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NUCLEAR
Surprise Word on Nuclear Gains by North Korea and Iran
World drags feet on securing nukes from terrorists
Navy Officers Lose Commands Over Sub
'Health will suffer for generations'
Nuclear Waste Back in Germany for Storage
Iran's Secret Nuke Research Had Foreign Help
U.S. urges 'appropriate action' on Iran's nukes
After Report, Iran Acknowledges 'Minor' Breach of Nuclear Pact
Iran's Leader Says U.N. Arms Report Is Positive
Arms Experts Wary, But Iran Stresses Atomic Peace
Is nuclear power cheaper?
The meaning of Japan's election
Smithsonian Rejects Pleas on Labeling of Enola Gay
DOE needs more money for Test Site compensation claims
Bush's Middle Eastern Quagmire and Apocalypse Future
Financier Soros puts millions into ousting Bush
Congress Is Nearing Approval of Record Pentagon Spending
Government Outgrows Cap Set by President
MILITARY
The Crime Called World War I
U.S. Fails to Certify Many Labs That Use Pathogens
BAE-Boeing sign 767 manufacturing deal
War killed 55,000 Iraqi civilians
Welcome to Iraq
MILITARY - General Vows to Intensify U.S. Response to Attackers
At Least 17 Italians Among 25 Reported Killed in Attack
U.S. Seeks A Faster Transition In Iraq
U.N. Estimates Israeli Barrier Will Disrupt Lives of 600,000
Ending Political Turmoil, Palestinians Approve Cabinet
Grind of War Giving Life To Opponents Of Sharon
Senate Follows House and Votes to Impose Sanctions Against Syria
Senate votes for sanctions against Syria
Syria Sanctions Bill Easily Clears Senate
BAE Systems Modernizes Radiation Hardening Capability
Some Iraq Copters Without Missile Defense
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Analysis: Guantánamo Case About Federal Turf
F.B.I.'s Reach Into Records Is Set to Grow
Ex-Detainee Details Fearful Path to Syria
ENERGY AND OTHER
Will Hydrogen Clear the Air? Maybe Not, Say Some
Ohio Town Empties as Utility Buys It
Pfizer Donating 135 Million Doses of Anti-Blindness Drug
ACTIVISTS
Blair Expresses Support for Bush and Cautions Demonstrators
World's Highest Tree Sit Aims to Save World's Tallest Hardwoods
-------- NUCLEAR
Surprise Word on Nuclear Gains by North Korea and Iran
November 12, 2003
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/politics/12NUKE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - Two intelligence reports issued in recent days find that North Korea and Iran have made advances on a variety of technologies necessary to build nuclear weapons that surprised many nuclear experts and Western intelligence officials.
Overall, the reports support the consensus view that North Korea is far ahead of Iran in the production of actual weapons and poses the most urgent proliferation problems for the Bush administration.
Yet Iran's program turns out to have been even broader and deeper than American intelligence agencies suspected. A 30-page confidential report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency and sent to 20 governments on Monday describes a program that reached back at least 18 years and involved extremely complex technologies, including an exotic program to use lasers to enrich uranium.
In recent weeks, President Bush has declared that his administration is making great progress in its diplomatic effort to disarm both countries, putting together coalitions of neighboring countries to pressure the two surviving governments of what he famously called the "Axis of Evil."
But the essence of the Central Intelligence Agency report about North Korea is that that country is speeding up its weapons production. And Iran's decision to allow the international agency into facilities that were previously closed to inspectors may, diplomats said, blunt Mr. Bush's effort to seek some kind of sanctions in the United Nations, leaving Iran with an advanced nuclear infrastructure that could be restarted at a moment's notice.
Taken together, the reports show that Iran and North Korea have each dabbled in separating plutonium - one path to a bomb - and have each set up centrifuges to enrich uranium. The difference, as the C.I.A. told Congress, is that North Korea has fully mastered the complexities of detonating a bomb, perhaps with the help of some of its nuclear suppliers like Pakistan. There is no evidence that Iran has made that much headway.
"The Iranians did a lot better at this than Saddam Hussein did," one administration official said. "But not as well as Kim Jong Il," he added, referring to the North Korean leader.
The international agency's report is full of examples showing that Iran fooled the global nuclear watchdog for years. It refers to "limited and reactive" cooperation with inspectors and "changing and contradictory" stories. Despite that history of deception, though, the international agency insisted that there is no evidence of a current weapons project in Iran. That conclusion left many experts agape.
"It's dumbfounding that the I.A.E.A., after saying that Iran for 18 years had a secret effort to enrich uranium and separate plutonium, would turn around and say there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program," said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, a private group that tracks nuclear arms. "If that's not evidence, I don't know what is."
A federal intelligence official echoed that assessment, saying, "It's obvious that this is not an atoms for peace program."
But the international agency's report, while detailed, found no actual weapons of the kind that North Korea boasts about.
Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a private group based in Washington, argued that the agency's job of simultaneously promoting and regulating nuclear power had blinded it to Tehran's ambitions. "Iran is an example," he said, "of what happens when you let the rhetoric of atoms for peace take precedence over the hard realities of a nation that supports terrorism going nuclear."
Still, American officials said the 30-page document from the international inspectors included details missing from American intelligence reports. "They may have suspected it," said David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security, an arms control group in Washington. "But a lot of this stuff would not have been known to the U.S. government."
Private and federal experts said that the most stunning revelation was how Tehran had labored in secret for 18 years to enrich uranium, a main fuel of nuclear arms. Its effort focused on developing centrifuges, a standard method in which fast spinning concentrates U-235, the uranium isotope used in making bombs.
The report said that Tehran acknowledged building two centrifuge plants and finishing a third site, the Kalaye Electric Company, which made centrifuge parts and did extensive centrifuge testing and experimental purification of uranium. Inspectors were blocked from entering the electric company's facilities earlier this year; they now know that behind a false wall of boxes were scores of centrifuges, in what appeared to be a pilot program to produce weapon-grade uranium.
That is exactly the kind of program that North Korea is also believed to be involved in as an alternative to the country's main nuclear weapons development program. The project was discovered a few years ago by South Korean intelligence officials, though its exact location is still a mystery. Inspectors were thrown out of North Korea on New Year's Eve.
While the North Koreans have clearly made more progress, intelligence officials say, the international agency's report indicates that the Iranians have been more technologically daring than most experts expected.
The report reveals that for 12 years Iran developed a program to use lasers to purify uranium. In theory, the exotic technique can be highly efficient in producing enriched uranium. But no country, including the United States, has found a way to make it economical in the production of fuel for commercial nuclear reactors. It is so expensive that experts assume its only usefulness would be for a military program where costs are no obstacle.
"The technology and physics are not easy," said Steve Fetter, a physicist at the University of Maryland. "It's probably the most difficult of all the enrichment techniques to master."
The international agency's report said that three years ago Iran established a pilot plant for laser enrichment and used it between October 2002 and January of this year to conduct experiments on natural uranium. The Iranian authorities said the pilot plant was disassembled in May.
David E. Sanger reported for this article from Washington and William J. Broad from New York.
-------- accidents and safety
World drags feet on securing nukes from terrorists
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 12, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031112170832.50jzh70w.html
The nightmare scenario of terrorists unleashing a nuclear weapon on a major city is real and growing -- yet world efforts to meet the threat are still "shortsighted" and inadequate, researchers warned Wednesday.
Despite the 20 billion dollar Global Partnership unveiled at the Group of Eight summit in Canada last year to secure stocks of nuclear weapons and material, efforts still fall well short of what is needed to prevent a catastrophe, they warned.
The warnings are contained in a progress report on the initiative compiled by 21 research institutes in 16 European, Asian and North American countries known as the Strenghtening the Global Partnership project.
"When one considers the global economic, political and military consequences of a terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction -- not to mention the cost in human lives -- the current spending priorities of Partnership countries can only be described as shortsighted," the report said.
Under the plan, the United States agreed to put up 10 billion dollars over 10 years, a figure to be matched by other G8 members and interested countries.
But due to wrangles with Russia over initiatives on its soil "only a small number of new projects have gotten underway since the Global Partnership was launched in June 2002," the report said.
"Only a tiny fraction of the funds pledged have been disbursed or even allocated to specific projects."
On funding, the group added : "20 billion should be considered a floor, not a ceiling."
Former US senator Sam Nunn, who now heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, devoted to preventing terrorism with weapons of mass destruction, warned that valuable time was being lost.
"We are doing a lot of things -- but we are not moving nearly fast enough, we have a common peril and we must hold leaders to be accountable for the wise pledges they have made," he said.
"A crude nuclear explosion in one of the world's largest cities would be a human tragedy. It would shake our world economic confidence and foundation in a way that we have not experienced in the modern age."
Nunn referred to a US intelligence warning in October 2001 that terrorists had smuggled a 10 kilotonne nuclear bomb into New York City. The assessment was discredited within a week but only after it sparked alarm, weeks after the September 11 attacks.
"It was never judged by our top officials and the people who know most about this in our government as either impossible, nor implausable in New York City or anywhere else in the world," said Nunn.
Nations in the Global Partnership are the United States, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Russia, Japan, Britain, Switzerland plus the European Union.
----
Navy Officers Lose Commands Over Sub
Wed Nov 12, 2000
(AP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=9&u=/ap/20031113/ap_on_re_eu/italy_us_submarine
ROME - Two U.S. Navy officers have been relieved of their commands after a nuclear-powered submarine went aground near the Italian island of Sardinia, the U.S. 6th Fleet said Wednesday.
The USS Hartford, a fast attack submarine, went aground on Oct. 25 off La Maddalena, a tiny island off Sardinia's north coast that hosts a Naval support facility.
Cmdr. Cate Mueller of the U.S. 6th Fleet based in Gaeta, Italy said the grounding caused limited rudder damage and scraped the bottom of the sub, but no one was injured and there was no environmental damage.
Still, the grounding of the nuclear-powered vessel raised concern in Italy, where citizens voted against nuclear power plants in a 1987 referendum.
After an investigation of the grounding, Rear Adm. P. Stephen Stanley on Saturday relieved Capt. Greg Parker, commander submarine squadron 22, and Cmdr. Christopher R. Van Metre, of their commands.
Mueller said the admiral had "lost confidence" in their ability to command.
Another officer and one enlisted crew member were also relieved of their duties and ordered to return to their parent squadron in New London, Conn. Capt. Mike Mckinnon, an interim commanding officer, assumed command of the sub on Saturday. The sub, which has been temporarily repaired, will go to the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Va., for more work.
The six-month deployment of the Hartford, which is based in Groton, Conn., had just begun last month.
-------- depleted uranium
'Health will suffer for generations'
James Meikle, health correspondent
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1083106,00.html
Iraqis will suffer the health consequences of the second Gulf war "for years, maybe generations", says a report warning of an "information black hole" on what is truly happening in the country.
The international health charity Medact said yesterday that up to 9,565 civilians might have been killed between the start of the war in March and October 20, and more were at risk as already weakened public services collapse.
A breakdown in law and order, lack of security and damage to infrastructure threatened further casualties.
Even in 2001, Unicef, the UN's children's organisation, reported that one in eight children under five died and one in four was chronically undernourished.
The Medact report, Continuing Collateral Damage, estimates that 22,000 to 55,000 people on all sides, including in the military, had died in the war and its aftermath. The figure is far lower than the 49,000 to 261,000 the UK-based charity forecast before the war, largely because military resistance collapsed quickly.
