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NUCLEAR
Iran Says Yet to Suspend Uranium Enrichment
Iran 'Studying' Uranium Enrichment Halt
Iran yet to halt uranium enrichment as IAEA deadline looms
Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat
Israel's Weapons of Mass Destruction
North Korea to 'Consider' U.S. Offer on Security
White House blocks Congress trip to NKorea:
North Korea says U.S. team was to visit atomic site
North Korea rethinks nukes
North Korea Says U.S. Team Was to Visit Atomic Site
U.S. Congress Delegation Delays Trip to North Korea
Japan suspects new North Korea missile
Pentagon wants 'mini-nukes' to fight terrorists
A General Bind for Rumsfeld
"Two measures of American desperation: Wesley Clark and Howard Dean"
Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad
MILITARY
Disarming of Afghans Called Vital to Security
Swallowed by Kabul's Cracks Afghan Returnees Find The Living's Not Easy
Rockets Hit Baghdad Hotel Where Wolfowitz Was Staying
Wolfowitz Unhurt In Rocket Attack
U.S. Forces Press Attack Against Iraqi
Attack Drives U.S. Forces From Baghdad HQ
Israeli Military Kills Two Palestinians
Social Breakdown Turns Deadly in Guatemala
Belgian FM insists no plans to undermine NATO
Sick Army Reservists Will Be Moved, Official Says
One, Two, Three, What Are They Fighting For?
U.S. gleans facts on Iran from debatable source
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Supreme Court Bides Time in Terror Cases
9/11 Commission Could Subpoena Oval Office Files
Brazil's Polarizing Police Death Squads Inspire Horror and Praise
Alabama Prison at Center of Suit Over AIDS Policy
Terror Threat in Saudi Arabia
ACTIVISTS
Peace workers shot by Israelis
Demonstrators march against Iraq occupation
Protesters in Washington Demand Iraq Withdrawal
In D.C., a Diverse Mix Rouses War Protest
Rally calls for end to occupation of Iraq
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran Says Yet to Suspend Uranium Enrichment
October 26, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iran-nuclear-enrichment.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - A spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry said on Sunday Iran had yet to suspend uranium enrichment, backtracking on his earlier statement that the process had already been suspended.
``We are discussing and examining how to suspend enrichment,'' Hamid Reza Asefi told Reuters by telephone after his press conference.
Iran agreed on Tuesday to suspend uranium enrichment and to sign up to snap nuclear inspections.
----
Iran 'Studying' Uranium Enrichment Halt
October 26, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran said Sunday it had not yet suspended enriching uranium after promising to do so in a deal with three European countries who had come to Tehran to express international concerns it is pursuing nuclear weapons.
``Iran is currently studying suspending uranium enrichment,'' the Foreign Ministry said in a brief statement, saying its spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi had been mistaken when he told reporters earlier Sunday that enrichment had already been suspended.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. High-grade enriched uranium can be used in bombs, while low-grade enriched uranium can be used in energy programs.
In an agreement with the British, German and French foreign ministers, Iranian authorities said Tuesday they would suspend uranium enrichment and sign a protocol giving inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, unfettered access to its nuclear facilities.
Iran had said it would abide by the protocol even before it is ratified by its parliament. But Tehran has been vague about when it would open up to inspections, as it has been vague about when and for how long it would halt enrichment.
Iran has previously allowed IAEA inspectors to visit non-nuclear sites, a privilege that goes beyond Iran's obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said earlier this month that agency inspectors were allowed to visit one military site and that there could be expanded reviews of both military and civilian facilities in the future.
Iranian officials are trying to balance pressure to meet the demands of the international community with the demands of hard-liners at home. About 1,500 hard-liners protested in Tehran on Friday against the pledge to open the nuclear program to unfettered inspections and suspend uranium enrichment.
Some Iranian extremists see backing down on the nuclear question as a sign of weakness.
On Sunday, as Asefi was addressing the press conference at the Foreign Ministry, over two dozen clerics demonstrated outside the building to protest Iran's pledge.
``No compromise, no surrender. Death to compromisers,'' shouted the clerics, some of them wearing white shrouds symbolizing their readiness to die for their cause.
Asked about the protests, Asefi said, ``We are the 81st country agreeing to sign the additional protocol. It's not treason or compromise. It was necessary to do so.''
Iran faces an Oct. 31 deadline to prove to the IAEA that its nuclear projects are entirely peaceful. If Iran fails to satisfy the IAEA, the U.N. agency is expected to refer the matter to the Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
In the agreement, France, Britain and Germany promised in turn to help Iran acquire peaceful nuclear technology.
Iran gave the U.N. nuclear watchdog a dossier Thursday meant to dispel fears it is trying to make atomic bombs.
Asefi said the dossier was a 200-page account of Iran's nuclear activities. The spokesman said a team of IAEA experts arrived in Tehran Sunday to discuss the dossier with Iranian authorities. He gave no further details.
----
Iran yet to halt uranium enrichment as IAEA deadline looms
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 26, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031026113336.oy7p7x49.html
Iran has yet to halt uranium enrichment in accordance with a landmark pledge to Britain, France and Germany, the foreign ministry admitted Sunday, adding that it was still looking into the modalities of halting its controversial work on the nuclear fuel cycle.
"We have agreed to suspend it and we are studying the modalities of a suspension," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told AFP.
Asked if this meant enrichment activities were still going on in the country, he replied: "Implicitly, yes".
Earlier, Asefi had said he believed that a halt to enrichment had been implemented, but then retracted the comment.
The acknowledgement that work was still under way came five days after Iran vowed to cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demands during an unprecedented joint visit by the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany, Jack Straw, Dominique de Villepin and Joshka Fischer.
An IAEA deadline for the Islamic republic to meet a series of demands expires this coming Friday, and the UN's nuclear watchdog's board of governors is to meet to evaluate Iranian compliance on November 20.
During Tuesday's talks with the European Union's big three, the Islamic regime agreed to sign an additional protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that allows tougher checks by the IAEA.
Iran says it will formally state its intention to sign before the agency meets in November, but has nevertheless agreed to work within the framework of the protocol by allowing unlimited IAEA inspections pending signature and ratification of the protocol.
The country also agreed to make a full declaration of its activities, and on Thursday handed the IAEA a report with information about its controversial nuclear programme.
Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, said Friday that Iran in its report to the watchdog admitted that it had failed to meet international nuclear safeguards commitments but he again denied that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons.
Iran was asked to cease uranium enrichment after IAEA inspectors found traces of highly enriched uranium during previous visits. Iran says the traces came into the country on imported equipment.
But officials here have emphasised that any suspension of enrichment -- said to be one of the most difficult issues during Tuesday's talks -- would only be temporary.
"We are suspending enrichment temporarily," Asefi said, adding that he hoped the IAEA board would make a reciprocal gesture of "trust building" in return.
"It is natural that we will not give up our right to peaceful nuclear technology. This is the legitimate and natural right of Iranians. Suspension is a temporary matter," he said.
In return for Iranian compliance, Britain, France and Germany said the Islamic republic could "expect easier access to modern technology and supplies in a range of areas".
Diplomats said that opened up the possibility of Iran receiving nuclear fuel from overseas, thereby keeping the sensitive fuel cycle -- and the risk of its misuse -- out of Iranian hands.
-------- iraq / inspections
Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat
No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17707-2003Oct25?language=printer
In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Thirty miles to the north and west, Army troops were rolling through the precincts of the Nasr munitions plant. Inside, stacked in oblong wooden crates, were thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.
That equipment, and Iraq's effort to buy more of it overseas, were central to the Bush administration's charge that President Saddam Hussein had resumed long-dormant efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The lead combat units had more urgent priorities that day, but they were not alone in passing the stockpiles by. Participants in the subsequent hunt for illegal arms said months elapsed without a visit to Nasr and many other sites of activity that President Bush had called "a grave and gathering danger."
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.
Administration officials interviewed for this report defended the integrity of the government's prewar intelligence and public statements. None agreed to be interviewed on the record. Vice President Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort." Cheney said investigators searching for confirmation of those judgments "will find in fact that they are valid." His office did not respond to questions on Friday.
'Drain Pipe'
No evidence mattered more to the nuclear debate than Iraq's attempt to buy aluminum tubes overseas. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, among many others, scorned the Baghdad government's explanation that it sought the tubes as artillery rocket casings. By August, news accounts made clear that the U.S. government's top nuclear centrifuge experts dissented strongly from the claim that the tubes were meant for uranium enrichment.
Meekin, whose remarks were supported by other investigators who said they feared the consequences of being quoted by name, is the first to describe the results of postwar analysis.
"They were rockets," said Meekin, 48, director general of scientific and technical assessment for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, speaking by satellite telephone from Baghdad. "The tubes were used for rockets."
A U.S. government official, who was unwilling to be identified by name or agency, said Meekin is not qualified to make that judgment. The official did not elaborate. Kay's interim report this month said the question remains open.
Participants in the Pentagon-directed special weapons teams, interviewed repeatedly since late last spring, noted that Kay's operation has taken no steps to collect the estimated 20,000 tubes in Iraq's inventory -- some badly corroded, but others of higher quality than the ones the U.S. government intercepted in Jordan three years ago and described as dangerous technology.
"If you told me they had access to these tubes and have chosen not to seize and destroy them, it undermines the judgment that these tubes are usable for, if not intended for, centrifuge development," said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who retains his classified clearances and still consults with government analysts on Iraq.
Meekin said he no longer knows the whereabouts of the tubes once stacked at Nasr. "They weren't our highest priority," he said. "The thing's innocuous." Unguarded, the tubes "could be in arms plants, scattered around, being grabbed by looters, perhaps in scrap metal yards."
Scavengers, he said, most likely have "sold them as drain pipe."
Three Fates
The day Marines and Army mechanized troops marched past the remnants of Iraq's nuclear past, Baghdad's three most important nuclear weapons scientists met three distinct fates.
Mahdi Obeidi, chief of the pre-1991 centrifuge program to enrich uranium, sat anxiously at home awaiting U.S. investigators. Jaffar Dhai Jaffar, who directed alternative enrichment efforts and other component designs under the code name Petrochemical Three, watched the U.S.-led coalition's invasion from the United Arab Emirates, to which he had decamped before fighting began. Khalid Ibrahim Said, the principal overseer of Iraq's nuclear warhead designs, drove incautiously through a newly established U.S. checkpoint. He died in a burst of gunfire from Marines.
A short and pugnacious man, unpopular among his Iraqi contemporaries, Said had been less forthcoming than the other two men in contacts with U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1998. His loss struck a blow to U.S. occupation authorities, because there were unanswered questions about his portion of the 1991 "crash program" to build a bomb.
Said was believed to have kept comprehensive records of his work, including design details and assembly diagrams, on optical disks. Iraq delivered much of its information to inspectors in electronic form, and it did so again in its seven-volume report of Dec. 3, 2002, titled "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declaration of the Past Nuclear Program." That report, a copy of which has been made available to The Washington Post, was not thought to include all the technical details in Iraq's possession.
Kay said this month that Iraq took "steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program." If true, that would represent a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, but would fall far short of a resumption of illegal development.
"Everybody, including Donald Rumsfeld, agrees the program was destroyed 12 years ago," said one U.S. expert with long experience on Iraq. "The question for David [Kay] is whether it restarted."
Jaffar, who remains under the protection of the UAE government, agreed to voluntary interviews with U.S. and British investigators. Those familiar with his statements said he was combative, telling the Americans -- as he did during years of U.N. inspections -- that there was no hidden nuclear weapons program. Iraq, he said, never resumed the effort after U.S. bombs destroyed the Tuwaitha reactors during the Gulf War, and the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled enrichment and design facilities over the next five years.
