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NUCLEAR
Assemblyman seeks inquiry on contamination culpability
Former UN chief: bomb was payback for collusion with US
ElBaradei: Iran Was Shopping on Nuclear Black Mkt
Blix Felt U.S. Intimidating Him Before Iraq War
Targeting Iran
Ananova: Israel 'would bomb Iran nuclear plant'
S Korea boosts defence budget
China Says North Korea Wants Nuclear-Free Peninsula
North Korea threatens to test nuclear weapons
US Says Long Way to Go to End N.Korea Nuke Crisis
IAEA's ElBaradei: N.Korea Can't Be Trusted
N. Korea Threatens Nuclear Arms Test
North Korea Says It May Test an A-Bomb
U.N. Nuke Watchdog Seeks More Cooperation
Ashcroft Taking Fire From GOP Stalwarts
Deepening Doubts on Iraq
Wesley Clark -- Mercenary
Assessing Gen. Clark
U.S. sinking in Iraq quagmire
MILITARY
Battle rages in Afghanistan; American soldier dies in fall
The problem with Tunisia
Groups Try to Halt Development of Biowarfare Labs
Blair Testifies to Accuracy of Dossier on Iraq
Blair's Political Suicide
Halliburton and Bechtel win more deals
ALABAMA - Army to burn cache of sarin
The last to know
Preventing a Nuclear Iran Is a Delicate Task
U.S. puts Iraqis on borders to stem terrorist flow
Burning money in Iraq
Shiite Cleric Is Reported Killed in Mosque Explosion
Blast in Iraq Kills a Leading Shiite Cleric
Copter Blamed For Dislodging Shiite Banner
Iraq strategy
Commentary: Iraqi history is back
Israel Kills Hamas Militant in Gaza
Sharon: U.S. needs to put financial pressure on PA
Effort to Diminish Arafat Is Said to Strengthen Him
Japan Moves to Ward Off Potential North Korean Threats
Peru Panel Details Toll Of Violent 2 Decades
Peru Report Says 69,000 Died in 20 Years of Rebel War
Philippine defence minister quits
Russia's Chechnya Leader Says Death Squads Operate
White House to Weigh Interplanetary Missions
Defense Communications Satellite Launched
US drops opposition to UN force for Iraq
Bush plan for Iraq given tepid U.N. reply
U.N. Envoys Cautious on New Force In Baghdad
High Cost of Occupation: U.S. Weighs a U.N. Role
Chirac Calls on U.N.to Lead Peace in Iraq
Army Europe
General in Iraq Says More G.I.'s Are Not Needed
Who's Wrong Now, Mr. Rumsfeld?
Condi's Phony History
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Report: U.S. Fails to Share Terror Information
Three Arrested in Alleged Immigration Scheme
ENERGY AND OTHER
Hydrogen Cycle Could Be Grounded in the Soil
Energy Bill About More Than Power Blackout Fix
E.P.A. Says It Lacks Power to Regulate Some Gases
States to Fight Relaxation of Power-Plant Pollution Standards
Study Suggests Mercury in Fish May Be Less Toxic
ACTIVISTS
CHINA - U.S. urged to stop Dalai Lama's visit
PETA Gets Personal in Campaign Against KFC
Huge peace rally in Nepal
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Assemblyman seeks inquiry on contamination culpability
August 29, 2003
NY Business Review
http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2003/08/25/daily49.html
Assemblyman Robert Prentiss (R-Colonie) is asking New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to determine what, if any, potential legal action the state can take against a company responsible for a contaminated site in Colonie, N.Y.
In an Aug. 25 letter to Spitzer, Prentiss said he has information on 50 constituents living near the former National Lead Industries site whose health is suffering.
"I am requesting that your office investigate whether the state may have a legal claim for any adverse health effects experienced by our constituents as a result of environmental contamination," the letter said.
National Lead purchased the 11.2 acre site at 1130 Central Ave. from Magnus Metal Company In 1937 and operated a brass foundry at the location. After World War II the company began casting aluminum aircraft frames there, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 1958, the nuclear division of National Lead began producing items manufactured from uranium and thorium under a license from the Atomic Energy Commission. Operation of the brass foundry ended in 1960.
From 1958 to 1984 the company used radioactive materials consisting mostly of depleted uranium. But smaller amounts of thorium and enriched uranium were also used between 1960 and 1972.
The company reduced depleted uranium tetrafluoride to depleted uranium metal which was then made into shielding components, ballast weights, and projectiles. In addition, from 1966 to 1972, National Lead manufactured fuel from enriched uranium for experimental nuclear reactors.
In 1984 the state shut down the company's operations because of airborne releases of radioactive materials that exceeded court-ordered standards.
Since 1984 cleanup operations have been going on at the site under the supervision of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
In his letter to Spitzer, Prentiss said that National Lead "must be held accountable for the damages caused to our constituents."
----
Former UN chief: bomb was payback for collusion with US
Neil Mackay,
UK Sunday Herald,
29 August 2003
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1059.shtml
The reason the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad were bombed is because the UN has been taken over by the US and turned into a "dark joke" and a "malignant force", according to one of the UN's most internationally respected former leaders.
Denis Halliday, the former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq, attacked the UN as an aggressive arm of US foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the truckbomb attack on the UN mission in Baghdad which killed at least 23 people - many of whom were Halliday's former friends and colleagues.
"The West sees the UN as a benign organisation, but the sad reality in much of the world is that the UN is not seen as benign," said Halliday, who was nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. "The UN Security Council has been taken over and corrupted by the US and UK, particularly with regard to Iraq, Palestine and Israel.
"In Iraq, the UN imposed sustained sanctions that probably killed up to one million people. Children were dying of malnutrition and water-borne diseases. The US and UK bombed the infrastructure in 1991, destroying power, water, and sewage systems against the Geneva Convention. It was a great crime against Iraq.
"Thirteen years of sanctions made it impossible for Iraq to repair the damage. That is why we have such tremendous resentment and anger against the UN in Iraq. There is a sense that the UN humiliated the Iraqi people and society. I would use the term genocide to define the use of sanctions against Iraq. Several million Iraqis are suffering cancers because of the use of depleted uranium shells. That's an atrocity. Can you imagine the bitterness from all of this?
He warned that "further collaboration" between the UN and the US and Britain "would be a disaster for the United Nations as it would be sucked into supporting the illegal occupation of Iraq".
"The UN has been drawn into being an arm of the US - a division of the state department. Kofi Annan was appointed and supported by the US and that has corrupted the independence of the UN. The UN must move quickly to reform itself and improve the security council - it must make clear that the UN and the US are not one and the same."
Halliday said the US should withdraw from Iraqi within six months and allow free elections to be held. The UN could then start the work of helping the Iraqis rebuild their nation. "Bush has blown $75 billion on this war, so he should spend $75 billion on reconstruction - and the money shouldn't just go to Halli burton [an oil firm now operating in Iraqi which was once run by vice-president Dick Cheney] and the boys either. Once the US goes from Iraq, the terrorist will go as well.
"Bush and Blair have misled their countries into war. By invading Iraq and placing the US inside the Islamic world, America is inviting terrorists to come on the attack."
Halliday, who resigned from the UN in 1998, knows his comments will upset London, Washington and Kofi Annan, but he claims many senior UN figures feel the same anger.
This article orginially appeared in The Sunday Herald on August 24th, 2003.
Page last updated: 29 August 2003, 23:52
-------- iran
ElBaradei: Iran Was Shopping on Nuclear Black Mkt
August 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said in comments aired on Friday that Iran had shopped for nuclear components on the international black market and called on Tehran to be more ``proactive'' and ``transparent.''
In an interview on the BBC television program Hardtalk, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei also said that Iran's nuclear program had been going on far longer than the agency had realized.
Although he was not certain of the countries that made the equipment Iran had acquired on the black market, ElBaradei said he had a ``pretty good idea'' which ones they were.
``It could be one country, it could be more than one country,'' ElBaradei said. ``They (Iran) told us they have got a lot of that stuff from the black market. It is through intermediaries. It is not directly from the country.''
Media reports have named Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state that has refused to sign the nuclear 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as one of countries whose nuclear technology Iran is believed to be using.
Although he stopped short of accusing Tehran of lying to the U.N. agency, ElBaradei said Iran had failed to give the IAEA a complete picture of its nuclear program, which Washington says is merely a front for a secret atomic weapons program.
``They have not really been fully transparent in telling us in advance what was going on,'' ElBaradei said in the interview, recorded on Thursday and aired on Friday.
Asked if he believed Iran was running a secret weapons program, ElBaradei said: ``It might be, it might not be.''
``I need to really get the Iranians to tell me the full, complete story,'' he said. ``And I would like Iran to be more proactive, more transparent.''
He said that it would have been much easier to verify Iran's insistence its nuclear program is peaceful if it had given the IAEA a complete picture of its atomic plans from the beginning.
``It would have been easier for us to complete our job if we knew what was going on as early as the mid 1980s,'' ElBaradei said. ``Now we have to go... 20 years back.''
He repeated his call for Iran to quickly sign a protocol giving the IAEA the right to carry out intrusive, short notice inspections across the country.
``The international community's getting very concerned, very impatient,'' ElBaradei said about the situation in Iran.
He also agreed that countries such as Iran, pre-war Iraq and North Korea -- what President Bush has branded the ``axis of evil'' -- have had a history of misleading the world about their nuclear programs.
``They have been giving the international community the runaround,'' he said.
The IAEA Board of Governors meets next month to discuss the agency's recent inspections in Iran. The United States is pushing the board to declare Tehran in violation of its NPT nuclear safeguards obligations and report it to the U.N. Security Council, which can impose economic sanctions.
Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said on Thursday the Islamic Republic was ready to start talks on allowing snap U.N. inspections of its nuclear sites.
``We have written to the director-general (of the International Atomic Energy Agency) saying we are ready to start negotiations on the Additional Protocol,'' Kharrazi told CNN.
-------- iraq / inspections
Blix Felt U.S. Intimidating Him Before Iraq War
August 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-elbaradei.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Former chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix felt Washington was intimidating him to produce reports that would justify military action in the run-up to the Iraq war, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday.
In an interview on BBC television's Hardtalk, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei also said he believed Iraq had not tried to revive its clandestine nuclear weapons program as the United States and Britain insist.
Blix and ElBaradei led the hunt for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction for nearly four months late last year and early this year. The IAEA hunted for nuclear weapons, while Blix's UNMOVIC monitoring agency looked for chemical, biological and ballistic arms.
Asked if the administration of President Bush had tried to intimidate him to produce reports support their case for a war on Iraq, ElBaradei said it had not.
``I think there were probably more efforts to intimidate Hans Blix, because there were more serious concerns about chemical and biological (weapons),'' he said.
``Hans complained a lot about the media campaign, some of the administration's efforts to put pressure on him.''
The Bush administration sharply criticized Blix before the war for refusing to back U.S. and British assertions about Iraq's weapons programs in his reports to the U.N. Security Council.
U.N. weapons inspectors never found the massive stockpiles of banned weapons that Britain and the U.S. claimed President Saddam Hussein possessed. Neither have the U.S. and British forces who took over the hunt for his arsenal after the war.
ElBaradei said a lesson should be learned about the dangers of cutting short weapons inspections.
``If anything comes out from the war in Iraq, it's that inspections take time and that we should not jump to conclusions, because jumping to conclusions on such a vital issue that determines war and peace is very reckless and irresponsible in my opinion,'' he said.
ElBaradei added that he would like to see the situation in Iraq ``coming to a closure soon and put an end to that tragic situation.''
Regarding U.S. and British insistence that Saddam had tried to revive his secret atomic weapons program, which the IAEA says it destroyed in the 1990s, ElBaradei was certain this allegation is unfounded.
``I would be very surprised if we were to discover that there was a nuclear weapons program restarted in Iraq,'' he said.
Blix, who headed the IAEA for 16 years until 1997, retired as the director of UNMOVIC at the end of June.
-------- israel
Targeting Iran
August 29, 2003
Washington Times
Inside The Ring
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030828-112113-3830r.htm
Israel has ready a plan to bomb Iran's Bushehr nuclear-power plant should the Persian Gulf coast facility, now under construction, begin producing weapons-grade material, an insider tells us.
This source says Israel has mapped out a route its jet fighters would take to destroy what is designed to be a two-reactor plant. A successful strike would ensure that the radical Tehran regime does not develop nuclear weapons. Iran has tested 600-mile-range ballistic missiles that can reach Israel and carry nuclear, biological or chemical warheads.
Russia has signed an $800 million contract to provide two reactors for the plant near the port city of Bushehr. The United States opposes the deal, as well as any nuclear program in Iran.
Israeli F-16s penetrated Iraqi airspace in 1981 to bomb the Osiraq nuclear-power plant, at the Tuwaitha nuclear center near Baghdad. Analysts believe the action, while condemned by the international community, kept Saddam Hussein from acquiring the bomb.
U.S. Central Command has contingency plans for war with Iran, but there is no active discussion of invading a country that President Bush has put in the "axis of evil." Still, some in the Pentagon talk unofficially of what would be needed to take out the Bushehr plant.
----
Ananova: Israel 'would bomb Iran nuclear plant'
Friday 29th August 2003
http://energy-net.org/is/en/nuke/POL/INT/NEWS/03829162.TXT
Israel has made plans to bomb an Iranian nuclear power plant if it begins producing weapons grade material, it was reported today.
Military commanders have mapped out a route Israeli fighter jets would take to destroy the Bushehr reactor on the Persian Gulf, officials told the Washington Times.
Russia has been helping Iran to build its first nuclear plant for eight years in a deal worth about £500 million to Moscow.
Both countries say it is purely for civilian purposes.
But the US claims Iran could use the technology to build a nuclear bomb, and President George Bush is expected raise the issue with Russian leader Vladimir Putin at next month's Camp David summit.
Russia said this week it would stop building the plant if the UN nuclear watchdog presents "concrete evidence" that Tehran is secretly developing banned weapons.
Iran has tested 600-mile-range ballistic missiles that can reach Israel and carry nuclear, biological or chemical warheads.
In 1981, Israel bombed the Iraqi Osiraq nuclear-power plant, near Baghdad, in an operation that drew widespread international criticism.
-------- korea
S Korea boosts defence budget
Friday, 29 August, 2003,
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3190673.stm
South Korea is planning to up its defence spending by 8% next year, almost four times the general increase in spending.
The boost would take the defence budget to 18.9 trillion won ($16bn; £10.1bn), the fourth biggest in Asia after Japan, China and India, at a time when aggressive noises from North Korea are growing.
Six-way talks between the two Koreas and the US, China, Japan and Russia are under way over North Korea's impending nuclear arsenal.
But the talks broke up on Thursday night without progress, and Seoul remains concerned that the dire state of Pyongyang's tattered economy might persuade it to move from sabre-rattling to actual military action.
North Korea was once richer than its southern neighbour, before the South's accelerated growth through heavy industrial and technological investment.
Stagnation north of the border and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as sharply reduced help from China, mean Pyongyang controls an economy estimated to be 16 times smaller than that of South Korea, with many of its people dependent on aid to avoid starvation.
The rigid control of information in the North also poses a threat, some observers believe, since opening up the economy on the Chinese model would reveal just how far behind the rest of the world North Koreans had slipped.
Shakeup
The new estimate for defence spending comes in a draft budget unveiled by the Budget Ministry on Friday.
It sets overall expenditure at 117.5 trillion won ($99.7m;£63m)), up 2.1% on the projections for 2003.
Tax revenues are supposed to provide 111.5 trillion won.
A central bank profit of 2.5 trillion won will fill part of the gap, and the rest should come from government commission fees, the Budget Ministry said.
The new money for the military is, in fact, rather less than at first predicted.
The Defence Ministry said earlier this year they wanted defence spending to swell by as much as a quarter.
The expansion comes as the US, which has 35,000 front-line troops and many more support staff in South Korea, is planning to reorganise its presence in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) which has separated North and South Korea since a truce ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
The Pentagon is planning to spend as much as $11bn over the next four years on the restructuring.
----
China Says North Korea Wants Nuclear-Free Peninsula
Story by Brian Rhoads and Masayuki Kitano
REUTERS CHINA:
August 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22042/newsDate/29-Aug-2003/story.htm
BEIJING - China said yesterday all six countries meeting in Beijing to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis had agreed on a mutual goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula as they prepared to announce another round of talks.
Such an agreement after the second day of negotiations in Beijing to end a 10-month stand-off would amount to a major concession by North Korea, which has said it has the right to a nuclear deterrent to fend off what it regards as U.S. hostility.
But Japan warned that differences remained between the parties in the three-day meeting, which has been seen as just the first in a series of tough rounds of negotiation.
It said no decision had been made on whether to hold another round of talks between the six negotiating countries, the two Koreas, Japan, the United States, Russia and China.
Beijing made its announcement after the second day of talks at the exclusive Diaoyutai State Guest House closed. "The parties reiterated that denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is the common goal of all sides and the nuclear issue should be resolved peacefully through diplomatic means," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on its Web site, www.fmprc.gov.cn.
Xinhua reinforced this stand later, citing Russian delegate Alexander Losyukov as saying North Korea did not want to own nuclear weapons.
The flurry of diplomacy follows months of threats and rhetoric.
Russia's representative at the talks said all sides had "practically" agreed on a document to be signed on Friday and planned to meet again by October, Itar-Tass reported.
"There is a mutual understanding that we should not drag our feet on the next round of negotiations and we should carry them out in the next two months," Tass quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Losyukov as saying. He added that the second round would likely be held in Beijing.
But Japan sounded a note of caution, saying differences still remained.
"It is undeniable that there are differences in the opinions held among the various countries," said a Japanese official in Beijing. "I wasn't optimistic that these would be shrunk in a day or two, and...that's the way it has been, at least until today."
LET'S MEET AGAIN?
The United States has already rejected North Korea's core demand that the two sign a non-aggression treaty. Washington, which says Pyongyang may already have one or two nuclear weapons, is looking initially for a commitment that Pyongyang will scrap its program.
North Korea wants security guarantees before dismantling.
Even agreement at the talks to meet again would likely be hailed as a sign of success in handling Pyongyang's half-declared desire to become a nuclear power that triggered the standoff.
A South Korean delegation spokesman said that the delegates were working hard on the wording of a final statement to be unveiled at Friday's closing session.
Last year President Bush lumped North Korea in an "axis of evil" with pre-war Iraq and Iran, infuriating North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il.
Japan, within range of North Korean missiles and the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has insisted Pyongyang must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Tokyo also wants issues such as Pyongyang's missile program and its abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s to be addressed.
Japan and North Korea held talks yesterday but showed little sign of resolving a row over the abductions.
Russia and China, historic friends of North Korea which regards them as the least threatening parties at the table, have been working to dispel the crisis.
China, which supplies Pyongyang with 70 percent of its fuel and food aid imports, is keen to avoid the destabilizing effects of conflict or collapse on its northeastern border.
But the stands of the two main protagonists, the United States and North Korea, are marked by an absence of trust. Each blames the other for a failure to live up to the terms of a 1994 deal to freeze North Korea's nuclear program, and say they have no reason to believe future promises.
With U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly holding a brief only to listen, and North Korea's most junior deputy foreign minister unable to act without approval from "Dear Leader" Kim, real progress appears virtually impossible. (Additional reporting by Paul Eckert, John Ruwitch and Jonathan Ansfield in Beijing, Jeremy Page in Moscow and Elaine Lies in Tokyo)
----
North Korea threatens to test nuclear weapons
August 29, 2003
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030828-112116-3563r.htm
North Korea startled the representatives at six-party talks in Beijing by stating it had nuclear weapons and was prepared to test them, a U.S. administration official said yesterday.
The Pyongyang team later backed off its fierce rhetoric, the official said, and multilateral talks involving the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia aimed at ending the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula were continuing today.
The White House moved quickly to downplay the flare-up, with spokeswoman Claire Buchan saying North Korea had a history of making "inflammatory comments."
"The assessment from our team that's on the ground in Beijing is that this is a positive session," she said.
Agence France-Presse, citing Russian and South Korean delegations, said North Korea yesterday emphasized its goal of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
After the second day of talks closed, Beijing made the following announcement:
"The parties reiterated that denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is the common goal of all sides and the nuclear issue should be resolved peacefully through diplomatic means." The Chinese Foreign Ministry put the statement on its Web site.
Meanwhile, all sides were reported ready to meet again within the next two months as the current round of talks entered its third and final day.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency said today a further round of six-way talks on North Korea's nuclear program was likely to take place in mid-October in Beijing.
In an unsourced report from Beijing, Yonhap said the six countries would issue a communique pledging to keep talking. "The six countries agreed that it is important to hold the next round of meetings as soon as possible to maintain the current momentum," Yonhap reported.
Earlier, in what appeared to be an angry outburst, the North Korean delegation led by Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong-il said Pyongyang was ready to demonstrate its nuclear-arms capability.
According to the U.S. official, during a pull-aside that the U.S. delegation had with the North Koreans at the end of the first day of talks, the North Koreans repeated their desire for a nonaggression treaty with the United States.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly's team responded that such a treaty was not in the works, leaving unsaid what Pyongyang could get - a statement or some security guarantee, the official said. Mr. Kelly's delegation insisted on the need for a verifiable end to Pyongyang's nuclear program and referred the North Koreans back to the U.S. opening statement.
"The North Koreans appeared to overreact. They said 'We have nukes and we're going to demonstrate that we have them,' " the official said.
"We were very calm, and in the course of the day, according to the Chinese, the [North] Koreans backed off this hard rhetoric," the official said. "Later in the course of the day, they softened [the rhetoric] quite a bit."
State Department spokesman Phillip Reeker refused to characterize the talks beyond saying the delegations are expected to meet again today. He added that no decision had been taken regarding another round of talks.
Russian media had reported that the six participants to the Beijing-hosted talks had reached an agreement to meet again within two months.
"At this point, there are no decisions on that. These talks aren't over, since the delegations expect to meet again tomorrow. So, we'll just have to see where we go from there," Mr. Reeker told reporters.
The six delegations met the second day for about four hours, the spokesman said. He said the U.S. delegation also met with the South Korean and Japanese delegations before the session, and with the Russians afterward.
The administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, downplayed what he said was just a spike in North Korean rhetoric.
"They've been threatening these kinds of things in the past. I don't think it's new. It reflects that they haven't carefully read our statement and our proposal.
"They rushed to judgment without paying careful enough attention to what we were saying," he said.
The six-way talks aim to defuse the tensions sparked by North Korea's admission to Mr. Kelly late last year that it had revived its nuclear-weapons programs, in violation of promises made under an accord with the Clinton administration in 1994.
The United States is demanding an end to the North's nuclear programs and the readmission of international inspectors.
North Korea has insisted that Washington agree to a nonaggression treaty and economic assistance before Pyongyang discusses its nuclear programs.
----
US Says Long Way to Go to End N.Korea Nuke Crisis
August 29, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said on Saturday six-way talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions were productive but there was a long way to go before the crisis was defused.
``We had a nice visit and a productive start. We have a long way to travel and don't know when we will be back here or whether it will be somewhere else,'' Kelly told reporters before departing Beijing after three days of talks with the two Koreas, Russia, Japan and host China.
``But a peaceful solution is something we are going to work on,'' Kelly said.
The talks in Beijing closed on Friday with no major breakthrough, but the six nations agreed to meet again within two months. No place or date was set.
Pyongyang took a parting swipe at the United States, likening Washington to a ``brigand'' determined to disarm and then invade North Korea.
Washington has branded reclusive Pyongyang part of an ``axis of evil'' along with pre-war Iraq and Iran. Hawks in the United States are determined to carry out regime change.
But South Korea's national security chief Ra Jong-yil was upbeat.
``We could expect the outlook for the next round of talks to be positive,'' Ra told domestic SBS radio. ``I'm confident about it.''
``The fact itself that North Korea said: 'It is not our goal to have nuclear weapons and the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula was our initiative' has been a considerable achievement,'' he added.
Ra brushed off foreign media reports over North Korea declaring it possessed nuclear weapons. ``That's just a repeat of its stance that it has no other choice but to go nuclear in case of no security guarantee,'' he said.
``That's not revealing its will to carry out a nuclear test.''
U.S. officials have said North Korea raised the rhetoric on Thursday by talking about carrying out a test and saying it could declare itself a nuclear power.
--------
IAEA's ElBaradei: N.Korea Can't Be Trusted
August 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-korea-elbaradei.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said on Friday that North Korea has been guilty of nuclear ``blackmail'' and could not trusted, though he was encouraged by the six-country talks that took place in Beijing.
``I don't think they can be trusted,'' head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview on BBC television. ``However, we would like to work with them and bring them back to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).''
Pyongyang expelled the IAEA's inspectors on New Year's Eve and withdrew from the NPT, the global pact aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, earlier this year.
As six-nation talks in Beijing over the crisis came to a close on Friday, North Korea spelled out a list of demands it had made to the United States, but said it would only scrap its nuclear program if Washington 'dropped its ``hostile policy.''
ElBaradei also said in the interview, recorded on Thursday and aired on Friday, that he thought North Korea posed the world's biggest nuclear threat.
``It is the most dangerous (situation) in many ways, because they have the capability, if not already the weapons,'' he said. ``But not only that, they are using it as blackmail and I think it sets a very dangerous precedent.''
ElBaradei said he was encouraged by the Beijing talks, which he called a ``first step in the right direction,'' but added that Pyongyang should make the first move by dismantling its facilities that produce bomb-grade plutonium.
``I don't think any settlement should be reached without a full, verified dismantlement of their nuclear capability,'' he said. ``I think North Korea has to understand that they cannot blackmail and they need to come back to (the NPT).''
``I think they (should) also understand that once they come back and become a civilized member of the international community that the international community is ready to provide them humanitarian assistance and help the people who are dying out of hunger,'' he said.
He said that if the situation in North Korea was not resolved, it would send a very bad signal to countries with ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
``It sends a signal that if you want to protect yourself, if you want to get economic concessions, build a nuclear weapon. I think it sends a horrible message, that, and the way we treat North Korea will be very important for the future 'wannabes'''
--------
N. Korea Threatens Nuclear Arms Test
Delegate to Talks Cites U.S. Hostility
By Peter Slevin and John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59829-2003Aug28.html
North Korea startled international diplomats yesterday by threatening to test a nuclear weapon in response to perceived hostility from the Bush administration, a U.S. official said after the second day of six-nation talks in Beijing on North Korea's nuclear program.