But disruption to the country's health was still considerable, says the report's author, Dr Sabya Farooq, pointing to dangers such as leftover explosives and ammunition - Unicef has said this has hurt more than 1,000 children - landmines, andrisks of cancers from toxic dust from weapons with depleted uranium.
"The mental and physical health of already weakened and unhealthy people is being damaged further," the report says. "Shortages of clean water, adequate food and power leads to an increase in diseases that is likely to result in more deaths than those directly caused by the conflict."
It adds: "The absence of reliable data, the failure of occupying forces to provide full information, and the deteriorated security situation which caused most UN staff and many non-government organisations to leave have led to an information black hole of unique proportions."
The report calls for independent academic institutions or the UN to be funded to monitor the war's effects, while an assessment of chemical risks and a rapid clear-up of unexploded ordnance should be organised. A strong health sector, eventually paid for by progressive taxation, must be established quickly, it says.
Iraq's £260bn debt must be cancelled or substantially cut and not left hanging like a millstone around the new democratic government's neck.
Iraqi doctors working in Britain who attended a London seminar to launch the report warned that health professionals still in Iraq were in increasing danger of kidnap, violence and murder.
Salih Ibrahim, a histopathologist at St Peter's hospital in Chertsey, Surrey, said: "It is a living hell. Doctors are regarded as soft targets. Nurses on their way to work have to have a male relative to accompany them and wait to take them home."
-------- europe
Nuclear Waste Back in Germany for Storage
November 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Nuclear-Waste.html
DANNENBERG, Germany (AP) -- A convoy carrying radioactive waste from a French reprocessing plant reached a storage site Wednesday in northern Germany, ending a journey that drew protests in both countries.
Police cleared hundreds of demonstrators from a road to allow the trucks to complete the final stretch of the trip from a fortified rail terminal in the town of Dannenberg to the temporary waste disposal site in Gorleben.
About a dozen protesters gathered behind police barriers to watch the convoy arrive at the site. Anke Lueder-Schuler, 39, said the experience left her feeling helpless.
``Every time we do something, and nothing happens,'' complained Lueder-Schuler, who said she was protesting on behalf of her two young children. ``They want a clean future too.''
A train carrying the waste left a reprocessing plant at La Hague in northwestern France late Sunday and arrived Tuesday in Dannenberg, where the containers were loaded onto trucks.
Some 12,500 police were deployed to protect the shipment in Lower Saxony, where Gorleben is located, state interior minister Uwe Schuenemann said. Authorities briefly detained 171 demonstrators and eight officers were lightly injured in clearing protesters.
The train arrived at Dannenberg some five hours behind schedule, slowed in Germany and France by activists who chained themselves to the rails. On Tuesday, it was halted for 90 minutes outside Dannenberg as police cleared protesters who occupied the line.
Spent fuel from Germany's 19 nuclear power plants is sent to France and Britain for reprocessing under contracts that oblige Germany to take back the waste.
Activists argue the waste containers and the Gorleben site aren't safe. But protests have eased since the German government announced plans to phase out nuclear power and renew a search for a permanent waste site.
-------- iran
Iran's Secret Nuke Research Had Foreign Help
Story by Louis Charbonneau
REUTERS UN:
November 12, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22832/newsDate/12-Nov-2003/story.htm
VIENNA - In decades of clandestine atomic research, Iran received help from sources in four countries with sensitive technology that could be used to develop weapons, the U.N. nuclear watchdog says in a confidential report.
The countries were not identified.
In the report, obtained in full by Reuters, the U.N. said it had not so far found evidence of an atomic weapons program in Iran, but Tehran had dabbled in activity often associated with bombs like plutonium production and uranium enrichment.
The United States has long accused Iran of using a civilian nuclear energy program as a front to build a bomb. Iran denies this and says it was forced to hide some nuclear activities because of decades of sanctions, which it says were illegal.
"Iran acknowledged that, starting in the 1970s, it had had contracts related to laser (uranium) enrichment with foreign sources from four countries," the International Atomic Energy Agency said in its 30-page report.
It did not name the countries, but diplomats have said Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state that has opted out of signing the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was almost certainly one.
Enrichment involves purifying uranium to make it usable as nuclear fuel or in weapons. It can be done with centrifuges that separate the fissile uranium atoms through high-speed spinning, or with lasers.
Diplomats said it was too early to say whether the IAEA Board of Governors would report Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions, for violating its obligations under the NPT, which Tehran signed in 1970.
"This is a very stiffly-worded report that shows clear non-compliance by the Iranians," a Western diplomat said. But he said it was unclear if France, Germany and Britain would want to anger Iran by supporting a verdict of non-compliance when the board meets on November 20 to discuss the Iran report.
On October 21, the European Union's three biggest states agreed with Iran that Tehran would suspend its uranium enrichment program and sign a protocol permitting more intrusive, short-notice IAEA inspections.
Monday, Tehran announced it had fulfilled its end of the deal. Diplomats said France, Germany and Britain were now bound by a tacit agreement not to support a U.S.-backed non-compliance vote.
JURY STILL OUT The IAEA made it clear it was still engaged in an inspection process and the jury was still out on whether Iran had at some point in the past attempted to secretly develop an atomic bomb as Washington alleges. "To date there is no evidence that (Iran's) previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons program," it said.
"However, given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time before the agency is able to conclude that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes."
After months of evasive statements about suspicious findings by U.N. inspectors in Iran, the IAEA Board of Governors on September 12 gave Iran until the end of October to come clean about all its past nuclear activities.
A European diplomat said the results of Iran's disclosure of activities, many commonly connected to bomb-making, were "a very serious matter."
"Iran has admitted that it produced small amounts of low enriched uranium ...and that it had failed to report a large number of conversion, fabrication and irradiation activities involving nuclear material, including the separation of a small amount of plutonium," the report said.
----
U.S. urges 'appropriate action' on Iran's nukes
November 12, 2003
By Tom Carter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031111-113139-4265r.htm
The Bush administration, citing the latest U.N. report on Iran's nuclear program, said yesterday it would prod other nations to take "appropriate action" against Iran's ability to make nuclear weapons.
"Iran's nuclear-weapons program and its now well-documented pattern of nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguard violations are deeply troubling," said a senior State Department official. "The report reinforces our concerns."
"The United States will work with other IAEA board members to ensure that the Nov. 20 board meeting in Vienna takes the appropriate action," the official said on condition of anonymity.
The comments came a week before a crucial session of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is to decide whether to refer Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council.
"Iran has no peaceful need for uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing," the official said.
The IAEA, the United Nations' nuclear monitoring agency, circulated a new report on Monday that concluded Iran had made small amounts of enriched uranium and processed plutonium, in violation of international conventions.
Uranium or plutonium can be used to build atomic bombs.
The report also detailed decades of Iranian subterfuge and secrecy regarding its program. However, the report found no evidence that Iran was trying to build nuclear weapons.
Michael Levi, a physicist and nuclear-weapons expert at the Brookings Institution, said the IAEA finding that there is no evidence of an Iranian weapons program is a "red herring."
"The difference between civilian nuclear material and material for a nuclear-weapons program is largely one of intent. The IAEA is not in the business of assessing intent," he said. "We've pretty much reached the end of the road scientifically, technically. It is now up to the policy-makers to determine intent."
Mr. Levi said that the report reached two conclusions: first, that Iran has enriched uranium and processed plutonium in violation of international accords, and second, Iran has engaged in two decades of "systematic deception and illegal activity."
The United States has been pushing for months to refer the Iran nuclear matter to the U.N. Security Council, where Iran could face sanctions.
Iran is loath to come under the kinds of international sanctions that crippled Iraq, especially since the hard-line Islamic government is facing enormous pressure for democratic reform from its population.
On Oct. 21, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Britain cut a deal in which Iran agreed to suspend its uranium-enrichment program and to sign a protocol allowing intrusive international inspections on short notice.
On Monday, coinciding with the IAEA report, Tehran said it had fulfilled its promises.
If Iran is found in noncompliance by the IAEA board of governors at the Nov. 20 meeting, the problem would be automatically referred to the United Nations.
"We will be consulting intensively in the coming weeks with other members of the board to ensure that the board takes decisive action aimed at ensuring full Iranian compliance with its safeguards obligations," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said last week, in anticipation of the IAEA report.
But some analysts say that the Oct. 21 deal made with the three European nations makes a finding of noncompliance unlikely.
There was no official reaction from Germany, Britain or France to the report yesterday. However, the foreign ministers of the three nations plan to speak in a conference call in the next few days regarding the Iran report, according to a German government official.
•Marc Hujer contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
----
After Report, Iran Acknowledges 'Minor' Breach of Nuclear Pact
By Glenn Kessler and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27994-2003Nov11.html
Iran acknowledged yesterday that it had failed to comply with international nuclear nonproliferation rules, as documented in a harshly critical report by a U.N. agency. But Tehran asserted that the failures were minimal and rejected suggestions that it was developing nuclear weapons.
"The failures that Iran has been reproached for are minor, and are only on the order of the gram or milligram, while in the past some countries had problems with larger quantities of plutonium," Iran's representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, was quoted as saying by state television.
The IAEA's confidential report said Iran manufactured small amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium as part of a nuclear program it operated in secret for 18 years. The report faulted Iran for hiding evidence of its nuclear program from international inspectors and for numerous breaches of its nuclear treaty obligations.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog said it would continue to probe whether Tehran's nuclear program was intended to develop weapons.
While the report said Iran had been misleading the IAEA as recently as last month, Salehi said the "matter is closed" because "these failures correspond to the past [and] corrective measures have been taken." Iran's failures, he said, only concerned "experiments in laboratories which we should have declared to the agency."
Salehi said "a very small quantity of plutonium" resulted as "a secondary effect" of producing medicine for hospitals. The IAEA report said Iran told investigators the experiments were designed to study the nuclear fuel cycle and gain experience in reprocessing.
The State Department and the White House would not comment yesterday on the report -- written for a Nov. 20-21 IAEA board meeting -- because the document had not been officially released. But a State Department spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the report reinforced the Bush administration's concerns about Iran's nuclear program. "Iran's nuclear weapons program and its now well-documented pattern of [nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] safeguards violations are deeply troubling," the spokesman said.
He added that while Iran satisfied lingering questions, "we believe no country should be engaged in nuclear cooperation with Iran." But Russian officials said yesterday that Iran's recent cooperation with international inspectors -- and its willingness to allow unannounced inspections -- should demonstrate that Russia's construction of a nuclear power plant near the Iranian town of Bushehr did not pose a danger.
Indeed, experts said, Iran's willingness to signal cooperation with the IAEA might undercut U.S. efforts to maintain pressure on Iran. Washington could, for example, have the IAEA refer Iran's breaches of the non-proliferation treaty to the U.N. Security Council.
Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, said Iran now faced a "fundamental choice" that would decide not only its nuclear future but its place in the world.
"Which path Iran chooses depends to a great degree on how the international community behaves," said Einhorn, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It is the job of the United States, Russia and the Europeans to remain united and to make it clear that going down the nuclear path is not the right path."
The Iranian opposition group that exposed Iran's uranium program at Natanz a year ago contends that Iran still has not told the full truth. Alireza Jafarzadeh, a former spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an organization that was declared a terrorist group by the Bush administration over the summer, said the Iranian military remained heavily involved in directing the country's nuclear scientists, in contrast with Iran's assurances that the program is strictly peaceful.
