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NUCLEAR
Spent fuel assembly dropped at Fort Calhoun
Russia: latest nuke news-09/24
Radioactive Parcel Bound for U.S. Seized in Ukraine
Generational Casualties
Troops cleared over uranium scare
Serbia cleans up depleted uranium fired by NATO
PFBR - atoms of a power dream
Israeli military chief warns against Iranian non-conventional weapons
Iran Refines Stance on Nuclear Program
Iran Says It Is Not Able to Make Nukes
Iran Denies Having Nuclear Weapons Technology
Inspectors' report will find no WMD in Iraq: US source
No Conclusions Likely in Iraq CIA Report
Inquiry Unlikely to Report Finding Iraq Arms
U.S. withdrew opposition to Tokai plant
Kawaguchi eyes bigger SDF role
S.Korea's Roh Links Iraq Request to N.Korea Talks
Push for missile defense could lead to risk: US Congress report
Pentagon 'pushing missile defence system too fast'
Report Sees Risks in Push for Missile Defense
New Zealand to build nuclear test monitoring station in Fiji
Secret shipment
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Slams U.S. 'Mini - Nuke' Plans
Congressional Auditors Find U.S. Nuclear Plant Security Flawed
Probe Finds Nuke Plant Security Concerns
Entergy expresses 'sincere regret'
Let the neo-cons bellow, just bring the troops home
There Is Nothing Conservative About the US Policy in Iraq
White House Presses Its $87 Billion Request for Iraq
Clark Lays Out $100 Billion Plan for Jobs and Security
Analysis A Vague Pitch Leaves Mostly Puzzlement
Congress Completes Defense Spending Bills
DEADLINE FOR THE "PATRIOT ACT"
Kucinich in Print
MILITARY
'Most evil place in Afghanistan' under fresh rocket attack: US
AfghaniScam:Livin' Large Inside Karzai's Reconstruction Bubble
Britain's military chief begins India visit
South Korea sends mission to Iraq following US request for troops
Pentagon Faults Senators On Plane-Lease Proposal
Raytheon Group Mulls Predator UAVs For NATO
Bulgarian soldiers in Iraq demand danger money for serving in Iraq
Brussels to give E200m to rebuild Iraq
Schroeder offers support to Bush
Deadly Bombings on Rise in Iraq; 1 Killed in Baghdad Blast
FAO Says Millions of Iraqis Desperately Hungry
Israeli pilots refuse missions in Palestinian territories: TV
Experts: Israeli Military Stronger After American Victory In Iraq
Israel A Danger
Assassination, Occupation, Separation
On the Fence
Hamas Rejects Talk of Cease-Fire with Israel
"Indo-Israeli Alliance Affects Regional Players"
Venezuela's Chavez Blasts U.S. Over 'Terrorist' Plot
Congress, White House at Odds Over Saudi Arabia
TENSION ERUPTS BETWEEN SAUDIS, U.S.
200 held in Yemen 'to placate US'
NATO interested in modernizing Tajik forces: Robertson
Singapore, Malaysian navies in joint exercise
New Philippine defense chief pledges to work for peace
Europe readies for first moon mission
Why gather intelligence if our leaders deliberately ignore it?
Airman Is Charged as Spy for Syria at Guantánamo
Panel to close Pentagon terror-spy office
China urges greater UN role in Iraq
US aggression breeds terror: UN chief
At the U.N., Bush Wins No Fresh Pledges of Iraq Aid
Annan Tells General Assembly That U.N. Must Correct Its Weaknesses
Killer disease hits gulf vets early
Senior general says many more reservists may go to Iraq
Despite Protests, U.S. Soldiers Detain Photographer and Driver
Corps of Engineers Chief Drafts Plan to Reorganize Agency
Networks banned from Iraq council
Déjà Vu With Condoleezza Rice
Iraqi Council Denies Access To 2 Arab Satellite Networks
Belgium drops war crimes cases
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Romney seeks new death penalty
Sept. 11 Panel Weighs Ideas for Domestic Intelligence
Concerns about citizen privacy grow as states create 'Matrix' database
Virus Disrupts U.S. Visas
Ashcroft's edict
Athens Runs Mock Olympics Chemical Attack Drill
ENERGY AND OTHER
No Electricity? Use a Wind-Up Phone Charger
Conservationists Decry Removal of Judge From Everglades Case
Enlarged environmental 'dead zone' ripples across Lake Erie
Toxic fire retardant found in breast milk
ACTIVISTS
U.S. activists ask Congress to withhold Iraq funds
ACLU seeks fairness at protests
Saudi Dissident Arrested Before Reform Meeting
Lawsuit Criticizes Secret Service
Western Shoshone Distribution Bill Sched
A-Bomb Survivors' Message to the People of the United States
Anti-war teacher quits her job rather than her principles
Citizens across the U.S. speak out
Bring Our Children Home from Iraq Now!
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Spent fuel assembly dropped at Fort Calhoun
Washington (Nuclear News Flashes)
24 Sep 2003
Platts
ttp://www.platts.com/stories/nuclear1.html
Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) suspended off-loading Fort Calhoun's core after a spent fuel assembly became "ungrappled" and fell while being moved to its storage location in the plant's spent fuel pool, OPPD spokesman Mike Jones said Sept. 24. The assembly was underwater Sept. 23 when it dropped from the fuel handling machine, he said. Jones said he didn't have information on how far it dropped but said the fuel was not damaged, and no releases occurred as a result of the incident. OPPD won't resume removing fuel from the core until it has a root cause for the drop. Jones said it was too early to tell what effect, if any, this would have on the length of the refueling outage. Fort Calhoun went off line Sept. 12 for a refueling and maintenance outage expected to last around 30 days.
----
Russia: latest nuke news-09/24
From: "Michael Kerjman" <mkwrk2@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Sep 24, 2003 11:37pm
NEWS-NTV-Russia,
24 September,2003
An environmental group "Beluga" has informed of a radioactive impact on employees at the submarines' used nuke facilities storage on Kolsky Peninsula (North of St.Petersburg). Although a level of radiation was within the norm, ten workers had been affected. It is unclear, whether civil personnel were involved.
Following it, both technical and medical data vary between officials much, and what is clear for sure that this accident is the most last attempt to cover a usually occurring feature.
----
Radioactive Parcel Bound for U.S. Seized in Ukraine
September 24, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-ukraine-usa.html
KIEV (Reuters) - A radioactive package addressed to the United States has been seized at Ukraine's main airport in the capital Kiev, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday.
The regional emergencies ministry said the package, discovered Tuesday, was emitting radiation at a rate thousands of times higher than the norm in Kiev of 0.05 milliroentgens an hour.
``This material is being investigated,'' said Mykola Karabet, duty officer for the emergencies ministry in the Borispyl region of Kiev. ``We do not know what it is.
``It was a parcel in some luggage to be sent by air transport... There is no threat to human health or life.''
The United States has been on alert for suspect packages since Washington was all but shut down by letters containing anthrax powder in 2001.
In Ukraine, metal scrap and other objects from the Chernobyl region are often stopped at the borders of the former Soviet state for higher than normal radiation levels.
Large swathes of the country were left with high levels of radioactivity after Chernobyl's reactor number four exploded in 1986, in the world's worst civil nuclear disaster.
Health officials have blamed that accident for thousands of deaths from radiation-linked illnesses and an increase in thyroid cancer.
-------- depleted uranium
Generational Casualties
The Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
By STAN GOFF
September 24, 2003
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/goff09242003.html
My grandson was born last December at Womack Army Medical Center, one of the finest medical facilties in the country now. The labor and delivery room was nicer than many hotel rooms. The care and attention was nonpareil. Military medical care -- now under idiotic pressure to privatize -- is proof that profit is often antithetical to the provision of quality services.
My grandson was born there because his father -- my son -- was entitled to this quality care as a member of the Army. My son is now languishing in a former palace along the Euphrates River, surrounded by millions of people who don't want him there, waiting for mail that takes four to five weeks to arrive, keeping an ear attuned for incoming mortars, and gazing at pictures of his son -- our grandson -- who will not know him when he returns.
My grandson is perfect, and I don't just say that because I have become a grandparent cliche -- which I have, with my office and home both converted into shrines full of baby photos. He is perfect in that he has all his assigned parts, they function in coordination with one another, and his growth and development are proceeding, as the medical folk say, normally. He was born with great lungs and the grip of a longshoreman, he never seems to get sick, and he seems very interested in all people, in all music, in squirrels, and in passing automobiles. He seems to go into a trance when a breeze blows on his face, and he chatters and blows raspberries when he is excited.
I am crazy in love with this child, spoill him shamelessly, have already dedicated a book to him, and I look forward to more grandchildren, having three more kids who are well into their reproductive years.
At a recent Congressional briefing organized by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ten military family members, myself included, testified about our opposition to Bushfeld's War. Afterwards, during dinner together, one of the young military spouses told me that she and her husband, now stationed in Iraq, had made a decision not to have children. Since then, those if us involved with the Bring Them Home Now campaign are hearing this more and more from military couples. They are worried about depleted uranium.
My grandson is learning to walk, and he is immensely curious, which makes for a lot of vigilance and work. But he didn't require massive surgery to survive to his ninth month, nor does he require a battery of experts and specialists like he would if he were born without a thyroid gland, or if he required a drain inserted into his cranial vault, or if his digestive tract were disconnected.
This happens a lot more than it should to Iraqi children, and it may happen to American children born to parents now serving in Iraq. That's why many couples in the military are now deciding that they will not have children. Here is an excert from a letter on the Bring Them Home Now web site: "My husband and I have decided not to have children. We are afraid that something that we've been exposed to in Iraq may cause birth defects. This whole war has turned my life upside down and is even affecting my life years into the future."
For those who are not feint-hearted, you can visit this site where there are some very disturbing images of "extreme birth defects" in Iraq, that are occurring at alarming rates, lest anyone think this is an irrational fear being expressed by these military couples.
I am a big fan of these kinds of images, because the sense of decorum of our so-called press that excludes "offensive" images is a form of complicity. War is offensive. If we are to understand war, we need to see the bodies. People who support it should have to see it. Likewise, if you want to understand the reality of what is going on in the bodies of the troops, you need to see these terribly deformed children. We need to broadcast images of dead people, maimed people, deformed children, including our own dead and maimed and deformed, and we need to do it often. Anything else is denial.
The only people who seem to be denying that depleted uranium may actually be a significant causative agent in these hideous deformities are the governments of the United States and Great Britain, who use DU munitions in Iraq. What a surprise!
But Ross B. Mirkarimi, of the Arms Control Research Centre said, "Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA." This was a report published in 1992 and largely applied (or so people thought) to Iraqis, so it didn't seem to matter here, even in many cases to those in the West who were studying DU. Let's face it, the slow murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, disproportionaly children, by sanctions not only did not arouse American outrage, the US Secretary of State, Madelaine Albright, said -- when confronted publicly with the numbers -- that it was worth it. (It remains utterly amazing to me that we still talk very little here about how racism underwrites American foreign and domestic policy. But the reality is, people often have to themselves come under attack before they wake up to reality and begin to recognize their shared humanity.)
The military knows damn well that depleted uranium, insecticide-impregnated uniforms, insect repellents, toxic smoke, and the questionable cocktail of inadequately tested immunizations they have given may be dangerous, alone or in combination. They are playing the odds that they can squeeze the necessary three, six, or twenty years out of a troop before all the biomedical chickens come home to roost, then -- with the able assistance of the entire US government -- deny that they are responsible.
No one I know of ever signed an enlistment contract that said "I herein surrender the integrity of my DNA." But more and more, it seems, that may be exactly what they've done. What shall I tell my son if he wants to become the father of a second child?
Show up in DC on October 25th, and show up mean and angry. Goddamn decorum! And mail the images from that website to president@whitehouse.gov.
----
Troops cleared over uranium scare
Wed 24 Sep 2003
Australia MSN 9
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/National/story_51928.asp
Negligible quantities of depleted uranium have shown up in tests of Australian servicemen who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government said.
Veterans Affairs Minister Danna Vale said all the personnel who went to Iraq and Afghanistan had been briefed on the potential health risks of depleted uranium before deployment then tested for exposure on their return.
"In view of the wide range of operational, occupational and environmental hazards, Australian Defence Force personnel deployed to the Middle East area of operations are currently offered a post-deployment medical screen as soon as practicable on return to Australia," she said in answer to a question on notice from Labor backbencher Arch Bevis.
"All tests conducted to date have been within the normal range."
A spokeswoman for Mrs Vale said urine samples provided by returned soldiers had been analysed by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).
She said ANSTO's reference range for so-called normal urine uranium concentrations in spot samples was below 50 parts per trillion.
"None of the currently tested defence urine samples are above that range," she said.
Depleted uranium is what's left over from normal uranium once most radioactive isotopes are removed for use as nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.
Its extreme hardness makes it ideal for use as anti-tank projectiles and also as tank armour.
Depleted uranium munitions were used by US and British forces in the 1991 Gulf War and in the recent war against Iraq. It has low radioactivity but the dust is potentially toxic when ingested.
Australia acquired some depleted uranium ammunition when it purchased Phalanx missile defence gun systems for warships in the early 1980s but phased it out by 1986.
The spokeswoman for Mrs Vale said ANSTO did not report results as either negative or positive but only the actual levels from instrument printouts.
She said depleted uranium exposure was assessed by measuring total uranium excretion then looking at the ratio of the U-238 to the U-235 isotopes.
"They further advise that they are unsure as to the exact range of normal urinary uranium excretion in the Australian population. This is currently being studied," she said.
----
Serbia cleans up depleted uranium fired by NATO
September 24, 2003
(AP) Balkans Brief
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/news/world_&xml/&aspKath/world.asp?fdate=24/09/2003
BELGRADE - The remnants of more than 200 bullets made of depleted uranium, fired by NATO during the 1999 war in Kosovo, have been found in an area in southern Serbia, the environment minister was reported as saying late Monday. The depleted uranium, a slightly radioactive heavy metal used by the US military during the 78-day NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, was found in an area of southern Serbia near the border with Kosovo, the environment minister, Andjelka Mihajlov, said. The bullets were found over the past days in an area near Presevo, about 280 kilometers (175 miles) southeast of Belgrade, after the government on September 12 commissioned nuclear and military experts to launch clean up efforts at four sites. Experts will begin cleaning up the other three sites next year.
-------- india / pakistan
PFBR - atoms of a power dream
Placid Rodriguez,
Wednesday, Sep 24, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2003/09/24/stories/2003092400900900.htm
Fast breeder test reactor at Kalpakkam...The return of nuclear power is inevitable the world over. When that happens India can be seller of the breeder technology rather than buyer.
"Success means accomplishments as a result of our own efforts and abilities. Proper preparation is the key to our success. Our acts can be no wiser than our thinking. Our thinking can be no wiser than our thoughts. Our thoughts can be no wiser than our understanding"- George S. Clason
WHEN I was the Director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) between 1992 and 2000, a question often put to me was: "Why is India working on a technology that all the leading countries have given up, or at least slowed down?"
My reply was: "The return of nuclear power is inevitable, and this would include breeders. When that happens, for a change, we can be sellers of technology rather than buyers."
"That is a dream" would be the response to that. But, then, as the song in the film South Pacific goes: "If you don't have a dream, how are you going to have your dream come true?!"
When I heard news of the Cabinet approval for the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), my joy was boundless, arising from my firm conviction about the following:
Any vision for a "developed India" should envisage a minimum total electricity generation of 450 GWe; even this total would only mean approximately 1,500 kWh per capita consumption (assuming a stabilised population of 1.2 billion in the country) much lower than the current world average of 2,500 kWh per capita, let alone the 10,000 kWh per capita in the US and Western Europe.
To achieve the above and, at the same time, ensure energy independence for the nation, nuclear power through the breeder route is inevitable. Energy independence of a nation implies that a major part of the energy requirement is met from resources within the country.
In the absence of any other new technology, FBRs will become relevant and necessary for the whole world. When that happens, India can be a major supplier of this technology.
Let me now substantiate the above three points. The current installed electricity generation in India of 100 GW is distributed among the different resources as follows: Coal: 60GW; hydro: 25 GW; gas: 10GW; nuclear: 2.7 GW; diesel: 1GW; and non-conventional: 1.3 GW.
We have exploited only one-fourth of the hydro-electric potential so far; most of what remains to be exploited is in the North-East and in the Himalayan sub-regions of Northern India, far away from the industrial areas. Future additions to hydro-electricity will be mainly from mini- or micro-hydroelectric plants.
For hydrocarbons, India is already dependent on imports. Coal, which is the major resource for electricity generation, will be the major source of new capacity additions in the near future. But this cannot go on indefinitely. As coal is also needed for non-power (metallurgical) applications, indigenous coal resources cannot sustain an installed capacity of 450 GW for more than 60 years.
Non-conventional energy (NCE) will undoubtedly make increasing contributions in the decades to come. But there are serious limitations to the growth of electricity generation from these sources: Their state of development of technology is relevant only to small plants (a few MW) and they are not economically viable yet.
The potential for solar power in India has been estimated to be as high as 600,000 GW-yr. But with the currently available technologies the minimum solar cell area required to tap even one tenth of this energy is half the land area of the country. For a solar thermal power plant, the maximum plant capacity achieved so far is 50MW.
Thus, while all sources of energy have to be exploited optimally, to provide energy security on a long-term basis, large-scale development of nuclear power is inevitable.
The importance of the fast breeder for India is in the effective multiplication of uranium resources. India's uranium resources can generate electricity of about 340 GW-yr from the 0.7 per cent of U-235 in natural uranium. Through the breeder route (which breeds Pu-239 from the 99.3 per cent of U-238 in natural uranium), the energy potential increases fifty-fold to about 16,000 GW-yr.
India has five times more thorium than uranium and the energy potential from the thorium resources is as high as 200,000 GW-yr. In fact, a point not appreciated by many is that without breeders, nuclear power from indigenous resources will have no rationale on the basis of energy independence for the nation, as the installed capacity without breeding can at best be 50GWe.
Nuclear power will return globally
Now let me put forward my arguments for the conviction that sooner or later nuclear energy (and the fast breeder) will stage a comeback globally:
The World Energy Council (WEC) statement 2000 outlines 10 policy actions, one of the options being, "Keep all energy options open".
Under this option, it says: "Nuclear power is of fundamental importance for most WEC members because it is the only energy supply that already has a very large and well-diversified resource (and potentially unlimited resource if breeders are used), is quasi-indigenous, does not emit greenhouse gases, and has either favourable or at most slightly unfavourable economics. In fact, should the climate change threat become a reality, nuclear is the only existing power technology which could replace coal in base load."
Here are some hard statistics to support the above arguments:
The current primary energy use in the whole world is around 12 TWy (Tera Watt years, 1 Tera Watt = 1000GW), of which electricity accounts for 1.3 TWy.
The projections for 2050 is a minimum (low-growth scenario) of 20 TWy for primary energy use and 2.7 TWy for total electricity generation; for a high growth scenario, the figures would be as high as 85 TWy for primary energy and 5.3 TWy for electricity generation (World Energy Council 2000 projections).
The main point from these numbers is that in the absence of the discovery of new energy resources and emergence of new technologies for electricity generation, nuclear energy is bound to make a comeback; even with a minimum contribution of 1 TWy from nuclear, the return of the Breeder becomes inevitable within 45 years.
There is unity among all forecasts about the emergence of a "hydrogen energy economy". In such a scenario, hydrogen as a clean energy source will replace fossil fuels (note, also, that they will get depleted soon) as the major primary energy source, particularly for transportation.
What is not appreciated is that while hydrogen (in water) is abundant, we need energy to produce it. There will be a definite role for nuclear energy in the hydrogen economy that appears certain to emerge in the second half of this century, if not earlier.
Nuclear radiation could be a method for hydrogen production by dissociation of water. In other methods, such as thermal and electrochemical dissociation of water too, the source of energy could be nuclear.
Are we ready for PFBR construction?
This question has also been addressed to me often of late, and I have been emphatic in giving an affirmative answer.
In my opinion, management of the technology of fast breeder reactor in India is a fascinating story of exercises in technology options, technology acquisitions, technology absorption and adaptation, upgradation and innovation in technology and, above all, building infrastructure and indigenous capabilities in research, design, engineering, materials, manufacturing and fabrication.
The preparedness achieved to launch PFBR is unparalleled in the history of any other technology story in our country.
Let me just narrate the efforts in development of the manufacturing technology.
As part of PFBR technology development, Indian manufacturers have been involved in developing the special tooling and in creating facilities to manufacture the PFBR components. Items taken up for technology development were:
# Components whose fabrication or manufacture was considered difficult and intricate, and those to be made in the country for the first time.
# All components that need to be tested in sodium.
# Prototype of a component that was needed in quality more than one.
# For a large component and one of a kind, a petal or sector.
These exercises in manufacturing technology development have given valuable inputs for finalising the manufacturing, fabrication and inspection procedures and in modifying specified tolerances and procedures on a realistic basis, wherever necessary.
A concrete benefit from these efforts is that the IGCAR teams and the vendors have both travelled up the `learning curve'; other benefits are the in-sodium and other simulated tests on the prototypes to confirm performance characteristics (and to modify design, if necessary) and the availability of modules or sectors of components for developing in-service-inspection techniques.
FBR cost
The cost of construction of the PFBR is Rs 2,800 crore (overnight cost, at February 2002 prices). At 62.8 per cent plant load factor, the unit energy cost for a construction schedule of seven years is estimated at Rs 3.22, with debt-equity ratio of 1:4. Construction delayed by one year will increase the energy cost to Rs 3.3, and by two years to Rs 3.4. Thus, it is seen that the FBR will be, cost-wise, competitive with other energy technologies.
But this is the cost or price of the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) PFBR. When Mr Y. K. Alagh was Minister of State for Science and Technology, at one of my meetings with him, when the PFBR was discussed, the astute economist he is, advised me that we should be talking of the cost of an FBR as we travel up the learning curve and go to series production of a number of reactors.
It was interesting to hear from him how the cost of the steam generator for the PHWR manufactured by BHEL was brought down by him, as the arbitrator, when he was the Chairman, Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices, in a dispute between BHEL and NPCIL. He mentioned that while BHEL took 1,679 days to manufacture the first PHWR steam generator, the manufacturing time of the eighth steam generator came down to 258 days, and this was the basis for the cost reduction award given by the Bureau.
In fact, this aspect of cost reduction, as we build more fast breeder reactors, was discussed in my 1996 Brahm Prakash Memorial Lecture (Indian Institute of Metals, Bangalore Chapter) and the data were readily available for discussion with the Minister (See bar diagram).
If the capital cost of a FOAK PFBR is 100, building a replica will bring down the cost to 71.7. The cost comes down with series construction to 64 for a reactor with two plants on one site and 59.2 per reactor with four plants on one site and somewhat stabilising at 57.7 per reactor for 12 plants on three sites.
It is this stabilised cost of FBR that one should be talking about (and not the cost of the FOAK PFBR), when the cost is compared with other mature, stabilised technologies.
Is it a gamble?
In R&D, and in technology development, one cannot expect 100 per cent success. One must be ready to accept both successes and failures. But when a techno-commercial demonstration project such as the PFBR is taken up for implementation, it cannot be a gamble.
It is the culmination of the vision and foresight of the founding fathers, and decades of dedicated hard work and toil of thousands of engineers and technicians, and it is for everyone involved to resolve and work towards its success.
I am sure of the success because there is a high level of confidence in FBR technology due to the following reasons:
Satisfactory operation of FBTR
In depth R&D efforts in support of PFBR design.
Incorporation of feedback from operation experience of other fast breeder reactors into PFBR design.
Review of design by organisations in France and Russian Federation.
Efforts put in by industries towards manufacturing technology development of NSSS components.
Safety review by AERB.
Availability of conventional components, such as turbines, which are similar to those in a conventional fossil-fired power plant.
In my opinion, no other project of this magnitude in our country has gone through the kind of research, development, design and engineering efforts, and manufacturing technology development exercises that have accomplished a high level of preparedness, before its actual launch.
(The author is a former Director of IGCAR, Kalpakkam.)
-------- iran
Israeli military chief warns against Iranian non-conventional weapons
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924154826.vzatqq6b.html
Israel's military chief of staff issued a warning Wednesday over the danger represented by non-conventional weapons of "an irresponsible" state such as Iran.
"The fact that a country like Iran, an enemy (of Israel) and which is particularly irresponsible, has equipped itself with non-conventional weapons is worrying," General Moshe Yaalon told military radio.
"The combination in this case of a non-conventional regime with non-conventional weapons is a concern," Yaalon said in an interview to mark the Jewish new year.
"At the moment there is ongoing international diplomatic activity to deal with this threat and it would be good if it succeeds.
"But if that is not the case we would consider our options," the general added.
Israel has come to regard Iran as its chief military threat since the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
It warned last month that a new ballistic missile that was officially inaugurated by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei represented a threat to the whole of the Middle East.
Iran put on show its new Shahab-3 ballistic missiles in a military parade in Tehran on Monday, with the rockets sporting slogans including "Israel must be wiped off the map".
The United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has imposed an October 31 deadline on Iran to prove it is not secretly developing nuclear weapons and also urged it to suspend enriching uranium, which the United States claims could be used to make nuclear bombs.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said late last month that Iran's pursuit of a nuclear capability is a "nightmare scenario" which demands immediate international action.
"Iran is fast approaching the point of no return in its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capability," Shalom said.
"It's urgent that the international community act to ensure that this nightmare scenario is prevented."
--------
Iran Refines Stance on Nuclear Program
Envoy to IAEA Says Access Negotiable
By Ali Akbar Dareini
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54721-2003Sep23.html
TEHRAN, Sept. 23 -- Iran remains willing to negotiate with the U.N. nuclear agency on unfettered access for inspectors but will scale back its cooperation with the agency in the meantime, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency said today.
Ali Akbar Salehi had announced Monday that Iran would cut back its cooperation with the IAEA in response to the agency's Oct. 31 deadline for Tehran to prove that its atomic programs were peaceful. Tehran said the move was politically motivated.
Diplomats had said the Iranian decision did not bode well for efforts to resolve the nuclear dispute, but Salehi said today that his comments were being misinterpreted.
"We have decided to fulfill our obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and not beyond that," Salehi said.
"It doesn't mean that we are rejecting the additional protocol or are not prepared to talk on that," Salehi said. The additional protocol would provide IAEA inspectors with unrestricted access to any site in Iran.
Salehi appeared to suggest that Iran's latest position would confine its cooperation with the IAEA to the letter of existing agreements while at the same time negotiating its acceptance of the additional protocol.
The United States has accused Iran of running a clandestine nuclear weapons program and wants the IAEA to declare Tehran in violation of the treaty.
Tehran insists its nuclear programs are designed only to generate electricity.
In Vienna, a spokesman for the IAEA, Mark Gwozdecky, said the agency had heard "nothing official from the Iranian government."
"We've put everything in place to make it possible for Iran to comply with the board of governors' resolution," Gwozdecky said, referring to the deadline. "We hope that Iran will do its part in providing the accelerated cooperation that will be necessary for us to resolve the outstanding questions around the nuclear programs."
-------
Iran Says It Is Not Able to Make Nukes
September 24, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iran-Nuclear.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Iran is able to mine and enrich its own uranium and can develop its atomic energy program independent on its own, but it does not have the technology to develop nuclear weapons, Iran's foreign minister said Wednesday.
Kamal Kharrazi also said Tehran will ``hopefully not'' withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as North Korea did. Last week, a leading hardline Iranian cleric said Tehran should withdraw from the nuclear arms control treaty.
``No, we do not have the technology to make a nuclear weapon,'' Kharrazi told a conference on Eurasian security and economic development held in conjunction with the U.N. General Assembly.
``We have the technology to enrich uranium. There is a difference between having the technology to enrich uranium needed for a power plant as fuel, and the technology to make a bomb.
The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, Austria, has given Tehran until Oct. 31 to prove its atomic energy program is peaceful. Failure to do so means the issue could be referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible enforcement action.
Kharrazi accused the IAEA board of buckling to political pressure from the United States.
The IAEA said traces of enriched uranium that its inspectors found at Kalay-e-Electric Co. in west Tehran, which raised Western suspicions of a weapons program, needed more investigation to determine their origin.
Kharrazi said that before the IAEA reached a final conclusion, Washington rammed through the IAEA board a demand for Iran to prove it had no weapons.
President Bush declared in his 2002 State of the Union speech that Iran was part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
With the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq toppled by U.S.-led military forces and North Korea a pariah state after it declared that it had a nuclear weapons program, Iran is worried that it might be the next country to face U.S. action.
U.S. analysts believe Iran is years away from a nuclear weapon, even with significant foreign assistance.
Kharrazi said Iran had developed high-speed ballistic centrifuges on its own to separate and enrich uranium from its own mines, and denied the technology was imported from Russia.
He said Tehran and Moscow will soon sign an agreement to return to Russia enriched uranium provided to develop the Iranian atomic program. But he added that Iran will be able to enrich its own uranium.
Kharrazi acknowledged that the capability to produce nuclear weapons would be a source of pride for Iran, but insisted that ``Iran is pursuing enrichment technology for peaceful use.''
On Tuesday, Iran's representative to the IAEA said Tehran remains willing to negotiate for IAEA inspectors to enjoy unfettered access to its energy plants but, in the meantime, it will scale back its cooperation with the U.N. watchdog.
``We have decided to fulfill our obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and not beyond that,'' Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's representative to the IAEA, told The Associated Press.
This would limit IAEA inspections to Iran's declared nuclear facilities.
In August, Iran allowed inspectors to visit the Kalay-e-Electric Co. after they were turned away two months before when they came to take environmental samples. Iran allegedly tested centrifuges, which are used to process uranium, at the site.
Kharrazi reaffirmed Wednesday that Iran is ready to negotiate with the IAEA the additional protocol allowing complete access to all nuclear sites. But he said the Bush administration would not accept any amount of proof that Iran's atomic program was peaceful.
When asked whether Iran might withdraw entirely from the treaty, as North Korea did before declaring its weapons program, Kharrazi replied only: ``Hopefully not.''
``We especially agree that the whole region should be free from nuclear weapons,'' he said.
--------
Iran Denies Having Nuclear Weapons Technology
September 24, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-minister.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi on Wednesday denied that Iran has the technology to produce nuclear weapons and reaffirmed that Tehran would never abandon its nuclear programs.
``No, we do not have the technology to produce nuclear weapons. We have the technology to enrich uranium. This is a difference between having the technology to enrich uranium needed for power plant as fuel and the technology to actually make a bomb,'' he told a meeting on the fringes of the U.N. General Assembly.
With Iran under a deadline set by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to prove by Oct. 31 that its nuclear aims are peaceful, Kharrazi gave little ground.
Tehran is willing to negotiate on stricter inspections with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ``but the problem is the Americans believe (that) is not enough,'' he said.
Asked if Iran would consider abandoning its nuclear activities, Kharrazi, speaking at an event sponsored by the Business Council for the U.N., said: ``No. No way. No reason.''
The IAEA, under U.S. pressure, has raised concerns about Iran's nuclear aims and given Tehran until the end of October to dispel doubts it is secretly developing nuclear arms.
The agency has also urged Tehran to sign and implement an Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty which would allow snap inspections of any suspected site.
CHIRAC PRESSURE
French President Jacques Chirac, in an interview with USA Today, said if Iran ``agrees to all the necessary controls'' he would back Tehran's development of a civilian nuclear program.
But if not, Chirac said he would support a U.S. push to take the issue to the U.N. Security Council where sanctions might be imposed.
Underscoring their charge that Iran is developing arms, the Americans say the Islamic republic does not need nuclear energy because it is one of the world's major oil producing countries. Hence, its nuclear programs must be for weapons.
But Kharrazi said that with an annual growth rate approaching 8 percent, Iran is using up its reserves and ``we need to diversify our sources of energy.''
The United States severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 1979 when Islamic fundamentalist student revolutionaries held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Former President Bill Clinton made tentative steps toward resuming contacts, but President Bush has lumped Iran in an ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and North Korea.
Kharrazi said Washington did not appreciate Iran's help in the U.S.-led war to oust from Afghanistan the al Qaeda militant group, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
He said improved ties would depend on ``reciprocal'' cooperation and renewed Iran's call for Washington to release $10 billion in frozen Iranian assets and lift U.S. sanctions.
The Bush administration's ``mindset ... has to be corrected. Iran is an anchor of stability in that region. Why do they have this mindset toward Iran which is very negative?'' he asked.
In a speech before answering questions, Kharrazi called the U.S. occupation of Iraq a ``mistake (which) if left uncorrected may contribute to undermining the moderate mainstream in the Islamic world.''
``The ouster of Saddam (Hussein) was a welcome development, but the situation in Iraq and the whole region could be much worse if the U.S. chooses to stay the current course.''
-------- iraq / inspections
Inspectors' report will find no WMD in Iraq: US source
LONDON (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924175915.xm0p6xp1.html
US and British arms inspectors will report next month that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, the BBC said Wednesday, quoting an unnamed US government source.
The Iraq Survey Group, a 1,400-strong Anglo-American team, will report that not even "minute" amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material have been unearthed, according to the BBC television show "Daily Politics".
In the US, the Central Intelligence Agency said an interim report by former weapons inspector David Kay was not expected to reach any firm conclusions or rule anything in or out.
Iraq's refusal to give up its alleged weapons of mass destruction was cited by London and Washington as a main reason for going to war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq in March.
No delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction and no laboratories involved in developing such weapons were found, according to the BBC report, which quoted a source within the administration of US President George W. Bush.
The BBC reported that Kay's team of scientists, military and intelligence experts did come across some depleted uranium samples in a cave north of Baghdad but reckoned they could have been there since the 1991 Gulf war.
The report will also say it is highly unlikely that any such weapons were squirreled out of Iraq to countries like Syria before the war began, according to the same source.
But the document will, it was reported, include computer programmes and files and paperwork and pictures suggesting that Saddam's regime was developing a weapons of mass destruction programme.
The BBC said that although it had not seen Kay's report, which had not yet been finalised for publication and could be altered, their source had been told of the content of some key passages, which are not expected to be substantively altered.
The BBC said it had also learnt from another source that US intelligence is being forced to conclude that much of what it and British intelligence were told by Iraqi defectors before the war was bogus or misleading.
"It looks like they were telling us what we wanted to hear," the unnamed source had said, according to the BBC.
----
No Conclusions Likely in Iraq CIA Report
September 24, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Hunt.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A preliminary report by the CIA's chief weapons hunter in Iraq will not make any claim of finding weapons of mass destruction, officials at the intelligence agency said Wednesday.
The officials declined to say what specific findings David Kay might include in his upcoming report but said it is not expected to reach any conclusions about Iraq's alleged weapons program.
The Bush administration has not announced finding any weapons of mass destruction, and U.S. and British officials have not disclosed any discoveries that would validate most of their prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons. Those assertions drove their case for invasion and toppling of President Saddam Hussein's government.
Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector, is the CIA adviser working with teams in Iraq searching for evidence of chemical and biological weapons, programs to make more, and prohibited missiles and nuclear weapons programs.
