed court.
"What intensified the war so far was a remark made by President Bush: 'Taylor should step down and leave now,' " Sam Williams, 35, a first sergeant in the Liberian armed forces, said outside the triage ward of John F. Kennedy Hospital. "But he was not prepared to send troops. That statement encouraged the rebels."
In the hallway behind Williams lay a dozen government fighters wounded in the desperate fighting for territory that has characterized the past two days.
A veteran fighter sat on one stretcher, two fingers blown off his left hand and a single tear rolling down his face. Rufus Tarr gave his age as 13 and his unit as the "Jungle Fighters," one of the unpaid, untrained and undisciplined militias that remained after the regional peacekeeping force left in 1998.
By then, only part of a peace deal had been put into effect: the presidential election that brought Taylor to power. Analysts say the voting was marred, however, by the continued existence of the militias loyal to Taylor, who threatened to resume a guerrilla war if he lost. He won decisively, with an informal slogan: "He killed my pa, he killed my ma, I'll vote for him."
"They were going to restructure the army, but they left," Williams said of the West African force. "The job was not completed. I'm not with Charles Taylor. I'm a government soldier. I want to be a professional soldier."
-------- business
Israeli firm wins public telephone contract in Iraq
August 04 ,2003
http://menareport.com/story/TheNews.php3?action=story&sid=255621&lang=e&dir=mena
Iridium Satellite Israel is supplying Iraq with public telephones worth four to five million dollars. The global satellite voice and data communication provider was authorized last month by the office of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to sell its mobile satellite communications services, subscriber terminals, and related equipment in Iraq.
According to CEO of Iridium Satellite Israel Ami Schneider, the order was placed by a Jordanian company, reported Globes. The company also plans to market several thousands of mobile telephones in Iraq.
Israel's Minister of Finance Benjamin Netanyahu signed a general permit late last month authorizing trade with Iraq. The new agreement normalizes commercial and financial ties between the two countries, marking the Jewish state's recognition of Iraq as a hostile-free nation.
Israeli companies can now trade and invest in Iraq without facing any sanctions from the government. A group of Israeli industrial representatives reportedly made a trip to Baghdad this past June in order to scope out business opportunities related to the reconstruction effort.
Iridium Satellite Israel is a subsidiary of the privately held corporation Iridium Satellite. The company acquired the assets of the Iridium company in December of2000 . It is a provider of global satellite voice and data solutions with complete coverage of the earth. Through a constellation of 66low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites operated by the Boeing Company, Iridium delivers communication services to and from remote areas where no other form of communication is available.
Iridium currently provides service to the US Department of Defense under a multi-year contract. Iridium Satellite Israel is owned by Iridium Satellite Solutions' regional operators in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Eastern Europe, and East Africa, and a group of investors headed by Schneider. - (menareport.com)
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Israeli High Tech Targets U.S. Security Market
August 4, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-israel-security.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - From software that can ``translate'' a guard dog's bark to lasers that sniff out explosives, Israel is banking on years of defense expertise to give it an edge in a burgeoning U.S. security market.
Israeli ingenuity in cross-the-board technologies and an ability to quickly turn an idea into a product is seen likely to return the country's industry to prominence in a world obsessed by security. Advertisement
``Israel has a 30-year lead over the rest of the world,'' said Dan Inbar of the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a California-based consultancy that predicts the United States will spend at least $130 billion on homeland security by 2010.
Israel has been dealing with issues such as plane hijackings since the late 1960s, but for its technology to win contracts on the fierce government-contract market today, it has to compete with U.S. firms with which Washington is more comfortable. Near Tel Aviv, an Israeli start-up has developed a technology that uses biosensors and digital signal processing analysis to determine whether a watchdog is merely responding to routine events or to someone penetrating its territory.
``We got the idea during our military service,'' said Eyal Zahavi, chief executive of DBS Watchdog Alarm Systems. ``We recognized the need for security and worked from the ground up.''
Actimize, another start-up, has developed a surveillance platform to analyze suspicious patterns such as the same cellphones appearing together in various cities around the world. The Nahal Sorek nuclear research center south of Tel Aviv has developed an instrument that uses a laser's ultra-violet spectrum to detect dynamite from a distance of eight feet. The project was launched in the 1990s to detect explosives being smuggled into Israel.
Israel's technology sector, considered one of the world's Silicon Valleys, served as a main engine of economic growth in the 1990s.
Scores of successful start-ups in the software and telecommunications industries sprouted and sold products worldwide before the global high-tech collapse in 2001.
ISRAELI GOVERNMENT GRANT PROGRAM
With an eye on future profits in the emerging security market, Israel's minister of science and technology, Eliezer Sandberg, launched a grant program this year to encourage the country's researchers to focus on solving security problems.
``The idea is to direct research by handing out grants to areas where we think there will be economic benefit,'' he said.
Tal Keinan, director for homeland security technology at Giza Venture Capital, said the market's future would largely be driven by efforts to prevent attacks on the scale of the September 11, 2001 suicide-hijackings in the United States.
He said the level of public fear over security, balanced against civil liberties issues, could set the tone for the market.
``If there is not another attack, this could be a smaller opportunity than we thought,'' Keinan said.
Even if the homeland security market sees mushroom-like growth, Israeli companies will still have to get around bias against foreign companies in the United States, he said.
Some of the Israeli-developed security solutions are more secretive than others and include ways to counter the missile threat against civilian airliners.
``The Israeli government has been a customer of this kind of thing for a long time, doing homeland security even before it was called that,'' said Keinan. With their headstart, Israeli companies could enjoy an edge over competitors.
For Israel, he said, ``terrorism is not virgin territory.''
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Jobs here, there, everywhere
Critics say defense work is spread out to win votes. The Air Force's new refueling tankers have subcontractors in 40 states, including Florida.
By PAUL DE LA GARZA, Staff Writer
St. Petersburg Times
August 4, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/04/Tampabay/Jobs_here__there__eve.shtml
CLEARWATER - In a nondescript building near the airport, dozens of workers at Smiths Aerospace Electronic Systems-Clearwater make computers and other parts that help aircraft fly.
Dressed in sky-blue lab coats and armed with screwdrivers and desktops, they sit at workstations under fluorescent lights, spitting out millions of dollars of machinery every year.
"It's a very busy facility," says Robert Fullarton, the company's senior quality engineer.
Despite a sluggish economy, he says business is bound to pick up even more.
Smiths, a British company, is one of more than 200 subcontractors in 40 states that stand to profit from a controversial plan to replace the Air Force's refueling tanker fleet. Under the $17.2-billion deal, which is expected to get congressional approval this year, the Air Force would lease 100 new refueling tankers from Boeing Co. Some will be located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
Critics, led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., dismiss the package as a corporate bailout of Boeing but acknowledge they can do little to derail it because of the political clout of the powerful defense industry.
Take, for example, the role of companies such as Smiths in big-ticket Pentagon projects.
Analysts say defense giants such as Boeing routinely spread work to subcontractors in as many congressional districts as possible to generate support on Capitol Hill. The practice is known as "political engineering."
Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a retired Pentagon reformer who made the cover of Time magazine in 1983 after challenging the Reagan administration's huge defense buildup, has written extensively on the subject. He argues that defense contractors "paralyze decisionmakers at all levels by carpet bombing Congress with jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs."
In the case of the tankers, Boeing estimates that once the project gets cranking in 2006, it will support about 29,000 aerospace workers, including about 100 at Smiths. Smiths would provide flight management and aerial refueling computers, as well as cockpit display units, for the modified 767s.
Boeing said it plans to use 13 subcontractors in Florida alone. In the bay area, AAR Composites of Clearwater, which designs and produces advanced composite components for military and civil aerospace, also would benefit.
Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the Largo Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, represents the congressional district that includes the Smiths complex. Young is a big supporter of the tanker lease program.
In an interview Friday night, Young said the most important thing is that the new tankers would provide U.S. forces with the capability to refuel aircraft anywhere in the world. The project also would create good-paying jobs, he said.
"It would mean additional work for Pinellas County residents," Young said.
In Anatomy of Decline, a Pentagon briefing document, Spinney says that when it comes to procurement, the Pentagon regularly downplays future costs, exaggerates potential threats and uses accounting trickery as well as scientific studies to bolster its position.
The idea, Spinney writes, is to "overload the layman's mind with complex information having the appearance of scientific authority."
Even critics praise the strategy as smart business and note that it's perfectly legal.
"It's a very savvy strategy, no doubt about it," said senior defense investigator Eric Miller of the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. "And it works."
Chet Richards, a former defense official and a Spinney colleague, agreed.
"It's the only way in a democracy, really, to ensure your program survives, because if you don't do that, then what's the incentive for somebody to vote for your program?" Richards said.
But Richards said political engineering can lead to waste of federal tax dollars.
Sometimes, to get the federal spigot flowing, defense contractors embark on research and development projects even for weapons systems they don't expect to pan out, he said.
Once big projects get funded, Richards said, they can survive for decades.
"It's really very difficult for a congressman to come out and run on a platform that (says), "I'm going to take your job away from you,"' Richards said. "Even if we don't need (the program) anymore, it doesn't make any difference."
Christopher M. Jones is a professor at Northern Illinois University at DeKalb who has studied the politics of another controversial Pentagon project, the V-22 Osprey aircraft, which takes off like a helicopter but flies like an airplane.
The two main Osprey contractors, Boeing's helicopter division and Textron's Bell Helicopter, have subcontractors in 45 states and 276 congressional districts. Jones characterized political engineering as "the hallmark of the arms industry."
"These might not be the best, most economical systems to buy, and it might not be the most beneficial for military use," Jones said, "but once these things go, they have their own inertia."
Paul Guse, a Boeing spokesman, dismissed the notion of political engineering.
He said that politics had nothing to do with Boeing's decision to dole out work to subcontractors. He said individual expertise is the reason the company is relying on scores of subcontractors for the tanker program.
"We'll go and find that best supplier wherever they're at," Guse said. "That's what drives this. There's no road map to get into certain states or anything like that."
Critics wonder whether the refueling planes are even necessary. And they say it would be cheaper in the long run to buy the planes outright rather than lease the tankers for six years before buying.
The government has always bought military planes up front, but the federal government doesn't have the money to buy the planes now, the Air Force says. And Boeing has seen its commercial sales drop and badly needs the business.
The Air Force has 544 KC-135 tankers, including 12 based at MacDill. But the tankers are getting old. On average, they have been part of the Air Force inventory for 43 years. At any one time, about 40 percent of the KC-135 fleet is down for maintenance. The main problem is corrosion.
During the next several years, Boeing hopes to replace the entire Air Force tanker fleet - and Smiths hopes to be along for the ride.
Including domestic and foreign sales during the life of the tanker project, Smiths expects to generate about $1-billion in business.
The company employs 235 people in Clearwater, its home since 1969. Annual sales in the Clearwater facility run between $80-million and $100-million, the company says.
Smiths has yet to gear up for the tanker program.
William Olsson, the director of production operations, said the company won't be making many changes in its computer designs. The company's major customers already include Boeing, along with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
Of the tanker operation, Olsson said: "It's right up our alley."
Fullarton, the senior quality engineer, said they were excited about the tanker project. "It's great to be part of a program like that," he said. "We are satisfying mission goals for the United States military, and that's very rewarding."
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Comparing the US and the EU Constitutions
A successful working constitution, like that of the US, is concise and provides a clear political and legal framework -- unlike the counterpart proposed for the EU By William Niskanen
Monday, Aug 04, 2003, Page 9
Taipei Times
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2003/08/04/2003062289/print
`Europeans should be careful about any major political structure that is presented for their approval.'
Europeans will soon consider a proposed constitution for the EU that is very different from the US Constitution. The US is the oldest and largest surviving constitutional republic -- a nation that has experienced a larger increase in area, population, and income; absorbing people of more diverse racial, ethnic and language backgrounds than any other contemporary nation. So Europeans are well advised to understand and consider those characteristics of the US Constitution that provided the political and legal framework for the American success story.
Several characteristics of the US Constitution have contributed to its relative success and survival as a body of foundation law. The preamble, for example, describes the objectives of the Constitution in only 52 words of forceful, declaratory and quite general prose, which, by itself, provides no authority for any specific political decision.
The main text, in only seven articles, describes the powers authorized to the several branches of government and the powers denied to the federal government or the states as few, brief, and well defined. All residual powers are reserved to the states.
And the Bill of Rights, with one exception, is a list of the rights of individuals against the state, not a list of claims by individuals on services to be provided by the state; the one exception is the right to a trial by jury. All residual rights are reserved to the people.
The proposed EU constitution is very different in several dimensions. The preamble goes on and on for 293 words to describe the shared values and objectives of the Union; this is wholly unnecessary and sure to provoke continued controversy.
One sentence alone, for example, commits the Union to "work for a Europe of sustainable development based on balanced economic growth, with a social market economy aiming at full employment and social progress," a sentence that includes at least five ambiguous terms.
The proposed constitution has more than 400 articles but leaves several important issues unresolved.
The relation between the Union and the member states, for example, is not clearly defined; one article suggests that the Union could use its power outside its exclusive authority if some unspecified body decides that the Union could do it better than a member state.
Another article authorizes the Court of Justice to give preliminary rulings on the interpretation of Union law but without identifying what body has the authority to make a final ruling on these issues.
The most important difference between the US Constitution and the proposed EU constitution, however, is the concept of rights.
The US Bill of Rights is a list of individual rights against the state. In contrast, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which constitutes Part II of the proposed EU constitution, includes a long list of rights to services provided by the state. Such rights, for example, include education, a free placement service, paid maternity leave, social security benefits and social services, housing assistance, preventive health care, services of general economic interest and high levels of environmental and consumer protection.
These claims on the state represent the most important potential tension in the Union. On the one hand, the proposed EU constitution states that the "Free movement of persons, goods, services and capital, and freedom of establishment shall be guaranteed within and by the Union ... [and] any discrimination on grounds of nationality shall be prohibited."
Fine. On the other hand, any citizen of the Union seems to have a claim on a wide range of social services wherever that person chooses to live. This will lead to either a massive movement of people to states with a higher level of social services or the harmonization of these services among the member states.
The only way to resolve this potential tension is to allow each member state to restrict access to social services on the basis of such personal conditions as the number of years of work in that state and the absence of a felony conviction. Unless that happens, the EU will become a massive, harmonized welfare state.
As in the US, the proposed EU constitution doesn't deal well with the inherent conflict between nondiscrimination and affirmative action.
The EU constitution states that the "Equality between men and women must be assured in all areas, including employment, work and pay," but this "shall not prevent the maintenance or adoption of measures providing for specific advantages in favor of the under-represented sex."