The Rose Garden
It was Obeidi's former program -- the use of centrifuges to enrich uranium -- that the Bush administration maintained had been resurrected. Obeidi had heard the public statements, according to two close associates, and he waited with growing anxiety for arriving troops to knock at his door.
Anxiety turned to puzzlement when they did not. After two weeks, the Iraqi scientist turned to an unlikely source of help: David Albright, a U.S. nuclear expert and cordial antagonist during Albright's years as a consultant to the IAEA. One of the first things Obeidi told Albright, by the American's account, was that he had read Albright's published writings closely in the mid-1990s to learn which of Iraq's cover stories was working.
On May 1, Albright began looking for someone in the Defense Department or U.S. Central Command who would talk to Obeidi, "but I was rebuffed." Six days later, he reached a contact in the CIA. Obeidi had important information, Albright said, and wanted to come clean.
The first meeting with the CIA, on May 17, did not go well. Obeidi wanted assurance of asylum in the United States. The interviewers were noncommittal and appeared to know little about Obeidi or the centrifuge program, according to interviews with Albright and contemporaneous notes he provided in July.
On June 2, Obeidi led investigators to his rose garden. There they dug up a cache he had buried 12 years before and kept from U.N. inspectors: about 200 blueprints of gas centrifuge components, 180 documents describing their use and samples of a few sensitive parts. The parts amounted to far less than one complete centrifuge, and nothing like the thousands required for a cascade of the spinning devices to enrich uranium, but the material showed what nearly all outside experts believed -- that Iraq had preserved its nuclear knowledge base.
The next day, U.S. Special Forces burst into Obeidi's home and arrested him -- a misunderstanding, the CIA later explained. Shortly after Obeidi's release, on June 17, the CIA made public his identity and described the rose garden cache as proof that Iraq had the secret nuclear program that the Bush administration alleged.
But that, according to sources familiar with Obeidi's account in detail, is not quite what he told his interviewers. Joe's Return
According to close associates, Obeidi expected to speak to a peer among U.S. centrifuge physicists. He was dismayed, they said, to find that his principal interrogator lacked those credentials.
The man's name was Joe. An engineer with expertise in export controls, Joe made his reputation at the CIA as the strongest proponent of the theory that Iraq's controversial aluminum tubes were part of a resurgent centrifuge program. The CIA asked that Joe's last name be withheld to protect his safety.
In his interviews, Obeidi did not tell Joe what he wanted to hear, U.S. government officials said. Instead, Obeidi confirmed the account laid out in Volume 7 of Iraq's December nuclear disclosure, which said there had been "no nuclear activity since 1991" at seven of the program's previous sites and only "medical, agricultural and industrial" activities at the others.
The centrifuge program died in 1991, Obeidi said, and never resumed. He had buried the documents to prepare for resumption orders that never came. He had nothing to do with the aluminum tubes, he said, and a centrifuge program would have no use for them.
Obeidi's account corresponded closely with the history laid out in Volume 3 of Iraq's official history, which covered enrichment. The program began in 1988, under the designation Al Furat or 1200C, with a design based on rotors made of maraging steel. The following year Obeidi added an alternative design, using a more sophisticated rotor made of carbon fiber. In July 1990, a prototype system succeeded for the first time in separating the desired isotope of uranium from the gas uranium hexafluoride.
If Iraq had in fact revived its enrichment program, it would have needed a fluorine plant to convert uranium ore to that gaseous form and an intricate system of magnets, bearings and pipes to connect thousands of rotors in cascades. Kay's investigators, allied officials said, have found none of those things.
The physics of a centrifuge would not permit a simple substitution of aluminum tubes for the maraging steel and carbon fiber designs used by Obeidi. The tubes in Obeidi's design were also specified at 145mm in diameter; the aluminum tubes measured 81mm.
Joe sent dispatches to Washington over the summer accusing Obeidi of holding back the truth, according to a U.S. official who read one. The Iraqi scientist, fearful of his safety after being named in public, moved with his family to a CIA safe house in Kuwait. For months, he remained in limbo.
"They're just in a conflict of interest," Albright said in a July interview, speaking of Joe and other CIA analysts. "Their bosses are [still] saying the tubes are for centrifuges."
By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States. He declined through intermediaries to be interviewed, and a government official asked that his location not be published. Albright, who hopes to employ Obeidi at his Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is no longer willing to discuss the case.
Book of the Month Club
At Hussein's former palace complex in Abu Ghurayb, lush by Baghdad standards with two small artificial lakes, frustrated members of the nuclear search team by late spring began calling themselves the "book of the month club."
"There's a lot of guys over there read more novels than they will the rest of their lives," said a recently returned investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity. "You've got some bored people over there, big time."
Nuclear investigators had come with expectations set by Bush and Cheney, who gave rhetorical emphasis to Iraq's nuclear threat in their most compelling arguments for war. At least four times in the fall of 2002, the president and his advisers invoked the specter of a "mushroom cloud," and some of them, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, described Iraq's nuclear ambitions as a threat to the American homeland.
On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained "the least significant of the missions." The resources, personnel and operational pace of the nuclear team, he said, "were minuscule compared to chem and bio," a reference to chemical and biological weapons probes.
Fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the search personnel had nuclear assignments, about a dozen out of 1,500 at the peak strength of the Iraq Survey Group. In the immediate postwar period, investigators had about 600 leads in an "integrated master site list," of which the U.S. Central Command identified a "Top 19 WMD," for weapons of mass destruction. Only three of those were nuclear-related: Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment.
"There really wasn't a need for our specialized area of work," Navy Cmdr. David Beckett said in a recent interview. In Iraq, Beckett commanded a group of nuclear-trained Special Forces known as the Direct Support Team. Now program manager for special nuclear programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Beckett said the aluminum tubes and machine tools cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- vacuum tubes, industrial magnets and balancing machines -- were "not a big focus" of his work in Iraq. He added, "To be honest, I've read more about that since I got back."
An administration official, defending the CIA's prewar analysis, said its message had been widely misunderstood. "The term 'reconstituting' means restoring to a former condition, a process often inferred to be short term," he said. "Based on reporting, however, Saddam clearly viewed it as a long-term process. So did the NIE." Fertile Ground
Meekin, the Australian general who had principal responsibility for collecting Iraqi military technology, said his 500-member unit is disbanding, its work largely done. According to U.S. government officials, some of Kay's leading nuclear investigators have already left Iraq. Nuclear physicist William Domke, who ran the centrifuge investigation, returned last month to his intelligence post at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jeffrey Bedell, Domke's counterpart at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has also come home.
Domke and Bedell, according to people who know their work, confirmed their prewar analysis that the tubes were not suited for centrifuges and that Iraq had no program to use them as such. They had seen the tubes in December and January, on temporary assignment for the IAEA in Iraq. They were also principal authors of the Energy Department's dissent from the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.
Neither man replied to messages left by voice mail and e-mail. Steve Wampler, a spokesman at Livermore, said, "They really don't talk about their work." A U.S. government official, speaking for the administration but declining to be named, denied that the two physicists had reached final conclusions. "Domke may be coming back soon," the official said. "Their work is not completed."
Tim McCarthy, an experienced U.N. inspector who returned to Iraq late last month to join Kay's team, said in an interview before departing that the Iraqi rocket program based on 81mm tubes had been known to Western analysts "well before 1996." McCarthy said inspectors gave the tubes "maybe three minutes out of 100 hours" of attention because they did not appear to be important.
Meekin said the Nasr 81 rocket "appeared in a public arms show in 1999" at which Iraqi munitions were displayed for sale. Such sales would have been illegal under U.N. Security Council sanctions, but hardly secret. Meekin said trade magazines covered the show.
Partly for those reasons, the American-led search teams did not even visit Nasr until July. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Shehab Haythem showed them around, the tubes laid out in neat rows. Investigators sent samples to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and left the rest.
Today, Ash Shaykhili is a hulk. What it contained, apart from demolished remnants of the 1991 program, was exactly the kind of equipment that the CIA cited as part of its compelling case for Iraq's nuclear threat: "magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools."
"They're not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you'd think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else -- Iran, Syria, Egypt."
The investigation to date, Meekin said, suggests that Iraqi efforts to obtain dangerous technology since 1991 met with modest success at best.
"By and large, our judgment is that sanctions have been pretty good, or the sanctions effort, to prevent the import of components," he said. In the realm of nuclear proliferation, he said, "I guess there's more fertile ground in North Korea or Iran."
-------- israel
Israel's Weapons of Mass Destruction
By Hussain Khan Al-Jazeerah,
10/26/03
To reply - mailto:editor@aljazeerah.info
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2003%20Opinion%20Editorials/October/26%20o/Israel's%20Weapons%20of%20Mass%20Destruction%20By%20Hussain%20Khan.htm
Tokyo---After the worldwide publication of a report that Israel has developed a technology, after a research effort of over 30 years, to modify the US-made Harpoon anti-ship missile to deliver nuclear warheads to targets on land, a senior Israeli official has denied it. He says it is a phony story, politically motivated to draw public pressure away from Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. "They knew it was technically impossible to fit the missile with a nuclear warhead," said the official. "They are fishing for reasons why the US shouldn't do anything about Iran's program."
The report had originated in Los Angeles Times on the authority of two senior Bush administration officials who disclosed it and one Israeli official, who confirmed it. All three told this on condition that their names should not be disclosed. If it is phony a story, as the Israeli official claims, then the three officials involved in disclosing it should be punished for spreading rumors. But the question arises what interest these American and Israeli officials have in drawing public pressure away from Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program? Were these officials working as Iranian agents and being paid for their services by the Iranian government? If not, then the responsibility is shifted to the newspaper reporters. Were they paid Iranian agents to write such a 'phony' story in their newspaper? Both these possibilities are unbelievable. It is better to doubt the motives of that unknown Israeli official, who is try to deny this fact, than the senior American officials or the reporters of a responsible US newspaper.
As regards the official's claim that technically fitting Harpoon missile with a nuclear warhead is impossible, the missile experts have denied it. James Sentell, a retired guidance engineer who worked at Raytheon Missile Systems, said, "We have TERCOM [Terrain Contour Mapping], which was used in early Tomahawk cruise missiles" It can be used on Harpoon missiles. He further said that the radar seeker at the nose of the missile, though sufficient for plucking out a target on the vast empty sea, would have to be replaced by a more discriminating, satellite-driven global positioning system. With such modifications, Harpoons can be used for carrying warheads for land targets after cruising through the sea when they are launched from the Israeli submarines.
However, the problem remains whether the mass of the warhead could fit into the required space. Usually, the smallest nuclear warhead weighs a half-ton. The Harpoon's conventional warhead weighs in at 225 kilograms. Mark Hutchenreuther, an electronics engineer who worked at the Harpoon Missile Handling Branch, is of the opinion that it is possible to fit a small enough nuclear warhead on the missile
John Pike, a defense analyst for Global Security. org, said, "I can see the Harpoon, which has a13 . 5inch [34. 29cm.] diameter, carrying a10 - 20kiloton warhead that could burn down a large town".
The U.S. officials said the warheads have been designed for American-supplied Harpoon missiles, which have sea-skimming cruise guidance systems and a normal range of about 80 miles. Harpoons usually have conventional warheads and are common in the arsenals of the U.S. and other countries.
Robert S. Norris, a nuclear historian at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, said in an interview that Israeli engineers would have had to reduce the size of a nuclear weapon to fit the warhead of a Harpoon and alter the missile guidance system to hit land-based targets, both relatively simple tasks for a sophisticated weapons program.