----
Iran's Leader Says U.N. Arms Report Is Positive
November 12, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Shrugging off a U.N. nuclear report's criticism of his country, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami asserted Wednesday that the report dispelled suspicions Tehran was seeking atomic arms.
The International Atomic Energy Agency report said it found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. But the agency also suggested it could not rule out such ambitions until it sifted through new information only recently made available by the Iranians after nearly two decades of cover-ups.
The document, released Monday, listed numerous cases of covert nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment and the production of small amount of plutonium that effectively put Iran in violation of part of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
But it also praised Iran for its recent ``active cooperation and openness'' -- language that may sway the IAEA board of directors in Iran's favor. The United States had been lobbying for the board, which meets on Nov. 20 in Vienna, to formally declare Iran in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty -- a move that could lead to sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council.
Referring to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, Khatami said after a Cabinet meeting that ``the most positive point in Mr. ElBaradei's report is that it has been announced there is nothing to suggest that the Islamic Republic of Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.''
``This proves our claim and removes the possibility for some powers to misuse the situation against us,'' Khatami said, apparently staking out what would be Iran's argument at the IAEA board meeting next week.
Khatami acknowledged Iran had shortcomings, but he denied these constituted a violation of the treaty.
``Naturally, over 20 years of nuclear activity, some failures did occur. We do not deny this. But it does not mean we violated or transgressed the regulations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which we are committed,'' Khatami said.
Despite the revelations of plutonium production and other previously unpublished covert activities, Khatami suggested the United States and its allies would have little to seize upon in attempts to press the board to declare Iran in breach of the Nonproliferation Treaty.
``Whatever ElBaradei said about Iran's failures, it belongs to the past,'' the president told reporters. ``He (ElBaradei) had already said those things in his previous report. ... There was no need for him to elaborate on that.
``For us, (the failures) are trumped-up statements without a strong legal and technical justification.''
Khatami said he was optimistic about the way the IAEA board would judge the report.
``We will wait for the Nov. 20 meeting of the IAEA, and I'm sure that if they treat us on the basis of legal and technical criteria, there will be no problem.''
In London on Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Britain and the United States had ``some differences of emphasis'' on Iran's nuclear record.
``We should be reacting calmly to the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency,'' Straw told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. He added that while Iran had concealed nuclear activities in the past, the country had recently cooperated substantially.
Straw and the foreign ministers of France and Germany visited Tehran last month and secured Iran's agreement to suspend uranium enrichment and grant unrestricted access to IAEA inspectors.
--------
Arms Experts Wary, But Iran Stresses Atomic Peace
November 12, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Arms experts said on Wednesday a U.N. nuclear watchdog report on Iran supported U.S. claims Tehran had a secret atomic weapons program, but President Mohammad Khatami insisted its nuclear policy was purely peaceful.
The former U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, said there was no direct evidence Iran was engaged in a civilian energy program to make a nuclear bomb.
But in Washington, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Iran's nuclear program could reach ``the point of no return'' within a year unless there was strong international pressure to stop it.
The report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) criticized Iran's nuclear policy, but said there was no proof it had a weapons program. The agency said it needed more time to establish whether its research was for peaceful purposes, as Iran said it was.
The confidential report, circulated on Monday, said Iran had had a centrifuge uranium enrichment program for 18 years and a high-tech laser enrichment program for 12 years, both of which it had hidden from the United Nations.
It also said Iran admitted producing small amounts of plutonium, useable in a bomb and with virtually no civilian uses, and had conducted secret tests of its enrichment centrifuges using nuclear material.
In Tehran, Khatami said Tehran's nuclear plans were purely peaceful. ``It's not important what machinery we have, it's important that we are not pursuing nuclear weapons,'' he said.
He was optimistic Iran would avoid being reported to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions despite the IAEA report, if its case was studied technically and legally, rather than in political terms.
SOME EXPERTS BACK U.S. CLAIM
But some arms experts said the report backed U.S. claims of a secret nuclear weapons program.
Diplomats have said the IAEA findings proved Iran, at the very least, developed the know-how to build nuclear weapons.
``The report is a stunning revelation of how far a country can get in making The Bomb, while pretending to comply with international inspections,'' said Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a Washington-based think-tank. ``This is a classic case of a bomb in the basement.''
``Iran has secretly enriched uranium, made plutonium, and hidden the evidence of it from the world,'' he told Reuters. ``There's only one reason why anybody would do that -- because they want to make the bomb.''
``The Iranians are...following the textbook written by the late Shah'' -- who wanted the option of producing nuclear weapons -- Harald Mueller of Germany's Frankfurt Peace Research Institute told Reuters.
In a bid to head off international concern, Iran has in recent days submitted a comprehensive report to the IAEA on its past nuclear activity, agreed to allow snap U.N. inspections of its nuclear sites and suspended uranium enrichment.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Blix, who now heads a new Swedish-backed international commission on weapons of mass destruction, said Iran's civilian reactors were not themselves a worry and it was uncertain whether Tehran wanted to build a nuclear bomb.
``I haven't any evidence of that,'' he told Reuters in an interview at his Stockholm home. ``I don't think these two reactors or a civilian nuclear program are a danger per se.''
SIMILAR PROGRAMS IN OTHER COUNTRIES
He said many countries had similar programs, but Iran still needed to reassure the world it was not moving toward a weapon.
When it comes to reporting Iran to the Security Council for sanctions, Washington has few allies on the IAEA board, diplomats said, with most members supporting France, Germany and Britain, who would rather encourage cooperation with the U.N. watchdog than punish past failures.
``We should be reacting calmly to the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency,'' British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC Radio. ``This report, which certainly is very worrying in terms of what it discloses, also shows a pretty high level of cooperation,'' he said.
Israel's Defense Minister Mofaz, speaking at the Washington Institute, did not elaborate when he said Iran's nuclear program could reach the point of no return within a year.
But an Israeli official said he took the minister to mean that in one year Iran would no longer need any foreign assistance in putting together a nuclear weapon.
Israel, itself thought to have up to 300 nuclear warheads, strongly opposes any Iranian effort to make a nuclear bomb.
-------- japan
Is nuclear power cheaper?
The Asahi Shimbun,
IHT
November 12,2003
http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/TKY200311120174.html
The estimated price tag for storing, reprocessing and disposing of spent fuel and other waste from nuclear power generation will push the total cost of producing such power to around the same as that for generating power using coal or natural gas, according to industry sources.
The ``back-end'' costs of nuclear power generation-that is storing, reprocessing and disposing of radioactive spent fuel and other waste-will total almost 19 trillion yen, according to the electricity industry's first estimate.
This would, the sources say, push the price tag for generating nuclear power to level with the 6.4-yen-per-1-kilowatt-hour cost of generating power using natural gas and the 6.5-yen-per-1-kilowatt-hour cost of producing power using coal.
That could cause controversy since government and electricity industry officials have promoted nuclear power generation as an ``inexpensive'' source of energy.
The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan reported its first findings on the costs Tuesday to a panel of the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy's electricity industry subcommittee. The committee advises the minister of economy, trade and industry.
The estimates will serve as a basis for discussion on what burden of the ``back-end'' costs will be shouldered by consumers and others.
The total ``back-end'' costs were estimated at 18.9 trillion yen on the assumption a reprocessing plant currently under construction in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, will operate for 40 years from 2006.
The estimate covers dismantling and disposal of facilities related to the plant as well as storage, reprocessing and disposal of spent fuel and other waste incurred.
Operation costs for the reprocessing plant, for example, are estimated at 9.4 trillion yen, according to the federation. Burying high-level nuclear waste will cost a further 2.5 trillion yen, while storing spent nuclear fuel comes with a 1.9-trillion-yen price tag.
The total 18.9 trillion yen translates into an extra 1.53 yen per 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by the nation's 52 nuclear reactors.
----
The meaning of Japan's election
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003
From: kbnobu <kbnobu@mub.biglobe.ne.jp>
The general election was over. I guess you have already heard the result. The media (even BBC) reports that the LDP's loss and the Democratic Party of Japan's gain mean something good to the Japanese people. But as a matter of fact, it isn't. We are worrying about the future of Japan.
The DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) has promised to change the Japanese Constitution in their election platform. It's also promised to raise the rate of consumption tax. Mr. Kan, the leader of the DPJ, asked business circles to give his party money so that the DPJ can work more for them (to reduce corporate tax, etc).
Leaders of the business circles, Japan Federation of Economic Organizations etc, have been deeply concerned about which political party they should rely on after the LDP. They know that the LDP's government (even Koizumi) won't last long because it is getting unpopular among Japanese people. So they want to find a new political party which will work for them even when the LDP (and Komeito Party) fails to be a majority force in the Parliament.... Finally they picked up the Democratic Party of Japan as one of the future parties for them.
Before the election, Mr. Ozawa, head of the Liberal Party, was called to meet with the leader of business circles and was "asked to hold the reins of the DPJ" so that the DPJ could be truly a party for business people. Later, as Mr. Ozawa wrote in a magazine proudly, the Liberal Party and the DPJ merged into a new party "for good."
Since then the DPJ has completely changed. It is now competing with LDP how to achieve policies for business circles (it also means policies for the US), such as a change of the Constitution....
We tried hard to let it known to the public. The more they knew this, the more support we could get. But the problem was the time. It was too short to talk to everybody. All the media ignored us. And now the election is over. We have to work harder to defend the Constitution. We will.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Smithsonian Rejects Pleas on Labeling of Enola Gay
November 12, 2003
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/arts/design/12ENOL.html
The National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution has rejected a petition seeking revision of the labeling of its exhibition of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, in 1945.
The petition from scholars, writers and others argued that a new display of the plane should be used to "stimulate a national discussion of U.S. nuclear history and current policy."
The label describing the Enola Gay at the new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, adjacent to Washington Dulles International Airport, acknowledges that it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, describes the aircraft as "the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II," explains the role of the B-29 and furnishes statistics about it. The museum says the label conforms to those of other aircraft in the center, which is to open to the public on Dec. 15.
In a statement, the Smithsonian said, "The National Air and Space Museum tells the story of the development of flight and chronicles the history of the technologies that have made flight possible."
Gen. John R. Dailey, the director of the museum, said, "To be accurate, fair and balanced, inclusion of casualty figures would require an overview of all casualties associated with the conflict, which would not be practical in this exhibit."
Peter J. Kuznick, a professor of history at American University and an organizer of the petition, said, "I'm disappointed that the Smithsonian is defining its mandate so narrowly and missing a golden opportunity to educate the American people about one of the most important moments in our history and its ongoing ramifications for the world today."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
DOE needs more money for Test Site compensation claims
By Suzanne Stuglinski
LAS VEGAS SUN
November 12, 2003
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2003/nov/12/515849571.html
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department needs at least $33 million more next year than it originally requested to process former Nevada Test Site and other workers compensation claims, officials told Congress today. This would put the program at $49 million.
This would be in addition to the $9.7 million added to the program in October and $16 million already approved by Congress for 2004.
The money would not come from an additional request to Congress, since the appropriations process is winding down for the year. Department spokesman Joe Davis said it will work with lawmakers to figure out how to "reprogram" funds from other Energy Department accounts.
Davis said the department is still working on determining which accounts would lose money to make up the $33 million.
The Energy Department created the program in 2002 to help its former workers now ill from various sicknesses due to their work at different facilities. Previous estimates were that 3,000 claims and $360 million would be paid through the program, but instead 70,000 applications have been filed and costs have exceeded $1 billion, according to the department.