Some Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have said that weapons hunters have found what they interpret as evidence of Iraqi preparations to secretly produce chemical and biological weapons.
That evidence is primarily drawn from documents and interviews with Iraqi officials, the officials said. It suggests plans for weapons production that was to take place primarily at ``dual-use'' manufacturing facilities inside Iraq, the U.S. officials said.
These are buildings with an overt, legitimate purpose, such as making pesticides or pharmaceuticals, but their equipment also can be used to make weapons.
The officials did not know whether searchers had found any evidence that weapons production had actually taken place at these sites.
Two other postwar discoveries in Iraq -- trailers that are suspected biological weapons factories and some buried parts from Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear program -- remain contentious.
Some in the U.S. intelligence community believe the trailers were for hydrogen production for weather balloons. U.N. experts interpret the unearthed parts as evidence Saddam never attempted to reconstitute Iraq's nuclear programs after the first Gulf War.
Kay is expected to present his findings to CIA Director George J. Tenet and other officials soon.
``Dr. Kay is still receiving information from the field, and this will be just the first progress report, an interim report, and we expect it will reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out,'' said CIA spokesman Bill Harlow.
He said it has not been determined how much, if any, of Kay's report would be made public. After the report is complete, Kay is expected to return to Iraq to continue his investigation.
Administration officials in recent days had sought to lower expectations that Kay's report would put to rest ongoing questions about whether Iraq had prohibited weapons and programs.
On Fox News Channel's ``The O'Reilly Factor'' on Wednesday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said: ``David Kay has miles of documents to go through. He has hundreds of people to interview. ... He's going to put together the picture.''
``I await the report eagerly from Mr. Kay as does the international community,'' said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday. ``I'm not going to comment on drafts I may have or haven't seen. What we are looking for is published reports and they will be made available in due course.''
After a summer visit to Iraq, Republican senators said U.S. searchers had uncovered solid evidence of weapons programs. But Democrats on the same trip said the evidence was not definitive. No one provided details.
In August, Kay suggested a breakthrough was close but added that the U.S. government would proceed slowly before going public with any discoveries, to make sure its analysis was sound.
--------
Inquiry Unlikely to Report Finding Iraq Arms
September 24, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-wmd.html
UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An eagerly awaited U.S. inquiry is expected to report finding ``documentary evidence'' that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs but no proof of actual arms, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday.
The expected finding in a report by David Kay, who served as a U.N. nuclear inspector in Iraq in 1991, would be a blow to President Bush who, before ordering the invasion of Iraq last March, argued Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat that justified war.
The failure to turn up any such weapons has eroded U.S. credibility as Bush now seeks greater help from the international community to stabilize and rebuild Iraq.
The Bush administration has not given up, however, and seems to be pinning its hopes on Iraq's former defense minister who was given ``effective'' immunity from prosecution when he surrendered to U.S. forces last week.
Washington believes former Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed, seen at Saddam's side in what is thought to have been the ousted dictator's last public appearance, could provide significant information on Iraqi weapons activities, the senior U.S. official told Reuters.
The official, speaking anonymously, said other ``lower level guys who were technical functionaries in Iraq's weapons programs'' were also given immunity and have been assisting Kay in his Iraqi arms inquiry.
MOST WANTED LIST
Ahmed, number 27 on Washington's wanted list of Iraqi fugitives, turned himself in to U.S. troops in the northern city of Mosul on Sept. 19 after weeks of negotiations.
``I don't know what he's going to say, but he's knowledgeable about what their actual weapons capacity is and he is going to be very important. I think that's one reason why, when they agreed to accept this surrender, they, in effect, agreed not to prosecute,'' the U.S. official said.
``It's more and more apparent the weapons were either very hidden, and we haven't found the people who know where they are,'' the official added, or Saddam kept an arms production capacity that could have been revived once U.N. inspectors left the country.
U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters that reports about Kay's findings were premature and cautioned against jumping to ``definitive conclusions.''
It was uncertain when Kay, who was at the CIA this week working on the report, would brief members of the U.S. Congress, but some sources said it could be as early as next week.
U.S. forces have been searching unsuccessfully for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq for more than five months. The Iraq Survey Group, headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has led the search since June, with the guidance of Kay, a CIA adviser.
The report ``generally will be about chemical and biological weapons and I think he's going to find evidence, documentary evidence, statements by Iraqi scientists and technicians, that they had chemical and biological weapons production programs,'' the senior U.S. official said.
``Whether they will find or disclose anything on the weapons themselves, I doubt,'' he added.
The CIA described the report as an initial document that will ``reach no firm conclusions.''
OPTIONS OPEN
``Dr. Kay is still receiving information from the field. It will be just the first progress report and we expect that it will reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out,'' CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said.
When Kay briefed lawmakers in July, he said there could be ``surprises'' uncovered. But a congressional aide told Reuters: ``I'm unaware of any major surprises.''
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a chief U.S. ally in the Iraq war, has also come under attack over the weapons issue.
At the U.N. General Assembly, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dismissed news of Kay's likely findings as ``speculation on an as yet unpublished report.'' He refused to say if he had seen a draft.
Straw said the case for military action was debated in the United Nations last year when ``the whole of the international community came to a unanimous agreement that Iraq posed a threat to international peace and security because of its development of WMD and its unlawful missile systems.''
``And if people want evidence, they don't have to wait for Dr. Kay's report. What they can do is look at the volumes of reports from the (U.N.) weapons inspectors, going back over a dozen years, including the final report'' last March.
-------- japan
U.S. withdrew opposition to Tokai plant
Declassified documents show that Carter changed mind on nuclear facility
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Japan Times
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20030924a3.htm
WASHINGTON (Kyodo) In the interests of bilateral ties, the United States in 1977 decided against telling Japan to refrain from operating a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Ibaraki Prefecture, according to declassified U.S. government documents.
Then President Jimmy Carter had previously advocated halting the launch of operations at the plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture.
But Mike Mansfield, who had just assumed the post of ambassador to Japan, convinced him to reverse this decision.
Mansfield told Carter that halting operations at the plant, operated by the now-defunct Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corp., would have a detrimental impact on future Japan-U.S. relations, the documents indicate.
A telegram sent by Mansfield urged Washington to reach a prompt compromise on the matter.
A memo handwritten by Carter on the margins of the telegram instructed then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to tell Mansfield that the president would decide quickly on a compromise plan and that it was all right to ask then Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda to present alternatives.
The documents were declassified at the behest of Don Oberdorfer, a former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent who has published a biography on Mansfield, titled "Senator Mansfield."
Oberdorfer said he had confirmed the contents of communications involving Mansfield and Japan in interviews conducted with those familiar with the situation.
Many of the declassified documents show that, on the basis of suggestions made by Mansfield, the Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations treated Japan -- as it grew into an economic power -- as an increasingly important political ally.
In April 1977, Carter unveiled a new nuclear power policy emphasizing nonproliferation. It promoted research on nuclear fuel recycling without the threat of the technology being transferred to military use.
He opposed the launching of the reprocessing plant by Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corp., the predecessor of the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute, saying it was uneconomical.
At the time, construction of the facility was close to completion amid protests from local residents.
But the Carter administration's real fear centered on the extraction of plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons.
Fearing that the situation could rock the bilateral relationship, Mansfield urged the president in July that year to compromise, according to the documents.
The ambassador said it would not look good for the U.S. to allow Britain, France and West Germany to reprocess nuclear fuel but to show a lack of trust in Japan in this regard.
He said that Washington should consider that the energy situation was a vital matter for resource-poor Japan.
The documents also indicate that Mansfield asked Carter not to pressure Fukuda over bilateral trade friction in a memo handed to the president prior to the leaders' summit talks in 1978.
Mansfield, a former Senate majority leader renowned for his contributions to Japan-U.S. ties, served as ambassador to Japan until 1988.
He continued to be a vital link between the two nations thereafter. He died in October 2001 at the age of 98.
----
Kawaguchi eyes bigger SDF role
Minister considers 'other ways to interpret' Constitution
By KANAKO TAKAHARA, Staff writer
The Japan Times:
Sept. 24, 2003
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20030924a2.htm
CABINET INTERVIEW
The government should pursue a more flexible interpretation of the Constitution's war-renouncing Article 9 and allow the Self-Defense Forces to make a greater contribution to global peacekeeping efforts, according to Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi.
Yoriko Kawaguchi
"I think we should continue to place importance on Article 9. But perhaps there are other ways to interpret it," Kawaguchi told journalists shortly after her reappointment Monday.
At present, SDF dispatches overseas are limited.
Under a new antiterrorism law, SDF units have provided logistic support to the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. Another new law has paved the way for troops to be sent to help in Iraq's postwar reconstruction.
The peacekeeping operations law meanwhile sets tight parameters on Japan's engagement in U.N.-led military activities on foreign soil.
Despite pressure from Washington for a prompt dispatch of SDF troops to Iraq, Kawaguchi said Japan would consider the timing and nature of support activities following the return of a government fact-finding team that left for Iraq on Sept. 14.
Despite speculation that she would be replaced, Kawaguchi, a nonpolitician and former trade ministry bureaucrat, retained her post when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reshuffled his Cabinet on Monday.
Kawaguchi was serving as environment minister when she was named foreign minister in February 2002, following the sacking of the popular Makiko Tanaka amid a row within the ministry.
On the issue of Japanese abducted by North Korean agents, Kawaguchi said the government still plans to do its utmost to resolve the matter, despite the replacement of Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe.
Abe has worked for a long time on behalf of the relatives of those believed to have been spirited away to the reclusive state.
Last fall, Pyongyang owned up to the abductions and allowed five surviving abductees to return to Japan.
It refused to allow their offspring or the American husband of one of the five to accompany them.
The fate of several other missing Japanese is still at issue, with Pyongyang's accounts having left many dissatisfied.
The five returnees and their relatives have voiced concern that the government may become less eager to resolve the issue following Abe's appointment as secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Abe now holds no government post.
"The government is united in its effort to achieve the same goal as the families," Kawaguchi said. "I consider everyone a comrade."
As for North Korea's nuclear threat, she voiced hope that a six-nation framework involving the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia can clarify how Tokyo can contribute to getting Pyongyang to abandon its atomic ambitions.
"If we have to worry about (the kind of support Japan should provide), that is a happy situation," Kawaguchi said. "But we are still far from such a stage."
Kawaguchi brushed aside accusations that her lack of leadership has allowed staff within the Prime Minister's Official Residence -- led by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda -- to take the initiative in terms of Japan's diplomacy.
"Diplomacy should be carried out with the prime minister and his staff at the center, while the Foreign Ministry works to follow the policy," she said.
-------- korea
S.Korea's Roh Links Iraq Request to N.Korea Talks
September 25, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - President Roh Moo-hyun, facing hostility at home to a U.S. request for military help in Iraq, has linked the deployment of South Korean troops to progress on defusing the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
The United States has asked South Korea for combat troops to help ease the burden of stabilizing post-war Iraq. A South Korean newspaper quoted a U.S. official as saying Washington would like 5,000 troops and a decision by mid-October.
South Korean officials say a major factor is stability on the peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. troops help deter the North.
The United States and North Korea are at loggerheads over the North's nuclear program. They took part in six-way talks with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea last month but a second round is not expected before November.
In comments that could raise eyebrows in Washington, Roh connected the talks and the request publicly for the first time, although South Korean officials have made the link privately.
``Isn't it difficult for the country to accept the dispatch of our troops abroad in such an uncertain situation as we don't know how the six-way talks will go?'' Roh asked reporters on Wednesday. His office published the comments on Thursday.
``We need something predictable about stability on the Korean peninsula,'' he said. ``For that, the North Korean and U.S. stances are crucial.''
LINKAGE PLAYED DOWN
South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun played down the linkage at a briefing on Thursday.
``The government hasn't officially discussed the troop issue in connection with North Korea's nuclear program and the six-way talks and I haven't heard that such talks are under way even from the National Security Council,'' he said, referring to the powerful group that advises Roh on security policy.
He said North Korea had used pretexts in the past to delay negotiations but it was unlikely in this case.
Jeong has said he will convey updated views at North-South talks in Pyongyang next month. Foreign ministers have been meeting during the U.N. General Assembly session.
North Korea took a one-two swipe at the United States on Thursday for its policy toward Pyongyang with editorials in the main newspapers, Rodong Sinmun and Minju Joson.
Rodong Sinmun said U.S. talk of impending policy changes was a trite trick. Minju Joson said Washington was becoming isolated.
``The U.S. would be well advised to stop such foolish an act as digging its own grave, make a bold switchover in its anachronistic hostile policy toward the DPRK and buckle down to solving the issues between the DPRK and the U.S. including the nuclear issue,'' it said.
The North's KCNA news agency carried the editorials. DPRK are the initials of the North's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Roh told North-South experts on Wednesday South Korea would help boost aid to the North if it ditched its nuclear plans.
Jeong said economic cooperation, which is slowly gathering pace, could help ease tension across the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone that has bisected the peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty.
A more moving aspect of inter-Korean ties has been family reunions. The latest three-day round ended at the North's Mount Kumgang resort on Thursday. A group of 100 South Koreans met 246 North Korean relatives. Some 8,051 people have been reunited, albeit briefly, since the first such event in August 2000.
-------- missile defense
Push for missile defense could lead to risk: US Congress report
www.chinaview.cn
2003-09-24
(Xinhuanet)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2003-09/24/content_1098194.htm
WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 -- The Bush administration's push to deploy a 22-billion-dollar missile defense system by this time next year could lead to unforeseen cost increases and technical failures, Congressional investigators have said.
In a 40-page report released Tuesday, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said the Pentagon was combining 10 crucial technologies into a missile defense system without knowing if theycan handle the task, often described as trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.
The report, cited by The New York Times Wednesday, said an early warning radar system to be deployed in Alaska for tracking enemy missiles had not been adequately tested for that role.
The overall uncertainty has produced "a greater likelihood thatcritical technologies will not work as intended in planned flight tests," the report said. If failures ensue, the Pentagon "may haveto spend additional funds in an attempt to identify and correct problems by September 2004 or accept a less capable system."
The GAO report said the Pentagon expected to spend 21.8 billiondollars on the system between 1997 and 2009.
President George W. Bush announced in last December the plan todeploy a preliminary system of six rocket intercepts in Alaska andfour in California by the end of September 2004.
Critics have said the timetable is devised to yield a missile defense system before the 2004 election so that Bush can point to it as a fulfilled campaign pledge.
----
Pentagon 'pushing missile defence system too fast'
By Peter Spiegel in London
September 24 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480089152&p=1012571727162
The cost of the US's national missile defence system is likely to spiral higher, and the system's effectiveness could be impaired, because the Pentagon is pushing to get the programme operational by the end of next year, congressional investigators say.
The General Accounting Office said this week that introducing untested technologies before they were fully developed could drive the programme well beyond Pentagon estimates.
The GAO report said the Missile Defence Agency had developed and tested only two of 10 vital technologies needed for the ground-based shield, to be built in Alaska and California. The MDA maintains it will have five more ready by the middle of next year, but the GAO found they would be integrated into the final system before they had been fully demonstrated.
"Making a decision to begin system integration of a capability before the maturity of all critical technologies have been demonstrated increases the programme's cost, schedule and performance risks," the GAO said.
In December, President George W. Bush ordered the Pentagon to field a ground-based missile shield in Alaska, where six interceptors will be built, and central California, with four. The system has been described as limited, but Mr Bush's decision significantly accelerated a controversial programme developed piecemeal since Ronald Reagan first proposed a space-based anti-missile system in the 1980s.
The GAO report said the stepped-up schedule proposed by Mr Bush was largely responsible for the premature integration, a point the administration has quietly conceded in budget documents. "As a result, there is greater likelihood that critical technologies will not work as intended in planned flight tests," the GAO said, which could force the Pentagon to spend more funds than expected or "accept a less capable system".
The Defense Department has budgeted approximately $10bn (?8.7bn, £6bn) a year over the next five years to fund the missile defence programme, and congressional appropriators last week approved $9.1bn to be spent next year on the system. The portions in Alaska and central California will cost an estimated $21.8bn through to 2009, $6.2bn of which has already been spent.
The GAO report singled out a radar being developed to track incoming missiles as a particular problem. The "Cobra Dane" radar is currently used to collect data on some Russian test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, but does no "real-time" data processing or communications.
In order to fit into the missile defence system by the end of next year, it must be upgraded to perform both functions, a task that will require significant software changes, which will be completed only shortly before the entire system is to go online.
"Unless the current test programme is modified, the only opportunities for demonstrating Cobra Dane in an operational environment would come from flight tests of foreign missiles," the GAO said.
----
Report Sees Risks in Push for Missile Defense
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
September 24, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/politics/24MISS.html
The Bush administration's push to deploy a $22 billion missile defense system by this time next year could lead to unforeseen cost increases and technical failures that will have to be fixed before it can hope to stop enemy warheads, Congressional investigators said yesterday.
The General Accounting Office, in a 40-page report, said the Pentagon was combining 10 crucial technologies into a missile defense system without knowing if they can handle the task, often described as trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.
The report especially criticized plans to adapt an early warning radar system in Alaska to the more demanding job of tracking enemy missiles, saying it had not been adequately tested for that role.
The overall uncertainty, the investigators said, has produced "a greater likelihood that critical technologies will not work as intended in planned flight tests." If failures ensue, they added, the Pentagon "may have to spend additional funds in an attempt to identify and correct problems by September 2004 or accept a less capable system."
Dr. Philip E. Coyle III, a former head of weapons testing at the Pentagon, said in an interview that the report showed that if the system was switched on in late 2004, it would be "no more than a scarecrow, not a real defense."
Some critics say the timetable is devised to field a missile defense system before the 2004 election so President Bush can point to it as a fulfilled campaign pledge.
But Pentagon officials say that the timing is prompted by security concerns and that the Sept. 30, 2004, target date came about simply because it is the end of the fiscal year.
The system, initially with six rocket interceptors in Alaska and four in California, will fire "kill vehicles" that would destroy warheads by force of impact.
In its report, the accounting office said the Pentagon expected to spend $21.8 billion on the system between 1997 and 2009.
Of the 10 antimissile technologies, the report said that contractors and military officials had demonstrated the readiness of 2: infrared sensors on the kill vehicle and the fire-control software of ground-based computers. It said five other technologies - two for booster rockets, two for kill vehicles and one for signaling between ground controllers and kill vehicles in space - would be tested next year.
The report said "the least mature" technologies were three radar systems meant to track incoming warheads. It said the Pentagon planned to certify two in the 2005 fiscal year - after the missile defense system's initial deployment - and to skip testing a final one, known as Cobra Dane, on Shemya Island at the tip of the Aleutians. The Pentagon is struggling to adapt this early warning radar to an antimissile role.
The report called for realistic testing of the Cobra Dane radar before deploying the antimissile system. In a response to the report, the Pentagon said it would try to do that.
The report was requested by Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, the ranking minority member on the subcommittee on financial management of the Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee.
"If the radar does not work, the system will not be able to intercept incoming missiles," Mr. Akaka said in a statement. "We should not be funding an expensive rush to failure in order to meet an artificial deadline set by the president."
Critics say the $22 billion will be wasted in any case because any nation that can build a long-range missile can develop ways to foil antimissile arms, an assertion Pentagon experts reject as giving too little credit to missile defense technology.
-------- pacific
New Zealand to build nuclear test monitoring station in Fiji
WELLINGTON (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924054004.v9b7hpni.html
New Zealand said Wednesday it would build a nuclear test monitoring station in Fiji as part of a global network of facilities.
Health Minister Annette King signed a contract on behalf of the government with the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) to instal a monitoring station in Nadi, on the western side of Fiji's main island of Viti Levu.
New Zealand's National Radiation Laboratory will build the one million NZ dollar (600,000 US) station, part of a worldwide network of 321 monitoring posts designed to help enforce the nuclear test-ban treaty.
The treaty, signed by more than 160 countries, including New Zealand, is intended to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and lead to disarmament.
-------- russia
Secret shipment
September 24, 2003
(AP) Balkans Brief
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/news/world_&xml/&aspKath/world.asp?fdate=24/09/2003
A shipment of weapons-grade uranium was clandestinely transported from Romania to Russia, in a US-funded program meant to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism, Romanian authorities said yesterday. The 14 kilograms (30 pounds) of highly enriched uranium shipped over the weekend will be degraded to a form useless for weapons use, said Lucian Biro, the chairman of the National Commission Controlling Nuclear Activities. The uranium left Romania late Sunday on a flight to Novosibirsk in eastern Russia, as part of a $400,000 operation funded by the US Energy Department, said the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA, US, Russian and Romanian officials supervised the transport.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Slams U.S. 'Mini - Nuke' Plans
September 24, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-usa-elbaradei.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog sharply criticized Washington's planned research into a new type of small nuclear bomb, saying Wednesday it would send the wrong signal to states considering atomic weapons.
``I had strong reservations, to say the least, when I read that there are plans to research small nukes,'' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told U.S. National Public Radio.
``It really sends absolutely the wrong message, that we are not moving toward disarmament, but that we are reversing course,'' he said.
The administration of President Bush has said it is interested in studying the so-called mini nukes, but not in deploying them.
The mini nukes would be bombs with a yield of less of than five kilotons -- less than half the size of the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945.
ElBaradei said that such research would encourage states with hidden ambitions of developing atomic weapons to go for it.
``It sends a message to all the 'wannabes' that if you really want to have security, prestige, status -- go for nuclear weapons, and that's clearly not the way we want to go,'' he said.
After strong lobbying by the United States for action, the governing board of the IAEA on September 12 set an October 31 deadline for Iran to prove it is not secretly developing nuclear weapons as Washington alleges.
Under the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia were allowed to keep nuclear weapons, though they agreed to negotiate in good faith toward full nuclear disarmament.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Congressional Auditors Find U.S. Nuclear Plant Security Flawed
WASHINGTON, DC,
September 24, 2003
(ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2003/2003-09-24-04.asp
Security at the 104 U.S. nuclear power plants needs immediate upgrading, according to a report released today by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The report recommends that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's oversight at commercial nuclear power plants be improved by "promptly restoring annual security inspections" and strengthening force-on-force exercises designed to prepare security personnel to deal with an attack.
The report on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) oversight of power plant security was prepared at the request of Congressman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and committee member Congressman Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who also serves on the House Homeland Security Committee.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) was asked to review the effectiveness of the NRC's security inspection program and legal challenges affecting power plant security.
The GAO determined that although the NRC has "taken numerous actions to respond to the heightened risk of terrorist attack," three aspects of its security inspection program were flawed.
Baltimore Gas and Electric Company's Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant (Photo courtesy NRC) First, NRC inspectors often used a process that minimized the significance of security problems found in annual inspections by classifying them as "non-cited violations" if the problem had not been identified frequently in the past or if the problem had no direct, immediate, adverse consequences at the time it was identified, the GAO reports.
Non-cited violations do not require a written response from the power plant licensee and do not require NRC inspectors to verify that the problem has been corrected.
For example, the GAO found that guards at one plant failed to physically search several individuals for metal objects after a walk-through detector and a hand-held scanner detected metal objects in their clothing. The unchecked individuals were then allowed unescorted access throughout the plant's protected area.
"By making extensive use of non-cited violations for serious problems, NRC may overstate the level of security at a power plant and reduce the likelihood that needed improvements are made," the GAO warned.
Second, the NRC has no routine, centralized process for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating security inspections to identify problems that may be common to plants or to provide lessons learned in resolving security problems, the GAO pointed out.
Third, although NRC's force-on-force exercises can demonstrate how well a nuclear plant might defend against a real life threat, several weaknesses in how NRC conducted these exercises limited their usefulness.
The GAO reported weaknesses including using more personnel to defend the plant during these exercises than during a normal day, attacking forces that are not trained in terrorist tactics, and using unrealistic weapons - rubber guns - that do not simulate actual gunfire.
Only limited use of some available improvements that would make force-on-force exercises more realistic and provide a more useful learning experience have been incorporated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the report found.
Releasing the GAO report today, Congressman Dingell said, "It is unfortunate that one terrorist attack on American soil wasn't enough to prompt the NRC to pay greater attention to the security risks at some of our country's most vulnerable sites. The GAO report is another wake up call to the NRC that they need to change their attitude about nuclear security by making much needed improvements immediately."
Congressman John Dingell of Michigan (Photo courtesy Office of Representative Dingell) In April, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a new design basis threat that the commercial nuclear power plants must be prepared to defend against.
"However," the report warned, "NRC's past methods for ensuring that plants are taking all of the appropriate defensive measures - the annual security inspections and the force-on-force exercises - had significant weaknesses. As a result, NRC's oversight of these plants may not have provided the information necessary for NRC to ensure that the power plants were adequately defended."
"It is stunning that the NRC still isn't assuring the safety of the millions of Americans who live near the 104 licensed nuclear reactors two years after the attacks of September 11," said Markey today. "GAO has documented a disturbing pattern of lax NRC oversight and inattention to security at these sensitive facilities that are at the very top of Al Qaeda's list for future attacks."
The NRC is in the process of revising both its security inspection program and its force-on-force exercise program. The NRC expects its security inspection program to be restored by 2004 and will decide the future of its force-on-force program after completing its pilot program - at a date yet to be determined.
Jim Wells, director of the GAO's Natural Resources and Environment division, explained in the report that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had seen a draft version for review and comment.
"NRC stated that our report did not provide a balanced or useful perspective of its role in ensuring security at commercial nuclear power plants. NRC believed that our report was 'of a historical nature,' focusing on NRC's oversight of power plants before September 11, 2001, and that our report failed to reflect the changes NRC has made to its program since September 11.
The commission told the GAO that its characterization of "non-cited violations as minimizing the significance of security problems is a serious misrepresentation," Wells wrote.
The commission called the issues raised in the GAO report "anecdotal" and said they were "relatively minor issues" and that it treated them appropriately.
"We agree," Wells wrote, "that NRC has taken numerous and appropriate actions since September 11, 2001, and that additional security procedures have been, and are being, put in place to increase power plant operators' attention to enhancing security."
But, Wells warns, "NRC's oversight actions since September 11 have been interim in nature; it has conducted ad hoc inspections and some force-on-force exercises as part of a pilot program."
Oconee nuclear power plant in Oconee County, South Carolina is operated by Duke Energy. (Photo courtesy NRC) The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has suspended the two primary elements of its oversight program - the security inspection program and the force-on-force exercises - and has not yet resumed them, the GAO points out.
Wells defends the GAO's inclusion of pre-September 11 security practices by explaining, "NRC said that it plans to reinstitute the security inspection and the force-on-force exercise programs in the future, but it does not now know what the revised programs will consist of. As a result, we remain convinced that it was appropriate to examine NRC's security oversight program before September 11. In the absence of any formal post-September 11 oversight program, this was the only way to systematically assess the strengths and weaknesses of NRC's oversight."
The GAO's recommendations are "directed at strengthening the oversight programs and making NRC's oversight more relevant to the post-September 11 environment," Wells wrote.
The GAO recommends that the NRC commissioners ensure that NRC's revised security inspection program and force-on-force exercise program are restored promptly and require that NRC regional inspectors conduct follow-up visits to verify that corrective actions have been taken when security violations, including non-cited violations, have been identified.
The NRC should routinely collect, analyze, and disseminate information on security problems, solutions, and lessons learned and share this information with all NRC regions and licensees, the report states.
The commissioners should make force-on-force exercises a required activity and strengthen them by conducting the exercises more frequently at each plant.
The exercises should use laser equipment to ensure accurate accounts of shots fired, and require the exercises to make use of the full terrorist capabilities stated in the design basis threat, including the use of an adversary force that has been trained in terrorist tactics.
The NRC commissioners should continue the practice, begun in 2000, of prohibiting licensees from temporarily increasing the number of guards defending the plant and enhancing plant defenses for force-on-force exercises, the GAO recommends.
The GAO report will be submitted to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and the House Committee on Government Reform not later than 60 days after the date of this report's release, which is today.
It will be submitted to the Senate and House Committees on Appropriations with the agency's first request for appropriations made more than 60 days after today.
The report, "Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Oversight of Security at Commercial Nuclear Power Plants Needs to Be Strengthened," is available on the GAO website at: http://www.gao.gov.
----
Probe Finds Nuke Plant Security Concerns
September 24, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Security.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal inspections and security exercises at commercial nuclear power plants often overstate the level of protection and reduce the likelihood of security improvements, according to congressional investigators.
The report said that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's inspection reports were found to not include incidents such as a guard found sleeping or falsification of security logs as security violations.
It also said that attack exercises that are supposed to test a plant's ability to detect and repel a mock terrorist assault often are staged in such ways that they provide false assurances about a facility's security.
The findings by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, mirror claims made by nuclear industry watchdog groups and some industry whistle-blowers. They maintain that security at nuclear power plants, despite some recent attempts at improvement, cannot deal with a sophisticated, well-armed terrorist attack.
Neither NRC officials or industry representatives could be reached immediately. The report was released late Wednesday.
In the past, industry representatives have said they have made major improvements in security since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
NRC officials have defended their inspection program and exercises as providing valuable experience and information that is used to improve reactor-site security. They argue if it made too realistic and no advance notice is provided an exercised could end up with someone being shot.
But Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and John Dingell, D-Mich., who requested the report, said the findings demonstrate that not enough has been done to assure that nuclear power plants are being safeguarded against terrorists.
Congressional investigators have ``documented a disturbing pattern of lax NRC oversight and inattention to security at these sensitive facilities,'' said Markey, a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee and a frequent critic of the NRC.
Dingell, ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the nuclear agency, said the report is ``a makeup call to the NRC that they need to change their attitudes about nuclear security.''
The report was particularly critical of the NRC's annual security inspections, saying that they ``may overstate the level of security'' at power plants by not citing certain shortcomings and by not assuring that failures are fixed.
It cited as one example a case where a security guard was found asleep on duty for more than half an hour. The NRC inspector called it a ``non-cited violation'' because no attack had taken place and because the incident appeared not to be a regular occurrence.
As to the mock exercises, investigators said they did not reflect ``the real life'' ability of guard forces to defend against actual terrorist threats. For example, according to the report, the NRC exercises:
--allow plant operators advance warning. On the night of the mock attack, they often have as much as 80 percent more guards on duty than normal.
--often use ``mock terrorists'' not trained in terrorist techniques including at times off-duty plant managers and guards who may have a vested interest in how the tests turn out.
--allow attackers to use ``unrealistic weapons'' such as rubber guns that do not accurately reflect attack situations.
Industry officials have defended the exercises and have said that some degree of warning has to be given and limits have to be made on how realistic the exercises are, or someone is likely actually shot someone and possibly get killed.
Peter Stockton, an investigator for Project on Government Oversight, a private watchdog group that has raised many of the same security issues as cited by the GAO, said he found it ``mystifying'' that guard forces could be inflated for the mock exercises.
---------
Entergy expresses 'sincere regret'
September 24, 2003
By SUSAN SMALLHEER
Rutland Herald Staff
http://rutlandherald.com/News/Story/72054.html
The head of Entergy Nuclear in Vermont has sent a letter of "sincere regret" to the Public Service Board, promising another in-house review to make sure the company complies with the board's repeated orders that all relevant documents in the company's power case are shared.
"I sincerely regret that discovery difficulties have interfered with the ability of the parties to review the proposal and present their viewpoints," Jay K. Thayer, Entergy site vice president, wrote in a letter to Michael Dworkin, chairman of the Vermont board, dated Tuesday.
"I believe that the review described above will result in the full disclosure of all documents relevant to power uprate," he said.
Last week, at the end of three days of technical hearings into Entergy's plans to increase power production, Dworkin and other board members read Entergy's attorneys a regulatory riot act, saying they appeared to be guilty of trickery by trying to impeach a witness with new documents, and claiming them to be otherwise.
"At last Wednesday's hearing, the board expressed grave concerns regarding Entergy VY's compliance with board orders," Thayer noted. "I personally want to assure the board that all of us at Vermont Yankee understand that the board's process must be fair, open and comprehensive. We also understand that it is our obligation to provide information requested by the parties to this case."
Thayer, in his letter, said he had spoken with his legal team on the case, Victoria Brown and Gary Franklin of the Burlington law firm of Eggleston & Cramer.
Thayer's letter was released after the close of business Tuesday afternoon by Entergy's public relations office, but he was unavailable for direct comment.
But Robert Williams, Entergy Nuclear's spokesman, said that the two-page letter was "an expression of sincere regret ... the letter speaks for itself."
Raymond Shadis, on the staff of the New England Coalition, said that Thayer's letter was "so much crocodile tears and nothing more."
"What is this? A death-bed conversion?" Shadis said. "This is typical of corporate and bureaucratic manipulation. To suggest there's something wrong with their system? This is a question of basic honesty. They knew very well the documents were incomplete."
Shadis this summer had assembled a small group of nuclear experts to evaluate Entergy's plans, but they were largely thwarted because of incomplete or missing documents.
Entergy wants to add, in essence, a 110-megawatt reactor to the existing 540-megawatt station already in Vernon, a 20 percent increase.
According to a recent filing with the NRC, the federal agency that will review the proposal, the company plans on changing the nuclear fuel more often, so that younger and hotter fuel generates more heat and steam, which is converted to electricity.
The New England Coalition, which has been fighting Vermont Yankee since it was first planned in the 1960s, contends that the power increase would be a dangerous thing for a small, aging reactor to undertake. The financial benefits are all Entergy's, the coalition says, while the risks are Vermonters'.
So far, the Department of Public Service, which acts as the ratepayers' advocate, has refused to endorse the plan, saying there is no economic incentive for Vermont ratepayers, that, in fact, there is substantial financial risk.
The department's support is usually viewed as key in such a case before the Public Service Board.
Last year, when Entergy was seeking the board's approval of its $180 million purchase of Vermont Yankee, the department's support was pivotal.
Shadis, who was invited by the board last week to suggest sanctions against Entergy Nuclear, said that even Tuesday, when he received another round of documents about the power increase, Entergy didn't follow the Public Service Board's orders.
"Protocols are important. As of today, they are still mistreating the process," he said.
He said the UPS man delivered Entergy Nuclear's filing with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission "dumped in a bag and shipped to me like a dead cat."
Most importantly, he said, there was no cover letter and formal pledge from either the attorneys or Entergy officials that the documents were complete and true.
"If they're going to start to do things right, when are they going to start?" he asked.
Shadis wouldn't say Tuesday evening what sanctions against Entergy Nuclear he would be seeking when he files the New England Coalition's request with the board on Wednesday. Entergy has until Monday to respond.
Thayer closed his letter with a somewhat cryptic promise to the board: "I am prepared to take additional management actions should they prove necessary to ensure Entergy fully meets the board's expectations in these proceedings."
When asked what that meant, Williams repeated: "The letter speaks for itself."
Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.
-------- us politics
Let the neo-cons bellow, just bring the troops home
Bruce Ramsey editorial columnist
Seattle Times
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001742573_ramsx24.html
George, here's what to do in Iraq: Declare victory and bring the troops home.