"They have been at it for more than 30 years, so this is something within the realm of capability for Israel's scientists and engineers," said Norris, who added that the range of the missiles might have been extended, too.
And Israel already has the submarine-launched Popeye Turbo, which the Federation of American Scientists puts conservatively at a range of200 - 350kilometers. Its diameter is53 . 34cm. ( 21inches) - perfect for carrying a multi-kiloton warhead and for launching from a torpedo tube.
Ultimately, the question is one of need. According to a spokesman at the Boeing Company, parent of McDonnell Douglas, it would be illegal for Israel to modify the US- made Harpoons without permission. The number of U.N. resolutions Israel has violated and refused to follow is sufficient to show to what extent Israel cares for the legality of any action. Its400 , 000settlements on the land, which the U.N. has declared as an 'occupied' one, is also illegal. But Israel is always confident that the US will keep a blind eye for all her illegal actions, as all her politicians are in dire need of Jewish money and vote in all US elections.
Despite Israel being smaller than New Jersey, with a population of six million, it has now become world's5 th or6 th largest nuclear power with its nuclear weapon estimated to be within 100 to200 . Britain is having only185 , the smallest number among the five, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The group estimated Russia has8 , 232weapons, the United States has7 ,068, China has 402 and France has348 .
Israel began building a nuclear bomb after a secret agreement was signed with the French government in 1956 to help Israel build a plutonium nuclear reactor. The reactor site was chosen in the Negev desert, outside the village of Dimona. This was a massive project.1 , 500 Israeli and French workers were engaged to build the reactor. An extensive underground complex was built 14 square miles. According to the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, French military aircraft secretly flew heavy water, a key element of a plutonium reactor, from Norway to Israel.
In the beginning, Israel never admitted it and even told lies to the US. When an American U- 2spy planes spotted the construction site in the beginning in1958 , Israel initially lied that it was just a textile plant. Later on she said that it was just a metallurgical research plant. According to documents at the National Archives in Washington, two years later, U.S. intelligence identified the site as a nuclear reactor and the C.I.A. said it was part of a weapons program.
Avner Cohen wrote a a book, 'Israel and the Bomb'. In that book he has written that the first and last time an Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, publicly admitted about the existence of a nuclear plant was on Dec.21 ,1960 . On that day, he made a statement before the Israeli parliament that a nuclear reactor was under construction, 'exclusively for peaceful purposes.'
Beyond Iran, Arab diplomats and U.N. officials said in interviews that Israel's steady enhancement of its secret nuclear arsenal, and U.S. silence about it, inflames Arab desires for similar weapons.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Shara, said, "Some quarters selectively choose to level their false accusations at some Arab and Islamic states. . . while simultaneously ignoring the Israeli arsenal of weapons of mass destruction."
Even the countries friendly to the US like Egypt and Saudi Arabia joined Syria in her criticism late last month. They spoke against the US as well as the U.N. on this issue. They said that both of them are pressuring Iran to give up nuclear program but ignoring Israel's weapons of mass destruction.
"The presence of a nuclear program in the region that is not under international safeguards gives other countries the spur to develop weapons of mass destruction," Nabil Fahmy, Egypt's ambassador to Washington, said in an interview. "Any future conflict becomes more dangerous.
As a matter of fact, there were certain occasions when Israeli generals had decided to use nuclear weapons According to a report in an Israeli newspaper, Haartz, at the start of the Yom Kippur War, Moshe Dayan feared for Israel's fate and considered ordering the army to arm the doomsday systems. It was the Prime Minister Golda Meir, who immediately ordered Dayan to "forget" the idea of activating the nuclear arsenal.
Similarly, in the Gulf War, Israeli generals were weighing the use of nonconventional weapons. The then prime minister and his senior ministers maintained restraint and did not issue any open threats. But thick hints were leaked about Israel's nuclear potential. Commenting about it, Reuven Pedatzur, has written in an article in Haartz that "In the end, use of the nuclear threat did serious harm to Israel's image of deterrence, as it was obvious that its leadership lacked self-confidence and was not demonstrating the steadfastness that is the requisite basis for the success of any deterrence."
Israel continues the same policy of threatening its neighbours. The Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam in Egypt and the prime minister failed to admonish him. The latest leak to Los Angles Times was for the same purpose to keep its neighbours afraid of Israel's weapons of mass destruction and its power to destroy rather annihilate them. That same day, the German weekly Der Spiegel published a report that Israel plans to launch an air-force attack on six Iran's nuclear sites.
Commenting on this sort of a 'lunatic'Israel image, Reuven Pedatzur concludes in his Haartz article that "Anyone who believes that making Israel the nuclear neighborhood bully will strengthen its image of deterrence is liable to find that it could do lethal harm to its nuclear deterrence, weaken its international status, and invite pressure on itself in the nuclear realm."
-------- korea
North Korea to 'Consider' U.S. Offer on Security
October 26, 2003
New York Times
By JAMES BROOKE and DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/international/asia/26KORE.html
TOKYO, Oct. 25 - In a marked shift, North Korea said Saturday that it would evaluate President Bush's offer of a security guarantee signed by its neighbors and the United States, which Mr. Bush made provided that the North dismantles its nuclear weapons program.
Earlier in the week, North Korea had dismissed President Bush's offer as "laughable." Now that statement seems to have been a rote reaction by the North's propaganda machine.
The carefully worded Saturday statement, which was carried by North Korea's official news agency, omitted the usual criticism of the United States. But it did not set a date to resume six-party talks, which began with one session in Beijing in August.
"We are ready to consider Bush's remarks on the written assurances of nonaggression if they are based on the intention to coexist," the Korean Central News Agency said, quoting an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman.
It stressed the principle of "simultaneous actions." That has meant diplomatic recognition by the United States, building nuclear power plants and foreign aid in return for North Korea's abandoning its bomb program.
The C.I.A. has said that North Korea already has one or two nuclear weapons, and this summer the North has admitted to building some. It recently threatened to test a bomb.
Next week, Wu Bangguo, the head of China's legislature, is to visit Pyongyang, the North Korea capital. He will be the highest-ranking Chinese dignitary to visit the North in several years.
With China increasingly seen as the deal maker in the North Korea standoff, the North may have released its statement before Mr. Wu's arrival to avoid any impression that it was acting at the bidding of the Chinese.
China now maintains close economic ties with South Korea, but it has longstanding links to the North and great leverage on it. The largest supplier of food and oil to North Korea, China flexed its muscle earlier this year by briefly cutting off the oil.
China is frustrated that North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, has not followed the economic model laid out by Beijing. China, which fears that that waves of impoverished North Koreans will cross the land border between the nations this winter, has reportedly stationed 150,000 troops along the frontier.
If North Korea follows through on the Saturday announcement, it could mark a breakthrough in the yearlong standoff with the United States.
Mr. Bush has refused to conduct direct talks with the North, as the State Department and many outside experts have urged. He has insisted that the only way to press North Korea was to bring all of its neighbors into the process, especially China. Mr. Bush has encouraged China to take on the role of both intermediary and negotiating partner.
But until last week, during his trip to Asia, Mr. Bush refused to offer North Korea anything concrete in return for giving up its nuclear weapons program, and for surrendering its weapons and stockpiles.
That changed in Bangkok last Sunday, when Mr. Bush indicated for the first time that the United States would offer the North a written security guarantee that would probably also be signed by the other parties in the talks: China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. "We will not have a treaty, if that's what you're asking," he said during a meeting with Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. "That's off the table."
The North previously demanded a formal treaty, ratified by the Senate. Mr. Bush would not agree, and as a matter of political reality, it is highly unlikely that the Senate would approve a treaty with a nation that still has no diplomatic relations with the United States, and that has not, in legal terms, agreed on a treaty ending the Korean War.
A senior White House official said today that the Bush administration was notified of North Korea's new position through the North's representatives at the United Nations on Friday. The official said the administration was still examining the statement and had reached no conclusions.
Next week, Hwang Jang Yop, the highest-ranking defector from North Korea, is to arrive in Washington and testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is expected to give Congress and news organizations details of the inner workings of the Kim Jong Il government. Once a close aide to Kim Jong Il, Mr. Hwang is considered to have been the architect of North Korea's ideology of self-reliance, known as juche.
Discussing North Korea, Mr. Bush said "perhaps there are other ways we can look at" the problem, and his aides sketched out a plan that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has been working on for months, involving the security guarantee among the several partners.
The theory, one senior administration official said, is that if the North reneged, and refused to dismantle its nuclear arms infrastructure, including a plant at Yongbyon, it would be defying not only the United States but also all of its primary allies. "We think it is a lot harder for the North Koreans to offer their traditional gesture of defiance to everyone at once," the official said.
One channel may open up next week, when Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, is to lead a Congressional group to Pyongyang, his second visit since June.
"I was told in June that if we came back we would be allowed to meet Kim Jong Il and to visit Yongbyon," Representative Weldon said in a telephone interview. "My concern is that we not allow ourselves to get sucked into a military conflict with the North. I believe we have to exhaust every possible bit of diplomacy."
Timing is crucial to the Bush plan. Mr. Bush has made it clear that while the North will learn the details of the security guarantee, it will not take effect until the country's weapons program is being dismantled, its nuclear material is being shipped out of the country and inspectors have free run of the North.
----
White House blocks Congress trip to NKorea:
Pyongyang SEOUL (AFP)
Oct 26, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031026145235.209qvj62.html
North Korea said Sunday that the White House had blocked a visit to the Stalinist state next week by a US Congressional delegation.
Republican Curt Weldon, vice-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and other members of Congress, were to visit North Korea from October 28 to 31 and had been given permission to tour the Yongbyon nuclear complex north of Pyongyang, the official Korean Central News Agency said.
"Weldon, however, informed our side on October 24 that the projected visit of the delegation was cancelled due to the opposition of the White House," KCNA said in a dispatch monitored here.
North Korea recently claimed that it had completed reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods at the complex, and was building nuclear bombs there.
The claims were greeted with scepticism in Seoul and Washington, which believes that Pyongyang already has one or two nuclear bombs from plutonium diverted from Yongbyon over a decade ago.
KCNA said the visit to Yongbyon had been planned at the request of the members of Congress headed by Weldon, who led a delegation to Pyongyang five months ago.
"How this attitude of the White House openly blocking even the visit of Congressmen should be interpreted?" the agency asked.
"We wonder if the administration is not getting nervous about the possibility of the state of our nuclear activity being confirmed by the delegation. Is there any need to do so?"
Following his last visit, Weldon called for a non-aggression pact between the United States and North Korea and Washington's official recognition of the Stalinist state.
US President George W. Bush has ruled out a non-aggression pact and offered a written multilateral security guarantee for the Stalinist state instead.
On Saturday, North Korea said it would consider the US offer.
----
North Korea says U.S. team was to visit atomic site
Oct. 26, 2003
Reuters
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters10-26-160302.asp?reg=PACRIM
SEOUL - North Korea said a U.S. congressional delegation that has delayed a visit was going to visit the Yongbyon nuclear complex where Pyongyang says it has reprocessed fuel rods as part of its atomic arms programme.
In a report late on Sunday, the official KCNA news agency said North Korea wondered whether the U.S. administration withdrew its support for the trip because it feared the team would be able to confirm progress in the North's nuclear plans.
Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican set to head a bipartisan delegation, said in the United States on Sunday the trip had been delayed after the White House withdrew its support for the visit at the last minute. The delegation had been due to leave on Sunday.