For the moment, in both the US and the EU, discrimination against people is generally illegal but discrimination in favor of some people is sometimes required. This minor madness, hopefully, will not last.
A final point: The text of the proposed EU constitution is pretentious. Many of the substantive provisions are described as if they were derived from some first principle, as if the crafting of a constitution is some form of algebra rather than the result of political negotiation and agreement.
For example, the text talks about the principles of loyal cooperation, conferral, subsidiarity, proportionality, solidarity, democratic equality, representative democracy, participatory democracy, and on and on.
Broad agreement on the substantive provisions of a constitution is necessary to its effectiveness. Broad agreement on principles is not, because many people may support the same substantive provision for quite different reasons. On these issues, I suggest that Madison is a better guide to an effective constitution than is Descartes.
Europeans should be careful about any major political structure that is presented for their approval, particularly a constitution that was originally presented as a treaty among the member states but now appears to be more like the constitution of a European nation.
Even those who favor the major provisions of the proposed constitution should be careful to ensure that the constitution limits the authority of the EU to define its own powers, because all governments seek broader powers than first authorized.
Over time, an imperfect Europe of national states -- bloodied but hopefully wiser -- may be a better protection of liberty than approving the proposed constitution in the hope for a more perfect EU.
William Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute, www.cato.org, in Washington.
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Mission to Iraq rattles Poles
Public wary, but government aims to raise its profile
August 4, 2003
Chicago Tribune
By Tom Hundley, foreign correspondent
http://www.ctnow.com/news/custom/newsat3/chi-0308040148aug04,0,4051681.story?coll=hc-headlines-newsat3
WARSAW -- When the Bush administration asked Poland about commanding one of the three military stabilization zones that the United States envisioned for postwar Iraq, the flattered Polish government quickly said yes.
But that was months ago, when Poles thought they were signing up for a peacekeeping mission. Now it appears that Poland is sending its soldiers to fight in a war, and public support for the mission is eroding rapidly.
"It's a natural reaction," said Stanislaw Koziej, a retired general and former national security adviser. "People see that the security situation in Iraq is getting worse and worse, and the time for our soldiers to go is getting closer and closer. The moment of truth is approaching.
"Another big problem is we have no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Some people are thinking the war was not justified," he said.
A survey released late last month by CBOS, the country's leading polling organization, indicated that 55 percent of the Polish population opposed sending troops to Iraq and 36 percent supported the idea. That represented a dramatic turnaround from a CBOS survey a month earlier in which 50 percent were in favor of sending troops and 33 percent were against.
The Warsaw government has not flinched from its commitment, and senior commanders in the Polish military speak enthusiastically of the challenges that await. Koziej and other military analysts see a unique opportunity to sharpen the Polish army's professional skills and raise its profile in NATO.
Polish troops already have extensive peacekeeping experience in places such as Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon and the Golan Heights. About 200 Polish special forces troops were involved in combat operations during the Iraq war, but regular Polish ground troops have not seen combat in more than half a century, and Polish officers have never commanded multinational forces.
The Poles will be responsible for a 28,000-square-mile swath of southern Iraq that includes the potentially troublesome Shiite religious centers of Karbala and Najaf as well as a stretch of the Iranian border.
After agreeing to the U.S. request, the Polish government asked fellow NATO members to contribute troops. Germany publicly ridiculed the idea of its troops serving under Polish command.
Only Spain, Denmark and Hungary agreed to participate, and only Spain will dispatch a significant number of troops, a 1,300-member brigade. Poland is sending 2,300 soldiers, its biggest deployment since World War II. They are scheduled to depart for Iraq this week and officially begin their duties Sept. 1.
`A tremendous opportunity'
"From the professional point of view, it's a tremendous opportunity, not just for the 2,300 who are going down there now but for the next 2,000 or so who are preparing to go down there after them," said Lt. Tomasz Kowalik, a West Point-trained specialist in international relations with Poland's Defense Ministry.
Other countries contributing troops that will serve under Polish command include Ukraine, Mongolia, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Latvia and Fiji.
The ragtag composition of the troops in the Polish zone underscores the difficulties the Bush administration has had in mustering international support for rebuilding Iraq.
In recent weeks, Washington has leaned heavily on allies, especially those such as Turkey and Pakistan that have received significant U.S. financial aid, to send troops to Iraq. But in the absence of a fresh UN mandate, most have declined.
Strain on defense budget
Poland receives little military aid from the United States, and the costs of sustaining a peacekeeping mission in Iraq will put a severe strain on the country's $3.6 billion defense budget.
In its preparations for the mission, the Polish military has placed the emphasis on avoiding casualties and establishing a good rapport with the Iraqis. Polish officers have consulted extensively with their U.S. counterparts, and they also have brought in their own Middle East experts.
"The hope is we won't generate any hatred," one officer said.
If the mission goes well, it undoubtedly will elevate Poland's status in NATO and boost its position on the European stage.
"For Poland, it's an opportunity to advance on the international scene," said Kostrzewa-Zorbas, the political analyst, noting that recent surveys indicate Poles, by a 3-1 ratio, believe their country should play a more assertive role in world affairs.
"The problem is that the public in Poland has no experience being citizens of a country involved in war," he said. "The military can cope with trouble. They are prepared; it's their profession.
"But public opinion is totally unprepared. If there are fatalities--and there will be--the response of Polish public opinion is unpredictable. There is no history, no precedent."
When the decision to send troops to Iraq was first put to a vote in the Polish parliament, it received the backing of more than 70 percent of lawmakers.
But that unity has started to crumble. The populist Self-Defense party recently introduced a motion to prohibit Polish troops from going to Iraq.
"Sending our soldiers to Iraq was the initiative of some in the Polish military who want to enhance their status with the Americans," said Sen. Maria Szyszkowska, a member of the ruling Democratic Left Alliance. "It's not the will of the people."
-------- iraq
Meet the New Boss ...
08/04/2003
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?pid=869
Iraq has its first temporary president, and his name is Ibrahim Jafari. (He'll hold the job for a month: It's a rotating presidency, handed off like a relay baton between nine "chairmen", each of whom was in turn chosen by a USDA-approved 25-member Governing Council.) Jafari hails from the Shiite fundamentalist party Al Dawa.
Dawa? Would that be the same Dawa that carried out a series of Reagan-era bombings in Kuwait of, among other things, the American and French embassies and the residential housing of American Raytheon employees -- bombings that killed five people and injured 80? The same Dawa that took inspiration from the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Ayatollah Khomenei? The same Dawa that founded and set up Hezbollah in Lebanon? Why yes, it would. Only now, after three decades of guerrilla and terrorist violence, they've surfaced to demand a share of ruling post-Saddam Iraq, and claiming they now believe in democracy and rule of law. And we trust them on this because ... well ... who can keep track of all these guys anyway?
So meet the new boss (same as the old boss), and check out this Chicago Tribune profile of a crowd likely to rule a post-Paul Bremmer Iraq. To summarize: Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam Hussein was our friend and Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan Administration envoy, was only too glad to shake his hand. Dawa, meanwhile, was busy killing Baath Party officials and trying to assassinate our friend Saddam. The regime fought back, and thousands of Dawa members disappeared (and died) in Saddam's jails; thousands more fled abroad to places like Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Hezbollah soon after emerged from Dawa's Lebanese branch. And when 17 terrorists were jailed over the suicide bombings against the US and French embassies, rage at the imprisonment of the "Dawa 17" became a main declared motive for the Mid-East kidnappings of Americans.
Today, Dawa officials say the Dawa 17 who bombed our embassy were freelancing, and had been co-opted by Iranian intelligence. The "new" Dawa -- which still operates as secretive "cells" and can't or won't lay out a platform, or even fully identify its leaders -- is supposedly a more moderate crowd than the "old." So, is that like dealing with the moderate wing of Al Qaeda?
To recap: When Libya was up to head the UN Human Rights Commission, it was a national outrage (and indeed it was). But when the secretive fundamentalist sect that created Hezbollah, bombed an American embassy, and kidnapped Americans is invited not just to join but to run a US-created organization, that's just us bringing democracy.
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Iraqi president looks forward to exit of Americans
NIKO PRICE IN BAGHDAD
Mon 4 Aug 2003
The Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=839872003
ASKED where he lives, Iraq's new president has a simple answer: "London."
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a shy general practitioner with a trimmed grey beard and striped blue suit, hasn't lived in Iraq since 1980, when Saddam Hussein's repression of his Shiite Muslim al-Dawa Party forced him to flee - to Iran, Syria and Britain. He still hasn't settled in.
His wife and five children remain in London. He is staying at a friend's house and seems out of place in his office in the resthouse of Saddam's son-in-law, transformed by the Americans from a looted shell into a government headquarters.
But Mr al-Jaafari, whose governing council is tasked with cobbling together a government in a nation ravaged by dictatorship and war, and occupied by the US military, seemed upbeat.
"I don't fear the responsibility. I don't feel depressed or hopeless," he said. "But of course I know the path is difficult." Then again, as presidencies go Mr al-Jaafari's is a humble one.
Iraq's American occupiers have veto power over anything he does. The US-appointed governing council he heads isn't recognised by a single foreign government. When August ends, so does Mr al-Jaafari's term, which will rotate among nine council members.
In fact, Mr al-Jaafari is Iraq's first president since Saddam for a very simple reason - of the nine leaders in the rotating presidency, his name comes first in the Arabic alphabet.
He insists Iraqis support him. "I have no statistics, but people love me. They see that I am not very happy about being president, because I love to live a normal life," he said in an interview in the council's new offices.
Probably the only place in Iraq where men wear suit jackets, they boast manicured lawns and marble floors. The luxurious building once was a resthouse for Lt Gen Hussein Kamel, a cousin and son-in-law of Saddam who defected to Jordan, then was lured back to Iraq and killed in 1996.
Mr Al-Jaafari said he has a good relationship with the Americans. Bremer has been to his house for lunch. Al-Jaafari said the American promised not to use his veto power unless there was a "crisis situation".
But the Iraqi president made clear the Americans are expected to leave soon - "in one year, more or less".
"The Americans fulfilled their promise to topple Saddam Hussein," he said. "They also have to fulfil their promise to leave."
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Who will police the police?
By: Yousef Allaa
4/8/2003
Baghdad Bulletin
http://www.baghdadbulletin.com/pageArticle.php?article_id=113&cat_id=2&PHPSESSID=fcb39cfd7947aceaaa6b7d211a75806c
Every night before going to bed, every Iraqi asks himself: "will I sleep safely tonight, without hearing the sound of gunfire or an explosion in my district? Will anyone break into my garage trying to steal my car, or attempt to enter my house? How can I defend myself if somebody does? Will the newly formed Iraqi police intervene in time, or should I kill in self-defense?"
Yes, our revamped police force is available in the morning, afternoon, and even in the evening -although at night they seem to evaporate.
But last week the Iraqi police conducted their worst action since the US command was established. In the Al-Karkh General Hospital, where officers brought in several injured policemen -- one with high rank -- they started to shout, yell, and hurl abuse at the doctors working in the emergency unit of the hospital. One of emergency unit doctors was pushed, sworn at, and threatened with weapons.
The Junior Doctor Committee letter to all functioning hospitals in Baghdad announced that 15 armed policemen were responsible for this, some pointing automatic rifles directly at the heads of the doctors. There were also US military police officers watching the event without intervening to prevent such actions. Perhaps it was a case of policemen standing up for each other -- right or wrong. They eventually stepped in to stop the quarrel, but didn't take any action against the Iraqi officers.
Under the old law, any police officer who assaulted a doctor would get a sentence of six months to 2 years. Why hasn't this law been reestablished for the protection of our medical society? Maybe the police force is above the law -- if they are not, why didn't the MPs do anything against them? If even doctors and medical staff cannot work without such problems, how can people sleep safe in their homes with confidence that the new police force is helping the community -- not working against it. The coming days will prove the truth of these events which could make the Iraqis more angry for everything happening around them.
When I read your essay, I found myself wondering if you were a Baathist. Writing articles that increase indignation, depression and despondence was something the communists did in the United States as far back as the 1950'. I admit, things aren't utopian in Iraq after liberation. Several things got worse than they were during Saddam's reign, like electricity and security. But there are certainly things that boosted, not least of which is being able to write, express and demonstrate freely. A thing without which your essays might not have seen the light of day.
The electricity problem you mentioned is not due to the CPA being liars or failing to fulfill their promises. It's because our fellow "patriotic" citizens are active in sabotaging our country. Nevertheless, the sun is shining. Maybe too slow for our patience, though. True, there are tragic deaths in happening in the hospitals. But what about the disasters that used to happen during Saddam's reign? I didn't read anything about the thousands that used to die every month because of Saddam's policy in medicine, whom he used to "cry" for, while claiming that their death was due to sanctions. Weren't any of them your patients?
Mohammed Al-Najjar Baghdad
I'm very grateful to you that you read my article and gave an opinion about it, this is the best part of democracy -- writing an opinion and having someone respond to it, I'm also happy that people are reading my articles. Accusing people is not a part of democracy. Accusations kill real true journalism, and by accusation you close everybody's mouth who doesn't accept your opinions.
The other day we had a discussion at lunch with a lot of fellow colleges about whether we accept the US policy in Iraq, and, if not, are we are supporting the old regime? that is nonsense, putting everybody with or against, this is ridiculous, there is a space in between the two areas .
When me and you write about the disappointing events in the Iraqi streets, we are trying to put our country on its right path, to see where the truth lies, and to over come all the problems for a better home for you and me.
Owing to the thousands of people that used to die every month in our medical ward is obvious, we pointed that several times to the news media working in our country, they're never to be forgotten. And yes, part of them were my patients . We are looking for a better day for us.
Yousef Allaa is an anethetist at Mansur Teaching Hospital and a regular contributor to the Bulletin. Published date: 4/8/2003 Author: Yousef Allaa
----
With Iraqi Courts Gone, Young Clerics Judge
August 4, 2003
New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/international/worldspecial/04COUR.html
NAJAF, Iraq, July 30 - An obviously agitated young man walked into the Islamic court of Najaf and confessed to the sheik serving as chief judge that he had killed his mother.
"I was merciful with her: I emptied a full magazine because I didn't want to make her suffer," explained the man, Mukdar Jabar Ali. He did it, he said, because he was sure his mother had been sullying the family name by committing adultery since he was a boy. He got a gun two weeks ago, he said, and did what he had wanted to do for years.
Sitting on the carpeted floor of a tiny chamber in a former theological school, the judge, Sheik Ahmed Shaibani, listened carefully, asking for details but not pressing when Mr. Ali said that what he had witnessed his mother doing on the roof with a man years ago was too horrible to recount.