A North Korean delegate told diplomats gathered in the Chinese capital that the Pyongyang government had "no choice but to declare its possession of nuclear weapons" and "conduct a nuclear weapons test," according to a portion of a cable dispatched by the U.S. negotiating team.
The isolated country has a history of alarmist rhetoric, sometimes followed by confrontation, sometimes by conciliation.
Despite the announcement, diplomats agreed early today to resume talks within two months, according to the China News Service, a semi-official news agency in Beijing.
The apparent agreement on more meetings constitutes a small but important step in precarious negotiations aimed at persuading the Stalinist state to abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for diplomatic and economic openings to its neighbors and the United States.
North Korean diplomats yesterday reiterated a long-standing position that the government of Kim Jong Il would be willing to dismantle its nuclear programs if the United States changed its anti-North Korea policies, stopped hindering the country's economic growth and contributed to electrical power costs, according to the cable. The White House made little of North Korea's nuclear test threat, with a spokeswoman calling the Beijing gathering a "positive session."
"North Korea has a long history of making inflammatory comments," deputy spokeswoman Claire Buchan told reporters in Crawford, Tex. "The talks are continuing."
The U.S. official who had read the diplomatic cable reported that the Chinese delegates who had worked hard to coax the United States and North Korea to the table were visibly upset, while the Japanese, South Koreans and Russians were taken aback.
Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, the leader of the U.S. delegation, said in his opening statement on Wednesday that an increase in tensions or hostile rhetoric would slow progress toward an agreement, said the U.S. official.
In a step that implied longer-term hurdles for the international effort to end North Korea's pursuit of atomic weapons, the North Korean delegate also denied that his country has a program to develop highly enriched uranium, according to the cable, as relayed by a U.S. official.
The effort to deny the uranium-enrichment program, which U.S. officials say North Korea has already admitted to and U.S. intelligence has confirmed, suggests that Kim's government would be unwilling to permit the intrusive inspections the Bush administration wants. Intensive verification measures are considered essential to test the veracity of North Korea's claims.
North Korea has defied international pressure since October, when Kim's government admitted having a secret uranium-enrichment project along with a suspended program to make weapons from plutonium. Pyongyang soon evicted foreign inspectors, withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, activated a reprocessing plant for spent fuel rods and restarted the shuttered nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.
A principal Bush administration goal for the Beijing talks was to demonstrate to North Korea that the five countries most closely linked to its fate -- China, Japan, South Korea, the United States and Russia -- were united in a determination to bring an end to North Korea's nuclear threat.
China said yesterday that the five countries and North Korea had agreed on the goal of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
"The parties reiterated that denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is the common goal of all sides, and the nuclear issue should be resolved peacefully through diplomatic means," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on its Web site. In the past, North Korea has said it has the right to a nuclear deterrent to fend off what it regards as U.S. hostility.
The talks were held in the Diaoyutai State Guest House, an isolated collection of villas and gardens in western Beijing. The six parties were arrayed around a hexagonal table, and the Chinese put the U.S. delegation, led by Kelly, next to its North Korean counterpart, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong Il.
Kim and Kelly ended four months of official high-level silence between the two nations on Wednesday when they huddled for roughly 35 minutes in an informal meeting following a day of six-party talks. A U.S. official said it was during those talks that Kim told the American that North Korea intended to stage a nuclear test.
Kim repeated the statement to the full group yesterday, the U.S. cable reported, declaring that the United States had not made a fundamental switch in what Pyongyang considers hostile behavior toward the North Korean leadership, including verbal digs and economic pressure.
Russia and Japanese delegates countered that North Korea was misconstruing the U.S. position, according to the cable.
Pomfret reported from Beijing.
--------
North Korea Says It May Test an A-Bomb
August 29, 2003
The New York Times
By JOSEPH KAHN with DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/asia/29KORE.html
BEIJING, Friday, Aug. 29 - North Korea told diplomats from five other nations on Thursday that it planned to declare formally that it has become a nuclear power and may test an atomic bomb in the near future to prove it, according to senior Bush administration officials.
The statement by Kim Yong Il, North Korea's deputy foreign minister, appeared to sharply contradict the spirit of the six-party talks organized by China, North Korea's closest ally and leading aid donor, and may buttress the contention of hard-liners in the Bush administration that the reclusive Communist government has no intention of reaching a verifiable agreement to dismantle its nuclear program.
Even so, China prodded the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Russia and Japan, the participants in the talks that concluded here this afternoon, to agree to another round within two months, China's state media said.
Though there was no firm date set for future talks, the parties involved had said that they would consider an agreement to continue a dialogue a significant step, given the often volatile relations between North Korea and the United States.
Asian diplomats described Thursday's meeting in less negative terms than did American officials, who revealed some details of the Beijing meetings to reporters in Washington on Thursday. These diplomats said the meeting was all along intended as a forum for parties to present negotiating positions, not to fully resolve differences.
North Korea has often made bellicose statements at negotiating sessions. In April, in its last meeting with the United States, a North Korean diplomat told James A. Kelly, then and now the head of the American negotiating team, that it had nuclear weapons and was moving quickly to develop more by extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods.
Administration officials cautioned that they had not yet seen a word-by-word translation of what the North Koreans said on Thursday, so they could not assess how much it went beyond the threats the North has issued in the past.
"Maybe they are bluffing, but if so, it raises the bluff to a new level," a senior official in Washington said.
The officials also said the statement by North Korea was perplexing because it is risky to publicize a nuclear test in advance, given the real chance that the test might fail.
In public, the White House insisted that it was unfazed by the North's action, calling it yet another effort by to increase pressure on President Bush through bluster and threats.
"North Korea has a long history of making inflammatory comments that serve to isolate it from the rest of the world," said Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, speaking in Crawford, Tex. She said Mr. Bush had not backed away from his commitment that the United States would never tolerate a nuclear North.
Administration officials have not said how they would react to a nuclear test, which would show that North Korea has the ability to turn its nuclear technology into working weapons - a step one intelligence analyst said recently was "something the North Koreans themselves probably aren't sure they can do."
But if North Korea follows through on its threat and conducts a nuclear explosion, that would almost certainly produce a serious escalation of the crisis and result in a breakdown of the current diplomatic overture.
A nuclear test could prompt the United States to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning North Korea, opening the door to sanctions. North Korean officials have said they would consider sanctions an act of war.
Mr. Kim's comments came on the second day of discussions here at Diaoyutai state guest house, where representatives of the six nations were asked by China to respond to proposals put forward by other parties on Wednesday.
Mr. Kim, apparently responding to Mr. Kelly's rejection of the North's proposal to sign a nonaggression pact before it admits nuclear inspectors and scraps its nuclear program, accused the United States of refusing to abandon its hostile policy toward his country.
Mr. Kim then said that the North intended to declare formally that it has nuclear weapons, and the ability to deliver them, and that it plans to test them, according to officials in Washington who were briefed on the talks by Mr. Kelly.
When negotiators from Russia and Japan sought to look for common ground between American and North Korean positions, Mr. Kim accused diplomats from those two countries of lying on instructions from the United States, according to Bush administration officials.
Some Bush administration officials have been saying for months that North Korea appears set on becoming a nuclear power and that a tight regime of sanctions and multilateral pressure, or even military action, may be necessary to prevent that from happening. But American officials had also supported the current talks because they view the discussions as a chance to put collective pressure on the North.
China, South Korea and Russia worked throughout the talks to balance American demands for a complete and verifiable end to North Korea's nuclear program with the North's call for a nonaggression treaty with Washington and for economic aid for its strapped economy.
A Chinese foreign policy expert informed about China's strategy at the talks said Beijing proposed a four-point declaration stating that all sides agree that the Korean peninsula should remain nuclear free, that the issue must be resolved peacefully, that North Korea's security concerns must be addressed, and that talks should be continued in the near future, he said.
The final statement appeared to fall short of that goal, with the various sides saying that they had a frank exchange of views and would continue to discuss the problem.
-------- un
U.N. Nuke Watchdog Seeks More Cooperation
Aug 29, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_ELBARADEI?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
VIENNA, Austria -- The U.N. nuclear watchdog needs more power and more cooperation to deal with Iran and North Korea, the head of the agency said Friday.
"I work on the basis of legal authority and information. If I don't have the authority, if I don't have the information, I am paralyzed," said Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran and North Korea "have been giving the international community the run-around" when it comes to its nuclear programs and possible weapons ambitions, ElBaradei said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.'s "HARDtalk" program.
"That's why I have been kicking and screaming to say, `Give me more authority,'" he said. "If you really need me to do a good job, I need additional authority."
The Vienna-based nuclear agency has been pressuring Iran to sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would open the country to more intrusive and unannounced inspections. ElBaradei said the Iranians assured him a couple of days ago that they would sign, giving him more authority to act.
"I hope they will do it as early as possible," he said. "If you have nothing to hide, there no reason not to be transparent."
ElBaradei said he also was concerned about Iran following reports that the country has embarked on a uranium enrichment program.
The U.N. nuclear chief conceded that his agency should have known about the development of new nuclear facilities at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility, where IAEA experts found traces of highly enriched uranium.
The Iranians "have been acting in some way in a transparent manner" by opening several facilities to the agency in recent months, ElBaradei said. "But I need more transparency, a more proactive approach," he added.
ElBaradei said he had not given in to pressure when compiling a report on Iran ahead of the agency's Sept. 8 board meeting.
"Washington made it clear what they expect to see in the report. But that's their expectation," he said. "I work for 135 countries. I tell them: 'I give you all the facts. I will ... give you my assessment as we see it as an impartial organization.'"
On North Korea, ElBaradei accused the secretive country of risky posturing by claiming to U.S. officials that it may test an atomic bomb.
"It is pretty dangerous," he said in the BBC, which was taped Thursday. "The fact that they are using it to intimidate, to blackmail. I think it sends a very bad signal."
Nonetheless, ElBaradei said diplomats must be patient in trying to convince North Korea to halt any nuclear weapons program. "It will take time, but I think the only way to resolve it is through dialogue," he said. "We would like to work with them."
North Korea expelled inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency in December, shortly after it dismantled U.N. seals and monitoring cameras installed at the country's nuclear facilities. The facilities had been mothballed under the 1994 agreement.
Asked about Iraq, ElBaradei said the nuclear agency needs to complete its work to determine with any certainty that the Iraqis did not revive their atomic weapons program.
"There could be one," ElBaradei said. "I would be surprised if there were."
The Bush administration is running the post-war search in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, but has yet to discover any.
-------- us politics
Ashcroft Taking Fire From GOP Stalwarts
Fri Aug 29, 2003
By Dan Eggen and Jim VandeHei,
Washington Post Staff Writers
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1803&e=4&u=/washpost/a61836_2003aug28
BOISE, Idaho -- Even here, in a bedrock Republican state in the heart of the conservative Mountain West, a lot of people think Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has gone too far.
One of this state's most prominent politicians, Rep. C.L. "Butch" Otter (R), is leading an effort in Congress to curtail the centerpiece of Ashcroft's anti-terrorism strategy, the USA Patriot Act. Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), who used to croon alongside Ashcroft in a senatorial quartet, said this month that Congress may have to consider scaling back parts of the law. And in a state with an all-GOP congressional delegation, several city councils and the legislature are considering resolutions condemning Ashcroft's tactics in the war on terrorism.
"Ashcroft wants more power," said state Rep. Charles Eberle (R-Post Falls), who has drafted a resolution critical of the Patriot Act. "What a lot of us in Idaho are saying is, 'Let's not get rid of the checks and balances.' . . . People out here in the West are used to taking care of themselves. We don't like the government intruding on our constitutional rights."
Ashcroft has always been one of the Bush administration's most controversial figures, particularly among liberals and Democrats who fiercely opposed his nomination. But now the attorney general finds himself at odds with some fellow Republicans from Idaho to Capitol Hill who are troubled by the extent of his anti-terrorism tactics and angered by his unwillingness to compromise.
The rise of opposition within his own party could threaten Ashcroft's bid to secure even greater powers for the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s war on terrorism.
New Harris Poll numbers released this week also show Ashcroft's overall popularity slipping below 50 percent for the first time this year, while the percentage of those who disapprove of his performance has climbed to nearly 40 percent.
The tumult has made Ashcroft a central issue in the Democratic presidential campaign, where candidates are turning to him and his terrorism policies as a sure-fire way to rally the party faithful. Democrats also hope that focusing on Ashcroft will raise doubts among undecided voters about the Bush administration's tactics in the national security arena.
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire last week, former Vermont governor Howard Dean went so far as to summon the ghosts of Watergate, calling Ashcroft perhaps the worst attorney general in history -- worse, he said, than President Richard M. Nixon's attorney general, John N. Mitchell.
"And he was a criminal," Dean told supporters.
Amid the growing controversy, Ashcroft traveled this week to Boise and two other GOP-friendly cities, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, as part of a month-long tour to drum up support for the Patriot Act. "Make no mistake: Our strategies and tactics are working," he said. "Our tools are effective. We are winning the war on terror."
The former Missouri senator and governor, who once flirted with a presidential bid as a candidate of the religious right, says he is untroubled by the increased focus on his anti-terrorism policies, and has shown no sign of tempering his rhetoric. In his address Monday to police and prosecutors here, Ashcroft called the war on terrorism "the cause of our times" and, in a thinly veiled jab at Otter, warned that those who want to restrict the law "would tip off the terrorists that we're on to them."
In an interview after the Boise speech, Ashcroft said he pays little attention to criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) and other groups. He said he believes that the Otter amendment approved 309 to 118 by the House in July, which would cut off funding for "sneak-and-peek" warrants, "was a mistake," and that many members did not know what they were voting for.
"I don't take things personally," Ashcroft said. "Debate about civil liberties is a good thing. In no way do I want to silence debate. I want to participate in the debate, to help people understand the truth of what we're doing and how we are defending Americans against terrorists."
But Otter, who was one of only three Republicans to vote against the original Patriot legislation, said Ashcroft and the Bush administration are making a mistake by continuing to ignore objections to the Patriot Act and by implying that those with concerns are aiding terrorists. The measure, approved just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, dramatically expanded the ability of the government to monitor and search the belongings of people targeted in terrorism investigations. It includes provisions that allow FBI (news - web sites) agents to conduct secret searches and to seize records from banks, libraries and other businesses without disclosing that they have done so.
"It's pretty reckless to say that 309 members of Congress want to tip off terrorists," said Otter, who noted that more than a third of the votes cast for his amendment came from Republicans. "Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the attorney general should be listening to the concerns that many Americans have about some portions of the act."
Ashcroft has often commented on the bumpiness of his life in politics, which included the embarrassment of losing his Senate seat in 2000 to a Democrat, Mel Carnahan (news - web sites), who remained on the Missouri ballot after he died in a plane crash. Less than three months later, Ashcroft won confirmation as President Bush (news - web sites)'s attorney general by a 58-42 margin, the narrowest in recent times. As Ashcroft wrote in an autobiography about his political career, "for every crucifixion, a resurrection is waiting to follow."
Since taking office, Ashcroft has drawn the left's ire for the reach of the government's war on terrorism; for overruling local prosecutors in death penalty cases; for altering the government's decades-old interpretation of the Second Amendment's right to bear arms; and for overseeing continued raids on facilities that provide marijuana for medical purposes. Now some conservatives, concerned that the war on terrorism has eroded civil liberties, are joining the criticism of Ashcroft's policies for the first time.
David Israelite, a longtime aide who serves as Ashcroft's deputy chief of staff, said that "being criticized is nothing new for someone who's been a senator or governor. He's more concerned about the judgment of history than the judgment of how he's portrayed in the press or by opportunists on either side."
But many civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers still bristle at Ashcroft's sharply worded testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (news - web sites) in December 2001, in which he suggested that critics were aiding terrorists and endangering the safety of U.S. citizens.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero, whose group has helped organize many of the anti-Patriot Act resolutions approved in recent months by more than 150 municipalities and states, said Ashcroft is now "clearly on the defensive. He and the Justice Department have finally understood that there are large portions of the public raising questions about their policies on terrorism and the Patriot Act. The opposition is springing up all across the country."
Yet it is still unclear whether bashing Ashcroft will be a political winner in 2004. As Ashcroft and his aides point out, most Americans and lawmakers supported the Patriot Act when it was approved in October 2001, and few voters mention it as a top concern when questioned by pollsters. Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (news - web sites) (Mo.) and Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.), John Edwards (N.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) -- all of whom are Democrats running for president and criticizing Ashcroft -- were among those who voted for the act.
Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee (news - web sites), said Democrats have little to gain politically from targeting the attorney general because his tactics are favored by most of the electorate.
"The Democrats who are attacking John Ashcroft (news - web sites) and his policies to appeal to the hard-core component of the Democratic primary electorate are likely to find themselves on the opposite side of a vast majority of Americans, who are concerned about the threat of terrorist attacks in the aftermath of September 11," he said.
Ashcroft and the White House point to a July 31 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll showing that 91 percent of registered voters said the act had not affected their civil liberties, while 56 percent said the law is good for the country. Moreover, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks appear to have changed U.S. attitudes over how much latitude the federal government needs and should be given to fight terrorism, pollsters from both parties said.
At the very least, Democrats believe their attacks on Ashcroft and the Patriot Act will help rally the party's base. They also aim to win over what they see as a big pool of potential voters who have deep concerns about government intrusion into their lives.
Even some Republicans are troubled by Ashcroft's visits to 18 cities in 16 states, questioning whether the tour will do more harm than good by focusing attention on the civil liberties issue. Larry D. Thompson, the departing deputy attorney general, and key White House officials reached out to several conservatives in recent weeks to enlist their help, only to hear of deep concerns about the act from some allies, sources familiar with the effort said.
One Republican who has discussed the matter with White House officials said that, at the very least, Ashcroft is taking the heat instead of Bush. "This gives Bush some distance, because this is an issue with liabilities," he said. The White House may be "sending [Ashcroft] out to see if it works, to test the waters, to see how mad people are," he added.
Researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report. VandeHei reported from Washington and New Hampshire.
----
Deepening Doubts on Iraq
August 29, 2003
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq29aug29,1,3221896.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
Where are the weapons of mass destruction? As President Bush and other administration officials made the case for war with Iraq, their biggest selling point was the claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime possessed chemical weapons. Allegations he had biological weapons were shakier; assertions he had nuclear arms or could build them were even more dubious. There were other ever-shifting official rationales for the Iraq invasion, like Hussein's torture and killing of his own people and promoting Mideast democracy through his ouster. The main justification, however, for sending Americans to die in the desert was Hussein's earlier use of chemical weapons, his continued possession of them and the imminent threat he would inflict them on the United States.
In this year's State of the Union speech, Bush cited United Nations reports or U.S. intelligence that showed that Hussein had failed to account for 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and material for 500 tons of sarin, mustard agent and VX nerve agent. "From three Iraqi defectors, we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapon labs designed to produce germ warfare agents," Bush said. Where are those chemicals, those poisons or those labs?
Times staff writer Bob Drogin reported Thursday the deeply disturbing news that U.S. intelligence officials were now laboring to learn whether they had been fed false information about Iraq's weapons, especially by defectors. U.N. inspectors' prewar searches found no chemical, biological or nuclear stockpiles. Hundreds of inspectors combing Iraq since major combat ended May 1 have fared no better. One U.S. intelligence official says analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support White House claims about Iraqi arms. Intelligence and congressional sources told Times reporters in October, five months before the invasion, that senior Bush officials were pressuring CIA analysts to shape their assessments of the threat to build the case against Hussein.
On the eve of war, this editorial page said Iraq should be given more time to disarm, otherwise the U.S. "risks being branded as the aggressive and arrogant superpower that disregards the wishes of the international community." The United States now wears that label, especially in light of the administration's vacillations on involving other nations' forces in postwar Iraq.
But worse is the possibility that nearly 300 American personnel and dozens of British soldiers, plus U.N. officials and untold numbers of Iraqis, have died due to incredibly bad or corrupted intelligence. In Britain, a Sunday Telegraph poll showed that 67% of the public thought that their government, the main U.S. ally, had deceived the British people to get them into Iraq.
The war was more popular in the U.S. But Bush, administration officials, intelligence analysts and Congress need to keep asking: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? And if they are not found, was the defiant U.S. insistence that Iraq had them the result of incompetence or lies?
----
Wesley Clark -- Mercenary
August 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030828-084944-9821r.htm
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark's year-long flirtation with running for the presidency is becoming absurd. Not since Mario (Hamlet-on-the Hudson) Cuomo's ultimately fruitless presidential dalliance in the eighties has a non-candidate received so much press coverage, most of it uncritical. Mr. Clark is posturing himself above partisan politics, presumably deciding which party he will represent should he actually run for president based on an undisclosed calculus of self-interest. He doesn't seem to grasp that there are clear philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats, and that choosing sides is a matter of principle, not expediency. Mr. Clark's actions in the presidential arena make him the equivalent of a political mercenary.
Before Mr. Clark campaigns for the White House, he needs to go through basic training in American politics. His first lesson should be to memorize Lincoln's adage about the impossibility of fooling all the people all the time. Mr. Clark has been posturing as an independent who doesn't know whether to run as a Democrat or a Republican. In August, he told CNN's Aaron Brown that "for me, it's not about partisan politics." Yet Mr. Clark's track record is plainly partisan. In Georgia's Senate race last year, he endorsed the Democratic incumbent over Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss. Mr. Clark votes as a Democrat in primaries in his home state of Arkansas. The "Draft Clark" Web site lauds him for having "progressive social principles in line with our Democratic ideals." Time magazine reported last year that Mr. Clark's presidential prospecting included meetings with top Democratic donors and fundraisers.
Mr. Clark's evasiveness regarding his Democratic Party affiliations is troubling, but his ignorance of American politics is more disturbing. Last week on ''Crossfire,'' Mr. Clark said: "The majority of the people in this country really aren't affiliated with parties, they're independent." This is dead wrong. Three-quarters of the voters register as Republicans or Democrats, and another five percent or so belong to minor parties. Four out of five voters identify themselves as partisans because they embrace the particular set of political ideals for which their chosen party stands. They grasp something that apparently eludes the general: Politics is about principles.
Mr. Clark is a mature man whose intellectual formation includes West Point and Oxford University. If choosing between political parties is so difficult for him, it reveals a core lack of principles. This mercenary mentality raises serious doubts concerning his fitness for the presidency.
Mr. Clark could be attracted to the commander in chief component of the job. Ambition may tell him it is the only rank left to attain higher than that of four-star general. But that is only part of the president's job description. The majority of a president's duties involve working with other elected officials. This requires keenly-honed political skills. Mr. Clark's dismissive attitude toward the role of parties on America's governing process suggests he would fail miserably as our top politician. Mr. Clark says he is considering running because of a "groundswell" of public support. He seems to be the only political observer who has spotted the groundswell. We rather doubt that the people are, or will be, clamoring for a political mercenary in the Oval Office. They know that the presidency isn't a matter of choosing a flag of convenience.
----
Assessing Gen. Clark
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor,
September 1, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030831-102436-6911r.htm
I am confident that retired Gen. Wesley Clark will handily debunk the assertions in your Friday editorial "Wesley Clark - Mercenary."
What I found humorous is that The Washington Times puts forth that Gen. Clark needs to "memorize" Abraham Lincoln's famous saying about the impossibility of fooling all of the people all of the time. Can you imagine the applesauce President Bush would make of the Lincoln quote? "You can fool all the fools most of the time. Erm ... no ..."
Right-wingers always shoot themselves in the foot with qualifications they want Gen. Clark to meet. Mr. Bush did not have much "basic training" in politics or meet his sworn obligations to the National Guard. Republicans leave Mr. Bush open to criticism at every turn in the paint-ball game they have initiated with Gen. Clark.
Another less-than-clever assertion is that Gen. Clark is wrong about Americans' party affiliation. Gen. Clark is quoted as saying that the American people are largely independent, but the editorial then says that Gen. Clark is wrong because voters are largely registered as Republicans, Democrats or Independents. Well, Gen. Clark didn't say "voters," he said "the majority of the people are independent," with a small "i." I find that entirely credible. My opinion is that many people who are politically apathetic probably are independent in their thinking. Perhaps Gen. Clark is reaching out to those who don't usually vote.
It's also ludicrous to say that Gen. Clark is a political mercenary. Given that a general's salary is only about nine times what a private earns in the military, I would say that his life trumps your evaluation of his political motivation. Since when are leadership and ambition qualities the conservative party won't embrace? Your point is weak and disappears by virtue of its weightlessness. You do a disservice to all who serve at the highest levels of the military when you employ this tactic. Given Mr. Bush's policies, I would say he's the political mercenary you describe.
It appears to me that you haven't been able to dig up any factual "dirt" about Gen. Clark, so you are trying to hit him on personal ability and motivation. That's dangerous territory, because Mr. Bush is richly vulnerable in those areas. If panning for fool's gold is where the right wing wants to go - it's your choice.
HELEN POELKER Lakewood, Colo.
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U.S. sinking in Iraq quagmire
August 29, 2003
BY ANDREW GREELEY,
Chicago Sun Times
http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel29.html
Faced with persistent sabotage and an increase in guerrilla violence, the Bush administration faces unpalatable options in Iraq, especially as the country approaches the beginning of the year before the election. Real imperial powers ought not to be distracted by elections.
It can send more American troops, either National Guard or Reserve units, or new units drawn from recruits or eventually perhaps from a draft. This choice is unpalatable because it would be an admission that the administration had made serious mistakes in its calculations about how many troops were needed. Moreover, it would give the lie to the president's claim on the aircraft carrier that the war is over.
It can invite the United Nations to send in troops. However, the other Security Council countries are not likely to approve such action unless the United States eats humble pie, admits that it was mistaken in its confidence, and permits the UN to take charge of Iraq. It is virtually unthinkable that the president could accept that humiliation in an election year.
It can withdraw from Iraq. If the army ever manages to capture Saddam Hussein, it can claim victory and say in effect to the Iraqis, we know you don't want us here. We don't want to be here either. Rebuild your country yourselves. Fight the swarming Saudi berserkers yourselves. We're out of here. But such a strategy--probably the wisest--would also be an admission of failure.
It can continue the present strategy, at the cost of $1 billion a week, hoping that the United States can muddle through and that, as was said in Vietnam, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually, the Iraqis may settle down and the neighboring countries can stop the flow of Saudi and Palestinian crazies. In another six months things might be a lot better. However, at the present rate, they may be a lot worse. American soldiers may still die every day and truck bombs may explode every other week. The military would be tied down in a seeming never-ending war. This paradigm is so similar to Vietnam as to be frightening.