''Discussions continue between our delegation and North Korean officials,'' Weldon said. ''The members of the delegation still believe that a congressional visit will positively impact relations.''
KCNA said Weldon had proposed the trip to the North.
''The relevant institution of our country consented to the proposal and has prepared an itinerary in such a way as to let the delegation visit the nuclear facility in Yongbyon as desired by the delegation so that it might watch on the spot the completed reprocessing and the switchover made in the use of plutonium obtained in its course,'' it said.
The North has said the Yongbyon complex north of the capital Pyongyang has finished reprocessing the rods, which can provide plutonium for atomic bombs.
KCNA said Weldon, who is vice chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, informed the North of the delay on Friday.
''This, of course, is an internal affair of the United States which we have nothing to do with. But it is the view of our relevant field on this matter that this has happened because the congress delegation will have an opportunity to see for itself the nuclear facility in Yongbyon,'' said KCNA.
''We wonder if the administration is not getting nervous about the possibility of the state of our nuclear activity being confirmed by the delegation. Is there any need to do so?''
Weldon visited North Korea in May, after which he proposed giving up to $5 billion a year in aid as part of a plan to end its arms programme. The State Department dismissed that idea.
Washington has said it is willing to negotiate some kind of a multilateral security guarantee short of a treaty with North Korea if it abandons its nuclear arms plan, which the United States sees as a major threat to allies South Korea and Japan.
North Korea, in a significant shift in the year-old nuclear crisis, said on Saturday it was prepared to consider the U.S. security proposal.
(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro in Washington)
----
North Korea rethinks nukes
October 26, 2003
By Jae-suk Yoo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031026-010752-3061r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea, brightening prospects for ending a nuclear stalemate, said yesterday it will consider President Bush's offer of written security guarantees in return for dismantling its nuclear-weapons program.
It was the latest about-face by North Korea, which had called the offer "laughable" and "not worth considering" and has been unclear about its actions and plans during the yearlong dispute over its atomic ambitions.
Still, the abrupt shift raised hope of resuming six-nation talks aimed at ending the standoff, though Pyongyang said it may be premature to talk about another round of conferences.
U.S. officials believe Pyongyang already has one or two atomic bombs and can yield several more bombs within months from its nuclear programs. North Korea already has informed the Bush administration of its new intentions through its diplomats at the United Nations, said an unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry.
The White House responded to North Korea's latest comment with guarded optimism.
"We're looking at the message, and we hope North Korea will return to the Beijing six-party talks," said Jimmy Orr, a spokesman for President Bush.
Separately, the Japanese government said North Korea may have test-fired a short-range missile off its eastern coast yesterday. It was the third suspected missile launch by Pyongyang last week.
A U.S. official said the North Koreans normally conduct such testing in three stages, and this one appeared to have been scheduled previously.
During a Bangkok summit of Asia-Pacific leaders last week, Mr. Bush proposed that the United States, Russia, South Korea, Japan and China would offer written assurances that the North will not be attacked if it promises to dismantle its nuclear program.
Mr. Bush made his overture during international efforts to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table. Wu Bangguo, head of China's legislature and the Communist Party's No. 2 man, will travel to Pyongyang this week to encourage North Korea to return to the talks.
"We are ready to consider Bush's remarks on the 'written assurances of nonaggression' if they are based on the intention to co-exist with the [North]" and offer "simultaneous actions," the North Korean spokesman said in comments carried by Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency.
North Korea has said previously that "simultaneous actions" include economic and humanitarian aid from the United States, opening diplomatic ties, and building a nuclear-power plant. It also has said it must include a nonaggression treaty - something the Bush administration has refused.
In exchange, North Korea has said it would declare its willingness to give up nuclear development, allow nuclear inspections, give up missiles exports and finally dismantle its nuclear-weapons facilities.
The North Korean spokesman said it was "premature" to talk about whether his country would return to six-nation talks. Pyongyang first must confirm that the United States will take "simultaneous actions" toward ending the nuclear crisis, he said.
"Simple and clear is our request," the North Korean spokesman said. "What we want is for both sides to drop guns and establish [a] normal state relationship to co-exist peacefully."
North Korea was now "in the process of ascertaining the real intention of the U.S.," he said.
U.S. officials pledged to maintain their New York contact with North Koreans, he added.
South Korea welcomed the North's comments.
"This is a positive development ahead of future six-party talks," said Ban Ki-moon, President Roh Moo-hyun's adviser on diplomatic affairs, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
Representatives of the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South and North Korea met in Beijing in August for their first round of six-nation talks aimed at ending the North Korean nuclear crisis. However, the meeting ended without agreement on a new round because the United States and North Korea failed to narrow their differences.
Washington demanded that North Korea first shut down its nuclear program immediately, but Pyongyang said it would do so only after the United States signed a formal nonaggression treaty and granted economic aid.
In recent weeks, North Korea added urgency to the crisis by declaring that it is using plutonium extracted from its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to build new atomic bombs, besides the one or two it already is believed to possess. Earlier this month, it threatened to test a bomb.
The nuclear dispute flared last October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted having a secret nuclear-weapons program in violation of international agreements.
----
North Korea Says U.S. Team Was to Visit Atomic Site
October 26, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-nuclear.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea said a U.S. congressional delegation that has delayed a visit was going to visit the Yongbyon nuclear complex where Pyongyang says it has reprocessed fuel rods as part of its atomic arms program.
In a report late Sunday, the official KCNA news agency said North Korea wondered whether the U.S. administration withdrew its support for the trip because it feared the team would be able to confirm progress in the North's nuclear plans.
Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican set to head a bipartisan delegation, said in the United States Sunday the trip had been delayed after the White House withdrew its support for the visit at the last minute. The delegation had been due to leave Sunday.
``Discussions continue between our delegation and North Korean officials,'' Weldon said. ``The members of the delegation still believe that a congressional visit will positively impact relations.''
KCNA said Weldon had proposed the trip to the North.
``The relevant institution of our country consented to the proposal and has prepared an itinerary in such a way as to let the delegation visit the nuclear facility in Yongbyon as desired by the delegation so that it might watch on the spot the completed reprocessing and the switchover made in the use of plutonium obtained in its course,'' it said.
The North has said the Yongbyon complex north of the capital Pyongyang has finished reprocessing the rods, which can provide plutonium for atomic bombs.
KCNA said Weldon, who is vice chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, informed the North of the delay Friday.
``This, of course, is an internal affair of the United States which we have nothing to do with. But it is the view of our relevant field on this matter that this has happened because the congress delegation will have an opportunity to see for itself the nuclear facility in Yongbyon,'' said KCNA.
``We wonder if the administration is not getting nervous about the possibility of the state of our nuclear activity being confirmed by the delegation. Is there any need to do so?''
Weldon visited North Korea in May, after which he proposed giving up to $5 billion a year in aid as part of a plan to end its arms program. The State Department dismissed that idea.
Washington has said it is willing to negotiate some kind of a multilateral security guarantee short of a treaty with North Korea if it abandons its nuclear arms plan, which the United States sees as a major threat to allies South Korea and Japan.
North Korea, in a significant shift in the year-old nuclear crisis, said Saturday it was prepared to consider the U.S. security proposal.
----
U.S. Congress Delegation Delays Trip to North Korea
October 26, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-congress.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. congressional delegation seeking to ease nuclear tensions with North Korea has delayed a trip to the communist nation because of White House opposition, the lawmaker heading the delegation said on Sunday.
Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican set to head the bipartisan delegation, gave no indication when the trip would be rescheduled, but said talks were continuing.
The delegation had been set to leave on Sunday but Weldon, vice chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said in a statement it was delayed after the White House withdrew its support ``at the 11th hour.''
The White House, which has been trying to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, said it was important to keep the focus on progress being made through six-way talks involving China, Japan, Russia, the two Koreas and the United States.
``Given our desire to keep the focus on the six-party process we believe that a congressional delegation visit to North Korea at this time would not be appropriate,'' a White House official told Reuters.
Late on Sunday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported that Weldon's delegation had been scheduled to visit the Yongbyon nuclear complex where Pyongyang has said it has reprocessed fuel rods as part of its atomic arms program.
A spokesman for Weldon confirmed the North Koreans had indicated the delegation would have an opportunity to visit the Yongbyon facility.
The news agency earlier reported that Weldon had informed the North on Friday that his visit would be delayed. But Weldon expressed confidence it would be rescheduled.
``Discussions continue between our delegation and North Korean officials,'' Weldon said. ``The members of the delegation still believe that a congressional visit will positively impact relations between our two nations.''
A Weldon spokesman said the congressman backed the administration position that North Korea must abandon its nuclear weapons program but wanted to reach out to Pyongyang on a personal level.
Weldon visited North Korea in May, after which he proposed giving up to $5 billion a year in aid as part of a plan to end its arms program.
The State Department dismissed that idea, saying the United States would not pay Pyongyang to halt a nuclear program that Washington believes should never have been started.
Washington has said it is willing to negotiate some kind of a multilateral security guarantee short of a treaty with North Korea if it abandons its nuclear arms program, which the United States sees as a major threat to allies South Korea and Japan.
North Korea, in a significant shift in the year-old nuclear crisis, said on Saturday it was prepared to consider the U.S. offer of security guarantees in return for Pyongyang dropping its atomic weapons program.
-----
Japan suspects new North Korea missile
October 26, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031025-104256-6665r.htm
TOKYO, Oct. 25 -- The Japanese government suspects North Korea may have test-fired another short-range missile off its eastern coast Saturday.
If confirmed, it would be the third suspected missile launch by Pyongyang this week, Sky News reported.
Foreign Ministry Assistant Press Secretary Jiro Okuyama said the government received an unconfirmed report about a land-to-ship missile firing into the Japan Sea.
The missile was fired from North Korea's east coast Saturday afternoon, Kyodo News said quoting Defense Agency sources.
Officials believe there were similar launches both Monday and Tuesday.
Short-range missiles are not considered a threat to neighboring countries because they only have a range of up to 62 miles and are thought to be part of routine military drills, Sky News said.
-------- terrorism
Pentagon wants 'mini-nukes' to fight terrorists
26/10/2003
By Julian Coman in Washington
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/26/wnuke26.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/10/26/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=175717
Influential advisers at the Pentagon are backing the development of a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons - so-called mini-nukes - in a controversial report to be published this autumn.
The document, entitled Future Strategic Strike Force, has been produced by the Defence Science Board, which has a Pentagon brief to "transform the nation's armed forces to meet the demands placed on them by a changing world order". US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
The DSB's findings envisage a revamped nuclear arsenal made up of small-scale missiles whose explosive impact would be easier to control and could be targeted at smaller aggressive states. The most radical part of the report argues for a move away from the Cold War view of nuclear arms as catastrophic weapons of last resort.
The document is believed to have the strong backing of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, who last week called for a "bolder" approach to national security in a leaked Pentagon memo. A month ago the Senate eased restrictions on nuclear tests at the military's Nevada site, where no new test has taken place since 1992.
Privately, Defence Department officials describe it as the logical development of the Pentagon's 2002 nuclear posture review, which urged a renewed role for nuclear weapons in American military strategy.
One former Pentagon official said of the DSB report: "The authors are saying that cumbersome Cold War-style weapons are no longer appropriate in an era when one superpower is dealing with a number of terrorist threats and smaller, hostile states. Enemies of the United States can gamble on them never being used."
America's nuclear capability from the Cold War is described in the report, which has been leaked to a specialist defence magazine, as "not adequate to future national security needs". It proposes steps to make US nuclear weapons "relevant to the threat environment" in the era of the war on terrorism.