Sheik Shaibani ordered a scribe sitting beside him to write three letters. One went to the police asking them for whatever files they might have on the killing. A second went to the local sheik in a neighboring town to prevent the mother's family from exacting revenge, and a third summoned the mother's family to tell its side of the story.
When Saddam Hussein disappeared in the face of the American invasion, the entire Iraqi state disappeared with him. Those who want to establish an Islamic system of government in Iraq similar to the one in neighboring Iran stepped quickly into the vacuum, establishing courts in this holy city and in Baghdad to deal with a welter of legal problems.
Their docket covers all types of criminal and civil cases that normal courts would hear if they were functioning: murder, divorce, spouse abuse, property disputes. The religious courts have also asserted a special right to grant permission sought by people seeking revenge against the former ruling Baath Party of Mr. Hussein.
The Islamic court's decisions, which include permission to kill, could have dubious legality in the regular court system, assuming it is restored.
Nonetheless, many aggrieved Iraqis, feeling that they have no other place they can trust for legal rulings, have flocked to these courts. It does not seem to matter that the courts have no enforcement power and are not recognized by either the American occupation forces or Iraq's other Muslim religious authorities.
In this holy city, the fact that a group of upstart young clerics has established a court system is cause for scandal. The grand ayatollahs either deliberately ignore the institution or say its decisions lack religious significance because no local senior cleric advises them.
Officials of the regular court system, still trying to recover under American tutelage, expect the religious courts inevitably to fade.
Asked for a comment on the Islamic courts, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most respected cleric in Iraq, responded tersely in a written response a few days after the question was submitted to his office.
"The religious marjaia have no relation to these `courts,' " his answer said, using the term for the half dozen senior ayatollahs whose rulings carry the weight of law. "It is run by some unqualified `students.' "
Sayyid Muhammad Hussein al-Hakim, the spokesman for his father, another grand ayatollah, was equally dismissive. "They should not even call them Islamic courts," he said, adding that to have true religious authority, the decisions must come from the marjaia.
In the secular courthouse, operating with a skeleton staff, Raid al-Saedi, an investigative judge, said the police should not turn over any files to the Islamic court. He would not move against the courts, though.
"We didn't open those courts in the first place, so it's not up to us to shut them down," he said. "I think when the political situation is stable and the judicial system effective, people will stop going there because those courts don't have the means to implement their rulings."
Whether or not the Iraqis end up with Islamic courts is a constitutional question that they themselves will have to settle, a spokesman for the American occupying authority said.
Sheik Shaibani insists the court is here to stay. The 33-year-old cleric, the Friday Prayers leader in the southern city of Diwaniya, is a close aid to Sayyid Muqtada Sadr, the scion of an renowned clan of clergymen. His revered father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, was an opponent of Mr. Hussein and is believed to have been assassinated by the government in 1999.
Mr. Sadr and the young clerics around him have broken with the more conservative, senior clergymen in Najaf by openly calling for opposition to the American occupation and for the establishment of a theocracy mirroring that in Iran.
Sheik Shaibani said an important purpose of the Islamic courts was to investigate the killing of Ayatollah Sadr. His group seized all the local records from the secret police and is slowly working through them.
They have also given religious approval to those who wish to kill members of the old Baathist government. The sheik would not say how many had sought such permission, and emphasized that the court would not carry out any death sentences itself. But he said such rulings were based on guidelines issued by the grand ayatollah in the Iranian holy city of Qum. That alone gives the court the proper standing, he argued.
The ruling states that the lowest ranks of the Baath Party, like students who joined in order to graduate, should not be killed, but it makes fair game of informants, torturers, major party figures and current saboteurs, the sheik said.
But the court is more commonly occupied with the travails of Iraqis seeking redress from daily problems. Situated up a narrow dirt alleyway from the gold-domed tomb of Imam Ali, the founding caliph of Shia, it is housed on the second story of a former religious school. The five judges hear cases in tiny rooms that can hold about 12 people. Sometimes every inch seems taken.
Junan Abdullah, 26, was there to try to get a divorce from the man she said had been beating her since she married him at age 13. Because he was an army officer under Mr. Hussein, there was no hope of getting a divorce in the regular courts before.
This was her third visit to the Islamic court, and she was hoping that her divorce would be granted today. "I can't stand the sound of his name," she said. "If you force me to go back, he will beat me."
The judge decided that he needed to investigate and asked her to return another day. She refused to be discouraged. "The old system pretended to grant women their rights, but it was just a facade," Mrs. Abdullah said. "This court is better. It will give women their religious rights."
Mr. Ali, 25, also expressed the belief that his chances of getting a fair ruling from the religious court were better than they would be from a regular court. His slain mother's relatives said they would exact a terrible revenge on him and his four brothers unless they turned over their house, two female relatives from the father's side of the family for marriage and blood money.
Mr. Ali said he owed the mother's family nothing, because he was restoring the family honor after the adultery he said had driven his father insane. He told the judge that the local police were still corrupt Baathists, demanding bribes to make sure the case ended in his favor.
Sheik Shaibani promised a fair mediation.
Mr. Ali said: "This court will rule according to our Shiite traditions. This is the true court. This is the ruling of God."
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New Iraq Army Recruits to Begin Training
August 4, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military took 400 volunteers for the new Iraqi army to the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday to begin two months basic training, and American forces passed a third straight day without reporting the loss of a soldier in combat.
According to the military authorities in the Iraqi capital there had not been a U.S. soldier killed in action since late Friday night.
In recent weeks, American forces have seen near daily casualties in attacks by Saddam Hussein loyalists and others. The insurgency has killed 52 American soldiers since May 1, when President Bush declared major fighting over.
The Iraqi army recruits were taken to Kirkuk and on to a U.S. base under heavy guard for fear Iraqi resistance fighters would attack the convoy of red and white buses.
The recruits sent north Monday make up about half the first batch due to begin training under U.S. instructors this month. More than 12,000 Iraqi soldiers are scheduled to be ready for service by year's end and 40,000 by the end of 2004.
Some Iraqi guerrilla fighters have said the Iraqi recruits are collaborators aiding the occupation force. American officials denied reporters permission to talk to the Iraqi recruits for fear of exposing them or their families to retribution.
Those eligible to join the army must be between 18 and 40 and must not have held the rank of colonel or above in Saddam's military. During the two-month training period, they will be paid $60 monthly. Recruits who complete training must serve at least 26 months. Their salaries will be determined according to rank, with top pay of $120 a month.
West of Baghdad, in the town of Khaldiyah, angry residents stormed and ransacked an Iraqi police station on Monday after an incident that began with an ambush on a U.S. convoy.
Witnesses said a U.S. soldier was injured in the ambush and carried into the police facility as American forces opened fire against their attackers. The U.S. military confirmed an incident in Khaldiyah, 50 miles west of the capital, but would provide no details and said there were no U.S. casualties.
Witnesses said Iraqi police joined U.S. soldiers in fighting the attackers and then withdrew inside the police station. The crowd later stormed the station looking for the American forces and Iraqi police, who apparently escaped.
The crowd dispersed when U.S. Kiowa helicopters appeared in the skies and started to circle low overhead. Some hours later, Iraqi police reinforcements reclaimed the burned out building.
U.S. forces continue to close in on Saddam and said they had conducted a series of secret operations in the two weeks since American soldiers killed his sons Odai and Qusai in a gunbattle in the northern city of Mosul, the military said Monday.
``It's just a matter of time. He can't stay in one place very long,'' 4th Infantry Division spokeswoman Maj. Josslyn Aberle told reporters.
The top secret Special Operations Task Force 20 -- which is roaming Iraq, hunting Saddam and other high-profile targets -- captured four key individuals last week in raids that were supported by 4th Infantry soldiers, Aberle said.
The Army would not release the four men's names or their connection to Saddam.
Two of them were Saddam's ``very close associates,'' captured Friday during simultaneous raids in Tikrit, the dictator's hometown, Aberle said. Tikrit is 120 miles north of Baghdad.
The two others, described only as high-profile targets, were caught Saturday during a raid in Baiji, just north of Tikrit, she said.
Soldiers say they believe they came within 24 hours of capturing Saddam's new personal security chief -- and possibly the dictator himself -- during a raid in Tikrit on July 27.
``Based on intelligence that is way above our level, we believe that we have come close on one or two occasions,'' Aberle said.
Military officials estimate that Saddam is changing locations every four hours. The army has distributed composite photos of how he may have changed his appearance.
``Every day, every night, soldiers and coalition forces are out there, they're actively looking, actively pursuing leads and constantly gathering more intelligence,'' Aberle said.
Countrywide, over the past 24 hours, the military said it had conducted 17 raids and detained 80 people.
----
Iraqi Shiites fighting war 'of the soul'
By HANNAH ALLAM
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Mon, Aug. 04, 2003
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/6456779.htm
KUFAH, Iraq - Iraqi mothers raise their children with an ancient superstition against handling the white drapes that Muslims wear to the grave. These days, however, the burial shrouds are slung across shoulders and waved high in the air by thousands of Shiite men as a chilling symbol of their willingness to die rather than succumb to the U.S.-led occupation of their homeland.
Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims, who suffered for decades under Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim-dominated regime, initially expressed gratitude to the American military for toppling the dictator and restoring their right to worship. In turn, they were awarded most of the seats on the 25-member interim governing body that U.S. administrators assembled last month.
But recent U.S. raids on religious centers, the reported arrests of Shiite scholars, the stationing of troops near shrines and other perceived cultural missteps have turned America's most powerful Iraqi ally into the greatest potential threat to the U.S. effort to rebuild the country and reshape the Middle East.
"We are now carrying burial shrouds always to remind us of death," said Sheik Raysan al Assadi, the keeper of the oldest mosque in the Shiite holy city of Kufah, south of Baghdad. "We must be ready to sacrifice our lives if Americans attack our religion or traditions."
The most worrisome scenario for America is that Shiite resentment, especially if it's armed and financed by neighboring Iran, could merge with Iraqi nationalism and with secular anger at the failure to restore order and basic services into an Iraqi version of the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah of Iran, who had been a longtime U.S. ally.
A second danger is that rising Shiite anger could fracture Iraq, a nation that in the past has been unified only by force, into a Shiite south, a Sunni Muslim center and a Kurdish north. That would encourage Iran, Iraq's Arab neighbors and Turkey to intervene to protect their interests.
Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. ground commander in Iraq, has acknowledged that religious extremists are emerging suspects in attacks that have killed dozens of American service members since President Bush declared major combat over May 1.
The most worrisome figure for American officials is Moqtada al Sadr, a fiery young Shiite cleric whose father was a venerated ayatollah who was murdered by Saddam's regime in 1998.
Sadr, said to be his 20s, seeks to make Iraq a Shiite theocracy like Iran, and he called recently for forming a religious army to protect Iraqis from what he described as brutal American forces. Sadr's speeches regularly draw thousands, but Iraqis don't agree on whether his followers truly believe in him or show up out of respect for his father.
"Moqtada al Sadr does not represent most Shiites," said Ahmed Sabah, 22, who sells scarves around the corner from Sadr's headquarters in the southern holy city of Najaf. "He's too young to lead us. He doesn't yet have the wisdom of a leader."
A spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called Sadr a rabble-rouser angling for political gain. The spokesman said Sadr was walking a thin line between freedom of speech and incitement to violence, a charge invoked by U.S. officials who shut down an anti-American newspaper in Baghdad last month.
"As long as he does not create an armed militia, he's welcome to collect support around him," the spokesman said.
All signs indicate that Sadr plans to form a full-fledged Shiite army, though some of his assistants admitted they're having difficulty gathering weapons and signing up volunteers. So far, mosque records show, about 10,000 men have registered for service in the "Mehdi" army, named after a Shiite imam who vanished hundreds of years ago and is expected to return to slay infidels.
American Lt. Col. Chris Conlin, the commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, which controls Najaf, said his Marines had enjoyed good cooperation with local leaders from the moment they arrived three months ago. Unlike many other Iraqi cities, Najaf has electric power 24 hours a day, and a $48 million project is under way to overhaul the power plant. Conlin said that even Sadr's group was friendly until U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer appointed an interim Governing Council that didn't include Sadr.
"I think what really happened is that Sadr is upset because he's not on the Governing Council," Conlin said. "And in an act of desperation, he went to the pulpit and preached this idea of creating an Islamic army for jihad."
Cloaked in a white burial shroud, Sadr appeared before about 7,000 people in Kufah on Aug. 1 and delivered a blistering sermon in which he urged men to join his army instead of the new Iraqi military overseen by American troops. He joined in chants of "No to America" but stopped short of urging attacks on the U.S. military.
"When people joined the Iraqi army established by the United States, they wronged themselves and they wronged Muslims," Sadr told the cheering crowd. "They joined for money, but material things are not more important than ethics and morals. I pray that they will leave this army and follow God's order."
Sadr may be the loudest voice calling for Shiite resistance, but the two most respected Shiite clerics also are expressing growing hostility toward the American presence.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who occupies the highest Shiite post in the world, advocates a strict separation of religion and politics. He refused an invitation to meet with Bremer in a move that made clear his position on U.S. forces in Iraq.
The other key cleric, Mohammed Baqir al Hakim, has advocated a secular government through his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and has a brother on the Governing Council. Many Iraqi and American officials are concerned about Hakim's ties to Iran, where he spent the past 20 years in exile.
U.S. officials accused Hakim's group of creating false identification for Iraqis streaming in from Iran, and conducted three raids on SCIRI offices. Ghaleb Zanji, the editor of the group's Al Adala daily newspaper, said the only weapons that American troops found in the raids were two rifles that were properly licensed to employees. Zanji said the troops seized computers, notebooks and photos, hampering publication of the newspaper.
U.S. officials wouldn't comment on the raids or the four people who reportedly were detained during one of the operations.
"We don't know how to act with them; we don't know what they're thinking," Zanji said. "We know for a fact we're on the Governing Council, we know freedom of the press is guaranteed in America, but we didn't know the Americans have two standards. It's freedom for the United States and injustice here. They're unpredictable in their behavior, so they have lost the support of most Iraqi people."
The spokesman for U.S.-led forces disagreed that most Shiites harbor anti-American feelings. He said they were still basking in the ability to practice their religion openly, which Saddam brutally oppressed. Bremer and top U.S. military officers meet regularly with religious leaders and have begun multimillion-dollar reconstruction projects in Shiite holy cities.
"We don't feel threatened at all by the Shiites. They are enjoying political and religious freedom, and working with us on the Governing Council," the spokesman said. "These people are coming out into the light and blinking at the brightness that's out there."
Images of revered imams now are mass-produced on key chains, posters, T-shirts and jewelry that used to depict Saddam. But alongside those wares, street vendors hawk grainy, bootlegged videos of Shiite demonstrations against U.S.-led forces, and worshipers sprinkling perfumed water pour into Iraq's shrines to pray for an Islamic government and for the Americans' swift departure.
