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NUCLEAR
'66 H-bomb accident still a concern in Spain
Nuclear Agency Changes Its Stance on a Fire Safety Proposal
Exclusion zone
Iran Clarifies Uranium Enrichment Plans
Iran Says Won't Shelve Uranium Enrichment Forever
Japan, US Send Confusing Signals on Korea
N Korea seeks US compo for cutting nuke project
N. Korea Rejects Japan in Nuke Talks
Quiet Power
Senators Urge U.N. Role in Iraq Lawmakers Visit Troops in Baghdad
MILITARY
May Broaden Its Role in Afghanistan
Nations Endorse Treaty to Clean Up Postwar Munitions
Two Senators Seek to Postpone Boeing Deal for Tankers
Beijing Softens Its Stance Against New Legislation in Taiwan
Taiwan Vote Met With Caution
China Breaks Off Ties With Kiritabi
3 Arrested in Europe Are Tied to Recruitment of Iraq Fighters
U.S. Says Iraqi Police May Have Coordinated Attacks on G.I.s
U.S. Is Worried Foe Is Tracking Targets in Iraq
Iraq Exit Plan: New Obstacles
November Deadliest Month in Iraq
U.N. Chief Denounces West Bank Barrier
Coerced or Not, Palestinians Who Assist Israel Face Death
Japan scuttles two spy satellites
Ceasefire holding on, says ISPR:
Guantanamo Bay Officer Charged
Japan Space Launch Fails
Japan Spy Satellite Launch Ends in Failure
Intelligence Weaknesses Are Cited
Annan Calls Israeli Barrier a U.N. Violation
Reservist Faces Punishment After Questioning a Waiver
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Division Over Death Penalty
A Prisoner Of Panic After 9/11
Justice Dept. Reviews Prisoner Death Probe
OTHER
Nations Endorse Treaty to Clean Up Postwar Munitions
ACTIVISTS
The art of destruction
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
'66 H-bomb accident still a concern in Spain
Saturday, November 29, 2003
By Yvonne Zanos,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03333/245423.stm
PALOMARES, Spain -- Almost 40 years have passed since the U.S. Air Force accidentally dropped four hydrogen bombs on Spain. But the fallout continues with a newly published scientific study that traced the spread of radiation from the accident site -- and continuing rumors about a mysterious fifth bomb that supposedly is still leaking on the Mediterranean Sea floor.
Ironically, while the scientists who conducted the study discount the fifth-bomb theory, their findings have fueled the rumors. They reported that the Mediterranean, indeed, has been contaminated -- but only from radioactive material that washed into the sea from the bombs that hit land. They also said current levels of radioactivity pose no threat to people.
The story goes back to Jan. 17, 1966, when a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker aircraft collided during a refueling exercise over the sleepy farming village of Palomares on Spain's southeastern coast.
Both planes disintegrated and down went the B-52's four hydrogen bombs, creating the first U.S. nuclear weapons crisis near a populated area. Each 1.5-megaton bomb packed 100 times more explosive power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
Two were found intact. One fell on land, the other into the Mediterranean, where it was recovered after an 80-day effort dramatized in the 2000 Hollywood film "Men of Honor." The movie spotlighted U.S. Navy diver Carl Brashear, who lost a leg in the effort.
Non-nuclear explosives in the other two bombs detonated when they hit the ground. Hydrogen bombs contain conventional explosives that trigger the nuclear blast. Seven pounds of plutonium were splattered over 558 acres of Palomares, forcing an $80 million clean-up by the United States.
Military crews hauled away 1,500 tons of radioactive soil and tomato plants for burial at a nuclear waste dump in Aiken, S.C. Some radioactive material inevitably was left behind, perhaps as much as 15 percent of the total.
"The remainder of the original plutonium clearly has spread, and spread widely," said William R. Schell, a University of Pittsburgh emeritus professor and a member of the international team that reported on the accident in the current edition of the journal Science and the Total Environment. "There's been quite a bit of migration into the Mediterranean."
Radioactivity was detected in western Mediterranean plankton -- tiny plants and animals that drift in the water and serve as staple food for fish and other larger organisms. "It was a surprise," said Joan-Albert Sanchez-Cabeza of the University of Barcelona, head of the research team.
Sanchez-Cabeza explained that plutonium does not dissolve easily in water. Yet somehow, plutonium and a related radioactive material, americium, got into the water and were taken up by marine organisms.
Plutonium is extremely toxic and lingers in the environment for ages. It takes 24,000 years for half of a given amount to decay.
Plutonium outside the body is relatively harmless because it emits a form of radiation that cannot penetrate skin. But when absorbed into the body from air, food or cuts in the skin, it can cause cancer and other serious health problems.