Yet, the administration might well decide, that if the ''sacrifices'' in Iraq can be portrayed as necessary to win the ''war on terrorism,'' Bush may keep his eclat as an able wartime president and win the election despite being trapped in the big muddy. He might be successful in situations that doomed both Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson.
One recalls what Sen. George Aiken said of Vietnam: The best strategy would be to claim victory and go home. The present administration has proven itself very skilled at spinning reality so that truth becomes invisible. Does anyone remember ''compassionate'' conservatism? Or ''no nation building''? Or more recently, the president's claim that his energy bill would solve the problem of the nation's erratic electric grid? Everyone knows, don't they, that Alaskan petroleum is just what the grid needs? The spinmasters could fool the majority of the American people into believing that defeat was really victory. Having been clever enough to steal an election, the administration may well be able to pull off an imaginary victory in Iraq. What's the point in being a Teflon president unless you can do that? So far, most Americans still dismiss criticism of the administration's Iraq policy as ''politics.''
Finally, God, who apparently advised Bush to invade Iraq, might well intervene with a miracle because everyone knows that God is on our side, isn't He?
The American public grows skeptical of prolonged wars rather quickly. But this is a special time in the nation's history. The savage jolt to American self-confidence and self-esteem caused by the World Trade Center attack has played into the hands of the spinners. They got us into the war by playing games with the truth. They may also be able to spin a coverup that will persuade the public that the Iraq situation is not as bad as it seems. Can they get away with it? Maybe they can also pretend that unemployment is not serious.
I wouldn't bet against them.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Battle rages in Afghanistan; American soldier dies in fall
8/29/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-08-29-afghan-fighting_x.htm
QALAT, Afghanistan (AP) - Afghan soldiers were waging a fierce battle with entrenched Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan after a night of heavy U.S. bombing that left many Taliban dead, an Afghan intelligence chief said Friday.
The U.S. military said a special operations soldier died in an accidental fall during the fighting, some of the fiercest in recent months. The soldier's name was not immediately released.
U.S. warplanes began bombing two suspected Taliban positions in the Chinaran and Larzab mountains of Dai Chupan district in southern Zabul province late Thursday, provincial intelligence chief Khalil Hotak told The Associated Press.
The bombing ended at about 4 a.m., and some 500 local Afghan soldiers moved in on the Taliban fighters, who had taken up fortified positions in a deep mountain gorge and along a stream running through the area, Hotak said at a command center set up in Qalat, about 45 miles south of the fighting.
Hotak described the area as a Taliban stronghold, from which the insurgents direct their operations into the neighboring provinces of Kandahar, Ghazni and Uruzgan. It was impossible to verify his claim independently.
It was impossible to know the exact number of Taliban killed in the bombing and subsequent fighting, but Hotak said the number of fighters killed could be as high as 35. No casualties were reported among the Afghan soldiers.
Four Afghan soldiers were wounded in fighting Thursday.
The U.S. military said a special operations soldier died in a fall suffered during a "night combat assault" in Dai Chupan.
"The injuries were sustained during an accidental fall and were not the result of hostile action," the military said in a statement from Bagram Air Base, north of the capital, Kabul.
Hotak said the largest suspected Taliban base was near a part of the mountain range called Hazar Buz, about four miles from the latest ground fighting. As he spoke, he received calls from commanders at the scene, barking back orders for the ongoing fighting.
"We get information when the Taliban change their positions. Then we give this information to our commanders," he said.
The fighting was still going on by midmorning Friday, Hotak said. His forces believe hundreds of Taliban have taken up positions in the area, with at least 15 hideouts, he said.
Zabul has seen heavy fighting this week. The province's governor, Hafizullah Hashami, said even before the most recent fighting that about 40 Taliban were killed in an ongoing operation to clear out guerrillas hiding in the mountainous area.
Afghan officials say they believe at least two prominent Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Shafiq, were leading the fighting in the area.
Hotak also named Mullah Abdul Qahar as one of the commanders leading the Taliban fighters. A native of Zabul, Qahar was a senior Taliban commander in the province before the militia was ousted in late 2001 by a U.S.-led coalition, according to Hotak.
Haji Granai, an Afghan military commander, said at least two U.S. bombers and two helicopters helped in the operation, and Hotak said 20 American troops and 12 military vehicles were on the ground to aid the Afghan forces.
Two fighters arrested in the area two days ago told investigators they were recruited by the Taliban and fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. They said they received $650 from the two groups, Hotak said.
Hekmatyar, a former prime minister who has since fallen into disfavor, so far has eluded U.S. efforts to arrest or kill him. The renegade warlord has issued calls for a jihad, or holy war, against foreign troops in Afghanistan.
In other fighting, a group of suspected Taliban attacked an Afghan checkpoint in Spinboldak, 130 miles southwest of the Zabul province fighting.
Three Afghan soldiers were killed in Thursday's attack, said Fazluddin Agha, district police chief of Spinboldak. Two Taliban fighters were wounded in the exchange of gunfire, he said.
-------- africa
The problem with Tunisia
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor,
September 1, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030831-102436-6911r.htm
The Washington Times' glowing portrayal of Tunisia as "An 'Arab country that works' " (World, Aug. 20) ignores the North African nation's monumental failures in human rights, particularly press freedom.
After nearly two decades of official threats and harassment against local journalists, Tunisia's press remains one of the most restricted anywhere in the Arab world. In fact, Tunisia is one of just two countries in the Arab world that jails journalists.
One of those imprisoned in President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's jails is a young Internet journalist named Zouhair Yahyaoui, who is serving a two-year jail term for merely posting chat forums and articles critical of the president and his government.
Though Tunisia's economic achievements should be lauded, one should not confuse them with success when basic liberties are so flagrantly trampled.
HANI SABRA
Researcher Middle East and North Africa Committee to Protect Journalists New York
-------- biological weapons
Groups Try to Halt Development of Biowarfare Labs
SAN FRANCISCO, California,
August 29, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2003/2003-08-29-09.asp#anchor1
Two nuclear watchdog groups filed suit this week in federal court to suspend the U.S. Department of Energy's construction of biowafare labs at two national nuclear weapons facilities. The organizations say the Energy Department failed to complete a comprehensive review of the projects' environmental impact. The facilities have been designed to conduct research into biowarfare agents such as anthrax, plague and botulism.
Plaintiffs representing individuals and community groups have requested an injunction barring the federal agency from breaking ground for biowarfare agent labs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and from introducing pathogens into a partially constructed facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"The Department of Energy granted itself the go ahead to construct and operate hazardous biowarfare agent facilities without conducting thorough analyses of the risks to lab workers and neighbors," said Marylia Kelley, the executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment).
A comprehensive environmental review, public hearings and serious consideration of safe alternatives are all legally required, but the Energy Department has failed to complete this process, Kelley explained.
"The Energy Department hastily and capriciously gave a 'green-light' to novel and dangerous operations in two states," Kelley said.
Officials with the Energy Department say the environmental assessments it conducted found that the effects on the environment would be minimal, but the plaintiffs are not convinced.
The laboratories would generate some 2,600 pounds of hazardous, infectious waste each year. The "cursory" environmental assessments completed by the Energy Department dismissed threats of sabotage, transportation accidents, escaping research animals and natural disasters, said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.
The plaintiffs, who filed their suit in federal district court in San Francisco, says both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos have poor safety, security and environmental records. Lawrence Livermore - located in Livermore, California some 50 miles from San Francisco - is on the federal Superfund list and is in an active earthquake fault zone. Los Alamos, located in New Mexico, has repeatedly been subject to federal investigations for security and management scandals.
"We are not against enhanced defenses to stop bioterrorism," said Coghlan. "But we oppose allowing the Energy Department to rush forward in a manner that may cause more problems than it solves. For the public good, proposals to locate biowarfare agent research programs at secretive nuclear weapons labs need the transparency our lawsuit seeks."
-------- britain
Blair Testifies to Accuracy of Dossier on Iraq
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57711-2003Aug28.html
LONDON, Aug. 28 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair told a public inquiry today that he regarded as "extremely serious" allegations in a BBC report that his office knowingly exaggerated estimates of Iraq's access to weapons of mass destruction and said he would have resigned had the charges been true.
Facing the biggest political crisis in his six years in office, Blair insisted in 21/2 hours of testimony in the Royal Courts of Justice here that the intelligence dossier his office published to justify Britain's participation in the U.S.-led military campaign against Iraq was accurate.
But he said the BBC radio report on May 29, which alleged that Blair's aides had "sexed up" the dossier by inserting a dubious claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes, was continuing to damage his government's credibility.
The report had unfairly transformed the debate over the war, Blair said. "The whole thing has been not did the government make the wrong decision [to go to war], but did the government dupe us, did the government in effect defraud people over it," he said. "I mean, we're three months on and it's still the issue."
"It was an extraordinary allegation to make and an extremely serious one," said Blair, adding, "Had the allegation been true, it would have merited my resignation."
The inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Brian Hutton, is supposedly narrowly focused on the apparent suicide last month of weapons expert David Kelly after he was identified as the confidential source for the BBC report.
But the inquiry has widened into a look at how Blair's government used intelligence data to sell the case for war to reluctant British voters, how it waged an intense public relations campaign against the BBC, one of Britain's most hallowed institutions, and how it handled Kelly after he came forward to tell superiors he had spoken to the BBC.
Unlike some of the previous government witnesses, Blair took responsibility for the major decisions in the Kelly affair, including the decision to disclose publicly that Kelly had likely been the BBC's source. Had the government failed to disclose his identity, Blair testified, it could have been accused of concealing important facts from two parliamentary committees investigating the Iraq war.
Blair said he had insisted that senior civil servants, as well as political appointees, take part in the process that led to Kelly's naming, because it was a difficult matter and he wanted it handled "by the book." He added, "Because of the sensitivity of this, it was better just to be open about it."
Nonetheless, he said, "I take full responsibility for the decisions. I stand by them. I believe they were the right decisions."
Blair, a lawyer, fielded questions from James Dingemans, the inquiry's lawyer, with occasional interspersions from Hutton. It was a confident and polished performance, delivered in a conversational tone, and only the second time a British prime minister has appeared in public before a judicial inquiry. The first was when John Major, Blair's immediate predecessor, testified before a 1994 inquiry into the supplying of arms to Iraq.
The prime minister said his aides helped polish the language of the dossier -- including the wording of the 45-minute claim. But he said that its content was controlled solely by John Scarlett, chairman of the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee. Blair said he wanted the public to see the kind of material that had convinced him there was a case to take to the United Nations to force Iraq to disarm or face military action.
The BBC report, by defense correspondent Andrew Gilligan, contained three glaring inaccuracies, according to Blair: that the 45-minute claim had been inserted by his aides, that this had been done even though they knew it was "probably wrong," and that it was done against the wishes of the intelligence services. At the time, Blair's office denied the allegations, but the BBC stuck by them.
Their impact was considerably heightened the following Sunday when Gilligan published a newspaper article naming Alastair Campbell, Blair's top aide and a hate figure for parts of the British news media, as the instigator of the changes. The controversy "really had booster rockets put on it" after that, Blair testified.
Blair said several attempts to defuse the growing confrontation -- including a private phone conversation he had with BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies -- were to no avail. "All the way through we hoped the dispute might go away," he testified. "But the only way was if they [the BBC] said clearly and unequivocally that the original story was wrong."
The disclosure that Kelly had met with Gilligan a week before the BBC broadcast put government officials in a quandary, Blair said. Kelly was denying he had told Gilligan some of the things the reporter had alleged, so it was unclear if he was Gilligan's source. At the same time, Blair said, he feared being accused of withholding relevant information from the two House of Commons panels -- especially the Foreign Affairs Committee, which was about to issue a report on the war.
The Defense Ministry eventually issued a press statement -- vetted by officials at Blair's Downing Street office and by Blair himself -- disclosing that an unnamed official had come forward. Press officers then engaged in a "naming strategy," revealing enough details of Kelly's identity that reporters quickly guessed his name, which the officers then confirmed.
Blair said the strategy had been "not to offer the name, but on the other hand, not to mislead people." Kelly's body, with the left wrist slashed, was found near his Oxfordshire home in western England three days after he testified.
Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, charged today after the testimony that Blair had participated in the naming process that had helped drive Kelly to suicide. "The prime minister knew about, and was satisfied with, the underhand treatment of Dr. Kelly and the systematic attempt to destroy his reputation both before and after his death," Smith told the British Press Association. "This is the most shameful act of this sorry saga."
After Blair left the stand, Davies, the BBC chairman, told the inquiry he had considered the dispute over Gilligan's report a minor affair until Blair's aide Campbell delivered "an unprecedented attack on the BBC" in testimony before the Foreign Affairs Committee in late June.
Davies appeared to back away from the media corporation's previous support for Gilligan, whom Davies said reported his stories "in primary colors rather than shades of gray." He said Gilligan had been wrong in his first unscripted broadcast to say officials "probably knew" the 45-minute claim was wrong -- an allegation Gilligan omitted from later broadcasts. And he said Gilligan had been wrong to disclose to members of the committee that Kelly had been a confidential source for another BBC reporter, Susan Watts.
Kelly later told a friend that he was taken aback when a committee member asked him whether he had been Watts's source. He denied it. After his death, the BBC said he had been the source for both reporters.
----
Blair's Political Suicide
by Christopher Montgomery,
August 29, 2003
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/goldstein/g082903.html
Right, here's the problem: you need to go to war, but you'd find it ticklish - and frankly, boring - to go into your real reasons for doing so, so what are you going to do? If, last September, you were Tony Blair, you'd decide that the best way forward was to blind the electorate with science. Or at least, the next best thing: secret stuff, which you'll allude to (can't go into any serious detail, obviously, I mean, grow up), and other people, well, journalists, will get het up about and print banner headlines and generally go woo-hoo for war. And thus problem solved: your case for going to war is that you need to, despite the fact that you know full well that you don't need to, but are instead doing so for entirely optional reasons of statecraft.
Anything else would be complicated to explain to the electorate: they're not interested in nuance like your belief as to how Britain needs to go to war in order to put one over the lesser satrapies, or how - and admittedly, you can't regardless say this in public - our participation will act as a desirable deadweight on elements in the administration who otherwise will push on with a war you won't like. All jolly complicated that, and sooo much more tempting to take advantage of all those right-wing ninnies in the Murdoch and Black papers who'll cheer you on to Baghdad. That's it, dress it up as a moral crusade, and a vital matter of the national interest: hee hee, won't that be the clever thing to do? Never mind that you haven't the slightest what you'll do once the cakewalk's over, at least you'll have solved the short term problem, and that's what you're good at. Is this the genesis of the Hutton Inquiry, and l'affaire Kelly? Yes, and, uh, no. Bad, which is to say, incompetent government, has brought us to this pass, but that it is not a very serious pass at all is soon going to be seen as the truth it is, no matter how much the press squeals otherwise.
How We Got Here
Oh it would have so much simpler if only Tony Blair had done what I told him to do: if you have to fight the war (and I understand from your point of view - blind, unthinking, reflexive Atlanticism - why you felt that was the realistic thing to do), then do so with as few rhetorical commitments as possible. Don't fall into the rhetorical bog alongside our wanna-cons, who ludicrously thought that virtue was afoot a few months ago in the Gulf. Shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes, jerk your head towards Dubya and knowingly arch your eyebrows: 'well if it had been simply down to me to decide what to . . .' - that would have been the way forward. Make clear to the Cousins what an absolute chore it was to get involved, screw something substantial out of them in return, then high tail it out of Iraq, where you never wanted to be in the first place, even sooner than decency allowed.
Gosh, think on all those soldiers who'd still be alive, hmmn, anyway, let's keep this light-hearted, it's only make believe after all. That's what he ought to have done, and to pre-empt all those right-wing clowns who believe that Blair believes what they believed, and thus think that 'Tony' wanted to go to war to get rid of Saddam: baloney. The Prime Minister, appreciating what a fourth or fifth order of consequence the Iraqi dictator's departure was always going to be, never sought it as his principal goal. How do we know this? Desperately easy that: if, by whatever implausible means, war could have been avoided (the inspectors had been allowed back in, Saddam, ah, acquired serious amounts of WMD in order that he might, er, disacquisition them, on television, with an ad during the superbowl - seriously, whatever is very much the thought here) Blair would have avoided it. His goal, the object of British foreign policy as directed by him, was neither war, nor the supposed consequences of the war that did in fact take place, but the maintenance of the Anglo-American lock-step. If that could be done by America keeping pace with Britain, so much the better, but if it had to be done the other way round, so be it. The thing was, not to get out of step. Hence off to war we went, and now that that conflict is over as easily as, ahem, some of us said it would be (no chickening out here, not like those fretting wusses in the war party: remember the wobbling?), the problems of peace are firmly with us.
As far as the British government (and the Australian too, though not yet the American) is concerned, the primary problem of peace is not the good government of Iraq, or even of the sacerdotal 'war on terror', but the rising complaint that what we supposedly fought for doesn't seem to be quite the pressing and precarious urge it was once felt to be. I have limited political sympathy with this complaint, if boundless patience for the 'slow to anger, but sure to fight' spirit which I think informs it. In other words, all the mewling left-liberal nonsense that, 'Blair put one over on us: he lied us into war' - well boo hoo. Who actually believed all the 45 minute pap at the time? A few addled hacks on The Times, perhaps, but nobody seriously thought the government was telling anything like the truth. This sort of reasoning was seen as being entirely secondary by whole-hearted advocates of the war ('we're in it for the children of Iraq' blah blah); and, those opposed to the war either disputed such claims as being factually tendentious, or right but utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand. Which is to say, all the stuff in the dossier being arduously investigated by Lord Hutton did not determine whether we entered the war. The canard that it did should be dispensed with by clever people like us: we know why we went to war, despite, not because of all the arguments bandied about at the time. We knew it at the time, and media myopia notwithstanding, we should remember it now.
In relation to what was supposedly at issue in the Prime Minister's famed dossier, and thus is causing, in the debate over its veracity, the current fuss, I have no idea whether Saddam had plentiful, weaponised battlefield ABC munitions. Whether we just got lucky, or, our super-smart spooks [of whom, more later] brilliantly bribed the right Iraqi officers (not to use any WMD gizmos when the command came down from on furry-white-cat-stroking high), or, the right people on the other side all, at the same time, saw the writing on the wall, and wisely forbade from carrying out their supposed orders, who can say? My ante-bellum point was that it didn't matter a fig either way, as Saddam was never going to use WMD even if he did eventually get them. (And there was the British side argument to this particular recipe for peace that added: 'it especially doesn't matter to us, because no matter what we do, the Americans will sort [sic] it out anyway. With us benefiting to exactly the same degree that every other civilized country that didn't take part in the war against Iraq is assumed to have profited thereby from America's selfless discharge of the burden of global leadership' etcetera, etcetera - honestly, you sometimes get the distinct impression the other side forget what script they're reading from).
Scepticism therefore seems to me to be the most natural response to the claims of both the 'we were lied into war' brigade, and the 'we lied you into war, but it was good for you, and you wanted it anyway, bitch' lot. So what that we were lied into war? With the feeble counter-arguments put up by most of the loudmouths the antiwar left scrabbled together, the plain truth is that, had we stayed out of the conflict, we'd most likely have been lied out of the war. I mean, you did listen to the tosh the likes of Tariq Ali and Edward Said spouted, but you, wise old you, surely didn't believe it?
Lying to one side, the more practical problem for Tony Blair appears to be that he's now caught in a vice between the lumpen-realism of the public (which consistently supports 'national interest' wars, but opposes cuddly, humanitarian ones) that expected there to have been some semblance of a threat for us to have met in Iraq, and, weirdly enough, that of the state, and its functionaries. And it is this latter realism, which conflicted with his Atlanticist realism, that is really causing the Prime Minister all his present bother.
Simply put, although Atlanticism is a defining and widespread realism within the British establishment, it is not the only realism on offer, and in advance of the war against Iraq there were plenty of men inside the military, diplomatic and intelligence services who felt that the country could safely sit this one out. All kinds of disparate thinking - crypto-Europeanism, old fashioned Ameroscepticism, plain and simple Arabism, sublime inertia, you name it, there were plenty of powerful ideas that could justify the exceptional move of, for once, not standing by America - separately and severally informed this forestalled desire for a policy of strategic lethargy. But what, I believe, was crucial to this dissent, and the form it took, was precisely the way the Government publicly justified the war. By drawing upon the prestige of the state to make the case for war, by suggesting, rather than stating, that the war was in our interest, as well as being more windily "right", the Blairite Labour leadership relied upon what could not be said to justify fighting. They depended upon that which, to some small degree, they and their most advanced followers had been waging cultural war against for a decade: the security services, the armed forces, and all the rest of the panoply of 'old Britain', most notably the higher ranks of the Foreign Office.
What more than anything else the outward case for war rested upon was the Government's stated faith in what these men had told them. Crucially, for this compact to work, the Government has to affect to the public very largely what indeed they actually have been told - for if they don't, it compromises the professional pride of the people in question. These are the sort of men who care what the history books will eventually say about them after the thirty year rule has had its way. This is the origin of David Kelly and his discontents, and of the far wider unhappiness which lies behind him. Tony Blair said, let's go to war because you've got to trust the people whispering in my ear. They didn't like the use their good name was being put to, not because they're anti-war, but because they knew he was using the wrong arguments. That he had to rely upon the credibility of such quintessential 'forces of conservatism' says a lot about the Labour leader's diminishing political capital, but that is a distraction from the issue at hand: the coming irrelevance of the Hutton report.
They'll Tell You It Is, but It Isn't
What the press want to do - it suits their collective ego, and at any rate, some hacks feel guilt at the degree to which they were manipulated before the war, and wish to assuage it - is to tell you that this is all about them and the government: that the factions within the Government, and the country's relations with its allies, big and small, let alone the contest with the Official Opposition, these are all small beer compared to the fight between Mr Blair and the fourth estate. In one sense, and one sense alone, it is true that this is about the press. David Kelly committed suicide for reasons which we can never know, but that the consequences of his actions entailed a press culture barbarous enough to prevent him from even reaching his own home was unlikely to have been absent as a factor. Whatever coddling term you want to use, tipping point or final straw or as you wish: Dr Kelly died after he had been subject to the attentions of the British press. The evidential onus is on them to disprove responsibility: they can't. Their manner of going about reporting Kelly directly contributed to the state of mind in which he foolishly and wrongly took his own life. In that sense, this ought to be about the press, but just as David Kelly's death is not really the issue at stake in the Hutton Inquiry, despite its official remit, so too are the media ultimately a preening irrelevance. Britain went to war, and 'why?' is the question. The arrant pointlessness of having a judge ask this is neither here nor there, for soon we are to have his oblique answer.
Before coming onto the sequence of events that leads up to the Hutton Inquiry, we should though praise the Tory party, which for once is doing the right thing, and saying nothing. There's plenty that an opposition which had pursued the correct policy before and during the war could now be saying, and gravely to the detriment of the Government too, yet sadly that option is forever precluded by the hapless line we actually took, which was of course one of supine support. So the best the comprehensively compromised Conservatives can do is to leave this to the Government, the civil service, and their bastard off-spring, the BBC. We'll benefit, if we can keep our traps shut, even though we don't deserve to, and should instead be soundly flogged for our incompetence. But I feel deviation coming upon me, so should return to Lord Hutton and his inquiries.
Brian Hutton, as was, is an Ulster QC from one of those 'well-established' middle class legal families that used to be the mainspring of professional life in the Province. There were few things better in Britain gone by than having some measure of professional gentility: outside of London lawyers and doctors and the like enjoyed, as our Marxist friends would like to put, all the status of the ancien regime, without many of the unprofitable or time-consuming responsibilities. In short, if you wanted to socialise someone a Tory, Brian Hutton's your man. He rose to become Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland during the troubles at their most dispiriting (the 1980s, not the time when most people were being killed but the period when it became evident that the state was never going to do anything much to deal with terrorism beyond the least possible). After his retirement from that post, he was inducted into the law lords, being in recent years, though this amounts to a gross over-simplification, the most conventionally 'conservative' of them after the great Lord Lloyd. I don't think it would be to suppose too much of his table talk that, this, additionally, is a man who would share the puzzlement that we have a Prime Minister who can send troops half way round the world, all the better to fight terrorists, whilst at home he prefers to have them made devolved education ministers. All in all, a friend of the state, and the state moreover that Tony Blair, until oh so very recently, seemed to have terribly little time for.
The Government man then, for all that? I rather expect so: or to put it a more emotionally honest way, a man predisposed to respect proper authority. The danger for Tony Blair lies in his having transgressed against, rather than merely allowed others to fulminate at, the established way of doing things in Britain. Has, will or even, can, Hutton demonstrate that he did? What, in retrospect, this period, that is to say, the first six years of Tony Blair's premiership (or as I am sure we will say in the fullness of time, 'the first half' of the 1997-on Labour regime) will amount to is this: he tried (to subvert traditional means of governance) but failed. The will was there, but the job was never truly pulled off. This is what the Hutton documentation proves, and, ironically, it is exactly the sloughing off his attempts at an unconventional style of personal government that is going to enable Tony Blair to continue in office for some time to come.
What Hutton Saw
As a favour to a friend - papers are very short-staffed in August - I went into a Sunday last week to help plough through Hutton's documentation. One of the engaging things about the Inquiry is that so scared are the Government of being assailed with any more charges of 'spinning', they have neglected to equip Lord Hutton with any of the press paraphernalia any such undertaking would have received during the previous five years of new Labour (cf Campbell, NATO's press room and the war against Yugoslavia, etc, etc). As a result Hutton neither knows when it is being spun, nor indeed how to spin itself. One tragically missed opportunity came when Alistair Campbell was revealed by the paper [sic] trail to have canvassed the idea of leaking Dr Kelly's name by means of planting it on a tame hack. Sadly no one at the Inquiry asked the Prime Minister's Director of Communications & Strategy, 'now, how would you have done this? Do take us through the process, pull back that curtain and show us the magic at work . . . I see, you'd have rung up who? Tom what-win? At The Times? And what, he'd have written it up just so - how jolly interesting, who'd have thought?' - how we'd have laughed, but we must remind ourselves that the discomfiture of the press, though amusing, is trivia. This really is a matter of war and peace. Anyway, Hutton's media unworldliness extended to publishing its documentation (all the stuff anyone who felt themselves covered by the remit of the Inquiry had voluntarily submitted to it) at an ever-slipping hour last Saturday. Much to the angst of people putting together Sunday newspapers.