Before Saddam's ouster, 32-year-old Emad Sadq hid rare Shiite texts from the dictator's security forces in his gold shop in Baghdad, which stayed open until midnight. Now Sadq tucks his jewels away at dusk for fear of thieves but leaves religious writings in a pile near his cash register.
Sadq gathers with other Shiite shopkeepers in the evenings to sip tea and debate whether they were safer under Saddam. He and his friends said they were happy to be rid of the leader but that they resented the Americans, whose presence had brought satellite dishes, revealing clothing and other ostensible threats to their religion. Like most Shiites, Sadq said, he'll wait for guidance from al Hauza, a religious authority made up of the most esteemed Shiite scholars, before deciding whether to join resistance efforts.
"The Americans have technology, yes, but they lack morals," Sadq said. "We are not against Western civilization and development, but we should take the good things only. We don't want the bad, immoral parts of their culture. The biggest danger now is the killing of the soul, not the body."
(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Drew Brown in Baghdad contributed to this report.)
-------- israel / palestine
State proposes cut in Israel loans
August 04, 2003
By Inigo Gilmore
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030804-121403-8409r.htm
JERUSALEM - The State Department has drawn up a proposal to reduce loan guarantees to Israel in an attempt to halt construction of a security fence that would divide the West Bank, according to Israeli news reports yesterday.
The Ha'aretz newspaper said the scheme proposes to cut loan guarantees on the basis of what Israel spends building the security fence east of the Green Line in Palestinian territory.
The State Department views the fence construction and continued expansion of bypass roads for settlers as an effort by Israel to establish "facts on the ground" while the two sides are negotiating the "road map" peace plan.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his conservative allies in Washington, have long believed the State Department is insufficiently supportive of Israel's security concerns. Mr. Sharon, in particular, has routinely ignored State Department utterances, preferring to deal directly with the White House.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has stressed that the Bush administration remains opposed to the proposed route of the security fence, rejecting efforts by Mr. Sharon's office in Jerusalem to suggest that an understanding had been reached on the matter between the prime minister and Mr. Bush.
The barrier, of which the first 80-mile section was completed last week, topped the agenda when Mr. Bush met Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, last month in Washington.
A map produced by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington think tank that claims to have seen evidence of the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF) plans, shows 40 percent of the West Bank surrounded by the 200-mile fence.
The foundation, whose report has been seen by Bush administration advisers, says the projected final route is based on evidence from within the IDF, from contractors employed to build the barrier and from Jewish settlement leaders who have been consulted on its route.
Neither the Israeli army nor the government has released maps of the fence.
The foundation's map shows the barrier carving deep into the West Bank to surround existing Jewish settlements and with a route that could eventually surround a truncated Palestinian area by slicing through the eastern side of the West Bank to cut off the Jordan valley.
In a recent interview with an Israeli newspaper, Pinchas Wallerstein, a prominent settler leader, confirmed that his community was influencing the route of the fence in order to get "maximum Jewish population with minimum Arab population over maximum area."
Michael Tarazi, a legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority, said, "Through our own research we have come up with a similar map" to the foundation's. "The implications are serious and show that while Mr. Sharon may talk about a Palestinian state, in reality all that he has in mind is a glorified reservation."
According to the foundation, the route being carved appears to fit not only with the settlers' thinking but also Mr. Sharon's historical strategic objectives, which include the retention of command over the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and the separation of Arab populations in Jordan and Egypt from the Palestinians.
The foundation also argues that the route appears to fit not only with the settlers' thinking but also Mr. Sharon's historical strategic objectives - which include the retention of command over the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and the separation of Arab populations in Jordan and Egypt from the Palestinians.
"The map shows that, if anything, this is not a means of ending the occupation but a way of consolidating it," said Geoffrey Aronson, the foundation's deputy president and the report's author. "This helps only to create conditions under which Israeli settlements can remain for the foreseeable future. That is clearly what they intend."
After his meeting last week with Mr. Abbas, Mr. Bush described the fence as a "problem" for Middle East peace and asked Mr. Sharon to halt work on it. Mr. Sharon shrugged off the request and vowed the work will continue.
Mr. Bush subsequently said he realized the issue is sensitive and made no firm commitment to try to influence Israel's thinking on the route.
----
Security more important than human rights in marriage law: minister
Monday, 04-Aug-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/dd/Qmideast-israel-marriage.R0bA_Da4.html
JERUSALEM, Aug 4 (AFP) - Security concerns outweighed human rights when it came to drafting a controversial law blocking Palestinians from acquiring Israeli citizenship through marriage, Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz admitted Monday.
"I'm not happy with the law, I'm not happy at all. It's unfair, because most (Palestinians) have no intention to be involved in terrorism," Poraz told reporters.
"But even though their human rights are affected, our obligation to prevent terrorism is on a higher scale," he told the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem.
"Is it more important to give some hundreds of Palestinians the right ot marry and live in Israel, or to save Israeli lives? I know what is my answer," said Poraz, from the secular centre-right Shinui party.
On July 31, the Israeli parliament passed a law barring Palestinians from acquiring Israeli nationality or residency permits through marriage and blocking the reunification of families split between Israel and the occupied territories.
The minister in charge of relations with parliament, Likud member Gideon Ezra, had argued that 30 Israelis had been killed by Palestinians who had gained Israeli citizenship through marriage since the start of the intifada 34 months ago.
"The punishment is that if indeed they want to marry, they had to move and go to live in the West Bank ... There could be a bigger punishment," Poraz said, pointing out that the standard of living was higher there than in neighbouring Arab states.
The minister stressed that the validity of the law would not be extended after one year if the situation on the ground was stable.
----
Israeli Prisoner List Disappoints Palestinians
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html?hp
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel on Monday published a list of 342 Palestinian prisoners it plans to free on Wednesday to bolster a U.S.-backed peace plan and reformist Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, but Palestinians cried foul.
Palestinian officials noted that 31 men were to complete their sentences this month anyway, and that Israeli officials said earlier 540 would be freed. Palestinians want a general release of all 6,000 of their brethren in Israeli jails.
``What is this? Is this deception? Are they deceiving nations?'' Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Palestinian Security Affairs Minister Mohammed Dahlan said: ``What the Israelis are doing will complicate the peace process and frustrate the supporters of peace among the Palestinians.''
In another blow to peace hopes, the local branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades militant group in the West Bank city of Tulkarm threatened to break a three-month truce -- but only to avenge the killing of one of its members by Israeli soldiers.
The Brigades leader in Tulkarm said the branch would otherwise stick to the cease-fire declared on June 29 by it and Islamic militant groups. Other branches of the fragmented and loosely disciplined Brigades said they would stick to the truce.
The militant group Hamas, pressing demands for all prisoners to be freed, said its patience was running out.
``We appeal to all the national and Islamic forces to prepare themselves for a confrontation of the arrogance of that criminal enemy (Israel) that denied the right of freedom for our hero prisoners,'' it said in a statement.
INTERNET LIST
The publication of the prisoners' names on the Internet was aimed at giving any Israeli opposed to a prisoner's release time to appeal to Israel's Supreme Court to keep him in jail.
Israel gave no explanation why only 342 prisoners -- 183 convicted by Israeli courts of activities ranging from stone-throwing to membership in ``terrorist organizations'' and 159 detained without trial -- were being released.
Israel's Army Radio said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could meet Abbas on Wednesday for the first time since their separate talks with President Bush in Washington last month. Neither side confirmed the report.
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, responding to a Palestinian shooting attack that wounded a Jewish settler and her three children on Sunday, said there would be no further releases or West Bank pullbacks until Abbas reined in militants.
``For now, we will not transfer any more Palestinian cities until we see that the necessary steps are being taken against the terror and definitely against the group that carried out the shooting,'' Mofaz told reporters.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group within Arafat's Fatah movement, took responsibility for the attack near Bethlehem but said that ``it was not aimed at violating the cease-fire.''
A Brigades leader told Reuters it was meant to ``teach a lesson'' to a senior Fatah official close to Arafat who ``went to Bethlehem and ignored the brigades.''
Israeli forces quit Bethlehem in the West Bank last month under the peace plan, which envisions an end to almost three years of violence and creation of a Palestinian state by 2005. It also calls for ``terrorist infrastructures'' to be dismantled.
A spokesman for the Organization of Israel Terror Victims, a group representing the families of Israelis wounded or killed in Palestinian attacks, said it was studying the list on the Internet for ``any specific names we might object to.''
A statement prefacing the list on the Hebrew-language Web site at http:/list.ips.gov.il said: ``It should be emphasized the list does not include any prisoners or detainees with 'blood on their hands'.''
--------
In Israel, Settlers Resist
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16896-2003Aug3.html
NOFEI NEHEMIA, West Bank -- On a blistering day last week, Michael Plotkin stood beside a bright new children's swing set and listened to the sounds of his expanding outpost in the desert.
Hammers pounded out the finishing touches on two trailer homes. A bulldozer chewed away a rocky hillside beneath a newly erected water tower.
"We need families," said Plotkin, unofficial mayor of this burgeoning Jewish outpost on the West Bank, about 25 miles north of Jerusalem. "If we have a lot of families, nobody will try to remove us."
Plotkin said his outpost of 14 residents and 11 buildings is part of the larger struggle for survival against proponents of a U.S.-backed peace process that calls for dismantling Jewish outposts scattered across the hilltops of the West Bank.
Last week Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in Washington, promised President Bush that "unauthorized outposts will be removed." But recent visits by The Washington Post, along with aerial and ground surveys conducted by Peace Now, an advocacy group that opposes Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, found that across the West Bank, the debate over dislodging outposts has instead reinvigorated efforts to expand existing ones, create new ones and rebuild those ripped down by the Israeli military.
That frenzy of activity, coupled with what some Israeli lawmakers and Palestinian officials say is the sluggish effort of the Israeli government to remove outposts and prevent new ones, is emerging as one of the most contentious obstacles in the peace process known as the "road map."
Since the June 4 summit in Aqaba, Jordan, at which Bush, Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas formally agreed to pursue the new peace effort, the Israeli military has dismantled 17 outposts and settlers have removed six others, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry.
However, Peace Now's Settlement Watch, which maintains a comprehensive list of outposts, said 12 outposts have been dismantled since the summit, three were only partially removed or have been partly restored, two on the Defense Ministry list were taken down by settlers last year, two have not been demolished and two sites listed had nothing on them.
In addition, the group said, eight of 13 outposts established since the June summit remain intact.
Outposts generally begin as a dirt road to a single cargo container, cell phone antenna or water tower. Then houses are erected, but infrastructure typically remains rudimentary for the first residents. It is only when such additions as a community center, nursery school, playground area or paved roads emerge that an outpost begins to take on the characteristics of a settlement, though some settlement opponents consider any outpost with people living in it to be a settlement.
As of this week, an estimated 105 outposts dot the West Bank -- more than half of which have been established since Sharon took office in February 2001, according to Peace Now documents. That figure is similar to totals recently provided to the Israeli parliament by defense officials.
"The bottom line is nothing of significance has been done yet," said Yossi Sarid, a member of parliament who represents the dovish Meretz party. "If the cease-fire evaporates and each side blames the other side for being responsible, I believe Israel will have to check itself for its own contribution."
Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, said the government is "doing everything according to the law. Do they want us to use brutal force?
"We don't want to kill these people," Gissin said of the settlers. "They have committed no crime."
Settlement opponents say, however, that outposts -- and in fact all settlements -- violate several U.N. resolutions and international laws, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bars an occupying power from moving its civilians into territories it occupies. Israel does not recognize the validity of the international restrictions on these lands.
Israeli government policy prohibits the creation of new settlements. But settlement opponents say the Sharon government has circumvented that policy by allowing large expansions of existing settlements, sometimes by creating outposts that are considered new neighborhoods but are miles from the original settlement. Settlers say they are staking claim to lands promised to Jews since biblical times.
Sharon told Bush the Israeli government planned to dismantle an additional 12 outposts in the coming days, according to accounts by Israeli reporters who traveled with Sharon to Washington.
Asked for details about the promised demolitions, a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said, "There isn't any decision yet about whether to evacuate any outposts, or when, or which ones."
She added, "Everything [Sharon] told the president will happen sometime, but which 12 and when they will be evacuated" is subject to negotiation.
Dror Etkes, who conducts the outpost surveys for Peace Now, cited the continuing uncertainty as evidence that the Israeli government is not complying with the road map, which requires removal of all outposts erected since March 2001.
Israeli officials agree that many outposts have been constructed without authorization, but Sharon's spokesman, Gissin, noted that the government must frequently allow appeals to wend their way through the court system before the military can dismantle an outpost.
Last October, the Israeli military spent days dismantling a cluster of huts and tin sheds at Gilad Farm, inhabited by Itay Zar and his family and about 10 young bachelors. A few weeks later, Zar returned to the site. Since then, he has erected even more structures -- three trailer houses, two buses and a large army tent -- about 200 feet from the original location on a hilltop near the West Bank city of Nablus.
With his outpost again scheduled for demolition as part of the military's efforts since the Aqaba summit, Zar has staved off removal by taking his case to court.
"I'm afraid they will evacuate me one day," Zar said. "I am used to it -- to build and then they destroy."
Here at Nofei Nehemia, named for the deceased owner of the company that has supplied most of the house trailers used to build and expand outposts and settlements, court appeals also have kept destruction at bay.
Plotkin, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, who moved to Israel with his family as a teenager, was among the first settlers to inhabit Nofei Nehemia a year ago, after he finished his mandatory military service. He said the threat of demolition has pushed outposts into a fierce competition to attract new settlers.
"Everyone wants people to come" to their outposts, he said. "It's like a business."
Plotkin posted a notice on a college bulletin board in the nearby settlement of Ariel and began giving tours of the outpost to potential residents. In recent weeks, two new families have moved in, and another two are set to occupy two soon-to-be-completed trailer houses, he said.
"I'm very proud of what's happening here," said Plotkin, whose sunburned face is sandwiched between copper-red hair and a fuzzy beard. He wears a pistol that peeks from beneath his T-shirt but said he abhors settlers who wave their guns and promote a Wild West cowboy image. "I believe in what I'm doing, and I believe it is good for the Jewish state."
But with Israel's economy at a low point, many Israelis are expressing anger at the money the government pours into settlements and outposts. The Tourism Ministry was castigated in the Israeli media recently for spending $68,000 on a stone-paved promenade overlooking a hillside of rubble, a water tower and views of Palestinian towns at the outpost of Artis, about 11 miles north of Jerusalem. Artis is near the West Bank settlement of Beit El, where Tourism Minister Benny Elon resides.