The research team found that the highest radiation levels in the plankton were well below the human danger level set by the World Health Organization. It also learned that the plutonium apparently does not accumulate to higher levels in the fish that eat plankton -- a matter of particular concern to the Spanish, who eat a lot of fish.
"We think that the plutonium found in plankton should not be of serious concern to the public," Sanchez-Cabeza said. "But further research and monitoring is needed."
The study revived rumors that a fifth nuclear bomb from the Palomares accident was never recovered and remains submerged in the Mediterranean, leaking radiation.
A Spanish radio news program dredged up the old stories right after the new study was announced. "That has been a local rumor or worry in the area since the accident," the station's commentator noted. "Well now, the latest radioactive readings in local plankton have started to rise. I'll leave you to decide for yourselves if there is another bomb."
Sanchez-Cabeza, noting the lack of any documentation to support the fifth-bomb theory, said, "Well, that's a big one."
American B-52 bombers in the 1960s typically carried four hydrogen bombs. In another of more than 30 known "Broken Arrow" incidents between 1950 and 1980, a nuclear-armed B-52 crashed near the Thule Air Base in Greenland in 1968. Crews recovered four nuclear bombs.
Researchers dismiss the fifth-nuke stories and believe that contaminated soil from Palomares eventually washed into the ocean after heavy rains. Wind-blown dust, which contains the same chemical "fingerprint" as the radiation found in the soil at Palomares, may be another source.
The U.S. Department of Energy and its Spanish counterpart are monitoring the health of Palomares' 1,500 residents. The Energy Department said the accident so far has caused no known radiation-related cancers or other health problems.
In 2002, the U.S. Air Force surgeon general re-analyzed the radiation exposure of 1,500 U.S. military veterans involved in the Palomares clean up. Their work involved packing contaminated soil in steel drums, burning tainted crops and roto-tilling fields to bury radioactive material. The surgeon general concluded that they were exposed to only one-tenth the current radiation limit for workers at commercial nuclear power plants and other facilities.
The Air Force study reached similar conclusions for 700 personnel involved in cleaning up the Broken Arrow incident in Greenland, which happened when a B-52 caught fire and the crew was forced to bail out. Conventional explosives in the hydrogen bombs detonated in that incident as well, spreading plutonium and other radioactive material over the ice and snow.
In his 1997 book "America's Lost H-Bomb," the late Randall C. Maydew, a government nuclear weapons guru who helped design arming, fusing, firing and safety systems, wrote that the Palomares case and other Broken Arrow episodes produced at least some beneficial fallout: They prompted designers to make weapons less prone to release radioactive material in the case of an accident.
Post Your Problems appears Tuesday through Friday, addressing questions and problems from readers. Yvonne Zanos from KDKA-TV looks into consumer-related issues, including difficulties with products and services. Post-Gazette Staff Writer Lawrence Walsh helps sort through bureaucratic problems.
----
Nuclear Agency Changes Its Stance on a Fire Safety Proposal
November 29, 2003
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/politics/29NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - After 10 years of struggling to make reactor owners modify their plants to protect electrical cables from fire, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now proposing to amend its own rules, retroactively legalizing an alternate strategy used by many plants but never formally approved.
The change involves the cables that connect the control room with pumps, valves and other equipment needed to shut down a plant safely.
Previously, the commission wanted the reactors to separate the control cables for redundant equipment, or install fire detection and suppression equipment or fire barriers, so a single fire could not disable all the cables. It now proposes to accept letting the plants designate technicians who would run through the plant and operate equipment by hand if the control cables had burned away.
Under a proposal published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, the commission's staff would not evaluate the feasibility of such a solution; instead, the reactor operators would draw up the plans, test them and keep the results on file for the inspections conducted every three years by the commission's staff.
Among the questions raised by the new strategy is whether workers could get to the equipment, through the heat, smoke, radiation, and steam that might be present in a fire.
The reason for the proposal, said Sunil Weerakkody, the section chief for fire protection and special studies, is that over the years the commission's inspectors in the field had informally approved such plans or that reactor owners had made such arrangements without asking permission. According to commission documents, some reactor owners simply asserted that they could use such alternate means under the terms of their licenses.
The commission's lawyers recently concluded that these approvals were not legal. The commission could require an application in each case and then evaluate each one, Mr. Weerakkody said, but it lacks the resources to do so and still keep up with its other work. Inspectors, he said, "have common sense and engineering sense" and can judge from the records whether the precautions are adequate.
But Paul Gunter, a safety advocate at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a group generally critical of the nuclear industry, said, "The N.R.C. took the word of a noncompliant and noncooperating industry, and set the bar low enough so they could step over it."