A senator from Vermont once suggested such a policy during the Vietnam War. It would have meant a defeat. In this case, it might mean chaos, at least for a while, unless you can get more international help.
You asked for help from the U.N. That was good. Get back to them and say, "We're serious. We're on a fast track to leave."
To America's soldiers, you can say: "You're fighters, not social workers. The fighting's done, excellent work, and you can start going home."
Thousands of American families will thank you.
To the American people, you can say: "We've changed our minds about the occupation of Iraq. We'll need only part of that $87 billion I asked for. The rest you can keep."
Watch your poll numbers go up.
The warrior intellectuals - the neoconservatives - will bellow. Let them. They don't have any electoral votes. The American people never bought their "neo-Wilsonian" fantasies of empire. Asserting American dominance was never your argument for war. You said Americans had to depose Saddam Hussein in order to protect themselves.
That's done.
Our occupation of Iraq is not yet six months old and already Iraqis are making sure that we tire of it. This will not tend to get better. An antiwar feeling has arisen in the United States, and Howard Dean, a nobody from a small state, has ridden it to the head of the pack. Dean says he wouldn't have gone to war in the first place. Few notice that Dean also says we ought to stay in Iraq to do nation-building.
"Well, Howard," you can say, "I'm bringing the troops home. If you're elected, you can send them back."
Would America be giving up if we did that? We would be giving up the right to reconstruct Iraq our way. We would not be giving up anything the average American cares about.
Certainly, the American people would accept a change in policy. They have accepted the official story from the start - the weapons of mass destruction, the "link" between Saddam and bin Laden, the "Woman Warrior" story about Pvt. Jessica Lynch. They are not paying much attention to Iraq. They will accept a pullout.
Consider the alternative: Five years of occupation. Maybe 10. Bombs, demonstrations, dead Americans.
Think of the Democrats. In 2002 you beat them by offering to save America from a foreign threat. If you do that in 2004, you're going to be in trouble. Americans get tired of wars that drag on and on, and tend to toss out the political party that does the dragging. Look up the election of 1952. Also 1968. Ask your dad about the political shelf-life of military victory. It is less than one year.
Think of the economy. Business has been terrible since you became president. The people have been pretty forgiving about that. They know the dot-com bust was not your doing (nor Clinton's, really). You have given the people a tax cut, and Alan Greenspan has given them rock-bottom interest rates. In normal times, these would produce a snapping recovery. But war sits on business confidence like a fat man on a dog.
Your war, a Republican war, of which the politically profitable part is over. We are now in the losing part. The occupation of Iraq could drag on well past November 2004.
But you can forestall that. Lean on the U.N. for troops. Lean on the Egyptians; they owe us a favor or two for the billions we've doled out to them. Speed up the creation of an Iraqi government. You don't need to wait for elections. That's Iraq's business.
Then you can announce that most of the troops will be home by Christmas and you will not be needing all of that $87 billion.
Watch Wall Street jump. The dollar, too.
Nobody expects you to do this. It will shock your friends, but what's more, it will confound your enemies. It will also steer the Republican Party back toward that nationalistic but "humble" foreign policy you described three years ago, which best suits the interests, and the patience, of those who might vote for you in 2004.
Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com
----
There Is Nothing Conservative About the US Policy in Iraq
by Rep. John J. Duncan
September 24, 2003
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/duncan3.html
Conservatives have never believed in massive foreign aid. Our occupation of Iraq has become the largest foreign aid program in the history of the world.
We are building or rebuilding thousands of Iraqi schools, giving free health care to Iraqi citizens, and even making back payments to the Iraqi military and Iraqi retirees.
Last week I read that we are sending 60,000 soccer balls there. Our Founding Fathers could not have foreseen this in their wildest dreams.
Conservatives have never favored huge deficit spending. We are now told our deficits will reach an astounding one trillion dollars counting this fiscal year and the next.
Supporters of the war scoffed at predictions that we would spend $200 to $300 billion in Iraq over the next 10 years.
Now, by the most conservative estimates, not counting many things that should be counted, the Iraqi operation will cost us $167 billion in just the first two years.
And because we are in such a deep fiscal hole already, we will have to borrow all these billions we are spending there.
Conservatives have never believed in world government and have been the biggest critics of the United Nations.
Yet some prominent war supporters, while criticizing the U.N. in one breath, would say in the next that we had to go to war to enforce all the U.N. resolutions that Saddam Hussein had violated.
If this is not world government, then what is? And why should we put almost the entire burden of enforcing U.N. resolutions on the U.S. military and American taxpayers? That is not conservative.
Conservatives have been strong supporters of national defense, not international defense.
Senator Robert Taft wrote: "No foreign policy can be justified except a policy devoted...to the protection of the liberty of the American people, with war only as the last resort and only to preserve that liberty."
Conservatives have never believed that the United States should be the policeman of the world.
President John Quincy Adams, in one of his most famous statements, said: "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Presidents Washington and Jefferson both warned against permanent or entangling alliances with other countries.
Now, we have been in Korea for 50 years, spending over three billion dollars a year to "protect" that nation, in spite of massive anti-American demonstrations there. We are still in Bosnia even though President Clinton promised we would be out by the end of 1996. In fact we have a military presence of some sort in almost every country.
Most traditional conservatives believe we would not have nearly as many enemies around the world if we followed a non-interventionist foreign policy and did not get involved in so many religious, ethnic, and political disputes in other countries.
The so-called Neo-Cons have great power but really are a small minority of American conservatives, if they are conservative at all.
The syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote recently: "Critics of the war against Iraq have said since the beginning of the conflict that Americans, still strangely complacent about overseas wars being waged by a minority in their name, will inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire across the globe."
A very small minority of very powerful Neo-Cons have apparently dreamed of war with Iraq for many years. They got their wish. But what they may have thought would be their crowning achievement may instead lead to their downfall.
So many people in the U.S. and around the world feel that they were misled about the need to go to war in Iraq that they almost certainly will be much harder to convince the next time around.
Saddam Hussein was a very evil man, but he had a military budget only about 2/10 of one percent of ours and was never any real threat to us. Everyone knew we would win the war quickly and easily.
But Fortune magazine, in its November 25th issue, long before the war started, published an article entitled "Iraq- We Win, What Then?" The article said a "military victory could then turn into a strategic defeat" and that an American occupation would be "prolonged and expensive" and "could turn U.S. troops into sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists." These predictions have turned out to be deadly accurate.
The great conservative columnist Charley Reese wrote that a U.S. attack on Iraq "is a prescription for the decline and fall of the American empire. Overextension urged on by a bunch of intellectuals who wouldn't know one end of a gun from another - has doomed many an empire. Just let the United States try to occupy the Middle East, which will be the practical result of a war against Iraq, and Americans will be bled dry by the costs both in blood and treasure."
Where are we now? The September 1 Time magazine said "an Iraq in which civil servants are murdered while aid workers live under armed guard is not a success."
William Pfaff, in a column in the International Herald Tribune in late August, wrote that "there is no victory in sight, not even a definition of victory" and that "killing fields" have now opened "that no one knows how to shut down, with American forces themselves increasingly the victims."
Shortly thereafter, Adil Allawi wrote a letter to the Editor of the Financial Times. It is interesting because he was an opponent of Hussein's who has been forced to live outside of Iraq for 30 years.
Mr. Allawi wrote: "Replacing a U.S. occupation with a U.N. occupation will only create a different target for the bombers....The root of the violence is that Iraq is occupied by a foreign power. There is no real vision of how that occupation might be transformed into a representative government. Iraqis should be providing their own security but I cannot see how they can risk their and their families' lives for a fuzzy promise."
No nation has even come close to doing as much for other countries as has the United States. Yet despite hundreds of billions in oversees spending, the National Journal last December said "signs of resistance to U.S foreign policy leadership are growing, as is widespread resentment about the long shadow the American Goliath casts across the globe."
In that same issue, columnist William Schneider wrote: "Throughout the Middle East, anti-Americanism has grown along with U.S. influence....The lesson: Great power breeds great resentment."
Almost all conservatives applauded and were enthusiastic when President Bush, as a candidate, said that he opposed nation-building and that we needed a more humble foreign policy. Over 80% of House Republicans voted against our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I strongly supported President Bush in the 2000 election, and I will support him again in 2004.
My party unity scores were the exact same in both 2001 and 2002- 91%. My ratings from the American Conservative Union were the exact same for both 2001 and 2002- 92%. It is unusual, and it was unintentional, to have the exact same scores two years in a row, but these ratings clearly show that no one can fairly question either my loyalty to the Republican Party or my conservatism.
I represent a district that has voted Republican for Congress and President since the founding of the Republican Party. Yet now there are many life-long Republicans who are wondering why in the world we are borrowing billions to rebuild Iraq when there are so many people unemployed and so many needs here at home.
I have expressed my views in regard to Iraq without once ever criticizing President Bush. In fact, I continue to believe that this war came about because he is surrounded by big government Neo-Cons in key foreign policy positions rather than traditional conservatives.
Many, possibly even most, Republicans in the House have expressed misgivings and concerns about our policy in Iraq but have reluctantly gone along with the White House.
Now it is politically correct for most on both sides of the aisle to repeat noble clichés like "we have to get the job done" and "we must stay the course" and the American people "must be willing to make the sacrifice."
Well, we should all be asking why. It is clear that the Iraqi people do not want us running Iraq. They only want our money.
Neo-con interventionist foreign policies are only breeding resentment, creating even more enemies, and putting our children and grandchildren into a financial black hole so deep they may never get out.
In 1967, Russell Kirk and James McClellan, in a book called The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, wrote that Taft, while no pacifist, believed that "every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action" because "war would make the American president a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, break in upon private and public morality. The constitutions of government in America were not made for prolonged emergencies; and it might require generations for the nation to recover from a war of a few years' duration."
No matter who is President, almost all the leaders of the Defense Department, the State Department, the National Security Council, and our intelligence agencies are going to advocate more and more involvement in foreign affairs, even those which should be none of our business or even where there is no threat to our vital interests.
This is because all their power and glory and, most importantly, their funding are determined in large part by our involvement in the affairs of other nations. These people are not seen as men and women of action and as world statesmen unless they urge that we do more and more in other countries.
Unfortunately, we do not have many Calvin Coolidge's leading these departments and agencies today.
I wish more of our leaders would heed the advice of President Kennedy who said in 1962: "we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient - that we are only six percent (now four percent) of the world's population - that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind - that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity - and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
There is nothing conservative about the U.S policy in Iraq.
----
White House Presses Its $87 Billion Request for Iraq
September 24, 2003
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/politics/24CND-COSTS.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 - The Bush administration told senators today that the $87 billion it seeks for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan would be invested, in a larger sense, in the security of the United States and the cause of freedom itself.
But several Democrats were disdainful of that argument, and accused the White House of distorting history, including some recent history. And even those lawmakers who said they would vote to provide the $87 billion for military spending and reconstruction expressed misgivings.
"It's a great deal of money, let there be no doubt," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee. "But it's a modest fraction of our nation's wealth. To defend freedom in the 21st century, we need to rout out terrorists. And we need to help the now-free people in Iraq and Afghanistan rebuild from the rubble of tyranny."
L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator in Iraq, delivered the same message to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"Make no mistake," Mr. Bremer told the panel. "These requested funds represent an investment in America's national security. You may think I exaggerate, but I ask you to look at what happened in Afghanistan, another country which after it was debilitated by decades of war and mismanagement became easy prey to the Taliban and Al Qaeda."
The two administration officials, testifying at the same time, were received courteously by lawmakers from both parties. Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who heads the Appropriations Committee, said early on: "We cannot afford to fail the people of Iraq. We must complete our mission."
But Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee who has emerged as one of the fiercest Democratic critics of the administration's policy on Iraq, assailed the administration yet again.
"The American people deserve to know more about what the administration has planned," Mr. Byrd said. "But rather than explanations of the administration's long-term plan for Iraq, the American people only get comparisons to the Marshall Plan."
A moment later, the West Virginian said the campaign in Iraq had done great damage to America's stature. "The war in Iraq was not a defensive war," he said. "It was a pre-emptive attack. We have alienated most of the international community in fighting this pre-emptive war."
As for comparisons to the Marshall Plan, Mr. Byrd said, "The Marshall Plan was not presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval."
Mr. Byrd is first in seniority in the Senate. He is a jealous guardian of the prerogatives of Congress, likes to cite passages from the Constitution, and is a master of Senate procedures. So if he wanted to be an obstacle to the administration on its request for the $87 billion in supplemental financing, he could be.
But a number of senators in both parties have said the administration will get the $87 billion it seeks, in part because the bulk of it would go toward military operations. The conduct and sacrifices of the American troops have been unanimously praised, and many lawmakers have said they will give them whatever they need to complete their mission and come home.
"Iraq was a tremendous military victory, and you folks at the table ought to be congratulated," said Senator Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina. "Thus far, it's a political failure."
But Mr. Rumsfeld, who was accompanied by Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. John Abizaid, head of the military's Central Command, said it was "premature" to think of political failure.
Mr. Hollings went on to question the administration's assumption that the previous rulers of Iraq were a threat to the United States. "If there were any real security threat by Saddam Hussein, Israel would knock it out in the next two hours."
Outside of the hearings, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said that while she did not question Mr. Bush's motivations, "I've said that I didn't think that the threat was imminent; that the intelligence did not support the threat. I've said that for nearly a year, and I continue to say that, and I think the facts have borne that out. Whatever they may eventually find in Iraq, if anything, they cannot find the imminence of a threat. And that was the provocation for war."
Other Democrats in the hearings also expressed annoyance over the administration's portrayal of the Iraq campaign as part of a worldwide campaign against terrorism.
"We were led to believe and understand that there was imminent danger of weapons of mass destruction being unleashed," said Senator Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin. "We were led to understand that there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq."
Even Republicans have given signals that they will closely follow the spending on Iraq and the progress there. Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, said as much.
"Our planning must reflect the promise to establish an Iraqi government that is representative, that is effective and underpinned by protected freedoms and a market economy," Mr. Lugar said. "Many Iraqis have had a difficult time understanding how the most powerful nation in the world could defeat their armed forces in three weeks and still have trouble getting the lights turned on."
Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said: "We cannot afford to lose this. If we fail, our credibility and our national security will be damaged badly."
But Mr. Biden said he was unpersuaded by the administration's repeated equating of the Iraqi campaign and the broader campaign against terrorism, although he conceded that terrorism might be "relevant."
Mr. Biden said President Bush's address to the United Nations on Tuesday "sets us in the right direction." But the senator clearly was unenthusiastic about the overall tone of the speech. In any event, he said, "we so poisoned the well in the lead-up to this war" that other countries will be reluctant to contribute to the work in Iraq.
"That's a terrible indictment, in my view, of our foreign policy and a harsh example of the price of unilateralism."
--------
Clark Lays Out $100 Billion Plan for Jobs and Security
September 24, 2003
New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/politics/campaigns/24CND-CLAR.html
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, in his first policy address, harshly criticized President Bush's handling of the economy today and outlined his own plan to devote $100 billion to create jobs and strengthen homeland security, education and health care.
The retired four-star general, who entered the presidential race a week ago with no political experience or thoroughly stated positions on key domestic issues, said his plan was "a clear alternative to the failed polices of Mr. Bush."
General Clark, a former NATO commander and Army officer, blamed the Bush administration for overseeing "massive tax cuts for the rich, staggering deficits for the country and the worst job losses since the Great Depression," and declared, "It's heartless, it's reckless and it's wrong." He spoke in Manhattan on the opposite bank of the East River from the Domino Sugar plant where company officials plan to close the refinery by next February and lay off 180 workers.
The speech came a day before General Clark and the nine other candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination face off in a two-hour debate in New York focusing on the economy, which has become a focal issue of the campaign.
Also today in New York, Gov. Howard Dean spoke to the American Society of Magazine Editors, and Sen. Bob Graham was planning to attend a reception with young professionals and a campaign fund-raiser.
Several other Democratic candidates were in Washington, including Senator John Kerry, who received the endorsement of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which reported 214,000 dues-paying members last year. Also in Washington today, Representative Dennis Kucinich was on Capitol Hill to unveil legislation to repeal the USA Patriot Act; the Rev. Al Sharpton was attending the Congressional Black Caucus legislative conference; and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman was scheduled to attend the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute's 26th Annual Gala.
Representative Richard A. Gephardt was in Chicago this morning where he received the endorsement of the Laborers International Union of North America and then traveled to Washington for private fund-raising events. The endorsement is the 13th union endorsement that Mr. Gephardt has received, far more than any other Democratic candidate. The union has 840,000 members and represents construction workers
Tomorrow's debate, the second of six scheduled meetings, will be General Clark's first big test on the national stage following a week of saturation news coverage but, until today, scant discussion of policy.
He said today he would base his jobs plan on the reduction of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans - those making more than $200,000 a year - and direct the savings into three funds: homeland security, relief for state governments and business tax incentives.
About $40 billion would be allocated for the improvement of homeland security, including more training and hiring of firefighters, police officers and Coast Guard and customs personnel.
The second fund calls for $40 billion to help state and local governments suffering the "brutal effect" of federal tax cuts, the general said. Some $20 billion would be earmarked for job-training programs, $10 billion would help states pay for health care, and $10 billion would help states pay for law enforcement and social services jobs.
The final fund - $20 billion - would pay for tax incentives for businesses that hire new employees. The plan would offer a tax credit of up to $5,000 for each additional full-time employee hired between 2004 and 2005.
General Clark insisted that the plan would not increase the deficit because it would simply be shifting wealth from the richest Americans to "funds that will help middle-income and working class families."
"The workers have no jobs, and this White House has no plan," the candidate said. "They say tax cuts for the rich will create jobs. They say drilling in the Arctic will create jobs. They say a new energy plan will create jobs. They say easing environmental regulations will create jobs. They are flailing. They are desperate." In his speech today, General Clark continued to draw on his military background to bolster his campaign, recounting his 34-year military career, including a stint in Vietnam.
Yet he insisted that dissent and argument was an essential part of a democracy, using language that would have thrilled activists who protested the war in which he fought.
"Nothing is more American, nothing is more patriotic than speaking out, questioning authority and holding your leaders accountable," he declared.
"I'm promoting a new American patriotism because it is vital to the life and health of this country that we criticize our leaders fairly but freely," he said. "Some ask, `How can you criticize the president at a time of war?' I answer, `How can you not?' "
--------
Analysis A Vague Pitch Leaves Mostly Puzzlement
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54800-2003Sep23.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 23 -- In his speech today to the U.N. General Assembly, President Bush tried to walk a fine line between defending a war deeply unpopular in much of the world and looking for help from reluctant countries to rebuild Iraq. The result left diplomats and lawmakers puzzled about his ultimate intentions.
Bush, in fact, sidestepped direct answers to many of the questions that have arisen since the administration said it would seek a Security Council resolution that would expand the United Nations' role in Iraq and call on countries to contribute more troops and money. How quickly would the United States grant sovereignty to the Iraqis? Would the administration grant any decision-making role to the United Nations in exchange for its imprimatur? Or does the administration simply want assistance without giving up much in return?
One reason for the vagueness is that U.S. diplomats have discovered in recent weeks that little help is likely to be forthcoming. Secretary General Kofi Annan, deeply disturbed by the bombing attacks on the U.N. mission in Baghdad, has urged a slow and careful review of the organization's role in Iraq, U.S. and U.N. officials say. The list of countries willing and able to provide troops appears to have dwindled, not increased, and even financially deep-pocketed countries such as Japan have indicated they would not be able to contribute much to the U.S. enterprise in Iraq, U.S. officials said.
"There is a hell of a case of donor fatigue," a senior administration official said today. "A realistic appraisal [of what a new resolution would bring] is 'not much.' "
Bush's rhetorical maneuvering room was limited in other ways. Faced with the worst approval ratings of his presidency, Bush designed his speech to appeal to a domestic audience. But the president's conservative base, long skeptical of the United Nations, would not approve of an explicit acknowledgment of a broad U.N. role in Iraq. Bush limited his comments on potential U.N. aid to programs that bring broad bipartisan support, such as UNICEF and the World Food Program.
In Bush's most direct plea for assistance, he declared, "Every young democracy needs the help of friends. Now the nation of Iraq needs and deserves our aid, and all nations of goodwill should step forward and provide that support."
Democrats on Capitol Hill quickly took note of Bush's unwillingness to offer a detailed plan for Iraq. "He came before the international community and he could have made the case for more troops, for more resources. He didn't do that," Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said. "He hasn't presented a plan to the United Nations. He hasn't presented one to this country or to this Congress. It was a missed opportunity, and that's very disappointing."
In the view of many in attendance here, Iraq is largely a problem of Bush's making. The Security Council was deeply divided over whether to authorize military action against Iraq -- and Bush withdrew a proposed resolution before the war when it faced certain defeat. Many nations might have been willing to support a war if the administration had been willing to give U.N. weapons inspections a few more weeks, but the administration refused to alter its military timetable. The inability to find proscribed weapons after the war also hurt the administration's case.
Bush, in defending the war, argued, "Events during the past two years have set before us the clearest of divides: between those who seek order, and those who spread chaos; between those who work for peaceful change, and those who adopt the methods of gangsters."
But in two speeches that bracketed the president's address, Annan and French President Jacques Chirac suggested that it is the administration's doctrine of "preemption" -- the promise to strike against emerging threats -- that threatens to spread chaos across the globe. Both men bluntly said that the Bush administration is undermining the collective security arrangements that have governed the world since World War II.
"The United Nations has just weathered one of its most serious trials in its history: respect for the [U.N.] Charter, the use of force, were at the heart of the debate," Chirac said. "The war, which was started without the authorization of the Security Council, has shaken the multilateral system."
Annan said that reserving "the right to act unilaterally or in ad hoc coalitions . . . represents a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years. My concern is that if it were to be adopted, it would set precedents that resulted in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force with or without justification."
The enthusiastic reaction to those speeches in the General Assembly hall, compared to the tepid, almost perfunctory applause for Bush's presentation, underscored the difficult task ahead for the administration as it tries to build support for the nascent Iraqi government.
----
Congress Completes Defense Spending Bills
September 24, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Spending.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress on Wednesday completed work on a $29.4 billion measure to finance domestic security programs next year, sending President Bush the first spending bill to cover the new Homeland Security Department.
The House also approved a $368 billion measure covering Pentagon spending other than for the war in Iraq. The Senate was likely to follow suit on Thursday so Bush can sign the bills into law before the 2004 budget year begins Oct. 1.
Both measures passed with little opposition, although House Democrats said the Homeland Security bill did not go far enough to ensure the safety of cargo on passenger planes.
The House and Senate also passed a $3.54 billion bill to run Congress and its related offices. Attached to that measure was $937 million in emergency spending for this budget year to help victims of natural disasters.
The three bills would be the first spending bills this year to reach the president's desk. Congress every year must pass 13 spending bills to fund programs for the new fiscal year.
The Homeland Security bill, passed 417-8 in the House and by voice in the Senate, is the first for the new department formed last spring from the combination of 22 security-related agencies. The funding, $1 billion above what Bush requested, includes some $4.2 billion for first-responder programs, $9 billion for border protection and $5.2 billion for the Transportation Security Agency and the Federal Air Marshal Program.
Democrats said the money for first responders was insufficient and criticized the administration for seeking to spend $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan while holding down spending on domestic security. But the biggest dispute was over air cargo.
The original House bill banned passenger planes from carrying uninspected cargo. But the compromise worked out with the Senate instead provides $85 million for the research, development and procurement of technology that can screen cargo. No deadline is set for full implementation.
The machinery doesn't exist today to effectively screen cargo, said Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., head of the Appropriations subcommittee in charge of homeland security. An unrealistic deadline, he said, would be an economic disaster for the airlines, which carry 22 percent of their cargo on passenger aircraft.
But Democrats said the cargo issue needed to be addressed more urgently.
``We all understand that what goes into the belly of a plane is really a problem,'' said Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn. A Democratic effort to sideline passage until money for first responders was increased and air cargo security improved was defeated, 226-198.
The bill also approves $890 million in fiscal 2004, and $5.6 billion over 10 years, for a project to research, produce and stockpile vaccines and antidotes in response to the threat of bioterrorist attacks.
The defense bill, passed 407-15, provides $98.5 billion for military personnel, with an average 4.1 percent pay raise. It includes $9.1 billion for a missile defense system, up $1.4 billion from this year, and $11.5 billion for shipbuilding, up $2.4 billion.
The defense budget is up only 1 percent from this year, but does not include spending for military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those costs were included in a $62.4 billion emergency spending bill passed earlier this year and the proposed $87 billion measure, now being debated in Congress, for military and rebuilding operations in the two countries.
The $3.54 billion spending bill for the legislative branch, passed 371-56, has $48 million for the Capitol Visitor's Center, a massive three-story underground project aimed at enhancing security and tourist facilities and due to be completed in 2005.
Attached to that bill is an emergency spending measure that provides $442 million for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief, $319 million for firefighting and $50 million for NASA's investigation of the Columbia shuttle disaster.
On the Net:
Information of the defense bill, H.R. 2658; the Homeland Security bill, H.R. 2555; and the legislative branch bill, H.R. 2657, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov/
----
DEADLINE FOR THE "PATRIOT ACT"
Congressman Dennis Kucinich continued his leadership today on Capitol Hill today by introducing the first comprehensive bill to repeal offensive sections of the misnamed "USA PATRIOT Act." The Kucinich bill -- called the "Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act" -- is already supported by the ACLU, NAACP, a Jewish group, an Islamic group, and 20 members of Congress.
Kucinich's bill would repeal sections of the original "PATRIOT Act," that authorize 'sneak and peak' searches; warrantless library, medical, educational, and financial record searches; and the detention and deportation of non-citizens without meaningful judicial review. Passage would be the final deadline -- or death -- for the "PATRIOT Act."
Rep. Kucinich is the only presidential candidate who voted against the "PATRIOT Act" in October, 2001. The other Democrats in Congress currently running for president all voted for it -- and Howard Dean has said, "I never criticize them for that" in view of the post-9/11 pressure. Congressman Kucinich stood up to the pressure then...and now.
At a news conference today, Kucinich invoked the words of Ben Franklin, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Kucinich added: "Will we stand by as the Administration formulates a second more dangerous "PATRIOT Act" because, in the President's words, 'the first bill didn't go far enough'? Or will we step back from this atmosphere of fear and work to restore our basic freedoms and rights? With the introduction of the True Patriot Act, I say we take back our Constitution."
DEADLINE FOR DOLLARS Sept 30 presents another deadline -- the quarterly fundraising deadline for presidential candidates. This is the time for true Patriots to support this unique candidate who is taking his battle against the "PATRIOT Act" nationwide
Many of you have already donated. If so, please send this email to every civil libertarian or Libertarian or Green or lover of privacy and individual rights you know and ask them to support a man who (whether you agree with him on all issues) is standing up for your basic freedoms on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill.
For more on Kucinich: http://www.kucinich.us
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Kucinich in Print
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003
From: "Mark M. McNabb" <privateer6@aol.com>
FYI, here's some info on Kucinich-related books:
A Prayer for America, a 160 page collection of Kucinich speeches and essays, is due out soon from Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books. Amazon lists it as a November release while the Thunder's Mouth website simply says Fall 2003. Amazon is selling it for $9.56 and reports a list price of $11.95. Studs Terkel wrote the Forward.
Info on the book can be found at thundersmouth.com (search under Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books).
Also, Dennis authored the Forward of Shafted: Free Trade and America's Working Poor. The book presents the testimony of working people, farmers, fishermen, and others regarding the effect NAFTA has had on their livelihoods. This testimony was given in hearings co- sponsored by the Congessional Progressive Caucus and Food First, the advocacy organization that published the book. It's available for $8 on Amazon -- I picked up a copy for $10 at a bookstore this week and I'd recommend it.
More info on the book can be found at http://www.foodfirst.org.
Also available at Amazon is a CD-ROM that collects all of Kucinich's Congressional votes, press releases, etc., that were available through either his or the House website as of the time the disc was produced. I purchased one and have found it very interesting. They are available for all seven Democratic candidates who have served in Congress.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
'Most evil place in Afghanistan' under fresh rocket attack: US
Wednesday, 24-Sep-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/cb/Qafghanistan-us-fighting.R6DG_DSO.html
KABUL, Sept 24 (AFP) - Suspected Taliban fighters fired 10 rockets at two US military bases near Afghanistan's insurgency-hit eastern border with Pakistan, a US military spokesman said Wednesday.
Eight of the rockets landed near the base at Shkin in Paktika province and two landed near a base in northeast Kunar province late Tuesday but neither caused any casualties.
"Shkin, we call it the most evil place in Afghanistan. We have lost more soldiers in Shkin than any other place in Afghanistan," Colonel Rodney Davis told reporters in Kabul.
The most recent fatalities were those of two US soldiers killed in a shoot-out with suspected Taliban fighters near Shkin on August 31.
Paktika's Shkin base, some 280 kilometres (175 miles) southeast of Kabul, is regularly targeted by suspected Taliban fighters alleged to be regrouping over the border in Pakistan.
"Maybe most of the house is cleaned but sometimes you have to sweep the corners," Davis said of the re-emergence of the hardline militia, two years after their ouster by US-led forces. A US-led coalition of 12,500 troops is still hunting remnant Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan.
"Right now we are sweeping the corners," the colonel said Wednesday.
Afghan officials say resurgent Taliban forces have controlled the border district of Barmal since seizing it last month in a bloody assault.
They have also claimed control of four other districts in Paktika and neighbouring Zabul province.
Taliban fighters, whom Afghan troops say are armed with new technology including night-vision gear and satellite telephones, have been blamed for spiraling attacks on US and Afghan troops, aid workers and Afghan officials.
The upswing in violence has forced the suspension of aid works across huge swathes of southeast Afghanistan, undermining the war-shattered country's chances of recovering from 23 years of war and drought.
Afghan officials charge the hardline militia are finding sympathy and regrouping over the border in Pakistan's mountainous tribal districts.
The Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border share the Taliban's ethnicity and their fury at the perceived sidelining of Pashtuns from the new administration in Kabul.
----
AfghaniScam:
Livin' Large Inside Karzai's Reconstruction Bubble
by Marc W. Herold
Departments of Economics and Women's Studies
Whittemore School of Business & Economics University of New Hampshire
SEPTEMBER 24, 2003
http://www.cursor.org/stories/afghaniscam.html
In mid 2003, Domenic Medley, the British author of Kabul's first tourist guidebook since 1972, noted that aside from opium production, which has soared since the Taliban were tossed-out by U.S. bombs, serving foreigners is "the only real economy."1
"Even though the British didn't call it a conquest, they were there in support of the shah - just as we're in support of Karzai - the Afghans realized this was a conquest, this was an occupation for all practical purposes....the thing that we have over the British is airpower. We won't have an army wiped out in the passes."2
-- Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban, Peter Tanner [De Capo Press, 2002]
In a forthcoming book, I argue that the descent from a predictable, frugal existence for the average Afghan before 1950, into an uncertain condition of modern impoverishment by the late 70s, has been exacerbated by periodic droughts and two decades of war.3
In effect, three forces --modernization, war and drought -- explain the misery of contemporary Afghanistan. Certainly drought, landmines and the destruction of Afghanistan's traditional irrigation system have deepened rural misery. But the most important factor has been a failed modernization which, predictably, has gotten the least attention in the West [and its local allies whether King Zahir or Karzai] given that it is precisely this import from the West which has been the prime culprit.
Modernization has meant the uprooting of age-old tribal-peasant, rural, village communities which gave way to the isolated, individualism of the cities. With modernization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration took place, with the new city dwellers unable to find gainful employment. The impoverished rentier state was unable to garner sufficient resources to launch a profound process of capital accumulation.
I shall argue herein that social class might just have a tad to do with what an observer "sees." Little hope for the future is warranted as the Karzai regime is inspired by an upper middle class, urbanite, westernized "vision." The brief Taliban interlude [1996-2001] represented the brutal imposition of a particular, distorted interpretation of rural mores and vision upon a handful of urban centers and given the dearth of state resources simply resulted in a socialization of poverty [especially felt by westernized urban women]. One could construe it as the revenge of the village clerics, or mullahs, not the resurgence of Pashtun tribal codes and power.4
The successor, U.S-handpicked Karzai regime merely acts as a toll-gate for some of the foreign resources which have flowed into Afghanistan during 2002-3. The foreign community recognizes this and has wisely preferred so-called project aid, which frustrates the Karzai clique insofar as it has a dearth of resources with which to buy allegiance and build up its internal forces of repression [police and military].
The only vibrant element in Afghanistan today is the bustling informal market---epitomized by the endless cheery accounts in the West of Kabul's Chicken Street--- which exists notwithstanding and outside of, the Karzai "vision." As Andrew Bushell caustically wrote in the Boston Phoenix, "The new government of Afghanistan is a failure, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the U.S. and U.N. spinmeisters."5 Add the U.S. corporate press, although it took about a year after Bushell's article for it to raise many of the same misgivings. In September 2003, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times wrote about mismanaged projects, graft, "Mafia NGOs", luxury hotels in Kabul arising amidst absence of sewers and clean water, though the author could not admit the class bias of so-called reconstruction.6
Another "economy" exists in the urban centers, primarily Kabul (which today accounts for 40-50% of Afghanistan's urban population). This economy is indulging in a huge consumption bubble, fueled by massive foreign "aid" inflows which in 2002, amounted to over 40% of Afghanistan's gross domestic product [as I have calculated elsewhere7]. Granted much of the aid has been in-kind relief. Add to that the $1.2 billion in gross income from heroin sales in 2002.8 In other words, the money inflow from drugs production just about matched all reconstruction aid flows in the year 2002. Such funds lubricate the numerous mafias openly operated in the Karzai bubble economy: the timber, housing, drugs, fur and NGO mafias.
This is the bubble economy of the wealthy and the wannabees, including the returned 'necktie' Afghans and the proliferating 'expat' community. They populate the state and services sectors, earn high incomes which are spent on consumption of imports and local services catering only to this strata, e.g., beauty salons, hotels, foreign travel, gardeners and security personnel, weekend parties, golf clubs, Toyota Land Cruisers [the vehicle of choice] , the Excelnet Cafe - the Intercontinental Hotel's cyber-cafe9, bars and restaurants (like B's Place where a pizza costs $12, when the average daily wage in urban areas is $110). On Christmas Day 2001, Variety Magazine carrolled, "In Kabul, Hooray for Bollywood." An article in the Boston Globe, announces "Hotel Critical to Rebirth of Kabul."11 For whom, when rooms at the refurbished Kabul Hotel will cost $125/night single occupancy?
Popular nightspots now include an Afghan-Italian pizza and kebab joint, an Iranian restaurant, and a couple Chinese places [including one where waitresses dress in miniskirts, though in April 2003 these were replaced with sarongs slit to the thigh]. Another article in the New York Times breathlessly announced how Vogue was rushing to Afghanistan to assist Afghan women "to be beautiful again." Hip Kabulis are now donning "skin-tight jeans and waist-high tops with short sleeves....as young people adopt the clothing they see in the movies from India and Hollywood," but the bluejeans for sale in the Jemhoriat Market sell for $5 - $25 a pair.12 Income in Afghanistan for most people today is $30 - $50 a month.