"It was built to service tourists and local residents," said a ministry spokesman, Golan Yusifun.
Researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
-------- nato
Nato to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed: ISAF
Monday August 04, 2003
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2003-daily/04-08-2003/main/main18.htm
KABUL: The Nato will stay in Afghanistan as long as it is needed following its take-over of command of the peacekeeping International Security Assistance Force on August 11, an ISAF spokesman said on Sunday.
"The actual mandate of ISAF lasts until June 2004 according to the underlying political frame, which is the Bonn agreement, and the Nato, on the other hand, is prepared to take over indefinitely as long as there will be a political need for the ISAF," German Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Loebbering told reporters at a press conference. Under its United Nations mandate, the ISAF is responsible for security in Kabul and that will not change under the Nato, Loebbering said. "To give the whole thing a motto, it will be 'consistency and continuity' so there will be no change of the ISAF mandate due to the fact that the Nato will take over the lead," he said.
"There will no longer be any search for a new lead nation every six months because that will be provided by the Nato." Since it was established in December 2001, command of ISAF has changed every six months. The current joint German-Dutch term of command ends on August 11 when the Nato takes over.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai and high-ranking German, Dutch and the Nato officials would attend the hand-over ceremony in Kabul, Loebbering said, declining to name the Europeans for security reasons.
-------- pacific
Danger begins when guns amnesty runs out
By Matt Wade
August 4, 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/03/1059849282300.html
Australian police and military personnel in the Solomon Islands would be in more danger when a gun amnesty expired later this month, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, warned yesterday.
The "exuberance" that had marked the early stages of the Australian-led mission to restore law and order in the islands might change when the amnesty ended on August 21, he said.
Mr Downer told Channel Ten: "I would imagine that there will still be some number [of weapons] out there, and that will be the difficult part, when the operation has to go after the weapons that are still out there in the community. Not only will it be difficult, it will be dangerous."
The Prime Minister, John Howard, said on Saturday that the deployment had been a reminder "of our own leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region", although Mr Downer yesterday played down the possibility of forces embarking on another Solomon Islands-style intervention in the region.
However, he said Papua New Guinea was confronting "some difficult issues at the moment" and that the Government was reviewing its $300 million a year foreign aid contribution to the country.
"I am not entirely satisfied that we are getting the best value for money from our aid program," he said.
Mr Downer rejected the suggestion that Australia's foreign aid to Asia-Pacific countries should be made conditional on efforts to root out corruption and terrorism.
"We want our aid program to concentrate more on governance issues in order to help clean up these problems. But let us not exaggerate this - it is enormously difficult to clean up a problem . . . It will take a long period of time."
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistani Spokesman Blasts U.S. Official
August 4, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-US.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2987549,00.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan blasted America's recently departed ambassador to neighboring India on Monday, calling him ``ill-informed'' and ``heartless'' for alleging that Islamabad was allowing terrorist incursions into India's portion of disputed Kashmir.
Robert Blackwill, who stepped down as ambassador on Wednesday, became a ``prejudiced'' observer of the conflict between nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Massood Khan.
``He is suffering from localitis,'' said Khan. ``Mr. Blackwill seems to be ill-informed, he is prejudiced, and I think he is heartless because he is condoning the genocide of the Kashmiris, and how can he do that?''
Blackwill stepped down early from his post to return to Washington and work with National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice on matters connected to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. No new ambassador has been named.
In an interview in his last week on the job, Blackwill warned of unspecified consequences if Pakistan fails to end incursions by Islamic guerrillas into the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir.
``The problem persists ... There are still terrorists coming across the Line of Control,'' Blackwill said in an interview aired July 26 on New Delhi Television.
The former princely state has been the main source of tension between Pakistan and India since they gained independence from Britain in 1947. The two nations have fought two of three wars over the region, and nearly fought another last year following a deadly Dec. 13, 2001 attack on the Indian parliament by suspected Islamic militants.
More than 63,000 people have died since 1989, when Islamic militants began their insurgency to separate the region from India or merge it with Pakistan.
New Delhi has accused Pakistan of backing the militants, a charge Islamabad denies.
On Monday, Khan complained that ``Indian leaders and Cabinet ministers are competing with each other in demonizing Pakistan.''
Khan also reiterated at the weekly press briefing that Pakistan is considering sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq. He said the government had agreed ``in principal'' to send the troops.
``We would like to send the troops provided we have the cover of the United Nations or the Organization of the Islamic Conference'' or another international organization.
Finally, Khan said his country is in discussions with other Muslim nations about the possibility of recognizing Israel.
``A debate has started which has broken the taboo of talking about starting a relationship with Israel,'' said Khan. ``It couldn't be discussed openly and publicly before, but a healthy debate has now taken place in the media and academic circles. All the participants are looking at the pros and cons, the costs and benefits.''
-------- prisoners of war
More than 5,000 prisoners in Iraq: US military police
Monday, 04-Aug-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/av/Qiraq-us-prison.RAg1_Da4.html
ABU GHARIB, Iraq, Aug 4 (AFP) - US-led coalition forces are currently detaining 5,000 Iraqi prisoners, General Janis Karpinski of the US army's military police said Monday.
The 5,000 include several categories: prisoners of war, common criminals and security detainees.
The coalition has previously said there 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners were held in its penal system.
There are currently 300 to 400 security detainees being held, Karpinski said during a tour of the renovated facilities at Abu Gharib, a dreaded prison under Saddam Hussein, set to open within two weeks.
Security detainees include those having launched politically-motivated attacks against Iraqis or the coalition, said Colonel Mark Warren, the US military's top legal advocate in Iraq.
Karpinski said 205 foreign nationals were currently being detained in the prisons, although she refused to give their nationalities. The 500 detainees at Abu Gharib, 25 kilometres (15 miles) outside Baghdad, are living in canvas tents in the compound's sweltering yard while they wait for the prison's renovated facilities to open.
-------- us
The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded
Julian Borger, Washington
Monday August 4, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1011692,00.html
US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media.
Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total number of US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112.
The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
Unofficial figures are in the thousands. About half have been injured since the president's triumphant appearance on board the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln at the beginning of May. Many of the wounded have lost limbs.
The figures are politically sensitive. The number of American combat deaths since the start of the war is 166 - 19 more than the death toll in the first Gulf war.
The passing of that benchmark last month erased the perception, popular at the time Baghdad fell, that the US had scored an easy victory.
According to a Gallup poll, 63% of Americans still think Iraq was worth going to war over, but a quarter want the troops out now, and another third want a withdrawal if the casualty figures continue to mount.
In fact, the total death toll this time is 248 - including accidents and suicides - and as the number of non-combat deaths and serious injuries becomes more widely known, the erosion of public confidence is likely to continue, posing a threat to Mr Bush's prospects of re-election, which at the beginning of May had seemed a foregone conclusion.
Military observers say it is unusual, even in a "low-intensity" guerrilla war such as the situation seen in Iraq, for non-combat deaths to outnumber combat casualties.
The Pentagon does not tabulate the cause of those deaths, but according to an American website that has been tracking official reports, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 23 American soldiers have died in car or helicopter accidents since May 1, while 12 have been killed in accidents with weapons or explosives.
Three deaths have been categorised as "possible suicides", three have died from illness, and three from drowning. The rest are unexplained.
Wounded American soldiers continue to be flown back to the US at a relentless rate, in twice-weekly transport flights to Andrews air force base near Washington.
Hospital staff are working 70- or 80-hour weeks, and the Walter Reed army hospital in Washington is so full that it has taken over beds normally reserved for cancer patients to handle the influx, according to a report on CBS television.
Meanwhile, at the nearby national naval medical centre in Bethesda, new marine injuries are delivered almost daily by a medical plane known as the Nightingale.
The Pentagon figure for "wounded in action" in Iraq is 827, but here again the total number of injuries appears to be much higher.
The estimate given by central command in Qatar is 926, but according to Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the airlift of the wounded into Andrews air base, that too is understated.
"Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda, which are in this area also," Col DeLane told National Public Radio.
He said 90% of injuries were directly war-related.
Some of that number may involve double-counting - if a soldier stays at the Andrews clinic on the way to Washington and then again on the way back to the war or back home, for example. But the actual number of wounded still appears to be much higher than the official figures.
"When the facility where I'm at started absorbing the people coming back from theatre [in April], those numbers went up significantly - I'd say over 1,200," Col DeLane said.
"That number even went up higher in the month of May, to about 1,500, and continues to increase."
----
War casualties overflow Walter Reed hospital
August 04, 2003
By Jon Ward
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030804-121425-6485r.htm
Officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are referring some outpatients to nearby hotels because casualties from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have overloaded the hospital's convalescence facility.
"We have an informal agreement with any number of hotels in the area. If we come to this point, they will take [patients] for us," said Walter Reed spokesman Jim Stueve. "They're very supportive and cooperative when we need that assistance."
Mr. Stueve could not specify how many soldiers are in hotels, but said Walter Reed is referring about 20 patients or their relatives to hotels each day. Hotels in Silver Spring, just across the D.C. line, offer discounted rates for outpatients and their families, and the military pays the bill.
However, the hotel arrangement has not compromised the quality of care for incoming wounded, Mr. Stueve said.
"The staff is highly motivated to get these troops mended and on their way," he said.
A hospital spokeswoman said: "We haven't turned away any injured soldiers. We are treating all of them."
The Army hospital and its convalescence facility, Mologne House, are at maximum occupancy capacity, with 96 percent of their outpatient beds filled with war wounded.
Walter Reed has been at maximum capacity since Operation Enduring Freedom began in Afghanistan in 2001, Mr. Stueve said, adding that the hospital's 3,900 staffers have "put in a substantial amount of overtime."
Before Enduring Freedom, the hospital's occupancy rate had held steady at 83 percent for five years.
"We haven't been average here for well over a year. We've been really busy. They've been rolling in here real regular," Mr. Stueve said.
The Mologne House is a 280-bed facility for outpatients who need continued care or rehabilitation, as well as their families.
"Anybody who comes here and wants to stay there can't," said a hospital spokeswoman.
The hospital has 40 of 250 beds available for inpatients, but must continually open beds for new arrivals from Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany or the U.S. Naval Hospital in Rota, Spain.
"We have flights coming in almost every night from Landstuhl, so you don't book that sucker up solid so when you have your No. 1 priority come in, you say, 'You can't stay here,' " Mr. Stueve said.
Walter Reed has treated about 750 patients from Operation Iraqi Freedom since the war began, 185 of whom have been battle casualties. Of the 185 battle casualties, 135 have been treated as inpatients and 50 as outpatients. The total number of battle casualty patients discharged is 111, including one death, leaving 24 currently at the medical center as inpatients.
One of the hospital's best known patients - Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch - left Walter Reed last month to return to her family's home in West Virginia.
A current inpatient is still in critical condition. Two others remain in critical but stable condition. Walter Reed physicians describe the conditions of other inpatients as ranging from fair to good. The patients have broken bones, orthopedic injuries, gunshot wounds and other minor injuries.
The hospital received seven battle casualties this week. Four are in serious but stable condition, one is in fair condition, and one is in satisfactory condition. The seventh received treatment as an outpatient.
President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1. But U.S. troops there continue to come under attack almost daily by resistance fighters, especially in cities north and west of Baghdad, where Sunni Muslims were the strongest supporters of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
-------- propaganda wars
How To Sell a War
The Rendon Group deploys 'perception management' in the war on Iraq
By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
8.4.03
http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=299_0_1_0_C
As U.S. tanks stormed into Baghdad on April 9, television viewers in the United States got their first feel-good moment of the war-a chance to witness the toppling of a giant statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Americans channel-flipping over breakfast between Fox, CNN and CBS all saw the same images, broadcast live from Baghdad's Firdos Square. For those who missed it in the morning, the images were continually replayed on cable news throughout the day, and newspapers carried front-page color photos.
A crowd of jubilant Iraqis had climbed onto the statue, thrown a noose around its neck and tried to pull it down. A man with a sledgehammer began pounding at its concrete base. Others took turns, but the statue was too big and the base too massive, so the U.S. marines moved in with an armored vehicle and a chain. Saddam's statue first bent from its pedestal and then snapped completely, to roars of approval from the crowd, which surged forward to stomp on its remains, kicking and spitting on the rubble. Whooping, they dragged its head through the street.
Media commentators were quick to assign iconic significance to the statue's tumble, ranking it alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protesters facing down tanks at Tiananmen Square, and other great events caught on TV.
NBC's Tom Brokaw compared the event to "all the statues of Lenin [that] came down all across the Soviet Union."
"Iraqis Celebrate in Baghdad," reported the Washington Post.
"Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital," said the headline in the New York Times.
"It was liberation day in Baghdad," proclaimed the Boston Globe.
"If you don't have goose bumps now," gushed Fox News anchor David Asman, "you will never have them in your life."
The problem is that the images of toppling statues and exulting Iraqis, to which American audiences were repeatedly exposed, obscured a larger reality. A Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showed that it was nearly empty, ringed by U.S. tanks and marines who had moved in to seal off the square before admitting the Iraqis. A BBC photo sequence of the statue's toppling also showed a sparse crowd of approximately 200 people-much smaller than the demonstrations only nine days later, when thousands of Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad calling for U.S.-led forces to leave the city. Los Angeles Times reporter John Daniszewski, who was on the scene to witness the statue's fall, caught an aspect of the day's events that the other reporters missed. Most Iraqis were indeed glad to see Saddam go, he wrote, but he spoke near the scene with Iraqi businessman Jarrir Abdel-Kerim, who warned that Americans should not be deceived by the images they were seeing.
"A lot of people are angry at America," Abdel-Kerim said. "Look how many people they killed. Today I saw some people breaking this monument, but there were people-men and women-who stood there and said in Arabic: 'Screw America, screw Bush.' So all this is not a simple situation."
Perception Management
The visual images, of course, are what most people will remember. But it is worth asking whether the toppling of Saddam was as spontaneous as it was made to appear. If this scene seemed a bit too picture-perfect, perhaps there is a reason. Consider, for example, the remarks that public relations consultant John Rendon-who, during the past decade, has worked extensively on Iraq for the Pentagon and the CIA-made on February 29, 1996, before an audience of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
"I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," Rendon said. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." He reminded the Air Force cadets that when victorious troops rolled into Kuwait City at the end of the first war in the Persian Gulf, they were greeted by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. The scene, flashed around the world on television screens, sent the message that U.S. Marines were being welcomed in Kuwait as liberating heroes.
"Did you ever stop to wonder," Rendon asked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" He paused for effect. "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."
Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Rendon or any other PR specialist helped influence the toppling of Saddam's statue or other specific images that the public saw during the war in Iraq. Public relations firms often do their work behind the scenes, and Rendon-with whom the Pentagon signed a new agreement in February 2002-is usually reticent about his work. But his description of himself as a "perception manager" echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define "perception management" as "actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. ... In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops [psychological operations]."