Fire has been a concern since March 1975, when a worker at one of the Tennessee Valley Authority's three Brown's Ferry reactors, in northern Alabama, accidentally set a fire with a candle that he was using to search for an air leak. The fire made it difficult to operate the equipment needed to shut down the plant and to monitor its condition.
In response, some plants installed a material called "Thermo-lag" as a fire barrier, but in the early 1990's, the commission determined that the material was not effective. To compensate, for a time, many plants assigned employees to watch for fire. But many made plans for sending workers directly to the affected equipment, a strategy called "operator manual action."
Mr. Weerakkody said that under the new proposal his agency would have a uniform set of criteria for approving "operator manual action" plans made by the plant managers, instead of relying on the simple judgment of inspectors. In that way, approving the new program would increase safety, he said.
At a recent briefing by the commission's staff, one specialist in fire protection said that until 1992 the commission had approved a total of 50 manual actions for more than 100 nuclear reactors, but that he had found 100 manual actions at a single nuclear plant.
A recent staff paper concluded, "While the use of unapproved operator manual actions may contribute to increases in risk from fires, results from staff inspections to date indicate that there is insufficient evidence that the generic use of these actions poses a safety issue."
But the idea of substituting humans for physical protections has attracted some skepticism. In September, at a meeting of the commission's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, Dana A. Powers, the committee's vice chairman asked: "Is there any hope? It's not like you can set up a simulator and test an operator action."
"How do you simulate smoke, light, fire, ringing bells, fire engines, crazy people running around?" he asked.
A commission staff member, Eva Brown, replied that in some cases, lights could be turned off to make a drill seem more realistic, and inspectors could check preparations by seeing if air packs were available.
Mr. Gunter, in a telephone interview, said that relying on manual actions would mean that plant workers would be counted on to perform heroic, or even suicidal, tasks.
-------- britain
Exclusion zone
29/11/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/main.jhtml?xml=/property/2003/11/29/prad290.xml&sSheet=/property/2003/11/29/ixptop01.html
Raymond Fox claims that radioactivity at his former home has blighted his health - so he refuses to return. His neighbours and the local council insist that the area is perfectly safe. David Rowan investigates a suburban mystery
It is something of a riddle how Raymond Fox's detached suburban home came to be contaminated with plutonium and uranium. Since his family abandoned the four-bedroom house two years ago, following his diagnosis with severe radiation poisoning, Mr Fox has devoted his remaining strength to uncovering the truth about 337 Wokingham Road, in the comfortable Reading suburb of Earley. Wealth hazard: neighbours complain that the campaign is devaluing their property
At first, he thought the radioactivity might be connected with the nearby atomic weapons plant at Aldermaston; or perhaps the result of a hushed-up air crash involving a damaged nuclear weapon. But since he discovered toxic black sludge in drains leading from the former Shell depot next door, Mr Fox has drawn a conclusion which, if true, has far more worrying implications for his neighbours. Somewhere beneath the bottom of his garden, he is convinced, there was once - perhaps still is - a secret nuclear bunker.
Mr Fox, a short, frail 53-year-old, has built up filing cabinets full of witness statements, photographs and contamination test results that, he says, will prove what has made number 337 "the most radioactive house in Britain". He refuses to go back inside, his symptoms worsening whenever he returns. Scientists who have examined the property confirm unusually high radiation levels in and around it.
The latest independent tests, conducted in June, identified "a source of material from a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb in the vicinity of the property" - and warned that a neighbouring road where children play was so contaminated with radium and uranium that it represented "a public health hazard".
There can be few more shocking claims to confront a quiet, residential neighbourhood, yet no exclusion order has ever been placed on this leafy part of Earley, and no steps have been taken to rehouse anxious local families. The statutory authorities Mr Fox has turned to - from the Environment Agency to the local council - have uniformly denied that residents have anything to worry about, and Shell denies that its site ever housed a nuclear facility. The council insists that the radiation detected is still at a relatively low level and so "gives no cause for concern in respect of public safety".
Unconvinced, Mr Fox and his lawyers have now taken their "explosive" dossier of evidence to the European Commission - which, they believe, will finally expose official complacency as part of "a gigantic nuclear cover-up".
In the meantime, the residents of Amber Close, the neat Persimmon housing development built three years ago on the site of the former Shell depot, appear more concerned about the impact on property values than any immediate health risks. "We've been trying to sell our house since July, and if Mr Fox stops us we'll be really cross with him," says the mother of a young baby who, like most of the neighbours, declined to be named. "If there was proof of some historic nuclear bunker underneath these houses, it wouldn't be so bad - but the council says there's nothing wrong. What does he expect us to do, for God's sake?" Deserted: 337 Wokingham Road
"Of course, it's going to devalue houses," says a sceptical local shopkeeper. "I've lived here since 1970, and brought up two children here, and there's nothing wrong with them. Do I look like I glow in the dark?"