"The original estimates on the number of claims and the expectations it set for handling these cases was inaccurate," said Energy Undersecretary Robert Card, who now supervises the program. "To thoroughly and comprehensively process these claims, as we assumed Congress intended, we must receive the support of Congress and the necessary funding."
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham raised the program to Card's level "to ensure the fastest possible processing ofapplications for assistance," he said.
The request comes just after House and Senate negotiators decided earlier this month to allow the department to continue assisting workers in filing claims with state worker compensation programs.
There had been a proposal to shift the responsibility to the Labor Department, which still controls the $150,000 lump sum program for former workers now ill from exposure to radiation, beryllium or other sicknesses specified in the law.
The Labor Department has received $346 million since 2001 to runs it share of the program while the Energy Department has received $74 million in the same time frame, although it has helped process 33,000 claims with Labor.
Energy Department officials said today that their department met an goal of processing more than 100 worker claims per week. Claims data updated Nov. 7, shows 106 applications were completed and prepared for review by the independent physician panel.
According to the department's website, there are 439 cases from the Nevada Test Site, and increase from the 402 claims identified in data updated Oct. 3.
There is also one case from the Project Shoal Nuclear Explosion Site and three from the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project site. The data does not specify the status of these cases.
For Nevada residents, 385 applications have been filed.
Overall, 20,851 applications have been received and 1,270 have been completed. About 14,500 cases still need to be development. Others have dropped out or were deemed ineligible.
Under the Labor Department's program 1,706 claims have been filed by Nevada residents. Of these, 145 claims have been paid totaling just under $11 million as of Oct. 31.
For former Nevada Test Site workers, 2,118 claims have been filed and 95 paid as of Oct. 30, an increase from the 2,081 claims and $11.5 million paid on 89 claims through Sept. 29.
Card, and seven other witnesses, are scheduled to testify at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the worker compensation program Friday.
The House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections held a hearing on the Labor Department's role in the program last month.
-------- us politics
Bush's Middle Eastern Quagmire and Apocalypse Future
12-11-2003
Mark Dankof
Al Bawaba
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=263220&lang=e&dir=news
One trusts that an American electorate mesmerized by Reality TV and the NFL/NBA regular season schedules will stop long enough to contemplate the apocalyptic implications of Gordon Thomas's October 27th exclusive for the American Free Press: that George Bush's neo-conservative regime has secretly flown 100 Harpoon cruise missiles tipped with nuclear warheads to the joint American-UK military base stationed on the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. Thomas informs us that it is now known where 72 of these Harpoons have been subsequently assigned--to three Israeli Dolphin-class submarines (24 apiece) that have subsequently left Diego for the Gulf of Oman. The purpose? To target Iranian nuclear facilities well within the range of the Dolphins and their collective nuclear-tipped payload supplied by the United States. Most ominously, these instruments of mass death and destruction are under the command-and-launch decision making authority of one Ariel Sharon, whose moral, political, and military mindset is best revealed by his pivotal role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in southern Lebanon in1982 , along with occupational policies on the West Bank and Gaza that have recently included the deliberate IDF bulldozing to death of Olympia, Washington's Rachel Corrie, an unarmed peace activist protesting Palestinian house demolitions sanctioned by the Sharon government.
It gets worse. The Thomas story has subsequently been confirmed by a senior aide to Bush National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice for both the Los Angeles Times and London's Guardian newspaper.
Where, pray tell, is the American media and Congress in confronting George Bush with the absolutely incomprehensible decision to supply any government--much less the Sharon regime in Tel Aviv--with American nuclear weaponry and the accompanying authority to decide if, when, and against whom the Apocalpyse is to be unleashed? Who are the powers in his Administration who have set this obviously reckless and derailing course of action in motion? May we conclude that they are largely the same advisors--with direct connections to the Likud regime in Israel--who urged the President to involve American men and women in an ill-conceived preemptive strike against Iraq, where the fraudulent Administration claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction in that country are made all the more maddening by the obvious, enveloping quicksand of death, debt, and international ill-will increasing exponentially by the day? And where are the medallioned luminaries of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in this nightmare--scheduling this week's tee times at the Congressional Country Club?
Pat Buchanan correctly observes that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Wurmser and Company have now placed themselves, and their countrymen, in mortal peril with the neo-conservative strategy on preemptive military action against Iraq and the subsequent occupation. As Mr. Buchanan analyzes things, the Project for the New American Century crowd has only three options in the political and military morass created since March. The first is to withdraw from Iraq completely, an option made problematic by the subsequent power vacuum, civil war, and outside interventionism that would surely follow. A second involves continuing the present course of action by priming the pump of American lives and dollars in the elusive hope that a responsible government and economic infrastructure for the Iraqi people can emerge from the present chaos and violence. Buchanan notes here that the elusiveness of the goal is matched by the thinning of the patience and political will of the American electorate for Mr. Bush's version of the War on Terrorism and For World Democracy. The third is the most ominous of all--a deliberate escalation of American military interventionism in the Middle East by preemptive attacks against Syria and Iran, with all of the attendant risks.
The Thomas report on Harpoons for the American Free Press must be seen as the most significant sign yet that it is the third option which has been selected in the secret and dark inner counsels of the Bush national security team. The Boys of Empire and Sharon lead us to Apocalypse Future.
Mark Dankof is a correspondent for Uncensored News and Views. A3 rd party candidate for the U. S. Senate in Delaware in2000 , he is an ordained Lutheran pastor and post-graduate student in systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. His web site is entitled Mark Dankof's America at www.MarkDankof.com
----
Financier Soros puts millions into ousting Bush
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1083165,00.html
George Soros, one of the world's wealthiest financiers and philanthropists, has declared that getting George Bush out of the White House has become the "central focus" of his life, and he has put more than $15m (£9m) of his own money where his mouth is. Mr Soros argues that the Bush White House is guided by a "supremacist ideology" that is leading it to abuse US power in its dealings with the rest of the world, and creating a state of permanent warfare.
He has mounted a single-minded campaign involving a book, magazine and newspaper articles as well as multi-million dollar donations to liberal groups, all aimed at defeating President Bush in the November 2004 elections, a contest he describes as "a matter of life and death".
The Hungarian emigre and finance genius has given nearly $5bn to oppose dictators in Africa, Asia and the former Soviet bloc, but now he is directing his energies at the elected leader of his adopted country.
"It is the central focus of my life," he told the Washington Post in an interview published yesterday, after announcing a donation of $5m to a liberal activist organisation called MoveOn.org. The gift brings the total amount in donations to groups dedicated to Mr Bush's removal to $15.5m.
Other pledges of cash have gone to America Coming Together (ACT), an anti-Bush group that proposes to mobilise voters against the president in 17 battleground states. Mr Soros and a friend, Peter Lewis, the chairman of a car insurance company, promised $10m.
Mr Soros has also helped to bankroll a new liberal think-tank, the Centre for American Progress, to be headed by Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, John Podesta, which will aim to counter the rising influence of neo-conservative institutions in Washington.
The 74-year-old investor, who made a fortune betting against the pound in the late 80s and against the dollar this year, is to lay out the reasons for his detestation of the Bush administration in a book to be published in January, titled The Bubble of American Supremacy, a polemic which he has half-jokingly dubbed the 'Soros Doctrine'.
In the book, he will argue that the US is doing itself immeasurable harm by its heavy-handed role in the world. "The dominant position the United States occupies in the world is the element of reality that is being distorted," he writes, according to an excerpt to be published in next month's Atlantic Monthly magazine. "The proposition that the United States will be better off if it uses its position to impose its values and interests everywhere is the misconception. It is exactly by not abusing its power that America attained its current position."
The Bush administration's "war on terrorism" cannot be won, he argues, but is instead ushering in "a permanent state of war". He uses the emotive terms like "supremacist ideology" deliberately, saying that some of the rhetoric coming from the White House reminds him of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
"When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans," he said in yesterday's interview. "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitised me."
His remarks have infuriated the Republican party, which has accused him of promoting his interests with the steady flow of money to like-minded institutions, and avoiding federal limits on donations to political parties - an allegation which Democrats consistently level at big business for its links with the Republicans.
"George Soros has purchased the Democratic party," said Christine Iverson, a Republican national committee spokeswoman.
----
Congress Is Nearing Approval of Record Pentagon Spending
November 12, 2003
By DAVID FIRESTONE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/politics/12DEFE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - After agreeing to drop a provision requiring many military contracts to go to American companies, Congress is on the verge of passing a record authorization bill to let the Pentagon spend more than $400 billion for the next year.
The bill, approved by the House last week and scheduled to be passed by the Senate as early as Wednesday, resolves a host of issues that have divided Republicans on military-related committees, like a multibillion-dollar lease of tanker jets from Boeing and a program to pay other countries to destroy chemical and nuclear weapons.
A main issue was the insistence of House Republicans that many costly contracts go primarily to American suppliers. The Bush administration and several American allies strongly opposed that provision, which would have affected many purchases for military operations in Iraq. Senate Republicans succeeded in removing it in a conference committee. The provision now encourages contractors to use American-made equipment, but does not require it.
"It's a balanced compromise which shows our support for a strong U.S. industrial base without undermining our important defense-cooperation relationships with our allies," said Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Warner fought to preserve the administration's ability to contract with foreign companies.
The Senate also restored the full $451 million that the administration requested for a program to destroy nuclear and chemical weapons abroad, for the first time extending the program beyond the countries of the former Soviet Union. The House had proposed cutting $29 million from the chemical weapons section.
Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is an original sponsor of the program, said it began in 1991 to reduce unconventional weapons in the Soviet Union, but had never extended beyond those areas.
"The president has sought the authority to prevent the intersection of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Lugar said, citing the $50 million in the bill that could be used to help any foreign government destroy weapons at Washington's discretion. "In trying to fight a worldwide battle against terrorism, that authority is obviously needed."
The bill includes a 4.1 percent average pay increase for all uniformed military personnel. But the bill has drawn criticism from civilian employees for a provision that would let officials bypass traditional Civil Service rules in granting increases and promotions in favor of a performance-based system. Moderate Republicans who have traditionally fought such changes agreed to the administration's demand after winning provisions for appeals through unions, similar to accords struck in forming the Homeland Security Department.
----
Government Outgrows Cap Set by President
Discretionary Spending Up 12.5% in Fiscal '03
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28252-2003Nov11.html
Confounding President Bush's pledges to rein in government growth, federal discretionary spending expanded by 12.5 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, capping a two-year bulge that saw the government grow by more than 27 percent, according to preliminary spending figures from congressional budget panels.
The sudden rise in spending subject to Congress's annual discretion stands in marked contrast to the 1990s, when such discretionary spending rose an average of 2.4 percent a year. Not since 1980 and 1981 has federal spending risen at a similar clip. Before those two years, spending increases of this magnitude occurred at the height of the Vietnam War, 1966 to 1968.
The preliminary spending figures for 2003 also raise questions about the government's long-term fiscal health. Bush administration officials have said fiscal restraint and "pro-growth" tax cuts should put the government on a path to a balanced budget. Bush has demanded that spending that is subject to Congress's annual discretion be capped at 4 percent.