The paradox of the American war in Iraq, however, is that perception management has been much more successful at "influencing the emotions, motives, and objective reasoning" of the American people than it has been at reaching "foreign audiences." When we see footage of Kuwaitis waving American flags, or of Iraqis cheering while U.S. Marines topple a statue of Saddam, it should be understood that those images target U.S. audiences as much, if not more, than the citizens of Kuwait or Iraq.
It became obvious within days of the toppling of the statue that although the Iraqi people largely welcomed the dictator's downfall, they were not as eager to throw bouquets of flowers at American soldiers as the scene at Firdos Square seemed to suggest. In Nasiriyah, some 20,000 people rallied to oppose the U.S. military presence on April 15, only six days after the statue fell. "Yes to freedom, yes to Islam," they chanted. "No to America, no to Saddam." In other protests, crowds chanted, "No, no, Chalabi" in opposition to Ahmed Chalabi, the U.S.-backed head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Newsweek interviewed a high-ranking U.S. military officer who said he was stunned when he began talking to Iraqis, even anti-Saddam locals, about Chalabi's credibility. "It's astonishing how little support he has," the officer said. "I'm afraid we're backing the wrong horse."
The "George Washington of Iraq"
In 1991, a few months after the end of Operation Desert Storm, then-president George H.W. Bush signed a presidential directive ordering a CIA covert operation to unseat Saddam Hussein. And the CIA turned to Rendon.
In 1992, the Rendon Group helped organize the INC, which represented the first major attempt by opponents of Saddam Hussein to join forces. According to a February 1998 ABC News report by Peter Jennings, Rendon came up with the name for INC and channeled $12 million of covert CIA funding to it between 1992 and 1996. INC brought together Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs (both Islamic fundamentalist and secular), as well as democrats, nationalists, and ex-military officers. In October 1992, Ahmed Chalabi, a Rendon protégé, was appointed to head the group.
Internal differences led to the group's virtual collapse, and for years afterwards, Chalabi was mistrusted by the CIA and the Clinton administration, which dropped INC and began funding a rival opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA). That venture also ended disastrously, when a number of INC and INA members were rounded up and killed by Saddam Hussein's forces.
But despite repeated setbacks, Chalabi remained a frequent visitor to the corridors of power in Washington. Certain circles-the pro-Israel hawks with roots in the Reagan and first Bush administrations who have come to be known as "neoconservatives"-even referred to Chalabi as the "George Washington of Iraq." As a propaganda effort, the conversion of Chalabi to the equivalent of a founding father was clearly a resounding success. Everyone, including Chalabi, seemed convinced. Chalabi knew how to tell the hawks what they wanted to hear, promising that Saddam's regime was on its last legs, that INC commanded vast sympathetic support and intelligence assets, and that Iraqi forces would defect en masse as soon as the United States showed the gumption to support a war of liberation.
Chalabi's political fortunes improved in 1997, when a number of prominent neoconservatives formed the "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC), which lobbied for increasing U.S. military spending and taking a harder line against Iraq. PNAC's founder and chairman, William Kristol, was a former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and to Secretary of Education William Bennett (both PNAC founding members themselves). Kristol is better known as the editor of The Weekly Standard, an influential political affairs magazine underwritten by right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Other PNAC founders, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, would later hold important positions in the second Bush administration.
The inauguration of George W. Bush and the post-9/11 war on terrorism would put the PNAC neoconservatives back in the driver's seat of U.S. foreign policy. Nine days after the 9/11 attacks, PNAC sent an open letter to President Bush, calling not only for the destruction of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, but also to extend the war to Iraq, and to take measures against Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.
The Information War
John Rendon's refusal to discuss his activities makes it difficult to do more than speculate about the full scope and extent of his firm's involvement in Iraq, but an incident during the war itself provided a rare breach in the wall of secrecy. On March 23, TV cameraman Paul Moran was killed in northern Iraq by a suicide bomber while on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His obituary, published in his home town of Adelaide, Australia, noted that Moran's activities "included working for an American public relations company contracted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to run propaganda campaigns against the dictatorship. ... Company founder John Rendon flew from the United States to attend Mr. Moran's funeral in Adelaide on Wednesday. A close friend, Rob Buchan, said the presence of Mr. Rendon-an adviser to the U.S. National Security Council-illustrated the regard in which Mr. Moran was held in U.S. political circles, including the Congress."
Moran's work for the Rendon Group apparently included producing the only television interview with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, the Iraqi engineer who claimed that he helped build special underground facilities for Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program. According to a report by the Australian news show Dateline, Moran was one of two reporters who were granted access to al Haideri by Chalabi's INC. (The other was the New York Times' Judith Miller, whose reporting has come under scrutiny since it was revealed that Chalabi and INC were the primary sources for her numerous stories about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Zaab Sethna, INC spokesman, told Dateline, "The information that al Haideri provided went directly to President Bush, it went to Tony Blair." Indeed, Bush quoted the information provided by al Haideri in his State of the Union address as he made his case for war. Yet the underground facilities that al Haideri claimed to have helped build have never been found, perhaps because they never existed.
In December 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported in The American Prospect that the Bush administration actually preferred Chalabi's INC-supplied analyses of Iraq over the intelligence coming from the CIA. "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency," wrote Dreyfuss. "The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war." Much of the pro-war faction's information came from INC, even though "most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil."
"[INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert, told Dreyfuss. "They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."
Two days before the Saddam regime crumbled in Baghdad, INC-the organization that the Rendon Group had carefully named and packaged 11 years earlier-was ensconced in Iraq.
Chalabi, whose return marked his first opportunity to set foot in Baghdad since his exile in 1958, set up headquarters in the Hunting Club, a private enclave that was previously the club of Saddam's son Uday. "I am not a candidate for any position in the interim government," he said. "My role is to rebuild Iraq." Simultanously, however, his office began to take on the trappings of a government-in-waiting, as throngs of petitioners came clamoring for jobs and favors.
As the war faded, Chalabi's name began popping up in more and more places. In May, longtime Chalabi aide Francis Brooke-a former Rendon employee-said that Chalabi might bow to popular pressure and agree to become Iraq's president after all. "George Washington turned it down many times," Brooke said, apparently without irony. "I wouldn't be surprised if the Iraqi people prevail on him." On May 5, U.S. Gen. Jay Garner named Chalabi as one of five Iraqis likely to be appointed as the nucleus of a new interim government.
Psyops
The blurring of boundaries between truth and myth certainly did not begin with the current Bush administration. Disinformation has been a part of war since at least the days of Alexander the Great, who planted large breastplates of armor in the wake of his retreating troops to convince the enemy that his soldiers were giants. The story of Alexander's little trick is usually taught in the first day of class for soldiers who receive training in psyops.
A 1998 U.S. Air Force manual titled Information Operations, which includes a section titled "Psychological Operations," states: "There is a growing information infrastructure that transcends industry, the media, and the military, and includes both government and nongovernment entities. It is characterized by a merging of civilian and military information networks and technologies. ... In reality, a news broadcast, a diplomatic communiqué, and a military message ordering the execution of an operation all depend on the [global information infrastructure]." In this environment, psyops "are designed to convey selected information and indicators to foreign leaders and audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately their behavior," while "military deception misleads adversaries, causing them to act in accordance with the originator's objectives." Indeed, it says, quoting Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, "All warfare is based on deception."
More than anybody else, it was the American public who was deceived by administration's psyops-a covert disinformation campaign that was directed at the American people. In an October 2002 opinion poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 66 percent of Americans said they believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States, while 79 percent believed that Iraq already possessed, or was close to possessing, nuclear weapons. The principal reason cited by 25 percent of war supporters related to their perceptions of Hussein or the nature of his regime (he's "evil," a "madman," "represses his own people"). However, more than twice that number-60 percent-gave a reason related to their concerns stemming from 9/11 (getting rid of weapons of mass destruction, preventing future terrorism).
In January, Knight-Ridder Newspapers conducted its own, separate opinion poll. "Two-thirds of the respondents said they thought they had a good grasp of the issues surrounding the Iraqi crisis, but closer questioning revealed large gaps in that knowledge," it reported. "For instance, half of those surveyed said one or more of the September 11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens. In fact, none was." Moreover, "The informed public is considerably less hawkish about war with Iraq than the public as a whole. Those who show themselves to be most knowledgeable about the Iraq situation are significantly less likely to support military action, either to remove Saddam from power or to disarm Iraq."
This gap between reality and public opinion was not an accident. If the public had possessed a more accurate understanding of the facts, more people would probably have seen a "pre-emptive" war with Iraq as unwise and unwarranted. The public's erroneous beliefs developed through a steady drumbeat of allegations and insinuations from the Bush administration, pro-war think tanks, and commentators-statements that were often false or misleading and whose purpose was to create the impression that Iraq posed an imminent peril.
True Lies
At a press briefing two weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had an exchange with a reporter that deserves to be quoted in detail:
Reporter: Will there be any circumstances, as you prosecute this campaign, in which anyone in the Department of Defense will be authorized to lie to the news media in order to increase the chances of success of a military operation or gain some other advantage over your adversaries?
Rumsfeld: Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill's famous phrase when he said-don't quote me on this, OK. I don't want to be quoted on this, so don't quote me-he said, sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies, talking about the invasion date and the invasion location, and indeed, they engaged not just in not talking about the date of the Normandy invasion or the location, whether it was to be Normandy Beach or just north off of Belgium, they actually engaged in a plan to confuse the Germans as to where it would happen. And they had a fake army under General Patton, and one thing and another.
That is a piece of history. And I bring it up just for the sake of background.
The answer to your question is no. I cannot imagine a situation. I don't recall that I've ever lied to the press. I don't intend to. And it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you're lying. And I don't do it. And [Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke] won't do it. And [her deputy] Admiral Quigley won't do it.
Reporter: That goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?
Rumsfeld: You've got to be kidding. The members of the press laughed.
This essay was adapted from Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (Tarcher/Penguin, 2003).
----
Poll: Britons Trust BBC More Than They Trust Blair
WMUR-TV, New Hampshire;
August 4, 2003
http://www.thewmurchannel.com/news/2378525/detail.html
LONDON -- A new poll for the Financial Times newspaper in London says more Britons trust the British Broadcasting Corp. than Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Observers say this suggests the media outlet is coming out on top in its heated political battle with the government over claims that Blair's office exaggerated the pre-war threat from Iraq.
The poll says 59 percent of those questioned say they trust the BBC, compared with 41 percent who say they trust Blair.
The suicide of British weapons adviser David Kelly has damaged Blair's popularity and credibility. The BBC identified Kelly after his death as the main source for a report that the government inflated the threat from Iraq to justify war.
----
Whistleblower on Niger uranium claim accuses White House of launching 'dirty-tricks campaign'
By Kim Sengupta
04 August 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=430315
The former American diplomat who exposed false claims that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger has accused members of the Bush administration of a dirty tricks campaign against him.
The revelation of Joseph Wilson's investigation in the African state forced President George Bush to retract claims about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium made in his State of the Union speech two months before the war began.
The Administration is alleged to have leaked the name of Mr Wilson's wife, an undercover CIA operative in the field of weapons of mass destruction, with the aim of discrediting him. It is said that Mr Wilson was selected to go on the trip to Niger last year only after his wife, Valerie Plame, suggested him.
US intelligence officials and the Democrats are furious about the move, arguing that it jeopardises Ms Plame's work and undermines her husband. They have called for an inquiry.
Her identity was revealed by Bob Novak, a syndicated columnist, who said that he was given the information by "two senior administration officials". They told him that Ms Plame had suggested to her CIA colleagues that her husband should be sent on the mission.
His report was followed by allegations on neo-conservative websites that Mr Wilson was an opponent of the Iraq war, and had an interest in refuting the threat from Saddam Hussein's WMD.
Mr Wilson said yesterday that the naming of his wife had parallels with the disclosure of the identity of the British scientist David Kelly, the source of BBC allegations that the British government "sexed up" an dossier on Iraqi weapons.
"The Administration in Washington came in saying they were going to restore honour and dignity to the presidency," Mr Wilson said. "They have shown no sign of it so far.
"This is highly damaging to my wife's career, and could be seen as a smear against me."
But it was also about discouraging "others who may have information embarrassing to the administration from coming forward," he said.
"It is absolutely untrue that my wife was responsible for my trip to Niger. I met a number of senior members of staff to discuss the visit."
Democrats have criticised the White House over disclosing Ms Plame's identity, and Senator Charles Schumer of New York has urged the FBI to investigate.
Former US intelligence officials have also attacked the Administration for the leak, saying it put Ms Plame at risk.
Frank Anderson, the former CIA station chief for the Near East Division, said: "When it gets to the point of an administration official acting to do career damage, and possibly endanger someone's life, that's mean, that's petty, it's irresponsible, and it ought not to be sanctioned."
Mr Wilson, a former US ambassador to Gabon, revealed his Niger mission, undertaken last year, in a recent article in The New York Times. He reported to the State Department and the CIA that tales of Iraqi purchases of Niger uranium were without credence but it was still used by Mr Bush in his speech, though attributed to Britain.
Mr Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has acknowledged that the CIA told Britain that there was no evidence of Iraq attempting to acquire uranium from Niger. The Government insists, however, that it has "separate intelligence" about Iraq's attempts to acquire African uranium. Ministers have refused to state what that is.
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Bush's WMD Flimflams
by James Bovard,
August 4, 2003
Future of Freedom Foundation
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0309d.asp
The Bush administration's rush to war against Iraq was justified largely by the danger that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction supposedly posed to the United States and to U.S. allies. In his January 28, 2003, state of the Union address, Bush denounced Saddam as "the dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons" and listed vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons that few independent experts believed Saddam possessed. Bush concluded, "A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all." In his March 17 "ultimatum address," after listing Saddam's alleged WMDs, Bush declaimed, "And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail."
In his March 17, 2003, speech on his 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam, Bush declared that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.... Under [UN] Resolutions 678 and 687 - both still in effect - the United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush warned, In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over.
But there was no evidence that the Iraq "threat" has increased in recent years and no reason to expect it to "multiply many times over" in the following 12 months - especially since UN weapons inspectors were busily ferreting in Iraq at that moment.
At a time when the allegations of Iraqi WMDs are unraveling, it is important to recognize the extent of the frauds that preceded the war.
The Bush team waved nuke after alleged Iraqi nuke over Americans' heads in the run-up to the war. On August 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, warned that Saddam could have nuclear weapons "fairly soon." Two weeks later, President Bush told reporters, I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied, finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic - the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] - that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need.