In consequence, every Sunday paper, to the varying standard their, uh, resources allowed, filleted as much of the 900 pages as they could before they had to go to bed, and each one tried to find some magic bullet, ideally fatal for the Government, but at pinch, especially on the Murdoch papers, anything damaging for the Beeb would do. All this naturally took place before Hutton's report, and in fact, before even the final round of witnesses have this week been taken (and that includes both Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon). The paper I was helping settled on, 'Blair knew Kelly was feeling under pressure and did nothing to help him', and this did for a front page. Others went as the mood took them. No one found anything terminal though for the Prime Minister, and nor will they. To see why that is, and why it was always going to be the case, and why convening this oddly inappropriate forum was always going to facilitate Tony Blair vaunting out of the mess Alistair Campbell had immediately created, and he himself had more fundamentally caused, we have only to look to the origin of the Inquiry.
Lord Hutton is being asked to 'urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly'. No more, no less. He doesn't have the power to compel witnesses to attend, those who do won't be subject to criminal sanction should they subsequently be proven to have fibbed through their teeth to him, and no one, government included, is legally obliged to provide full documentary disclosure, should they fall under the mysterious remit of the Inquiry. Self-evidently the terms of reference would better have been served by an investigation by a minister of the church, or to satisfy any secularist fanatics reading, a psychiatrist I suppose. Not a judge, sitting in a pretend court, considering ream upon ream of bureaucratic output concerning the formulation and advocacy of a war, and not of the unknowable mental and moral state of being of Dr David Kelly. Hutton is due to Kelly, but it is not about Kelly; and nor will its findings be treated as being him. That after all it what the poor man's inquest will be for in due course.
The Lord Chancellor sought out this esteemed law lord to inquire into the death of Dr Kelly because no other way was to hand to stop the crisis caused by Alistair Campbell from spinning out of control. This crisis started with Andrew Gilligan's infamous, single sourced report on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (morning talk radio, for those of you not familiar with it: I must say, I never listen), which, inter alia, claimed that it was being claimed that Alistair Campbell had personally 'sexed up' the Prime Minister's parliamentary dossier justifying the case for war against Iraq. Campbell, an entertaining and talented man, ten times the performer anyone in the parliamentary lobby is, went [word? word please!] mental [not totally sure that's the mot juste, but we'll go with it]: here then is the start of our crisis - Campbell did not have to react as he did, Blair did not have to let him react as he did. Now whether Campbell went nutso for tactical effect (he casually demolished one Marxoid telly hack in a captivating live appearance, which should have been but won't be an exemplary masterclass in how political actors should treat broadcast journalists ie with contempt), or was genuinely out of control is tangential. Here, in response to the debilitating BBC smear that the Government spun before it governed, and lied as easily as it breathed, is where the crisis began. And it started because, in point of fact (as Hutton and his documentation are going to demonstrate in excruciating detail) Campbell didn't technically do what Gilligan had allowed him to be accused of.
Here, therefore, is what I, moving over to historicist pomposity, think we can sensibly reconstruct as to being the thought-processes of Alistair Campbell during this critical period: Gilligan misspoke [we'll come back to that]; Campbell saw his opportunity; it was an opportunity he should have been cold-blooded enough to resist, but he didn't. Why was that? I shall explain: Campbell is already quitting Downing Street. This very fact is what gave him the freedom to over-react in the way that he did. Control and calculation went out the window in response to a chance to go out on a high, sticking one on the BBC and the high liberal-leftist critics of the Blairite project as he went. The end result is going to be that Alistair Campbell's departure from Downing Street is delayed until the forthcoming Hutton report finally serves to drain this issue of all immediate passion. In that sense, yet again Campbell's demob unhappy lack of judgement will have cost him (extra, unwanted time in Downing St - where the Prime Minister's wife, and her kooky friends, humiliate Campbell's wife on a daily basis) but, he will, as we shall see, get that uncertain pleasure of landing a sickner on Auntie.
It goes without saying that Campbell obviously did do his bit (he wasn't alone, and the tone came from the top) to pitch the case for war in the Jesuitical and logic-chopping manner we are wearily familiar with. But he didn't do what Andrew Gilligan accused him of having been accused of doing, right when he was supposed to have done it. That mistake is going to result (career-wise) in Andrew Gilligan's guts being spread all over the place. Which is good. Not because I wish my university coeval any personal harm, but because his epating will do its bit - which will not be enough in itself, so we all have to keep pushing - to smack the BBC out of its bad, relatively recent habit of trying to make rather than merely report news. The BBC is too powerful and too left wing to be allowed to do this.
Andrew Gilligan was brought to the Today programme by its former editor (former because he was sacked, after a fashion, for mistiming his boringly 'shocking' views about pro-hunting types in a newspaper column), Rod Liddle. Liddle, a third rate self-publicist, though by all accounts exceptionally able BBC fonctionnaire, managed, in the course of his self-serving defence of Gilligan and his shabby performance, to repeatedly and unintentionally knife him and his kind over and over again. The reason, he said, why he had brought Gilligan (from The Sunday Telegraph) on board was to generate the sort of stories Sunday papers ran. In other words, speculative, anticipatory, and above all else, manufactured to deadline. This is not what BBC broadcast news ought to have been doing. Today, already the worst and most self-opinionated aspect of the BBC's output has long been riding for the fall that Gilligan's error has set it up for. So what was his error? The world and its mother will, slyly or directly, write this up as having been to reply upon the late Dr Kelly, and his take on Campbell and the presentation of news (not exactly the good Doctor's area of expertise), but that just ain't so: what Gilligan did wrong was to belong to a culture of comment in a place where there should have been none. Had Gilligan run straight with what he had, rather than trying to be needlessly confrontational with the government he would not now be in the undoubtedly unhappy place he presently is.
David Kelly came to Andrew Gilligan, rather than the other way round: this, at least to begin with, is always the way with hacks and their most esteemed source. The motivations of the sources, whatever the news to hand, are as varied as the topics they know about; the functional interest of the hack is always and in every instance the same: to meet the deadline, to fill the page, to drive away the dead air. The media are always hungry, there are generally always enough sources to keep them well enough fed. This, to a substantial extent, is what Dr Kelly did, in between finding WMD, and other still more secret stuff. He was, in a suitably and usefully hands off fashion, licensed by his employers in the MoD in his enterprise.
Here then is where we find the downfall of Andrew Gilligan. It is as old as journalism, and it is of two equal parts: Dr Kelly, ambiguous as all experts are, told Gilligan what he wanted Gilligan to hear, Gilligan heard what it was useful to hear; then, Gilligan was allowed on this basis to opine on air just after six in the morning on an underheard radio station. Without wanting to put too fine a point on it: this is journalism everywhere. It's not so much that Gilligan was unlucky and got 'caught', it's more that for once, and unlike 99.9999% of all forms of media output everywhere, this actually mattered. As we have seen, the transformative factor, what made this matter, was the quixotic intervention of Alistair Campbell. To repeat: if Campbell hadn't played up the way he did, no one other than Gilligan, and probably not even him, would have remembered a solitary word of his report on Today. It wouldn't even have had the consolation of providing wrapping for fish n' chips. And David Kelly would, most probably, still be alive.
I say no one other than Gilligan would have remembered an untransmogrified by Campbell report, but that is not absolutely true: Kelly would have remembered, near word for word, for as a source, this would have been of compelling interest, in as much as any of his work mattered to him. And that brings us back to the class of men David Kelly can assuredly be taken as being entirely representative of: the secret people horrified, for reasons of tone as much as anything else, by the manner in which the Blairites used their public reputation - essentially one of deliberative efficiency - to justify as unavoidable a war in fact positively optional.
This stance may not be that of the majority of the British military, diplomatic and intelligence community, but it certainly has taken on enough of a critical mass for it to be unwise for the Prime Minister to ignore it. Moreover, as with all state bureaucracies - we can call this the Guthrie syndrome for want of a better term - the men able enough to hack their way to the top of the governmental service tree have the skills necessary to be agreeable to their temporary political masters. On paper, in emails, this is going to look an awful lot like they actually agree with them, on substantive matters of policy, when in fact all they are doing in what is required for the sound dispatch of government business. Hutton and his documentation are going to confuse a lot of people about the whys and wherefores of senior civil service behaviour: priestly as it might be to say this, there really is a case for historians being left many years later to read minutes and explain what apparently oleaginous bureaucrats were actually up to.
As to whether simply just Hutton so far shows eg a JIC incapable of adequately analysing and extrapolating intelligence streams, or whether the incoming intelligence is woefully, monumentally misshapen, is something we will have to wait even longer to discover and understand. Either way, the fact of John Scarlett having had ownership of the dossier does neither him nor his craft a great deal of credit. And should the fears of Muslim-fearing friends be anything other than baseless, our shield is not comforting to think on.
What Hutton Will Not Do
It is a deceit of our frighteningly shallow media to call for the head of the Defence Secretary because he over-ruled the senior MoD civil servant, and agreed that Kelly's name would have to be released to the press. The forgotten chronology of this is the very start of the present fuss: when Gilligan was challenged on the veracity of his claim, his source was sought, both by the Government, and by the rest of the press. When Kelly 'fessed up to his line manage, it was a development no one inside the political track can have meaningfully expected (certainly there was no assumption that any internal leak inquiry would produce a name), and Alistair Campbell least of all. It is possible indeed that the unfortunate man may not even be able to comprehend the notion of confession to a superior that one has leaked something to the press. But being in possession of this unwelcome knowledge, what on earth was Geoff Hoon to do? Had he denied or otherwise suppressed it, any subsequent discovery would have led to braying calls for his resignation (for the 'cover-up') from exactly the same poltroons who are presently demanding it for his releasing, when asked, poor Dr Kelly's name, and thereby adding to the pressure Kelly felt himself under. That, as we have discussed, a mighty part of the direct and upfront pressure Kelly surely felt himself to be under was precisely that exerted upon him by the press, is not something much of it seems as yet to have found subsequent space to regret. Perhaps when Hutton publishes his report, they will, but then again, perhaps not.
The good news for Labour that Hutton unwittingly encapsulates - and as I have said, it runs through the fascinating documentation - is how one central part of the new Labour project has been defeated. Tony Blair, rightly from his own point of view (if he has, that is, a point of view he believes in), wished on coming into power to transform the machinery of central government. He wished to make it much more responsive to the personal wishes of the Prime Minister (in, I contend, a witting or otherwise extension of 'mandate theory', which held that since the Prime Minister, as party leader, was really the source of his government's electoral mandate, he ought to have much more say in its direction than our parliamentary system seems to allow him), and accordingly less hedged in by Cabinetism (such an old theory) like, for example, the Cabinet Office. This manifested itself in the appointment, by orders in council, of Labour party flacks in Downing Street, who rather than being there to advise, were able to direct civil servants (something the civil service act rightly otherwise bans political advisors from doing). Campbell, Hunter, Powell, and Morgan all superintended the attempted Prime Ministerialisation of British government, and, one by one, they failed, and have either left, or are about to leave.
To take the obvious examples, when Campbell goes, and then Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell departs, neither man's hybrid job will be replaced. Their roles will fall with them, as legacies of the Blairite project's opposition mode. What the Hutton documentation inescapably shows is how Downing Street has been recaptured by, and for the traditional forms of the British civil service. This, after the disastrous final period of Blairism as a governing technique, will be greatly to the benefit of Tony Blair the politician, and his prolonged presence in Downing Street as a result is singularly to the electoral benefit of the Labour party, which could not hope to compete as well without him. Such is the perversity of politics.
What Hutton will hopefully do is to damage the BBC in a way that shocks, or more realistically, starts shocking it back into being what it should be: a public service broadcaster, and not a self-appointed public champion, defender of right, and scourge of the wrong. We have, in a parliamentary and capitalistic system, fully enough of those. The BBC in its arrogance takes on more and more the qualities of the unreformed church of English legend. Andrew Gilligan has done his little bit to trigger its necessary reformation. One final point is particularist in the extreme, and it is this: the BBC is also a bigger danger to both conservatism, and to the Conservative party than is the Labour government. If what we call 'Hutton' damages just the government, it will be a far lesser gain for Toryism than if it damages chiefly the BBC-as-is. Do that and you will fatally weaken both enemy propositions, attack merely Labour and the BBC will await the next Tory government as strong as ever.
-------- business
Halliburton and Bechtel win more deals
Reuters
August 29, 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/28/1062050603425.html
Halliburton and Bechtel Group, which have been working to rebuild Iraq after the US-led war, are expected to win more contracts, US newspapers have reported.
The Washington Post reported that Halliburton, the world's second-largest oil field service company, could make hundreds of millions more dollars than earlier disclosed for services such as maintaining Iraqi oil fields under a US Army Corps of Engineers contract, according to documents surveyed by the newspaper.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the US Agency for International Development had recently said that construction company Bechtel, based in San Francisco, would receive about $US350 million for infrastructure projects. That would amount to about 50 per cent more than earlier allocated for Bechtel services, the paper said.
Representatives at Halliburton and Bechtel were not available to comment.
The US General Accounting Office has told aides to US Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, that Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root was likely to earn "several hundred million more dollars" from the no-bid Corps of Engineers contract to rehabilitate oil fields, the Post said.
The paper also surveyed a spreadsheet provided by the Joint Munitions Command that gave detailed estimates of money obligated to Brown and Root.
Houston-based Halliburton was once headed by US Vice-President Dick Cheney.
-------- chemical weapons
ALABAMA - Army to burn cache of sarin
August 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030828-112127-2718r.htm
BIRMINGHAM - The Army said yesterday it will destroy about 800 gallons of sarin nerve agent at the Anniston Army Depot in the first bulk burn of the lethal chemical at its newest weapons incinerator.
Sometime Sunday afternoon, workers will begin pumping the agent from a double-walled, glass-lined holding tank into a 2,700-degree furnace at Anniston, about 50 miles east of Birmingham.
The chemical, also known as GB, was drained from the nearly 600 M-55 rockets that have been chopped up and burned since the incinerator began operating on Aug. 8. A single drop of sarin can kill a person.
Depot spokesman Mike Abrams said as many as 173 gallons of nerve agent residue already have been incinerated, but all in small amounts that couldn't be emptied from rockets.
-------- europe
The last to know
Venal eastern European governments are desperately trying to curry favour with the US in its 'war on terror' - but keeping their people in the dark,
Ian Traynor
Friday August 29, 2003
Zagreb Dispatch, UK Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1031838,00.html
When 10 governments in central and eastern Europe lined up behind Washington last February in support of the war in Iraq, the general publics from Lithuania to Albania were the last to know.
Leading politicians and diplomats across the region, indeed, found out about their governments' backing for war from American press reports.
Hardly surprising, given that the "Vilnius declaration" of the 10 states was penned not in eastern Europe, but in New York and Washington.
In Hungary this week, the same thing happened again. A New York Times report from Baghdad triggered apprehension and bafflement in Budapest with the news that some 28,000 Iraqi policemen were to be trained by the Americans at a Hungarian airbase.
The Americans used the same base, at Taszar in south-western Hungary, earlier this year for an experiment in training an exiled Iraqi militia to help in the war. Although the plan was to train 3,000 Iraqi exiles, no more than 200 had gone through the course when the plan was abruptly dropped. Again, the Hungarians were the last to know.
The police training plan may or may not suffer a similar fate, but for Karoly Szita it is all a case of déja vu. Mr Szita is the mayor of the town of Kaposvar next door to the Taszar base, so might be expected to have advance warning of the arrival of 28,000 Iraqis.
But no. He, too, learned of the bombshell from the Hungarian papers recounting the New York Times. It was "the same game" earlier in the year when "nobody knew anything", he complained to Budapest journalists. The exiles were said to be undergoing training as interpreters for the US forces, but were armed, in uniform, and being put through combat training.
If mayors, local authorities and general publics across the region are being kept in the dark about Iraq, America, and the "war on terror", the governments of central and south-eastern Europe are competing keenly for Washington's favours.
A US congressional delegation has just breezed through Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, eyeing military assets and bases that look likely to be turned over to the GIs vacating more than half a century of US garrisons in Germany.
The Pentagon is keen to take advantage of the military facilities and political welcome offered by the countries of central and south-eastern Europe where pro-American sentiment contrasts with the prevailing climate in France and Germany, where environmental complaints about military exercises are more easily ignored, and where public opinion is more passive than in western Europe.
Poland has proven a rare and keen ally in the Iraq campaign. Romania and Bulgaria made airports available to the Americans. The Pentagon is firming up plans to shift much of its west European military presence, mainly in Germany, to eastern Europe.
General Nikola Kolev, chief of the Bulgarian general staff, was on his best behaviour by stating that turning over Bulgarian bases to the Americans was a political issue to be decided not by the country's soldiers but by its politicians. But then he made his preferences plain.
The politicians should note, he told Bulgarian radio, that a welcome for the US deployments would mean tourist dollars and more jobs for Bulgarians.
The Romanians are at least as keen to attract the Americans and the dollars, the Poles are the biggest and strongest US allies in the region and next week take over a large sector of south-central Iraq despite being on the receiving end of sniper and mortar attacks this week. The Czechs are trying to build themselves a role as mediators between the estranged west Europeans and the Bush administration. And the Hungarians appear to be giving the Americans carte blanche to do whatever they want with the sprawling Taszar base.
The Americans have been using the Taszar base for years, during the campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo to the south of Hungary in the 1990s. Earlier this year in the run-up to the Iraq war the Americans spent 9m (£6m) dollars converting the former Warsaw pact airbase into "Camp Freedom" to train the Iraqi militia.
And while the Bulgarians, Romanians and Poles are hoping for contracts, tourists, and investment as the pay-off from the Americans, the Hungarians are depending on the Americans to exploit Taszar since otherwise it will be closed down under budget cuts and military reforms.
"The future of the Taszar base is up to the Americans. If there are no Americans, the base is over," said a senior government official in Budapest. "But Hungary is interested in the further use of Taszar since it's an excellent training facility."
While the Bush administration is increasingly desperate to spread the burden of policing and occupying Iraq and is trying to get other countries to contribute troops, the east Europeans are already there.
The Bulgarians have 500 men in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, the Poles take over the sector between the US and British forces next week, the Hungarians have sent 300 troops, the Czechs ditto.
"It is important for us to stay in Iraq," the Czech foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda, told the Pravo newspaper. "One must confront terrorism. No country today is considerably safer or less safe than another...To run away from this conflict only means to turn a blind eye to reality."
-------- iran
Preventing a Nuclear Iran Is a Delicate Task
Discovery of weapons- grade material adds momentum to effort. U.S. presses the U.N. to declare that Tehran has violated a treaty.
By Maggie Farley and Douglas Frantz
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
August 29, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran29aug29,1,6982728.story?coll=la-headlines-world
UNITED NATIONS - Following a report by the U.N.'s nuclear agency that particles of highly enriched uranium were found in Iran, diplomats are debating how to apply enough pressure to keep the country in line with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty without pushing so hard that Tehran rejects international oversight altogether.
"If there is a lesson learned from North Korea, it is that we have to stop these countries before they get the bomb," a United Nations official said Wednesday, as talks on denuclearizing North Korea were underway in Beijing. "But how do you stop a country from reaching that point?"
The United States is pushing for the International Atomic Energy Agency to declare Iran in noncompliance with its treaty agreements at the organization's 35-nation board meeting Sept. 8 - the first step toward possible sanctions.
The confidential U.N. report, which details new evidence of the presence of weapons-grade material at a nuclear facility in Iran and shows several reversals of position by officials there, has added momentum to the effort.
The European Union and others may now be convinced that there is a "pattern of noncompliance," a Western diplomat said. "We need to strengthen the IAEA's hand by reporting the pattern to the Security Council and pressing Iran to cooperate more fully."
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Thursday that his country was ready to start talks on an additional protocol to the treaty, allowing surprise inspections of any nuclear facility.
"We do not have enriched uranium, and we do not have a program to develop nuclear weapons," he told CNN during a trip to Japan to discuss oil field development.
Although U.S. and IAEA officials welcome the step, some worry that talks could drag on at a time when experts say Iran may be one to three years away from developing a nuclear weapon.
But if Iran does not prove to be immediately accommodating, the Security Council could impose tough economic and diplomatic sanctions, ban all nuclear assistance to Iran and even call for the return of all nuclear equipment received from other countries.
Many countries are still not convinced that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, diplomats say. Russia, China and about 10 developing nations on the IAEA board are focusing instead on parts of the report that note Iran has been more cooperative recently.
In the meantime, an analysis of another set of nuclear samples due to be completed in October may provide definitive proof of whether Iran has enriched uranium for military purposes.
Inspectors took the samples from Kalaye Electric Co. early this month, after Iran blocked their first attempt to visit the site in March. Inspectors noted major renovations at the facility, changes that officials suspect were an attempt to sanitize it before inspections.
Positive test results would show that Iran has enriched uranium or tested nuclear materials, both of which the government denies doing.
The results will be presented at the next board meeting of the IAEA in November.
"The central issue is: Has Iran enriched uranium in Iran?" said David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "The IAEA needs more time to determine that, but Iran really should provide that information themselves."
For the IAEA, the most important consideration right now is to keep Iran engaged so the agency can find the answers to urgent questions.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA director-general, has said privately that his first priority was to understand what Iran had been doing in recent years with its nuclear program, according to the Western diplomat. The additional treaty protocol will deal with future inspections, making it essential now to have a clear understanding of the Iranian program, he said.
"If they made some mistakes in reporting imports but are truly not trying to produce a nuclear weapon, the IAEA is the only one who can prove them innocent," a U.N. official said.
"The important thing is to pull them back from the nuclear threshold. If there is too much pressure, too many penalties, they may decide to withdraw from the treaty, and then there is no access at all."
Indeed, the IAEA's investigation has started the slow unraveling of Iran's story about its nuclear program.
"I count six reversals of position by Iran," said the Western diplomat. "This report is not a report of cooperation, but one that demonstrates the skill of the IAEA at getting to the facts. The only time Iran changed its position was when it was confronted by irrefutable evidence."
Iran claims that the traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium the inspectors found at the Natanz nuclear facility in central Iran came from contaminated components imported from another country. The IAEA has asked Tehran to identify the suppliers to check that claim, but Iran has refused.
The report also details Iran's pursuit of two other production techniques for nuclear material. Iran previously said it was not involved with heavy-water technology, which produces weapons-grade plutonium. But Iranian officials admitted that work on heavy-water technology had been underway for more than a decade.
In another reversal, Iranian authorities also acknowledged this month that scientists had used nuclear material to conduct research on uranium conversion after repeatedly telling the IAEA over the last seven months that it had never used nuclear material in research and development, the report says. The research was apparently aimed at developing uranium metal, which has not been known to be used in Iran's commercial nuclear program but is regarded as essential for building a nuclear weapon.
"Uranium metal is not something that would normally be needed for the type of reactor that Iran is building," the Western diplomat said. "It's normally associated with things that go boom."
The IAEA report does not link the new developments to any weapons effort, disappointing those pushing for an immediate halt to Iran's nuclear work. But it says investigations are still underway.
"We believe the report to be objective and contain all the facts," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in a phone interview from Vienna. "We are determined to have answers to the outstanding questions in the next few weeks or months."
Farley reported from the United Nations and Frantz from Istanbul, Turkey.
-------- iraq
U.S. puts Iraqis on borders to stem terrorist flow
August 29, 2003
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030828-112121-1452r.htm
The top U.S. commander in Iraq said yesterday that he now has thousands of Iraqi border guards in place to try to stop the influx of foreign terrorists aiding guerrillas faithful to Saddam Hussein.
"We now have 47,000 border guards that are in place and actually exercising control of Iraq's borders," Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said during a wide-ranging news conference in Baghdad.
He backed statements from his bosses, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid, the chief of Central Command, that the 130,000 troops in Iraq are sufficient to pacify the country.
"Putting more soldiers on the ground is not going to solve the problem when I don't have the intelligence to act on it," he said.
Gen. Sanchez said one of his main security challenges is to obtain more intelligence information from Iraqi informants for Army units to use.
More than 60 U.S. troops have been killed since May 1 by a varied resistance movement primarily made up of Saddam loyalists. To defeat them, Gen. Sanchez's soldiers have launched a series of pre-emptive raids, collaring hundreds of enemy fighters and seizing loads of weapons.
"This environment is an environment that requires intelligence and it requires the ability to move forces around the battlefield rapidly to counter those threats," he said. "When you look at the troop-to-task ratio and the missions that have been assigned to this command, it is clear to me that at this point in time, given the missions and given the tasks, it is not a function of additional soldiers."
Pentagon officials said last month that the killing of Saddam's two ruthless sons, Uday and Qusai, had emboldened more Iraqis to come forward with tips on the enemy's whereabouts. But, Gen. Sanchez said, the flow is not adequate.
"What we do need is the linkage to the Iraqi people," he said. "We need some Iraqi cooperation."
One growing problem is the number of Islamic terrorists entering the country to fight a jihad, or holy war, against the Americans. Military analysts say Iraq's border - a mix of mountain ranges, desert and wetlands - is virtually impossible to plug. They note that the United States cannot stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the American Southwest.
But Gen. Sanchez hopes Iraqi border guards can stem the flow.
"I think we clearly understood from the very beginning that the introduction of coalition forces into this environment would, in fact, engender some sort of terrorist activity," the three-star general said. "It has manifested itself and we're prepared.
"We need these Iraqi forces that we're working so hard to stand up right now in the form of the civil defense corps, in the form of police forces and the border control forces, to be able to establish the linkages to the Iraqi people that can then give us the intelligence that we need."
In recent weeks, top Bush administration officials have acknowledged failure to accurately predict the security picture in Iraq once Saddam was ousted.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said this week that the United States "underestimated" two factors: that Saddam's long hold on power had "instilled into the hearts and into the souls of the Iraqi people a greater degree of terror than we understood" and "the nature or the extent to which Iraq had become full of criminal enterprise."
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has said the war plan did not envision thousands of Saddam loyalists choosing to fight a guerrilla war against the occupation.
Gen. Sanchez spoke on another day of acts of violence against coalition troops.
An angry mob trapped a British convoy in the town of Ali as Sharqi. Lt. Cmdr. Richard Walters said the soldiers moved around the crowd, but were stopped by another group blocking the road, the Associated Press reported from Baghdad.
----
Burning money in Iraq
David Lazarus
Friday, August 29, 2003
San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/08/29/BU276805.DTL
A mid all the recall-related fretting over California's budget, it's been hard to keep up with the money mess at the federal level. Let's refresh ourselves.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office revised its estimates yet again this week and announced that the federal budget deficit will soar to a record $480 billion next year, reaching $1.4 trillion over the coming decade.