The doubters do not bother Mr Fox and his growing support team - among them anti-nuclear campaigners, volunteer press officers, anti-corporate activists, as well as the local Green MEP, Caroline Lucas. At one stage, his house was covered with "Danger: Radiation" signs visible to any commuter driving between the town centre and the M4 approach roads. Today, though, it is distinguishable by the tarpaulin hanging over the leaking front roof, the dishevelled caravan blocking the driveway, and the stench of damp that hits you as the front door opens into the mould-infested hallway.
Deserted suddenly in spring 2001, when Mr Fox finally persuaded his then wife Susan to move elsewhere with the children, number 337 today reflects the painful disruption of a family's life. Crockery and pans lie half-washed on the draining-board; a pile of folded towels sits in the bathroom waiting to be put away. Children's toys spill out of boxes on the playroom floor - a Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, a stuffed clown and a tennis racquet, long forgotten now beside a creased copy of The Daily Telegraph dated April 6, 2001.
Upstairs in the main bedroom, a Swan Teasmade pays homage to domestic comforts long given up. A child's Vanilla Ice cassette lies unspooling on a bed below a Winnie-the-Pooh noticeboard. According to the "Untidy Room Certificate" on the door, this bedroom once belonged to the Foxes' son, Christopher.
But it is in the main living-room, where the crumbling floor joists lie exposed, that one is starkly reminded what has kept the house empty for so long. The timbers have been eaten away by what Mr Fox calls "radioactive seepage". The radiation also explains, he says, the blistering paint on walls facing the former Shell plant. In a car parked a safe distance away from the house, he reads the conclusion of a "scintillation counter" investigation conducted in June by Dr Chris Busby, a radiation specialist who took samples from the garden and the drains running underneath it, and from an adjoining road, Lambourne Gardens. The caesium and plutonium ratios found in the drain, Dr Busby noted, showed that "highly concentrated material containing plutonium-239" was once present.
Additionally, the Lambourne Gardens samples contained enough radium-226, and possibly uranium-235, to constitute a public health hazard. Such isotopes, he pointed out, could have come only from a nearby nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb. The council and Shell stressed that Dr Busby's study has not altered their views, based on earlier evidence, that there is no current source of radiation and no evidence of a historic source.
The Fox family, with two children and two adopted children, paid £150,000 for the house at the height of the 1988 property boom. Life was good: a builder whose £1.5 million firm was offered work at Windsor Castle, Mr Fox owned other homes in Sussex and a Tenerife timeshare.
But soon he began to fall mysteriously ill - gut trouble, back problems, a constant nausea. "We also had problems at the house, such as raw sewage coming up through the drains, the vegetables refusing to grow in the garden, and the pet rabbits dying," he recalls. "And then one day we spotted the white worms."
Neighbours had also spotted them. "A friend said, if you've got white worms, you've got trouble. That's a sign of radiation."
By 1995, Mr Fox's health was deteriorating quickly. In retrospect, things became much worse after he went down in the drains to investigate a leak, and emerged covered in "black sludge", which had apparently come from the Shell site. Shell cleaned out the pipe after Mr Fox alerted them to its contents. Shell acknowledges that there was a cleaning operation. No publicly disclosed tests were conducted. Mr Fox contends that the material they took away was radioactive. "I didn't realise that this stuff was lethal," he says now. "I was being sick all the time, bleeding terribly all over my body, and my moods were changing. From my diaries, I now realise that whenever I went to Sussex for a weekend, I was fine - but when I worked in the garden, near that drain, I was taken ill on the Monday." Mr Fox: 'That house is riddled with contamination'
His father mentioned that, while in Germany during the war, he had learned a little about the effects of radiation. He encouraged Raymond to go for independent tests. Dr Josef Kees, a specialist in Bad Homburg, Germany, who had worked with Chernobyl children, agreed to see him.
Dr Kees diagnosed "chronic multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome", involving "radiation-induced toxicodermatitis" and a range of problems linked to uranium and lindane exposure. Mr Fox was prescribed months of detoxification treatments that, he says, saved his life. The marriage, however, was not to survive, and Mr Fox, who lost his business and was made bankrupt, now lives in a one-bedroom flat in central Reading, from where his campaign for justice continues.
Mr Fox has gained a reputation locally as a rather difficult man, who is quick to declaim the "conspiracy" he believes is designed to silence him and save Shell and the Government the expense of rehousing the residents of Earley. He may not have helped his case by refusing the Environment Agency's scientists access to his home, or by engaging in frequent if unsuccessful litigation against those he believes are maligning him.