On March 16, 2003, Cheney announced on NBC's Meet the Press that "we believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
But the Bush administration never presented any evidence to support these assertions. The IAEA - the UN organization that was conducting inspections for nuclear weapons in Iraq - never produced the report Bush "reminded" reporters of in September. Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA's director general, informed the UN Security Council that "there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities" in Iraq. And although Cheney and Bush repeatedly invoked some aluminum tubes that Iraq sought to purchase as key steps toward making a nuke, UN experts investigated and concluded that the tubes were not intended for use in nuclear weapons production.
Perhaps the most decisive piece of evidence offered by the Bush administration was the fact that Iraq sought to buy 500 tons of uranium oxide for use in nuclear weapons from uranium mines in Niger.
CIA chief George Tenet gave a classified briefing to congressmen on this and other charges in September 2002, a few weeks before Congress voted to endorse war with Iraq.
Secretary of State Colin Powell also informed a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee two days later of the Iraq attempt to secure the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon. The revelation sent shock waves through Capitol Hill and helped squelch resistance to going to war.
In his January 28 state of the Union address, Bush declared: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The forgeries
In early March, the IAEA announced that the documents detailing the attempted purchases of uranium were frauds. One senior IAEA official told the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped.
The British government had long refused to give the documents to the IAEA; when the Brits finally passed along the "smoking gun," it took IAEA inspectors "only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake," Hersh reported.
The letters appeared to be a crude cut-and-paste operation with Niger government letterhead; however, the names of officials in power did not match the dates on the letter and the signature of Niger president Tandja Mamadou was an obvious forgery.
A senior IAEA official observed that the flaws in the letters could have been "spotted by someone using Google on the Internet." Hersh, who wrote a superb exposé on the scam, noted, Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-West Va.) requested that FBI chief Robert Mueller investigate the document fraud because "there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." The FBI effectively brushed off Rockefeller's request.
Six weeks after Hersh's piece appeared, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that the vice president's office began a much-earlier investigation into the Iraq-Niger nuclear documents, sending a former U.S. ambassador to Niger. Kristof reported that in February 2002 that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.... The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted - except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. A tardy admission
After months of the story of the false Niger claims festering in the media, a senior Bush administration official - unnamed, of course - formally announced on July 7, 2003 Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.
This greatly belated admission by an unnamed official was taken by senior Republicans as the proper close of the entire episode. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, declared, Obviously, when you use foreign intelligence, you - we don't have necessarily as much confidence or as much reliability as you do your own. It has since turned out to be, at least according to the reports that have been just released, not true. The president stepped forward and said so. I think that's all you can expect.
But it is ludicrous to assert that "the president stepped forward and said so." Bush never conceded his statements were false; instead, he busied himself in late June denouncing "historical revisionists" who were examining the administration's record on Iraq. The Bush administration did not even have the gumption to permit the "senior administration official" to be named - and yet Santorum believes Bush deserves a "That's all you can expect" response.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) derided concerns over the administration's confession that it had used false statements on the path to war: It's very easy to pick one little flaw here or one little flaw there. The overall reason we went into Iraq was sound and morally sound. And it's not just because somebody forged or a made a mistake on whether Saddam Hussein was looking for nuclear material from Niger or whatever.
Whatever. Hundreds of American soldiers are dead and thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed. It is not a question of "one little flaw here or one little flaw there." Instead, it is a question of plank after plank of the Bush administration's justification for going to war being rotten to the core. And leaders like DeLay respond by rushing to attempt to close the subject and to portray any further curiosity as pettifogging - or worse.
Bush White House aides sought to defend the president by blaming the CIA for failing to warn them that the Niger story was as bogus as three-dollar bill. However, on July 22, Bush's Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley and his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, conceded that the CIA had sent two warnings to the White House in early October 2002 casting grave doubts on the Iraq-Niger uranium claims.
The Washington Post noted the following day that yesterday's disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation.
Most of the American media ignored the revelations amidst widespread exulting over the killing of Saddam's sons by the U.S. military in Iraq.
The Bush administration knew - at least as of early March - that the president's statements in the state of the Union address on Iraq pursuing uranium in Africa were false and misleading. Yet the administration made no effort to correct its falsehoods until a British parliamentary inquiry had bludgeoned the Blair government on the same issue.
There is no reason to presume that Bush was more deceptive and manipulative on the war on Iraq than he is on the war on terrorism or other subjects. The main difference is that the evidence of false claims on Iraq is now stark, especially after the U.S. invasion.
James Bovard is author of Lost Rights (1994) and the forthcoming Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush's Crusade is Sabotaging Peace, Justice, and Freedom (St. Martin's Press, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- immigration / refugees
Republicans Put Immigration Laws Back on Political Agenda
August 4, 2003
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/politics/04IMMI.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, several Republicans in Congress are pushing for broad legislation that would regulate the flow of foreign workers into the country and potentially legalize millions of illegal employees.
Senator John McCain and Representatives Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake, all Republicans from Arizona, introduced bills in July that would grant permanent residency over several years to foreign workers who enter the country legally and to illegal workers already in the United States. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, also introduced a guest worker bill last month.
The measures have been criticized by liberal advocacy groups that contend that they do too little for immigrants and by conservative Republicans who say they go too far. White House officials say they have not taken a stance on the bills, and their proponents do not expect them to pass this year.
But critics on both sides of the political divide said the proposals were still significant because they constituted the first time Republicans in Congress had pushed aggressively for comprehensive changes in immigration laws since talks on the issue between President Bush and President Vicente Fox of Mexico collapsed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Fox had been working on a long-term strategy to regulate immigration flows from Mexico and legalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants already in this country. The plan appealed to Hispanics and to big businesses, important political constituencies for the Bush administration.
"To have Republicans stepping up and proposing these important but imperfect bills is something of a breakthrough," said Frank Sharry, who runs the National Immigration Forum, a policy group.
"To me, it's the post-9/11 signal that it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when we're going to legalize more migration so that we can better regulate it," Mr. Sharry said.
Mr. McCain said he expected the plans to be attacked from "both ends of the spectrum" and that the legislation would face many political obstacles.
Advocates for immigrants said that the bills lacked adequate safeguards for workers and created a complicated and arduous legalization process. On the other side, Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, has criticized the plans as an attack on America's borders.
"It's really amnesty on the installment plan," said Mr. Tancredo, the leader of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, which favors reducing immigration. "They are even more ambitious in their amnesty proposal than some of the Democrats I've seen. We have to watch this carefully."
Mr. McCain and other supporters of the proposals said that many illegal immigrants did jobs that Americans do not want and that legalizing such workers would help many businesses. They also said they hoped that the legislation would help curtail or end the abuses some illegal immigrants suffer. Many die during desert crossings or suffer at the hands of smugglers and ruthless employers.
"We all know it is an issue that must be addressed," Mr. McCain said in a telephone interview. "The status quo is no longer acceptable. This starts the debate."
The bills would allow the number of worker visas to be determined by the demand for workers. Jobs listed on a Labor Department registry for 14 days and not filled by Americans could be given to an immigrant guest worker. The jobs would be advertised every three years to ensure that American workers were not interested.
Foreign workers who apply for temporary work visas while living abroad could apply for legal permanent residency after working in the United States for three years. Illegal immigrants already here would have to pay a $1,500 fine and wait for three years before applying for permanent residency if an employer sponsored the application, or six years without an employer sponsor.
"We will be able to funnel 99 percent of the currently undocumented population through ports of entry, where they can be documented, screened and monitored to give the U.S. a better understanding of who is living within the nation's borders," Mr. Kolbe said in a speech in Tucson last week.
Mr. Cornyn's bill would allow illegal immigrants to receive guest worker status if sponsored by their employers. But they would have to return home after three years. Once there, their applications for permanent residency would be given priority.
Democrats say Mr. Cornyn's bill would separate families by requiring workers to leave the United States to apply for green cards.
Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. Cornyn, said the senator was pleased that the measure had stirred debate. "It has sparked discussion and it will continue to do so," Mr. Stewart said.
-------- justice
Pentagon rules keep lawyers away from military trials
Monday August 04, 2003
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2003-daily/04-08-2003/world/w8.htm
WASHINGTON: Defence lawyers could not do their utmost to represent terrorism suspects tried before military tribunals and thus cannot ethically participate in any such trials under rules the Pentagon has laid out, the largest organisation of criminal defence lawyers said recently.
"We took the position that it is unethical for a lawyer to represent a client under current conditions for military tribunals, and if a lawyer chose to do so, he or she must contest all of those unethical conditions,'' said Barry Scheck, the incoming president of the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers.
The organisation will issue the ethics statement to its 11,000 members. Lawyers are not legally bound by the organisation's positions, but state bar associations sometimes adopt the same reasoning for their rules.
The NACDL's board of directors voted on the matter at its annual meeting in Denver. Scheck discussed the action in a telephone interview. The American Bar Association, the nation's largest lawyers' group, is expected to address similar concerns at its annual meeting next week.
The Pentagon has not convened any tribunals, but such panels could be used to try any of hundreds of foreign citizens held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. The Pentagon calls those held at Guantanamo enemy combatants, and maintains that they do not have the same legal rights as US citizens or those tried in ordinary US civilian courts.
Anyone brought before a military tribunal will get a free military lawyer to provide legal help. At issue is whether and under what conditions outside civilian counsel could also participate. The NACDL and other legal organisations object to several restrictions the Pentagon has placed on outside civilian lawyers.
For instance, the Pentagon could listen in when the lawyer meets with a client. The Pentagon has said that is a security precaution, and that none of the information would be used by military prosecutors. Lawyers are also worried about restrictions on where and how lawyers could meet with clients or conduct research.
-------- police
Illuminating D.C.'s Darkest Corners
National Guard Guides Police From Above, Photographing and Spotlighting Crime
By Simone Weichselbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16940-2003Aug3.html
From a National Guard helicopter 500 feet above the city, a camera takes pictures of the street scene below, magnifying images that will be scrutinized by police.
"That building on the corner," said pilot Rohn LeGore, pointing to 1300 Valley Avenue SE, "it has a lot of drug activity."
From LeGore's seat, the roof of the apartment building in Southeast Washington is clearly visible, as is anyone walking in the nearby wooded area. The bubble-shaped infrared camera on the belly of his chopper records images that can be displayed live on monitors in the helicopter and at police command centers.
At night, the chopper's spotlight, the Night Sun, can generate the equivalent of 30 million candles glowing in the dark sky, giving the National Guard and D.C. police the ability to see and be seen in areas that can be a challenge to check.
The flights are part of an ongoing mission that began in 1989 to assist D.C. police. The National Guard also helps police with a program that uses floodlights to illuminate dark corners and doorways in neighborhoods where drug dealers are believed to lurk.
"They offer the community a strong security presence by virtue of them being part of the military," said Winston Robinson, commander of the 7th Police District, who works with the National Guard on a regular basis. "That is what it is all about -- making the streets safe."
Some D.C. residents question the long-term value of the work, noting that the National Guard moves from place to place, depending on priorities set by police.
"If our taxpayer dollars go towards the National Guard, why can't they be out here all the time?" asked Congress Heights resident Tracee Simmons. "Our kids can't go out at night without the risk of them being shot."
But D.C. authorities and National Guard leaders in the District said the surveillance and lighting have an impact. Although the National Guard does aerial surveillance in other cities, the District is the only place to feature the Lite-All program, in which National Guard members stand on flood-lit streets in hopes of deterring drug traffic.
"Drug dealers are like cockroaches," said Maj. Berkley Gore, head of the Guard's counter-drug program in Washington. "You shine the light on them, and they won't come back for weeks."
The National Guard does not make arrests in the city but provides police with the tools to nab suspects. Robinson estimated that of the more than 100 helicopter reconnaissance missions the guard has conducted in his district, about 70 percent resulted in arrests.
"We use the helicopter extensively," Robinson said. "It is very helpful in investigations."
The OH-58, the chopper LeGore flies, is a reconnaissance craft that typically is used by the military to gather data in hostile areas before the armed units are sent in.
The National Guard provides the helicopter for surveillance in the District five days a week and at least twice a day, Gore said.
During daytime surveillance, a National Guard pilot and a D.C. police photographer fly over areas selected by law enforcement officials. At night, two National Guard members operate the craft while a D.C. police representative sits in the rear, watching images on a small monitor.
When police are not aboard, the pilot communicates with law enforcement officials on the ground via radio.
Police requested help on Valley Avenue after a shooting July 11. That afternoon, two men were shot, one fatally, in the courtyard of the Wheeler Terrace apartments, a complex in the 1200 block of Valley Avenue SE.
Days after the shooting, two National Guard trucks were deployed to floodlight the neighborhood. National Guard patrols stood on the illuminated street for almost five hours and distributed coloring books with anti-drug messages to children.
LeGore flew over the area a few days later.
Police officials determine where the National Guard is deployed on such missions, National Guard officials said. The officials estimated that the National Guard receives about 250 requests from D.C. police each year and said that nearly all of them result in assistance.
Sandra Seegars, a community activist, said she supports the program. She recently questioned National Guard members at a Lite-All site about why they do not stay in one place longer and was told that budget constraints limit the National Guard's ability to come night after night to the same locations.
"Why doesn't the city put up brighter street lamps?" asked Seegars, offering an alternative. "Criminals stay away from light."
In addition to the flyovers and Lite-All duties, National Guard members have helped the city seal abandoned buildings identified as crack houses to prevent illegal entry by squatters and drug users.
Since 1997, the National Guard has sealed more than 2,000 dwellings across the city. In the 7th Police District, Robinson estimated that more than 80 properties have been closed.
The three programs cost the federal government about $1.7 million a year -- a bargain, Gore said, "if you look at the amount of missions we have done."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Initiatives Aim to Halt Cycle of Felons Returning to Jail
August 4, 2003
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/nyregion/04PRIS.html
Tucked into the state budget that Connecticut legislators approved last week are community programs that would put the state at the forefront of an effort to reduce prison overcrowding and the ballooning costs associated with it, criminal justice experts said.
A major part of the new strategy focuses on breaking a cycle that currently sends 40 percent of the nation's felons back to prison within three years.
New community programs and strategies, costing $7.5 million over two years, would be based in low-income neighborhoods - in places like Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport - where, according to statistics, as many as one in 10 adults has spent time in prison or jail.
The local programs would, for instance, provide more nuanced methods of dealing with thousands of nonviolent convicts who are automatically sent back to prison, at a cost of $27,000 a year per prisoner, for committing only minor or technical violations of their parole or probation. State lawmakers may also increase the number of parole officers, many of whom juggle hundreds of cases.
Connecticut's prison population makes the state especially ripe for such change, prison experts said.