But the Republican-led Congress has not obliged. The federal government spent nearly $826 billion in fiscal 2003, an increase of $91.5 billion over 2002, said G. William Hoagland, a senior budget and economic aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Military spending shot up nearly 17 percent, to $407.3 billion, but nonmilitary discretionary spending also far outpaced Bush's limit, rising 8.7 percent, to $418.6 billion.
Much of the increase was driven by war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as homeland security spending after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But spending has risen on domestic programs such as transportation and agriculture, as well. Total federal spending -- including non-discretionary entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- reached $2.16 trillion in 2003, a 7.3 percent boost, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
White House officials have said the president's 4 percent annual growth cap was never supposed to curtail "one-time" spending requests, such as natural disaster aid or wars. But even if such emergency spending measures are removed, spending jumped last year by 7.9 percent, Hoagland said.
"Getting growth down to 4 percent? We're still not there, not by any stretch of the imagination," he said.
Administration officials say spending is being brought under control. White House spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo said the president cut spending growth, excluding the Pentagon and homeland security, to 6 percent in 2002 and 5 percent in 2003, and has proposed to hold all discretionary spending to 4 percent growth this year.
"The president has said that he would spend what's necessary to win the war on terrorism and protect Americans at home," she said, "but outside these items, he has put a serious brake on other spending, which is key to halving these deficits over five years."
Even some Republicans have trouble squaring such comments with the evidence. "It's still more than it ought to be," Hazen Marshall, Senate Budget Committee staff director, said of spending that excludes the military and homeland security.
Official spending figures for fiscal 2003 will not be released until January, when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office unveils its next 10-year federal deficit forecast. But the latest figures track closely with the CBO estimates released in August.
"I don't expect the official numbers to be any different than those, or not much different," Marshall said.
Regardless of the final numbers, there can be little doubt that government growth has been accelerating, said Richard Kogan, a federal budget analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And although Congress ultimately controls the purse strings, Bush is not immune from criticism, said Rudolph G. Penner, a Republican and former CBO director.
"The most interesting thing is Bush has not vetoed anything, let alone a spending program," Penner said. "One wonders how serious the White House is about holding the line."
Stan Collender, a federal budget analyst at Fleishman-Hillard Inc., said: "This is an administration that cannot possibly take up the mantle of fiscal conservatism. It's probably the least fiscally conservative in history."
Penner said the lapse in spending restraint occurred in two stages. First came large, projected budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration. Discretionary spending rose 0.9 percent in 1998, then 3.6 percent in 1999 and 7.5 percent in 2000. The projected surpluses have disappeared into a flood of red ink, but the 2001 terrorist attacks, coupled with a recession that year, eliminated any sense of restraint beyond rhetoric, Penner said.
"After September 11, it was 'We have to do anything we can to pull ourselves out of recession and protect ourselves,' " he said, adding that the surge in deficits and spending have so far had few political ramifications. "I don't remember a time when there's been so little commentary on it, and I can't really explain it."
Marshall said the surge in military spending was inevitable, once the nation mobilized for war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. The nonmilitary discretionary spending increases have been driven by increases in homeland security spending, he said.
But even after factoring those out, some Republicans say spending is rising too quickly. Marshall noted that after Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 elections, discretionary spending actually fell, by 1.6 percent between 1994 and 1996.
Budget experts said taxpayers should not anticipate a return to austerity anytime soon. The military bill that passed Congress yesterday would mandate $40 billion in additional spending over the next decade, Marshall said. Nearly half of that would be for veterans' benefits, but $18 billion would finance a controversial program to buy and lease military tanker planes from Boeing Co.
-------- MILITARY
The Crime Called World War I
by John V. Denson,
November 12, 2003
ewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson3.html
The Pity of War Niall Ferguson Basic Books • 1999 • 563 pages
Niall Ferguson is a history professor who taught at Cambridge and is now a tenured Oxford don. Those are the credentials of an establishment, or "court," historian, whose main purpose is to protect the patriotic and political myths of his government. Professor Ferguson, however, has written an iconoclastic attack on one of the most venerable patriotic myths of the British, namely that the First World War was a great and necessary war in which the British performed the noble act of intervening to protect Belgian neutrality, French freedom, and the empires of both the French and British from the military aggression of the hated Hun. Politicians like Lloyd George and Churchill argued that the war was not only necessary, but inevitable.
Ferguson asks and answers ten specific questions about the First World War, one of the most important being whether the war, with its total of more than nine million casualties, was worth it. Not only does he answer in the negative, but concludes that the world war was not necessary or inevitable, but was instead the result of grossly erroneous decisions of British political leaders based on an improper perception of the "threat" to the British Empire posed by Germany. Ferguson regards it as "nothing less than the greatest error in modern history."
He goes further and puts most of the blame on the British because it was the British government that ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war. He argues that the British had no legal obligation to protect Belgium or France and that the German naval build-up did not really menace the British.
British political leaders, Ferguson maintains, should have realized that the Germans were mostly fearful of being surrounded by the growing Russian industrial and military might, as well as the large French army. He argues further that the Kaiser would have honored his pledge to London, offered on the eve of the war, to guarantee French and Belgian territorial integrity in exchange for Britain's neutrality.
Ferguson concludes that "Britain's decision to intervene was the result of secret planning by her generals and diplomats, which dated back to 1905" and was based on a misreading of German intentions, "which were imagined to be Napoleonic in scale." Political calculations also played their part in bringing on war. Ferguson notes that Foreign Minister Edward Grey provided the leadership that put Britain on the bellicose path. Although a majority of the other ministers were hesitant, "In the end they agreed to support Grey, partly for fear of being turned out of office and letting in the Tories."
The First World War continues to disturb the British psyche today, much as the Civil War still haunts Americans. British casualties in the war numbered 723,000 - more than twice the number suffered in World War II. The author writes that "The First World War remains the worst thing the people of my country have ever had to endure."
One of the most important costs of the war, which was prolonged by British and American participation, was the destruction of the Russian government. Ferguson contends that in the absence of British intervention, the most likely result would have been a quick German victory with some territorial concessions in the east, but no Bolshevik Revolution. There would have been no Lenin - and no Hitler either. "It was ultimately because of the war that both men were able to rise to establish barbaric despotisms which perpetrated still more mass murder."
Had the British stayed on the sidelines, Ferguson argues, their empire would still be strong and viable; instead, their participation and victory "effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world." He believes that the British could have easily coexisted with Germany, with which it had good relations before the war. But the British victory came at a price "far in excess of their gains" and "undid the first golden age of economic 'globalization.'"
World War I also led to a great loss of individual liberty. "Wartime Britain . . . became by stages a kind of police state," Ferguson writes. Of course, liberty is always a casualty of war and the author compares the British situation with the draconian measures imposed in America by President Wilson. The suppression of free speech in America "made a mockery of the Allied powers' claim to be fighting for freedom."
While the book is addressed mainly to a British audience, it is relevant to Americans who tragically followed the British into both world wars at a tremendous cost in freedom as a result of the centralization of power in the leviathan government in Washington, D.C. There are many valuable lessons to be learned from this timely and important book.
-------- biological weapons
U.S. Fails to Certify Many Labs That Use Pathogens
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27978-2003Nov11.html
The federal government has failed to perform required security reviews on hundreds of U.S. laboratories and thousands of scientists researching biological pathogens such as anthrax spores and plague bacteria, according to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who helped pass a 2002 law mandating the probes.
In a letter last week to three Cabinet secretaries, Lieberman, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said that "it appears that the administration has not acted forcefully and expeditiously" to carry out provisions in the 2002 law that required the background and security investigations to be finished by today.
Agencies given the job of carrying out 2002's Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act had set today as the deadline by which the nation's hundreds of laboratories needed to have been certified to do research using biological materials that U.S. officials fear could be diverted by terrorists.
Last month, as the deadline approached and almost no labs or employees had been certified as being in compliance, leading scientific groups representing microbiologists and university labs wrote administration officials warning of possible disruptions in their work, or even shutdowns, unless the government extended the deadlines.
Last week, U.S. officials issued "provisional" certifications allowing those labs that had filed proper paperwork to continue operating, even though they had not been approved under the law.
As of last week, U.S. agencies had not certified any laboratories or researchers as being fully in compliance with the law, and 5,400 of 9,000 of the more limited security reviews of scientists had been completed, Lieberman's letter said.
He also wrote that it appears the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture, which are supposed to oversee separate groups of labs under the act, have not assigned adequate staff to perform the checks. The same goes for the FBI, Lieberman staff members said.
An administration official said the delays resulted in part because so many agencies are involved.
Officials initially had estimated 1,653 labs and 20,000 researchers would register as doing this type of research, meaning they needed certification. But with many scientists abandoning the field because of onerous security rules after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, only 513 labs and 9,000 individuals have applied for approval.
-------- business
BAE-Boeing sign 767 manufacturing deal
November 13, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031112-091138-4372r.htm
LONDON, Nov. 12 -- The Boeing Co. and Britain's BAE Systems have reportedly signed an agreement giving BAE more than $670 million of work on all future 767 manufacturing.
The Financial Times (London) said Wednesday the agreement is contingent on Britain's Royal Air Force selecting the aircraft for a new air-to-air refueling fleet.
The total value of the deal could be as much as $3 billion for Britain's BAE if the U.S. Air Force decides to replace all its ageing tankers with 767s.
The Financial Times said the Boeing-BAE consortium is locked in a bitter battle with the European Airbus consortium over the $22 billion RAF contract, which is to be awarded next month and will be the largest private financing initiative deal in the British defense ministry's history.
The agreement would give BAE manufacturing responsibility for the leading edges of all new wings for future 767s built by Boeing, both for military and commercial customers.
-------- iraq
War killed 55,000 Iraqi civilians
Wednesday November 12, 2003
Indymedia
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2003/11/419707.php
The invasion, war and occupation of Iraq has cost up to 55,000 civilian lives, according to a shocking new report published by a UK-based charity .
Now the medical charity is lobbying the American and British governments to focus urgently on the healthcare needs of the Iraqi population, following the invasion of the country.
Medact's report, highlighting the devastating impact of war on the Iraqi population, reveals that between 22,000 and 55,000 Iraqi civilians died during the bombing of the country.
The report titled, Continuing Collateral Damage: the Health and Environmental costs of War on Iraq, says the American and British occupiers are obliged under international law to ensure the healthcare needs of the population are met.
Findings
One of the co-authors of the report, Dr Sabya Faruq, told Aljazeera.net that the situation across Iraq was desperate.
''There has been a reported increase in maternal mortality rates, acute malnutrition has almost doubled from 4% to 8% in the last year and there has been an increase in water-borne disease and vaccine-preventable diseases.''
Iraq has a population of 25 million people, half of whom are under the age of 18. Children are particularly vulnerable in post-war Iraq, with one in four not receiving immunisation against measles since Saddam Hussein was removed from power.
The charity says that mines and unexploded bombs are continuing to kill and maim. The effects of chemicals, such as depleted uranium used by invading forces, on civilians could take decades to manifest.
Pre-Conflict
Dr Faruq has told Aljazeera.net that before the recent invasion of Iraq, the country had a poor record on healthcare, but the situation now is at breaking point.
In 1990, the UN development index, which ranks countries in terms of provisions of healthcare, education and life expectancy rates, placed Iraq 50th out of 130 countries. By 2003 and before the recent invasion of the country, Iraq had dropped to 126th out of 174 countries.
''Iraq was never a third world country, it had a fairly developed infrastructure and healthcare system that was able to deliver to the population. Now, the escalating violence in post-war Iraq is creating huge problems.