Wokingham District Council insists that it has investigated his concerns "fully and extensively" in partnership with the Environment Agency and the National Radiological Protection Board, yet found no evidence to substantiate them. In 2001, the Environment Agency and the council tested soil, pebbles, grit and household dust near the property and concluded that the results showed radioactivity at "levels expected in any area of the country which is not close to a radiation source", which contradicts the findings of tests Enviro Consultants and Analysts carried out on behalf of Mr Fox's insurers.
That study found unusually high levels of two isotopes of plutonium and three isotopes of uranium. The family were advised to vacate their home. The council's assessment of both surveys combined "did not give us any further reason to carry out more investigation of this matter", it told The Daily Telegraph.
Shell, for its part, insists that its Earley depot was a conventional oil-storage terminal, and that the company has never operated a nuclear site there or anywhere else in the UK. "I have no idea what is the cause of Mr Fox's health problems and we're obviously very sorry about them, but I can only reiterate that Shell had no nuclear facility there," says Justin Everard, a spokesman for Shell. "Because we are a large oil company, some people are convinced we must be involved in some terrible subterfuge. But it's not in the interests of Shell to pursue secrecy - we've got too much to lose."
That still leaves important questions over the source of the radiation identified in and around 337 Wokingham Road. Besides Dr Busby's test, an earlier analysis for Mr Fox's insurers also detected unusually high levels of radioactivity. Michael Meacher, when Environment Secretary, suggested that the cause might be a fire affecting a railway fuel wagon near the Shell site; others have speculated that there was a nearby underground explosion, or perhaps a leak from a 1950s atomic bomb.
For as long as the speculation continues, the homeowners of Amber Close and the surrounding streets can only curse the publicity that they fear may imperil their house values.
Estate agents, in the meantime, still have a job to do. For the past year, the local firm of Haslams has had the unenviable task of selling the now notorious house "at offers in excess of £200,000".
Remarkably, it has attracted a serious offer above this price - an achievement that fills Mr Fox with disgust and suspicion. "That house is riddled with contamination," he says angrily. "Why would I want someone else to fall ill or die, when it's got to be torn down?"
"The prospective buyer, who is well known to us, is quite aware of Mr Fox's claims, and I very much doubt that he's part of some conspiracy," an agent from Haslams says with a philosophical sigh. "Maybe one day this house will be sold and we won't hear anything more of it. Then again," and he breaks into an intense laugh, "these things are sent to challenge us estate agents."
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk
-------- iran
Iran Clarifies Uranium Enrichment Plans
November 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran insisted Saturday it has the right to enrich uranium to produce nuclear power, saying its decision to suspend enrichment to allay suspicions of a weapons program was voluntary and temporary.
Hasan Rowhani, head of the powerful Supreme National Security Council, said Iran expected to eventually produce fuel for one or two power plants despite its agreement with the U.N. nuclear agency to suspend enrichment and open up its nuclear program to extensive inspection.
``Our decision to suspend uranium enrichment is voluntary and temporary. Uranium enrichment is Iran's natural right and (Iran) will reserve for itself this right. ... There has been and there will be no question of a permanent suspension or halt at all,'' Rowhani told a news conference.
``We want to control the whole fuel cycle,'' he added. ``Since we are planning to build seven nuclear power plants in the future, we want to provide fuel for at least one or more of the plants ourselves.''
Rowhani also said Iran will punish nations that backed the U.S. plan to bring Iran's nuclear program before the U.N. Security Council, introducing a direct threat of sanctions.
On Wednesday, the 35-member board of the International Atomic Energy Agency adopted by consensus a compromise resolution that censured Iran for the secrecy of its nuclear program but fell short of the U.S. position. Key European powers opposed a direct threat, worried that Tehran would stop cooperating in retaliation.
Iran has insisted its nuclear program is aimed only at peaceful uses, challenging U.S. accusations it plans to make weapons.
The Iranian government hopes to produce 6,000 Megawatts of electricity by 2021 from planned nuclear reactors, along with one now under construction. Iran's first nuclear power plant, being built by the Russians at Bushehr on the shores of the Gulf, is expected to be completed by the end of 2004.
Rowhani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, said Iran possesses the technology needed to enrich uranium and does not need foreign help.
``Today, we can produce centrifugal parts ourselves. We possess the technology. We are at the pilot stage. We haven't reached the semi-industrial or industrial stage yet. It's a local technology now,'' he said.
Rowhani said countries that supported the U.S. call would be effectively barred from receiving lucrative contracts for huge energy and development projects in Iran. Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand offered outright support to Washington in negotiations over the IAEA resolution.