That alone is very bad news. Many economists, including Fed chief Alan Greenspan, have warned that chronic deficits of this magnitude can cause interest rates to rise and the economy to sputter.
But things are worse than the budget office lets on. These new estimates don't include the rising cost of the war in Iraq, which, if factored into the mix, would push the 2004 deficit well beyond $500 billion.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has estimated that the "burn rate" -- his words -- for our little exercise in Mideast nation-building is currently running $3.9 billion a month, or nearly $48 billion a year.
That's a highly conservative figure. It doesn't include the cost of replacing damaged vehicles and equipment, or the cost of munitions used in daily skirmishes. Some experts say the annual war cost is actually closer to $60 billion.
Just for the sake of argument, though, let's take Rumsfeld at his word.
At $3.9 billion a month, that means the nation's 105 million households are each ponying up $37 every four weeks to cover the cost of the war.
That doesn't sound so bad, does it? OK, let's look at this another way.
The average middle school teacher in the United States earns $43,570 a year,
according to the Department of Labor. If all households coughed up an extra $37 a month, we could have 1.1 million more teachers.
Or we could have:
-- 1.3 million more firefighters.
-- 1.2 million more police officers.
-- 995,000 more registered nurses.
-- 2.8 million more child care workers.
But we don't pay more for such things because most Americans believe they're taxed heavily enough already. We aren't being asked to pay an additional war-in-Iraq tax for just that reason.
Instead, we expect the government to do the best it can with what we give it.
That's the idea, anyway.
The Bush administration, which has cut taxes three times in the past three years, is determined to spend whatever it deems necessary in the "war on terrorism" even as it systematically slashes the government's revenue.
"In the last two and half years, this nation has acted decisively to confront great challenges," President Bush said the other day while raising money for his re-election. "I came to the office of president of the United States to solve problems, instead of passing them on to future presidents and future generations."
He was referring to problems like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, wherever they are. Bush apparently doesn't see a budget deficit lasting until at least 2012 as a problem for future presidents and future generations.
Moreover, he seems blissfully unaware that if his tax cuts are made permanent -- a goal he has sworn to achieve -- the cumulative deficit over the next decade will balloon to almost $3 trillion.
The $400 billion Congress plans to spend overhauling Medicare over the same period would push the total even higher.
"It's like living off your credit card," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization advocating fiscal responsibility. "Eventually, taxes will have to go up to pay the bill."
He added: "Things aren't going to get any better as we go on. The retirement of the Baby Boomers is looming right at the end of the next 10 years."
Indeed, and current projections don't begin to estimate the strain on federal coffers as 77 million Boomers start cashing in on Social Security and Medicare benefits.
I've noted before that the next five years represent our best chance to get the nation's finances in order. Until 2008, Baby Boomers will be at their peak earning power. They'll never be pulling down more money on an aggregate basis than right now.
Yet the Bush administration is determined to forgo as much of that money as it can, thus missing a golden opportunity to prepare for the coming fiscal storm.
At the same time, though, the White House is spending like a sailor on shore leave. Paul Bremer, the administration's man in occupied Iraq, was asked in a recent interview how much it will cost to rebuild the country.
"It's probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion," he answered. Then, as if that didn't sound wishy-washy enough, he added, "It's a lot of money."
Bremer flew back to Washington this week to ask the White House for a few billion more to tide him over until a larger budget bill can be introduced this fall.
For his part, Bush said he'd help out by cutting annual raises for more than 1 million federal employees -- a move that will free up billions for Iraq but impact the spending power of Americans on the home front.
We could have more teachers, or firefighters, or police officers or nurses. Instead we have an open-ended commitment to policing and reconstructing a Mideast nation that may or may not have posed a threat down the road.
And we'll put off paying the cost for many years, leaving a mountain of debt and obligations for our children to somehow tackle -- the president's self-congratulatory remarks notwithstanding.
Kind of makes California's troubles seem quaint by comparison.
----
Shiite Cleric Is Reported Killed in Mosque Explosion
August 29, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Mosque-Bombing.html
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -- A massive car bomb exploded at the Imam Ali mosque during Friday prayers in this holy city, killing one of Iraq's most important Shiite clerics and at least three other people, witnesses said.
Al-Jazeera television said more people than 20 died. Dozens were injured in the blast, which dug a crater about 3.5 feet deep in the street in front of the mosque and destroyed nearby shops, where people pulled the dead and injured from the rubble.
Among the dead was Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim moments, who had just delivered a sermon calling for Iraqi unity at the shrine, the holiest in Iraq.
Shiites in Iraq are embroiled in a generational power struggle, but there was no evidence the bombing was the work of the younger Shiite faction, which has its strongest support in Baghdad's Sadr City slum.
Even so, both the al-Hakim supporters and a prominent figure in the U.S.-backed government blamed Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Also on Friday, attackers fired rocket-propelled grenades at two U.S. convoys in separate ambushes, killing one American soldier and wounding six, the U.S. military said.
Murthada Saeed al-Hakim, al-Hakim's nephew who spoke to the family in Najaf, told The Associated Press the cleric had been killed.
"I saw al-Hakim walk out of the shrine after his sermon and moments later, there was a massive explosion. There were many dead bodies," said Abdul Amir Jassem, a 40-year-old merchant who was in the mosque and said the cleric had prayed for Iraqi unity.
Ayatollah al-Hakim was the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and had divided his time since the end of the war between Tehran and Najaf, the holiest Shiite Muslim city in Iraq.
Mohsen Hakim, another of the cleric's nephews and a spokesman for the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, said in Tehran that Saddam loyalists were the prime suspects behind the killing, and he called on the U.S. occupation forces to identify the murderers.
Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and a Governing Council member, blamed U.S. forces for not keeping the region secure. Speaking on Al-Jazeera, also said Saddam supporters were behind it, saying they were trying to create sectarian discord in the country.
No coalition troops were in the area of the mosque out of respect for the holy site, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jim Cassella said in Washington.
The top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, denounced the bombing, saying it demonstrated that "the enemies of the new Iraq will stop at nothing."
"Again, they have killed innocent Iraqis. Again, they have violated one of Islam's most sacred places. Again, by their heinous action, they have shown the evil face of terrorism," Bremer said in a statement.
There has been considerable unrest among the religious factions in Najaf.
The al-Hakims are one of the most influential families in the Iraq's Shiite community. The ayatollah's brother, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, is a member of the Governing Council and was leader of the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headquartered in Iran before the war.
Younger Shiites have been fighting for power with the more traditional Shiite Muslims in the city and region, trying to grab control from the al-Hakim family.
Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, who is not yet 30, and his young followers have sought tirelessly to replace more traditional factions as the voice of Iraq's Shiite majority, portraying themselves as the ones doing the most to redress decades of suppression by Sunni Muslims under the Saddam's rule.
"The killing appears to have sought to deny Shiite Muslims an effective role in Iraq's future at a time when Iraq is gradually preparing for elections," said Iranian political analyst Morad Veisi in Tehran.
He said the killers sought to sow seeds of discord between Shiite and Sunni Muslims and showed the United States is "incapable of providing adequate security in Iraq."
The blast occurred a week after a bomb exploded at the house of another of Iraqi's most important Shiite clerics, killing three guards and injuring 10 others, including family members. The gas cylinder was placed along the outside wall of the home of Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim in Najaf. It exploded just after noon prayers Aug. 24.
Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim is related to the ayatollah who was killed Friday.
A day after Saddam's ouster, a mob in Najaf hacked to death a Shiite cleric who had returned from exile. Abdul Majid al-Khoei was killed when a meeting called to reconcile rival Shiite groups erupted into a melee.
Shiites make up some 60 percent of Iraq's 24 million people.
In the attack on the U.S. troops, insurgents fired three rocket-propelled grenades at a supply convoy on a main road northeast of Baqouba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, said Capt. Jay Miller from the 67th Armor Regiment's 3rd Battalion.v The soldiers were also hit by small arms fire. One of the wounded soldiers would have to have a leg amputated, said Capt. David Nelson from the 4th Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade.
The death raised the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq to 282. Of those, 67 have died in combat since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Another U.S. Army convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade near a mosque in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, said Spc. Margo Doers, a spokeswoman at coalition command in Baghdad. She said two were wounded in the attack, according to early reports.
At the United Nations, key Security Council members said U.S. talk of relinquishing some military authority in Iraq was a first step in trying to deal with the postwar turmoil. But they said a real solution will require more power for Iraqis and the United Nations.
The Bush administration is sounding out nations on a possible new U.N. resolution that would transform the U.S.-led force in Iraq into a multinational force authorized by the United Nations with an American commander.
The United States is trying to assess whether the proposal -- which was floated last week by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- would prompt more countries to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq to relieve some of the 138,000 U.S. troops.
The 4th Infantry Division troops carried out three raids across north central Iraq over a 24-hour period and detained 25 people, two of whom were targeted as Saddam loyalists suspected of planning attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces, said Lt. Col. William MacDonald, spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.
--------
Blast in Iraq Kills a Leading Shiite Cleric
August 29, 2003
New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR with KIRK SEMPLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/worldspecial/29CND-IRAQ.html?hp
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 29 - A top Shiite leader and at least 14 other people were killed today in a huge car bomb explosion outside a mosque in this Shiite holy city soon after Friday prayers.
The explosion occurred moments after the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, had left the site, which houses the tomb of Imam Ali and is considered the holiest shrine in Shiite Islam. Witnesses at the scene indicated the casualty toll could be far larger. But beyond the scale of human losses, the blast was particularly significant because of who its target apparently was.
Ayatollah al-Hakim was an important Shiite ally of the American occupying force and his death will likely undermine the coalition's efforts to build stability in Iraq.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing.
American officials, speaking about previous violence in Najaf, have said that attacks that harm Shiites are probably the work of other Shiites, while attacks aimed directly at the coalition forces or intended to foment anger toward the coalition are probably the work of Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein.
Ahmed Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, subscribed to the second theory today, blaming the attack on remnants of the Hussein regime trying to sow sectarian discord in Iraq. "It's Saddam's people," he said during a televised interview with CNN.
But Najaf, about 110 miles southwest of Baghdad, has been the stage for a violent power struggle between Shiite clerics vying for the leadership of Iraq's Shiite Muslims, who account for 60 percent of the country's population of about 25 million.
The battle pits the older, established ayatollahs against a younger, more militant faction. The older ayatollahs, including Ayatollah al-Hakim, have been counseling patience with the occupation, while the younger faction wants to found an Islamic state.
The militants are suspected of carrying out a series of attacks, including one last weekend, engineered to eliminate or at least unsettle Najaf's religious scholars just as Shiites feel their moment has come.
The bloodshed started in April with the killing of a prominent young cleric in Najaf, Abdel Majid al-Khoei.
A week ago, a bomb exploded outside the house of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim, another of Iraqi's most important Shiite clerics, killing 3 guards and injuring 10 other people. Muhammad Said al-Hakim is a relative of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, who was killed today.
Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim was the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and had divided his time since the end of the war between Tehran and Najaf.
The top American civil administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, called the attack "a heinous action" and said it showed "again that the enemies of the new Iraq will stop at nothing.
"Again they have killed innocent Iraqis," he said. "Again they have violated one of Islam's most sacred places."
A spokeswoman for the coalition forces said no coalition troops were in the area at the time of the explosion.
According to shopkeepers near the site of the blast today, the bomb was placed in a sport utility vehicle that a lone attacker drove the wrong way down a one-way street and parked next to the motorcade of Ayatollah al-Hakim. The driver got out of the car and fled into the crowd, shopkeepers said. Moments later, witnesses said, the car blew up, creating a huge crater in the street, breaking the geometric, turquoise-colored tiles that adorned the holy site, collapsing a building in front of the shrine, and shattering windows up to 200 yards away.
Witnesses said they counted at least 15 bodies in the street. The director of the city's teaching hospital told Reuters that at least 75 people had been killed and more than 140 had been wounded.
Thousands of worshipers fled the site in panic, afraid there was going to be another explosion. People were weeping in the street.
"We didn't know what happened," said Ali al-Azgar Zuen, the owner of a textile shop about 50 yards from the crater. "Everything in the store turned upside down. Pieces of the car and dead bodies hit the front of our building. More than six cars caught on fire. There's a big fire. Some people got caught in that and were burned."
Mr. Zuen added: "Everybody in the town is afraid now. It's gotten to be something strange."
In violence elsewhere in Iraq today, an American soldier was reported killed and at least five others were wounded in two separate attacks on American troops.
In the deadly attack, one Fourth Infantry Division soldier was killed and three others were wounded when their convoy was hit by rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire near Suaydat, the American military reported.
Two other American soldiers were injured when their Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade near a mosque in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, said Spec. Margo Doers, a spokeswoman at coalition command in Baghdad.
At least 65 American troops have now died from hostile actions since President Bush declared the end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1.
--------
Copter Blamed For Dislodging Shiite Banner
Army Drops Denials About Event That Led to Violence
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61533-2003Aug28.html
BAGHDAD, Aug. 28 -- The commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq said today that an American helicopter crew intentionally dislodged a Shiite Muslim banner from a tower in the capital's Sadr City district two weeks ago, an incident that sparked violent protests in which U.S. troops killed an Iraqi boy.
In an abrupt reversal of denials issued at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said that as a result of a U.S. military investigation, "I think the aircraft was getting close enough to that tower in order to blow the flag down."
Sanchez did not say why the helicopter crewmen might have wanted to knock down the black banner, which was inscribed in white letters with the name of one of Shiite Islam's most revered figures. He said that the soldiers faced punishment and that results of the investigation could be released as early as next week.
Sanchez also told reporters that establishing security in Iraq depended not on bringing more ground troops into the country but on gathering better intelligence and training more Iraqis in civil defense. As the Bush administration explores the possibility of a multinational military force under U.N. sponsorship, he said, "we'd welcome anyone who wants to come."
Meanwhile, attacks on U.S. and British forces continued.
In Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad, four American soldiers were injured by an explosive planted under a bridge, the Reuters news agency reported. When U.S. forces sealed off part of the town after the attack, hundreds of residents took to the streets, chanting slogans that praised former president Saddam Hussein and denounced President Bush.
In southern Iraq, British military officials said a soldier died after coming under fire on Wednesday in Basra.
The Aug. 13 flag incident angered religious leaders in Sadr City, who contended that the American crew had defiled a religious symbol.
At the time, the U.S. military dismissed the idea that the flag was removed deliberately and said gusts from the low-flying helicopter had knocked it down accidentally. Although the military immediately issued an apology and promised to reduce its presence in Sadr City, any suggestion that the act was intentional was "totally bogus, totally untrue," Staff Sgt. J.J. Johnson, a military spokesman, said then.
Today, however, Sanchez said the military investigation revealed that "some of my soldiers in fact exercised poor judgment in this matter."
"The poor judgment that was exercised was twofold," Sanchez said. "One was in the . . . aircraft's proximity to the tower. There were some unsafe acts that occurred there. And the second one was in the leadership judgment that was being exercised by soldiers on that aircraft."
Sadr City residents said tonight that they felt vindicated by the admission. "Yes, I know they did it deliberately, for sure," said Ayad Abdul Kadhem, 34, an unemployed army veteran. "They wanted to attack Shia and all of Islam."
Sheik Hadi Darraji, 32, a leading neighborhood cleric, said he had seen fewer U.S. forces since the episode. When he learned that Sanchez had said the flag was dislodged intentionally, Darraji renewed his call for U.S. forces to withdraw completely from Sadr City "before we fight them and force them to leave."
Concerning security in Iraq, Sanchez said the number of ground troops in Iraq was adequate for the task. More important, he said, is the intelligence gathered about the enemies they face. "Putting more soldiers on the ground is not going to solve the problem when I don't have the intelligence to act on it," Sanchez said.
Because occupation forces rely heavily on local sources for their information, he said, it is critical to work with Iraqis "and have the Iraqi people help us."
----
Iraq strategy
August 29, 2003
Washington Times
Inside The Ring
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030828-112113-3830r.htm
Commenting on the current insurgency in Iraq is Robert Andrews, a former Green Beret and Vietnam War veteran who until recently served as a special-operations policy-maker in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
He tells us it was Napoleon's older brother, Joseph, who, while installed as king of Spain, faced local insurgents in a struggle that produced the term "guerrilla warfare."
"Joseph wrote his brother to say that 'One can do everything with bayonets except sit on them,' " Mr. Andrews said.
"The more I see - from a distance - about Iraq, I'm convinced that more bayonets [and] conventional troops isn't the answer," Mr. Andrews said.
"Indeed, adding conventional troops could result in more targets for an increasingly restive Iraqi population."
Mr. Andrews says one solution would be to use special-operations commandos and intelligence assets to work within the Iraqi population to conduct counterterror operations.
At the same time, the United States could reduce conventional force levels.
"The conventional forces we do keep in the country would be stationed away from the population and organized into highly mobile, instant-response strike units," he said.
----
Commentary: Iraqi history is back
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
8/29/2003
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030829-041655-8925r
WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 (UPI) -- The devastating bomb attack that took the lives of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and at least 74 other people at the Ali Imam mosque in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday grimly confirmed warnings and themes we have been sounding over the past year in UPI Analysis columns. First and foremost, it teaches that Iraq history is back.
The Pentagon civilian hawks and their neo-conservative media allies who preached the necessity for toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and building a shining monument to American democracy never referred much to Iraqi history and they seem to have known little or any of it, which is not surprising, as few of them had ever visited Iraq.
The general impression one got from their writings, and from the pronouncements of President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the other masterminds of the war was that Iraq, the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, had indeed been one, and that that state of innocence had endured until Saddam and his allies seized power to establish the Second Baath Republic in 1968 or, at least until the pro-Western monarchy with its trappings of parliamentary democracy was destroyed in the bloody coup of 1958.
But that was not the case.
The history of Iraq before the 35-year-long night of the Baath Republic descended upon it should have provided ample warning that once the lid was lifted off, those long decades of repression, more years of terrorism, assassination and massacre were only too likely to follow. For they were what had gone before.
Kanaan Makiya -- today one of the leading figures in the Iraqi democratic opposition and over the past decade and a half, one of the most fearless and perceptive critics of Saddam's tyranny -- summed up the history of Iraq's last decade of political turmoil before Saddam and his colleagues of the Baath took power -- and kept it -- in 1968.
Writing in his classic study "The Republic of Fear," he recalled, "Between 1958 and 1968 there were more than 10 coups and attempted coups two armed rebellions and a semicontinuous civil war against the Kurds."
The 37 years of supposedly constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy which the British Empire created in 1921 until its destruction in the frightful military coup and killings of 1958 was hardly a model of democratic and political propriety either. The late Professor Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics, the greatest Western authority of his day on the modern political history of Iraq, described it up this way:
"Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine and, however pitiful its end, we may now say this was implicit in its beginning."
In 1933, right after Britain granted Iraq titular independence, the Iraqi army under Gen. Bakr Sidqi launched a massive pogrom against the Assyrian community in northern Iraq, slaughtering many thousands of them. So frightful were the killings that there was a serious move in the League of Nations to try and rescind full Iraqi independence, but it was blocked by Iraq's British protectors.
Three years later, on Oct. 29, 1936, the first military coup in the Arab world took place in Iraq when Gen. Sidqi overthrew the government of the day. In June 1941, British forces in Iraq who had just foiled another coup planned to bring Iraq over to the Nazi-Axis side in World War II stood back passively while forces led by frustrated young Iraqi army officers killed hundreds of Iraqi Jews and despoiled their community.
Repeated local Arab tribal rebellions were crushed by the British-supported regimes during this period with the utmost severity. Discussing the crushing of the 1936 Rumaitha revolt, Kedourie wrote, "The killing, it seems, was indiscriminate, and old men, women and children were the victims of machine-gunning and bombing from the air."
This, it should be noted, was a year before the Nazi Condor Legion bombed the Spanish Republican-held city of Guernica, indiscriminately, arousing shock and outrage throughout the world.
The British, it should be remembered, ruled Iraq directly for 15 years from their military conquest in 1918 to 1933. And they remained the real power in the country behind a succession of puppet governments -- the most long-lasting of them led by Nuri e-Said -- for the next quarter of a century until 1958. It was an era when the technology did not yet exist to threaten the homeland of a world-spanning empire with weapons of mass destruction. But in all that time, the British failed dismally in their sincere efforts to bring political stability and Western institutions of government, law and freedom to Iraq.
Although Britain came to Iraq as its military conqueror in 1918 with a 300-year long record of imperial conquest and colonial administration unequalled by any other power in modern history, it failed to successfully transplant any of the institutions of freedom and Western democracy there, even though it tried hard to do so for 40 years. And almost as soon as they entered the country, the British faced a ferocious popular uprising of Sunnis and Shiite alike, though dominated by Sunnis, which it mercilessly crushed at the cost of thousands of dead.
The end of empire was as bloody as its beginning. The Royal family were first massacred by mutinous troops wildly firing their automatic weapons, then their bodies were mutilated. Nuri e-Said, seeking to flee disguised as a woman was recognized in a street crowd and instantly torn limb from limb. The remains of his body were then repeatedly driven over by a small family car until it had been reduced to the consistency of porridge.
Friday's frightful bombing in Najaf, coming so soon as it does after the destruction of the U.N. compound in Baghdad and the murder of the chief U.N. envoy within it, serves notice that the bullet, the knife and the bomb are reigning again in Baghdad, just as they did during all those four long decades of supposedly enlightened British rule. U.S. policymakers should cease laboring under the delusion that they are about to change it.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Kills Hamas Militant in Gaza
Reuters
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61922-2003Aug28.html
GAZA CITY, Aug. 28 -- Israel killed a senior Hamas militant with a helicopter missile strike on a donkey cart he was riding today after his radical Islamic group fired a rocket into a large Israeli city for the first time.
Palestinian medics identified the militant as Hamdi Kalakh, the eighth member of Hamas to be killed by Israeli helicopter missiles in the past week. Three Palestinians were wounded, including a 4-year-old boy who was in critical condition, the medics said.
An Israeli army spokesman said Kalakh was killed as he was preparing to fire mortar shells into Gush Khatif, a Jewish settlement near the Palestinian city of Khan Younis.
The Kassam rocket fired by Hamas crashed into an industrial zone in Ashkelon, an Israeli seaside city of 116,000 people six miles north of Gaza's boundary. The rocket caused no casualties or damage. The strike was the farthest a Kassam had been fired into Israel since the Palestinian uprising against Israel began in September 2000.
In an initial response, five Israeli tanks, three troop carriers and two bulldozers swept into the town of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza and leveled foliage used as cover by the men who launched the rocket.
----
Sharon: U.S. needs to put financial pressure on PA
29/08/2003
By Aluf Benn,
Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/334451.html
The United States should pressure the Palestinians financially in order to make the Palestinian Authority dismantle terror infrastructure, Israel Radio on Friday quoted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying.
Sharon, talking to Republican congressmen Thursday night, said that the U.S. should also pressure Syria to stop transferring aid to terrorists. He added that Europe needs to declare Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terror organizations in order to stop the flow of funds to these groups.
U.S. wants Israeli gestures to PA, says targeting of Hamas can go on The U.S. is pressing Israel to make "positive" gestures toward the Palestinians along with the military measures it is taking against terrorism.
In a message to Jerusalem from high-ranking administration officials, the Americans said that Israel need not desist from its policy of assassinating terror operatives, but it should also take steps that prove Israel's good intentions toward the Palestinians.
The administration is now focused on restoring the status quo that existed before the Jerusalem bus massacre last week and applying pressure on Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to take steps against the terror organizations.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met Thursday with Republican congressmen, to whom he praised U.S. road map inspector John Wolf and Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer.
Sharon said that they have difficult jobs but deserve all the support they can get, because American monitoring of the road map is the only way it will be implemented.
The prime minister called for ongoing, uncompromising pressure on the Palestinian Authority, particularly in the economic sphere, to persuade it to act against terror.
"I am committed to the road map and want to proceed, but unless the Palestinians meet their obligations - a war on terror and the dismantling of the terror infrastructure - it is impossible to make progress," he said.
He also said that unless the Palestinians give up the right of return and recognize that the Jewish people have a right to a Jewish state, it will be impossible to achieve a solution.
The administration does not intend to send any senior officials to the region to calm the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. But Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who is planning a swing through the Middle East in the second half of September, will probably visit Israel.
----
Effort to Diminish Arafat Is Said to Strengthen Him
August 29, 2003
New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/middleeast/29MIDE.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug. 28 - When the United States pushed Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to appoint a prime minister three months ago, American and Israeli officials hoped that Mr. Arafat would recede from the scene, profile diminished and power diluted.
But by making that wish so clear, those officials may have accomplished just the opposite. Recent events have shown that Mr. Arafat remains at the center of Palestinian politics and the efforts to banish him may be a major reason.
"They just decided to say that he was irrelevant and that they were going to ignore him," said Qadoura Fares, a Palestinian legislator.
He was among a group of legislators who pressed Mr. Arafat to share power with the prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen. But, Mr. Fares said, "One reason that Yasir Arafat has remained and re-emerged as so strong is because the Americans and the Israelis were talking and acting like Abu Mazen was perfect and Arafat was all mad."
"This moved people closer to Arafat," he said today.
Just how much closer is impossible to gauge right now. But it has become clear in the past week and a half that Mr. Arafat feels emboldened and that he has reason to.
His re-emergence presents a serious problem for Israeli and American officials. While both have declined to negotiate with him and have cast him an impediment to an American-backed peace process known as the road map, they may not be able to navigate around him.
Some of those officials seem to know that. Israeli officials have recently talked about deporting Mr. Arafat to get him out of the way.
But last week, when militant Palestinian groups declared an end to a seven-week cease-fire and threw the road map into uncertainty, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appealed to Mr. Arafat for help.
This week, as Mr. Arafat and Mr. Abbas plunged deeper into a bitter power struggle, Palestinian politicians and political analysts said that Mr. Arafat was the one with the upper hand. "Abbas was superimposed on Palestinian society, and Arafat has always been a good chess player," said Hisham Ahmed, a political science professor at Bir Zeit University. "I would not rule out that he expected this kind of scenario."
Mr. Arafat certainly seems determined to wield influence. On Monday, he appointed a new national security adviser, a reminder that he controls the majority of Palestinian security forces. It was also a signal that he would not accede to international demands to give that authority to Mr. Abbas.
On Wednesday, he called on militant groups to reinstate the cease-fire, stepping into a situation that Mr. Abbas was trying to handle.
While Mr. Abbas was appointed - by Mr. Arafat - Mr. Arafat was elected, and his status in Palestinian society is iconic.