Among the weapons programmes proposed is an enhanced neutron bomb, capable of destroying deeply buried biological weapons caches, and "nuclear bunker-busters" that can threaten terrorist cells and hidden weapons of mass destruction. Military officers familiar with the DSB study say that it states that smaller nuclear weapons, causing less collateral damage, would constitute a more "credible" threat to adversaries than traditional atomic missiles.
"Brutally, 'mini-nukes' would be easier to use, and therefore more useful as a deterrent," said the former Pentagon official.
Any resumption of testing or the development of new nuclear weapons in the US would cause consternation among America's allies, particularly in Japan. The mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, expressed his concern this month that "the policy of the United States has now shifted towards something that will be used".
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has told senior American diplomats that developing new weapons could encourage other countries to violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
"This is extremely serious," said Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Washington-based Institute of Energy and Environmental Research, which has produced a study of the Bush administration's developing nuclear weapons strategy. "The appeal to deterrence is a smokescreen. The desire is to develop nuclear weapons that can actually be used. The United States is in danger of being at the leading edge of proliferation."
The DSB document is the latest signal that the Bush administration is preparing to modernise its nuclear programme. In September the Senate passed a White House-backed plan to reduce the preparation time required for nuclear testing in Nevada. George Bush Snr had imposed a moratorium in 1992.
At the time of the Senate vote Jon Kyl, a Republican senator, argued that tests were likely to be needed given the nuclear ambitions of countries such as North Korea and Iran. "We've had a self-imposed moratorium on testing," said Mr Kyl. "Has it stopped other countries? No. It shows a failed strategy."
-------- us politics
A General Bind for Rumsfeld
What to do when an extremist subordinate is also "indispensable"?
By William M. Arkin
E-mail: warkin@igc .org.
October 26, 2003
Los Angeles Times
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/latimes16.html
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. - In April 1862, after a bloody Union victory in the battle of Shiloh, critics who loathed the hard-drinking Gen. Ulysses S. Grant asked President Lincoln why he didn't fire his controversial general. "I can't spare this man," Lincoln is said to have responded, "he fights!"
The anecdote sheds light, a friend in the Pentagon tells me, on why Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has not moved quickly to remove Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the controversial deputy undersecretary for intelligence who in speaking at evangelical Christian churches has presented the fight against Islamic terrorists as a war between Christianity and Satan. Boykin is no politically correct, consensus-driven bureaucrat: He fights. "Do you want to win this war or not?" my friend, a Boykin admirer, asks.
It's certainly true that Boykin brings a warrior spirit and a strong sense of conviction to the terrorism fight. He told an Oregon congregation that the U.S. was under attack "because we're a Christian nation ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." Though government officials have moved to distance themselves from Boykin's comments, many can't help but admire his determination.
Rumsfeld's support for his general may or may not hold, depending on how the political winds blow. But it's not hard to see why the Defense secretary would like to see him stay. Rumsfeld is worried about how the war on terrorism is going, as shown by a Defense Department memo that was made public last week. More than one Defense Department official has said to me in the last week that special operations veteran Boykin, who has a fine military record, is "indispensable" to that war.
In his memo, the secretary prods his subordinates to think about new approaches and frets about whether the U.S. is "winning or losing the global war on terror." Rumsfeld asks whether a "new institution" that "seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies" on fighting terrorism should be created. That sounds a lot like what Boykin has been put in charge of.
But one of the other major themes in Rumsfeld's memo is a grand strategy question that is decidedly outside of the purview of the Defense Department: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" This suggests the questions that some at higher levels in the military have been asking for months: Is the military "war" enough? Can the United States really defeat terrorism one terrorist at a time? What else needs to be done to increase the standing of the United States in the Islamic world and neutralize extremism?
But those questions also make Rumsfeld's support of Boykin all the more difficult to defend. How can he on the one hand ask pointed questions about the progress of the war and at the same time defend a key official whose private views may hinder his ability to do his job and, more broadly, run counter to U.S. objectives in the Islamic world?
On Oct. 17, after the Los Angeles Times and NBC News reported on Boykin's extremist statements about terrorism, Islam and religion, the Pentagon issued a statement in which Boykin said he was "not anti-Islam" and apologized "to those who have been offended." Boykin said he was curtailing his appearances at evangelical Christian churches and asked Rumsfeld to initiate an investigation into his conduct.
After news of his activities broke, the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Republican John W. Warner of Virginia and Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, suggested that Rumsfeld temporarily reassign Boykin. "Public statements by a senior military official of an inflammatory, offensive nature that would denigrate another religion and which could be construed as bigotry may easily be exploited by enemies of the United States," they said in a letter to Rumsfeld.
The Defense Department, up to now, has maintained a solid public front. "Nobody is thinking about asking him to step aside," Defense Department spokesman Lawrence DiRita said.
But Boykin is not the victim of a media frenzy. In the year before his appointment, he preached in Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina, New Jersey, Tennessee and Oregon. Even after he became deputy undersecretary in June, he preached at least twice in Florida, the last time evidently Sept. 27. Before his controversial statements to congregations were reported in the media, Boykin seemingly did not think that his preaching - at least some of the time while wearing his uniform - undermined his military position.
What is now clear, according to high-level Defense Department officials and Rumsfeld's statements, is that the Defense secretary and his deputies didn't know about Boykin's beliefs or activities. This in itself is shocking for someone appointed to an important policymaking position and promoted to lieutenant general. Equally problematic on the other side is the perception by many that Boykin is just articulating views secretly shared by the administration.
Faced with the Boykin problem, Rumsfeld is opting to let someone else decide whether Boykin violated regulations. An inspector general's review of Boykin will address a number of questions, according to Army sources: Did Boykin violate Department of Defense Directive 1334.1 on "Wearing of the Uniform"? That is, did his appearance "bring discredit upon the armed forces" or imply official sponsorship of his talks? Did Boykin violate regulations associated with political activity or ethical conduct for executive branch employees? Did Boykin receive permission to speak and to wear the uniform while doing so? Who paid for his speaking trips, and why is it that only one is listed on the general's public financial disclosure report (and even that is described as being for attendance at a "music festival")? Was it proper for Boykin to use his military aide-de-camp to prepare a religious talk that by his own admission represented his "personal" views?
The inspector general, of course, cannot resolve whether Boykin's views undermine the war on terror or complicate foreign policy, or whether they represent the views of someone who might not be effective as a policymaker.
Faced with questions Wednesday afternoon about his memorandum on the war on terror, Rumsfeld philosophized that sometimes it was important to step back and say to a big institution: "Hey, wait a minute. Let's lift our eyes up and look out across the horizon and say, 'Are there questions that we ought to be asking ourselves?' " The secretary needs to take his own advice in the Boykin matter as well.
----
"Two measures of American desperation: Wesley Clark and Howard Dean"
Sunday, October 26, 2003
By Sunil K. Sharma and Josh Frank
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnists
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/ap/ap_story.html/Intl/AP.V6081.AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
(YellowTimes.org) - Enthusiastic support for front-running Democratic presidential contenders Wesley Clark and Howard Dean from liberals and some progressives reveals the dismal state of oppositional politics in America.
Decades of unremitting right wing assaults on every sphere of American life have so jerked the political landscape to the right that instead of clamoring for sweeping or even revolutionary changes as in days long past, the main battle cry coming from "the left" is "Anybody But Bush."
Long before the first primary, genuinely progressive platforms of Democratic candidates such as Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich have been deemed unrealistic and unworthy of consideration not only by the media, as can be expected, but by liberal activists and advocacy groups who often concede privately that they prefer a Kucinich, Sharpton or Ralph Nader.
As the U.S. threatens to expand its empire, with news of American soldiers killed in our illegal occupation of Iraq a daily occurrence, -- a war many Americans are waking up to realize they were deceived into supporting under false pretenses -- as the economy continues to go down the toilet, and as the wealthiest of Americans are lavished with tax breaks while services benefiting the common good are eviscerated, it's no wonder that Bush's popularity ratings are at pre 9/11 levels. In this degraded climate, simply to say you're an anti-war, anti- Bush candidate is to draw cheers from a battered opposition. And while they may be an improvement over Bush, have our standards so declined that we get weak in the knees when business-as-usual candidates like Clark and Dean summersault over a low hurdle?
Another White Knight from Little Rock
Four-star general Wesley Clark first came to public attention as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the U.S. war on Serbia in 1999, and was until recently a CNN military analyst. Early this year, a grassroots campaign to draft Clark to run for the presidency formed and, mostly through the Internet, garnered many signatures. Their efforts received an unlikely boost in the form of a letter from left-liberal author and filmmaker Michael Moore urging Clark to run. Moore claims that his article/letter helped generate 30,000 letters to the Draft Clark campaign and, sure enough, a few days later, Clark declared his candidacy. Yet a look at the real Wesley Clark's past makes us wonder why so many liberals and erstwhile progressives like Moore are so ga-ga over Clark.
It's often said that Clark is "our best hope" to beat Bush because he's a general, and no one can tarnish his anti-Bush positions on Persian Gulf Slaughter II, the Patriot Act, and other reactionary policies with the charge that he's an "unpatriotic," "anti-American" loon (as Dean is sometimes categorized). It's a rather strange assertion considering there have only been six generals elected as president in American history, Eisenhower being the most recent, Andrew Jackson being the last Democrat. Generals who've been elected were major war heroes like George Washington and Ike. Nobody thinks Clark inhabits that pantheon.
Clark's decision to run as a Democrat is but a recent development, and his allegiance to the Party is questionable at best. Clark's first presidential vote was for Richard Nixon. He subsequently voted twice for Ronald Reagan and then for George Bush the elder. Up until just two years ago, Clark was delivering speeches at GOP fundraisers in his home state of Arkansas, fuelling speculation he was considering a run for the Oval Office as a Republican. In a speech he gave at a fundraiser for the Pulaski County Republican Party, May 11, 2001, Clark praised Ronald Reagan's Cold War actions, Bush Sr.'s foreign policy, and singled out the current administration's hyper-unilateralist national security team: "We're going to be active, we're going to be forward engaged. But if you look around the world, there's a lot of work to be done. And I'm very glad we've got the great team in office: men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul O'Neill -- people I know very well -- our president, George W. Bush. We need them there, because we've got some tough challenges ahead in Europe."
Clark only declared himself a Democrat this past August. Why the decision to run as a Democrat? A hint can be found in a recent Newsweek article. After 9/11, Clark had expected the Bush administration to enlist him in their "war on terror."
"After all, he'd been NATO commander ... and the investment firm for which he now worked had strong Bush ties. But when GOP friends inquired, they were told: forget it. Word was that Karl Rove, the president's political mastermind, had blocked the idea. Clark was furious. [Clark] happened to chat with two prominent Republicans, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and Marc Holtzman. ... 'I would have been a Republican,' Clark told them, 'if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls.' Soon thereafter, in fact, Clark quit his day job and began seriously planning to enter the presidential race -- as a Democrat. Clark late last week insisted the remark was a 'humorous tweak.' The two others said it was anything but. 'He went into detail about his grievances,' Holtzman said. 'Clark wasn't joking. We were really shocked.'"(Newsweek, September 29, 2003)
"Anti-War" Ain't What it Used to Be
So why are liberals and progressives so star struck over Clark? One is the widespread perception that, as Michael Moore writes in his aforementioned letter, Clark "oppose[s] war." As the media watchdog group FAIR reveals in a review of statements made by Clark before, during and after the Iraq war, if Clark is "anti-war" then clearly the term has been gutted of any meaning.