''The effects of the war will impact on the healthcare of future generations and, with the way things stand, the situation will get worse.''
Support
Medact is also calling for better support for Iraqi doctors and healthcare workers who are working under increasingly difficult conditions ''This report hasn't even touched on the trauma that doctors in Iraq have been and are suffering. They are working on the frontline and are subjected to violence themselves on an almost daily basis.''
Dr Faruq says that it is important for doctors and development workers to speak up about what is really happening in Iraq.
''Healthcare workers have a duty to speak out and let the outside world know about what's happening in Iraq. We have to speak up to make sure that civilians aren't suffering any more than they already are.''
The charity is calling on the UN to send peacekeepers to Iraq so that humanitarian and reconstruction work can begin.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3FF27CFC-764F-441B-A0D6-FB5B3BAF0704.htm
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Welcome to Iraq
[wildfirejo]
November 8, 2003
I'm safely in Baghdad. As if in welcome a bright orange sun was just easing over the horizon as I crossed the much slimmed-down border from Jordan. No more the endless glasses of sugary tea in the "VIP lounge", a riot of tinsel and paper chains with a giant Saddam gazing benevolently across the room at the TV watching Caspar the Friendly Ghost or some other cartoon. No more the 10 Euro bribe not to search your luggage too carefully, because they only opened the boot of the car, glanced in and closed it when there were no obvious rocket launchers or assault rifles.
It's too soon to tell you all that's changed here. Superficially little is different. The streets are not teeming with troops. Now and then you pass a few carriers of them. Those are the Poles, a companion remarked. Apparently you can tell the difference. People are still selling clothes, food and tools on the streets. Kids selling petrol at the roadside are a new sight, standing around a metal can with a funnel waiting for customers, who are many, presumably avoiding the immense queues at petrol stations which began shortly before the war and have continued.
The roads are still crowded with cars. Roads have been closed off around government buildings, hotels, all manner of things, so the roads left open are ever more tightly packed. No one bothers about traffic lights anymore because there is no enforcement and no penalty. Wasef shook his head in despair at the other drivers and explained: before the war a lot of people couldn't afford cars. Now they have money because they looted the palaces and government buildings and they've bought cars and they think they're big shots and so they drive like shit.
He pointed out a cubicle on the roadside - one of many white and blue concrete sentry boxes for the traffic cops to stand in when not directing traffic. There was a huge jam a few days ago and everyone assumed it was another roadblock which, from time to time, the troops put up. The tanks, though, stopped a little distance away from the cubicle which, they said, was booby trapped.
Why would anyone booby trap a traffic cop cubicle, he wanted to know. It wasn't going to cause the troops any trouble. It wasn't even a very busy street, let alone an important one. And how was it that after the "booby trap" was discovered there was time to call the troops and they had time to arrive, through all the morning traffic in Baghdad, before it went off? But the next day in all the newspapers there were pictures and accounts of the heroic American soldiers who defused the bomb. It was all staged, he concluded, as propaganda.
It's still cheap to get a taxi to anywhere but there are less of them about. Before the war, when petrol was cheaper than water - many times cheaper - men would just drive around looking for people who needed a taxi. Now a lot of the cars are full already. Waiting near the Palestine Hotel (of which more later) one of the hotel workers asked where we were going. In Arabic Imad explained and his eyes lit up. Were we going to see the English girl with blonde hair to about here - he indicated his shoulders - who works with the workers? We weren't - Ewa is in Basra, but Imad laughed. Everyone knows Ewa, he said. I'll write more about her work when I've had a chance to talk properly to her about it.
There are almost no working telephones, so you have to go by taxi to the usual places of anyone you want to see. I tried to phone Michael yesterday: I came to the Fanar to get his number and Luay gave it to me but, he said, "You cannot call from here. There is no operator." From the internet center around the corner I had to dial the full international code to call a few miles across the city. Calls within Iraq were free before the war. Bugged, of course, but free. If you know the address it's cheaper, though much, much slower, to just go and see if they're in but, if you don't, you have no choice but to try to call and to pay over $1 a minute.
I tried again from the Kandeel Hotel where I stayed last night but the phone in my room just beeped at me. "There is no operator here," said Mohammed, at reception, "because... bombing, you know." Still only a few exchanges are working. Even if your phone is working the chances are that the person you want to call is not connected. Still most people in the city can't call an ambulance or fire engine if they need to.
Today I was on my way to Al-Muajaha and Emar's offices when I spotted Michael on his way to find me, so he jumped in and we went for falafels. He'd been staying with a couple of Palestinian families about to be evicted from their homes, but they were made homeless yesterday. Palestinians were seen as receiving preferential treatment from Saddam in his attempts to build up his image as the great Arab leader, so landlords were forced to accept lower rents from Palestinian refugees. Now a lot of them are getting kicked out, as are other people for a whole variety of reasons because there's no protection from eviction here.
No one was in at Emar's offices, nor in the internet café they use, so we carried on to Al-Muajaha. Again I'll write more about their work when had chance to spend some time with them but essentially Muajaha is a newspaper and website set up by some Iraqi people I met here last time and Emar is Arabic for 'rebuild' and is setting up teams to assess their own reconstruction and other needs, again set up by some Iraqi friends I met before the war.
At the Muajaha office Muthanna was looking for Salam. The two of them have been invited to Geneva for some web posting training as part of the Indymedia network. He's really excited but as yet they haven't got passports. Previously passports had to be approved by Saddam, so now they're invalid, even if you had one, and the Americans are not issuing any at the moment.
Muthanna's in his final year of a film degree at university. He went today with a journalist and a member of a European NGO (non-governmental organization) to translate for them in an interview with the dean of the film college. It was a terrible interview, he said. The dean was really rude to them and he told them lies. He told them there were a thousand Iraqi films. Muthanna says there are only a hundred and the last Iraqi film came out in 1992. Films had to include directly and indirectly things about Saddam, pro-Saddam, so all the respected artists went abroad and only - he consulted Imad in Arabic for the right word in English - only the bullies were making films in Iraq.
The taxi driver who brought me back here used to be a major in the Iraqi army. It was bad, he said. Saddam used to force them to be in the army and then to join the Ba'ath party and if they wouldn't join they were fired and then jailed. He made the army do things that were bad for Iraq - to go to war and to attack other Iraqi people in the north and south. During the 'Anfal' campaign against the Kurds he was sent up to the north. He was an engineer, so he was only mending cars and the large guns but his friends were sent to go and gas people. I hope to interview some of those people about what happened during that time. It was a brief conversation but one which would have been unlikely before the war.
Mohammed in the Kandeel agreed some things are better now, but it's extremely unsafe and they don't have enough money. The new currency is in bigger denominations than the old, which is still in use, in the familiar bundles of 250 Dinar notes. The crisp, waxy 5000, 10000 and 25000 Dinar notes fit into wallets but, Mohammed and Sura explained, you go to the market and you can't afford anything with your salary. The food ration has dwindled to almost nothing. The electricity situation is better than over the summer because the weather is good - not so hot they need air conditioning but not yet cold enough to turn on heaters. There's less demand for electricity so there are fewer cuts and the loss of power when it happens matters less.
The falafel seller, the kids in the street, the taxi drivers and so on still ask where I'm from and say ahlan wa sahlan fi Iraq - welcome - as they always did. An English woman can still find a welcome in Baghdad. The dashboard kitsch hasn't changed either: one taxi driver had nodding dogs next to the steering wheel grooving along to Justin Timberlake.
Kamil is still working in the Al Fanar. He gave me a big hug when he saw me and brought me a glass of numb basra, the hot sweet lemon drink I loved last time I was here. But the Fanar has now extended into the street, which is closed, with an outdoor café called The Meeting Point, between the fortress walls and razor wire which now surround the Palestine, Ishtar Sheraton and recently-bombed Baghdad hotels, the closed-down UN Development Project building and the whole of Abu Nawas Street.
The familiar view from the window is filled with strangeness. Concrete walls ten feet high or lower ones with spikes on make an alleyway that, after a frisking and a bag search from Iraqi policemen backed by four US soldiers in full kit, people can pass down. The roll of razor wire is moved aside, now and then, for an approved vehicle to pass down, before joining the gleaming rows of the car park on what was once one carriageway of Abu Nawas.
As I write there's a gun battle going on. I can hear the crackles of smaller weapons and the roar of heavier fire. Red flares are rising from all sides, reminding me of the tracers of anti-aircraft fire the last time I stood on this balcony. Three tanks trundled out from the Palestine and then steamed along Sa'adoon street, parallel with Abu Nawas. A helicopter silhouetted against the dark blue of the sky and disappeared behind the building. It's either a gun battle or they've caught Saddam.
Over tea I saw a journalist, Boris, who I met before the war, writing for Die Welt. Casually he mentioned that on his trip to Ramadi today he caught the back end of the attack near Falluja. The usual, he said: smoke everywhere, helicopters overhead and Americans running about shouting at everyone to go away. He got to Ramadi where, it was reported, students were too scared to go to the university because of the resistance. He asked them about it. "We are the resistance."
Welcome to Iraq.
• A group in Canada has raised the money to take 5 people from Iraq to the World Social Forum in India in January (15th to 21st). The people who the organizers think would benefit and contribute the most don't speak English. Is there anyone out there who speaks fluent Iraqi Arabic and English who would be able to get themselves to the WSF and be there for those dates who'd be up for going and translating. The possible group includes a bakery worker and a textile factory worker - not sure of any other details but please e-mail wildfirejo-owner@yahoogroups.com if you think you can help.
• There's a woman here trying to set up a shelter for women who have fled domestic violence. I'll have more details of the project soon but if there's anyone who works in that field and / or knows about grant making bodies which might be able to help, please let me know as she needs funding sources to get it going.
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MILITARY - General Vows to Intensify U.S. Response to Attackers
November 12, 2003
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/international/middleeast/12IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 11 - Stung by the deaths of nearly 40 American soldiers over the past 10 days, the top American military commander in Iraq spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict on Tuesday and outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said operations would be stepped up against shadowy groups behind the increasing tempo of attacks on American troops in the Iraqi heartland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Those groups have been mounting ambushes, triggering roadside bombs and shooting down American helicopters. He confirmed that the Black Hawk that crashed Friday, killing six soldiers, had been shot down; a missile strike on a Chinook on Nov. 2 left 16 dead.
"We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country where we continue to face former regime loyalists, criminals and foreign terrorists, who are trying to isolate the coalition forces from the Iraqi people and break the will of the international community," General Sanchez told a heavily guarded news conference in the Iraqi capital. He added, "They will fail."
Hours after he spoke, the attackers struck anew with two mortars that were fired at midevening into the so-called green zone, the fortified area of central Baghdad where General Sanchez and top American civilian officials have their headquarters. A third mortar shell struck in an unfortified area to the south of the headquarters in what was Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace, but an American military spokesman said that the volley that struck in the palace complex had caused no damage, and that there were no reports of casualties.
Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many Bush administration officials in recent months, General Sanchez, commander of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq, described what they were facing as a war.
He was blunt in assessing the challenge posed by armed opponents who faded away as American troops overran the country in April, only to regroup, mainly in the area known as the "Sunni triangle," between Baghdad, Tikrit and Ramadi. From those Sunni Muslim areas, the major beneficiaries of Mr. Hussein's rule, attackers have mounted an increasingly sophisticated campaign that the general said accounted for more than 90 percent of strikes on allied forces.