Thousands of well-heeled foreign "aid" workers and Afghan expats partake in raucous weekend parties, their Landcruisers parked in a smart Kabul street. Imported alcohol flows and Madonna echoes in the street outside.13 Peter Essen, German owner of the giant Supreme Food Service warehouse which initially supplied only the international ISAF force [whose members can only eat imported food for security reasons], caters to diplomats. Foreign aid workers, international journalists, etc.14 Essen said, "we've got beer, wine, whiskey, pork - anything you want." Reuters reported some locals in Kabul mentioning foreign women engaging in solicitation on street corners near foreign offices in downtown Kabul.15
Mrs. Lalita Thongngmkam's new Thai restaurant is the fashionable place to be seen in Kabul,
"at Lai Thai, in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood once preferred by al-Qa'ida leaders and Taliban commanders, slim waitresses in silk sarongs help guests out of their bulletproof vests and dish up green seafood curry under fairy lights in the walled garden. Bulky bodyguards wait patiently in dozens of foreign 4x4s parked outside."16
Sean McQuade who had worked in Afghanistan as an engineer, opened the Irish Club on St. Patrick's Day 2003, in the posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul. The bar is located in a mock Tudor house surrounded by high walls. Several soldiers paid for by McQuade prowl the street in front armed with AK-47s. The Karzai regime licensed the bar to sell alcohol, but only to foreigners. Inside, hosts crowd around a wooden bar with a top made of green marble imported from, yes, Ireland. The male staff is Afghan, but all have been given Irish names - Kevin, Jimmy, George, etc.. Outside, Afghan drivers slump in four-wheel drive vehicles waiting for aid workers and diplomats to finish their evenings, hoping it won't be very late. McQuade observed,
"we're the first people to stick our necks out and say this can be a cosmopolitan city."17
In July 2003, Atlanta-based World Airways Inc. got a $102 million, two-year contract to run twice-a-week flights from Washington D.C. to Kabul, with a coach round-trip fare costing $3,500 and business class going for $7,500. The drug, fur and timber mafias are doing a raging business. Dozens of new shops have sprung up in central Kabul selling furs of wild animals - like wolves, lynxes, and the endangered snow leopard - to foreigners.18 The export of timber to Pakistan from the forests of Kunar and Nangarhar is soaring despite calls from Kabul to desist.
Mercedes cars proliferate on Kabul's old Soviet-paved thoroughfares. Tawdry Pakistani-style mansions covered with marble and fake Roman pillars are sprouting up. In early September 2003, Karzai's chief of police in Kabul led officers in bulldozing away homes that some thirty poor Afghan families had built for themselves on open land in the posh Wazir Akbar Khan area, to make way for houses for high-ranking Karzai officials. Even the United Nations felt obliged to issue a mild protest against the new "housing mafia." The preferences of the "Gucci guerrilla", Hamid Karzai, are revealed in actions, again.
Many complain of blatant corruption.19 The extent of corruption amongst Afghan officialdom is allegedly legendary, though of course direct data is lacking. But Marshal Fahim has been able to buy up a whole block of real estate in Kabul's Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood. Indeed, even a U.N.-appointed, independent rapporteur dispatched to assess housing in Afghanistan in September 2003, reported that top Afghan ministers - he specifically named Defense Minister Fahim and Education Minister Qanooni - have illegally grabbed valuable land and displaced locals.20
A couple days after the U.N. complaint, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission [AIHRC] expanded the list of Karzai government officials accused of graft to include the governor of the Central Bank [Mr. Anwar Ahady of the royalist Peshawar exile group and formerly political science professor at Providence College], the planning minister [Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq], the mayor of Kabul and his deputies, and even the minister of women's affairs [Ms. Habiba Sorabi]!21
A couple days later, the special U.N. envoy was publicly chastised by Lakhdar Brahimi, head of the U.N. in Afghanistan, who has faithfully backed his U.S. allies in just about all matters pertaining to Afghanistan, especially in his unequivocal support of the U.S.-anointed regime of Hamid Karzai.22 Brahimi scolded the hapless envoy for having gone too far in naming the Karzai regime officials, saying that such concerns are better kept private. In other word, no criticism of the Karzai regime however founded it might be, deserves public airing, the carefully constructed image of a sovereign and competent Karzai needs to be kept.
America's mainstream press has been predictably silent on this profound though revealing embarrassment for Karzai, just as it had been on civilians killed by U.S. bombing.23 It took a British paper, The Independent, to plainly state the truth, "Afghan Elite Seizes Land for Mansions as Poor Lose Homes."24 General Momen Atahi is one such owner of a plot of prime land in Sherpur on which his mansion adorned with balconies commanding a glorious view of the mountains is slowly rising,
"the city's chief of police will live over there...the Minister of Defence has a place over there, the deputy mayor of Kabul is there. And there's the Minister of Water and Power's plot."
But the housing mafia extends beyond Kabul into, for example, Jalalabad where houses are destroyed, evictions undertaken, owners forced to sell, and arbitrary beating, arrest and torture occurs as reported by the AIHRC.25
Patrick de Saint-Exupery, senior correspondent for France's Le Figaro, wrote in the context of discussing the imminent return to Europe of King Zahir Shah,
"Many Afghan military high-ups and government officials dispose of enormous amounts of cash, so the sale (of Zahir Shah's land) gives them a perfect opportunity not only to conveniently launder their money, but also to do a favor to the (former) king and his family."26
A favorite U.S-supported warlord, General Rashid Dostum is, of course famous for his mansions in the north. In 2002, Dostum added an indoor swimming pool to one of them, which he inaugurated in a midnight swim with some of his U.S. Special Operations Forces buddies of A-Team Tiger 02, who helped him re-capture Mazar on November 9, 2001.
Dostum's newly completed private swimming pool [Source: AFP photo]
Dostum's Jamiat militia thugs control the border checkpoint with Uzbekistan at Hayratan and plunder millions in customs revenues.27 Even the Karzai-appointed Planning Minister complained that a person lucky enough to find a job as a government employee will earn $30 to $50 a month, but well-connected persons involved in "reconstruction" can get their hands on as much as $ 15,000 a month.
With the exit of the Taliban from Jalalabad in mid-November 2001, that city returned "to [the] rule of the thieves."28 Foremost amongst these, figures the favorite regional warlord of the United States, Hajii Hazrat Ali, who amongst many other things took possession of the city's only major hotel, the Spin Ghar, where he has shown tremendous ingenuity at extorting foreign patrons. Veteran Afghan correspondent for the Associated Press, Canadian Kathy Gannon, wrote how
"Afghans [are] losing faith in U.S. as corruption runs rampant."29
Aside from the unwarranted conflation of all Afghans into a single category, the article points out [again] what has long been known. She quotes a local man from Jalalabad who states that the warlords so maligned in western press accounts, are in fact local military commanders and Karzai government officials, specifically mentioning a favorite U.S. client, Hazrat Ali, who, along with Haji Zahir Qadir [son of the slain governor of Nangarhar, Haji Abdul Qadir] are part of the timber mafia, extorting vast sums from timber merchant truckers both in fees and 'protection money.'30
These unsavory elements also deal in drugs, extort, possess beautiful new mansions, and enjoy the support of both Karzai and the Americans. The Jalalabad narco-mafia goes back to the 1980s anti-Soviet struggle, including former commanders like Haji Abdul Qadir, Haji Mohammed Zaman, and Hazrat Ali, who in November 2001 returned from exile to re-take control. Even MSNBC commented on the opium-dealing businesses of U.S. warlords like Hazrat Ali and the infamous governor of Kandahar, Gul Agha Shirzai whom the U.S. protects with a detachment of Special Forces and who is said to control the heroin trade in southern Afghanistan.31 One of Gul Agha's closest associates is the major Pakistani drug trafficker Ayub Afridi.
This is the world of Hamid Karzai and his 'necktie' associates. No connection exists between this economy and that of the hundreds of thousands in the informal, urban economy or of the millions in Afghanistan's rural lands. A bifurcated economic system exists, as it has since the onset of western modernization in the 1950s. But, to assert that such a bifurcated economic system exists, does not mean - contra Rubin32 - that the subsistence sector is non-monetized. It is, as revealed in the very large role played by agricultural indirect taxation.
The small urban upper and middle class lives today in a world disconnected from the tribal-peasant sea, just as its predecessors under Zahir Shah and the Soviet-leaning regime did. In matters of daily life - work, entertainment, consumption, dress, education, pace of life, desires - it "sees" only its cohorts who, in turn, provide it with meaning, money, services, goods and friends.
The all - civilization restored and the bubble economy - "protected" by 12,000 foreign troops, as a tragic epiphany of the later Roman Empire [only the Praetorian Guard in Kabul is not even Afghan].
In what must be one of the more unusual insights into economic development, on a visit to New Delhi in March 2003, Karzai summed up the achievements of his government during the last year, with
"Traffic jams are a sign of prosperity and this is what my government has managed to achieve."33
Grasping for "evidence" of Afghans' improving lives since the fall of the Taliban, Mark Memmott, economics editor of USA Today, invokes the "picnic in Istalif" criterion. In recent times, some Kabul families have taken to Friday picnics in the old royal mountainside village of Istalif, 90 minutes north of Kabul. Memmott solemnly proclaims,
"It takes an Afghan, someone who knows that this country was one of the world's poorest....to see a picnic as a sign of something larger."34
The Christian Science Monitor's Scott Baldauf has tried to provide another positive "spin" to Afghanistan's alleged reconstruction and "how much ordinary life...has changed."35 He points successively to: over 2 million refugees returning from Pakistan; the enormous growth of small businesses and house construction in major cities; the large wheat crop in 2003; and the oft-mentioned rebuilding of the Kabul-Kandahar highway. Offsetting such changes, he notes only minor project funding, escalating violence, perception by Afghans of Americans supporting the Tajiks, etc.. But refugees returned with Pakistani encouragement, many refugees found only grinding poverty and no employment in Kabul but are too poor now to return to Pakistan, small business has grown in spite of Karzai's policies, the weather is responsible for the good wheat crop, and the highway reconstruction is progressing very slowly and is a glamour project which will only marginally affect most Afghans.
As Wolfgang Sachs so cogently put it, monetary-based poverty
"...affects mostly urban groups caught up in the money economy as workers and consumers whose spending power is so low that they fall by the wayside. Their capacity to achieve through their own efforts gradually fades, while at the same time their desires, fueled by glimpses of high society, spiral toward infinity. This scissor-like effect of want is what characterizes modern poverty."36
Under U.S-anointed [and personally protected by about 50 U.S soldiers serving as his palace guard] Karzai, the scissor-like effect has fueled modern poverty like never before in Afghanistan.
What we "see" says a lot about who we are. The wealthy Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, leader of the Popolzai clan, "sees" traffic jams, whereas others "see" begging, an urban landscape of modern poverty, and a Hamid Karzai - "the chicquest man on the planet" - wearing his trademark karakul hat made from the downy fur of aborted sheep fetuses.37
Switan, 10, looks through restaurant window in Herat. She survives by begging, earning about $2.50 a day
In the words of an reporter for the Associated Press, many of the returned refugees
"Now view Karzai's government as serving the rich and doing little for the poor."38
Footnotes
1. From Andrew Higgins, "After Cities Crumble, Thai Woman Builds Eateries," Wall Street Journal [May 11, 2003]
2. Bill Putnam, "Parallels Through Afghan History," Armylink/U.S. Army [July 23, 2003]
3. 'Modernizing' Afghanistan' : How 80 Years of Intervention Impoverished a Frugal Society [Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, forthcoming 2004]. This essay is based upon Chapter Four therein.
4. For details, see Barry Bearak, "Afghans Ruled by Taliban: Poor, Isolated, but Secure," New York Times [October 10, 1998]. A more academic treatment emphasizing the Taliban as imposing a new clerical order, unknown in Afghanistan, with an interpretation of the shariat often at odds with the Pashtun tribal code [pashtunwali], is found in Gilles Dorronsoro, "Pakistan and the Taliban: State Policy, Religious Networks, and Political Connections [Rennes, France: manuscript of the I.E.P., Universite de Rennes, October 2000], at: www.ceri-sciencepo.com/archive/octo00/artgd.pdf
5. Andrew Bushell, "Big Decision. The New Government in Afghanistan is a Failure. But You Wouldn't Know It By Listening to the US and UN Spinmeisters," The Phoenix [August 29, 2002]
6. Paul Watson, "Afghan Aid Faces Hurdles. Reconstruction Effort is Plagued by Mismanagement, Confused Priorities and Sheer Need, Although Large Projects Are Planned," Los Angeles Times [September 1, 2003]
7. See my "Empty Hat: Foreign Investors Shun Karzai's Afghanistan" dated September 2, 2003, at: http://www.cursor.org/stories/emptyhat.html
8. according to United Nations Office on Drugs Control in "UN Anti-Drugs Chief Visits Leading Drugs Producer Afghanistan," Agence France-Presse [August 24, 2003 at 3:31 AM]
9. See Sanjoy Majumber, "Kabul's Cyber Cafe Culture," BBC News [June 16, 2003] and his "Kabul's Cyber-Cafe Culture," BBC News [June 13, 2003] at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2987270.stm.
10. All dollars cited herein are in current dollars.
11. Victoria Burnett, "Hotel Critical to Rebirth of Kabul," Boston Globe [February 23, 2003]
12. Rahimullah Samander, "Kabulis Dress Up After a Fashion," IWPR [July 17, 2003]
13. Nick Meo, "Afghanistan Gets Its First Party Town," Sunday Herald [U.K.] [August 3, 2003]
14. "Grenade Fence' Doesn't Deter Crowds at Kabul Restaurant. Scarcity of Western Fare Creates a Seller's Market - if there's stability," Associated Press [November 26, 2002]
15. "Afghan Paper Urges Kabul to Act on Moral Crime," Reuters [August 25, 2003]
16. Jan McGirk, "Have Wok Will Travel: How Thai Expat Spices Up World's Hot Spots," The Independent [July 13, 2003]
17. The above is from Todd Pitman, "Irish Pub in Kabul a Have for Some - But Not for Afghans," Portsmouth Herald [April 17, 2003]
18. Jannat Jalil, "Afghans Flout Fur Ban," BBC News [July 21, 2003 at 04:44 GMT]
19. Meo, op. cit.
20. "UN Accuses Top Afghan Ministers in Land Grab," Dawn [September 12, 2003], at: http://www.dawn.com/2003/09/12/int4.htm
21. "Afghan Ministers Accused of Graft," Dawn [September 14, 2003]
22. "UN U-Turn on Afghan Land Grab," BBC News [September 15, 2003]
23. Elaborated upon in Marc W. Herold, "Truth About Afghan Civilian Casualties Comes Only Through American Lenses for the U.S. Corporate Media [Our Modern Day Didymus]," in Peter Phillips & Project Censored [eds], Censored 2003. The Top 25 Censored Stories [New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002]
24. Phil Reeves, "Afghan Elite Seizes Land for Mansions as Poor Lose Homes," The Independent [September 19, 2003], at: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=444797
25. "Property Disputes Top Afghan Rights Violations," Associated Press [September 14, 2003]
26. "Zahir May Quit Afghanistan, Says Paper," Dawn [August 13, 2003]
27. Pepe Escobar, "Kabul: Rocking, Rolling and 'Carpet Bombing'," Asia Times [September 4, 2002], at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/DI04Ag01.htm
28. C.J. Chivers, "Afghan City, Free of Taliban, Returns to Rule of the Thieves," New York Times [January 6, 2002]
29. Kathy Gannon, "Afghans Losing Faith in U.S. as Corruption Runs Rampant," Associated Press [September 8, 2003]
30. "Timber Imports From Afghanistan Increase," Dawn [September 13, 2003]
31. Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, "A Deadly Habit. Afghan Warlords - Most of Them U.S. Allies - May be Making a Fortune Off the Country's Drug Trade," MSNBC.com [July 14, 2003]
32. Barnett Rubin, "The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan," World Development 28, 10 [October 200]: 1791
33. Siddharth Srivastava, "Karzai Sees Traffic Jams as Sign of Prosperity," Times of India [March 7, 2003]
34. Mark Memmott, "Afghans Can See Progress Since the Fall of Taliban," USA Today [July 7, 2003]
35. Scott Baldauf, "Nation Building, Redoubled," Christian Science Monitor [September 8, 2003]
36. Wolfgang Sachs, " 'Poverty' - In Need of a Few Distinctions. You Can't Measure Wealth by Cash Alone," In Context [Winter 1993]
37. Gucci's Tom Ford calls Karzai "the chicquest man on the planet." See "Karzai Heads for Hat Trouble," BBC News [April 28, 2002]
38. Matthew Pennington, "Returning Afghan Refugees Struggle to Survive in a Ruined Capital," Associated Press [September 14, 2003], at: http://www.cbs2chicago.com/world/ReturningtoRuins-ai/resources_news_html
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Britain's military chief begins India visit
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924044814.3mdxj010.html
Britain's chief of the defence staff, General Sir Michael Walker, was due to hold talks in New Delhi Wednesday with Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes and top officials on military relations.
The two sides would also discuss joint exercises and training.
During his four-day visit, Walker is due to visit a number of regional army headquarters and units in restive Indian Kashmir and the cities of Agra and Gwalior, a British high commission (embassy) statement said.
Walker's visit comes just weeks after India decided to award a billion-dollar deal for 66 air force training jets to British Aerospace. Officials said the purchase may figure in talks.
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South Korea sends mission to Iraq following US request for troops
SEOUL (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924073430.ysmy28lx.html
South Korea on Wednesday sent a fact-finding mission to Iraq in response to a controversial US request for South Korean combat troops for the war-torn country.
The 12-member mission headed by Brigadier General Kang Dae-Young is to visit Iraq for 10 days.
"We are going to check the situation in Iraq ... plans for reconstruction and (the Iraqi) perception toward allied forces," Kang told journalists before the mission departed.
"The information will be used for setting up our policy (on the dispatch of troops)."
South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun has said he is considering the US request and will take into account public opinion, deeply divided over the troop dispatch.
The US request has triggered angry protests from activists opposed to putting South Korean troops in harm's way.
"We strongly oppose sending the investigation team to Iraq which is aimed at paving the way for sending troops to Iraq," the Council for National Reconciliation, Self-Reliance and Reunification of Korea said Wednesday.
"We find no justice in sending combatants to Iraq, which would also damage our national sovereignty and international image," the group said.
The group called for a mass rally on Saturday to oppose sending troops to Iraq.
But South Korean war veterans and other conservatives' groups urged the government to accept the US request.
Roh's National Security Advisor Ra Jong-Yil said the government was taking its time before making a decision.
"We are talking about the lives of our young people. We have absolutely no reason to hurry," he told Yonhap news agency Tuesday.
Most South Koreans would oppose the dispatch of troops, according to opinion polls.
A survey by Korea Gallop showed 75.6 percent of South Koreans are opposed to sending combatants to Iraq while 16.1 percent approve.
However, more would be inclined to support the deployment if it were authorized by a UN resolution.
Washington is seeking UN backing for a resolution which would give a UN mandate to a multinational force in Iraq.
The United States has asked South Korea to send troops which could be "self-sustaining," according to spokesman Park Jin of the opposition Grand National Party (GNP).
This means the number of troops South Korea might send to Iraq could range between 3,000 and 10,000.
Defense Minister Cho Young-Kil told the National Assembly on Tuesday that it would cost South Korea some 200 billion won (174 million dollars) every year should it send some 3,000 troops to Iraq.
South Korea sent 675 non-combatants, including army engineers and medics, to Iraq in May.
Currently, the United States is stationing a 130,000-strong force in Iraq, backed by 21,000 troops from 21 countries. Britain and Poland have a division-level presence.
The United States is also asking other countries, including India, Pakistan and Turkey, to send combatants to maintain peace in the war-torn Middle East state, according to the media reports.
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Pentagon Faults Senators On Plane-Lease Proposal
Defense Says Speed Outweighs Savings
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54873-2003Sep23.html
The Pentagon said yesterday that a Senate committee's proposal to scale back its plan to lease and then buy 100 Boeing Co. tankers was "potentially unexecutable," even as it acknowledged that the plan could save $2.7 billion.
Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), ranking members of the Armed Services Committee, proposed leasing up to 25 of the planes, which refuel fighter jets in flight, and buying the remaining 75 under the traditional procurement process. In a letter responding to the proposal, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said the plan would require at least a year-long delay and would attract less enthusiasm from Wall Street investors needed to help finance the deal.
"The biggest drawback to this approach is the need to negotiate totally new contracts," Wolfowitz said.
Warner and Levin's proposal would cost more money upfront, the letter said. Their proposal would require $16 billion in funding over the next five years, the Pentagon's planning period, compared with the $5.5 billion needed under the Air Force's lease-then-buy plan to acquire 100 of the planes.
According to Wolfowitz's letter, the Air Force plan would cost $29.8 billion, including training, operation and maintenance costs. The Senate committee's proposal would cost $27.1 billion, and buying the planes outright would cost $24.3 billion.
"The letter validates my position that, to the extent we buy these aircraft instead of leasing them, would result in significant savings to taxpayers," Warner, chairman of the committee, said in a statement. "In my view, this letter represents progress."
The deal to replace the 40-year-old tanker fleet needs the approval of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warner's office said that before scheduling a vote he would ask the Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office to review the Pentagon's response.
Critics of the deal said the Pentagon's response lacked key information, including an adequate assessment of the extent of corrosion problems with the current fleet and an explanation of why the per-aircraft lease cost, $131 million, is more than the $120 million the Institute for Defense Analysis estimated. "It was an unresponsive response," said a congressional aide.
"The good news is they are getting closer; the bad news is that they are ignoring concerns from senators and others," said Keith Ashdown, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The Pentagon urged acceptance of the original contract negotiated with Boeing and said concerns about its cost could be addressed by paying off some of the leases early. That would eliminate interest expenses associated with lease payments and potentially save $1.2 billion, the letter said.
"The lease proposal balances the urgent needs of the warfighter with the demands of our other vital programs, while staying within our budget," Wolfowitz wrote.
Trimming interest expenses would also help the Air Force address a potential budget crunch in the program's later years. "We understand the Committee's concerns about the future affordability of the lease," he wrote.
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Raytheon Group Mulls Predator UAVs For NATO Radar System
Washington - Sep 24, 2003
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-03zq.html
An international consortium led by Raytheon that is vying to build a $4 billion airborne radar system for NATO is inclined to incorporate Predator B unmanned aerial vehicles in its proposal, a Raytheon executive said Tuesday.
The executive, Peter Wray, said the consortium will submit a proposal in November for a system that would use both manned and unmanned aircraft to monitor battlefield threats. NATO wants the radar network, the Airborne Ground Surveillance System, to be ready by 2010.
The proposal will call for the use of five specially equipped Global Express jets from Canada's Bombardier Inc. and seven unmanned aerial vehicles of a yet-undecided variety, Wray said. Among UAVs, he told reporters at a briefing, the consortium's "main focus is on the Predator B," made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego.
NATO is expected to decide early next year which of two international consortiums will develop the radar system, which is designed in part to allow the armed forces of NATO's member countries to jointly track and attack battlefield targets. Many NATO countries now rely on national radar systems that are incompatible with the systems of other NATO members.
The second consortium, led by Northrop Grumman Corp., has proposed using Airbus' 321 jets and its own brand of unmanned aircraft - the Global Hawk. The aircraft is considered more sophisticated - but also more expensive - than the Predator, which first gained fame when the CIA used it to attack an al- Qaida convoy.
-------- europe
Bulgarian soldiers in Iraq demand danger money for serving in Iraq
SOFIA (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924075428.6hb3jw4m.html
Bulgarian troops stationed in Iraq have demanded a 67-percent pay increase to compensate for the dangers they face in that country, the Bulgarian defense ministry said on Wednesday.
The ministry said it had received a written demand signed by 359 of the 470 Bulgarian troops that form part of the international force under Polish command in southern Iraq.
The soldiers said they want 100 dollars (87.5 euros) a day compared to the 60 dollars (52.5 euros) they currently receive because "of the risks they run," Defense Minister Nikolai Svinarov told journalists, adding that he would consider the demand.
Since they left for Iraq in August, the soldiers have been paid one and half times their usual salaries, as well as the 60 dollars a day.
The Bulgarian contingent is mostly deployed in the central Iraqi city of Kerbala.
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Brussels to give E200m to rebuild Iraq
By Judy Dempsey in Brussels and Edward Alden in Washington
September 24 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480092293&p=1012571727088
The European Commission is expected to commit only €200m to the rebuilding of Iraq, a tiny fraction of what the US needs and much smaller than the European Union contribution to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
The small sum, which the commission is expected to pledge at next month's donors conference, illustrates the poor response to president to President George W. Bush's call for more international military and financial support.
Senior US military officials said on Wednesday they were preparing to call up more US reserves for Iraq in expectation that other countries would not provide the new division of 15,000 troops the US had been seeking. "We're not going to get a lot of international troops with or without a UN resolution," said Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary.
The administration is also facing growing political pressure over its request for more than $20bn in new funding just to pay for administration and reconstruction in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are trying to stir public anger over plans to spend billions on electricity, hospitals, schools and roads in Iraq when funding for the same needs in the US is being starved because of growing budget deficits.
Paul Bremer, head of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, revealed on Monday that the World Bank has estimated a cost of $60bn-$70bn over the next four to five years to rebuild Iraq, though Bank president James Wolfensohn would not confirm that figure on Wednesday.
"It begs the question: where are we going to get the remaining $40bn to $50bn?" said Senator Joseph Biden, who grilled Mr Bremer in a hearing yesterday. "We so poisoned the well in the lead-up to this war that no one expects the international community to provide more than $2bn or $3bn at the donors conference. That's a terrible indictment . . . of our foreign policy."
The lack of European support will be particularly damaging. Chris Patten, the European Union's external affairs commissioner, visited Iraq last week to assess the country's reconstruction needs. He will present his conclusions to commissioners next week, where he is expected to propose the €200m aid figure.
The possibility of a fresh call-up of US reservists illustrates how the overseas hostility to the Bush administration is beginning to have political repercussions for the president at home.
As the White House looks increasingly towards the 2004 presidential election, opinion polls are showing a plurality of people disapprovingof the president's handling of Iraq.
Underlining the difficulties the White House is having in securing international support, a senior Bush administration official yesterday suggested it could take as long as a month to get a new UN resolution enabling more foreign countries to participate in Iraqi reconstruction.
"Nobody is in a particular hurry, because we are going to do it right," the senior administration official said.
----
Schroeder offers support to Bush
BARRY SCHWEID,
AP Diplomatic Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/09/24/national1036EDT0550.DTL
President Bush won a commitment Wednesday from German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to set aside differences and work together for a strong and stable Iraq. "We both agree that we want to look into the future together," Schroeder said.
"It is very important, not just for Iraq, but for the whole of the region, for Germany and therefore for the whole of Europe," Schroeder said.
Receiving a renewed German offer to help train Iraqi police and security forces, Bush said, "I appreciate his efforts to help Iraq grow to be a peaceful and stable and democratic country."
Still, there was no indication that Germany would contribute peacekeeping troops, as it has to Afghanistan, or that Schroeder would retract his support for France's call for a quick end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
And Schroeder said he did not feel "under time pressure" from a proposed U.S. resolution in the U.N. Security Council designed to draw in troops and financial support for reconstruction.
He described his conversation with Bush as "very open-minded" and "trustful."
In Washington, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon may be forced to call up more reservists if other countries do not soon pledge thousands of more troops.
Over two days of meetings with foreign leaders Bush did not receive any offers, and a senior U.S. official said there was no hurry to try to win passage of a U.S. resolution in the United Nations to authorize more peacekeepers.
Work on the resolution will proceed, but it may take months to work it out, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In a flurry of diplomacy, French President Jacques Chirac met with Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same midtown hotel.
"There is not a shadow of a difference of view between the Germans and the French position. This is clear and irrefutable," Chirac said.
"We have also a very similar position with the Russians,' he said.
Striking a conciliatory stance, Chirac said the three leaders intended to consider a proposed U.S. resolution to give the United Nations a role -- but not the leading one -- "in a positive and constructive frame of mind."
Bush faced an uphill task in his drive for an unhurried transition to rule by Iraqis as the difficult reconstruction of postwar Iraq reopened the divide between the United States and the United Nations despite the president's softer rhetorical tone here.
Pushing ahead, Bush met with Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and then with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India.
And Secretary of State Colin Powell scheduled a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.
The administration hopes to set up a third division of 10,000 to 15,000 peacekeeping troops with contributions from India, Pakistan, Turkey and South Korea.
But Musharraf told The Associated Press that "it is important that our troops not be seen as part of an occupation force."
Instead, he said he wanted to see a Muslim force put together that has the blessing of the United Nations or an international Islamic organization.
Except for handshakes at a NATO meeting last November in Prague and at an economic conference last spring, it was the first formal meeting between Bush and Schroeder in more than a year.
Bush said he had told Schroeder that "we have had differences and they are over, and we're going to work together."
Schroeder, sounding the same theme, told reporters Germany "would like to come in and help with the resources that we do have."
A German diplomat, meanwhile, said Bush had expressed understanding that Germany could not provide troops. The diplomat, who was at the meeting, said the issue of financial contributions was not discussed.
The United States and Germany differed on whether or not to go to war, the diplomat said. But that does not mean that the two countries are now sitting back in their armchairs watching others take care of the difficulties that have now arisen, he said, or the challenges that must now be confronted, he said.
In fact, he said, Germany was prepared to help within the very limited scope of its own "possibilities."
France, Germany and many other nations remained opposed to continued U.S. occupation after Bush's mild defense Tuesday of an unhurried transition to democracy in Iraq.
Chirac insisted earlier on a "realistic timetable" for returning sovereignty to the Iraqi people.
As Chirac stood against unilateral U.S. action in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticized Bush's "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq.
Bush suggested softly "Let us move forward," but his remarks Tuesday did not overcome the gap between the United States and skeptical leaders.
"There is an important role for the U.N. to play," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But, the official said, the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by American L. Paul Bremer "has to get the job done" and whatever resolution the Security Council may adopt must reflect "what really are the facts on the ground."
The official said Bush has touched off a debate about whether the United Nations is capable of dealing with the threats of the 21st century.
-------- iraq
Deadly Bombings on Rise in Iraq; 1 Killed in Baghdad Blast
The New York Times
By IAN FISHER
September 24, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/international/middleeast/24CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 24 - It was not until after the powerful explosion here today that Rasoul Khalid Ibrahim, a security guard, remembered: The morning before, two men, one in the clothes of a street cleaner, had been digging a hole in the dirt of a median strip. It is such a common sight, as Baghdad tidies up after war, that he did not give the workers a second thought.
But from that same spot, the bomb went off this morning, missing its apparent target of two passing American Humvees and hitting instead two small buses carrying Iraqis to work in the northern neighborhood of Adhamiya.
At least one Iraqi died and about 20 others, including children, were injured in a blast of such force that it shattered windows dozens of yards away and pierced clean through a steel I-beam used as power pole. A doctor on the scene he believed one other person may have been killed.
It was the third bombing in the Iraqi capital in six days, and it came on a day when another bomb went off in a movie theater in the northern city of Mosul. Witnesses said several people were injured.
If Mr. Ibrahim is right, one small mystery may be answered: exactly how the bombers may be planting their explosives without getting caught. Late last week another roadside bomb detonated in a pile of garbage, and this morning a street in Baghdad was closed off because, witnesses said, of another suspected bomb.
"I didn't suspect anything," Mr. Ibrahim, 39, who guards a building site near where the bomb went off today, said. "They were just working."
If the last few days are any measure, these roadside bombs called "improvised explosive devices" by the military appear to be a growing threat to the American forces here. Lt. Col. Bill MacDonald, a spokesman for the United States military near Tikrit, north of Baghdad and a hot spot for attacks against American troops, said they have seen more bombs recently and fewer attacks by machine gun and rocket-propelled grenades.
He said the increasing number of bombs may suggest that the attackers are looking increasingly to kill from a distance, in a way where "they don't go toe-to-toe with us - because when they do, they lose."
Colonel MacDonald said an informant told American soldiers on Wednesday night about three men planting a roadside bomb north of the village of Al Hadid. He said a patrol from the Fourth Infantry Division spotted two men fleeing the area with AK-47 machine guns. Both men were killed, he said, when they failed to stop after soldiers fired warning shots.
He said six other Iraqi militants were killed in two other incidents overnight in the area north of Baghdad.
Early this morning, he said, soldiers killed three Iraqis near the town of Balad who suspected of planning an attack. He said they confiscated one rocket-propelled grenade and several AK-47s.
Near Samara, he said, a military unit guarding an oil pumping station called in airstrikes after they came under attack from small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. A nearby AC-130 attack plane tracked seven people fleeing the scene, he said, then fired, killing three of the men and seriously wounding a fourth.
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FAO Says Millions of Iraqis Desperately Hungry
REUTERS ITALY:
September 24, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22334/newsDate/24-Sep-2003/story.htm
ROME - Several million Iraqis remain desperately hungry despite a better cereals crop and the lifting of economic sanctions, U.N. food agencies said yesterday.
"While starvation has been averted, chronic malnutrition persists among several million vulnerable people," the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a statement about a new report on Iraqi food supplies and nutrition.
"The situation of mothers and children in central and southern Iraq is of particular concern," Rome-based FAO said.
The agency said the hardest hit included some 100,000 refugees and 200,000 displaced people.
The report published by FAO and the World Food Program (WFP), the U.N. food aid agency, said nearly half of Iraq's 26.3 million people are estimated to be in need of humanitarian aid despite a better cereal harvest and the removal of sanctions.
This year's cereal production in Iraq is forecast at 4.12 million tonnes, 22 percent more than in 2002.
"Production increased mainly due to favorable rains in the north, increased irrigation and timely distribution of seeds and tools in the main producing areas," FAO said.
War, sanctions and drought have seriously eroded living standards in Iraq.
About 60 percent of the Iraqi population is unemployed and depends largely on public food rations.
The report said millions of Iraqis have no access to food other than through public assistance, which is financed through the oil-for-food program that allows Baghdad to sell oil so it can fund purchases of food, medicine and humanitarian supplies.
"Any significant disruption of the public distribution system would have a severe negative impact on food access," the FAO/WFP report said.
It said public food handouts were needed in Iraq in the short-to-medium term because the farm sector would need considerable time to get back to strength.
WFP estimates 3.5 million people will need supplementary food at a cost of $51 million in 2004.
Food supplements are needed for malnourished children, their family members and pregnant and nursing mothers, WFP said.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli pilots refuse missions in Palestinian territories: TV
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924164504.5zllwyj4.html
Twenty-five Israeli air force pilots said they had refused to carry out missions over the Palestinian territories, Israeli radio reported late Wednesday.