- In an article published in The Times of London, April 10, Clark savors America's great "victory" over Iraq: "Liberation is at hand. Liberation -- the powerful balm that justifies painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt and reinforces bold actions. Already the scent of victory is in the air. Yet a bit more work and some careful reckoning need to be done before we take our triumph. ... President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt."
- As the U.S. and its client Israel are presently focusing the crosshairs on Syria and Iran, we have Clark writing in the same article: "But the operation in Iraq will also serve as a launching pad for further diplomatic overtures, pressures and even military actions against others in the region who have supported terrorism and garnered weapons of mass destruction. Don't look for stability as a Western goal. Governments in Syria and Iran will be put on notice -- indeed, may have been already -- that they are 'next' if they fail to comply with Washington's concerns."
Sounds straight out of the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century playbook!
Many Clark supporters were stunned when he told the New York Times on September 19 that he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq: "At the time, I probably would have voted for it, but I think that's too simple a question." After pausing to consider his statement, Clark repeated: "I don't know if I would have or not. I've said it both ways because when you get into this, what happens is you have to put yourself in a position -- on balance, I probably would have voted for it."
In response to the shocked reaction among supporters to the "antiwar" candidate's statement, Clark backpedaled the next day: "Let's make one thing real clear, I would never have voted for this war. ... I've gotten a very consistent record on this. There was no imminent threat. This was not a case of pre-emptive war. I would have voted for the right kind of leverage to get a diplomatic solution, an international solution to the challenge of Saddam Hussein."
Clark's claim to having a consistent record is simply false. In October 2002, Clark traveled to New Hampshire to endorse Katrina Swett's run for Congress. The Union Leader newspaper reported that "Clark, who supports a congressional resolution that would give President Bush authority to use military force against Iraq, said if Swett were in Congress this week, he would advise her to vote for the resolution, but only after vigorous debate." (October 10, 2002)
You're Either With Us or Against Us
Clark's oft-repeated claim that the U.S. should act in concert with the international community to reach a diplomatic solution on Iraq is belied by statements he made on CNN before the war:
- "I probably wouldn't have made the moves that got us to this point. But just assuming that we're here at this point, then I think that the president is going to have to move ahead, despite the fact that the allies have reservations." (1/21/03)
- "The credibility of the United States is on the line, and Saddam Hussein has these weapons and so, you know, we're going to go ahead and do this and the rest of the world's got to get with us. ... The U.N. has got to come in and belly up to the bar on this. But the president of the United States has put his credibility on the line, too. And so this is the time that these nations around the world, and the United Nations, are going to have to look at this evidence and decide who they line up with." (2/5/03)
And let's not forget that as Supreme Commander of NATO, Clark led an undeclared war against Serbia that was never approved by the U.N. Before the Kosovo War commenced in March 1999, Clark repeatedly called for U.S. air strikes against Serbia.
Maximum Violence
It's instructive to look at Clark's actions during the Kosovo War as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Clark waged a brutal air war against Serbia that brought death and destruction mostly to civilians and the infrastructure that was their life support but, by most post-war accounts, left the Serbian military relatively unscathed. "We're going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately, unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community, we're going to destroy his forces and their facilities and support." It's clear that Clark included as legitimate targets schools, bridges, hospitals, electrical facilities, market places, trains, refugee convoys, and media outlets. Clark bombed Serbia with "an almost sadistic fanaticism" (William Blum), making profligate use of deadly cluster bombs and depleted uranium shells of the sort now ravaging Iraq. The Washington Post reports Clark "would rise out of his seat and slap the table. 'I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign...now!'"
Independent estimates of the civilian death toll in the Kosovo War range from over 500-2000, yet Clark in testimony to Congress said there were between 20 to 30 instances of "collateral damage."
Clark's attempts to cover up instances of intentional NATO bombings of civilian targets have been exposed, though not properly publicized. In one case, fourteen people were killed in a Grdenicka, Serbia on April 12, 1999 when a U.S. jet bombed a passenger train crossing a bridge. Clark claimed the atrocity was a tragic mistake as the pilot was firing on the bridge and the trains only came into view after the bombs had been dropped. He showed two video films shot from the nose of the remote control-guided bombs to support his claim, which were later found to have been doctored. In fact, the train could be seen on the bridge when the pilot bombed it, and he turned around to make a second sweep on the burning bridge, dropping a bomb directly on the carriage.
This is the anti-war, anti-unilateralist candidate? Orwell must be rolling over in his grave.
Flunking Howard Dean's Foreign Policy
By now we have all heard of him. He has rallied progressives with his populist rhetoric, and media hounds have praised him from coast to coast -- his name is Howard Dean, and he wants your vote for President of the United States.
Iraq Debauchery
Ex-Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, catapulted onto the national stage when he announced his position opposing Bush's unilateral attack on Iraq. He was the first Democrat to enter the race for the White House, and therefore the first presidential candidate to speak out in opposition to Bush's dubious war. However, he was never wholeheartedly opposed to dethroning Saddam. And like Wesley Clark, he's swapped positions more than once.
Dean announced back in September 2002 that if Saddam didn't comply with United Nations' demands, the U.S. reserved the right to "go into Iraq." Dean claimed he would have gladly endorsed a multilateral effort aimed at destroying Saddam's regime. And on CBS's Meet the Press last July, he said that the United States must up its pressure on Saudi Arabia and Iran. "We have to be very, very careful of Iran," he said. Bush "is too beholden to the Saudis and the Iranians."
And as the quagmire in Iraq thickens, Dean has boasted to the Washington Post that he has no intentions of bringing U.S. troops home. Later Dean decided to flip-flop that stance, and stated in a New York Primary debate, "We need more troops. They're going to be foreign troops [in Iraq], not more American troops, as they should have been in the first place. Ours need to come home." So which is it? It seems according to Howard Dean that the Iraq disorder must go on at all costs. He is just not quite sure whose soldiers should do the occupying.
When drilled during that same debate about Bush's $87 billion dollar Iraq package, Dean said that he would support it, and that "we have no choice...we have to support our troops." So, do we support our troops by bringing them home, or by financing the occupation? He hasn't clarified.
More recently, in an October issue of the Jewish Week, Dean was quoted as saying that he has been very clear in his support for "targeted assassinations" of Palestinian terror suspects. He believes these men are "enemy combatants in a war," and added that, "Israel has every right to shoot them before they can shoot Israelis."
Dean's Sharon Love Affair
Dean's not-so-progressive stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict may be for a good (or not so good) reason. Dean's campaign fundraiser, Steven Grossman, is the ex-director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential Israeli lobbying force in the United States -- ranked number four on the Forbes list of the top twenty-five most giving organizations in Washington. AIPAC's unwavering ideology includes defending Ariel Sharon at every mishap. Grossman himself spent many nights in the Clinton White House -- and it's a certainty he'll be doing the same during a Dean tenure.
In an interview with The Forward magazine, Dean admitted that his position on Israel was "closer to AIPAC's" than Palestinian advocates. He has also announced his support for the wall now separating Palestinians from their homeland, as well as championing Israel for taking their battles over the border into Syria. "If Israel has to defend itself by striking terrorists elsewhere, it's going to have to do that." Dean said in a CNN interview with Judy Woodruff, "terrorism has no place in bringing peace in the Middle East ... nations have the right to defend themselves just as we defended ourselves by going into Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda."
Dean is also opposed to curtailing any of Israel's loan guarantees from the United States. Even though he's claimed he'll take an "even-handed" approach to the bloody conflict, Dean has made it clear he'll support the billion dollar U.S. loan guarantees to Israel. His own campaign website exclaims that the United States should "maintain its historic special relationship with the state of Israel, providing a guarantee of its long-term defense and security."
Why all the Hype?
So how did Dean get labeled a progressive antiwar candidate? Dean wonders himself, "[I'm] out here talking about a balanced budget and a healthcare system run by the private sector," Dean said in a New York Times article. "It's pathetic I'm considered the most progressive candidate." He's even remarked on the campaign trail that he doesn't "think the Democrats are going to be able to beat the President with the equivalent of Bush-Lite." So why isn't he offering us a clear alternative, or at least acknowledging they exist?
Don't count on Dean for that. It is unlikely he'll be hailing the true progressives in the Democratic primaries -- Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton -- anytime soon. Why would he point his supporters to their camps? Dean's generous patrons have anteed up over ten and a half million dollars in small donations since his campaign's inception. Their loyalty has pushed the ex- Governor into top contention for the Democratic nomination for President.
Looking over some of Dean's hawkish foreign policy positions, it's difficult to see what all the hype is about. The Right has so controlled the political landscape in the U.S. that Howard Dean and Wesley Clark look decent to some progressives. Even if either pull it off by winning their party's nomination and by unseating Bush -- the Left will still not be "victorious."
Desperate Americans
It's hard to imagine that either Dean or Clark would be monumentally different than George W. Bush. Perhaps they would. However, it's clear our struggles must continue well beyond the 2004 elections. The Democrats may save us from Bush, but with the likes of Governor Dean and General Clark leading the oppositional pack -- its apparent the Democrats won't be able to save us from themselves.
[Sunil K. Sharma is the editor of Dissident Voice, a radical online newsletter that is "dedicated to challenging the lies of the corporate press and the privileged classes it serves." Josh Frank is a writer and activist living in New York City.]
Josh Frank encourages your comments: frank_joshua@hotmail.com
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Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad
October 26, 2003
New York Times
ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/politics/26RELI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - Shortly after George W. Bush took office, an odd coalition came to the White House to see Karl Rove, the president's powerful political adviser, to ask that the United States intercede in the civil war in Sudan. The group included Charles W. Colson, the born-again Christian who spent seven months in jail for his role in Watergate, and David Saperstein, a reform rabbi and a longtime lobbyist for liberal causes in Washington.
The two-decades-old war in Sudan was not a front-burner problem for the new administration, and Mr. Rove was not a foreign policy adviser. But the religious strife between Christians and Muslims in a conflict that had killed two million people was of enormous concern to American religious groups, particularly the evangelicals who make up a major portion of President Bush's electoral base.
Mr. Rove, the participants in the meeting recalled, was unusually receptive during a nearly hourlong conversation. "He made it clear how seriously the administration was going to engage on this," said Rabbi Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Close to three years later, the White House has lived up to Mr. Rove's promise to engage not only in peace talks in Sudan, but on other human rights issues of critical importance to American religious groups, most notably sex trafficking and AIDS.
Administration officials and members of Congress say the religious coalition has had an unusual influence on one of the most religious White Houses in American history. The groups have driven aspects of foreign policy and won major appointments, and they were instrumental in making sure that the president included extensive remarks on sex trafficking in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September.
No one disputes that Mr. Bush already cares deeply about these issues and has a personal faith that his advisers say brings a moral dimension to a foreign policy better known for war. "To put it simply, it's a fairly radical belief that a child in an African village whose parents are dying of AIDS has the same importance before God as the president of the United States," said Michael Gerson, Mr. Bush's chief speechwriter and an important White House policy adviser who is a born-again Christian.
But it is also true, religious leaders and administration officials note, that white evangelicals accounted for about 40 percent of the votes that Mr. Bush received in the 2000 presidential election. In 2004, political analysts say, he is unlikely to be re-elected without the strong support of this constituency, which is predominately but not wholly Republican, and which in other years has thrown significant support to southern Democrats like Bill Clinton. Mr. Rove is now tending to the constituency with great care.
"You're not going to run into too many people who are smarter than Karl," said Dr. Richard D. Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who is in regular contact with Mr. Rove. "Karl understands the importance of this segment of his coalition, and I think the president understands it. The president feels that one of the contributory factors to his father's loss is that he didn't get as many evangelical votes as Reagan did."