``Iran will not treat countries that stood beside America and others equally. We will scrutinize this carefully. In big economic projects, Iran will consider this,'' he said.
-------
Iran Says Won't Shelve Uranium Enrichment Forever
November 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has no intention of scrapping its disputed uranium enrichment program, needed to provide fuel for at least one of eight nuclear reactors it plans to build, a top Iranian official said on Saturday.
Faced with concerted international pressure, Iran agreed last month to allow snap inspections of its nuclear sites and suspend uranium enrichment, which can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors or bomb-grade material.
``Our uranium enrichment program has been suspended voluntarily, temporarily, to build trust,'' Hassan Rohani, secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told a news conference.
``But the issue of ending uranium enrichment is not in question and never has been nor will be,'' added the mid-ranking cleric, who emerged as Iran's key negotiator with European Union countries over the nuclear issue.
The U.N.'s watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Wednesday condemned Iran's 18-year cover-up of sensitive nuclear research, including uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, and said any further serious breaches of non-proliferation obligations would not be tolerated.
Rohani said Iran had nothing to fear from tougher inspections of its nuclear facilities and would do everything it could to help the IAEA give Iran a clean bill of health in its next report, due in February.
``Whatever search, inspection or visit they want to do they can do, because they will come to the conclusion that Iran's nuclear activities are peaceful,'' he said.
FIRST REACTOR TO BE COMPLETED IN 2004
Rohani said Iran's efforts to produce its own fuel for nuclear reactors, including the development of uranium enrichment, were due to the scale of its nuclear energy plans.
``We want to have full control of the fuel cycle in Iran because we want to have eight reactors and we want to provide the fuel for at least one of those,'' he said.
The first of the reactors, each of which will have a capacity of 1,000 MW, is being built with Russian help near the southwestern port city of Bushehr and should be completed by the end of 2004, he said.
Rohani, who noted that Iran's plans to generate nuclear power pre-dated the 1979 Islamic revolution, said Russia had expressed interest in building a second reactor at Bushehr.
Asked about a Reuters report that the IAEA was probing a possible link between Iran and Pakistan after Tehran acknowledged using centrifuge designs that appear identical to ones used in Pakistan's quest for an atom bomb, Rohani emphasized the work of Iran's own nuclear scientists.
``Even if we used people and companies in the past, right now it (Iran's nuclear industry) is domestic... We are now able to build all the parts for centrifuges and manufacture them inside the country,'' he said.
Rohani's role in negotiating the nuclear issue has thrust him into the public spotlight and led to intense media speculation in Iran that he may run for president in 2005.
Rohani, who political analysts say is closely tied to influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, declined to quash the speculation. ``I have not made any decision yet (whether) to stand,'' he said.
-------- korea
Japan, US Send Confusing Signals on Korea
by Tim Shorrock
November 29, 2003
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/shorrock2.html
North Korea's apparent acquisition of nuclear weapons and its admission last year that it had abducted scores of Japanese citizens over the past two decades has transformed the political outlook of many Japanese, driving even cautious diplomats to take positions further to the right of the Bush administration.
That was apparent at a recent Washington seminar on Korea, where Naoyuki Agawa, the minister for public affairs and director of the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Embassy of Japan, publicly endorsed the concept of "regime change" in North Korea as "ultimately the solution" for the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.
"Nobody talks about it, but I think it's obvious," Agawa told the seminar organized by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. "The question is how soon. I don't think anybody's in a hurry to forcibly bring that to take place, and therefore I think that the status quo will continue."
To be sure, Agawa, who is a member of a US-Japan Strategic Study Group, was speaking for himself and not the Japanese government. But his open call for an overthrow of the Kim Jong Il regime in Pyongyang show how deeply North Korea's recent behavior has touched Japan's political psyche.
According to Agawa, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, along with other political parties, began to change their attitude towards the North after it tested a ballistic missile over Japan three years ago and admitted to the kidnapping charges during Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's historic visit to Pyongyang in 2002.
"For the first time in 50 years, Japan has the fear of a clear and present danger," he said. Many ordinary citizens now realize "that one of their loved ones could be abducted from the coast."
He pointed out that Takako Doi of Japan's Socialist Party, a historical ally of North Korea, recently lost her bid for reelection as party chair because she was identified with a faction that had denied the abductions for many years.
To some observers, Agawa's comments illustrate an alarming lurch toward militarism in Japan and show how quickly Japan has forgotten its own legacy in colonial Korea and its role as a US military supply base during the Korean War.
Agawa's views "reflects the Koizumi's government's stand, definitely," said John Feffer, a longtime Korea watcher and the author of North Korea/South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis recently published in the United States by Seven Stories Press. "It's unfortunate there's been such a rise in anti-North Korean feeling in Japan."