The 25 pilots, who were believed to be regulars and reservists, recently submitted a petition opposing the missions to air force head General Dan Haloutz, the radio said, but gave no further details.
It is thought to be the first time that Israeli air force pilots have signed such a petition.
----
Experts: Israeli Military Stronger After American Victory In Iraq
9/24/2003
By Combined News Sources
http://www.thejewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=2865
TEL AVIV - Israel's conventional military capability has increased sharply in wake of the U.S. defeat of Iraq.
Leading Israeli strategists say the U.S. victory over the regime of President Saddam Hussein pointed to the superiority of Western arms and military doctrine over those employed by Iraq and many of its Arab neighbors.
The strategists said Israel - with powerful capabilities in command, control, communications, computers and intelligence - could achieve a similar victory over neighboring Syria, regarded as the chief adversary of the Jewish state.
"In the next few years, Iraq will not be able to build a military that will pose a threat to Israel," Shlomo Brom, a senior researcher for the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, said. "This [U.S. war against Iraq] campaign has stressed Israel's conventional superiority."
Brom and other strategists made this determination on Sunday during the release of two studies by the Jaffee Center on the war in Iraq and the Middle East military balance. The strategists recommended that Israel reduce its military, particularly the armored corps.
"When the U.S. forces against Iraq are compared with the balance of forces between Israel and Syria an interesting conclusion is reached," the center's new publication, entitled "After the War in Iraq: Defining the New Strategic Balance," said in an essay by [Res.] Maj. Gen. Issac Ben-Israel.
"Israel is military capable of attaining victory over the Syrian army to the same degree at least as the American victory over the Iraqi army. Israel has the power, technology and battlefield conceptualization necessary for this."
The strategists said Israel should reduce its armored corps and consider suspending the Merkava Mk-4 main battle tank program.
The alternatives, they said, included obtaining such U.S. platforms as the M1A2 tank with American military aid.
"There's no difference between the Merkava and the M1," Brom said. "And the M1 we can buy with dollars."
Last week, Israel's Cabinet passed a 32.5 billion shekel defense budget for fiscal 2004 that marked a more than 2 billion shekel cut from the previous year. Israeli military officials said the budget reduction could result in the suspension of the Merkava Mk-4 production program as well as a slowdown in the Arrow-2 missile defense project.
The Jaffee Center's "Middle East Strategic Balance 2002-2003" said Israel has 3,930 main battle tanks, a slight increase since 1997. The force is composed of Merkava tanks and older U.S.-origin M-60 tanks.
The Israeli strategists said the military should invest in improving protection against weapons of mass destruction as well as from terrorists. They said Israel's superiority in conventional warfare would bolster Arab and Iranian efforts in WMD and low-intensity conflict.
But the analysts said they did not see any trend by Iran or Arab militaries to reduce their conventional forces. They said the Arab military buildup was launched largely in response to Israel's force development over the last decade.
"I don't see one Arab state that has undergone a drastic change," Yiftah Shapir, one of the editors of "Middle East Strategic Balance 2002-2003," said.
(With reporting by Avraham Shmuel Lewin in Israel and MENL)
----
Israel A Danger
Charley Reese
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
King Features
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030924/index.php
What country in the Middle East occupies the lands of other people? What country in the Middle East is in violation of more than 60 United Nations resolutions? What country in the Middle East openly practices a policy of assassinating its political opponents? What country in the Middle East routinely violates international law? What country in the Middle East possesses nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow international inspection of its nuclear facilities?
The answer to all of the above is Israel.
And here's one more question: What country in the world poses the greatest danger to the future of the United States?
Same answer: Israel.
OK, I know that sounds shocking. How could a little country the size of New Jersey pose any threat to the United States? Well, how could a little country drain more than $100 billion from the U.S. Treasury? How could a little country attack and try to sink a U.S. Navy ship in international waters and avoid any kind of congressional investigation? How can a little country openly brag to third parties that it controls the U.S. Congress? And partner, Israel does.
In Queen Noor's recent book, she says that her husband was dismayed when Congress told Jordanians that they would definitely not be given the things promised to them in exchange for a peace treaty with Israel. Queen Noor said her husband called Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin and told him of the problem. "Don't worry about it," Rabin replied. "I'll take care of it." And he did.
Now, let's be clear about this. Here you have the prime minister of one foreign country telling the king of another foreign country that he can get the U.S. Congress to reverse its position. And he did it. Too bad American governors don't have that kind of influence. And, as a quick aside, why do American taxpayers have to pay for Israel's peace treaties?
There are many examples to cite, but let me refer you to a book, "They Dare to Speak Out," by former U.S. Rep. Paul Findley. The publisher is Lawrence Hill books.
The problem and danger to the United States is that Israel effectively dictates U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel supporters were the architects of the war against Iraq, and if they can, they will get us into wars with Syria and Iran, thus eliminating Israel's enemies. They would like nothing better than for the United States to be at war with the entire Muslim world.
As I write this, the United States has once again vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Israel not assassinate the elected leader of the Palestinians. Great God, how do you think that plays in the Arab world when we cannot bring ourselves to condemn what would be a war crime? It's no wonder the World Trade Center towers came down. It's no wonder American soldiers are ducks in an Iraqi shooting gallery. Israel is the source of terrorism in the Middle East, both that directed at it and that directed at us.
And, by the way, it is Yasser Arafat who is the man of peace, not Ariel Sharon. It was Arafat who persuaded Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist, who persuaded them to accept a two-state solution, which means they will settle for 22 percent of their own country. And it is Sharon who refuses to give them even that. It is Sharon who rejected the "road map." It is Sharon who kicks sand in the face of little George Bush any time he feels like it.
And don't kid yourself. Regardless of what the Israelis say, they intend to kill Arafat. They know he will not surrender, so they will just say he died "in an exchange of gunfire." Then prospects for peace are dead forever, and the state of Israel will start its slide toward oblivion.
The question for Americans is this: How long do you want to bleed lives and treasure because your corrupt politicians have sold their souls to the lobby of a foreign country now led by a fanatic right-wing extremist?
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Assassination, Occupation, Separation
Sharon's Preemptive Zeal
By NEVE GORDON
September 24, 2003
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/gordon09242003.html
No more than a month ago I sat with a friend drinking coffee at the Hillel Cafe in Jerusalem. Today it is a shattered edifice, with blood stains on the floor. Indeed, this was the first thought that crossed my mind after hearing the news about the horrific suicide attack that left another 7 Israelis dead and 45 wounded. "I could have been there," I said to myself.
It is a frightening thought, one that has crossed the mind of many an Israeli, particularly since the eruption of the second Intifada in September 2000 -- a period in which 244 suicide attacks have been carried out. Just as disturbing, though, is the thought that this bloody reality has been accepted by the Israeli public as part of their daily routine; so much so that the same people who are terrified to leave their homes now consider Israel's gory mode of existence as their karma, as if the political realm were in some odd way predetermined.
But politics, as the great Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt repeatedly stated, is the realm of freedom, where humans actually have the opportunity to begin something new through speech and deed. Even "in the epochs of petrifaction and foreordained doom," she claimed, the faculty of freedom, "which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source of production of all great and beautiful things" usually remains intact.
What Israelis and Palestinians have been witnessing in the past few weeks is a concerted effort to destroy the road that might have led the two peoples out of a foreordained doom and into a new beginning. Notwithstanding the impression some people might have, this myopic effort has been led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, not only by Hamas. His strategy is one of preemptive strikes.
Approximately two months ago, the different Palestinians factions decided to implement a houdna (ceasefire in Arabic) and to stop attacking Israeli targets. Despite the fact that numerous militant groups operate without a central command in the Occupied Territories, for almost a month and a half the houdna managed to hold up. While one assault was perpetrated in the West Bank by a small splinter group, the violence had subsided and it appeared as if serious negotiations would resume.
Then, suddenly, as if out of the blue, the Israeli military invaded Askar refugee camp, killing four Palestinians, including two members of Izzeddin Al-Qassam, Hamas' military wing. The operation was a preemptive strike, the Israeli spokesman explained.
The Palestinians decided not to retaliate.
Less than a week later, on August 14, Israeli troops entered Hebron and killed a member of the Islamic Jihad. Another preemptive attack. Only this time the Palestinians did respond, and on August 19 a suicide bomber exploded inside a public bus. Israel, in turn, used its forces to carry out a series of extra-judicial executions, and now a month after the preemptive assault on Askar camp, the streets between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea are once again covered with blood.
The logic of preemptive strikes, however, does not merely inform Sharon's policy of extra-judicial executions; it is the logic that has informed his actions throughout his military and political careers.
Three examples will have to suffice: the Jewish settlements, the Lebanon War, and the separation wall.
Sharon is considered by many to be the father of Israel's unruly settlement project. He earned this title while serving as Minister of Agriculture during Menachem Begin's first government. Sharon had hoped to become Defense Minister and was disappointed when Ezer Weizmann received the appointment, but minor details of this kind have never stopped him from pursuing his goals.
Weizmann opposed the settlement project and opined that Israel should withdraw from the territories within the framework of a peace accord. Sharon, on the other hand, believes in the Greater Israel, and, in order to preempt the possibility of any future agreement based on land for peace, he initiated, as the chair of the government's Settlement Committee, a massive settlement enterprise. Whereas Israel built 20 settlements between 1967 and 1976, within less than four years Sharon managed to build close to 50 new settlements, totally changing the landscape of the West Bank.
In August 1981, Sharon became Defense Minister. Four years earlier, he had told an Israeli reporter that "the Arab states are swiftly preparing for war, and we are sitting on a barrel of explosives wasting our time on nonsense. The Arabs," he continued, "will launch a war in the summer or the fall." The war did not come, at least not until Sharon assumed office.
The story of how Sharon led Israel into Lebanon, hoping to establish a puppet government in order to preempt attacks from the north, is by now well known. When Israel finally withdrew its forces 20 years later, thousands of civilians and soldiers lay buried in the ground, hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced, and much of Lebanon was in shatters, but Sharon held on to the logic of the preemptive strike.
Not unlike the settlement project, Lebanon War, and extra-judicial executions, the separation wall should also be conceived as a preemptive attack. While Sharon declares that the wall is being built solely for security reasons, he neglects to say that it is not being erected on the 1967 borders, and is actually being used as an extremely effective mechanism to expropriate Palestinian land and create facts on the ground so as to preempt any future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Its effect is not less violent than the assassinations and suicide bombings. Already in this early stage, the wall has infringed on the rights of more than 210,000 Palestinians, some of whom now live in ghettos between the wall and Israel.
The crux of the matter is that Sharon's preemptive logic undercuts all form of dialogue and negotiations. Its rule of thumb is violence, and then more violence, whether it manifests itself as a military attack or as an aggressive act of dispossession. So while it may seem that the bloody routine is in some way preordained, it is actually Sharon's preemptive zeal alongside Hamas' and Islamic Jihad's fundamentalism that has clouded the horizon and concealed, as Arendt might have said, the possibility for a better future.
Neve Gordon teaches politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and has written about the outsourcing technique within the Israeli context for the Journal of Human Rights. He can be reached at ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
----
On the Fence
September 24, 2003
Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2003/39/we_522_03b.html
When word reached the Israeli government last week that the U.S. might withhold portions of its $9 billion in annual loan guarantees unless Israel rethought its West Bank wall, a panicky Ariel Sharon dispatched a delegation to Washington to see if the two sides couldn't work something out. The delegates ended their meeting without any promises, but a lot more than loan guarantees is at stake here.
During Monday's talks, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told Dov Weisglass, a senior member of the Sharon administration, that Israel's separation barrier is sharply at odds with American interests. The separation barrier being built around and inside the occupied West Bank, which Israelis commonly call the "security fence," and Palestinians the "apartheid wall," has been a source of major international conflict since construction began in June 2002. Rice's statements came as the United States, unusually, has been stepping up pressure on the Sharon administration.
"[The barrier] is not really consistent with our view of what the Middle East will one day have to look like -- two states living side by side in peace. "It is extremely important, if it is going to be built, that it, as much as possible... not intrude on the lives of the Palestinians, and, most importantly, that it not look as if it's trying to pre-judge the outcome of a peace agreement."
Even so, she said the White House hadn't decided whether to withhold portions of loan guarantees. Instead, said Rice, the administration will hold off on a decision until the Israeli security cabinet signs off on the wall's route.
This latest flare-up in the wall controversy comes as Israel prepares to decide whether the barrier will cut deep into the West Bank to encompass Ariel, a settlement bloc of some 20,000 people, 15 miles east of the green line. Annexing Ariel to the Israeli side would mean confiscating yet more Palestinian land and further separating northern Palestinian communities from bustling Ramallah, the de facto political and economic center of the West Bank.
The White House has hinted that if the security cabinet rules to run the barrier around Ariel, the sum allocated for its construction will be withheld from Israel's future guarantees. This year's loan guarantee agreement came after prolonged negotiations, wherein the U.S. told Israel it would deduct matching funds for every dollar Israel spends in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both former president George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced Israel's loan guarantees as a penalty for ongoing settlement contruction in the occupied territories.
The Sharon administration is essentially being forced to choose between the loan guarantees -- which are especially important now, with the Israeli on the skids -- and its loyalty to Israel's powerful settlement lobby. On Friday, Prime Minister Sharon lent his support for a plan that would suspend construction of the barrier in the Ariel region, instead beefing up Israel's military presence there. But while Sharon might be leaning toward compromise, other members of his coalition have vowed to fight hard for the annexation of Ariel.
The Bush administration seems to be playing good cop/bad cop with the Israelis. While Rice sent a veiled warning to the Israelis to lay off Ariel, Colin Powell empathized with Sharon's position. In a Monday appearance on the Charlie Rose Show, Powell explained that the Israeli public won't like it if Sharon appears to be pushed around by White House officials.
"It is very difficult if not impossible for the prime minister of Israel or any other nation in the face of activity [terrorism] that seems to be tolerated by the governmental authorities on the other side...to say to his people that he is yielding to pressure from the Americans or anyone else.''
Powell went on to say he didn't expect the Israeli government to respond to American settlement concerns until the Palestinian Authority starts "doing something" about terrorism.
Meanwhile the pro-barrier forces, both in the United States and Israel, have been in busy preparing for a political showdown. Akiva Eldar of Ha'aretz explains that Washington's pro-Israeli lobby is preparing for the worst.
"While the prime minister's bureau chief, Dov Weisglass, and the Defense Ministry's director-general, Amos Yaron, were stepping into Rice's office to discuss the future route of the fence, not far away, on Capitol Hill, Jewish activists were running from congressman to congressman, forming a bipartisan front to rebuff any administration effort to fulfill its official policy, which says that those who want the fence should put it up on their land, not their neighbors'.
About 100 congressmen visited Israel during the summer as guests of pro-Israel lobbies, becoming loyal ambassadors for the fence. For most, its precise location - east or west of Ariel - is at most a matter of nuance, just as long as the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC is pleased."
Israel's security cabinet is expected to finalize the route of the barrier in the coming days as the public debates the pros and cons of playing hardball with Washington. The center-right Jerusalem Post editorializes that Washington should, instead of criticizing the Israeli security wall, put more pressure on the Palestinian leadership to stop terrorist attacks against Israelis.
"The U.S. should be saying to the Palestinians: If you don't like the fence, stop building it with your attacks against Israel. Bush should also be categorical that terrorism will not succeed in moving him to the left of Clinton, that is, to undermining the settlement blocs that even Clinton recognized must be annexed to Israel as part of any conceivable territorial compromise.
Sharon, for his part, should consider that it is not healthy for Israel's relationship with the U.S. to be built mainly on acquiescing to American requests, but should also include the ability to persuade or to say no."
Alan D. Abbey, also in the Post, notes that political observers in Israel are starting to wonder if Sharon has his priorities out of whack, putting Israel's close relationship with Washington before the security of Ariel's residents.
But for some the issue comes down to Israel's ultimate intentions in the West Bank. Former president Jimmy Carter writes in Tuesday's Washington Post, that Israel has to make a choice.
"Confident that our support is unshakable, Israeli leaders eventually began to assert their independence, and real American influence has reached its lowest ebb in 50 years. In the face of certain rebuffs, why would any American president become deeply involved in a balanced mediating role?
No matter what leaders the Palestinians might choose, how fervent American interest might be or how great the hatred and bloodshed might become, there remains one basic choice, and only the Israelis can make it:
Do we want permanent peace with all our neighbors, or do we want to retain our settlements in the occupied territories of the Palestinians?
America's worst betrayal of Israel would be to support the second choice."
The Bush administration's decision on the loan guarantees is expected in the coming weeks, once the Israeli security cabinet has made a final decision on the route of the wall. A lot more than money is riding on both decisions.
----
Hamas Rejects Talk of Cease-Fire with Israel
Wed September 24, 2003
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=3500577
GAZA - The Islamic militant group Hamas Wednesday rejected calls by more moderate Palestinian leaders for a cease-fire with Israel and said it would not hand in its weapons or join the Palestinian government.
Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was wounded in an Israeli missile strike earlier this month, briefly emerged from hiding to make his comments in a mosque after Israeli troops killed a Palestinian youth during a raid in the Gaza Strip.
His remarks further dimmed hopes that militant groups will soon be disarmed under a U.S.-backed peace "road map" which has stalled after making little progress toward ending three years of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
"Talking truces is completely rejected by our side now," Yassin said, shrugging off calls for a cease-fire by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and his relatively moderate prime minister-designate, Ahmed Qurie.
Qurie and Arafat have refused to use force against militant groups but are obliged to rein them in under the road map, which sets out steps to establish a Palestinian state by 2005.
Israel has already ruled out a cease-fire, saying the militants would use it to regroup and the Palestinian Authority must first rein them in. An earlier truce announced by militants lasted only seven weeks.
"CHAOS OF ARMS"
Qurie has said he regretted the "chaos of arms" in Palestinian areas but Yassin told reporters: "Nobody can take our arms away until the land is liberated, the holy places are liberated, and we have a state and an independent entity."
Dismissing calls by Qurie for Hamas to be part of the government he is forming, Yassin said: "We do not share in governments under (Israeli) occupation."
Yassin also denounced a speech by President Bush to the United Nations Tuesday as a declaration of war on Islam. Bush said the Palestinian cause was being "betrayed by leaders who cling to power by feeding old hatreds."
Hopes of a quick end to the violence have faded after a new wave of suicide bombings in Israel by Islamic militants and Israeli missile strikes which have killed 12 Hamas leaders.
Witnesses said an unarmed 15-year-old Palestinian was killed by a tank shell in the latest violence in southern Gaza. Israeli forces also wounded 11 people, including gunmen who fired on soldiers who entered the Rafah refugee camp.
Israeli military sources said it was an operation to search for arms smuggling tunnels and that the soldiers came under fire before pulling out. Palestinians said the incursion followed Palestinian mortar fire at a Jewish settlement near Rafah.
Bush's comments at the U.N. General Assembly in New York appeared aimed at Arafat's leadership, but French President Jacques Chirac said the former guerrilla leader was the only one who could impose a peace deal on Palestinians.
Palestinian leaders criticized Bush's remarks. A senior Israeli political source welcomed his comments, saying he had "pointed at the major critical obstacle to the Palestinians realizing their aspirations."
The United States and Israel accuse Arafat of fomenting violence, an allegation he denies.
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"Indo-Israeli Alliance Affects Regional Players"
24 September, 2003
Power and Interest News Report
http://pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=95
The State of Israel is currently seeking to bolster its national security as well as its Eurasian influence through burgeoning bilateral relations with India. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited New Delhi in early September to meet his counterpart, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee; the common foe of militant Muslim extremists and arms and technology sales were the topics of greatest interest.
Ever since its inception as a state, Israel has worked to limit the power of regional countries, both on its borders -- Syria, Egypt -- and further westward -- Iran, Saudi Arabia -- while increasing its own regional supremacy. Almost sixty years later, and armed with nuclear weapons, this task is largely complete -- though the biggest security concern for Israel is technically within its own borders in the West Bank and Gaza -- and now Tel Aviv has decided to further protect itself by a growing strategic alliance with India.
This is significant because of India's relationship with its neighbor, Pakistan: the two countries are arch rivals, are both nuclear armed, and have come to the brink of using such arms on multiple occasions over the unresolved northern territory of Kashmir; India also continually charges Pakistan with training and harboring terrorists, especially as violence against Indian political and economic interests has increased in recent years. And internationally, Pakistan is considered to play a pivotal role -- both perceived and actual -- in the modern phenomenon of "terrorism."
Because of this, Israel's growing interest in an alliance with India must also be equally seen as a move to intimidate Pakistan and other Central Asian countries and attempt to diminish their respective roles in aiding enemies of the Jewish state and Western interests in general. India, because of its rivalry with Pakistan, has closer relationships with many governments in Central Asia and can provide the Israeli leadership an alternative window with which to influence states that -- willingly or unwillingly -- play host to the organizations and religious and political groups that have become the basis for terrorist, Muslim extremist, and anti-establishment culture throughout Central and South Asia.
Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said: "Our contacts with India are definitely a triangular strategic relationship, in line with the U.S. stance on world terror." This comment from Sharon's spokesman sheds further light on the Indo-Israeli alliance, which Washington may see as an avenue to indirectly strengthen New Delhi's counterterrorist and military hardware and technology capabilities for its own agenda -- something it couldn't do itself while simultaneously maintaining intimate ties with Pakistan in the "war on terrorism." And since a friendly relationship with Islamabad is key to Washington's long-term plans for the region, the Bush administration has been very careful about appearing to be too chummy with New Delhi. A perfect example of the importance given to the Washington-Islamabad bilateral relationship is the apparent lack of concern exhibited by the Bush administration regarding nuclear technology given to North Korea by Pakistan.
Also, as India is strengthened, shifting the balance of power in South Asia, Pakistan will become primed for when it becomes a target itself in the "war on terrorism." Recently, New Delhi refused to provide troops for U.S. efforts in Iraq because the war there was not seen as threatening Indian interests to a great enough degree. But with Pakistan, the situation is entirely different. If the U.S. can build up Indian power and influence in South Asia indirectly through its approval of Israeli arms and technology sales to India, then Washington will have a well-equipped and willing regional ally in South Asia when the "war on terrorism" expands beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. Attacks in India, like the recent bombings in Bombay, further strengthen India's national desire to fight "terrorism," which indirectly means fighting Pakistan.
In addition to in-roads in Eurasia for Washington and Tel Aviv, such a relationship as an overt Indo-Israeli alliance aimed at strengthening India works perfectly for New Delhi as well: It provides the Indian leadership an escape route by establishing an intimate and broad relationship with a key ally of the United States and, therefore, the U.S. itself should it ever need to fully align itself with the world's lone superpower for the sake of its own survival, whether because of some unexpected threat from China, Russia, Pakistan, or even from within. Currently, New Delhi maintains a close relationship with Tehran, and this is perhaps one of the most questionable Indian practices in the eyes of Israel and the U.S.
Needless to say, this "triangular strategic relationship" is not lost on Islamabad, which has reacted predictably to this concept with concern. Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf said, "The India-Israel nexus carries a lot of danger and we are concerned about it." He added, "We have to look into all this in the light of our national interest" and that Pakistan "would try that this nexus should not be used against Pakistan, and both India and Tel Aviv may carry on with their bilateral relations."
It should also be noted that both Israel and India posses nuclear weapons. Such a relationship between nuclear powers is bound to cause alarm in governments other than the one in Islamabad. Specifically, despite India's relationship with Iran, such overt political posturing could further Tehran's desire to acquire nuclear weapons and more advanced weapons' technology to have more international political leverage in a region that it could very well become isolated within.
Report Drafted By: Matthew Riemer
The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an analysis-based publication that seeks to, as objectively as possible, provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader. PINR seeks to inform rather than persuade. This report may not be reproduced, reprinted or broadcast without the written permission of inquiries@pinr.com. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com.
-------- latin america
Venezuela's Chavez Blasts U.S. Over 'Terrorist' Plot
Wed September 24, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=3502728&fromEmail=true
CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday Venezuelan "terrorists" plotting to kill him were training in the United States, and he told the U.S. and Spanish governments to stop meddling in his country's affairs.
In a pugnacious speech to a meeting of women supporters in Caracas, the left-wing Venezuelan leader also criticized the United Nations as a "dialogue of the deaf" and said it was not worth speaking at the international body.
Chavez, who faces a possible referendum on his rule sought by political foes in Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter, had canceled a planned visit to the U.N. and the U.S. this week. He had cited security concerns.
He said on Wednesday that, while he had no conclusive proof, his government had received information of a possible assassination plot against him by Venezuelan opponents based in the United States, which is a major buyer of Venezuelan oil.
"Over there, in U.S. territory, people are conspiring against Venezuela, terrorists are being trained," Chavez said.
He gave no more details but said those involved had taken part in a failed coup against him last year.
"If they (the U.S. authorities) are really fighting terrorism as they say, they should act against these terrorists who are threatening Venezuela," Chavez said.
He angrily accused Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and the government of President Bush of interfering in Venezuela's internal affairs. He has attacked both the U.S. and Spanish leaders in the past.
"The Spanish empire was thrown out of here almost 200 years ago, Aznar," Chavez shouted, recalling how Venezuela had won independence from Spanish colonial rule.
"What happens in Venezuela has nothing to do with Mr Bush's government," he added.
In recent weeks, Chavez has furiously rejected statements from senior Bush administration officials supporting the idea of a referendum on his rule.
His attack against Aznar appeared to be motivated by comments by the Spanish prime minister published in a Colombian magazine this week. Aznar had urged Chavez not to follow the example of communist Cuba in his policies for Venezuela.
Political opponents accuse Chavez of ruling like a dictator and say his self-styled "revolution" is dragging oil-rich Venezuela toward economic ruin. He portrays his foes as rich, resentful "oligarchs" fighting to preserve their wealth and privileges.
-------- mideast
Congress, White House at Odds Over Saudi Arabia
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
By Peter Brownfeld
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98129,00.html
WASHINGTON - Lawmakers on Capitol Hill accusing Saudi Arabia (search) of being at the center of terror funding say the White House is not doing enough to address the threats from that country. "The administration has more faith in the Saudis than I do," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Fox News on Tuesday. "I think that the Saudis have such a checkered history when it comes to the funding of terrorist groups that I would prefer our government take stronger action."
Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee (search), held a classified hearing Tuesday to hear from Treasury, State and FBI officials about cooperation in efforts to track terror financing.
The Bush administration has maintained that the longstanding friendship between the United States and Saudi Arabia continues unwithered, based on mutual security and oil interests.
"I've got an absolute sense [from the Saudis] that there are no holds barred in going after the money and the terrorists," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told reporters after a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last week with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
The Saudis have been "very good partners in helping us go after the people in the Al Qaeda organization," Vice President Dick Cheney said in a televised interview last week.
That sense of partnership has been quite different on Capitol Hill. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has emerged as a leading critic of Saudi Arabia and has urged the Bush administration to get tough with the country. Concerns have also come from Republican senators, including Jon Kyl of Arizona and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
"This administration has been somewhat insulating its foreign policy from popular concerns, but Congress is much more susceptible to public pressure," CATO Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow said, explaining the difference in attitudes toward the Saudis.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, Schumer railed against Saudi Arabia for funding radical Wahhabi Islamic groups throughout the Middle East and in Pakistan. Wahhabi is Saudi Arabia's state religion. Wahhabi charities have been accused of contributing to both Al Qaeda and the Palestinian terror network Hamas.
"The Saudis continue aggressively to export this intolerant and violent form of Islam Wahhabism (search) to Muslims across the globe," Kyl added during that same hearing.
For decades, the U.S. and Saudi governments have had friendly relations. But public opinion of the Saudis has soured since it was revealed that 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals.
Lawmakers are also concerned about the slow response by Saudi Arabia to terrorism inside its own borders and the Saudi government's refusal to allow American authorities to speak with the families of the Sept. 11 attackers.
Since a triple bombing against American targets in Saudi Arabia in May, the Saudi government has been more cooperative. It has allowed American investigators to collect DNA from the homes of the Sept. 11 hijackers. The Saudis have also detained more than 200 terror suspects since the May bombings, including two who were arrested on Tuesday after a gun battle with Saudi police.
Specter suggested that more pressure hasn't been put on the Saudis because the State Department wants to protect its ally for diplomatic and oil reasons.
Saudi Arabia sits on 25 percent of the world's known oil reserves, and has been providing oil to the United States since 1933, one year after the modern kingdom was created.
In 2002, the United States was Saudi Arabia's top trade partner, with 18.7 percent of its exports going to America and 11.2 percent of Saudi imports coming from the United States, according to the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Last year, almost 17 percent of U.S. oil imports came from Saudi Arabia, ranking it second behind Canada and just ahead of Mexico and Venezuela. With its strong infrastructure, the kingdom is also best poised to expand oil production should disruptions occur in other parts of the world, such as when Venezuelan workers went on strike earlier this year.
"Saudi Arabia is likely to remain the world's largest oil producer for the foreseeable future," the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration states in its country report. "Saudi Arabia is eager to maintain and even expand its market share in the United States for a variety of economic and strategic reasons."
Heritage Foundation (search ) Middle East expert Jim Phillips said that despite the availability of other oil sources, "if something did happen to Saudi oil, the whole world would suffer."
"If all Saudi oil was taken off the market, oil prices would skyrocket, probably more than quadruple," Phillips said.
But other experts point out that America is not dependent on Saudi oil and risks of oil supply disruptions are "overstated."
"Quite frankly, they need the money more than we need the oil. They're not in a position to boycott us and selective boycotts are virtually impossible in the international marketplace," Bandow said, adding that the U.S. could assert its other interests without endangering its energy supply.
Analysts also say that if oil contracts were to dry up, the Saudi economy would collapse and societal problems that can be disguised with oil money would be laid bare.
The Saudi royal family needs oil money to buy protection from the more extreme elements in Saudi society. A temporary disruption to the Saudi oil supply could result in serious instability and jeopardize the royal family's status, said Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at New York University (search).
"What could they possibly do with their oil, drink it? They're going to have to sell it," Ben-Meir said.
----
TENSION ERUPTS BETWEEN SAUDIS, U.S.
24 Sep 2003
Middle East Newsline
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2003/september/09_24_2.html
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- Relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States have again turned tense amid discussion over the next generation of Saudi leaders.
Saudi opposition sources said Riyad had demanded the expulsion of U.S. ambassador Robert Jordan and has declared the envoy unwanted in the kingdom. The sources said Jordan angered many members of the kingdom's leadership by declaring U.S. preferences for royal succession.
The Washington-based Saudi Information Agency reported that Jordan was asked to leave the kingdom soon after he discussed the prospect of Saudi succession. The ambassador discussed the issue at two dinner receptions in the spring of 2003 attended by senior Saudi officials.
At one reception, the Saudi opposition agency said, Jordan said the United States has decided to support Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Aziz as the next Saudi monarch. But the ambassador said the next crown prince would not come from Abdullah's brothers. Instead, Jordan said, the successor to Abdullah would come from what he termed the "third generation," or the sons of Abdullah or his brothers.
----
200 held in Yemen 'to placate US'
Brian Whitaker
Wednesday September 24, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/yemen/Story/0,2763,1048570,00.html
The US-led "war on terror" has caused a worsening of human rights in Yemen, with the authorities there holding almost 200 people without trial in an effort to placate the Americans, says a report published today.
In the months following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Yemen embarked upon mass arrests, detentions, and the secret deportation of foreign nationals, Amnesty International reports.
In the 1990s, Yemen, a poor, mountainous country with porous borders, became a popular refuge for Islamists, many with Afghan connections.
After September 11, Yemen's government was pressed by Washington to crack down on extremists, or face military intervention.
Kate Allen, Amnesty's UK director, said: "The Yemeni authorities have tried to defend the indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial of nearly 200 people as unavoidable in its efforts to stave off US pressure.
"The US's role in Yemen has been deeply questionable, with the FBI allegedly involved in mass arrests, the CIA conducting illegal killings with a 'drone' last year, and US authorities blocking trials of suspects in the sinking of the USS Cole three years ago."
The detentions in Yemen mirror those in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba, where Yemenis are among those being held by the US without trial.
Children - the youngest was 12 - have been rounded up in the mass arrests in Yemen, the report says.
Amnesty says the Yemeni authorities acknowledge that some of the measures breach the country's own laws but say they are obliged to "fight terrorism" to avert the risk of US military action.
-------- nato
NATO interested in modernizing Tajik forces: Robertson
DUSHANBE (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924151220.ew7imiuc.html
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is interested in modernizing the military forces in the impoverished former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, NATO chief George Robertson told reporters here Wednesday.
Robertson spoke after meeting with Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmonov and the country's defense and foreign ministers on the first day of a two-day regional tour.
"NATO is very interested in helping with the modernization of the Tajik forces," Robertson said.
"That will be part of an individual partnership program which will be drawn up for Tajikistan in association with NATO as part of its partnership in the Partnership for Peace," he said.
Tajikistan, which hugs Afghanistan's northern border, "is on the front line of the war against international terror" along with the rest of the Central Asia region, Robertson said earlier on his arrival in the country.
Tajikistan, which was roiled by civil war after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is the most impoverished of the former Soviet republics and its southern border with Afghanistan is currently patrolled mostly by Russian troops.
Robertson was due to travel to neighboring Uzbekistan on Thursday morning and then to Afghanistan.
Tajikistan is a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace programme, launched in 1994, which is aimed at developing military cooperation with non-NATO members, in particular the former Warsaw Pact states.
-------- pacific
Singapore, Malaysian navies in joint exercise
SINGAPORE (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924085410.wuycb34m.html
Singapore and Malaysia, whose governments are locked in dispute over water supplies and other issues, have begun an annual naval exercise in the Malacca Strait, a joint statement said Wednesday.
The exercise, code-named Ex Malapura, began on Tuesday and will end next Monday, said the statement from the defence ministries of both countries. The Royal Malaysian Navy is hosting this year's manoeuvres.
"The exercise, conducted in the Malacca Strait, will involve a total of seven ships from the two navies," the statement said.
"Maritime patrol and fighter aircraft from the Royal Malaysian Air Force will also be supporting the exercise."
It said the annual exercise "provides the opportunity for all participants to foster better understanding and it enhances the good working relationship between the two navies."
Both Singapore and Malaysia are members of the Five Power Defence Arrangement along with Australia, Britain and New Zealand.
Singapore, an island without substantial natural resources, was evicted from a federation with Malaysia to become an independent republic in 1965 and has risen to become one of Asia's most modern countries.
The neighbours have since been embroiled in a dispute over the price of water that Malaysia supplies to Singapore.
Other irritants to bilateral ties include a proposed new bridge linking the countries, use of Malaysian airspace by Singaporean aircraft and ownership of a rocky islet claimed by both nations.
-------- philippines
New Philippine defense chief pledges to work for peace
MANILA (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924033153.bbnk3n5k.html
Newly-appointed Philippine defense secretary Eduardo Ermita said Wednesday he would remain in his current post as chief government peace negotiator with rebel groups even as he pursues reforms in the military.