With 31,776 incarcerations last year, the state imprisons more residents per capita than any other state in the Northeast, but more than half of its prisoners are considered nonviolent or are in prison for technical parole or probation violations, according to a new study published by the nonpartisan Council of State Governments, a nonprofit group.
The study prompted Connecticut legislators to act on some of its recommendations. How the money for the new programs is spent will depend on further negotiations between the governor and lawmakers.
Michele Sullivan, the press secretary for Gov. John G. Rowland, said he supported many of the report's main recommendations. "The governor certainly does support it in terms of better ways to address prison management," she said.
Connecticut also has one of the lowest parole rates of any state, 83 per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 350 per 100,000, said James Austin, a co-author of the study and the director of George Washington University's Institute on Crime, Justice and Corrections.
Closing what Mr. Rowland and leading state legislators consider yawning inefficiencies in the state's prison system has become imperative in Connecticut where, as in other states, revenue declines have caused huge budget shortfalls. Changing how some parole and probation violators are treated will cost millions, but is expected to generate a net savings as early as next year and could become a model for many other states, experts said.
"There's no other state that I know of that has tried to impose this kind of discipline and cuts to corrections along with the reinvestments that will further cut incarcerations," said Michael P. Jacobson, the study's other co-author, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City correction commissioner.
Some of the study's recommendations include reducing by 25 percent the number of technical violations that send a parole violator back to prison, like not having a job or missing a meeting with a parole officer.
"You wouldn't send him back for two or three years for missing an appointment," said State Representative William R. Dyson, co-chairman of the Legislature's Appropriations Committee, who favors the changes.
Such a reduction would by itself save the state nearly $9 million a year, according to the Council of State Governments study.
Mr. Dyson also said he wanted the state to hire more parole officers to reduce caseloads and, in turn, allow the officers more thoughtful alternatives than recommending that a technical parole or probation violator simply be hauled back to prison.
Perhaps the most startling statistic in the study comes from its focus on geographic microcosms of crime: nearly half of the state's prison population comes from 10 neighborhoods in Connecticut's five largest cities.
Using data from the Census Bureau and the state and federal criminal justice systems, the report examined several specific neighborhoods in New Haven, the state's third-largest city. It showed that residents from the Hill, Fair Haven and Newhallville neighborhoods accounted for half of the 1,764 New Haven residents incarcerated by the state last year.
Locating strong post-prison programs - job training, drug counseling, remedial classes or simply instructions on how to apply for a driver's license - in those neighborhoods is an obvious way to attack the problem, Professors Jacobson and Austin said in interviews on Friday.
"Most of us can't go to jail for not having a job, but if you're on probation or parole, you can," Professor Austin said. In Connecticut, he added, "they're basically wasting space in their prison system."
Establishing programs for ex-felons in specific parts of cities has reduced recidivism elsewhere in the country, Mr. Austin said.
The same intense focus on the Connecticut neighborhoods most likely to produce felons would be aimed at the same cycle, he said.
"If you focus on these 10 communities, you could dramatically turn things around," he said.
The study also reveals that blacks are incarcerated in Connecticut at a rate 13 times higher than whites, a far higher ratio than in almost any other state. White residents in Connecticut are sent to prison at a rate of 190 of every 100,000 people, half the national average; the rate for blacks is 2,427 per 100,000.
The latter figure is only slightly higher than the national average in a country where half of all black men experience jail or prison at some point in their lives. But it does provide a starting point for Connecticut's lawmakers to stem prison population growth, Professor Austin said.
"From a public policy point of view," he said, "if you could get your black and Hispanic incarceration rate down, you could drop that prison population by thousands."
-------- terrorism
Ashcroft: Al Qaeda Remains a Threat
Associated Press
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16858-2003Aug3.html
After the release of a new tape said to be from al Qaeda, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft warned yesterday of a "very real potential" for attack by Osama bin Laden's terrorism network.
"They want to strike us whenever and wherever they can," Ashcroft told "Fox News Sunday."
Although not saying the tape is authentic, Ashcroft told ABC's "This Week" that it "signals to us that the war is still underway, that al Qaeda still has the same intentions toward the United States that it did when it unleashed its savage attack" on Sept. 11, 2001.
The recording threatens that the United States "will pay dearly" if it harms detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The voice is purportedly that of bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri.
"The potential for us to be hit again is a very real potential," Ashcroft said. "And the kinds of efforts that we're making, the kinds of information we're sharing with the American people, signal that we believe that there is such a potential, but that we minimize the potential whenever we're alert."
Ashcroft said the administration is taking steps to prevent new attacks.
Last week, the Homeland Security Department told airlines and law enforcement agencies that al Qaeda may attempt suicide hijackings in the coming months.
Over the weekend, the State and Homeland Security departments suspended visa rules for most foreigners traveling through the United States from one foreign airport to another. They now will be required to have visas as they wait for connecting flights. Ashcroft said that these actions add another layer of security and that he believes it is safe to fly.
In another anti-terrorism step, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said his agency will have representatives in Saudi Arabia "by the end of this month" to more closely monitor the granting of visas for travel to the United States.
Fifteen of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were Saudis.
"We're not going to replace the State Department officials and the consular affairs officials in Saudi Arabia," Ridge said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We will add additional bodies to that screening process."
Ashcroft said U.S. officials have seen significant success in efforts to track suspected terrorists and foil their plans, disrupting more than 100 planned attacks worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
House Democrats Question President's Clear Skies Claims
WASHINGTON, DC,
August 4, 2003
(ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2003/2003-08-04-09.asp#anchor2
House Democrats have stepped up criticism of President George W. Bush's air pollution plan, known as Clear Skies, and have called on Bush to retract a statement about the plan made in his State of the Union address.
The letter sent to Bush by four House Democrats - Representatives Tom Allen of Maine, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, Lois Capps of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts - specifically cites the statement in which the President said that his legislation "mandates a 70 percent cut in air pollution from power plants over the next 15 years."
"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis of the Clear Skies Initiative that was available before the State of the Union address reveals that this statement is simply not true," the members of Congress wrote. "Mr. President, we urge you to correct your statement or supply Congress and the American people with any additional analytical work upon which your statement was based."
"Alternatively, you could direct EPA to modify the Clear Skies proposal to be in accordance with your statement. Although these actions would not ameliorate our concerns about the merits of the proposal, if we are to have a fair and honest debate, we must begin with accurate and complete information."
According to the administration, Clear Skies will reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides and mercury by some 70 percent by 2018, and will achieve these benefits more efficiently than existing law. Many environmentalists and state pollution control officers believe the plan relaxes existing law.
An analysis released by EPA in September 2002 found that the President's proposal would achieve slightly less than a 65 percent reduction in emissions by 2020. The EPA analysis further found that even 18 years after enactment, emissions reductions under the President's proposal would still fall approximately 945,000 tons of pollution short of a 70 percent reduction.
"Under your proposal, a substantial majority of the emissions reductions would be achieved by reducing SO2 emissions," the Members said in their letter to the President. "Yet the cap of SO2 emissions would be attained so distantly in the future that EPA modelers refuse to identify a specific year that the three million ton annual emissions cap will be attained. At a congressional briefing, the EPA staff said the cap could be reached 'maybe in 2025.' This is startlingly different than your assurance that a 70 percent reduction would be mandated over the next 15 years, or by 2018."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Get involved now, Ralph Nader tells college activists
By David Damron
Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
August 4, 2003
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orange/orl-locnader04080403aug04,0,5640811.story?coll=orl-news-headlines
Consumer crusader Ralph Nader opened his civics toolbox to a conference of college-student activists Sunday, prodding them to turn Florida campuses into more than a "high-priced trade school" for corporations.
The longtime corporate critic flew in for the final day of the Florida College Activist Conference and urged the more than 200 students there to take advantage of their unique privilege: time to think, read and use campus media.
"When else are you going to have your own newspaper?" Nader asked the gathering at the University of Central Florida. "When else are you going to have your own radio station?"
Nader recently has traveled the country promoting a "Democracy Rising Tour," a series of political rallies with other liberal celebrities, authors and activist groups. The tour filled the University of South Florida Sun Dome with about 6,000 people at the stop in Tampa last year.
As a presidential candidate in 2000, Nader won 2.7 percent of the national vote. He's pondering another run in 2004 -- much to the discomfort of Democrats.
Nader officially polled 97,488 votes in Florida, enough to erase the disputed 513-vote victory margin that George W. Bush used to secure an Electoral College victory. Bush, then the Texas governor, entered the White House despite losing the national popular vote to Vice President Al Gore.
Nader supporters largely vote Democratic, most experts agree, and many Democrats still won't forgive him for running.
"I despise Ralph Nader," said Orange County Democratic Party Chairman Doug Head, labeling the Green Party under whose banner Nader ran in 2000 as "communist."
"He's a spoiler," Head said in an interview. "I think he brings the pretense of conscience, of which he has none. He's ego-driven."
Presidential shot
Nader said in an interview before his speech that his presidential decision largely depends on whether long-shot Democratic hopeful U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, earns his party's nomination. He lauded Kucinich's voting record, opposition to expanded military spending, and his fight as Cleveland mayor to save the city's municipal electric company.
The longtime consumer and environmental activist, most famous for spurring automobile-safety measures, all but ruled out joining Kucinich on a Democratic presidential ticket.
"You have to be a registered Democrat," he said. "I'm not." He is a registered independent, he said.
Nader mostly steered clear of presidential politics Sunday, focusing instead on what college students can do to bring about change:
Read a book a week; push campus administrators to teach a civics course on how to engage a democracy, he said.
Nader suggested students measure local drinking-water quality by using chemistry and biology labs and professors, then publicize the results to the media.
Students can compile scorecards on local politicians, he said, and push lawmakers to post voting records on official Web sites.
Nader said only 5 percent of members of Congress do this now, with the two best voting-record Web sites owned by Republican U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia and Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut.
Students at the conference said the three-day event wasvaluable in helping them meet other activists and learn organizing skills.Workshop topics included how to start a group, create a Web site, and learn the ropes of student government funding and politics.
'Incredibly effective'
"It was incredibly effective, in terms of networking," said UCF music student and Campus Peace Action member Chris Phillips, 22, who worked on a "subversion group" project that handed out fliers with images of soldiers and civilians affected by war and American munitions that include depleted uranium.
Katie Templin Culbert, 28, said she was inspired by Nader's message to organize locally and not be intimidated by problems that look too awesome to change worldwide.
"What's going to start to change the world is going to be at potlucks and small gatherings," the soon-to-beUSF graduate student said. "We need to be local."
The thread running through Nader's talk Sunday was the need to lift what he described as the inordinate corporate control over people's lives and inject civic values where large companies have put commercial values. From the fine legal print on every credit-card application to the sugar-loaded products promoted to children, corporations have massive control over our lives, Nader said.
Corporate power over daily life easily surpasses government's influence, which is inordinately swayed by corporate-campaign contributions and lobbyists anyway, he said.
The time to start changing that is as students, Nader said, pointing out that most in the room only had about 2,000 weeks left before they reach retirement age.
"If you are not active in college," he said, "you have an uphill fight to change your habits."
David Damron can be reached at ddamron@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5311.
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I Was Detained by Airport Cops
Don't Do Interviews Before Flying
By BRUCE GAGNON
August 4, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.com/gagnon08042003.html
On July 28 I was returning home after two days of speaking in Louisville, Kentucky. While in the Louisville airport, after having just received my boarding pass, I got a call on my cell phone from a reporter with the Columbus Post-Dispatch (Ohio) who wanted my comments about the Global Network's position on NASA's "Project Prometheus"--the nuclear rocket to Mars.
The interview lasted 10 minutes at the most and in it I outlined these three key points:
1) The exponential escalation of launches of nuclear power into space dramatically escalates the chance of an accident
2) DoE has a long and sad track record of local contamination of workers and communities building bombs. Can we expect anything else as they now ramp up the labs to produce more plutonium for nuclear space missions?
3) NASA has announced that from now on all space missions will be "dual use", meaning that each NASA mission will be both military and civilian. Thus the development of nuclear reactor technology for space missions will also become a military technology.
Immediately after finishing the interview I bought a newspaper and headed for the airport security screening line and my boarding gate. Just as I entered the line two policemen asked if I was Bruce Gagnon. They then directed me to follow them to the other end of the airport and would only say that I had been overhead making dangerous statements.
Amazingly they knew my name and had a copy of my boarding pass. All of this within 12 minutes after checking in at the airport.
As we walked to their office I racked my brain to understand what I might have said and to whom! Once inside the police inner sanctum I was questioned by three cops who wanted by name, my ID, my reason for being in Louisville, where I had spoken, to whom had I spoken.
Then they informed me that I had been overheard talking about bombs and contamination.
They searched by bag and one officer found my copy of the constitution and asked if I always carried it with me. I told him "Yes, you never know when you might need it."
It took me a moment to realize that someone must have heard my statements to the reporter about the nuclear rocket. So I explained the situation to them. Luckily I had remembered the name of the reporter and I gave that to them as well. One of the cops then called information and got the number for the Columbus newspaper and called the reporter. He verified that I had just spoken to him about bombs and contamination and suggested they let me go.
But the cops were not done.
They then ran a national ID check on me to make sure I was not on some terrorist wanted list. Then they let me go and I headed for my gate.
I still made my plane but as I was boarding one of the cops stood by the door at the gate to make sure I got on the plane. (Must have thought I'd slip out the back way or something.)
The remarkable thing to me is just how paranoid everyone has become that people are now reporting anyone that says any "key" word in airports, or probably anywhere else. I told the cops that I thought potential terrorists were not likely to stand in the middle of an airport and talk on the phone about bombs and contamination.
My trip to Louisville was sponsored by the local Fellowship of Reconciliation chapter. On Sunday, July 27 (my birthday) I spoke at the Central Presbyterian Church about the militarization of space and then on Monday at noon a different group heard me talk about the "Price of Endless War" at a local restaurant. Veteran activist Jean Edwards was the leading organizer of the trip and I stayed in the home of retired Presbyterian minister David Bos.
Just the week before David Bos has arranged for me to fly to Daytona Beach, Florida to deliver two workshops at the annual conference of the National Association of Ecumenical & Interreligious Staff. This was an important opportunity to present our message to religious leaders from throughout the nation.
One person who attended one of my workshops, and added much to it, was former Congressman Bob Edgar, now the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches.
My Louisville airport experience underscored to me the dangers we face in our nation today. While we all are concerned about terrorist attacks, I am frankly much more concerned about the loss of our civil liberties in the name of protecting us from terrorism.
The constitution is a very fragile document. It is something we should all carry with us and fight to hold onto.
Bruce K. Gagnon is coordinator of Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space based in Brunswick, ME. He can be reached at: globalnet@mindspring.com
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