Feffer sees a strong link between the government's positions on North Korea and its attempts to change Japan's peace clause in the constitution to allow Japanese military forces to participate in overseas conflicts, such as the US war in Iraq. "The specter of a North Korean attack is the only thing that can uproot Japan's deeply seeded pacifism," he said in a separate interview.
Feffer, who has visited both North and South Korea, believes that calling for regime change in North Korea is irresponsible because "there are no alternatives. They have no idea what would replace it (the Kim Jong IL regime)."
Agawa broached the idea after Ralph Cossa, a Korea specialist and president of the Pacific Forum of the Canter for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu, provided a generally upbeat preview of the upcoming six-party talks on ending the nuclear crisis.
The talks, tentatively scheduled for December, include the United States, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan, all of whom want Pyongyang to stop making weapons, and North Korea, which is seeking guarantees of security and economic aid in exchange for any promise to disarm.
The negotiations have been complicated by deep splits within the Bush administration, which is constantly wavering between a hard-line faction centered at the Pentagon, which would prefer to see the problem disappear through the regime change sought by Agawa, and a more pragmatic faction at the State Department, which sees no choice but to negotiate.
US President George W Bush, in a recent visit to Asia, made it clear that he supports the latter course, which has been doggedly pursued by Secretary of State Colin Powell. He has been represented at all talks with North Korea by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who was Cossa's predecessor at the Pacific Forum before taking his present job.
Cossa lamented as "one of the saddest things in the conduct of US foreign policy" the fact that when Powell announces something as policy, skeptics question whether that is official policy even after Bush endorses it. Instead, many suspect that when John Bolton, a hardliner in the State Department who supports the Pentagon position "opens his mouth, that's when the real George Bush speaks."
"That's the real US credibility problem in Asia," said Cossa. "There's a feeling that US foreign policy is in shambles."
Despite that perception, said Cossa, many officials in both China and Japan, key participants in the talks, believe that their relations with the United States have "never been better." With both countries pressing for an end to North Korea's nuclear program, Cossa said a multilateral deal with North Korea is a likely outcome of the talks.
Realistically, "they will be rewarded," he added. "It's not a question of if, but when." Cossa added that any such agreement must be fully verified, and, as a prerequisite, "South Korea must stand firm with North Korea."
Cossa dismissed liberal critics who say that Bush's hostile attitude toward Pyongyang, as evidenced by his 2001 "axis of evil" speech, was a key factor in the crisis that began a year ago when Kelly confronted North Korea with evidence it was enriching uranium.
"The ultimate goal of pursuing nuclear weapons and the decision to cheat not only on the Agreed Framework but also on the North-South 1992 denuclearization agreement and also on the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments started well before the Bush administration, and we're still dealing with that," he said.
Feffer pointed out that key members of the Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for regime change in North Korea long before the uranium revelations, adding that even the Central Intelligence Agency has no concrete evidence of exactly what that program looks like.
The harsh rhetoric coming out of the Pentagon and the people like Agawa in Japan, Feffer said, is exactly why conservative Republicans in Congress like Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania "want to strike a deal."
Weldon recently led a small, bipartisan delegation of US lawmakers to Pyongyang and returned saying he believed a deal was in sight in which North Korea would end its nuclear program in exchange for written guarantees of its security.
----
N Korea seeks US compo for cutting nuke project
November 29, 2003
(AFP)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1000065.htm
North Korea has demanded compensation from the United States for suspending a deal to build two nuclear power plants, state media has reported quoting the official North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun.
The Korean Peninsular Energy Development Organisation (KEDO) announced a week earlier it would suspend construction of two light-water reactors after judging North Korea had failed to meet necessary conditions to continue the project.
"The decision by the American and other members of the KEDO is a measure of open distrust against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and deals a brutal blow to the negotiated framework of relations between the DPRK and the United States", according to Rodong Sinmun.
KEDO suspended work from December 1.
The multi-billion dollar plan to build two 1,000 megawatt light water nuclear reactors for North Korea, deemed less suitable for weapons grade plutonium production, arose from a 1994 anti-nuclear deal between Washington and Pyongyang.
The US considers the deal, known as the Agreed Framework, ruptured after accusing Pyongyang last year of launching a prohibited program to enrich uranium for weapons production.
Since then Pyongyang has thrown out international inspectors, unfrozen its Yongbyon nuclear plant and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.
Pyongyang's demand comes ahead of a second round of six-way talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis which are scheduled to be held in Beijing next month.