Ermita, who has been President Gloria Arroyo's special adviser on the peace process, was named defense secretary on Tuesday, replacing Angelo Reyes who resigned after a short-lived military mutiny on July 27.
Asked if he would continue as peace negotiator, Ermita told television station ABS-CBN "definitely."
"The purpose of the peace process is not totally incompatible with the objectives of the defense department. One complements the other," he said.
Ermita, a former general, said negotiations did not mean "having an agreement at all costs."
He said he would "rationalize the needs of the department and the needs of national security and rationalize the activities in the peace process."
Ermita was active in helping revive talks between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) which has been fighting for almost three decades to set up an Islamic state in the southern third of this largely Christian nation.
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu welcomed Ermita's appointment, saying "we look forward for a fruitful negotiations with the Philippine government."
"Being a man actively involved in the peace process, we expect Defense Secretary Eduardo Ermita to pursue vigorously the peace talks with the MILF," Kabalu said, adding Ermita was aware of conditions in the strife-torn south.
Ermita said he would push reforms in the military.
He stressed that Arroyo had been cleaning up the military procurement process and bringing more resources to the soldiers in the field long before the July 27 mutiny by some 300 soldiers who cited alleged corruption in the military and neglect of soldiers in combat.
The mutineers had demanded the resignation of Arroyo and then-defense secretary Reyes but their uprising collapsed in less than a day and they are now in detention.
Reyes had resigned last month, saying he wanted to end the restiveness in the military. Arroyo had served as concurrent defense secretary in the interim until Ermita was appointed.
Ermita said: "I am very confident that as far as the (armed forces) is concerned, all we need are a little more resources for them to be able to look after the welfare of the men and improve the operational capability of our men in the field."
He said he expected to see closer coordination with the defense department of the United States, the Philippines main ally.
-------- space
Europe readies for first moon mission
(AP)
Wed, September 24, 2003
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2003/09/24/201544-ap.html
PARIS - It won't be the quickest ride in history, but the European Space Agency's SMART-1 spacecraft takes off this weekend for a trip to the moon - with an arrival date of December 2004.
The unmanned flight, Europe's first to the moon, is scheduled to begin Saturday with the launch of an Ariane 5 rocket from a base in Kourou, French Guiana.
The SMART-1, short for Small Missions for Advanced Research and Technology, will rely on energy generated by solar panels used by "ion engines" that provide a thrust of charged particles - the first time such technology has been used to get to the moon.
The craft, which weighs only 367 kilograms, will also pioneer miniaturized instrumentation that will be used to investigate the origins of the moon, the existence of water there and the possibility of building a permanent human base on the lunar surface.
Officials acknowledge there are quicker ways of getting to the moon, but they point to approximately $170-million Cdn cost of SMART-1 - about a fifth of a typical major science mission. "It's a very long journey, but it's a way to go there very, very cheaply, with very little investment in terms of fuel," said Franco Bonacina, an ESA spokesman.
SMART-1 was developed for ESA by the Swedish Space Corporation with contributions from some 30 contractors from 11 European countries and the United States.
The craft will rely on the Ariane rocket to get into orbit around the Earth, and then the ion engines will work to gradually put it into a polar orbit over the moon.
SMART-1 should enter a lunar orbit by December 2004, and a month later will begin a six-month run of experiments. After that, scientists may extend the mission, depending on funding, Bonacina said.
-------- spies
Why gather intelligence if our leaders deliberately ignore it?
What Hutton reveals is the corruption of the security services
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday September 24, 2003
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1048531,00.html
One moment of testimony at yesterday's Hutton inquiry had everyone nodding in agreement. The public were getting bored with the story, recalled the prime minister's spokesman, Godric Smith, from the witness box. He was casting his mind back to the early summer when the Kelly affair had already dragged on a while: everyone was anxious, he said, to move on.
That prompted a muttered ripple of "hear hears", at least in the marquee set up for the press. Reporters who have sat on folding chairs, staring at screens relaying live pictures from court 73, day after day since mid-August can at last see an end to their ordeal. No more squinting at documents, no more decoding civil servants and their language of mandarin. Tomorrow, Lord Hutton will sum up his inquiry and withdraw to write his report which will be delivered in November.
It will doubtless run to several volumes, the kind of thing Robin Cook can read in an hour-and-a-half, but which most ordinary mortals will barely be able to lift. This group will turn instead to that handiest of crib sheets, the executive summary. What will we read there? Probably an elegantly worded rebuke to both the BBC and the government for allowing their titanic battle to converge on a single human being who could not take the strain.
Hutton may well further reproach the government for the way it named David Kelly, and condemn the BBC for sloppy internal practices. Both sides will step forward, bite their lower lip and insist they have learned their lesson: they will promise an overhaul in the way they do business and a new commitment to listen to their critics. And they will both offer lambs of sacrifice, most likely Geoff Hoon for the one side and Andrew Gilligan for the other.
But what would a more direct, less even-handed Hutton report say? It might begin with a complaint about its remit. Confined to investigating "the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly", it was logically obliged to become obsessed with the way the weapons expert was shoved out of the shadows and into the public gaze. Hutton and his legal lieutenants had to spend hour after interminable hour on the "naming strategy" because it was his public outing that seems to have placed the psychological pressure on Dr Kelly.
But that inevitably diverted attention and energy from what surely mattered far more, at least to those outside the Kelly family: namely, the original accusation of political manipulation of intelligence. Here, most expect Hutton to let the government off pretty lightly. The conventional wisdom is that, in all the thousands of documents, no evidence has emerged to vindicate Gilligan's first report on the Today programme. The trouble here - and it was partly of Gilligan's own making - is that the bar was set too high. True, there has been no smoking email in which Alastair Campbell explicitly orders John Scarlett of the joint intelligence committee to make up a claim about Iraq's 45-minute capability. But that does not mean that Gilligan was fantasising. On the contrary, Hutton has uncovered much to suggest that, while a couple of details were badly awry, the Today correspondent was on to something serious: that, under this administration, the politicisation of intelligence has indeed reached a new pitch.
The evidence was on show again yesterday. Campbell's 15-point memo to Scarlett, attached to a list of comments from Blair himself, with its suggested rewrites to the September dossier is proof that No 10's political advisers were leaning on the spooks to harden up the JIC assessment. Constantly, Campbell is asking for "weak" statements to be replaced by "stronger" ones, for "may" and "might" to become are and will. Even when he calls for some language to be cooled down, it is only for stylistic effect, knowing that a sober intelligence report will always have greater power than florid rhetoric. What was this but political pressure to beef up the dossier?
The commentariat has accepted Scarlett's defence that these were mere "presentational" matters on which it was perfectly proper for a communications pro like Campbell to advise. But when it comes to intelligence that distinction between language and content is bogus. As Brian Jones, the retired branch head of the defence intelligence analysis staff, told the inquiry, the changes that were being sought "were about language but language is the means by which we communicate an assessment so they were also about the assessment". Put simply, a dossier consists of nothing but words: if you change the words, you change the assessment. And that is what Campbell did.
There is a more basic point. Until Kelly, most people assumed that government security decisions were based on intelligence. Yet Hutton has shown that, in the Iraq case, it was the other way around.
First came the decision - to make war on Iraq - and next came the search for evidence. Why else would Scarlett's bosses have ordered him to drop his inquiries into North Korea and Iran and focus solely on Baghdad? If they were genuinely interested in assessing the most pressing threat to security, they would have waited to hear which state posed the chief menace. But the government's mind had already been made up.
The pattern is not confined to Britain. Our coalition partners were up to the same tricks. In the US, too, the working method was conclusions first, evidence later. Democratic presidential candidate and former general Wesley Clark has told how he was phoned on 9/11 by "people around the White House" urging him to blame the attacks on Saddam Hussein. Never mind the lack of proof, it was the end goal that mattered.
If London and Washington had been truly interested in what their intelligence services had to say, they might have drawn very different conclusions. In October 2002 the CIA concluded that Saddam posed little threat - and was only likely to strike at the US if attacked first. Britain's own intelligence chiefs warned this February that al-Qaida remained the greatest danger to western interests "and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". But neither of these assessments fitted the policy that had already been decided, and so they were ignored.
This is a perverse way for governments to make choices about national security. Hutton might put it like this: what is the point of costly and elaborate intelligence agencies if their advice is to be ignored? Why have them if they are not to be listened to, but used merely as a public relations device, to attach the glamour and gravitas of "intelligence" to what is essentially a political decision?
We learned this week that Colin Powell and even Condoleezza Rice were happily declaring that Iraq posed no threat and had no weapons of destruction as recently as the spring of 2001. But 9/11 came along, the hawks won the upper hand and the decision was taken. One of the steps on the way was the corruption of intelligence. If Hutton wants to deliver one hard-hitting conclusion, let it be that.
· j.freedland@guardian.co.uk
----
Airman Is Charged as Spy for Syria at Guantánamo
September 24, 2003
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/national/24DETA.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - An Air Force translator at an American prison camp for captured militants and suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has been charged with espionage and passing military secrets to Syria, the Pentagon said today.
The translator, Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi, faces more than 30 criminal charges, including accusations that he tried to slip prison maps, cell-block information, names of prisoners and messages from them to an agent of the Syrian government. If convicted of the spying charges, he could face the death penalty.
A military lawyer for Airman al-Halabi, Maj. Kim E. London, disputed the military's accusations. "We don't believe we've seen sufficient evidence to support those charges," Major London said in a telephone interview tonight.
Airman al-Halabi is one of two American servicemen detained in recent weeks in an investigation of suspected espionage at the camp. An Islamic chaplain in the Army, Capt. James J. Yee, also known as Youssef Yee, was taken into custody on Sept. 10 at a naval air station in Jacksonville, Fla., but he has yet to be charged. The Army is investigating his activities at the camp, military officials said.
Pentagon officials said today that it was likely that Airman al-Halabi and Captain Yee knew each other, given the camp's small size and the need for translators in many of the camp's daily operations. Captain Yee was one of the few camp officials to have unrestricted access to prisoners, but at times he used a translator, the authorities said. It was unclear whether the arrests were related.
Military officials in Washington and in Cuba said today that they were reviewing security precautions at the camp. "We take security measures seriously here," Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, a spokeswoman for the military operation that runs the prison, said in a telephone interview tonight. "We are looking into our security procedures and insuring we strengthen all of our practices."
Airman al-Halabi, 24, was an Arabic language translator at the camp for about nine months after being transferred from Travis Air Force Base, Calif., where he had been assigned to a logistics squadron, said Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman. He has been in the Air Force nearly four years.
He was arrested on July 23 at the naval air station in Jacksonville after getting off a military flight from the Navy base in Cuba, but the Pentagon acknowledged this today only after it was reported by CNN. The Air Force said tonight that the detention had not been publicized "to protect ongoing investigations," which officials declined to describe.
Mr. al-Halabi was flown to Travis after his arrest and transferred to Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., where he is being held. Pentagon officials said that among the charges were 4 counts related to espionage, 3 of aiding the enemy, 11 of disobeying a lawful order and 9 of making a false official statement.
Neither Air Force officials nor the military's official charge sheet identify the "enemy" that he is said to have aided. But the most severe charges relate to activities involving Syria, a country with which Washington maintains normal relations. Syria, however, is on the State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorism, and the Bush administration has accused it of helping terrorists and foreign fighters who are attacking American troops in Iraq.
The accusations contained in the six-page charge sheet, copies of which the Air Force provided tonight, include wrongfully taking photographs of the camp sites, transferring classified information to an unclassified computer and unlawfully delivering baklava to detainees.
The most serious accusations focus on charges that Airman al-Halabi tried to pass sensitive information to the Syrian government. These communications included efforts to deliver two handwritten notes from detainees and more than 180 electronic versions of written notes.
The military also accused the airman of trying to pass on information about military and prisoner movements at the naval base in Cuba. The military said he did "knowingly communicate with the enemy by writing and transmitting secretly through unsecured e-mail to an unauthorized person or persons whom he, the accused, knew to be the enemy."
Many details surrounding the case were murky tonight. It was unclear how much, if any, of the information Airman al-Halabi is accused of trying to deliver was actually passed along, and, if so, to what extent security and operations at the camp were compromised, officials said.
There are 680 prisoners from more than 40 countries being held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base.
The military sought to keep Airman al-Halabi's arrest and legal proceedings secret, but his case has stirred an uproar inside Air Force legal circles.
In an unusual move, the Air Force on Sept. 15 tried to close the proceedings of the airman's Article 32 hearing, the equivalent of a grand-jury proceeding. His lawyers objected, and the next day, the United States Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the protest and ordered the government to open the proceedings to the public, except when necessary to protect classified information. The hearing continued in both open and closed sessions through Sept. 18.
An Air Force investigating officer, Col. Anne Burman, will prepare a report from the hearing and submit recommendations to Brig. Gen. Bradley S. Baker, commander of the 60th Air Mobility Wing at Travis. General Baker could take actions including dismissing all charges and ordering further court proceedings, including court-martial.
"The charges do not represent a trial," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice and an authority on military law. "It's quite urgent that there be no rush to judgment, particularly given the highly charged atmosphere we're in."
So far, the investigations into Airman Al-Halabi and Captain Yee are being handled by their respective branches of the military.
Captain Yee, a 1990 graduate of West Point who converted to Islam, is also being investigated on suspicions of espionage, improperly assisting the prisoners or some other breach of military duties, a civilian law enforcement official said.
Other law enforcement officials have said that the military opened its inquiry into Captain Yee before he left Guantánamo and that when he was searched upon arriving at the Jacksonville naval station, investigators found what seemed to be sketches or diagrams of the prisoner facilities at the base. He is being held at a military prison in Charleston, S.C.
Military officials said Captain Yee left the Army in the mid-1990's, moving to Syria for several years. He returned to this country and re-entered the Army as an Islamic chaplain. Investigators are looking into the possibility that he was sympathetic to prisoners there and was preparing to aid them in some undetermined way.
--------
Panel to close Pentagon terror-spy office
9/24/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-24-spy-office-closing_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - House and Senate negotiators have decided to close a Pentagon office that was developing a vast computerized terrorism surveillance system and bar spending that would allow those high-tech spying tools to be used against Americans on U.S. soil.
But they left open the possibility that some or all of the high-powered software tools under development might be employed by different government offices to gather foreign intelligence from foreigners, U.S. citizens aboard or foreigners in this country.
The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program was conceived by retired Adm. John Poindexter and was run by the Information Awareness Office that he headed inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was developing software that could examine the computerized travel, credit, medical and other records of Americans and others around the world to search for telltale activities that might reveal preparations for a terrorist attack.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has led a campaign against the program, hailed the result Wednesday. "Americans on American soil are not going to be targets of TIA surveillance that would have violated their privacy and civil liberties. The government is not going to be able to pick Americans up by their ankles and shake them to see if anything funny falls out," Wyden said in an interview.
"The original Poindexter program would have been the biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States," he added. "Now the lights have gone out on the program conceived by John Poindexter." He said the agreement would allow foreign intelligence gathering on terrorism "without cannibalizing the civil liberties of Americans."
Poindexter's office told contractors he wanted the software to allow U.S. agents to rapidly scan and analyze multiple petabytes of information. Just one petabyte of computer data could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times.
Wyden said Senate negotiators working on the 2004 defense appropriations bill stood up to stiff resistance from their counterparts in the House, which had passed a weaker restriction. Wyden himself had crafted the weaker restriction early this year before additional details of the Pentagon effort became public. The House restriction, which Wyden got included in another law that expires Oct. 1., allowed the research to continue at the Pentagon but barred its implementation against Americans in the United States without specific congressional approval. Subsequently, the Senate passed a provision in next year's defense appropriation bill killing funding for the TIA program.
"The conferees agree with the Senate position which eliminates funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness program within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency," the conference report said in a section Wyden released. "The conferees are concerned about the activities of the Information Awareness Office and direct that the office be terminated immediately."
In addition to the data-scanning project, other TIA efforts that cannot be pursued by DARPA under the conferees' agreement include projects to identify people at a distance by using radar or video images of their gait or facial characteristics.
The conference wrote that four, noncontroversial projects in TIA could continue at DARPA: two to develop software for wargaming future terrorist attacks and the response to them, a project to speed detection of bioterror attacks and one to develop software to automatically translate foreign documents and broadcasts.
And it said, "The conference agreement does not restrict the National Foreign Intelligence Program from using processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence purposes."
The full import of this sentence was not immediately clear, but it appeared to allow some or all of TIA's high-powered software tools to used by agencies involved in gathering foreign intelligence, information about foreign intentions, plans and capabilities from foreigners or U.S. citizens aboard or from foreigners in this country. The CIA, State Department, Defense Department and other federal agencies participate in the foreign intelligence program.
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, described the agreement last Thursday as shifting the antiterror surveillance program out of DARPA but not eliminating it. Stevens did not release any text of the conference report then, and the portion released Wednesday did not make clear whether the conferees agreed to move the money for some or all of the TIA research from DARPA to one or more other agencies or merely left open the possibility of doing so later.
Poindexter, who was forced to resign as former President Reagan's national security adviser over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, quit DARPA last month under fire over the surveillance program.
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China urges greater UN role in Iraq
UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
Sep 24, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030924175138.xl5ne9s7.html
China called on the United Nations Wednesday to play a greater role in post-war Iraq, and reiterated its commitment to seek a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis.
"Although the Iraq war is over, peace remains elusive with no end of suffering in sight for the Iraqi people," Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said in an address to the UN General Assembly.
"China is in favour of an important UN role in Iraq's post-war arrangements and reconstruction and supports the Iraqi people in resuming the exercise of sovereignty at an early date," Li said.
China has rallied behind France, Germany and Russia who have proposed limiting the US political role in Iraq in exchange for their support to bring order and stability to the country.
China had opposed the US-led war in Iraq without UN backing and Li stressed in his address that UN member states were "obligated" to maintain the leading role and authority of the world body.
"It is incumbent upon us to turn the UN into a forum of cooperation, instead of a coliseum of recrimination," he said.
"No country is populated all by saints and therefore should should have no right to throw stones of prejudice around.
"To this end, we should foresake all the old baggage of arrogance, estrangement and narrow-mindedness," he said.
Turning to regional issues, Li said China would continue to push diplomatic efforts to bring about a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
"China remains committed to solving the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula peacefully through dialogue and building a lasting peace there," he said.
Following talks in Beijing on Wednesday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kasyanov called for another round of six-nation talks aimed at resolving the North Korean nuclear dispute.
----
US aggression breeds terror: UN chief
By Caroline Overington,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in New York, and
Maggie Farley; with the Los Angeles Times
September 24, 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/23/1064083001492.html
The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, attacked American foreign policy - warning it could stoke terrorism and global chaos - just hours before President George Bush was due to defend the US-led invasion of Iraq in a speech to the UN.
Mr Annan said the use of military force against terrorist groups could encourage more terrorism, while pre-emptive strikes could lead to a lawless world where nations attack one another "with or without justification".
Without mentioning the US or its allies in Iraq by name, he told a New York conference on terrorism that nations were deluded if they believed military action alone could end terrorism.
He said the fact a "few wicked men or women" commit murder in the name of a political cause does not make the cause any less just. "Nor does it relieve us of the obligation to deal with legitimate grievance."
Mr Annan said terrorism "will only be defeated if we act to solve the political disputes and long-standing conflicts which generate support for it".
"Accordingly, there needs to be more on the horizon than simply winning a war against terrorism. There must be the promise of a better and fairer world, and a concrete plan to get there."
Mr Annan also said nations that launch military action against terrorists need to "respect the limits which international humanitarian law places on the use of force".
"Terrorist groups may actually be sustained when ... governments cross the line and commit outrages themselves, whether it is ... indiscriminate bombardment of cities, the torture of prisoners, targeted assassinations, or accepting the death of innocent civilians as collateral damage."
Mr Bush was expected to tell the UN that the US and its allies were justified in pre-emptively striking Iraq, because they were sure Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the world was better off without him.
But Mr Annan said pre-emptive attacks represent a "fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years".
He said the UN Security Council may need to consider ways of authorising "coercive measures" to address certain types of threats, "for instance, terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction".
Mr Annan will launch plans for "radical reforms" of the UN at the General Assembly. Since the US sidestepped the UN to invade Iraq this year, the world body has been looking for a way to recover its global standing.
Mr Annan will ask the assembly for an overhaul of the UN's global role. His suggestions include expanding the Security Council and forming a panel to consider the UN's most pressing internal issues.
"We have come to a fork in the road," he said. "This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded."
Those close to Mr Annan said he was deeply shaken by last month's terrorist bombing of the UN building in Baghdad, and the loss of his friend and colleague Sergio Vieira de Mello. The UN had "lost its innocence", he said at a memorial service this week.
A UN official, who was in Iraq, said the bombing "made him recognise that the UN is in severe crisis. The kind of thing he's saying now he's never said before".
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At the U.N., Bush Wins No Fresh Pledges of Iraq Aid
U.S. Military Action's Value Has Limits, Delegates Say
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54470-2003Sep23.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 23 -- President Bush's appeal for greater financial and military support for the reconstruction of Iraq failed to elicit fresh pledges today as members of the United Nations demanded that the United States yield greater power to the U.N. and the Iraqis.
The cool reaction to Bush's address by delegates at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly's general debate reflected concern at the United Nations that a larger military force in Iraq will not enhance security in the country unless authority also is transferred to a transitional Iraqi authority with real power.
Representatives from Brazil to South Africa used the General Assembly podium to underscore the limits of U.S. military action in resolving the dispute in Iraq and elsewhere. They said the obstacles faced by U.S. forces in Iraq prove the need for a greater U.N. role.
"Let us not place greater trust on military might than on the institutions we created with the light of reason and the vision of history," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil said in a speech to the 191-member body moments before Bush delivered his remarks. "A war can perhaps be won single-handedly, but peace, lasting peace, cannot be secured without the support of all."
U.S. officials acknowledged they are resigned to the probability that a new U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq -- which the Bush administration is proposing -- will not lead to a surge in commitments by key Muslim states, including Pakistan and Turkey, to send troops to the country.
One U.S. official said the administration hoped that Bush's speech would at least persuade governments to provide more money for Iraq's reconstruction at a donors' conference to be held in Madrid next month. "The expectation is that we are not going to get a great number of troops to participate," the official said. "But we want them to provide funds at the donor conference and we will try to make that happen."
Discussions over the U.N. role in Iraq have been complicated by two suicide bombing attacks against the United Nations in Iraq over the past month, most recently on Monday. In the Aug. 19 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, 22 people were killed, including the U.N.'s top representative, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Some senior advisers to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan have asked him to consider withdrawing, or at least sharply reducing, the presence of U.N. personnel in Iraq after Monday's attack outside the U.N. compound, which killed the bomber and an Iraqi guard.
Annan also warned the Security Council last week that he will not expand the U.N. presence in Iraq unless he is given a clearer mandate, stronger council backing and greater assurances of security. Some of Annan's top advisers believe that security can best be achieved by returning sovereignty to the Iraqis, not by increasing the international military presence there.
The debate over Iraq in the General Assembly today revealed a deeper unease over the United States' increasing use of force to defend its national interests. "Naturally, the powerful will set the agenda for all residents of the global village," South African President Thabo Mbeki said. "Because we are poor, we are partisan activists for a strong, effective and popularly accepted United Nations."
Delegates welcomed Bush's decision to launch new negotiations on a resolution that would assign the United Nations a specific role in helping to write an Iraqi constitution, training an Iraqi civil service and preparing for free elections. But they said the president's proposal does not go far enough.
French President Jacques Chirac continued to seek support for an amendment to the U.S. draft resolution that would endorse the transfer of power to an Iraqi transitional government within 90 days.
Bush and his top foreign policy team -- who filed out of the General Assembly hall shortly before Chirac delivered his speech -- favor the establishment of a constitutional process and elections before sovereignty can be handed to the Iraqis.
The French position has gained broader acceptance in recent days. The temporary president of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Ahmed Chalabi, and Annan indicated that the United States must accelerate the handover of power to the Iraqis.
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UNITED NATIONS
Annan Tells General Assembly That U.N. Must Correct Its Weaknesses
September 24, 2003
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/international/middleeast/24KOFI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 23 - Saying that the United Nations has "come to a fork in the road," Secretary General Kofi Annan argued today that fundamental weaknesses in the architecture of the institution must be remedied for it to retain any effectiveness in combating genocide, terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons.
If a robust and flexible new structure can be devised, he said, it could answer "the concerns that make some states feel uniquely vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action" - a clear reference to the Bush administration's policy of using pre-emptive force to eliminate perceived threats.
The logic of pre-emption, which was the political underpinning of the war in Iraq, he said, "represents a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years."
The secretary general's remarks were the clearest indication to date of his strategic shift over the past 10 months, through the rancorous dissolution of Security Council consensus on confronting Iraq, the slow response to massacres in the eastern Congo and Liberia and, most critically, the Aug. 19 bombing attack on the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations, which killed 22 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, Mr. Annan's colleague and close friend for more than 20 years.
Last winter, he urged consensus but set himself out as a person who carried out the mandates of the Security Council and the General Assembly. Since then, he has become ever more proactive. Today, he chided the delegates in language that bespoke his frustration at the United Nations' visible failures and at the attacks on it from Washington.
He also made clear his determination to leave the United Nations in better shape than it was when he became secretary general not quite seven years ago. Before the session began, he sent out personal appeals to heads of state and government to attend.
Last week, at a memorial service for the victims of the Baghdad attack, he said that bombing meant "a loss of innocence" for the institution. Today, he addressed the assembled delegates sternly, saying that the United Nations and its more than 9,000 employees belonged to them, and that they must do a better job of protecting them.
"Excellencies, you are the United Nations," he said. "The staff who were killed and injured in the attack on our Baghdad headquarters were your staff."
"We must take more effective measures to protect the security of our staff," he added. "I count on your full support - legal, political and financial."
But the overarching message of his speech was: Do not delay the tough political work of remaking the institution. Crucial to any change, he added, is reform of the Security Council - which for many members means expanding the 15-member body, and for others means making it smaller.
Over the past few years, there have been suggestions that Germany and Japan, as economic powerhouses, should have permanent seats on the Security Council. Some have argued for expanded representation for Latin America and the Islamic world, others for a reduction in the number of European countries, which currently occupy one-third of the Council's 15 seats.
Today, Mr. Annan chastised his audience for debating this issue for more than a decade. "In the eyes of your peoples, the difficulty of reaching agreement does not excuse your failure to do so," he said. "If you want the council's decisions to command greater respect, particularly in the developing world, you need to address the issue of its composition with greater urgency."
He added, "History is a harsh judge; it will not forget us if we let this moment pass."
Mr. Annan said that he intended to set up a panel of "eminent personalities" to assess the current security threats and the best use of collective action to respond to them. This group, he proposed, would also recommend changes in the United Nations and processes of the United Nations, and would report back in time for their ideas to be discussed at the next General Assembly.
-------- us
Killer disease hits gulf vets early
Studies link Lou Gehrig's, toxic agents
By BILL HENDRICK
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
9/23/03
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0903/23gulf.html?urac=n&urvf=10643743897050.45672857111311005
Veterans of the 1991 Gulf War are coming down with Lou Gehrig's disease at three times the normal rate for their age group, and the incidence is accelerating as they age, according to two studies published today in the journal Neurology that link the deadly disorder to exposure to nerve gas and other toxic agents.
Officially known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, it typically doesn't strike men and women under age 45, said Dr. Robert Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and lead author of one of the studies, "but something they were exposed to over there has triggered it much earlier."
A separate study by the Department of Veterans Affairs supported Haley's findings. They are the first studies subjected to the rigorous analysis known as peer review to establish an increased incidence of ALS among veterans of the Gulf War.
Haley said in an interview Monday that at least 60 veterans under age 45 had been diagnosed, far more than would have been expected in that age group. He said the ALS outbreak was probably triggered by exposure to sarin gas or other agents, which also are suspected of causing thousands of mysterious and sometimes devastating illnesses lumped under the moniker Gulf War Syndrome, or GWS.
The VA has said about 150,000 of the 696,118 men and women who served in the gulf region in that war have war-related disabilities, and Haley contends most cases of GWS, like the ALS "cluster," are the result of "deep brain" damage.
He said 23 percent of Gulf War veterans have been granted "war-related disability status," compared with 9 percent after World War II, 5 percent after Korea and 9 percent after Vietnam.
ALS is very rare -- it hits about one in 150,000 people -- and the soldiers who contracted it after the Gulf War probably would have gotten it anyway had they lived long enough, Haley said. But most people don't show symptoms until they're in their 50s and 60s, "so it's pretty clear something triggered this in the young Gulf War vets," he said.
"The ones who've had it and died or who've got it now were going to get it 30 years later," he said. "To get ALS, you have to have a very rare genetic predisposition."
Haley said he believes the spike in ALS and many GWS cases are traceable to the demolition by U.S. forces of Iraqi munitions dumps that later were found to be loaded with sarin and other poisonous agents.
Symptoms of GWS range from chronic muscle and joint pain to fatigue, skin rash, diarrhea, sleeplessness, difficulty concentrating, severe headache, mood instability and bad balance. They've been blamed on stress, smoke inhalation from oil fires, depleted-uranium ammunition used by U.S. forces, pesticides, even vaccines. But Haley's study found that two-thirds of the ALS victims had GWS prior to developing ALS.
"The new studies show something big wrong is going on in the Gulf War veteran population," said retired Sgt. Steve Robinson, 40, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md. He said 330,000 veterans have undiagnosed illnesses related to Gulf War service.
Haley said the rate of early-onset ALS began climbing in 1992 and has been on the rise ever since.
"This is really big," he said.
The VA launched its study in 1998, one year after Haley.
Haley, who spent 10 years as a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, quickly identified a group of Gulf War vets, all under 45, who had contracted ALS. At first, he projected 1.38 cases would be diagnosed in 1998, but five were, and this "epidemic curve" is still rising.
The VA study, by Dr. R.D. Horner of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., concluded that gulf vets experienced a two-fold greater risk of ALS.
But Haley said that was "the most conservative estimate they could make" and is belied by data in the VA study that show gulf vets are 3.37 times more likely to develop ALS.
ALS attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, leading to muscle weakness in the arms and legs and difficulty in speaking and breathing, swallowing and eventually in all muscle function. It affects about 30,000 Americans and is best known as Lou Gehrig's disease, after the Baseball Hall of Famer who was diagnosed at the exceptionally young age of 35 and died at 37. Most ALS victims die within three to five years.
Haley stressed that his research should not frighten military personnel involved in the current Iraq conflict "because, as far as we know, there is no sarin there now."
Dr. Robert Haley urges all Gulf War veterans diagnosed with ALS before age 50 to contact his team of researchers at 1-214-648-3075.
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Senior general says many more reservists may go to Iraq
9/24/2003
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-24-iraq-reservists_x.htm
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon may be forced within several weeks to alert a large number of additional National Guard and Reserve troops for duty in Iraq, a senior general said Wednesday.
Reservists have breakfast in a Baqouba, Iraq, military camp earlier in September.
By Samir Mezban, AP
Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said more reservists could be called upon if other countries do not soon pledge thousands more troops to form a third multinational division in Iraq.
"We need to be making decisions about alerting reservists over the next four to six weeks," he said. "I would think that by around the end of October or the beginning of November we should be alerting those forces that may need to be called up to relieve or be prepared to relieve (troops there now) if we don't have specificity by then on a third" multinational division.
He said the Guard and Reserve troops should be notified about four months before they would need to ship out because they require some training time.
Separately, a defense official said the Pentagon's personnel chief, David Chu, has approved a new policy that will allow U.S. troops - both active duty and reserve - who are in Iraq on 12-month assignments to take 15 days of vacation at some point during their tour. Details are to be worked out by Central Command, the organization that runs military operations in Iraq, the official said. The official disclosed the Chu decision on condition of anonymity.
When it announced a troop rotation plan in July, the Pentagon assumed that it would have available a third multinational division of 10,000 to 15,000 troops to replace the Army's 101st Airborne Division early next year.
Britain is leading one multinational division and Poland is leading another. Among nations mentioned as possibilities for a third division are Turkey, Pakistan, India and South Korea, but none has agreed to do so.
Pace said U.S. Central Command, which is running the military operation in Iraq, may determine that it can find enough active-duty troops to fill any gap next year. But he indicated that mobilizing more National Guard and Reserve troops was an option under active consideration.
"The entire population of the active force of the Marine Corps and the reserve force of the Marine Corps, and the Army and the National Guard and Reserves will be looked at" for possible duty, Pace said in an interview with a group of reporters at a Washington hotel.
Some in the military are concerned that reservists are being asked to shoulder too much of the burden.
Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said Wednesday that few reservists were likely to have realized when they signed up that they would be used so heavily.
"It has to have an impact - a negative one - on retention," he said. "People's lives are being obliterated" by lengthy and sometimes frequent mobilizations for duty overseas.
In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, however, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the Army has retained more than the usual number of National Guard and Reserve troops recently, although it faces "challenges" in recruiting more to join.
Of the 302 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq since the war began, at least 47 were National Guard or Reserve, according to an unofficial count. Twenty-one of the 47 were hostile deaths; 26 were non-hostile.
There are now about 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, including several thousand Guard and Reserve forces. Current plans call for mobilizing two National Guard brigades for duty in Iraq this fall. The Pentagon had hoped that it would need to activate no National Guard units beyond that, but Pace said more could be alerted within weeks for possible deployment.
"What is not clear now ... is whether or not what we thought two months ago about the security environment (in Iraq) is still a valid projection, and then whether the coalition countries will or will not come up with a third division," he said.
"There are many countries out there talking about it, and we have every hope that that will happen," he said, "but hope is not a plan."
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Despite Protests, U.S. Soldiers Detain Photographer and Driver
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55270-2003Sep23.html
BAGHDAD, Sept. 23 -- U.S. soldiers detained an Associated Press photographer and driver today, handcuffing them, forcing them to stand in the sun for three hours and denying them water and use of a telephone.
Soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 70th Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division detained photographer Karim Kadim and driver Mohammed Abbas near Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, and kept guns trained on the two Iraqis despite their repeated attempts to explain they were journalists.
The troops were looking for explosives planted in the area.
"We identified ourselves from the very beginning as press, even before we approached the troops," Kadim said. "I was asked not to take any pictures and I didn't. We were told to leave and we walked away, and then one of them shouted at us to come back."
An armored personnel carrier arrived moments later. Three soldiers disembarked and aimed their guns at the two men.
"We were searched, and they took away all my camera gear. Then our hands were tied behind our backs, first with rope, and then with plastic handcuffs," Kadim said.
The two were made to stand for three hours in temperatures of 110 degrees. Abbas said the soldiers accused them of being part of the insurgency attacking U.S. troops.
The two were taken to a U.S. base, where Maj. Eric Wick apologized. Wick also called the AP office in Baghdad and said the incident "was a misunderstanding on our part."
On Thursday, U.S. soldiers shot up Kadim's car in Khaldiya during a firefight after an American convoy was hit with a remote-controlled roadside bomb. Kadim and another driver jumped from the car after they saw a tank had them in its sights. They were fired on as they ran and the car was badly damaged, but neither man was hurt. The AP sent a letter of protest to the U.S. military in Baghdad.