Although he remains trapped in his ruined compound here, his face smiles from posters on buildings and from framed pictures inside offices throughout the West Bank.
The road map requires a consolidation of security forces under one authority, which would theoretically help Palestinians dismantle militant groups. Mr. Fares, a member of Mr. Arafat's Fatah party, described a plan in the works that would preserve Mr. Arafat's voice on security matters. He and another legislator with Fatah, to which Mr. Abbas also belongs, said that party members would propose the formation of a seven-person national security council, with Mr. Arafat at its head and Mr. Abbas beside him. The council would decide security policy.
Israeli officials say Palestinian leaders have been slow to crack down on militant groups, and the Israeli military has taken matters into its own hands. In the Gaza Strip tonight, an Israeli air strike killed a 35-year-old man whom witnesses identified as a Hamas militant. Israeli military officials said he was preparing to fire mortar shells at a nearby Jewish settlement in Gaza.
Earlier today, militants in Gaza fired several Qassam rockets toward Israel; one landed in the city of Ashkelon, about five miles north of the Gaza boundary. No injuries were reported, but it was the farthest a rocket had been fired into Israel since the latest conflict between Palestinians and Israelis began almost three years ago.
Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers then entered Gaza to destroy tress and shrubbery that the militants were using for cover. Israeli military officials said that the number of mortars and rockets fired by militants in Gaza had greatly increased in the past week.
In another development, Palestinian leaders followed through today on a pledge made this week to freeze bank accounts of charities linked to the militant group Hamas. Hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets in Gaza in protest.
The volatile state of events has unsettled the Palestinian leadership and given Mr. Arafat a new opportunity to assert himself.
Asked today if Mr. Arafat had always planned to do that, Muhammad Horani, a Fatah legislator, said, "I will answer the question this way: Arafat will always work to say, `I am here. I exist.' "
-------- japan
Japan Moves to Ward Off Potential North Korean Threats
August 29, 2003
New York Times
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/asia/29CND-JAPAN.html
TOKYO, Aug. 29 - Hours after North Korea reportedly threatened to test a nuclear bomb, Japan's Defense Ministry asked lawmakers here to spend $1 billion a year through 2007 to build an American-designed missile-defense shield to defend the main cities of the Japanese archipelago.
Under the plan, elaborated and accelerated in recent weeks, Japan would spend $1.2 billion next year, nearly 10 times the amount spent on missile defense in the last five years.
"Given recent behavior, we cannot discount the possibility that North Korea's nuclear weapons program is already quite advanced," the Defense Ministry wrote in a paper that was prepared before the reports from talks in Beijing on Thursday that North Korean delegates had threatened to test a nuclear bomb.
Noting that North Korea has 600 to 750 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Japan, the document continued, "We must monitor the military standoff on the Korean Peninsula and the development, deployment and spread of ballistic missiles."
In a two-tier shield, Japan would deploy SM-3 missiles that would be launched from its four Aegis guided-missile destroyers, ships that could be stationed in a picket line close to North Korea's shore. As back-ups, batteries of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles would be stationed on land.
"This is Japan's revolution in military affairs," Lance Gatling, an American aerospace consultant here, said in an interview about the spending plan. "Guess what? The Russians are not going to invade. So the Japanese are spending less money on defending against a massive, conventional invasion and are going to spend more money on missile defense and intelligence."
With the new defense blueprint, Japan, the world's fourth-biggest military spender after the United States, Russia and China, is realigning parts of its $42 billion budget to parry what it perceives as the new threat from North Korea.
"There has been a sea change, a dramatic turnaround," exulted Hideaki Kase, a conservative author. "Finally, we are taking North Korea seriously as a threat for the first time."
To track down, capture and analyze spy boats, the Japan Coast Guard is to get $85 million. Nearly two years ago, the Coast Guard sank a North Korean spy boat that appeared to be returning from a drug run to Japan. Salvaged from the bottom of the East China Sea, the vessel is on display at a maritime museum near Tokyo, drawing as many as 7,000 visitors on weekends.
To deal with guerrilla attacks, Japan's military is seeking $240 million. North Korea has 100,000 special operations forces, considered to be the largest such unit in the world.
"Japanese people are very nervous about security of their 53 nuclear power plants," explained Toshiyuki Shikata, the retired commander of Japan's Northern Army, based in Hokkaido. "They fear North Korean units would try to infiltrate Japanese territory to sabotage nuclear power plants on the Japan Sea."
To give further mobility to Japanese troops, formally called the Self-Defense Forces, the military this year wants to buy a converted 13,500-ton destroyer, which would be the largest ship in Japan's Navy since World War II. The $1 billion ship would carry 11 helicopters. Aware that Japan's Constitution forbids Japan from possessing offensive weapons, Defense Ministry officials emphasized in a briefing to reporters that the deck would not be strong enough to hold vertical-takeoff attack jets, like the Harrier.
Finally, the military's wish list, which is expected to be approved by Japan's Parliament, includes $1 billion for a global positioning system "smart" bomb-guidance system and $220 million for a Boeing-767 aerial refueling tanker. Currently, Japan's F-15's carry 1950's-era "dumb" bombs, and the jets do not have the fuel range to strike North Korean missile launching sites and return to Japan.
Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba has said that Japan will not stand idly by if, during a time of crisis, North Korea starts fueling and arming its missiles.
Mr. Kase, the conservative writer, said, "The F-15 pilots I have talked to said that after delivering the strike, they would ditch in the midst of the Sea of Japan and have to be rescued."
Referring to the suicide tactics of the last, desperate year of World War II, he added, "Some said that after dropping their bombs, they crash into the launch sites, following in the steps of the kamikaze pilots."
-------- latin america
Peru Panel Details Toll Of Violent 2 Decades
Over 69,000 Perished; Rebels, Military Blamed
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61912-2003Aug28.html
LIMA, Peru, Aug. 28 -- A civilian commission examining Peru's political violence has concluded that more than 69,000 Peruvians died or disappeared from 1980 to 2000, a period of barbarous civil war and authoritarian government that the investigators labeled "a time of national shame."
In a nine-volume document drawing on two years of testimony and investigation, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported today that most of the killings of civilians were committed by the Shining Path, a radical Maoist insurgency that ravaged the countryside during the mid-1990s in its war against the Peruvian state.
But the report was equally critical of Peru's aloof political class and its armed services, attributing just under half the atrocities committed over that time to the security forces and renewing a bitter debate over who bears responsibility for the war. Three of every four victims of the violence during that period -- in massacres, kidnappings and assassinations -- were Peruvians whose native language was Quechua or another indigenous tongue.
Salomon Lerner, president of the 12-member commission, said Peru's security forces employed a "systematic or generalized practice of human rights violations" that could support charges of crimes against humanity.
"Today is Peru's moment to confront a time of national shame," Lerner told a hushed audience at the National Palace during a ceremony marking the report's official release. "This report exposes a double scandal -- the killings, disappearances and torture on a huge scale, and the indolence, ineptitude and indifference by those able to intervene in this human catastrophe and who did not."
The report is an attempt to reconcile Peruvians with their brutal past by offering an official acknowledgment of what transpired and why. The commission was created in June 2001, seven months after President Alberto Fujimori's flight into exile ahead of corruption and murder charges stemming from his alleged connection to anti-guerrilla death squads.
Like similar panels in El Salvador, Guatemala and South Africa, Peru's truth commission was created after a period of intense internal conflict to help unite a country traditionally divided along racial and economic lines. But in assessing blame for the most horrific chapter in Peru's recent history, the findings have stirred up political passions at a fragile moment for President Alejandro Toledo, whose popularity since his 2001 election has fallen to the lowest level of any Latin America president.
In the weeks preceding the report's release, political allies of Fujimori and Alan Garcia, two of the three presidents whose terms fall under the investigation, have accused the commission of attempting to recast the war in terms favorable to the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a smaller Marxist insurgency held responsible for 1.5 percent of the civilian deaths. Defenders of the Peruvian military have also criticized the commission, fearing that the detailed report will set the stage for criminal trials.
Peru's leading human rights groups, as well as the thousands of victims' families, want the report to serve as the foundation for broader prosecutions of military officials implicated in massacres, disappearances and other crimes detailed in its pages. Lerner called today for the "criminal justice system [to] act immediately without vengeance, but at the same time with energy and without vacillation."
Almost all of the Shining Path's leaders are either dead or serving prison sentences, including its founder, Abimael Guzman. The former college professor from the southern city of Arequipa, who called on his followers to kill 10 percent of the population to make way for a new political system, was captured in 1992.
But the Shining Path is showing tentative signs of rising again, mostly in the coca-producing regions of Peru's eastern jungles. Hundreds of jailed members are scheduled for new trials in the coming months, following a high court decision that their convictions in military tribunals were unconstitutional. The report concludes that the Shining Path was responsible for 54 percent of the civilian deaths.
The defeat of the Shining Path "was a great victory for the armed forces -- with excesses, no doubt," said Jose Barba, a conservative congressman who has sharply criticized the truth commission. "But I don't know of such a thing as a clean war. This report is vengeance, vengeance by the Shining Path. And it is going to divide Peruvian society totally and absolutely."
The commission's findings show Peru's political violence to be far broader and more intense than earlier believed, even by human rights experts who have been trying for decades to track the number of victims. Until now, the number of Peruvians who died or disappeared during the war and its aftermath was thought to be about 30,000. The commission, which comprises human rights activists, academics and other prominent Peruvians, confirmed 24,000 deaths through witnesses and used statistical projections to arrive at the final toll.
The report draws on testimony from about 17,000 people, collected in emotional public hearings and private interviews over the past two years. Guzman participated in more than a dozen interviews with commission members. The project, which began under the interim presidency of Valentin Paniagua, who served between Fujimori's flight to Japan and Toledo's inauguration, cost an estimated $13 million.
During the years immediately following the Shining Path's declaration of war in 1980, the political violence remained concentrated in Peru's central highlands before spreading across the country and into the cities.
Of the estimated 69,280 victims, 85 percent came from six poor political divisions known as departments that ranged from Apurimac in the south to San Martin in the north. But the most severely affected was Ayacucho, southeast of Lima, home to more than 40 percent of those who died or disappeared.
The violence ebbed and flowed over the 20-year period studied by the commission. The report shows that 1984 was the single bloodiest year of the war. The upsurge followed the government's October 1981 emergency decree in Ayacucho, which placed the region in the effective control of army Gen. Clemente Noel. An estimated 4,500 people died or disappeared that year as Shining Path massacres mounted in the central highlands and the government used increasingly brutal methods against the insurgency.
The report also shows a sharp decline in deaths after 1992, the year Fujimori dissolved the Peruvian parliament and instituted a form of martial law. But human rights officials here say the numbers are misleading because Fujimori and his domestic intelligence adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos, began employing such techniques as mass arrests and trials by hooded anti-terrorism tribunals that have since been ruled illegal.
The report, which will be presented in Ayacucho on Friday by the truth commission during a special ceremony in memory of the victims, has shown few signs of healing the country. Toledo, who has never been popular with the Peruvian military, now faces the politically delicate task of weighing the growing public cries for justice against allowing the report to stand as the final word on the war.
In accepting the report today, Toledo said justice and reparations for the victims were "a state imperative," but also offered a general statement of support for the armed forces.
"It is indispensable that we look into the mirror of the past," Toledo said. "We can't open the doors to the future without looking first at the past."
Coming so soon after the end of the strife, the report poses a threat to a number of Peru's leading politicians and military officials who are still central figures in the national arena, including Fujimori and Garcia. Fujimori has suggested he might return to Peru and run for president, despite facing murder charges stemming from his alleged connection to squads that carried out two massacres in Lima early in his tenure. Garcia already has said he will seek another presidential term.
During an evening rally in support of the truth commission outside the Palace of Justice here this week, Teodora Cardenas, 26, held a small sign aloft bearing the word "Reparations." In 1990, her brother Federico, then 26, was taken away by a military-trained peasant militia in her village of Satipo in the Junin department, allegedly for belonging to the Shining Path. She never saw him again.
"We don't know where he was buried," Cardenas said. "We demand justice for his death, and the return of his body."
But just a few feet away, Rolando Pimental, who had two uncles murdered by the Shining Path in the Apurimac department, was unable to forgive. One uncle, a mayor, was stoned to death in front of his family. The other, an agricultural engineer, was taken away, never to be seen again.
"We always knew the truth. Do they think I am blind, that I am stupid?" said Pimental, 33, an engineer for a cell phone company. "This commission never wanted to hear from us, and now the terrorists want to return. Is it possible to reconcile with killers?"
--------
Peru Report Says 69,000 Died in 20 Years of Rebel War
August 29, 2003
The New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/americas/29PERU.html
LIMA, Peru, Aug. 28 - A government-appointed truth commission said in a report issued today that more than 69,000 people were killed between 1980 and 2000, over twice the previous estimates of the death toll for the period of war and rebellion.
The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that Maoist rebels, chiefly Shining Path, were responsible for more than half the deaths. But the commission also blamed three governments, two of them considered democratic, for widespread human rights abuses.
The commission said that three of every four people who died during the period were Quechua-speaking Indians, civilians who were caught between the military and guerrillas intent on toppling the government.
"Our report lets the whole country know the history of the thousands of human rights violations committed in the last two decades, crimes against humanity practiced by subversive organizations against society and the Peruvian state or by the Peruvian state through members of the security forces," Salomón Lerner, the commission president, said in presenting the report to President Alejandro Toledo.
The commission's report, the result of a two-year investigation based on nearly 17,000 individual testimonies taken in 530 villages, said that most victims died during the governments of Fernando Belaunde and Alan García in the 1980's, two administrations widely viewed as democratic. Those governments were cited for giving too much power to the military and then failing to stem abuses as some military units conducted a scorched-earth campaign in Peru's isolated highlands.
But President Alberto Fujimori, whose 10-year rule ended in a corruption scandal in 2000, was singled out for particularly harsh criticism. The report blamed his quasi dictatorship for hijacking democracy and introducing antiterrorism legislation that allowed his government to wage a dirty war. The head of the intelligence service under Mr. Fujimori, Vladimiro Montesinos, was accused of tortures and disappearances.
Though some details of Peru's war with Shining Path and a smaller rebel group, Tupac Amaru, were generally known, the report today was the first to offer a comprehensive account.
It was also considered crucial to Peru's fragile democracy, restored after Mr. Fujimori fled to Japan. Like other countries that have appointed truth commissions, Peru came to the conclusion that it was not practical or realistic to expect expensive, time-consuming trials.
"We cannot open the door to the future without looking at the past," Mr. Toledo said today.
The report's nine volumes, thousands of pages long, provide details about the massacres in Indian villages, the brutal crackdown on prison uprisings and the operation of a secret paramilitary unit called the Colina group. Commission workers said it also explained in detail the effects of the conflict on the Indians, an isolated people, victims of racism and indifference.
The commission's work enjoyed widespread support from both human rights groups and foreign governments, including the Bush administration, which released declassified government documents for the commission and contributed to the $13 million project.
Victims and families testified openly in community forums. Hundreds of politicians and political activists were also interviewed.
The commission criticized the Peruvian armed forces for a range of abuses, saying that in some regions of the country violations of human rights became a "generalized and systematic practice."
The commission has also forwarded to judicial authorities evidence collected in more than 60 cases in which the state security apparatus was involved in torture, disappearances and massacres, a commission investigator said.
Some retired military officers and conservative politicians, as well as Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Lima, have criticized the 12-member commission saying it favored the rebels at a time when remnants of Shining Path have been stirring in the highlands.
"The rebels have had influence in the Truth Commission," said Germán Parra, a former general and a leading member of a group representing retired general and admirals. "The terrorists wanted to destroy the society, the state, and committed acts of terrorism. The military did commit some excesses, but what they were doing was defending the state."
Some critics have even accused the commission of have ties to Shining Path. Some members of Peru's main opposition party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, whose leader, Mr. García, a former president, is likely to run again, opposed the report. The commission said Mr. García's government, in place from 1985 to 1990, held "grave responsibility" for the massacre of Shining Path inmates in two prison uprisings.
But the commission blamed Shining Path for the conflict and many of its most barbarous acts. The Maoist guerrilla organization, which began its war in 1980, was largely wiped out after its leader, Abimael Guzmán, was captured in 1992. Mr. Guzmán came across in the report as an uncompromising revolutionary who pushed his followers to lay down their lives but rarely risked his own.
The report said 54 percent of all deaths in the conflict were caused by Shining Path. Ciro Alegría Varona, who led the investigation of the armed forces, said 30 percent were caused by the Peruvian armed forces and most of the rest by government-backed peasant militias.
While Lima and other cities were hit hard by bombings, 85 percent of deaths took place in Ayacucho Province and five other states in the Andean highlands. The report said that Shining Path guerrillas terrorized Quechua-speaking Indians. The army, suspicious of Indian support for the rebels, responded with a savage campaign that killed thousands.
"Remember, the violence happened in the most isolated areas, to the poorest of all Peruvians," said Ernesto de la Jara, director of the Institute of Legal Defense, a human rights group, in Lima. "Very few people even complained."
The commission recommended reparations, even if symbolic in this poor country, and its members have said the government should exhume dozens of mass graves.
For many victims, the report was crucial, but because thousands remain missing, it was seen as only a first step.
"It is not easy to reconcile until there is justice, until we know what happened to our relatives," Angélica Mendoza, leader of a group of mothers and wives of men who disappeared, said by phone from Ayacucho Province. "The commission's work is done, but we will continue to fight until we know the truth."
-------- philippines
Philippine defence minister quits
Friday, 29 August, 2003
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3190721.stm
Philippine Defence Secretary Angelo Reyes has resigned, warning of what he calls a well-organised effort by certain forces to bring down the country's democracy.
Mr Reyes' resignation makes him the second senior government casualty since hundreds of renegade soldiers held a mutiny in Manila last month.
Mr Reyes said he hoped his decision would give President Gloria Arroyo a "free hand" to deal with what he described as the continuing threats to de-stabilise her government.
Ms Arroyo will now take up the defence portfolio herself, her spokesman Ignacio Bunye said.
During the 27 July mutiny, more than 300 soldiers took over part of Manila's financial district for 20 hours.
The mutineers called for the resignation of Mr Reyes, as well as Mrs Arroyo and military intelligence chief Victor Corpus, alleging endemic military corruption.
Mr Corpus left his post shortly after the uprising, although the government denied that his departure was connected to the incident.
Unless a drastic remedy is quickly found, these elements - I am convinced - are going to be the nation's undoing Angelo Reyes Mr Reyes was accused of corruption, including the selling of arms to Muslim rebels.
The mutineers also alleged that he was involved in a deadly bomb attack in the southern Philippines early this year, in a bid to win more anti-terrorism funding from the United States.
In his resignation speech, Mr Reyes denied all the accusations against him, describing them as "baseless", and said that the reason he had decided to quit was because of the continuing threats against Mrs Arroyo's government.
"At this time, there exists a well-organised and well-funded effort by certain forces to bring down our democracy through massive political disinformation and agitation," Mr Reyes said
"Unless a drastic remedy is quickly found, these elements - I am convinced - are going to be the nation's undoing," he warned.
Analysts are divided in their views on Mr Reyes' surprise departure.
Some say he is falling on his sword in order to appease any other potential coup plotters.
"It could be viewed as taking the wind out of the opposition's sails," JV Rufino, from the Philippines Daily Enquirer, told the BBC's East Asia Today programme.
But others said the resignation of Mr Reyes, who was instrumental in Mrs Arroyo's rise to power, could weaken the president further.
Mrs Arroyo herself has recently accused "disgruntled and disenfranchised politicians" of trying to destabilise her government.
A campaign accusing her husband Michael of corruption has added to her concerns.
Mrs Arroyo's anxiety is not unfounded, correspondents say. In 2001 her predecessor Joseph Estrada was deposed following a military-backed coup.
In a sign that she is taking the threats seriously, Mrs Arroyo has tightened the security around the Edsa shrine in central Manila, the focus of the 2001 revolt.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia's Chechnya Leader Says Death Squads Operate
By David Holley
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 29, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-chechnya29aug29,1,7327655.story?coll=la-headlines-world
MOSCOW - In a sharp preelection turnabout, the Kremlin-appointed head of Russia's war-torn republic of Chechnya declared Thursday that death squads associated with security forces were seeking to prolong the conflict through abductions and terror.
"People continue to go missing in Chechnya. They are taken away in the middle of the night. Their bodies are not found and they are never seen again," Akhmad Kadyrov, the republic's acting president, said in a letter he released to reporters in Grozny, the Chechen capital.
In the letter, addressed to Russia's top law enforcement officials, Kadyrov added: "I have no doubts that those who are taking people away at night are the so-called third force, the party of supporters of a horrible war. Through their crimes, they maintain tension in the republic, and their hands are stained with the blood of innocent people."
The force is made up of "kidnappers in armored vehicles," he said. "They are a death squad."
Human rights critics of Moscow's policies in the Caucasus republic have long complained of the operation of death squads, and many critics of the war believe it continues in part because some on the Russian side do not want to see the conflict settled - presumably because they are profiting from it through various forms of corruption. But to have Moscow's handpicked strongman suddenly appear to endorse those views was remarkable.
Russian rights advocates described Kadyrov's declaration as a belated recognition of the squads' existence and an obvious campaign ploy aimed at the Oct. 5 Chechen presidential election, in which he is considered a leading candidate.
The Kremlin's previously firm public support for Kadyrov has weakened in recent weeks. It was not clear whether his letter marked a form of lashing back at Moscow and distancing himself from its leaders.
It might instead be a maneuver undertaken with Moscow's permission in a bid to shore up his waning popularity.
Also, Kadyrov has himself been accused of running death squads, and the letter has the effect of pointing the finger elsewhere.
By official count, 267 people were abducted in Chechnya in the first six months of this year, with only five cases solved, said Movsar Khamidov, Chechnya's first deputy prime minister, in a statement to the Russian news agency Interfax.
In his letter, Kadyrov called on the federal government to create a commission to search for the missing and punish the death squad members. "The main thing is that we should tell the people of Chechnya the truth and save them from night terror," he said.
Death squads in Chechnya "are not a myth at all," said Tatyana I. Kasatkina, head of the human rights group Memorial. "They are a very horrible reality. But there is confusion as to who stands behind these squads. Some believe it is the federal troops. Some accuse Kadyrov's men of actually acting as death squads. So I am sure Kadyrov spoke about them only out of political necessity He has to do and say something unusual to whitewash his dark image."
Anna Politkovskaya, a political analyst and Chechnya specialist for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said that death squads "have been spreading terror through the republic for the last three years" but that Kadyrov "until now bluntly and doggedly denied their presence and sinister role."
Chechens exercised self-rule after defeating Russian troops in a 1994-96 war, but Russian forces returned in 1999 and have been fighting pro-independence guerrillas since.
Courts based on Muslim religious law functioned in the republic during its period of self-rule. At the time, Kadyrov was Chechnya's top religious leader. Only since 2000 has he been more associated with pro-Russian policies than with Chechnya's independence struggle, and many observers in Moscow say the Kremlin cannot trust him to remain on its side.
The squads in Chechnya were originally formed by Russian military intelligence to kill rebels and criminals without taking them to trial, Politkovskaya said.
"Now for at least a year, many people in Chechnya believe that Kadyrov's security force is responsible for a lot of deaths and kidnappings," she said. "They take advantage of the situation in the republic to settle their scores of all kinds with Kadyrov's enemies or political opponents."
It is obvious that Kadyrov's letter was not prompted by new information, Politkovskaya said.
"What could have happened overnight to become an eye-opener for him?" she said. "This statement is nothing but an awkward and all too obvious campaign move He is quite panicky now, and he is dead worried that the Kremlin might ditch him."
Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.
-------- space
White House to Weigh Interplanetary Missions
No Immediate Budget Boost for NASA Planned as Bush Mulls Human Spaceflight
By Mike Allen and Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61757-2003Aug28.html
A stinging report on the demise of the space shuttle Columbia is increasing congressional pressure on President Bush to resolve long-postponed questions about his plans for space, but aides said yesterday that he plans no immediate upgrade of NASA's budget or mission as the space agency struggles to restart the shuttle program.
Administration officials disclosed in an interview that the White House will begin work next week on a blueprint for interplanetary human flight over the next 20 or 30 years, with plans calling for Bush to issue an ambitious new national vision for space travel by early next year.
The officials said they will wrestle with the military's role in space, as well as with whether to emphasize manned or robotic missions, whether to build a base in space, what vehicle should replace the shuttle and what planets should be visited.
"The question is: What do we say to the president about why we should continue humans in space and in what vehicles and to what ends?" a senior administration official said.
But those answers will not come as swiftly as Congress would like, and lawmakers and some administration officials said they do not see how Bush will find the money to pay for any meaningful expansion of the space program given the costs of his tax cuts and the demands on the budget from the Pentagon, homeland security and possibly new Medicare benefits. That could turn his aides' study of options for future astronauts into something of an academic exercise.
"You can't fight a war on terrorism and stimulate the economy and put billions and billions of new dollars into the space program," an official said, adding that the end of the Cold War had made mastery of space a less pressing priority.
Lawmakers in both parties are calling for Bush to respond aggressively to the report issued Tuesday by the board that investigated the disintegration of Columbia. The report warned of the "lack of a national vision for space" in recent decades and a "failure of national leadership" in developing a replacement vehicle for the aging shuttle.
The release of the hard-hitting report set the stage for what promises to be an exhaustive series of congressional hearings, which will begin next Thursday and could lead to dramatic changes in the manned space program. Lawmakers said they are intensely concerned about what it will take to safely resume shuttle operations.
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), chairman of a Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA, said he will seek a presidential panel to examine the future of the space program, including whether to shift resources from the shuttle in order to resume the exploration of the moon.
Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), a member of the House Science Committee, is calling for a shift from manned to unmanned flight "for both safety and research value."
Since the board issued its indictment of the space agency's handling of the doomed shuttle mission, Bush has had nothing to say beyond a written statement that "our journey into space will go on." He was similarly elliptical during his 2000 campaign, and the issue of space disappeared from his speeches after he delivered a eulogy for the seven Columbia astronauts in February.
A senior administration official said a White House group will meet at least weekly to assess "the benefits to the nation and the world of continued human spaceflight by the United States."
"We know we can do it. What do we seek to achieve through it?" the official said. "Where and how does human spaceflight fit into national requirements and national priorities over the next several decades?"
Officials said the new panel on human spaceflight, led by the White House and involving several Cabinet departments, is scheduled to have recommendations ready for Bush in the next several months. Aides said they hope Bush will make decisions by the end of the year so that the ideas can be included in the administration budget for 2005, which will go to Capitol Hill in February.