The human rights issues offer a politically safe way for the president to appeal to his base of white evangelicals, who leading scholars and pollsters define by their membership in historically white evangelical denominations, like the Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God. Evangelical churches believe that the Bible is truth, that members have an imperative to proselytize and convert and that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.
"There are these issues below the radar screen that are of deep concern to the evangelical community, and while they are sincerely held by the administration, they also have the benefit of allowing the president to say, `I have responded to what you wanted me to do,' " Rabbi Saperstein said. "But they're not issues that will alienate large segments of the center in America. These are all-win issues for the administration."
The religious dynamic at the White House reflects a larger change within American evangelicals themselves, and their interest over the last decade in moving beyond the divisive domestic issues that consumed them a generation ago - abortion, school prayer, homosexuality, pornography - into an international arena.
The change is taking place in part because of a new focus on what evangelicals call "the persecuted church," or fellow Christians in other regions of the world who face abuse. The change also stems from leaders' concluding that evangelical groups made little headway on domestic social issues in the 1980's.
"Evangelicals today are more interested in making a difference than in making a statement," said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations. "We made a lot of statements in the 1980's and got zip."
Mr. Cizik said that evangelicals were now more willing to work with Jewish and feminist groups on certain foreign policy issues and that the failure of evangelicals in the 1980's to meet their goals was in part a failure to collaborate. "Evangelicals have thought historically, `Well, we'll do politics the way we do faith - we'll just convert the opposition,' " he said. "But you can't do politics the same way you do religion."
The groups now find the Bush White House to have an open door, particularly with a president who uses evangelical language in his speeches and credits his faith with helping him to give up drinking.
"There was no movement under Clinton," said Mr. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, who once Mr. Gerson's boss. "We couldn't get anyone to talk to us."
Other religious leaders say that this White House far surpasses the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Mr. Bush's father in its attentiveness.
"Under previous Republican administrations, they would take our calls and often return them," Dr. Land said. "In this administration, they call us. They say, you know, `What do you think about this?' "
The closeness has led to collaboration on policy, most recently on human trafficking. Religious leaders like Dr. Land and Mr. Colson pushed the White House for months to have the president denounce the coercion of women into prostitution around the world and the forcing of men and children into modern-day slavery.
"We certainly encouraged the White House to make it a prominent issue," Dr. Land said, adding that the United Nations speech "was one place we suggested it could be done."
The issue had also risen within the administration, which, as Dr. Land put it, "has a lot more evangelicals in it, and traditional Catholics," than previous administrations. Mr. Gerson, for one, said that he had been talking about international human trafficking for nearly a year, and that it was "bubbling up" on the National Security Council. It was of interest, Mr. Gerson said, to Elliott Abrams, a senior director for Middle East affairs, and to Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, were also focused on the issue, Mr. Gerson said.
About three weeks before Mr. Bush's United Nations address, Mr. Gerson said, "we went in and talked to the president in the Oval Office - Steve, Condi, Andy and myself. He was very interested and supportive of the idea of having trafficking in the speech. And that became the major topic of discussion in the meeting - where it's happening, how large. And he had a lot of questions."
Earlier in the year, religious groups say they successfully lobbied for a new director of the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Office, which was created in 2000 by legislation aggressively pushed by a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, Jewish groups and feminists. John Miller, a former Republican member of Congress from Seattle who had worked on human rights issues on Capitol Hill, was the group's choice. Mr. Rove is said to have raised concerns that Mr. Miller supported Senator John McCain in the 2000 presidential campaign, but the groups held fast.
"Essentially a variety of people let out the word that this is not the hill you want to die on - this is the guy we want," said Allen Hertzke, the director of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of a forthcoming book, "Freeing God's Children: The Faith-based Movement for International Human Rights."
Mr. Miller, for his part, said the influence of the groups on human trafficking had been substantial. "They're consumed by this issue," he said. "I think it's great. It helped get the legislation passed, it helped spur me, I think it keeps the whole government focused."
The groups were also influential in the development of the president's commitment to fight global AIDS, particularly the part of the policy based on Uganda's A.B.C. campaign, which promotes, in order, abstinence, being faithful and condoms.
Mr. Colson, who has enormous influence among evangelicals because of his books, lectures and radio program, said that President Bush personally told religious leaders that he was supporting them on the A.B.C. campaign in a meeting at the White House this spring.
After the meeting, Mr. Colson said he went up to Mr. Bush and said emphatically that faith-based policy worked. "He said, `You don't have to tell me,' " Mr. Colson said the president replied. "He said, `I'd still be drinking if it weren't for what Christ did in my life. I know faith-based works.' "
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-------- afghanistan
Disarming of Afghans Called Vital to Security
October 26, 2003
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/international/asia/26AFGH.html
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Oct. 25 - A long-overdue program to disarm and demobilize thousands of Afghan guerrilla and militia fighters began this week, with President Hamid Karzai personally locking away a truckload of weapons on Friday in this sleepy northern town in front of hundreds of schoolchildren and townspeople.
Nearly 1,000 men from Kunduz Province handed over weapons to United Nations inspectors this week and agreed to return to civilian life. For many of them, it was the end of 20 years of fighting.
The $150 million "Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration" program, run by the United Nations, plans to demobilize 100,000 men over the next three years, to try to rid the country of its warring factions and replace them with a new national army and police force. But it has begun tentatively, with a pilot operation in one of the calmest parts of Afghanistan, a region controlled by Gen. Muhammad Daoud, who is close to the minister of defense.
Germany's lower house of Parliament approved legislation this week expanding the scope of the country's peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan by sending troops to Kunduz.
Mr. Karzai said Friday was "one of the best days after 20 years of war and devastation," which civilians hoped would lead to peace, security and prosperity. He praised the men who had fought against occupation and urged them to embark on a new phase of the "holy struggle" to reconstruct the country.
The program is seen as a crucial step to dilute the power of regional commanders and warlords - many of whom exert political and economic control through their armed militias - and to prevent them from influencing the political process, particularly elections next summer.
But the program has been delayed for almost nine months, as the foreign countries sponsoring it insisted first on reforms in the Defense Ministry, to give it more ethnic balance and to reduce the power of the mostly Tajik Northern Alliance.
The failure to begin disarmament in the two years since the Taliban government collapsed has had serious security repercussions - not least on efforts to create a new Afghan Army. It has failed to draw recruits while so many soldiers have remained with their faction leaders.
Most of the first 1,000 men to disarm were illiterate farmers and laborers. They walked - rather than marched - before the president on Friday, dressed in civilian clothes, without weapons. Many actually returned to civilian life a year ago but were now making a formal break from the military.
Each will take an oath swearing to follow a code of civilian conduct and will receive $200 and a set of civilian clothes. Farmers among them will get wheat seed, fertilizer and tools, and others are to receive training and help with employment.
"We wanted to leave the army so we could be free to travel and do business," said Abdullah, a 25-year-old illiterate soldier who has been fighting since he was 13. "I think the fighting is over now, and we are very happy to have a peaceful life."
A disabled former fighter named Qasim, 35, asked, "Will they train me; will they help me find a job?" He said stomach wounds had left him unable to do heavy physical work.
The program remains fraught with difficulties, not so much from ordinary soldiers but from their commanders, who will be demobilized later but are reluctant to lose power by demobilizing their men. Sixteen officers from one unit were resisting orders to demobilize, a battalion commander said at the ceremony. Those demobilization can apply to enroll in the Afghan National Army, but they will have to be screened and start from the bottom.
Many regional groups are also reluctant to hand over weapons to the government in Kabul. The weapons are to go to the newly formed army. But the man who took the keys of the first weapons container on Friday was the defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, leader of the powerful Northern Alliance, which could deter rival factions from taking part.
Jim Ocitti, the United Nations spokesman for the program, said, "We are starting from the bottom up." Later, when the commanders are demobilized, those who do not join the army are to be given help to set up businesses or trained to clear land mines. Dealing with the bigger warlords would involve a political decision by the leadership, he said.
Marshal Fahim, who has been criticized in the past for delaying the reform process and thus disarmament, has thrown his support behind the effort in recent weeks, a senior United Nations official said. He gave a strong endorsement of the program on Friday.
"We will overcome any kind of obstacles and difficulties we encounter on the way to establishing peace and security in the country," he said in a speech to the demobilized soldiers and hundreds of onlookers.
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Swallowed by Kabul's Cracks Afghan Returnees Find The Living's Not Easy
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17795-2003Oct25?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan -- They live in tents and storefronts and abandoned ruins, cooking and bathing on patches of dirt. The men haunt traffic circles, hoping to be picked up for a day's construction work. The women knock on doors asking for clothes to wash. The children forage for firewood and filch potatoes from bazaars.
They are returnees without a refuge, the least skilled and most vulnerable of an estimated 750,000 Afghans who have flooded into Kabul in the past 18 months from Pakistan, Iran or other parts of Afghanistan where they had fled during years of war, drought, civil conflict and religious repression.
They came back because they had heard there was democracy and peace in their homeland. Mistakenly, they thought this also meant jobs, land and help. Instead, they fell straight between the cracks of a vastly overburdened Afghan government and an international aid network that is geared to help almost every category of need except theirs.
"People were promised green gardens, but when we got here, we found there was nothing at all," said Abdul Moqim, 33, an illiterate, one-legged war veteran who returned from Pakistan nine months ago and now lives with his wife and six children in a tent colony of 150 families in the city's Khair Khona district.
Moqim, who worked as a cook in Pakistan, said his disability has doomed his job prospects in a capital crammed with idle, able-bodied men. He spent the summer building a mud baseboard around his flimsy home, but he knows that when winter comes, it will not keep out the bitter, high-altitude cold. "We have extra blankets," he said.
When families like Moqim's cross the border into Afghanistan, as about 2.2 million returning refugees have done since early 2002, they register with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which gives them some cash, wheat, plastic sheeting and a few other basic necessities.
After that, those headed for the countryside are eligible to receive additional foreign assistance, in keeping with U.N. policy to encourage Afghans to repopulate their original villages and farmlands. But those settling in the capital, which is densely crowded and poorly serviced, are virtually on their own.
"Frankly, our priority has been rural," said Maki Shinohara, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency here. "People come to Kabul because it is more secure and there are more job opportunities, but it is already overpopulated. There was a big pull factor toward the city, so we have tried to pull people back to the rural areas."
Despite such efforts, the tide of immigrants into the capital has continued, though at a less frantic pace than a year ago. Those with skills generally find a niche in the fast-growing urban economy, and those with land are eligible for reconstruction assistance from foreign aid groups. But thousands of families have ended up as penniless squatters on blighted urban tracts.
Across the street from Moqim's tent colony is a row of vacant shops into which another 54 impoverished refugee families have hunkered down. Each has erected a blue U.N. plastic sheet across the entrance for privacy, but the cloth does not keep out the stench from the open sewer that runs alongside.
"We were happy to come home, but we are living like animals," said Raz Mahmad, 27, a leader of the community, whose members migrated from a refugee camp in northwestern Pakistan. "In the camp, we had water, electricity, shelter and jobs," he said. "Now we have to rely on our children for food. It is a great shame for us."
The only sign of government help these families see is a teacher who comes every day from the Afghan education ministry to hold literacy classes in one of the mud shops. Most of the attendees are small children, who practice math tables on a homemade blackboard and read short passages from an illustrated workbook.
But although the classes are free and have no age limit, almost everyone older than 12 is out in the streets, hustling for food and money. Boys shine shoes, search garbage dumps for soda cans or swing jars of incense as a form of alms-seeking. Girls beg for vegetables or snatch them from carts.