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Corps of Engineers Chief Drafts Plan to Reorganize Agency
By Eric Pianin and Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54802-2003Sep23.html
The military commander of the Army Corps of Engineers intends to launch a major reorganization next month that would strengthen the military's hand in reviewing and authorizing water projects while diminishing the role of civilian Pentagon employees and members of Congress.
Under the plan drafted by Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers, the Corps would be divided into eight new "regional business centers," each promoting nine lines of services ranging from navigation and flood control to recreation and environmental restoration. Unlike the current system, in which requests for harbor dredging and other major water projects must clear a series of local, regional and congressional hurdles, the new military-dominated business centers would solicit business and make most of the key decisions.
If the plan were fully implemented, it would represent a dramatic departure from current practice in which powerful members of Congress dictate the selection, pace and price tag for major projects.
Flowers intends to ask Congress to forgo its traditional line-item authority over the funding of studies of potential new projects and to consolidate and speed up the authorization and appropriations process. Lawmakers jealously guard their prerogatives and many would likely oppose the request.
He also has proposed that Congress eliminate the requirement that local communities share in the cost of project feasibility studies -- a move that would boost federal costs by $100 million or more a year.
"We must strengthen the Regional Business Centers if we are to provide effective and efficient service to our customers, partners and the American people," Flowers said in a message to Corps officials last month. "The Regional Business Center will be the focus of our operational model."
The 227-year-old Corps has faced unprecedented scrutiny in recent years because of botched water projects and serious problems with its economic analyses, which prompted Flowers to acknowledge in testimony last year that his agency faces "a turning point." The agency has been forced to suspend work on deepening the Delaware River and a similar dredging of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and had to restart the biggest study in its history after top officials were caught trying to skew data to justify billion-dollar lock expansions on the Mississippi River.
Lawmakers have called for major changes that would require independent peer reviews for all costly projects, an updating of agency guidelines to emphasize environmental protection and a requirement that local communities pay larger percentages of Corps port-dredging and beach-replenishment efforts.
Critics say Flowers's proposal would do practically nothing to address the concerns of lawmakers, the General Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences, internal Pentagon investigators and the Office of Management and Budget. Rather, they say, the changes would make it even harder for outsiders to monitor Corps activities and further shift the cost of projects from local communities to the federal government.
"What's been learned in the last few years is that we need more vigorous oversight," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "And it's very clear the country is looking for tough requirements to ensure projects are cost-effective. . . . I think proposing less vigorous congressional oversight is a nonstarter and will meet with bipartisan opposition up here."
But Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.), who is familiar with some aspects of the plan, said some of Flowers's proposals deserve consideration, especially those that would cut down on pork-barrel spending by members of Congress.
"The Corps needs to be more independent of these hungry wolves up here, these members of Congress that want projects done whether they are worthwhile or not," said Gilchrest, a member of the House Water Resources and Environment subcommittee. Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), called the plan "a misguided vanity project for Gen. Flowers that does nothing to help the Corps' professional staff do its job."
In a letter to J.P. Woodley, the newly appointed assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, PEER warned that Flowers's plan would commit the Corps to "its own unique water resources policy and doctrine requiring only limited 'interfacing' with civilian superiors on annual legislative matters."
The Corps has about 35,000 employees, all but 650 of them civilians, and a proposed fiscal 2004 civil works budget of $4.2 billion, an agency official said. The agency is involved in planning, designing, building and operating projects such as flood control levees, military facilities and harbor and river dredging. The Corps' civil works division functions largely as a project manager, employing engineers, architects, biologists, regulatory analysts and others who conduct studies, design plans and oversee construction.
Carol Sanders, an agency spokeswoman, said Corps officials started putting together the reorganization plans a year ago with the goal of stretching tight budget dollars. But they quickly saw the project as an opportunity to make wholesale management changes to spur efficiency, she said.
The intention, she said, is not to concentrate power in the hands of the military or inhibit Congress's oversight role, but to make the Corps less balkanized internally and more effective.
"We know that when we work in teams we can be more responsive," she said. "We get things done more quickly."
-------- propaganda wars
Networks banned from Iraq council
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 24, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030923-093040-9191r.htm
LONDON - The American-selected Iraqi Governing Council yesterday imposed a two-week ban on coverage of its official activities by the Arab world's largest satellite-television networks, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.
The U.S.-led coalition, meanwhile, is poised to impose new curbs this week on any TV network that gets information on a future act of violence and fails to report it immediately to the authorities.
An Al Jazeera reporter and cameraman were arrested last week after being at the scene of a bomb blast that wounded several American soldiers.
The temporary suspension by the 25-member Governing Council was strongly condemned as an invasion of press freedom by employees of the two stations.
A U.S. official at the meeting blocked stronger measures against the two stations, sources confirmed.
"They are acting like new Saddams," said one senior editor who asked not to be named.
Both networks were at the press conference where the two-week suspension was announced, their logos prominently displayed on the microphones.
Governing Council members contended that both networks had given witting or unwitting aid to terrorists and had shown bias against the coalition.
One of the key instances cited by Governing Council members to justify Al Arabiya's inclusion in the temporary ban was the broadcast by both stations of interviews with masked men claiming to represent armed insurgents, who threatened coalition forces and members of the Governing Council with death.
Al Arabiya has since pledged not to show footage of masked terrorists making threats.
"The Board of Trustees raised concerns and we have decided, with our news team, that we will not have these masked people again," said Walid al-Ibrahim, a 43-year-old Saudi media mogul who owns the bulk of the shares in Al Arabiya, which he launched in March.
"If they want to come and show their faces and give their names on TV, they are welcome to express their views. But we will not allow threats to kill people," Mr. al-Ibrahim said.
"Al Arabiya does not have a hidden agenda. Nobody is steering Al Arabiya with a remote control," he said.
Anticoalition militants have also viewed both stations as useful conduits for their clandestine audiotapes.
These have several times surreptitiously been left under a tree near the hotel, followed by a telephoned tip-off.
Al Arabiya has broadcast most of these messages, sometimes purporting to come from Saddam Hussein. It recently ran a tape, supposedly from a senior al Qaeda spokesman, warning that actions were afoot that would dwarf the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
----
Déjà Vu With Condoleezza Rice
09/24/2003
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?bid=7
One good measure of this Administration's extremism is the steady drumbeat of criticism being leveled against it by leading establishment figures--many not known for being politically outspoken.
Just the other day, Pulitzer-prize winner James McPherson, one of America's preeminent Civil War historians and the current President of the prestigious American Historical Association (AHA) published a blistering critique of President Bush and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in the September AHA newsletter.
Among other charges, he accuses them of mis-using the term "revisionist historians" to derisively deflect criticism and denigrate a legitimate and essential activity of his profession.
"Neither Bush nor Rice offered a definition of this phrase," McPherson notes, "but their body language and tone of voice appeared to suggest that they wanted listeners to understand 'revisionist history' to be a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present...The 14,000 members of this Association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past...There is no single, eternal, and immutable 'truth' about past events and their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past--that is 'revisionism'--is what makes history vital and meaningful."
"Without revisionism," McPherson argues, "we might be stuck with the images of Reconstruction after the American Civil War that were conveyed by D.W. Griffith's ' Birth of a Nation' and Claude Bowers's 'The Tragic Era'."
Would President Bush and Condoleezza Rice wish to associate themselves with Southern political leaders of the 1950s who condemned Chief Justice Earl Warren and his colleagues as revisionist historians because their decision in Brown v Board of Education struck down the accepted version of history and law laid down by the Court in Plessy v Ferguson?..."
McPherson reserves his real contempt for the alleged scholar on the Bush team--former Stanford University Provost and political scientist Rice. "The judgmental tone of Rice's derogatory reference to 'revisionist historians,'" McPherson observes, "brings to mind a review of her book The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, in the December 1985 issue of the American Historical Review...The reviewer claimed that Rice 'frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation.' In addition, according to the reviewer, she 'passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of the facts" and her "writing abounds with meaningless phrases.'"
Sound familiar? It does to McPherson, who concludes: "I am tempted to wonder, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, whether we are experiencing deja vu all over again."
----
Iraqi Council Denies Access To 2 Arab Satellite Networks
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55271-2003Sep23.html
BAGHDAD, Sept. 23 -- Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council today temporarily banned two popular Arab satellite television stations from covering the council's news conferences and entering government ministries because of what it called "irresponsible activities" that threaten the country's "democracy and stability" and encourage terrorism.
The two-week penalty was imposed on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, two of the most popular news channels in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. The council accused the stations of violating vague "media-conduct rules" outlined for the first time in today's edict.
Those rules include a ban on statements promoting the return of the Baath Party or provoking sectarian strife. The council also ordered all residents to inform government authorities of any information they obtain about "any sabotage or criminal act or terrorist act or any act of violence that is meant to spread chaos and fear among the people of Iraq."
Several council members have made little secret of their disdain for al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which they accuse of glorifying resistance attacks and being overly critical of Iraqi politicians who are cooperating with U.S. occupation forces.
The decision is "sending a signal that we will not any longer tolerate bad behavior by the media," said Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, chairman of the council's media committee. "The signal will come out loud and clear. They will understand."
In issuing the order, the council began the dicey task -- without the benefit of a constitution or elected legitimacy -- of trying to draw a line between free expression and acts deemed impermissible in most nations, such as inciting violence. Although several members insisted such a step was necessary in the face of ongoing attacks on U.S.-led forces and civilian targets, organizations representing journalists condemned the edict as a blow to press freedom.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists called the council's decision "deeply troubling."
"Penalizing media outlets sets a poor precedent and raises serious questions about how Iraqi authorities will handle the broadcast or publication of negative news," said Joel Campagna, the committee's Middle East program coordinator. "The Governing Council should encourage open media."
Shakir said the order, which is limited to council activities and government ministries under its control, was issued in consultation with the U.S. occupation authority. "We're all of the same mind," he said.
Attempts to reach spokesmen for the occupation authority by telephone tonight were unsuccessful. The order does not prevent the stations from operating in Iraq or attending events organized by the occupation authority.
The U.S. civil administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has issued an order banning any incitement to violence, including through media outlets, but the reporting of such statements by journalists has so far not been deemed to violate that rule. The council's decision, however, does not include any exemption for simply reporting the statements of resistance groups.
Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which both have several correspondents in Iraq, have rankled U.S. officials and Iraqi political leaders with extensive coverage of resistance attacks. In some cases, the stations have aired inaccurate reports of extensive American and Iraqi casualties. In other cases, they have accused U.S. officials of covering up casualties.
The stations also have become a conduit for shadowy groups seeking to assert responsibility for attacks or threaten new assaults. They also have broadcast several recordings purportedly from deposed president Saddam Hussein in which he called on Iraqis to fight occupying forces.
"The two channels were banned because they have invested the most in inciting violence," said Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman for Ahmed Chalabi, who holds the council's rotating presidency. "We hope other channels will draw a lesson from this decision."
Last month, the State Department condemned al-Arabiya for airing footage of masked men threatening to kill members of the Governing Council, calling it "irresponsible in the extreme."
At the Governing Council's first news conference, criticism of Arab television networks was a central theme. Muhammed Bahr Uloum, a Shiite Muslim cleric who has since suspended his membership in the council, accused the station of betraying the Iraqi people.
A spokesman for al-Jazeera, Jihad Ballout, said the station was "dismayed" by the Governing Council's action. "The first victim of such a decision is the truth," he said. "We try to give as comprehensive a picture as possible, but now a certain portion of the picture will be missing from our coverage."
Elsewhere today, U.S. soldiers backed by helicopters firing missiles attacked a farmhouse in Al-Sarj, west of Baghdad, killing three Iraqis and wounding three others, according to villagers quoted by the Associated Press. The U.S. military said the soldiers had followed suspected guerrillas into the village after a patrol was ambushed and said it knew of only one death, of a guerrilla fighter. Villagers insisted no one had fired on the Americans.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, U.S. Marines handed control to a Spanish-led multinational force after a three-week delay that followed the bombing of the Imam Ali mosque on Aug. 29. After the attack, which killed at least 95 people, militiamen from rival Shiite factions took to the streets and U.S. forces postponed the security transfer to organize and train a special Iraqi police force to protect the shrine.
-------- war crimes
Belgium drops war crimes cases
By Stephen Cviic
BBC News
Wednesday, 24 September, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3135934.stm
Belgium's highest court has thrown out war crimes cases brought against former US president George Bush and current Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The cases were brought under Belgium's universal jurisdiction law, which once allowed prosecutions of foreigners.
But changes to the law made it almost inevitable that the cases against Mr Bush, Mr Powell and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, would fail.
The cases against Mr Bush senior and Mr Powell related to the 1991 Gulf War.
Seven Iraqi victims of that conflict alleged that the two men had committed war crimes.
Bush Senior (r) was accused over the 1991 Gulf war Mr Sharon was charged with involvement in the massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982.
But it had always seemed likely that the lawsuits would fail, since Belgium's universal jurisdiction law - brought in 10 years ago - has recently undergone drastic changes.
Originally, the law allowed Belgian courts to rule on crimes against humanity regardless of the nationality of the perpetrator or where the alleged offences took place.
It was used successfully once, in the prosecution of four Rwandans involved in the 1994 genocide.
But the law was also controversial, with countries like the United States arguing that it simply provided an opportunity for campaigners to bring politically motivated cases.
The Belgian Government ended up agreeing with that judgement.
In April this year, the law was changed, and then in July it was modified further.
It now only applies if the victim or suspect is a Belgian citizen or long-term resident at the time of the alleged crime.
It also guarantees diplomatic immunity for world leaders and other government officials visiting Belgium.
The days when Brussels was the place for controversial international lawsuits seem to be over.
------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
Romney seeks new death penalty
September 24, 2003
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030923-101932-2079r.htm
BOSTON - Gov. Mitt Romney began his bid to bring the death penalty back to Massachusetts yesterday by saying he wants to craft a law that will make it "virtually certain" that only those guilty of the worst crimes would be executed.
He appointed an 11-member panel of scientists, prosecutors and legal experts to write a bill that relies heavily on science to determine guilt or innocence.
During his campaign for governor last year, Mr. Romney said he supports reinstatement of the death penalty for certain crimes, including the murder of a police officer, terrorist acts, the killing of a witness or murders committed with "extreme atrocity."
The Republican governor faces a battle in the Legislature, where support for the death penalty, which peaked after the 1997 murder of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, has declined in recent years. The past four Republican governors have tried unsuccessfully to reinstate the death penalty, which was banned in the state in 1984.
Mr. Romney said the burden of proof used to sentence someone to death would likely have to be even tougher than the "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" level needed to convict someone of a crime.
"We want a standard of proof that is incontrovertible," Mr. Romney said at a news conference. "This is a new kind of death penalty. ... Just as science can free the innocent, it can identify the guilty."
His panel includes U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan and Dr. Henry Lee, a forensic specialist best known for his testimony during the O.J. Simpson trial.
Romney told reporters he did not ask the panel members whether they favored or opposed the death penalty.
One of the co-chairmen of the panel, Joseph Hoffman, a member of the faculty at Indiana Law School, said the group intends to craft a bill that will guarantee an innocent person is not executed.
He said it is "within the realm of possibility" that the panel could conclude such a bill is not possible.
In 2000, then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, halted executions after courts found 13 men on death row had been wrongly convicted after the state resumed capital punishment in 1977.
In the case of Jeffrey Curley, two men are serving life sentences for luring the boy into a car, then smothering him with a gasoline-soaked rag when he resisted their sexual advances. His corpse was found encased in a concrete-filled tub in a Maine river.
-------- homeland security
Sept. 11 Panel Weighs Ideas for Domestic Intelligence
September 24, 2003
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/national/24TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks said today that it was weighing proposals for an overhaul of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the creation of a special domestic intelligence agency that would most likely take over some F.B.I. responsibilities.
The bipartisan commission, which was created by Congress over the opposition of the Bush administration, said in a report issued today that it was also considering a proposal to create a new post, director of national intelligence, to oversee domestic intelligence. It suggested that the new domestic intelligence agency could be an "American version of Britain's MI-5."
Such recommendations from the 10-member panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, would most likely meet with fierce resistance from the Bush administration, which has made clear that it would oppose any further restructuring of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Asked at a news conference if the panel would recommend a fundamental reorganization of counterterrorism agencies, the chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former governor of New Jersey, said that while no final decision had been made, the proposals for an overhaul of intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. were being seriously debated.
"We will, without question, be making recommendations in that area, and we've tried to state very boldly the questions that are out there in this town and elsewhere in the country," said Mr. Kean, a Republican. "We are, by statute and by mandate, asked to look at those questions."
The panel's vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, said that he expected some of the panel's recommendations next year to be "controversial," involving "cutting edge issues," and that panel members would publicly pursue them long after the commission filed its final report.
"We will not go away the day after we release our report," Mr. Hamilton said. "We want recommendations that can be implemented, work in the real world and make a difference."
A call for the creation of a domestic intelligence agency or a domestic intelligence czar would probably have enthusiastic support from lawmakers and counterterrorism specialists who have said that the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated the need for a wholesale restructuring of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other counterterrorism agencies.
The commission's interim report today offered no revelations about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, or the government's actions before or after the attacks.
Instead, the report outlined the commission's plans for its investigation, including public hearings later this year that will focus specifically on the performance of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other counterterrorism agencies, and whether they need to be restructured.
"We will explore questions of organization and leadership," the report said. "Should we restructure the intelligence community and create a director of national intelligence? Should we change the way we prepare and issue warnings of terrorist attacks?"
The report said that later public hearings "will examine reforms by the F.B.I. and whether we need a new agency to gather intelligence in the United States - what some have called an American version of Britain's MI-5. We will look at whether our nation is striking the right balance of security and liberty."
Elsewhere in its report today, the commission said agencies of the executive branch had "significantly improved their performance in responding to our document request" since July, when the panel went public with criticism that the Pentagon, the Justice Department and other agencies had been slow to turn over classified documents related to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The commission has obtained access to many of the key White House and National Security Council documents we have sought from this administration and its predecessor," the report said today. "The access we already have is on a unique breadth and scale."
The panel said it was still pressing the White House for a variety of highly classified documents. "Although we have received certain assurances, we are still negotiating with the White House," the report said. "We will inform the public promptly if the commission does not receive the access it needs."
At the news conference, Mr. Kean praised the administration's stepped-up cooperation with the panel and said that "at this point, we have been refused nothing." He said the panel had received 400,000 pages of government documents, most of them since July, and "it's amazing to see these documents come in, box after box after boxload."
But he said he was still disturbed by the insistence of some executive branch agencies - he did not say which - that their employees be interviewed by the commission only in the presence of the agency's lawyers or other "minders."
"Still got minders, still don't like them," Mr. Kean said, adding, however, that he had been pleased to hear from the commission staff that "as they've done these interviews, the interviewees are encouragingly frank, that they by and large have not seemed to be intimidated in any way in their answers."
Asked if President Bush and former President Bill Clinton would be asked to testify before the panel, Mr. Kean said that the decision would probably be made early next year.
"We have been talking with a number of people on levels that aren't quite as exalted," he said. "We are not going to make that decision at this time, but we plan to talk to everybody who has information to offer."
--------
Concerns about citizen privacy grow as states create 'Matrix' database
By Jim Krane,
Associated Press,
9/24/2003
Jared Stearns also contributed to this report.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/09/24/concerns_about_citizen_privacy_grow_as_states_create_matrix_database/
Their owr URL: http://www1.seisint.com/aboutus/
NEW YORK -- While privacy worries are frustrating the Pentagon's plans for a far-reaching database to combat terrorism, a similar project is quietly taking shape with the participation of more than a dozen states - - and $12 million in federal funds.
The database project,created so states and local authorities can track would-be terrorists as well as criminal fugitives, is being built and housed in the offices of a private company but will be open to some federal law enforcers and perhaps even US intelligence agencies.
Dubbed Matrix,the database has been in use for a year and a half in Florida,where police praise the crime-fighting tool as nimble and exhaustive. It cross-references the state's driving records and restricted police files with billions of pieces of public and private data, including credit and property records.
But privacy advocates,officials in two states, and a competing data vendor have branded Matrix as playing fast and loose with Americans' private details.
They say that Matrix houses restricted police and government files on colossal databases that sit in the offices
of Seisint Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla., company founded by a millionaire who police say
flew planeloads of drugs into the country in the early 1980s.
"It's federally funded,it's guarded by state police but it's on private property?
That's very interesting,"said Christopher Slobogin, a U.of Florida law professor and expert in privacy issues.
Matrix was initially intended to track terrorists, as was the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness project, which sparked a congressional uproar and got watered down.
As a dozen more states pool their criminal and government files with Florida's, Matrix databases are expanding in size and power. Organizers hope to coax more states to join, touting its usefulness in everyday policing.
Federal and state law enforcement officials in Massachusetts could not confirm whether the Bay State was in the program.
It gives investigators access to personal data, such as Boat Registrations and Property Deeds, without the government possibly violating the 1974 Privacy Act by owning the files.
California and Texas dropped out,citing, among other things, worries over housing sensitive files at Seisint. A competing data vendor, ChoicePoint, decided not to bid on the project, saying it lacked adequate privacy safeguards
Aspects of the project appear designed to steer around federal laws that bar the US government from collecting routine data on Americans. For instance, the project is billed as a tool for state and local police, but organizers are considering giving access to the Central Intelligence Agency,said Phil Ramer, special agent in charge of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's intelligence office.
In the 1970s, Congress barred the CIA from scanning files on average Americans, after the agency was cited for spying on civil rights leaders. Florida officials have acknowledged that users of Matrix, which stands for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, can "monitor innocent citizens." Globe correspondent Jared Stearns contributed to this report.
-------- immigration / refugees / deportation
Virus Disrupts U.S. Visas
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/politics/24VIRU.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - The State Department's electronic system for checking every visa applicant for terrorist or criminal history failed worldwide tonight because of a computer virus, leaving the government unable to issue visas.
The virus crippled the department's Consular Lookout and Support System, which contains more than 12.8 million records from the F.B.I., State Department and immigration, drug-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Among the names are those of at least 78,000 suspected terrorists.
-------- justice
Ashcroft's edict
The attorney general's order for U.S. attorneys to seek maximum penalties and limit plea bargains threatens to undermine prosecutors and overload the justice system.
St. Petersburg Times
September 25, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/25/Opinion/Ashcroft_s_edict.shtml
Attorney General John Ashcroft apparently doesn't trust the legal judgment of his own corps of professional prosecutors in the field. A new directive sharply limits the ability of federal prosecutors to seek plea bargains with defendants, ordering attorneys to charge the most serious legally sound offenses available. The Justice Department says this is a way to establish uniformity so the same crimes result in equivalent charges. But as prosecutors themselves are saying, the consequence of this wrongheaded policy will be overloaded federal courts and the removal of vital discretion at the local level that the system relies upon for truly just outcomes.
The directive is part of Ashcroft's campaign to make federal sentences harsher and reverse the decentralized decisionmaking that marked the department under former Attorney General Janet Reno. Where Reno allowed U.S. attorneys to determine whether to seek the death penalty, Ashcroft has overridden local prosecutors, demanding they charge capital crimes even when it is against their better judgment. Ashcroft also requires prosecutors to report any time a judge departs downward from federal sentencing guidelines, a policy that can only have a chilling effect on judges who could risk being labeled soft on crime.
This latest order from the attorney general directs that only the toughest sentence be sought, even when particular cases warrant compassion. And it centralizes control, giving prosecutors little wiggle room to negotiate with defendants for guilty pleas in exchange for cooperation.
Currently, 96 percent of federal criminal cases are resolved through plea agreements. Experts say if this balance were altered even slightly, the system would be overwhelmed. What Ashcroft is demanding will either be roundly ignored or will grind the system to a halt - neither a responsible outcome.
This tough-on-crime approach may be popular with the electorate, but Ashcroft has forgotten the victims of crime. Contrary to conventional wisdom, prosecutors say that victims often want the process to end with a plea agreement. It gives them ready closure, sometimes the promise of restitution, and it allows victims to avoid testifying at a trial that may take years to come to court.
Ashcroft also has a tin ear when it comes to employee morale. His directive insults the ranks of federal prosecutors - a group, on the whole, of seasoned professionals - suggesting they don't have the requisite judgment to charge cases on their own. There is no epidemic of leniency in federal criminal court - just the opposite. Within the last six weeks, two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, stated publicly that mandatory minimum sentences are too harsh, leading to unjust results. But Ashcroft wants to leave little discretion to local prosecutors to correct any imbalances. He apparently knows best, even if his way demoralizes the department's employees and threatens to overwhelm the justice system.
-------- terrorism
Athens Runs Mock Olympics Chemical Attack Drill
September 24, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/sports/sports-security-greece-olympics.html
ATHENS (Reuters) - Olympics organizers staged their first mock chemical and biological attack exercise on Wednesday, less than a year before the start of the 2004 Athens Games.
It was the fifth major Olympic exercise deploying forces from all of Greece's security and rescue agencies in under two years.
Intelligence officers, chemical and nuclear energy centers and health services will also be involved in the two-day drill.
``The participants will be asked to respond to the exercise called ``Blazing Sword,'' based on a complex simulated scenario set in the Olympics,'' police said in a statement.
Games organizers, who have said security was their top priority, have planned the biggest security operation in the history of the Olympics, with a $600 million security plan.
More than 45,000 police, military and special forces -- three times as many as at the 2000 Sydney Olympics -- will be on duty during the two weeks of the Games.
Greece has also set up an Olympics security advisory group, comprising Spain, Germany, Britain, the United States, Israel, Australia and France, to exchange information and know-how ahead of the Games.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
No Electricity? Use a Wind-Up Phone Charger
REUTERS THAILAND:
September 24, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22336/newsDate/24-Sep-2003/story.htm
BANGKOK - This must have happened to you: it's the end of the day, you need to make an urgent call, your mobile phone's battery is down, and you are nowhere near an electricity socket.
With the "GoGoPower," a wind-up mobile phone charger, you could make that call. Five minutes of winding the handle will give a mobile phone 20 minutes of power.
"It is not meant to replace the regular charger, but it is great for emergencies," said Nobumasa Neishi, marketing manager at Japan's Fuso Rikaseihin Co. Ltd, which makes the charger.
Priced at $42, the hand-held generator is quite noisy and not cheap, although it comes with a built-in flashlight. It can be used with phones from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT Docomo.
Neishi said Fuso Rikaseihin expects to sell 30,000 chargers in Japan this year and 100,000 in 2004. At a trade fair in Bangkok, the charger was launched for markets in Southeast Asia and China, where power is not always available.
But it also plans to sell the product to camping equipment shops and as an emergency backup in European and U.S. markets.
In the United States, worries about terrorism, natural disasters and electricity black-outs have boosted sales of muscle-powered generators for products such as flashlights, radios and phones.
Last week, hurricane Isabel knocked the power out in six million homes and businesses along the U.S. East Coast.
Fuso Rikaseihin is not the first on the market. Last year, Freeplay, the British company which invented the wind-up radio, and U.S. phone producer Motorola launched the "Freecharge," a charger for Motorola and Nokia phones.
Adaptors for other brands are in development, Freeplay said on its Web Site.
-------- environment
Conservationists Decry Removal of Judge From Everglades Case
TALLAHASSEE, Florida,
September 24, 2003
(ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2003/2003-09-24-09.asp#anchor4
A federal judge who has spent more than a decade presiding over the federal lawsuit that brought national attention to the fate of the Everglades has been removed from the case. Representatives of the sugar industry, which has been at the center of much controversy concerning the health of the Everglades, were successful in efforts to remove Judge William Hoeveler from the case.
"The sugar industry knew that they could not make their case in court, so it decided to attack this extraordinarily distinguished judge," said David Guest, managing attorney for the Tallahassee office of the environmental law firm Earthjustice.
Industry lawyers filed a motion to remove Hoeveler last spring, after he reprimanded the Florida legislature for passing a new law that relaxed limits on the amount of phosphorous pollution sugar interests are permitted to dump into the Everglades.
In 1992 - four years after U.S. Interior Department sued the South Florida Water Management District for failing to prevent pollution in the Everglades, Judge Hoeveler approved a consent decree that, starting in 2006, will prohibit discharges to the Everglades containing more than 10 parts per billion (ppb) of phosphorus.
But last spring, the Florida state legislature - and Florida Republican Governor Jeb Bush - enacted a law that gave the sugar industry an additional decade to comply with the phosphorus reductions.
Hoeveler responded by announcing hat the new state law would not affect pollution cleanup on federal lands. On federally owned portions of the Everglades, Hoeveler said the 10 ppb phosphorus limit must still be met by 2006.
He also declared that he would appoint a special master to ensure enforcement of the limit and the 2006 deadline - shortly afterwards, the motion to remove Hoeveler was filed by the sugar industry.
"Judge Hoeveler knew that the new law would allow the sugar industry to ease pollution controls, further damaging the Everglades," said Guest. "The judge's statement that the new law would result in increased phosphorous pollution to the Everglades is far from a biased opinion - it is a fact. Putting Judge Hoeveler through this indignity was totally unnecessary, and it certainly will not help Big Sugar's case."
----
Enlarged environmental 'dead zone' ripples across Lake Erie
By Dan Vergano,
USA TODAY
9/24/2003
http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/2003-09-24-lake-erie_x.htm
Lake Erie's environmental recovery faces the unexpected threat of a growing summer "dead zone," scientists warn.
Cleanup efforts starting in the 1970s rebuilt the quality of the lake water, polluted for decades by industries lining the Great Lakes. But within the past decade, monitors have witnessed an increasingly large region of low-oxygen water - dubbed the "dead zone" by the Environmental Protection Agency - in the lake's central basin every year during the late summer.
Last month, environmental officials and scientists from a consortium of universities sampled lake water and sediments, part of a two-year, $2 million study aimed at unraveling the mystery behind the growing zone.
The zone - a 10-foot-thick layer of cold water at the bottom, 55 feet deep in this area - stretches 100 miles across the lake's center and now lasts the entire month of August, up from two weeks a decade ago. The oxygen-poor water kills fish and microscopic creatures that support the lake's food chain.
"It was tremendously surprising" when the enlarged dead zone appeared a decade ago, EPA scientist Paul Bertram says, because pollution controls were improving water quality. "We're trying very hard to understand what has changed."
In addition to triggering foul-smelling water and killing fish that wash up and litter beaches, the zone could create problems that include decreased sports fishing and higher water and sewer rates.
"Bad for people, bad for fish and even bad for birds," says geologist Gerald Matisoff of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
It is thought to have multiple causes. Among them:
•Zebra mussels, an unwanted foreign species carpeting the bottom of the lake, may be a key culprit, Matisoff and others suggest. Efficient lake-water filters, mussels may be sucking up oxygen in the water and triggering algae blooms. Algae blooms pull even more oxygen out of the water.
•Undetected phosphates from fertilizers may be making their way into the lake, says scientist Dave Culver of Ohio State University. Storm sewers could be depositing phosphates into the lake as well as some smaller, unmonitored rivers. Phospates also trigger algae blooms.
•A naturally occurring cycle could be at work, one somehow worsened by still-undetermined climate changes or other lake rhythms, although core water samples show past dead zones were much smaller, Culver says.
"Nature has a way of dealing with imbalances," Matisoff says.
Help could come from another invasive species, the round gobie fish, which like to dine on zebra mussels.
"It's not like this is the end of Lake Erie," Culver says. Lowering phosphates, whether triggered by pollution or zebra mussels or both, should reduce the dead zone's severity, he says. "If we don't, it's definitely going back to the way it was in the 1970s."
----
Toxic fire retardant found in breast milk
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
By Don Thompson,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-09-24/s_8739.asp
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Chemicals used as fire retardants were found in the breast milk of each of 20 women tested across the country, and two of the women had the highest levels ever recorded in the United States, according to a study released Tuesday.
The study by the Environmental Working Group backs previous studies that show American women have the world's highest levels of the bromine-based fire retardants, nearing levels that have been shown to damage learning, memory, and behavior in laboratory mice.
California this summer joined the European Union in banning several forms of the chemicals, though California's ban won't take effect until 2008 to give manufacturers time to find alternatives.
PBDEs - polybrominated diphenyl ethers - are commonly used in upholstery, electronics, and other foam and plastic products. Traces have since been discovered in San Francisco harbor seals, Great Lakes birds, and Arctic polar bears. The chemicals remain in the environment for years and build up in the body over a lifetime, similarly to PCBs and DDT banned decades ago in the United States.
In March, California researchers reported that San Francisco Bay area women have three to 10 times greater amounts of the chemical flame retardant in their breast tissue than either European or Japanese women.
Indiana University researchers reported at the same time that levels in Indiana and California women and infants tested 20 times higher than levels reported in Sweden and Norway, where the ban is set to take effect this year.
A study in 2001 found North American mothers had breast-milk PBDE levels at least 40 times the highest concentrations found in Sweden. And in 1998, Swedish scientists reported levels of PBDE in breast milk had increased 40-fold since 1972.
In July, the Environmental Working Group reported finding rapidly rising levels of PBDEs in fish in San Francisco Bay since 1997. Tuesday's study by the same group found the average level in the milk of the first-time mothers was 75 times the average found in recent European studies.
Three of the mothers are from the San Francisco Bay area, and one is from Los Angeles, where the report is to be released. Also tested were mothers from Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Mothers from Oregon and Missouri had the highest chemical concentrations.
Peter O'Toole, spokesman for the industry's Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, criticized the small sample size.
Environmental Working Group spokeswoman Lauren Sucher said the nonprofit group couldn't afford a more comprehensive study but that the sample size and results are similar to other studies.
O'Toole noted that researchers have confirmed little risk to children from one form of the chemical, decabromodiphenyl ethers (deca BDEs), commonly used in televisions, computers, stereos, and plastic toys. While that form also is being banned in Europe, it is not included in the California legislation because it does not appear to accumulate in tissues as readily.
Environmental Working Group researchers criticized the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not banning or restricting use of the chemicals nationally.
The U.S. EPA is reviewing manufacturers' toxicity studies, with a decision expected by year's end to seek more study; to ask for voluntary restrictions; or to ban use of the chemicals.
Despite the increased evidence of BPDE contamination, the researchers noted that "breast-feeding remains the single most important choice mothers can make for the health of their babies, offering innumerable benefits to mother and child."
Fetal exposure appears to be the biggest problem, and breast milk, while a good indicator of fetal exposure, may actually help overcome some of the harmful effects, the researchers said. Officials with the industry's Bromine Science and Environmental Forum did not immediately return a telephone message Monday.
-------- ACTIVISTS
U.S. activists ask Congress to withhold Iraq funds
September 24, 2003
Reuters
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters09-24-120308.asp?reg=MIDEAST
WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 - U.S. anti-war activists launched a national advertising campaign on Wednesday urging Congress to withhold new funds for Iraq unless the White House agrees to transfer authority to the United Nations.
Tom Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine and director of the Win Without War coalition group, said the television and print advertisements were designed to force lawmakers to address public unease over the U.S. role in Iraq.