Citing a deadly Oct. 26 rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad, timed to coincide with the visit to the hotel of the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the general said the attack was intended to "weaken the will of the coalition forces" and cause the United States to "walk away" from Iraq.
"It's not going to happen," he said. "We are not walking away, we are not faltering, we are going to win this battle, and this war."
Aides to General Sanchez said the choice of the word "war" was part of a conscious effort by senior military officers to inject realism into debates in Washington. American officials disclosed Tuesday that the chief American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, had left abruptly for talks in Washington.
General Sanchez confirmed another setback for American forces: that the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City, a Baghdad suburb of about two million Shiite Muslims, had been killed Sunday. The general said the mayor, Muhanad al-Kaadi, had tried to drive into an area forbidden to vehicles, then had engaged in a "wrestling match" with an American soldier during which the soldier's gun had gone off, inflicting fatal leg wounds on the mayor.
"It was a very unfortunate incident," the general said, adding that it was under investigation.
On another issue with American political overtones, General Sanchez said interrogations of 20 people suspected of links to Al Qaeda had failed to confirm such links.
Perhaps unwilling to fuel criticism of the Bush administration for overstating links between Mr. Hussein's Iraq and Islamic terrorists, General Sanchez said that while there was no proof, "we believe there is in fact a linkage, if nothing more than ideology and some training and possibly some financial linkages." He said American estimates of the number of foreign-born fighters were "about 200," who "come and go" in and out of Iraq, and that the attackers included "some fundamentalists."
Several times, he returned to what has become a central tenet of American commanders here: that their problems are not a result of inadequate force levels but of sketchy intelligence that leaves them unsure whom they are fighting, the extent to which the attacks are coordinated at a national level, and, if so, by whom.
The general described a stark picture of the attacks on American troops, saying they averaged six a day when he took command five months ago, rose to "the teens" 60 days ago, and had increased to 30 to 35 a day in the last 30 days. He predicted that the attacks would increase still further before the intensifying American military campaign began to curb them, an outcome he said was not in doubt.
"The enemy has increasingly embraced terrorist acts designed to intimidate the Iraqi people, and just as importantly to create a picture of chaos," he said. But, he added: "The stark reality is that they cannot defeat us, and they know it. I am supremely confident of this reality."
At another point, he responded brusquely to a reporter's question that cited concerns among some in Europe and the United States that Iraq was turning into a new Vietnam.
"It's not Vietnam, and there's no way you can make the comparison to the quagmire of Vietnam, when you look at the progress that's being made, when you look at the lack of popular support for the previous regime," the general said. "There's no alternative political structure that the people of Iraq are going to embrace that is connected to this anticoalition element. I think it's just amazing that anybody would think that it's an alternative to go back to that oppressive, brutal regime."
General Sanchez, a 52-year-old Texan, joined the Army from college, American officers at the news conference noted, after his family persuaded him to defer plans to follow his older brother into the Army in Vietnam.
In his remarks on Tuesday, he struck a harsh tone, saying that American forces' determination to "win the hearts and minds" of the 25 million Iraqis with reconstruction programs remained firm, but that so did the determination to meet attacks with full force.
"Although the coalition can be benevolent, this is the same lethal instrument that removed the previous regime, and we will not hesitate to employ the appropriate levels of combat power," he said in prepared remarks. In response to questions, he added, "What we are embarking on here is the absolute necessity to defeat the enemy," in pursuit of which the "application of all combat power that is available to us" would be used.
He defended, in particular, the American forces' decision to call in combat aircraft to bomb targets close to the areas where the Chinook and the Black Hawk were shot down, near Falluja and near Tikrit.
The bombings, apparently aimed at targets close to villages near the crashes, were the first that American forces had acknowledged since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1. American officers have declined to say whether the bombings killed Iraqis thought to be responsible for the helicopter attacks.
General Sanchez said investigators had determined that the Black Hawk was shot down with what he described as a rocket-propelled grenade in a rural area south of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown and the focus of some of the most intensive American military operations since the fall of Baghdad.
General Sanchez acknowledged that the failure to capture or kill Mr. Hussein was a major problem, providing a rallying point for "former regime loyalists."
"Do I believe it is critical?" he said, referring to the hunt for Mr. Hussein. "I do believe that." Capturing or killing the fugitive Iraqi leader, he said, would "relieve the people of Iraq of the fear of his return."
"How close have I gotten to Saddam Hussein?" he said. "Not close enough. I don't know how close I've got to him, but by God I've got to get closer."
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At Least 17 Italians Among 25 Reported Killed in Attack
November 12, 2003
New York Times
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/international/middleeast/12CND-IRAQ.html?hp
A truck crashed through a fence around an Italian military police compound in Nasiriya, Iraq, today, followed by a car that blew up, leaving at least 17 Italians dead, including 2 civilians, a British military spokesman in Basra said today.
Twenty-one Italians were wounded and 12 Iraqis are missing or wounded, the spokesman said by telephone.
Earlier reports by news agencies said eight Iraqis were killed, but the British spokesman said he could not confirm those figures.
In addition to the 2 civilians, Italian fatalities included 11 military police officers and 3 soldiers, military police officials in Rome said.
The Basra spokesman said casualties had been evacuated to hospitals and coalition forces were at the scene. Local Iraqis assisted with the evacuation of the wounded and the dead, he added.
In Washington, President Bush offered his "deepest condolences" to the families of the victims. "We appreciate their sacrifices," Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in which Lord Robertson, the secretary general of NATO, received the presidential medal of freedom.
The blast, which happened at 10:50 a.m. Iraqi time, threw up a huge plume of dust and smoke and shattered windows hundreds of yards away, Reuters reported. Several houses around the base were badly damaged.
About 2,300 Italian troops are serving in southern Iraq as part of the British-led multinational force based in Basra. Nasiriya, on the banks of the Euphrates River, is about 52 miles northwest of Basra.
Today's blast was the first attack on Italian forces since their arrival in Iraq in July. Last week insurgents shot dead a Polish major serving in a separate multinational force in central Iraq.
The blast is part of a widening pattern of daily attacks by insurgents against coalition forces. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the American commander in Iraq, said on Tuesday that attacks on United States troops averaged six a day when he took command five months ago. In the last 30 days attacks had risen to 30 to 35 a day, he said.
An American soldier was killed on Tuesday, and two were wounded, when their military vehicle struck an improvised explosive device northwest of Baghdad, the United States Central Command said in a statement today. The two wounded soldiers were treated in a hospital and returned to duty.
Officials in Italy were quick to condemn the attack and reaffirm Italian resolve, but a large majority of Italians were against the war in Iraq. When police officers were sent to Iraq after the announced end of hostilities there, the operation was presented to Italians as a strictly humanitarian one with minimal risks.
Political analysts in Italy said Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would now face pressure from Italian voters to get those police officers out of harm's way - meaning out of Iraq - but that he would not be likely to yield to it just yet, given the closeness of the Italian government's relationship to the United States.
Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi said that "no intimidation by a bombing will budge us from our willingness to help that country rise up again and rebuild itself with self-government, security and freedom."
He added: "Pain is at this time a feeling shared by the entire nation. But we also feel pride for the courage and humanity with which our troops have worked and still work to make the situation tolerable for children, women, the elderly and the weak who live in that martyred region."
During Pope John Paul II's regular Wednesday audience, the pontiff expressed his most firm condemnation for the latest terrorist attack, which he called "a vile attack against a mission of peace."
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said: "My first thought is for the families of carabinieri killed by this ignoble act of terrorism. I express to the carabinieri my complete solidarity. They are soldiers who have fallen as they performed their duty."
An opposition leader, Piero Fassino, said: "It's a grave fact that confirms the barbarous nature of terrorism, for which there can be no justification."
He said the attack showed that more than ever there was an urgent need to transfer political power into the hands of Iraqis, a thought that has been expressed widely across Europe and is believed to be the subject of talks now going on in Washington involving the top civilian administrator in Iraq for the United States, L. Paul Bremer III.
In Rome, the lower house of Parliament observed a moment of silence after news of the attack became known.
Attacks in Iraq have killed at least 154 American and 12 British soldiers since major combat was declared over by President Bush on May 1.
Frank Bruni and Jason Horowitz contributed reporting to this article from Rome.
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U.S. Seeks A Faster Transition In Iraq
Top Administrator Returns for Talks With White House
By Robin Wright and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28318-2003Nov11?language=printer
The Bush administration's foreign policy team yesterday began plotting strategy with L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Baghdad, to save the troubled political transition in Iraq by accelerating the hand-over of power, according to senior U.S. officials.
Bremer returned suddenly from Baghdad to discuss various proposals, including one to hold some form of elections in Iraq, possibly in four to six months, to select a new body that would write a constitution and an executive to assume sovereign powers in Baghdad. That formula is comparable to the model in postwar Afghanistan.
A senior U.S. official described the administration's desire to move faster as a "sane and rational change of course."
Amid growing frustration with the Iraqi Governing Council, which is made up of 24 Iraqis chosen by the United States, Bremer discussed several permutations of the proposals at the White House with Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, CIA director George J. Tenet and others.
President Bush is scheduled to participate in a second round of talks today, when U.S. officials hope to agree on a plan that Bremer would then implement in Iraq, officials said.
But a decision could be delayed by divisions that remain within the Bush administration as well as within the Iraqi Governing Council. Some senior Pentagon policymakers favor a separate proposal that would basically hand over sovereignty to the council, despite widespread indications that vast numbers of Iraqis do not accept the body as legitimate.
The U.S. shift is motivated in part by security concerns -- matching the political transition to the gradual reduction of U.S. troops next year. The sooner a government that is embraced by the majority of Iraqis is in place, U.S. officials believe, the sooner stability might return, allowing troops and coalition officials to withdraw.
The Bush administration has been increasingly concerned about the political transition as a U.N.-imposed Dec. 15 deadline looms for the Governing Council to arrange selection of a panel to write a constitution -- the critical first step in handing back power to Iraqis -- and provide a timetable for a referendum, a census and the first democratic elections. But deep disagreements on the council over how to select a constitutional committee has stalled any progress.
"The goal is to get a constitutional process going, and find the best way to transfer more and more authority to Iraqi leaders who are recognized as legitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi people," said a senior official with the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
U.S. officials stress that they do not intend to abruptly abandon the Governing Council. One proposal calls for the council to be expanded in a way that would include members selected by Iraqis and thereby confer greater legitimacy to it.
Even if a new process is set into motion, the council would remain the chief Iraqi authority until then. Members of the council would be eligible to participate in a new assembly and leadership roles -- this time as officials elected by Iraqis rather than appointed by an occupying power.
But the ideas with stronger U.S. backing seek a transition that eventually moves beyond the council. One proposal calls for the council to establish an interim constitution or set of basic laws by which an election could be held for a constitutional committee by next summer. That committee would help establish a sovereign executive to rule until a constitution is written and the first democratic elections are held for a permanent post-Saddam Hussein government.
Bremer hopes to take the administration's designated plan back to Baghdad this week to discuss with the council, U.S. officials said. The administration is determined to act decisively, since the council has not agreed even on how to pick other Iraqis to write a constitution.
"There's serious frustration about the way it's worked so far. The council has not demonstrated the ability to have a seriousness of purpose or single-mindedness about its work," a senior administration official said yesterday.