Allah Mahmad is a quick-witted 15-year-old who finished third grade in Pakistan and can recite most of the alphabet in English. But now he spends his days selling pink toilet paper from a sidewalk tray. His father, who brought the family of nine to Kabul two months ago, is sick and jobless. Mahmad and his younger brother, who also sells toilet paper, bring home about 50 cents a day.
"I liked school, and I even learned some foreign words, but now I have to work to feed my family," Mahmad said with both pride and regret. "I'd like to study to be a mechanic some day, but I just don't have the time."
The tent colonies of Khair Khona are the most startling evidence of a festering urban problem that is largely hidden from view. Along the endless lanes of abandoned houses in West Kabul, an area virtually destroyed by civil war in the 1990s, hundreds of returnee families live in crumbling, lightless ruins, uncounted and unnoticed.
In one block, a maze of tumbled walls, live 18 families who returned together from Iran last summer. Dropped at a city bus stand, they walked as far as they could with their bundles and stopped. Now they occupy stone rooms with gaping windows and ceilings, sleeping on dusty carpets and hanging their laundry from the roof.
"My children are hungry, my father is sick, and we are afraid to go out at night," said Khalid Mahmad, 54. None of his children attend school, and he has not been able to find work. "We've spent all our money, and we can't go back to Iran," he said. "We are stuck."
Both Afghan authorities and international aid agencies are aware of the returnees' plight, but local government has few resources to help them and foreign assistance programs, initially unprepared for the mass urban influx, have been slow to respond to the city's urgent need for emergency shelters and low-cost housing.
One problem, Shinohara said, has been the difficulty of finding land in an overcrowded, poorly regulated city where property is often in dispute and prices are skyrocketing. She said the U.N. refugee agency has persuaded authorities not to evict squatters from public buildings this winter, but that its plan to rehabilitate one housing complex has become mired in bureaucracy.
For impoverished returnee families who own land and need help rebuilding their former homes, a few sources of help are available. Currently, a French aid organization called ACTED is providing 300 such families with roof beams, windows, doors and enclosed cement latrines. The residents provide all labor except for the bathrooms.
"We are trying to get everything finished by December, before the real cold sets in," said Beth Bolitho, an ACTED official. "These are traditional Afghan homes. The families supply the mud and most of the manpower, so there is an important element of self-mobilization."
In Kalai Fatu, a rural area south of the city that was decimated by bombs and rockets during the civil war, 36 mud-walled homes are in various stages of reconstruction with ACTED's help. The area has no electricity and no drinking water, but it has the feeling of a community that is coming alive again.
On Sunday, a woman named Tahira came to her door with mud-caked hands. She proudly showed off her parlor, with new wooden window frames and a half-finished mud floor she was smoothing over with a flat spade. A canary was singing exuberantly in a cage.
"When we came back, the house was totally destroyed. It had been burned by rockets, and we could never afford to rebuild it," said the mother of nine, whose husband earns $33 a month as a government janitor. "Now we are happy that God has beaten our enemies and we can finally come home again."
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Rockets Hit Baghdad Hotel Where Wolfowitz Was Staying
October 26, 2003
By THOM SHANKER and RAYMOND BONNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/international/worldspecial/26CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 26 - A senior American Army officer was killed and at least a dozen other individuals were injured early this morning when rockets slammed into a hotel located inside a heavily fortified compound. At the time of the attack, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was in the hotel; he was not injured.
The rockets were fired from the 14th of July street, a broad avenue that runs on the south side of the hotel. A huge concrete security barrier separates the road from the hotel and the rest of the compound, and most of the road has been closed off.
Shortly before 6 a.m. this morning, a white passenger vehicle moved along the quiet street, pulling a blue generator, stopped at what had been a cloverleaf - before American forces sealed it off for security reasons - unhitched the generator, then pulled away, according to Iraqis who saw it, and American military officials.
The generator's engine had been removed, and secreted inside were 40 rocket launchers, American officials said. The newer ones were French-made and the kind used in helicopters, American officials said. Half were French-made, half were Russian-made, officials said.
Electrical switches were used to fire the rockets, officials said. Twenty-nine fired. Eleven were in their tubes ready to fire.
Twenty rockets hit the hotel, blowing the balconies off two rooms, and the windows out of many more. Green curtains hung down the outside of the hotel.
A New York Times reporter traveling with Mr. Wolfowitz was a few rooms from where one of the rockets hit. Looking across the street, he saw the generator from which the rockets had been fired, and saw one projectile coming at the hotel, trailing sparks.
American officials declined to release the name of the dead, an Army lieutenant colonel, pending notification of the next of kin.
The injured included four American soldiers, and seven American civilians, according to American officials.
The attack on the well-known Rashid, especially during the visit of a high-ranking American dignitary, will only serve to underscore security concerns for the American-led stabilization effort and questions about how best to rout loyalists of the Saddam Hussein government. Stopping attacks like this looks like mission impossible, without stopping every vehicle, on every road, at every hour.
And that is not consistent with the American desire to returning as much normality as possible to Baghdad.
The 14th of July road was fully opened to traffic only on Saturday when the 14th of July Bridge was opened, amid considerable fanfare.
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Wolfowitz Unhurt In Rocket Attack
Baghdad Hotel Hit; Helicopter Is Downed In Separate Incident
By Theola Labbé and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17483-2003Oct25?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- At least six explosive projectiles struck the al-Rashid hotel in central Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying early Sunday morning.
The assault, which injured several people, followed a day of violence in which a convoy of civilian contractors was attacked west of Baghdad, killing at least three people, and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter was shot down, injuring one crew member.
The projectiles slammed into three floors of the al-Rashid, which houses hundreds of U.S. military personnel and civilian reconstruction staff. The 14-floor hotel was struck in at least five locations. At least three rooms appeared to have been hit. Reports of injuries varied. At least two people, one of them an American soldier, were carried out of the hotel on stretchers. A military official said there were unconfirmed reports that more than a dozen people were wounded.
Wolfowitz, who is traveling in Iraq, appeared uninjured after the attack. The explosive projectiles hit the hotel on floors below where Wolfowitz and his party were staying, shattering scores of windows, blowing off doors and filling hallways with smoke.
"It was a very fierce strike," said one occupant, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Sgt. Pedro Perez of the Florida National Guard, which is assigned to protect the hotel, said he heard reports on his radio of a fire on one of the floors and injuries that included severed limbs. At least one occupant was seen climbing on a narrow concrete railing on the side of the building to escape his room.
After the attack, scores of occupants, some dressed in their pajamas, ran across the street to a convention center. It was not immediately clear whether the projectiles, which struck the building's west side around 6 a.m., were mortars, rockets, or rocket-propelled grenades. The top floor of the al-Rashid was hit with a mortar in late September, but that attack caused no injuries. The hotel is located in a highly fortified section of central Baghdad that is home to the headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation authority. Immediately after Sunday morning's attack, U.S. military personnel around the hotel said they heard the sound of gunfire. Initial reports suggested the shots were fired by Iraqi police.
Iraqu police reported finding 11 unexploded mortar rounds near the hotel.
The attack on the civilian contractors occurred Saturday afternoon near Habbaniya, 50 miles west of Baghdad in the violence-plagued Sunni triangle, the U.S. military said. Three vehicles were struck by a roadside bomb and then fired on with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, according to a military spokesman.
The spokesman released no information about the victims' nationalities.
The Associated Press said the vehicles belonged to European Landmine Solutions, a British company. The AP quoted David Rasmussen, an American employee of the firm who was wounded in the attack, and an Iraqi security guard, Laith Yousef -- both of whom were traveling in the convoy -- as saying their vehicles were attacked by American forces.
A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad denied that U.S. forces had fired on the convoy. Another military official said U.S. forces from the 82nd Airborne Division, which is responsible for security in the area, arrived at the scene after the attack and provided first aid.
A CBS cameraman, Nick Turner, who reached the scene minutes after the attack, said in an interview that an American man and a British woman were killed. In addition, he said, three Iraqis were killed and three people wounded, he said.
Saying he saw a U.S. convoy heading toward the scene of the attack shortly before the roadside bomb detonated, Turner raised the possibility that the civilians had been caught in crossfire between U.S. forces and Iraqi attackers.
In either case, the convoy bombing represented the costliest attack to date against the civilian contractors relied upon by the U.S.-led occupation authority for most basic services. In addition to U.S. troops, attacks have targeted those cooperating with U.S. officials, including U.N. workers, Iraqi police and public officials, and diplomats from Jordan and Turkey.
Meanwhile, one member of the MH-60 Black Hawkwas injured when the helicopter, supporting U.S. ground forces, came down in a field 11/2 miles from Tikrit at 3:45 p.m. (8:45 a.m. EDT). It was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and burst into flames shortly after hitting the ground, the military said.
A second Black Hawk evacuated the crew as U.S. forces arrived to secure the crash site, about 100 miles north of Baghdad. Both aircraft were from the 12th Aviation Regiment, headquartered in Giebelstadt, Germany.
The downing came hours after Wolfowitz visited Tikrit on a four-day swing through Iraq, his second in recent months.
In an attack earlier in the day, three U.S. soldiers from the 1st Armored Division on patrol in Baghdad were wounded when a homemade bomb -- what the military calls an improvised explosive device, or IED -- exploded near their vehicle. None was reported seriously hurt.
The attacks marred a day when two events brought life in Baghdad closer to normal: the reopening of a major bridge across the Tigris River and the lifting of the nighttime curfew clamped on the capital since U.S. forces toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
U.S. military officials reopened the 14th of July Bridge, a major route that linked north and south Baghdad, saying security had improved enough in the city to allow traffic on the span. Members of Baghdad's interim city council from the neighborhoods of Karkh and Karrada had pushed for the reopening for months, citing the choking traffic on Baghdad's streets.
"It's steps like this, in the aggregate, that will demonstrate that safety and security have been achieved," said Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, based in Baghdad.
The bridge is named after the July 14, 1958, revolution that overthrew Iraq's British-backed monarchy. The bridge was destroyed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and was rebuilt by Hussein's government. The government did not allow citizens to walk or drive on the bridge because of its proximity to Hussein's presidential palaces.
After sunset, crowds of expectant Iraqis stood at the edge of the bridge. When an Iraqi policeman yelled, "Go ahead, it's open!" jubilant children and adults sprinted down the four lanes, cheering and clapping.
"During Saddam's time, we couldn't walk on this bridge," said Mustafa Kadem, 23, who walked with three of his friends. "This is the first time our feet have touched the ground. This is freedom."
But at a checkpoint on one end of the span U.S. soldiers searched cars and checked Iraqis for badges that would allow them to pass. Esa Niami, 54, and his son, Munir Esa, 17, waited behind a cluster of honking cars. "As long as we have checkpoints, this will waste time," said Niami, a retired traffic officer.
The lifting of the midnight-to-4 a.m. curfew was announced by Baghdad's interim council and approved by the occupation authority. The council said the curfew was being lifted "due to the reduction in the crime rate in the city and the overall improvement in the security situation."
It also coincides with the beginning of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. Timed to the appearance of the new moon, Ramadan is expected to begin here at daybreak Monday.
A new opinion poll of 1,620 Iraqis aged 18 and older, meanwhile, released by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, found that 60 percent oppose or strongly oppose the presence of U.S. and allied forces in Iraq.
According to the poll, based on interviews conducted between Sept. 28 and Oct. 10 in Baghdad and six other major Iraqi cities, the percentage of respondents who view coalition forces as