"Our base of support as a coalition is very angry and very eager to be active in turning this around. And clearly public opinion has turned against this invasion and occupation," Andrews said in an interview.
"The people are very receptive to this message in opposition to this (Iraq) policy. That translates into a political momentum that Congress needs to pay attention to."
U.S. President George W. Bush last week sent Congress a request for $87 billion to fund military operations and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. More than 60 percent of Americans oppose the plan, according to a recent poll.
Win Without War's $200,000 advertising campaign, unveiled at a National Press Club news conference, uses the White House funding request as a hook to demand a transfer of power in Iraq and the dismissal of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
One print advertisement features a photo of Larry Syverson, a Virginia resident with three sons in the U.S. military, next to the quote: "Donald Rumsfeld betrayed my sons and our nation. It's time for him to go."
Win Without War accuses Rumsfeld of misleading the public about the reasons for launching war on Iraq, and mismanaging its occupation. "He was the chief architect and it is his house of cards that is tumbling today," the ad reads.
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ACLU seeks fairness at protests
September 24, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030923-101955-1805r.htm
The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal court yesterday to prevent the U.S. Secret Service from keeping protesters away from presidential and vice-presidential appearances while allowing supporters to display their messages up close.
The civil-liberties group filed the lawsuit on behalf of four advocacy organizations that said the Secret Service forced them into protest zones or other areas where they could not be seen by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or be noticed by the media covering their visits.
"The pattern we found was at presidential and vice-presidential appearances, protesters were restricted to areas where they were out of sight, out of earshot and often out of mind," said Witold J. Walczak, legal director for the ACLU's Greater Pittsburgh chapter. "Protecting our nation's leaders from harm is important. Protecting our nation's leaders from dissent is unconstitutional."
Said Secret Service spokesman John Gill: "The Secret Service does not comment on pending litigation. However, we have a long-standing policy of recognizing the constitutionally protected right of the public to demonstrate and voice their views to their elected officials."
The ACLU complaint lists several incidents where it said protesters were forced to assemble blocks from where the president or vice president was speaking, while supporters of administration policies could hold their signs up in front of the building. It cited examples including occurences in Philadelphia; Columbia, S.C., Phoenix; Stockton, Calif. and St. Louis.
The plaintiffs are the National Organization for Women; United for Peace and Justice, an antiwar group; ACORN, an advocacy organization for low- and moderate-income families, and USAction, which supports universal health care and better public education and opposes the Iraq war and tax cuts.
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Saudi Dissident Arrested Before Reform Meeting
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54488-2003Sep23.html
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Sept. 23 -- A Saudi dissident was arrested today after a night-long siege of his Riyadh home, where he was planning what would have been the kingdom's first public meeting of independent reformers, an exiled opposition figure said.
The Saudi government traditionally has resisted allowing open debate on the way the country is run or criticism of the ruling family. But Saudis are increasingly demanding more freedom of expression and participation in the country's affairs.
The standoff with police outside the home of Abdel Aziz Tayyar began at about midnight Monday, according to Saad Fagih, director of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia.
Police repeatedly asked Tayyar, 44, to surrender, but he refused. They finally raided the house this afternoon, arrested him and confiscated documents and personal belongings, Fagih said in a telephone interview.
Tayyar's wife confirmed the arrest in a telephone call to the Associated Press. Saudi officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
Tayyar was a commentator on the London group's radio station, which is broadcast by satellite. Reformers regularly make anonymous calls to the station to express opinions and criticize the ruling Saud family, but Tayyar revealed his identity and telephone number.
Fagih said reformers were planning to hold a public meeting this month at Tayyar's house in the Saudi capital.
"It was intended to be an open meeting for everyone who has a complaint or criticism to come forward," Fagih said. "Judging by normal standards, nothing is wrong with such a meeting, but by Saudi authorities' standards, it is deemed a challenge."
Tayyar's fallout with the Saudi government started six years ago, when he was dismissed from his job at the chamber of commerce. "When he first called in to the station he was complaining about his personal grievance," Fagih said, "but then he went on to become an avid criticizer of the obsolete leadership and the absence of transparency and accountability in the kingdom."
In a separate incident in Jizan, 600 miles southwest of Riyadh near Yemen, a Saudi security officer and three suspected militants were killed in a gun battle at a hospital housing compound, the Interior Ministry said. Two suspects were arrested.
The government said the raid was intended to capture militants planning a terror attack. Saudi officials have cracked down on militants since suicide bombings in Riyadh on May 12 killed 35 people, including nine attackers.
Al-Arabiya television quoted a security official as saying at least one of those arrested was on a list of 19 alleged militants wanted after police discovered a weapons cache near Riyadh earlier in May.
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Lawsuit Criticizes Secret Service
Anti-Bush Protesters Are Kept at Bay, Advocacy Groups Say
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54986-2003Sep23.html
The Secret Service has helped keep Bush administration critics far from the center stage -- and television cameras -- at rallies and events where President Bush and high-ranking federal officials appeared, according to a federal lawsuit filed yesterday.
In more than a dozen public events nationwide in the past two years, the Secret Service has instructed local police to herd anti-Bush protesters into far-removed "protest zones," four advocacy groups claim in the suit. They charge that the Secret Service has kept protesters at bay before, but that the practice has increased markedly since Bush took office.
The groups, aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, say this tactic discriminates against protesters critical of the government and violates their free-speech rights. They are asking a judge in federal court in Philadelphia to stop the practice.
"Allowing a guy with a sign that says 'I Love Bush' to stand up close, while forcing the guy with a sign that says 'Bush, Go Home' to stand around the corner, is obviously unconstitutional and is becoming a pattern and practice of the Secret Service," said Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the ACLU's Washington office. "The Bush administration has exceeded all past administrations in controlling camera angles and the public impression of the presidency."
Secret Service spokesman John Gill said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. "However, we have a longstanding policy of recognizing the constitutionally protected right of the public to demonstrate and voice their views to their elected officials," he said.
The four groups suing are all protest-rally veterans: the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which lobbies for affordable housing; the National Organization for Women (NOW), an advocacy group for women's rights; United for Peace and Justice, an antiwar group; and USAction, which describes its mission as promoting social and economic justice.
They filed the suit in Philadelphia to build upon a four-year-old lawsuit there in which a federal judge issued a restraining order this summer against the Secret Service for keeping anti-government protesters at bay.
The suit highlights incidents in states from Arizona to Virginia that are similar to ACORN's July court fight in Philadelphia, where police barred protesters from a public sidewalk next to a Treasury building. Bush was touring the facility to highlight checks being printed for a new child tax credit, and ACORN demonstrated against what it said was the credit's small size. But Bush supporters were allowed on the sidewalk.
The judge in Philadelphia that day issued a restraining order requiring the Secret Service to allow government critics to demonstrate peacefully as close as supporters.
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ALERT -- Western Shoshone Distribution Bill Sched
From: Peggy Maze Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 4:35 PM
Please pass this along to all of your action allert lists. Thanks, Peg
Action Alert
ACT NOW!!
Largest Land Grab in Modern History Continues Its Journey through the Halls of Congress -- Western Shoshone Distribution Bill Scheduled for September 24th (10am EST) Markup before House Committee on Resources
ATTENTION FRIENDS AND SUPPORTERS: Despite heavy protest and the lack of response from the Department of Interior regarding the controversial and uncertified Western Shoshone "vote", the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill has been placed on tomorrow morning's calendar before the House Committee on Resources. It appears that the forceful tactics used by Senator Reid to move the bill through the Senate Committee are now being used on the House side by Republican Committee members.
Members of the Committee can ask that the bill be removed from the schedule until Interior has responded to the concerns raised by the Committee at the June 18th hearing. The alleged "vote" is the only leg of the stool upon which Interior, Senator Reid and Republican Committee members can rest their claim that the bill is not what it is - an attempt to clear title to over 20 million acres of disputed land throughout Nevada and California before opening it up to widescale mineral extraction, energy production, weapons testing and nuclear waste storage. The stakes are high, the monies to be had by special industry interests are incredible, the survival of Western Shoshone spirituality and connections to the land is on the line. Please spread the word and contact Committee members -- let them know your concerns!! Contact information, sample letters, background info, etc. can be found at http://www.peaceforallnations.com/westshoshone.htm or on the WSDP website at http://www.wsdp.org.
For your information and reference, today's statement submitted to the Committee by Western Shoshone grandmothers Mary and Carrie Dann follows:
--
Indian Law Resource Center Centro de Recursos Juridicos para los Pueblos Indigenas 602 North Ewing Street • Helena, Montana 59601 (406) 449-2006 • Fax (406) 449-2031 • Email mt@indianlaw.org
Vote No on HR 884: Western Shoshone Claims Distribution Act Statement Submitted by Mary and Carrie Dann and the Dann Band of Western Shoshone Indians
September 22, 2003
The House Resources Committee must oppose passage of the Western Shoshone Claims Distribution Bill (HR 884) because: 1) the survival of Western Shoshone spirituality is threatened; 2) the majority of recognized Western Shoshone tribal governments and traditional Western Shoshone communities and leaders are united in opposition to the legislation; and 3) HR 884 further United States' violations of Western Shoshone human rights.
To the Traditional People, this Bill is an Attempt to Destroy Western Shoshone Connections to the Land and Their Spirituality.
"No matter how many times the U.S. claims that the Distribution money is for "harms" the truth is that those monies are for the alleged extinguishment pronounced by the Indian Claims Commission and perpetuated by the Department of Interior.
Western Shoshone people are spiritually tied to the land. To us, the land represents our mother, how can the U.S. tear a people from their own earth mother? No government, no matter how powerful, should not be able to do such a thing. That is what is happening to us now with this distribution bill. Once Congress has paid this money out, the U.S. will be able to tell the world that they paid us for our land and then what will happen to us and the land? We advise you now - no matter what happens here, we the traditional peoples (people who still practice the laws of the Creator) will not accept such a fraudulent act in Congress or any where else. No one can make a determination on destroying us spiritually and culturally. If that is your God's wish, than you destroy us in the name of your God. You can not buy our spirituality. You can not buy our dignity. You can not buy our honor. You can not buy our birthrights. Our Earth Mother is not for sale.
Not too long ago, the U.S. placed a bounty on our physical lives, today they place a bounty on our spiritual lives. " Mary and Carrie Dann, September 2003
The Results of the June 2002 Straw Poll Are Not Valid, Do Not Reflect the Will of the Majority of the Western Shoshone, and Cannot Serve as the Basis for Approval of HR 884.
A. The straw poll was developed and conducted by individuals in a non-tribal, partisan interest group whose sole purpose is to secure a 100% distribution of the judgment fund as quickly as possible.
• There has been no certification of the "voting" results, voters' lists, or the ballot itself, either by tribal or federal officials.
B. The Te-Moak Tribal Council and the majority of other tribal and traditional Western Shoshone governments expressly opposed the ballot initiative.
• The Te-Moak Tribal Council passed resolutions that explicitly and unequivocally 1) disavow the referendum and its results; and 2) deny the authority of Felix Ike and the Claims Distribution Steering Committee to represent the Te-Moak Tribe in this matter.
C. The initiative was not carried out according to generally accepted electoral standards or according to provisions of the Te-Moak constitution.
• There were no rules or guidelines governing the conduct of the poll.
• The list of eligible voters, if it exists, was not made public, and it is impossible to determine who received a ballot and who did not.
• There was no provision for voter confidentiality.
• There were no independent observers to monitor the process or challenge ballots.
• The ballot was designed to produce a certain result, allowing only a 'yes' or 'no' vote to distribute the judgment without reference to other options.
• A misleading "fact sheet" influenced the outcome of the election by suggesting that voters could accept the award without affecting their rights to lands.
• Less than the 30% of Te-Moak registered voters required by its constitution participated, and other provisions were also ignored.
HR 884 Will Compound United States Human Rights Violations Against the Western Shoshone
A. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled in January, 2003 that the United States has violated the human rights of the Danns and other Western Shoshone by failing to recognize and protect their land and resource rights.
B. The Commission cited numerous and specific findings of due process human rights violations in regard to the Indian Claims Commission proceedings and related events that are at the core of HR 884:
• The Indian Claims Commission process in the Western Shoshone claim did not comply with international human rights norms (Paragraph. 139).
• The requirements of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which apply generally to takings of property by the United States, were not extended to the Danns, and there was no proper justification for this disparate treatment (Paragraph 144).
• In regard to the United States' assertion of ownership of the land as against the Danns, the Danns have not been afforded their right to equal protection of the law under Article II of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (Paragraph 143).
• The United States must afford a fair legal process to determine the Danns' (and other Western Shoshone) land rights (Paragraph 146).
C. As a member of the Organization of American States (OAS) the United States is bound by the human rights principles that are the basis of the Inter-American Commission's decision.
WESTERN SHOSHONE DEFENSE PROJECT P.O. Box 211308 Crescent Valley, NV 89821 775-468-0230 775-468-0237 (fax) www.wsdp.org
WESTERN SHOSHONE DEFENSE PROJECT P.O. Box 211308 Crescent Valley, NV 89821 775-468-0230 775-468-0237 (fax) www.wsdp.org
- Peggy Maze Johnson Executive Director Citizen Alert P.O. Box 17173 Las Vegas, NV 89114 702.796.5662 702.796.4886 (fax) pmj1@citizenalert.org http://www.citizenalert.org [This message contained attachments]
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A-Bomb Survivors' Message to the People of the United States
Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/english/index.html
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/english/038message.html
On behalf of the 280,000 Japanese Hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, we extend our warmest greetings of solidarity to the people of the United States who are working for peace.
It has been almost two years since the September 11th terrorist attacks. We cordially express our deep condolences to the victims of last year's September 11th terrorist attacks and our heartfelt sympathy to those who have lost their loved ones. Before the mourning was over, the United States launched a retaliatory strike against Afghanistan, followed by a preemptive strike against Iraq. Many innocent people's lives have been taken by cluster bombs, bunker buster bombs, depleted uranium weapons, and other kind of lethal weapons. Many fathers, mothers, children, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters have lost loved ones. We also express our deepest sympathy to them.
We experienced the atrocity of the A-bomb hell, the greatest massacre in scale in human history. We have seen a number of A-bomb victims die in agony and pain. The agony was to last until their death with a possibility of being inherited to their children and grandchildren. Many testimonies of the Hibakusha have told us of the tragic suffering caused by the atomic bombings. We would like you to take this opportunity to listen to Hibakusha's testimonies.
We, the survivors of Atomic bomb, are living witnesses of the most devastating historical crime against humanity. However, we never use the word "retaliation". We have always insisted "no more Hibakusha", "no more Hiroshima", and passed our experience down to younger generations. Today, we are here to tell you the same thing.
The horrific nature of nuclear weapons has been discussed in many aspects. Unfortunately, however, people are not yet well informed about the reality of such weapons. Nuclear weapons cause a large number of victims through the entire process of their production -- from uranium mining to development, manufacturing, testing and use, and throw these victims into unendurable suffering. No words can adequately describe the horror of these weapons that tortured and killed tens of thousands of people by throwing them into infernos in an instant. That is why we say nuclear weapons are the weapons of the devil. They cannot coexist with humans. Humans will never be freed from the menace of annihilation as long as nuclear weapons exist in the world, and we must abolish them from the face of this planet as soon as possible.
Nuclear weapons now threaten the annihilation of the entire human race in a moment. In particular, since "the Nuclear Posture Review" plan and usable low-yield nuclear weapons was proposed by the US Bush Administration last year, we have been facing the most serious dangers we ever had. On one hand, the Bush administration regards biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as "Weapons of Mass Destruction", but on the other hand, they insist that they may have to retaliate using these same weapons. This is unacceptable. Nuclear weapons are not only WMD, but also weapons of extinction. Even "Usable low-yield nuclear weapons" are unthinkable. Once the nuclear weapons are used, no matter how low they yield, it will begin a catastrophic chain of escalation ending with the extinction of humankind.
Our minds can see all too well the horrific possibility in the Middle East, South Asia, and particularly the Korean peninsula ending up under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Along with the US government, the Japanese government is responsible for having brought such critical circumstances. If both governments had openly publicized the inhumanity and cruelty of nuclear weapons after the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the elimination of nuclear weapons could have been achieved within several years after the war.
We the Hibakusha call on the government of the United States of America to acknowledge the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as criminal acts and apologize for the crime, and translate the apology into action by making good on the "unequivocal undertaking" to accomplish the elimination of nuclear weapons from its arsenal (adopted at the NPT Review Conference, May 2000) without delay.
We request that the Bush administration stop threatening other countries with nuclear weapons, to retract NPR, and to immediately end all development of new low-yield nuclear weapons.
We continue to urge the Japanese government to take its due responsibility of apologizing and compensating for the grave suffering and damage it caused to the people of its own and of other countries. In the meantime, we also continue to call on the Japanese government to withdraw from the US "nuclear umbrella" and take the initiatives in developing the opinion for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion saying, "The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law". The Review Conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty in May 2000 made its agreement of undertaking from the nuclear powers to accomplish the elimination of their nuclear weapons. And the General Assembly of the UN has successively adopted its resolution toward elimination of nuclear weapons. We must not reverse the growing consensus of world public opinion in favor of the elimination of nuclear weapons.
We must act now to inform the world of the horror that nuclear weapons will bring, and accelerate the process of nuclear disarmament leading to the their total abolition. If all people would only share the desire of the Hibakusha, our dream of creating a nuclear weapon-free 21st century will come true. In fact, we are steadily coming closer to reach that goal.
It is a duty of those who lived the 20th century under the curse of nuclear weapons to pass on a world freed from the threat of nuclear weapons or war to our children who will live in a new century. And the peoples of Japan and the United States, above all, bear the greatest responsibility. It is we who can change our own governments' policies. Let us walk hand in hand. Our future is in our hands.
August, 2003
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Anti-war teacher quits her job rather than her principles
By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/141016_roberto24.html
For the kids at Olympic View Elementary, it's the day the music died.
Their popular music teacher didn't come back to the Seattle school this year. Their arts instruction has been left with a gaping hole.
The reason why seems so ridiculous: Instructor Mary K. McNeill -- "Mary K" to everyone at the school -- made the "mistake" of encouraging kids to write and sing songs about love and peace during the U.S. war in Iraq.
A few parents complained. The school principal met with Mary, who had been at Olympic View for a few years and whose methods had been embraced. Mary was issued an ultimatum: You can sing about peace but in no way can you suggest anything about stopping war.
"I feel I was being censored," Mary told me yesterday.
So just before the school year began she followed her principles -- not her principal!
She walked away from the job she loved. Better that than get canned.
Mary -- an "artist in residence" and not a certified teacher -- got the raw end of this deal. Anyone looking for positive leaders in the classrooms of the beleaguered Seattle public schools now has one less place to look.
Olympic View's principal calls what happened "a tremendous loss." But he says he had little choice.
"Mary and I had a discussion about what is OK to teach your own children at home and what kind of things you can, as a school employee, teach other people's children in the classroom," explains Tim Moynihan. "We were exploring where that boundary was. Mary came to feel a public school was too limiting."
School officials and parents were singing a much different tune just this spring.
They held a big auction to raise money and a good a share of those funds -- some $20,000 -- was collected to pay for Mary's salary for the coming year; a special grant funding her position had dried up. At the time, no one raised a fuss about a teacher many parents said their kids loved.
And hardly anyone peeped when Mary and the kids sang at another event, also this spring, for the local East Indian community. King County Executive Ron Sims was on hand at the Indian spring festival, and hummed along to the young voices.
That song, which Mary's kids had been singing in class, went like this:
We are children of peace.
We are the children of the world.
We are children of dreams.
And we are the children of the world.
We are children of love.
We are the children of the world.
We don't want war anymore -- we are the children of the world.
The last line was the one that caused the teacher to leave her schoolchildren, and what's ironic is this -- the line didn't come from Mary. She often had the kids suggest song lines in class to foster group creativity and involvement. During one session, a 7-year-old student raised his hand and said: "Well, I don't want war."
Thus trouble was born.
"That lyric was the problem," Mary says. "I could keep my job if I sang a song that didn't add the issue of war. I could sing about peace but not against war. But if you look at issues of peace, inevitably aren't you looking at conflict?"
She loathed the idea of having to guard her tongue -- and the kids' tongues.
The school district has a policy that, in a ultrabroad way, speaks to the issue:
"The teacher, as facilitator, should treat controversial issues in an objective manner, pointing out alternative points of view, and ensuring that the major aspects of an issue are honestly and respectfully presented."
It's bothersome how this policy has been applied to Mary, who wasn't about to add a line from "Onward Christian soldiers ... " to the song.
The kids' tune was about war in the most generic terms. War in the Occupied Territories. In East Africa. And many people would agree that war, however necessary, isn't great. Mary had the song translated and sung in Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Spanish and Farsi -- just so it could be shared with children worldwide.
But because critics of the song knee-jerked and then shoehorned the song into the current Iraqi situation, they missed Mary's aim: to teach kids universal respect for others in ways and words they understand.
Don't worry. This 44-year-old music instructor will land on her feet. She's got work with an intergenerational choir at a local church. She's also got gigs with a couple of other schools. Mary says she has no beef with Olympic View's principal. She suspects pressure came from higher ups: "It's just heartbreaking all around."
In a flash of war-generated hysteria, in a rush to cave to a vocal minority, a fine teacher is gone. Didn't the school district learn a lesson earlier this year when it allowed outside forces to flush out a talented teacher who mistakenly used the N-word?
So far this year at Olympic View, there isn't anyone serving a diet of music rich with songs about love, compassion -- healthy stuff for young hearts and minds oft besieged by pop culture junk food.
The kids have no music at all. Just silence. P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. can be reached at 206-448-8125 or robertjamieson@seattlepi.com
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Citizens across the U.S. speak out
By Sam Stanton and Emily Bazar
Bee Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/liberty/story/7473568p-8415954c.html
JUNEAU, Alaska -- Tim Armstrong served with the 1st Air Mobile Cavalry Division in Vietnam, surviving a mortar barrage that left 33 pieces of shrapnel in his upper body.
He is a proud American who remembers the vow he made the day he joined the Army. "I took an oath, just like everyone else who serves in the military, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States," Armstrong said.
Today, the 56-year-old radio ad salesman says he is still defending the Constitution as he criticizes the USA Patriot Act and many of the security enhancements that accompany life in post-Sept. 11 America.
"I think the Patriot Act itself, it infringes on the rights that we swore to uphold and defend," Armstrong said recently as political leaders in Juneau debated -- and passed -- a resolution opposing the controversial law. "I didn't go to war to usurp the Constitution."
Concerned about the lengths to which the government has gone to defend the nation since Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of Americans like Armstrong are speaking out, fighting back and banding together in unusual political alliances against everything from enhanced government surveillance to increased airport security measures.
"I just don't think they need that type of power," Armstrong said. "I don't think people have to give up those types of rights in order to combat terrorism."
From Alaska to Florida, similar opinions are being expressed in town hall meetings, city council chambers and library conference rooms as citizens seek to put back what they say is some sorely needed balance in the equation between national security and civil liberties.
By Tuesday, 171 cities and counties across the country, joined by the states of Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont, had passed resolutions opposing provisions of the Patriot Act.
Some are major metropolitan areas, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. Some are tiny hamlets, including Dillon, Mont., and Newfane, Vt. Nearly 40 of the communities are in Northern California, and many others, including Sacramento, are expected to debate similar proposals very soon.
Some have passed the measures with little fanfare. Others have drawn attention because of efforts by federal officials to defeat the measures. Arcata's has sparked controversy for calling for strict disobedience to provisions of the act.
The politics of the communities involved run the gamut. In Alaska, where at least nine communities and the state government have approved anti-Patriot Act measures, the politics tend to run conservative to libertarian. Other communities, such as Salinas and Tucson, Ariz., are considered liberal.
But their alliance against the Patriot Act underscores the fact that Americans nationwide have emerged from the traumatic period after Sept. 11 and are beginning to question whether some of the security enhancements instituted by the Bush administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft might have gone too far.
"In evaluating what Ashcroft and Bush have done, it's important to give them the benefit of the doubt to a certain extent," said Michael Mello, a professor at the Vermont Law School who specializes in constitutional law, capital punishment and civil liberties.
Although Mello believes Ashcroft has overreached, he said he understands the administration's quandary.
"It is brand-new territory. They are making it up as they go along, out of necessity. And they're only human."
Federal officials say the backlash against their efforts is misguided and misinformed, and driven in large part by liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been effective in using its mailing lists and media contacts to stir up opposition to the Patriot Act and other security measures.
"If you went out and just interviewed the average person on the street, there's probably a widely held perception that John Ashcroft woke up in the middle of the night and said, 'I'm going to make up the Patriot Act, and the Department of Justice is going to implement it,' " said McGregor Scott, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California.
"The reality is that this thing was passed by overwhelming majorities, bipartisan majorities, and virtually every aspect of it is subject to judicial review."
Justice Department officials, frustrated in their efforts to quell the opposition, have begun organizing responses to questions about the law, including a 14-page paper titled "Ten Myths About the USA Patriot Act," written by Mary Beth Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
But that has not dampened efforts by community activists, who have seized upon the Patriot Act and Ashcroft as symbols of a government they believe has exceeded what is appropriate or necessary to defend the nation from attack.
The backlash has not been limited to town hall meetings or largely symbolic votes in City Hall.
Conservative and liberal groups have joined together to condemn what they see as overzealous efforts to restrict civil liberties. Last spring, panelists from such disparate groups as the ACLU, the American Conservative Union and Phyllis Schlafly's conservative women's group, the Eagle Forum, joined together to condemn the breadth of the Patriot Act.
The ACLU, in conjunction with immigrant groups, sued Ashcroft in July, contending the Patriot Act has been used unfairly to target community groups based on the ethnicity, religion and politics of their members.
Congress also has moved to scale back some provisions, with the House recently approving a measure to limit the use of "sneak-and-peek" warrants that allow FBI agents to conduct searches without a suspect's knowledge.
Since Ann Arbor, Mich., passed the first anti-Patriot Act resolution Jan. 7, 2002, a slow but steady procession of communities has been following suit. Denver passed its resolution March 18, 2002, Seattle approved one Feb. 18, and the East Bay city of Richmond passed one Feb. 25.
Many other communities have expressed concerns over excessive government power, holding meetings that have ended up as anti-Patriot Act rallies.
In Grass Valley in March, more than 100 people showed up for a town hall session and debated -- loudly at times -- with a panel that included area police chiefs and sheriffs, the Nevada County librarian and Michael Mason, who at the time headed up the Sacramento region's FBI office.
Mason did his best to convince the locals that the FBI has little interest in depriving people of their liberties, that there are checks and balances to prevent such abuses.
"An agent brought a case to me," Mason told them. "He said he had informant information that this individual was Muslim, hard-core Muslim, and always in possession of a Quran. And he looked at me. And I stopped and I looked at him, and I said is that anything like a devout Catholic always in possession of a Bible?
"So, it takes people. There is no Mr. FBI. It takes people to make intelligent decisions about how we're going to carry out our duties."
But the message officials tried to convey, that average American citizens would never feel the impact of the Patriot Act, was a hard sell to the crowd.
"I'm not average," said Chamba Lane, who hosts a local radio show called "Rabble Rousing." "My fear is that their idea of average is shut up and trust us."
Salinas residents mulled over the same concerns two months later, contending there was more chance of the Patriot Act's being used to oppress their neighbors than protect them.
"We're not a logical target for terrorists," said Salinas Mayor Anna Caballero. "In fact, in terms of homeland security concerns, Salinas in particular does not have any high-profile facilities. With the exception of food production, there's not much else that would interest a terrorist."
The farming community is home to many undocumented Latino immigrants, however, and concerns over how they might fare under the government's security crackdown prompted the City Council to vote to become the 106th community nationwide to oppose the Patriot Act.
"We have a large community of immigrants," Caballero said. "We believe it's really important to be fair to all immigrants."
But the drive to pass the resolution didn't simply evolve from local citizens' concerns. The idea didn't even start there.
Instead, the campaign was the brainchild of a newly formed group called the Monterey County Community Alliance to Protect Civil Liberties that decided to focus its attention on persuading area governments to pass resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. Salinas was targeted because it is the largest city in the county and because the City Council has a reputation for adopting liberal causes.
"If we were going to start anywhere, we were going to be assertive," said Sue Sutton, 47, chairwoman of the alliance. "We thought this could be the community that needs us the most."
Things haven't gone as smoothly in other communities. As Tucson's City Council was about to take up an anti-Patriot Act measure, it received a letter from U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., warning that "America remains vulnerable to terrorism." Kyl urged the council not to follow the lead of a "minuscule minority" of other cities that have opposed the act.
The council rejected his advice, passing a resolution three days later.
In Juneau, the U.S. attorney for Alaska, Tim Burgess, appeared before some members of the city assembly to speak about the act before the panel voted.
"I'm not taking a position on that particular or any resolution," he said afterward by phone. "That's obviously a decision they need to make. I tried to address some of what I thought were misconceptions about the Patriot Act that are out there and answer some of the questions folks had."
But at least one member of the panel found it odd that Alaska's top federal law enforcement officer had shown up at the session.
"If you didn't think this would do anything, why would the U.S. attorney come to our town?" said Jim Powell, who supported the measure that passed 6-1. "I've never seen him before."
"There's a lot of talk about patriotism," Powell added. "I think this is a way to demonstrate patriotism."
Others agree, and the efforts to bring attention to their cause range from lobbying to lawsuits to coffee house debates featuring unlikely participants.
Arturo Venegas Jr. is one of those.
As Sacramento's police chief until his retirement this year, his job at times included helping advise Ashcroft and others on such laws, and he said he told the attorney general the law was a mistake.
Venegas spoke passionately about the issue during a town hall meeting in Sacramento in July, contending the Patriot Act undercut efforts he made as chief to convince immigrant groups that law enforcement is there to protect rather than target them.
"Listen to the power that is being given now that has been affirmed by the Supreme Court of this nation," he told the more than 250 people gathered to discuss the Patriot Act. "It allows law enforcement now to be able to pry into your lives, to seek information on you and even to hold you incommunicado if they believe it is in the interests of national security.
"You know what? We did that to Americans of Japanese descent. We have done that in our history, and by God, we should have learned from it that nothing good comes from it."
Benjamin Sher is another evangelist speaking out about the threat to civil liberties.
A Carmichael businessman and community activist, Sher grew up in a political household as the son of state Sen. Byron Sher, a Palo Alto Democrat.
Now he is planning to lead a cross-country caravan to draw attention to issues such as the Patriot Act.
"Our national security depends on having a strong democracy," Sher said. "The Patriot Act weakens our democracy. We're going down the wrong track if we think we're going to inhibit terrorism by infringing our own civil liberties."
On Oct. 1, Sher will kick off his "Democracy Caravan," hauling a 40-foot trailer that doubles as an Internet cafe and stopping in shopping center parking lots across America. He plans to end the journey in Washington, D.C., in January, when the president will deliver his State of the Union speech.
While critics cite such efforts as proof the backlash is building against the government's new powers, the Bush administration is pressing ahead.
President Bush this month called for substantially broadening the scope of the Patriot Act, and observers say efforts to give law enforcement more power already are under way.
Early this year, a draft of the Justice Department's "Domestic Security Enhancement Act," known informally as "Patriot Act II," was leaked.
Though it hasn't been introduced in Congress, the draft's sweeping scope unleashed a torrent of protest.
One section would allow the attorney general to strip Americans of their citizenship for providing support to any group that has been designated a terrorist organization, even if they had no knowledge of any alleged links to terrorism.
Another would expand home searches and wiretaps without a warrant.
Although federal officials say much of the draft will never see the light of day, civil libertarians say pieces of it already have appeared in various legislative proposals.
One such proposal circulating in draft form on Capitol Hill, dubbed the Victory Act, contains many provisions sought by Justice Department prosecutors, such as increased wiretap and subpoena powers, said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The battle over civil liberties is not necessarily going to come in a neat package," Edgar said.
"Instead, this is going to be a continuing battle in Congress, and that's going to require constant oversight on the part of the American people demanding answers as to what their legislators are up to."
About the Writer
The Bee's Sam Stanton can be reached at (916) 321-1091 or sstanton@sacbee.com. Emily Bazar reported from Juneau.
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Bring Our Children Home from Iraq Now!
September 24, 2003
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/latino09242003.html
A Letter from Latino Military Families
September 12, 2003
Michael G. Jones Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret) Strategic Planning Office Florida Department Of Military Affairs
Dear Colonel Jones,
We, the relatives of the Florida National Guard soldiers want to express our position in relation to the last postponement of the return of our soldiers back home. We want to inform you that we are united in the fight for the return of our soldiers.
This letter shall serve to remind you that these soldiers have now been away from our homes for eight months, away from their children, wives and parents, away from their universities and jobs, involved in a guerilla war in an unknown country, not knowing the culture or the language of the place, menaced by mines, bombs and guns, risking their lives 24 hours a day, standing in their uniforms and carrying their equipment in temperatures of up to 130° F.
In less than 3 months, this small company has suffered countless attacks, leaving 4soldiers crippled and another soldier in coma, not to mention the injured soldiers at the AR Ramadi.
The National Guard soldiers are civilians, not active members of the Army. They have never received the training for combat in the desert or to face urban guerrillas. We know that, since their arrival at AR Ramadi, our young soldiers have been patrolling and searching the houses of presumed guerrilla forces. We know that they lack adequate equipment, that in many cases they have patrolled without bulletproof vests and without the necessary ammunition to face the guerrilla forces. Isn't this enough? How many months, how many abuses are we supposed to endure?
We will not mention each suffering and difficulty that our soldiers have endured. We just want to tell you that we know what they are going through and that we will not keep quiet in the face of this dishonor. We will not rest until our young soldiers come back to our homes.
We are determined to continue on this campaign to the end. If necessary, a group of mothers will go on an indefinite hunger strike. You will not only be responsible for the lives of our soldiers, but for that of their mothers. We shall not accept political apologies. Lack of governmental will by President Bush to work together with the United Nations and to restore the power to the Iraqis is the reason why the participation of an international force comprised by big nations is not possible. The coalition we are being told about does not really exist. It is our troops that carry the load of this war. It is our children who are being sacrificed due to an arrogant and unfair attitude.
For this and for other reasons, we demand the return of our soldiers now!! We shall not abandon our loved ones; we shall not abandon our troops. We shall continue demanding their return day-by-day, street-by-street, door-to-door. We will ask the world to join us. We will not abandon our fight until our soldiers are back in our homes.
Respectfully yours,
Maritza Castillo
Miladys Guerrero
Estela Guerrero
Maria Carrasquillo
Julio C. D'Augerot
Antonia Mendieta
Carlos A. Mejia
Teresa Lugo
Johanna Guevara
Anna Caballero
Mario Murillo
Patricia Luna
Ligia Sánchez
Patricia Cabadiana
Mirtha Bonilla
Claudia Gonzalez
Paola Gomez
Euri Velásquez
Ingrid Soriano
Ana Guerrero
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