The official said the interagency group will look at the space program's relationship with national defense, as well as with the advancement of science, and at "the question of how this relates to national goals that, at first blush, have nothing to do with spaceflight."
"The president's been very clear from the beginning that we want to continue doing this," an aide said.
Another administration review of space policy, led by the National Security Council, was launched in June 2002 by a National Security Presidential Directive and was completing a report on future space transportation systems when Columbia broke up. The report was shelved, but the review is continuing.
With the budget for the coming fiscal year already stretched thin by pressing security needs, key lawmakers and aides cautioned that there may be little additional money for NASA unless Bush speaks out quickly about his plans for space.
NASA officials said it may take several weeks or months to digest the accident board's findings and translate them into budget requests, possibly after lawmakers have completed the new spending bills.
"A clear signal of a commitment to NASA and the future of spaceflight from our leader [is] what's needed right now," said Rep. James T. Walsh (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls NASA spending.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has vowed that his agency will implement, "without reservation," all of the board's recommendations addressing the "human failures" and shuttle hardware problems. He went to the White House yesterday and met via videoconference with Vice President Cheney, who is in Wyoming.
The House last month approved a $5.7 billion NASA spending bill that includes only the modest increase Bush proposed in the budget submitted the week after the Columbia disaster. The Senate is to begin work next week on its own version.
Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.), the senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA, has repeatedly expressed concern that the administration has provided little useful guidance about the potential cost of the return-to-flight effort.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairmen of their chambers' Science committees, said they want a reassessment of the manned space program before Congress commits to major spending increases. Many lawmakers said they are frustrated with NASA's planning, which has left the United States dependent on an aging shuttle fleet to service the international space station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
--------
Defense Communications Satellite Launched
August 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Defense-Satellite.html
CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. (AP) -- A Boeing rocket roared from its seaside launch pad just before sunset Friday, carrying into orbit the last installment of the Air Force's state-of-the-art communications system.
The 6,025-pound Lockheed Martin-built satellite is the 14th in the Defense Satellite Communications System and will become one of five primary satellites that make up the constellation. The others perform a backup role.
The system, considered the backbone of military communications, provides secure voice and data communications, Air Force officials said in releases. It is used to relay messages between the White House, Department of Defense officials, battlefield commanders and diplomats, they said.
It is designed to be jam-resistant and to survive a nuclear exchange, officials said.
Friday's $210 million satellite, which will operate from a geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the equator, has an expected life span of 10 years. It will replace an older unit to provide coverage over the western Atlantic communications zone. The older satellite, launched in 1995, will be moved to a backup position.
Boeing rockets were scheduled to launch 19 of the planned missions, while Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 was to carry seven others. But in July, the Air Force stripped Boeing of seven of those missions and gave them to Lockheed Martin, ruling that Boeing had stolen trade secrets from Lockheed Martin during competition for the $1.88 billion contract in 1998.
The Air Force pegged the value of the transferred missions at about $1 billion.
On the Net:
www.boeing.com
-------- un
US drops opposition to UN force for Iraq
By Toby Harnden in Washington
29/08/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/08/29/wirq29.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/08/29/ixportaltop.html
The United States has abandoned its opposition to a multilateral United Nations force in Iraq, indicating that it is prepared to agree to let its soldiers serve under the banner of the world body.
Richard Armitage
In an important shift in Bush administration policy, Richard Armitage, deputy to Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said a UN force was possible as long as it was led by an American general.
Mr Armitage was understood to be speaking with White House permission and reflecting talks Mr Powell had held with Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, but the concept of such a force is likely to be viewed with intense suspicion by the Pentagon. Mr Armitage told reporters in Washington that "one idea being explored" was "a multinational force under UN leadership but an American would be the UN commander". He declined to provide further details because of the sensitivity of the subject.
As recently as Monday, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, asked if he could envisage American troops fighting under a UN banner, said: "I don't think that's going to happen."
American officials said it was far from certain that any deal over a UN-sanctioned but US-commanded force could be struck at the UN's New York headquarters.
France and Russia, which have permanent seats on the Security Council, have indicated that they want to be involved in the overall direction of Iraq policy before committing troops, a price the White House would be extremely reluctant to pay.
But the willingness even to contemplate instituting a UN force reflects President George W Bush's concern about the mounting American casualties and the rising cost of occupying post-war Iraq.
Multinational forces authorised by the UN but not kitted out with the blue helmets of UN peacekeepers became more common in the 1990s after the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
There are at present six multi-national forces operating under the authority of an international body in various parts of the world, including Nato-led contingents in Afghanistan and Kosovo. This year, the UN approved the sending of a French-led multinational force to eastern Congo.
American soldiers were part of a US-led UN force during their ill-fated mission in Somalia, which ended in ignominious withdrawal after heavy casualties were sustained in the Black Hawk Down incident in October 1993.
Mr Bush is under pressure from Capitol Hill to deal decisively with instability in Iraq. But committing more troops, which has been ruled out for the time being, would be politically unpopular. Sharing the military and financial burden with allies is much more attractive.
Joseph Biden, a senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, who has called for the post-war Iraqi operation to be strengthened, welcomed the idea of a UN-sponsored force.
"Otherwise, the American taxpayers carry the whole load," he said on ABC television.
"We're 95 per cent of the deaths, 95 per cent of the troops and 95 per cent of the costs. And the costs are staggering, the number of troops are staggering, and the time is going to be significant."
Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, offered a lukewarm reaction to Mr Armitage's comments, saying Paris would consider only "a real international force".
He added: "A real change of approach is needed. We must end the ambiguity, transfer responsibilities and allow the Iraqis to play the role they deserve as soon as possible."
# Hundreds of mourners filled a small church in Geneva yesteday for the funeral of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations diplomat killed in the Baghdad bombing last week.
Family, friends and UN personnel filled all 500 places in St Paul's Church in the heart of the city and many more people spilled on to the street, where the funeral Mass was relayed by loudspeakers.
The coffin was carried into the church by six UN guards, including three of his former personal bodyguards.
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Bush plan for Iraq given tepid U.N. reply
August 29, 2003
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030828-112115-9165r.htm
NEW YORK - Members of the U.N. Security Council reacted cooly yesterday to the Bush administration's willingness to accept a wider U.N. role in Iraq, with France saying that only a genuine power-sharing arrangement would be acceptable.
"The eventual [security] arrangements cannot just be the enlargement or adjustment of the current occupation forces," French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said.
"We have to install a real international force under a mandate of the United Nations Security Council," Mr. de Villepin told the annual meeting of French ambassadors in Paris.
His remarks came one day after Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters that the Bush administration is considering a multinational force under U.N. leadership, but with an American in command.
The idea, administration officials said yesterday, is to have a draft resolution ready to circulate informally to ministers and leaders who will be in New York for the General Assembly session in late September.
But yesterday afternoon, few diplomats stationed at the United Nations appeared to have been won over.
Key Security Council envoys described Mr. Armitage's remarks as a step in the right direction, but said his ideas still appeared to fall short of political, economic and military cooperation.
"This is an interesting approach but so far it just takes into account the security side," said Germany's deputy ambassador, Wolfgang Trautwein. "We have always said security, politics and economics are all interlinked."
Perhaps the Armitage remarks "reflect some view that is different now in Washington," Mr. Trautwein said. "It is interesting and it goes in the direction we have been advocating for some time."
After fighting the war without U.N. approval and largely sidelining the United Nations in all but a humanitarian postwar role, many here believe that the Bush administration will have to make plenty of concessions before winning international support for its occupation.
"The more U.N. the better," said Spain's U.N. ambassador, Inocencio Arias, whose government supported the Iraq war, and has contributed 1,300 troops to the U.S.-led coalition in postwar Iraq.
Some 138,000 U.S. troops are now based in Iraq, with an additional 23,000 sent there by Britain and 26 other countries.
Pakistan, a member of the Security Council, is another nation whose troops Washington would very much like to see assisting in Iraq.
Its ambassador, Munir Akram, said yesterday that his nation was waiting to hear the views of other nations, as well as the Iraqis themselves.
"For us, it is important that we are welcomed by the Iraqi people and there is a concurrence of regional states in the operation," Mr. Munir told reporters. "And that can only be enlisted through the political process."
Syria, which is stepping down this weekend as the rotating president of the Security Council, remains skeptical of Washington's willingness to return Iraq to its citizens as quickly as possible.
"Our goal is to see an end to the occupation, and to see the sovereignty and independence of the country restored," said Syria's deputy ambassador, Fayssal Mekdad.
He said that no conversations had been scheduled yet in the Security Council, but many diplomats were hoping to hear more.
France, one of five veto-wielding members of the council, is likely to play a key role in any effort to broaden the U.N. mandate in Iraq, and Mr. de Villepin gave the clearest signal yesterday of what it expected.
"A real change of approach is needed [in Iraq]," he said at the meeting of French ambassadors.
"We must end the ambiguity, transfer responsibilities and allow the Iraqis to play the role they deserve as soon as possible."
The international community should help reinforce security "on the basis of requests by Iraqi authorities," he said, referring to the provisional government that he said should be created out of the current U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
While Washington has begun to signal some flexibility on the military side, it has officially refused to consider giving up control of the civilian administration as Mr. de Villepin urged.
Mr. de Villepin last week called on Washington to switch from "a logic of occupation to a logic of [Iraqi] sovereignty."
He added to those remarks yesterday, saying the Iraqi Governing Council should be turned into "a real provisional government whose legitimacy would be reinforced by the United Nations."
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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U.N. Envoys Cautious on New Force In Baghdad
Diplomats React To Armitage Idea
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61398-2003Aug28.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 28 -- Key members of the U.N. Security Council reacted cautiously today to Bush administration efforts to solicit broader international financial and military support for the occupation of Iraq, saying the United States must move more quickly to relinquish power to Iraqis and grant greater authority to the United Nations.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said the United States needs "to transfer responsibilities and permit the Iraqis to assume the role to which they are entitled as quickly as possible."
De Villepin's reaction followed remarks by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage that the administration is exploring the idea of allowing a U.N.-mandated multinational force in Iraq that would operate under the command of a U.S. general.
Speaking in Paris, de Villepin did not rule out the possibility of supporting the U.S. initiative, but he made it clear that France wants to see the United Nations more firmly at the center of the postwar reconstruction. "It is not enough to deploy more troops, or more technical or financial means," he said. "A real change of approach is called for. It will involve setting up a real international force with a mandate from the U.N. Security Council."
The administration is under increasing pressure from Congress to broaden the number of countries involved in bringing security to Iraq and paying for its reconstruction. Armitage's remarks -- in an interview with journalists on Tuesday -- signaled that the administration might be willing to drop its insistence that the United States maintain total control over military, political and economic matters in Iraq and grant some authority to the United Nations.
The administration is engaged in an internal debate over expanding the occupation force in Iraq and whether the United Nations should be allowed a greater role.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is leading efforts to attract tens of thousands of foreign troops from India, Pakistan, Turkey and other countries, but the campaign has been stymied by the countries' insistence that the United Nations be granted a greater role. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others at the Pentagon said more troops are unnecessary, and the White House said today that the proposal discussed by Armitage was one of several options.
"That's one of many ideas that are floating around, and no decisions have been made on any of those ideas," Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, told reporters in Crawford, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing at his ranch.
Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said he was "not aware of any specific discussions" on the proposal. "The objective of continuing to internationalize the coalition is one everybody shares," he said. "There's going to be a variety of ways we'll want to consider on how you do that."
The administration's leading political and military allies in Iraq, Britain and Spain are also urging the United States to yield greater authority to the United Nations, particularly over the political transition from Saddam Hussein's government.
"We are realistic and we know that the United States cannot disappear from Iraq overnight or in two months because it will be chaos," said Spain's U.N. ambassador, Inocencio F. Arias. "If the United States is ready to give a bigger role to the United Nations, that would be good because that would be appreciated in the council."
Germany indicated that the idea of a U.N.-sponsored multinational force under U.S. command is a positive first step, but said the United States needs to permit more "burden sharing" in Iraq.
"It's very interesting and I would say it goes in the direction that I think we have been advocating for some time. Perhaps it reflects some new, different thinking that is taking place in Washington," said Germany's deputy U.N. ambassador, Wolfgang Trautwein. "But so far it just restricts itself to the security side and we have always said that security, politics, economic -- they are all interlinked."
Staff writer Vernon Loeb in Washington contributed to this report.
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NEWS ANALYSIS
High Cost of Occupation: U.S. Weighs a U.N. Role
August 29, 2003
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/worldspecial/29DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - In weighing a greater United Nations hand in the military occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration is acknowledging that the mounting costs of the operation, in both human and financial terms, are too great for the United States alone to bear.
Until now, the "vital role" that President Bush has promised for the United Nations has been limited, by American design, to a marginal contribution. But now the American need for troops and dollars that only other countries can provide is prompting a real reconsideration of those old, narrow lines.
What broader mission might be worked out, including the possible United Nations sponsorship of a multilateral force in Iraq under American command - the arrangement that the administration has said for the first time it might be willing to accept - remains to be negotiated. In the Security Council, and in the administration itself, there remain deep divisions about the extent to which a broader sharing of the burdens in Iraq must go hand in hand with a broader sharing of power and decision making.
But after four months in which the American occupation of Iraq has exacted a heavy toll, and with no end in sight, the new American approach to the United Nations can be seen as a call for help in the face of a politically intolerable arithmetic.
"We're 95 percent of the deaths, 95 percent of the costs, and more than 90 percent of the troops," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat, said in a telephone interview today. "The costs are staggering, the number of troops are staggering, we're seeing continuing escalation of American casualties, and we need to turn to the U.N. for help, for a U.N.-sanctioned military operation that is under U.S. command."
With nearly 140,000 American soldiers still in Iraq, the military costs alone are running at nearly $4 billion a month, administration officials have said. More American troops have been killed since major combat operations ended than during them, at least 64 of them by hostile fire in a guerrilla resistance that shows no sign of dissipating.
And while the administration had hoped that Iraqi oil revenues might cover the cost of reconstruction, that optimism has faded to the point that L. Paul Bremer, the top American official in Iraq, said this week that the country would need "several tens of billions of dollars" from the United States and other countries in the next year to help in the rebuilding.
To enlist outside help in footing that bill, the United States will convene an international donors conference in Madrid in late October, with a preliminary meeting scheduled for next week in Brussels. But many experts say it will raise little of the needed cash unless the United States offers donors a bigger hand in how the money is spent, whether that occurs through the United Nations or in some other way.
"It's hard to believe that the big donors will write a check to support an American occupation over which they have no control," said James B. Steinberg, who served as deputy national security adviser under President Clinton and is now director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
That the United States would want help from other nations in peacekeeping in Iraq and rebuilding its economy is not in itself a surprise; the administration made clear from the start that it hoped to enlist a "coalition of the willing" outside the United Nations, which it deeply mistrusts for its refusal to support the American invasion in the first place.
Indeed, even now, a multinational division is assembling in southwestern Iraq to replace the United States Marines, who are scheduled to leave in early September. The division is led by the Poles and will have brigades that are commanded by the Ukrainians and the Spanish. Other nations contributing troops including Bulgaria, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Thailand.
Apart from that force, however, what has been unexpected is the reluctance of other countries to send troops in substantial numbers to Iraq without a fresh United Nations mandate. And together with the burdens imposed by the continuing attacks on the occupying forces and the country's infrastructure, the result has been a heavier cost than the administration had foreseen. As recently as May, the administration had hoped by this fall to reduce its troops in Iraq to just 30,000, or less than a quarter of those it now expects to keep in place for the indefinite future.
Winning a new Security Council mandate is now seen as important enough an American goal that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell interrupted a vacation last week to travel to New York to meet with Kofi Annan, the secretary general. A mandate would allow American commanders to call on troops from countries like India and Pakistan that opposed the war but may be willing to contribute troops to a force if it is approved by the United Nations.
Such a mandate might also open the way for the enlistment of a NATO force, including Turkey, Mr. Biden said today.
But it is far from clear whether the administration would be willing to make the concessions necessary to enlist the support of Security Council members like France and Russia, which have said a wider United Nations role in Iraq would have to include real power.
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Chirac Calls on U.N.to Lead Peace in Iraq
August 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-France-Iraq.html
PARIS (AP) -- The United States should move ``without delay'' to transfer political power to the Iraqi people under the mandate of the United Nations, French President Jacques Chirac said Friday.
Chirac's statement echoed a speech by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on Thursday and joined a chorus of U.N. Security Council members urging a broader, multinational approach in Iraq.
``In the face of the risk of chaos, an approach based on security is necessary, but not sufficient,'' Chirac said in a speech to a gathering of French ambassadors.
``The response should be first political,'' Chirac added. ``The transfer of power and sovereignty to Iraqis themselves constitutes the only realistic option.''
Washington is gauging support for a possible U.N. resolution that would transform the U.S.-led force in Iraq into a multinational force authorized by the United Nations with an American commander.
But France, Russia, Germany, Mexico and Syria -- all Security Council members that opposed the war -- are pushing for a much broader front than just security, encompassing politics and economics.
The French president, who argued hard in the months before the war that no invasion should take place without U.N. approval, said the world body should also oversee the transition to Iraqi rule.
The transition ``should be put in motion without delay, under a process in which the United Nations alone is fit to provide its legitimacy,'' he added.
France, Russia, India and other countries including Arab nations have ruled out contributing soldiers to Iraq unless a multinational force is authorized by the United Nations.
Washington is eager for other nations to contribute troops to its forces, enabling some of the 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq to return home. Coalition forces have come under steady attack by insurgents; a U.S. soldier was killed Friday in an ambush.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that a U.N. resolution authorizing the deployment of international peacekeepers to Iraq would make it easier for his government to gain parliamentary approval to contribute troops.
Erdogan also said it was important that peacekeepers in Iraq not appear to be America's ``police.''
``If the United Nations Security Council plays a more active role, this would make things easier for Turkey, the United States and for Iraq,'' Erdogan told CNN-Turk television.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called for a timetable for Iraq's return to sovereignty.
``'Iraq-ization' must come as soon as possible and Muslim states should be brought into the stabilization efforts,'' the Handelsblatt newspaper quoted him as saying. ``To that end, a leading U.N. role is needed.''
Before the war, France had argued that U.N. inspectors should have been given more time to make sure Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
Chirac reiterated Friday his stand that U.N. weapons inspections remain ``the most effective and most legitimate'' way to check the spread of weapons.
Still, the French president said his aim was not to erode the Atlantic alliance, which was shaken up by the debate over whether to go to war.
``The partnership between Europe and the United States, our premier ally, constitutes a fundamental element in world security,'' he said. ``Making the European Union and NATO into rivals makes no sense.''
Chirac also called on North Korea to completely and verifiably dismantle its nuclear weapons program. He expressed worries about Iran's nuclear program and urged Tehran to sign an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
He also called for a summit of U.N. Security Council members to put together a plan of action against weapons proliferation.
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Army Europe
August 29, 2003
Washington Times
Inside The Ring
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030828-112113-3830r.htm
Some in the Army are predicting that the 1st Armored Division, based in Germany, will never go back to Europe once its rotation ends in Iraq next year. Instead, the division of 20,000-plus soldiers will relocate stateside, perhaps at Fort Riley, Kan., or Fort Carson, Colo.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants a smaller Army presence in Europe, so it makes sense to send the division back home next year instead of sending it back to Germany and then the United States.
The Pentagon also plans to disperse Army units from Germany into Eastern European bases and to rotate forces in and out of Europe to maintain a strong presence.
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General in Iraq Says More G.I.'s Are Not Needed
August 29, 2003
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/international/worldspecial/29GENE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., Aug. 28 - The top American commander for Iraq said today there was no need for more American troops there, but he encouraged Muslim allies like Turkey and Pakistan to send peacekeepers and said accelerating the training of a new Iraqi army should be considered.
The commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said these steps were among those that could help Iraqis take more responsibility for their country's security sooner, ease the physical burden on American troops and help counter the image of an American-dominated occupation in Iraq.
"You can't underestimate the public perception both within Iraq and within the Arab world about the percentage of the force being so heavily American," the general said in an interview here at his headquarters.
Partly for that reason, General Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, rejected calls by a growing number of American lawmakers to increase American troops in Iraq beyond the current 140,000. Instability in wide swaths of the country, increasing casualties and recent terrorist attacks have intensified these calls.
About 225 fighters from Syria, the Sudan and other countries are now in allied custody, but General Abizaid said up to 1,000 remained in Iraq.
Rather than increasing the American force, General Abizaid said the priority should be to increase the size of the reconstituted Iraqi security services - now at about 60,000 people - and to persuade other nations, particularly Muslim countries, to contribute military forces like military police, special operations forces and civil affairs specialists.
There are about 23,000 troops from other countries now in Iraq.
The general said that the Iraqi army training and the recruitment of other international peacekeepers were just two issues that would be discussed at a major strategy review by top American military and civilian officials in Baghdad next week.
That session, with the top American civil administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, and his aides, would try to produce a better coordinated long-term plan for rebuilding Iraq and ensuring its security.
"A campaign plan exists, but what we need to do is sharpen it up," the general said. "There's a need for a synchronization of effort, not only by the United States, but the international community and coalition forces." He said he was not familiar with the details of an idea being considered by the Bush administration to allow a multinational force in Iraq to operate under the sponsorship of the United Nations as long as it was commanded by an American. Countries like Pakistan and Turkey have demanded that the United Nations have a greater role in Iraq before considering sending troops.
General Abizaid said any sticking points were likely political rather than military, saying, "There are innovative ways of working the chain of command that are acceptable from a military point of view and a unity of command point of view."
He sought to portray the coming strategy session in Baghdad as a normal policy evaluation whose recommendations ultimately would need the approval of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
But the fact that it has been called reflects growing concerns among top American officials that the administration's Iraq policy needs fine-tuning - if not a major overhaul. There have been continued attacks on American and allied forces, notably the bombing last week of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people.
"We've got to get more of an Iraqi face on the security establishment," the general said, "and we need to have more international participation in the international coalition force."
He said that in Baghdad, he planned to raise the issue of whether a new 40,000-soldier Iraqi army could be trained more rapidly than the planned two to three years. "Where can you take your risks?" he said. "Somewhere between the perfect army and the just-good-enough army is the right answer."
American officials already plan to fly as many as 28,000 Iraqis to Hungary in the next several months for an intensive police training course.
General Abizaid said officials at next week's meeting will also discuss time lines for training and fielding Iraqi police, border patrol and civil defense forces, and establishing ways to measure their progress to ensure they are ready for duty.
"It's a pretty interesting and nuanced task to develop a roadmap starting from zero and going up to a point where you can defend the country, control civil unrest, and you can police the country," he said.
In terms of international forces, Britain and Poland are now leading two foreign peacekeeping divisions, but General Abizaid said he would like Turkey to lead a third and for Pakistan to play an important role.
But he acknowledged the existence of political constraints facing both Muslim countries. "Both of these nations need to have their internal political constituents satisfied that they're playing a role as an instrument of the international community and not as a pawn of the United States," he said.
General Abizaid said another reason to speed the fielding of Iraqi security forces was so they could establish ties with the Iraqi public, and provide intelligence about the location and activities of loyalists of Saddam Hussein, foreign fighters and Islamic terrorists.
"Most of the actions that yield us enemy targets that we're able to take out offensively have some component of Iraqi cooperation," he said, noting that for every remote-controlled bomb that goes off, Americans have have defused two others because of tips from Iraqis.
General Abizaid said that Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin and adviser to Mr. Hussein, who is known by his nickname, Chemical Ali, had provided information that was "valuable in some ways," since his was captured earlier this month.
But as for the fate of Mr. Hussein himself, General Abizaid said he did not know whether the former Iraqi dictator was on the move constantly or was hunkered down in a safe house somewhere. "Most of us believe he's in Iraq and that over time we'll unravel the puzzle of where he is and get him," he said.
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Who's Wrong Now, Mr. Rumsfeld?
What Victory?
By DAVID KRIEGER
August 29, 2003
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/krieger08292003.html
What a difference a few months can make.
At the end of April 2003, just four months ago, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Qatar headquarters of General Tommy Franks, effusively comparing the US victory in Iraq to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and a reuniting of East and West, and the people of Paris actually welcomed the Allied forces as liberators from the Nazis in World War II. In neither case was it necessary for American forces to remain as an occupying force; in neither case did the US government have its eyes on the oil.
As Rumsfeld savored US military dominance over the far inferior Iraqi forces, he triumphantly crowed, "Never have so many been so wrong about so much." He was presumably referring to the "many" who doubted American military tactics in the war, not those who thought the war was immoral, illegal and unnecessary.
It was clearly a day of jubilation for Rumsfeld and he was enjoying trumpeting to the world that he had been right all along.
A few days later, a triumphant George W. Bush, dressed up like a combat pilot, was flown some thirty miles off the California coast to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Bush announced to the assembled troops on the carrier that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.
Bush said: "With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians." He did not mention that approximately twice as many innocent civilians died in the Iraq War as had died on September 11th. Nor did not mention the Iraqi children who had lost arms and legs and parents as a result of the war, and would carry their injuries through their lives.
The president, looking to all the world like the military hero he was not, continued: "No device of man can remove the tragedy from war." He did not say, presumably because he did not think, that with wisdom the tragedy of war might be prevented. Nor did he say that, in the case of this war, it was initiated illegally without UN authorization based on arguments by him and his administration to the American people that the Iraqi regime posed the threat of imminent use of weapons of mass destruction.
The combat pilot impersonator went on, "Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent." He might have added that this is especially true when it is he and his colleagues, and them alone, who decide who is guilty and who is innocent.
As the television cameras rolled on, Bush said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on." Four months out his perspective on victory is questionable, and there remains no established link between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists. He was also wrong to conclude that the "battle of Iraq" was a victory or had ended.
While an action doll of Bush in military garb is being marketed across the country, almost daily young Americans in the occupation force are being killed in what now appears to be an on-going war of liberation from the Americans.
Saboteurs are blowing up and setting fire to oil pipelines, disrupting water supplies, and attacking UN relief workers. US occupation forces appear helpless to stop the new terrorists that have been created as a result of this war.
The former Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, had argued for a far larger occupying force in Iraq. Rumsfeld overruled him, concluding that a larger force wasn't needed. It now appears that General Shinseki was right and Rumsfeld was wrong.
The weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration alluded to in order to frighten the American people and justify the war have not been found, despite our being told by Cheney that he knew where they were located.