Some council members, in turn, have contended that the failure of the U.S.-led occupation to give them greater authority in running Iraq's affairs, particularly in security, made it difficult to put down a rebellion in an arc of territory running north and west of Baghdad. That lack of security has made their task more difficult. Some on the council are pressing the occupation authority to grant it the status of a provisional government, a step they contend would bring greater stability.
Iraq's interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zubari, said at a news conference Sunday that the lack of security could derail the U.N.-imposed deadline, now less than five weeks away.
"Those timetables depend on the security situation, and if the security deteriorates, we will not adhere to such commitments," he said.
The biggest disagreement appears to be the duration of the constitutional process, a project that would, in effect, put the Governing Council out of a job by creating an alternative, elected body. U.S. officials want a constitutional convention chosen and the document written well before the 2004 elections in this country. Some council members have proposed a far lengthier process, as long as two to three years.
"We believe that the constitutional process has to be given some time," said Mowaffak Rubaie, a council member and Shiite Muslim physician who returned from exile in Britain. "It will backfire if we speed it up. We have to cook this on a slow fire."
The U.S. occupation staff is concerned that time may be running out, reinforcing the need to focus on "where is the exit," a U.S. official in Baghdad said. Part of that calculation is the belief that Iraqis themselves need to see, as the official put it, "the light at the end of the tunnel."
A CIA field report from Iraq that arrived in Washington over the weekend provided a bleak summary of the situation. It said attacks on U.S. troops and personnel have escalated to as many as 30 to 35 a day at the same time the Governing Council has been unable to move toward a constitution or election and has not gained any support from the Iraqi people, according to a senior administration official familiar with the classified report.
Although the report pulls together these pieces of bad news for the administration, its arrival was not timed to coincide with Bremer's, the official said.
Bush, in a Veterans Day speech yesterday at the Heritage Foundation, said Iraqis are on the road to assuming political control. "The Iraqis want freedom, and the Iraqis are headed toward self-government," he said.
Bush also repeated previous vows to remain in Iraq and asserted that he has a plan for its transformation. "The United States has made an unbreakable commitment to the success of freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said. "We have a strategy to see that commitment through."
The president described the conflict as contained in a compact area. "The violence is focused in 200 square miles known as the Baathist Triangle, the home area to Saddam Hussein and most of his associates," Bush said. In fact, the full area of the Sunni Triangle, as the area around Baghdad and Tikrit is also known, is several thousand square miles.
Bush said the United States is battling terrorist groups in Iraq such as al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam.
"Foreign jihadists have arrived across Iraq's borders in small groups with the goal of installing a Taliban-like regime," he said, adding that "recent reporting suggests that despite their differences, these killers are working together to spread chaos and terror and fear."
The president also used his Veterans Day remarks to speak at more length than usual about the troops killed in Iraq.
"When we lose such Americans in battle, we lose our best," he said. "For their families, this is a terrible sorrow, and we pray for their comfort. For the nation, there is a feeling of loss, and we remember and we honor every name."
In Baghdad, insurgents yesterday struck at the heart of the U.S.-led occupation for the third time in a week. They hit the presidential palace compound with a series of rockets or mortars that sent leaders of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government running to basement shelters.
Lt. Col. George Krivo, a U.S. military spokesman, confirmed two explosions inside the "green" zone, a heavily fortified area around the operations center, and one just south of it. He said that at least four vehicles were damaged, but that the strikes missed the Coalition Provisional Authority's headquarters and there were no injuries.
One source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at least eight projectiles had landed in the area hit but only three exploded. At least one landed in a parking lot near the helicopter pad, and close to where U.S. contractor Bechtel Corp. is based.
At a briefing earlier in the day, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, said insurgents had been shifting tactics, increasingly using remote attacks, such as firing mortars and rockets, rather than engaging in direct combat with troops.
U.S. officials have blamed the escalating guerrilla attacks on loyalists of Hussein's former government, Iraqi Islamic militants and foreign fighters but have acknowledged that the degree of coordination between the groups is unclear.
Shadid reported from Baghad. Staff writers Ariana Eunjung Cha in Baghdad and Dana Milbank, Walter Pincus, Peter Slevin and Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.
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U.N. Estimates Israeli Barrier Will Disrupt Lives of 600,000
November 12, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/international/middleeast/12MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 11 - The route for Israel's planned boundary barrier would put nearly 15 percent of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, according to a United Nations report released Tuesday.
The report is based on calculations made after Israel presented its first detailed map of the barrier last month. Israeli officials questioned the accuracy of the report, by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and said the government was still assessing how many Palestinians would be affected.
"We think the U.N. is toying with the numbers," said Rachel Niedak-Ashkenazi, a spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Ministry, which is responsible for the project. "We do have one number: the 6.5 million Israelis will be better protected when the fence is finished."
The barrier, which includes an electronic fence, concrete walls, trenches and other obstacles, is intended to block Palestinian attackers and is not a political border, Israel insists. It veers into the West Bank to protect Jewish settlements, Israel says.
But Palestinians say the path amounts to confiscation of land and sets a boundary as a matter of fact that would make it difficult to establish a viable Palestinian state.
The United Nations agency said the map released by Israel showed the barrier running more than 400 miles on a twisting route through the West Bank. It will totally surround 12 Palestinian communities, leaving residents able to leave only through gates controlled by Israeli security forces, the report said.
Only 11 percent of the barrier is to be built along the Green Line, the armistice line set at the end of the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war.
The fence will put 14.5 percent of West Bank land on the Israeli side, the report said, adding, "This land, some of the most fertile in the West Bank, is currently the home for more than 274,000 Palestinians."
The agency made a rough estimate that an additional 400,000 Palestinians would be adversely affected. In some instances, the barrier is going up between Palestinian villages and nearby farmland. In many small Palestinian communities, employees and students must cross the barrier to reach larger cities and towns where they work or study.
David Shearer, head of the United Nations agency in Jerusalem, said the report was not intended "to make any sort of political point."
"We simply wanted to highlight the severe problems these people would face," he said.
Israel has acknowledged that tens of thousands of Palestinians will be affected, but says it is building gates and taking other steps to minimize disruptions. "To say that we are not taking humanitarian issues into account is misleading," Ms. Niedak-Ashkenazi said.
About one-quarter of the barrier has been built, mostly in the northern West Bank and near Jerusalem.
"I believe the wall is a profound disaster that's engulfing the Palestinian people," said Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian minister in charge of negotiations with Israel. "As the wall goes up, the vision of a two-state solution is being destroyed."
A new Palestinian cabinet is likely to be sworn in on Wednesday, which could accelerate talks with Israel about the barrier and other issues.
The United States did not initially object to the barrier last year when the first section was rising on or near the West Bank boundary. But as the barrier runs more deeply into the West Bank, President Bush and other American officials have called the route a problem.
The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution last month calling for the project to be halted. Israel said it would ignore the measure.
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Ending Political Turmoil, Palestinians Approve Cabinet
November 12, 2003
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/international/middleeast/12CND-MIDE.html?hp
The Palestinian Legislative Council approved the new Palestinian government today, voting for a cabinet that includes Yasir Arafat's hand-picked choice for an interior minister in charge of security forces.
The new interior minister, Hakam Bilawi, has been a lawmaker representing the West Bank town of Tulkarm and is considered a longtime Arafat loyalist.
The vote, taken in the West Bank city of Ramallah, ends months of political turmoil for the Palestinians and clears an obstacle to reviving efforts on a Middle East peace plan that is backed by the United States and intended to end more than three years of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
"The program of the new cabinet is to choose peace, and to stick to the Middle East peace plan," Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said in a speech before the vote, which was reported by the official Palestinian news agency.
Palestinian officials said 48 lawmakers voted in favor of the cabinet and 13 against; there were 5 abstentions.
Mr. Arafat said: "The Israeli government says we do not want peace. I tell them this is not true. We will not retract this recognition of the rights of the Israeli people to live in security and peace, alongside the Palestinians, independent in an independent state."
He added, "The time has come, Israelis, to emerge from this cycle of destructive war which gives no security, justice or peace to either of us."
Mr. Arafat appointed Ahmed Qurei as head of an emergency government after the former prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, resigned in frustration in September, saying his efforts to stop the violence between Israelis and Palestinians had been stymied.
Mr. Qurei, who had disagreed with Mr. Arafat over the Interior Ministry portfolio, failed to form a new cabinet during his first month in office. He later conceded to Mr. Arafat's choice on the question of control of Palestinian security and police.
Mr. Bilawi, the new interior minister, will have a portfolio that includes control over the police, civil defense and security forces, though Mr. Arafat will hold overall responsibility for the security forces as the head of the new National Security Council.
Mr. Arafat has run the security forces since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994. But Israel and the United States have demanded that he cede control of the security forces to a Palestinian prime minister, who would be expected to crack down on violent Palestinian factions.
Dore Gold, an adviser to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said by telephone from Jerusalem that the pace and depth with which Israel works with any new Palestinian government depends on the extent to which Palestinians "dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and incarcerate its operatives."
Reacting to the appointment of Mr. Bilawi as the Palestinians' new interior minister, Mr. Gold said: "Israel will measure this government on the basis of its performance. But at the same time, it is not encouraging to see Yasir Arafat's fingerprints all over key appointments."
Mr. Arafat also urged the new cabinet to put in place appropriate conditions for municipal, presidential and parliamentary elections as soon as possible. He also urged the new government to work for Palestinian national interests, such as independence and the right of Palestinian refugees to return.
Muhammad Suleiman, a Palestinian Information Ministry official who attended the parliamentary session in Ramallah, said by telephone that Mr. Qurei asked for elections to take place in June, but a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian areas was needed for voting to proceed.
Mr. Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, also called for a cease-fire and a resumption of negotiations with the Israelis. "To the Israelis, we want peace and security and independence that will not be realized unless we work together," Mr. Qurei told the lawmakers, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Gold said Israel wanted a complete renunciation of violence and action on the ground.
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Grind of War Giving Life To Opponents Of Sharon
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28260-2003Nov11?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Nov. 11 -- Three years into war with the Palestinians, Israelis are losing patience with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. With violence continuing and peace efforts at a months-old impasse, members of Sharon's government are voicing dissent, activists are pursuing independent peace initiatives and opinion polls show his approval ratings sinking.
The military's top general has publicly challenged Sharon's handling of the conflict, and long-dormant peace groups and dovish politicians are showing signs of rejuvenation. A memorial service for slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 1 drew 100,000 people and turned into the largest peace rally since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising.
"After three years, it's time to rethink," said Asher Friedberg, a political science professor at the University of Haifa. "Both sides are tired of what's going on. We're at a dead end."
Israeli pollsters and political analysts said the confluence of events and trends has produced the sharpest divisions within the Israeli leadership and among the populace since the first months of the uprising. Political leaders and analysts said the dissatisfaction among Israelis is exacerbated by mounting concern over the deterioration of the U.S. occupation in Iraq and its potential for inflaming the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Analysts said they do not believe the Sharon government is in danger of collapse, but they interpreted the trends as a turning point in the country's attitudes toward the uprising and a warning to the hawkish prime minister and his administration. With the conflict in its fourth year, more than 2,500 Palestinians and almost 900 Israeli residents have been killed.
"The mainstream is not as certain of Sharon as it was a few months ago," said David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Report, a current events magazine. "Mainstream centrists in Israel want to get back to the peace table."
In a poll released late last week in Maariv, a Hebrew-language newspaper, about one-third of respondents said they were pleased with Sharon's performance, and less than one-third said they would vote for him if elections were held now.