Four months after Rumsfeld crowed about the liberation of Paris and Bush declared an end to the major combat phase of the war, there is a deadly continuing war of attrition against US and British troops in Iraq. America, far from being hailed as a liberator, has created even more enemies in the Middle East and terrorists seem to be growing in numbers and boldness.
Paraphrasing Rumsfeld, who himself was paraphrasing Churchill, it might be said: "Never have so few been so wrong about so much." Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are the leaders of the militant and shortsighted few. There has been no victory in Iraq, and under the circumstances victory is not possible. We now need a public dialogue on how best to extract ourselves from the perilous situation these men have created before we become ensnared in an oil-driven equivalent of the Vietnam War.
The starting point for ending this peril is to awaken the American people by a full and open Congressional investigation of the misrepresentations by the Bush administration regarding Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war. In Britain, the misrepresentations of the Blair government are being vigorously investigated by Parliament, but in the US an investigation of the Bush administration is being blocked by Congressional Republicans. What is needed is an investigation as rigorous as that being pursued in Britain.
Additionally, as an intermediate step to transferring full administrative authority to the Iraqi people, the United States and Coalition Forces should move immediately to turn over authority for the administration of Iraq to the United Nations. Such a recommendation assumes, perhaps too readily, that the UN would be willing to accept this role and would be able to act with sufficient independence of Washington. By entrusting the future of Iraq to the UN, the United States would make clear that it is not administering Iraq in order to dictate the political future of the country or to enrich US-led corporations with ties to the Bush administration. It would also allow for sharing the security burden in Iraq and make possible the earlier return of the US troops presently in Iraq.
David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time (Capra Press, 2003), and author of Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (Middleway Press, 2002).
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Condi's Phony History
Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq
By Daniel Benjamin,
Slate
Friday, August 29, 2003,
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/
As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers-called 'werewolves'-engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them-much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."
Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted,
One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?
Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.
Werwolf tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in September 1944. "In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils," Beevor writes. "... Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. ..."
In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was "probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement."
Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled in-and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized. There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.
The Army history records that while there were the occasional anti-occupation leaflets and graffiti, the GIs had reason to feel safe. When an officer in Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an American soldier in four months of occupation. As the distinguished German historian Golo Mann summed it up in The History of Germany Since 1789, "The [Germans'] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of 'werewolf' units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign. ..."
Werwolf itself was filled not so much by fearsome SS officers but teenagers too young for the front. Beevor writes:
In the west, the Allies found that Werwolf was a fiasco. Bunkers prepared for Werwolf operations had supplies "for 10-15 days only" and the fanaticism of the Hitler Youth members they captured had entirely disappeared. They were "no more than frightened, unhappy youths." Few resorted to the suicide pills which they had been given "to escape the strain of interrogation and, above all, the inducement to commit treason." Many, when sent off by their controllers to prepare terrorist acts, had sneaked home.
That's not quite the same as the Rumsfeld version, which claimed that "Today the Nazi dead-enders are largely forgotten, cast to the sidelines of history because they comprised a failed resistance and managed to kill our Allied forces in a war that saw millions fight and die."
It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany-and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases-was zero.
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford's Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Report: U.S. Fails to Share Terror Information
By Thomas Frank
Washington Bureau
Newsday, August 29, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uslaw0828,0,5094798.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
Washington -- Federal agencies continue to withhold information about terrorist threats from state and local governments and from other federal agencies, says a congressional audit released Wednesday.
The lack of information-sharing means that officials may overlook or never know about terrorist activities or prevention efforts, said the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm.
"Without the information they feel they need, states and cities as well as the federal government may not be adequately prepared to deter future attacks," the report found. "No level of government was satisfied that they receive enough information."
The 44-page report said the problem persists despite other investigations and studies that have reached similar conclusions and post-9/11 federal directives to improve information-sharing. "The federal government still has not established comprehensive policies or procedures to effectively integrate state and city governments into the information-sharing process," the report said.
The problem stems from the tradition of leaving anti-terrorism efforts to federal agencies. Many local authorities do not have security clearance to receive sensitive information.
The report was based on interviews with officials and a survey early this year of 16 federal agencies, 40 state homeland security advisers and officials in 228 cities. The Department of Homeland Security, in a response to the findings, said it had made "significant strides to improve information sharing" since the research was done, including providing secure phones and security clearance to state leaders.
The Justice Department and the CIA, which did not give information to the GAO's researchers, said the report is "fundamentally incorrect" but gave no specifics.
-------- immigration / refugees
Three Arrested in Alleged Immigration Scheme
Two Fairfax City Lawyers, Annandale Restaurateur Accused of Falsifying Green Card Documents
By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 29, 2003; Page B04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62383-2003Aug28.html
Two Fairfax City lawyers and an Annandale restaurateur were arrested yesterday on federal immigration fraud charges for allegedly filing phony documents to get green cards for illegal immigrants.
The alleged scheme is virtually identical to one that landed an Arlington lawyer a 10-year prison sentence this year.
Federal agents picked up Steven Y. Lee, 48, and Jordan N. Baker, 36, principals in the law firm Lee & Baker, outside their homes, then searched their firm's office at 3251 Old Lee Hwy. for most of yesterday, seizing computers and records. At a hearing in federal court yesterday afternoon, Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. Morton said investigators found $12,600 cash in Lee's car, and he was ordered held without bond. Baker was released on a $25,000 bond.
Also arrested yesterday was Byung Chul Kim, 32, also known as Billy Kim, who owns the Todam Koll restaurant at 7331 Little River Tpk. Authorities allege that he was a willing participant in Lee and Baker's plan to file the phony documents with the government, then sell the opportunity for a green card to an immigrant for as much as $50,000.
An affidavit for search warrants by FBI Special Agent Amylynn Murray said Lee and Baker had probably pocketed close to $1.2 million from the scheme, much of it in cash. In addition to searching the law office, Lee's home on Leehigh Drive in Fairfax County and Kim's restaurant, federal authorities are trying to seize Kim's 2002 BMW X5, Baker's 1998 Lincoln Continental and Lee's 2000 S430 Mercedes-Benz.
Lee and Baker specialized in immigration law, particularly for Korean immigrants, Murray's affidavit said. For many immigrants, the best way to obtain permanent resident status, or a green card, is by having an employer certify that the immigrant is needed to fill a certain job and that no U.S. citizens are available. This "labor certification" is handled by state labor agencies, such as the Virginia Employment Commission, and then by the federal Department of Labor.
If a labor certification is granted, the immigrant then applies for a green card with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service).
The fees for the process are minimal, but the time and paperwork can be confusing to new immigrants, so law firms offer to help. Some firms offer to provide sponsoring employers, as did the firm of Samuel Kooritzky of Arlington.
Kooritzky, however, didn't actually find employers. Instead, he forged the names and signatures of local restaurants and businesses on hundreds of labor certification applications. He then charged thousands of dollars to unaware immigrants, whose applications were lost when Kooritzky was arrested last summer. He was convicted of 56 fraud counts and sentenced in March to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $2.3 million in restitution.
Lee and Baker are accused of a similar scheme, except that federal investigators believe they actually had willing employers, such as Kim, participating. Employers would receive a fee from Lee and Baker, usually about $5,000, in exchange for allowing their names to be used on the labor certifications, but they would never hire the immigrants, court documents said.
Once a labor certification is granted, an applicant or law firm is allowed to substitute another person to receive the green card. Authorities allege that Lee and Baker would file phony names and work histories for people in South Korea, then sell substitutions to local Koreans for fees between $10,000 and $50,000.
But an FBI agent in Seoul checked out 60 of Lee and Baker's original applicants and found that 58 were bogus, the affidavit said. The FBI also developed nine informants, including seven former secretaries at the law firm and at least one ex-girlfriend of Lee's. All told Murray that Lee and Baker were filling out and signing false labor certification applications, the affidavit said.
One informant told Murray that Lee charged clients $50,000 to substitute their names into an application: $10,000 as an attorney fee, $20,000 as a sponsor fee and $20,000 as a premium for avoiding a year-long wait. Only $5,000 would go to a sponsor, and the lawyers would keep the rest, the court papers allege.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Hydrogen Cycle Could Be Grounded in the Soil
BERKELEY, California,
August 29, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2003/2003-08-29-09.asp#anchor8
A new study concludes that most of the hydrogen eliminated from the atmosphere goes into the ground.
The findings mean that "we may be better able to predict what will happen if and when humans introduce and leak into the atmosphere vast quantities of hydrogen for fuel cells," said study coauthor Kristie Boering, professor of chemistry and of earth and planetary science at University of California at Berkeley.
In an article published in the August 21 edition of the journal "Nature," Boering and colleagues report that their findings shifts focus toward developing an understanding of soil destruction of hydrogen to accurately predict whether hydrogen emissions will eventually accumulate in the air.
This conclusion is based on measurements of the abundance of a rare isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium.
It has long been known that atmospheric hydrogen is rich in deuterium, but it was unclear why. This results of this recent study suggest that one of the main natural sources of atmospheric hydrogen - the breakdown of methane - is actually responsible for the atmosphere's enrichment in deuterium.
This result implies that reactions with atmospheric oxidants may be less important to the hydrogen cycle, and that uptake by soils, where microbial processes involve methane, is the driving force.
"We wanted to look at hydrogen in the stratosphere because it is easy to study the production of hydrogen from methane separate from other influences," said coauthor John Eiler, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology. "It may seem odd to go to the stratosphere to understand what is happening in the ground, but this was the best way to get a global perspective on the importance of soils to the hydrogen cycle."
With precise information on the deuterium content of hydrogen formed from methane, the researchers were able to calculate that the soil uptake of hydrogen is as high as 80 percent. It is suspected that this hydrogen is used by soil living microbes to carry on their biological functions, although the details of this process are poorly understood and have been the subject of only a few previous studies.
The scientists believe it likely that the hydrogen taken up by soils is relatively free of environmental consequences, but the question still remains of how much more hydrogen the soil can absorb.
If future use of hydrogen in transportation results in a significant amount of leakage, then soil uptake must increase dramatically or it will be inadequate to cleanse the released hydrogen from the atmosphere, Eiler explained.
"An analogy would be the discovery that trees and other plants get rid of some of the carbon dioxide that cars emit, but by no means all of it," he said. "So the question as we look toward a future hydrogen economy is whether [soil] microbes will be able to 'eat' the hydrogen fast enough."
-------- energy
Energy Bill About More Than Power Blackout Fix
Story by Tom Doggett
REUTERS USA:
August 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22036/newsDate/29-Aug-2003/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Preventing another major power blackout will be a top priority when Congress returns to work on an energy bill next week, but interest groups are also lobbying to keep Alaskan oil drilling, tighter gasoline mileage standards and other parts of the legislation in play.
President Bush has urged Congress, when it ends its summer recess on Tuesday, to finalize legislation for the first significant overhaul of U.S. energy policy in a decade.
"I have been calling for an energy bill for a long time. And now is the time for the Congress to move and get something done," Bush said last week.
The massive blackout that left over 50 million people in the United States and Canada in the dark earlier this month has given "fresh momentum" to passing an energy bill, said Bill Wicker, Democratic spokesman for the Senate Energy Committee.
Next week, Senate and House leaders may appoint lawmakers to a conference committee to hammer out differences in each chamber's energy bill, Wicker said.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican and chairman of the House Energy Committee, has vowed to have an energy bill ready for the president to sign by the end of September.
Although Republicans will control the negotiating committee, the talks are likely to be contentious in reconciling the vastly different energy bills passed by the House and the Senate.
WILDLIFE REFUGE DRILLING STILL UNRESOLVED
A long-running fight over opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling will be decided by bill negotiators. The House wants it, the Senate doesn't.
Democrats, environmental groups, and even some Republicans are saying the ANWR drilling provision should be dropped to win enough support to pass an energy bill, especially since fixing the electric grid has become a rising priority. However, the White House has insisted, at least at this point, that drilling in the refuge be part of a final bill.
Several House leaders insist that drilling in the Alaskan refuge is crucial to U.S. oil supplies and national security. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Lieberman has promised to filibuster any final energy bill that allows drilling in the Alaskan refuge, which is home to polar bears and other wildlife.
Other high-profile issues include tightening gasoline mileage standards for vehicles, more money for clean coal research, and providing government loan guarantees to build nuclear power plants.
While those issues are likely to create a lot of debate, there are other parts of the bill that many interest groups believe are just as important to allow the United States to have a sound energy policy.
For example, the American Wind Energy Association is pushing for a three-year extension of a wind power tax credit. The credit goes to wind farm owners, who would get 1.8 cents for every kilowatt hour of electricity they produce.
Kathy Belyeu, the trade group's spokeswoman, said wind power would not prevent another power blackout, but it will help diversify America's energy supplies. "The biggest national priority is spreading out our energy portfolio," she said.
Wind power could generate about 6 percent of the nation's electricity by 2020, which may seem small, but is close to what hydroelectric dams are producing now, according to Belyeu.
ENERGY-SAVING STEPS
Instead of drilling for more oil and gas, or building more power plants, the Alliance to Save Energy is backing language in the bill to reduce the amount of energy used in certain everyday items, such as lighted emergency exit signs, traffic lights, and computers and VCRs when they are not in use.
"By reducing the demand for energy, you in essence create additional available supplies," said Mark Hopkins, the group's acting co-chairman.
The Alliance is also pushing for a boost in the mileage requirements for cars and gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles or SUVs, but the auto industry so far has been able to convince a majority of Congress that such a move would hurt workers' jobs and, therefore, their political careers.
"If we had more fuel-efficient cars we could conceivably reduce our demand for imported oil," Hopkins said.
Hopkins' group does support language in the bill that would give tax credits to consumers who buy hybrid vehicles that run on both gasoline and electricity.
Even AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, wants a say in the energy bill.
The group wants money included in the legislation to fund federal programs that help low-income families pay their utility bills and weatherize their homes. The money would get people through summer and winter spikes in energy costs and cut demand for energy by having more weatherproof houses, said AARP lobbyist Jeff Kramer.
He said while there was certainly a humanitarian side of the programs, "down the road... it helps the system."
-------- environment
E.P.A. Says It Lacks Power to Regulate Some Gases
August 29, 2003
The New York Times
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/politics/29CLIM.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - The Environmental Protection Agency said today that it did not have the legal authority to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases under the Clean Air Act.
The act "does give us authority to do research on climate change, not to issue regulation," said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, the assistant administrator who oversees air programs. "Where there is a major public policy issue, Congress needs to decide."
The general counsel, Robert E. Fabricant, issued a memorandum that said "E.P.A. cannot assert jurisdiction to regulate in this area."
This contrasts with assessments made by two Clinton-era general counsels, who said such heat-trapping gases could potentially be regulated if the agency found that they could reasonably be expected to harm human welfare. They noted that the Clean Air Act listed "climate" as an aspect of human welfare.
But the environmental agency has never determined that carbon dioxide does indeed harm human welfare, though there is a growing body of scientific knowledge that says carbon dioxide plays a role in global warming. The E.P.A. has never issued any regulations on carbon dioxide with respect to global warming.
"The authority exists if the proper findings are made under the specific regulatory provisions of the act," said Jonathan Z. Cannon, who was general counsel in the Clinton administration and now a professor at the University of Virginia Law School.
Environmental groups and Northeastern states are also pushing that interpretation. This year, Northeastern states filed two suits against the E.P.A. to force it to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. Environmental groups filed a petition with the agency in 1999, asking it to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.
Some of those groups, led by the International Center for Technology Assessment, sued the agency in 2002 to speed a response to their petition. The general counsel decision on carbon dioxide today is a response to that 1999 petition.
The general counsel grounded his reasoning on a 2000 Supreme Court decision, Food and Drug Administration v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco, that said the F.D.A. could not try to regulate tobacco as a "drug" and cigarettes as a "device."
"The Supreme Court said where there is a major public policy decision to be made, an agency can't just go out and use a broadly worded statute to deal with that," Mr. Holmstead said.
Mr. Fabricant, the general counsel, wrote, "It is clear that an administrative agency properly awaits Congressional direction on a fundamental policy issue such as global climate change, instead of searching for an existing statute that was not designed or enacted to deal with that issue."
Environmental groups contested the environmental agency's representation of the Supreme Court decision, saying the case cannot be applied to carbon dioxide. They argue that Congress had taken a stand on tobacco regulation, whereas it has not taken clear stances on carbon dioxide regulation.
In the F.D.A. decision, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "If Congress has not specifically addressed the question, a reviewing court must respect the agency's construction of the statute so long as it is permissible."
The decision went on to say that Congress had specifically spoken on this issue, noting that Congress had directly addressed the problem of tobacco and health through legislation six times since 1965.
This kind of clarity does not exist on heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gases, said David Doniger, policy director of climate change of the Natural Resource Defense Council.
--------
States to Fight Relaxation of Power-Plant Pollution Standards
August 29, 2003
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
The New York Times
A day after the Bush administration issued new rules that will relax pollution-control regulations for thousands of power plants and factories, environmental groups and state officials across the Northeast began preparing legal challenges to the policy shift.
In Albany, the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, announced plans to file a federal lawsuit charging that the new rules violate the Clean Air Act, and Gov. George E. Pataki said he would support the effort. In New Jersey, Gov. James E. McGreevey said his appointed attorney general, Peter C. Harvey, would also take legal action, and state officials in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania announced that their states would also join the court battle to block the new plan.
The Environmental Protection Agency made changes on Wednesday to its New Source Review program, saying it would no longer require factories and power plants to upgrade their pollution controls if the cost of their expansions or renovations are less than 20 percent of the plant's total cost.
The acting E.P.A. administrator, Marianne Horinko, said that the old regulations, which required stricter environmental controls on plants that perform anything more extensive than "routine maintenance," were too cumbersome and confusing. She predicted that the new policy would spur new investment in an outdated power grid that led to the blackout this month.
But environmentalists and state leaders say that utility companies were pushing for the regulations long before the blackout. They warned that the new regulations would allow an estimated 17,000 factories across the nation to increase their emissions and would lead to hundreds of thousands of tons of additional pollutants being released each year.
"This is an attempt to completely undermine the Clean Air Act," said Peter H. Lehner, chief of the environmental protection bureau for Mr. Spitzer.
Although the new rule affects plants across the country, the battle over regulating the industrial emissions is fought largely along geographical lines. The bulk of the nation's largest coal-fired power plants operate in the West and Midwest, and much of their emissions carry east, where governors and local officials have for years been fighting for tighter air-quality standards.
Energy industry officials applauded the new regulations, saying that they would not lead to additional pollution because other environmental protection laws are already in place.
"Today's regulations will lift a major cloud of uncertainty, boosting our efforts to provide affordable, reliable electric service and cleaner air," said Thomas Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute.
But environmentalists say the policy will jeopardize the Justice Department's efforts to force power plants to reduce their emissions. Before Mr. Bush took office in January 2001, the Justice Department began suing 51 power plants, and pressured some of them into installing hundreds of millions of dollars of pollution control equipment. Earlier this month, the department won an important legal victory when a federal judge ruled that Ohio Edison had violated the E.P.A. regulations by upgrading its plant without adequately improving its pollution control devices.
John Walke, director of the Clean Air Project of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that many of those expansion projects would have been permissible under the new rules enacted by the Bush administration, even though they would lead to additional pollutants' being introduced into the air.
"Corporate polluters will now be able to spew even more harmful chemicals into our air," Mr. Walke said, "regardless of the fact that it will harm millions of Americans."
In December, Mr. Spitzer led a group of Northeastern states in opposing a separate set of proposed E.P.A. revisions to the New Source Review policy, and most legal experts expect the new lawsuits to be joined with that case. Governor McGreevey, who has supported the fight to tighten pollution controls on out-of-state factories and power plants, said his attorney general's office and the State Department of Environmental Protection will both be aggressively involved in the battle.
"A large portion of the pollution impairing New Jersey's air quality comes from out-of-state pollution sources," Mr. McGreevey said. " We will not allow the federal government to walk away from its responsibility to safeguard the quality of our air and protect the health of our residents."
-------- health
Study Suggests Mercury in Fish May Be Less Toxic
Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
REUTERS USA:
August 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22033/newsDate/29-Aug-2003/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The mercury that builds up in the flesh of fish may be less dangerous than people feared, scientists said yesterday.
The finding by the researchers, which may come as good news to pregnant women and others who have eaten fish, indicated the structure of the mercury molecules may make them less toxic to people, though they stressed more study is needed.
"There may be reason for cautious optimism," Graham George, who did the work at the Stanford University Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, said in a statement.
"The mercury in fish may not be as toxic as many people think - but there is a lot we need to find out before we can make this conclusion," added George, now at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada.
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that is especially harmful to developing fetuses and can cause sensory loss, tremors, loss of muscular coordination, speech, hearing, and visual problems, as well as increased risk of heart attack.
A metal, it can build up in tissues.
It gets into the environment when toxic waste is burned and the mercury molecules fall from the smoke onto the ground and into water. There it builds up in the bodies of animals that eat contaminated plants and drink contaminated water.
Predatory fish, such as tuna, swordfish and lake bass, are especially likely to have high levels of mercury in their flesh. For this reason, the U.S. government advises pregnant women to limit how much they eat.
But an important factor is what the mercury, a reactive element, binds with and environmental toxicology experiments have presumed it is methylated - tied up with carbon and hydrogen atoms.
But George and colleagues report in this week's edition of the journal Science that the mercury in fish is actually attached to both a carbon atom and a sulfur atom.
And since sulfur attaches more tightly to other elements than methyl groups do - it is possible that would make the mercury less likely to be metabolized, or taken up, by the body.
The researchers used a technique called X-ray absorption spectroscopy to look at the physical structure of the mercury compounds in fish muscle tissue.
They tested day-old zebra fish larvae and found the sulfur-mercury compound was less toxic than methylmercury chloride, the compound often used to determine the toxicity of mercury in fish.
"People have used methylmercury chloride to model the toxic properties of mercury in fish because they don't know what's on the mercury. And now that we know what's on the mercury in fish tissue, we can better investigate its toxic properties," said George.
Now they will look at what form of mercury compound accumulates in mammals that eat mercury-laden fish.
"Once we understand how mercury is bound in mammalian tissues, we'll be ideally poised to design a drug that could perhaps remove it," George said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
CHINA - U.S. urged to stop Dalai Lama's visit
August 29, 2003
Washington Times
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030828-112108-7910r.htm
BEIJING - China urged the United States yesterday not to allow the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, to visit next week, when he is expected to meet President Bush.
In Washington, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Philip Reeker said the Dalai Lama, who met with Mr. Bush during his last visit in 2001, will meet with "appropriate U.S. officials in his capacity as a religious leader."
Representatives of the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet for India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, said this week that he would visit New York, Washington and two other cities during the three-week trip, expected to begin Sept. 4.
----
PETA Gets Personal in Campaign Against KFC
Story by Lauren Weber
REUTERS USA:
August 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22039/newsDate/29-Aug-2003/story.htm
NEW YORK - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is getting personal in its campaign to force fast-food chain KFC, a unit of Yum Brands Inc., to raise the living and dying conditions of the chickens it sells.
PETA, known for its relentless and celebrity-heavy campaigns, has begun sending volunteers to meet with Chief Executive David Novak's neighbors, pastor, country club, even the manager at his local Italian restaurant.
The group sent Steve Gross, a management consultant and conflict resolution expert, to Yum's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky about a week ago to canvas the neighborhoods where Novak and Cheryl Bachelder, KFC's president, live.
"While PETA continues to push for a vegetarian world, most people disagree," said Yum spokesman Jonathan Blum. "We have no comment on PETA's misinformation campaign."
Most neighbors "were pleasant, curious and knew about the campaign," said Gross, who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He said six neighbors told him they would consider sending letters to Novak expressing concerns about the treatment of chickens.
Other neighbors were hostile and asked Gross to leave.
Representatives at the Owl Creek Country Club, where PETA says Novak is a member, and Abruzzi, the Italian restaurant, were polite but noncommittal, Gross said.
A spokeswoman at the club declined to respond to a Reuters request for information. An employee at Abruzzi said he had no knowledge of the visit but confirmed that Novak is a patron.
PETA says it will target Novak, Bachelder and KFC until the fast food chain forces reforms from its chicken suppliers.
Former Beatle Paul McCartney ran a full-page ad on behalf of PETA in the Louisville Courier-Journal in July, with an open letter asking Novak to improve conditions for the chickens used at KFC. Rap music producer and nascent political force Russell Simmons, called for a KFC boycott earlier this month, also on behalf of PETA.
The group is often criticized for heavy-handed tactics like throwing fake blood at fur-clad celebrities and civilians. A controversial PETA campaign recently compared animals being prepared for slaughter to concentration camp victims, infuriating Jewish groups, among others.
But it is also known for being effective. It wrung significant changes out of McDonald's Corp. three years ago after a bruising publicity offensive.
In June, activists threw fake blood on Novak while he was in Germany for the opening of a new restaurant.
Personal attacks can alienate the public, said Mitchell Hall, a professor at Central Michigan University who studies social movements.
"It's potentially an effective tactic, but it's at least as likely to backfire," he said. "This crosses the line for most people. They don't see this as a fair way to influence policy."
----
Huge peace rally in Nepal
Sushil Sharma
BBC correspondent in Kathmandu
Friday, 29 August, 2003
Tens of thousands of people have attended a peace rally in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu.
It was one of the biggest peace rallies in Nepal.
Social groups organized the event to protest at the resumption of violence after the Maoist rebels pulled out of a seven-month cease-fire and peace talks.
It was a unprecedented show of solidarity for peace and anger at the abrupt breakdown of the talks.
More pressure
An estimated 60,000 people took part in the rally.
Some 200 social groups jointly organized the event that drew a large number of women, school students, human rights activists and professionals.
Soldiers in Kathmandu Soldiers on the streets after a colonel was killed on Thursday
They went round the city carrying peace placards and banners.
The organizers said that the event was aimed at stepping up pressure on the government and the rebels to return to negotiation for a peaceful resolution of the seven-year conflict.
Both sides say they have not closed the doors of dialogue.
But there are no signs yet of an early resumption of talks.
Whatever little hopes that had remained had been dashed by the events over the past 24 hours.
The rebels shot dead an army colonel, wounded another and robbed a bank barely a day after pulling out of the peace talks that had stalled since an inconclusive third round last week.
The government responded by re-branding the rebels as terrorists.
Security has been tightened across the country.
Amid fears of a flare-up in violence, a dusk to dawn curfew has been imposed in a number of districts.
The worst violence of the insurgency broke out after a similar breakdown of peace talks two years ago.
The rebels have been fighting to replace the monarchy with a communist republic.
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