The first round of talks between North Korea, the US, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China broke down in August with Pyongyang dismissing them as "useless"
China, Pyongyang's main ally, is in favour of North Korea dismantling its nuclear program and is acting as a key mediator in the crisis.
----
N. Korea Rejects Japan in Nuke Talks
November 29, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea said Saturday it will not allow Japan to join multilateral talks over its nuclear weapons program if Tokyo insists on discussing the abduction of its citizens by the communist state.
The North's rejection could snarl ongoing efforts to restart six-nation nuclear talks, possible next month. The United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas held the first such talks in Beijing in August.
``If Japan, piggybacking the United States, continues to try to raise the abduction issue at the six-nation talks, we can never be condone its participation,'' the North's state-run KCNA news agency said.
Japan has repeatedly insisted on handling North Korea's abductions as part of the six-nation talks. North Korea accuses Japan of abusing the negotiations, saying the issue has been settled.
``This is an impure intention of the United States to create a hurdle by raising the issue again as during the past Beijing six-nation talks,'' said KCNA, monitored by South Korea's national Yonhap news agency.
Preparing for new round of talks, South Korea's Assistant Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck said early this week that Seoul, Tokyo and Washington were drafting an agreement to sign with North Korea.
Lee said the three allies plan to fine-tune the draft with China.
He did not elaborate, but Japan's Kyodo news agency has said the accord would include North's agreement to abandon its nuclear program, while the five other countries promise to provide a security guarantee.
No date has been set for the second six-nation talks, but delegations are aiming for mid-December.
The kidnapping of Japanese during the 1970s and 1980s by North Korea to train its spies has been a major sticking point between the Asian neighbors, stalling efforts to set up diplomatic relations.
The Japanese public was outraged when North Korea Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted during a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September 2002 that his nation's agents had systematically kidnapped Japanese decades ago. They were reportedly forced to teach the Japanese language and culture to North Korean intelligence officers.
North Korea has allowed the return of five kidnapped Japanese. But the abductees' children -- and a suspected deserter from the U.S. Army who is married to one the five -- remain in the communist nation.
The nuclear dispute flared in October 2002, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted running a secret nuclear program in violation of international agreements.
-------- us politics
Quiet Power
On Iraq and Elsewhere, Many Say Cheney Wields New Vice-Presidential Clout
By Ted Koppel
ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/Politics/dick_cheney_031129-1.html
Nov. 29 - Though Vice President Dick Cheney may stand discreetly in the background, rarely seen or heard from in public, don't underestimate him.
"His power is unparalleled in the history of the republic, frankly, for that position," said John Hulsman, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank.
"Everybody knows that the vice president is going to fundamentally affect the foreign policy of the country," Hulsman added. "[When the vice president's office calls] you better get down there and you better wipe your hands on the side of your jacket on the way in the door."
Analysts believe the secretive and conservative Cheney, who did not speak to Nightline for this story, was a driving force behind the Bush administration's aggressive approach to war in Iraq, a role that eventually might cost him.
But for now, critics and adversaries in Washington are extremely reluctant to talk publicly about Cheney.
"I think he has this mystique, whether it's justified or not, of being a very tough guy, and a very Machiavellian guy, and a very bare-knuckles fighter," said Richard Clarke, who worked with Cheney after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a National Security Council official and is now an ABCNEWS consultant.
"I don't know whether any of that is true. I've never really seen very much of that, but that's the mystique," Clarke said. "I wouldn't want to put it to the test. I never did. I think he enjoys the reputation that you don't want to cross Dick Cheney."
Bush Confidant
The vice president's job has gained an enormous amount of prestige since John Nance Garner, who occupied the office under President Roosevelt in the 1930s, famously described it as "not worth a warm bucket of spit." But even Al Gore, the most powerful and influential vice president until Cheney came along, was hampered by the perception that afflicts most vice presidents - that they all want to be president.
Cheney ran an abortive presidential campaign in 1996, but might never have been elected to the No. 2 position without Bush. Paradoxically, that may be the very thing that gives him his clout as a trusted adviser.
"There's an inherent tension in having a vice president who's politically ambitious," Hulsman said. "If you're president, you have to factor that in when you ask his advice. I think most of us know that due to his age and health, that Vice President Cheney is highly unlikely to seek the presidential nomination. So he has no axes to grind.
"The president, I think, can be very confident about just saying, 'For the good of the country, Dick, what do you think about what's going on here?' " Hulsman added. "And I think that's really made him an honest broker in an administration full of very strong personalities that often have very different ideological touchstones."
But if the term "honest broker" suggests that Cheney is a middle-of-the-roader, a moderate without strong ideological opinions and goals of his own, it may not be an apt description, given his record during five terms in Congress.
"He had a 100 percent conservative voting record on cutting spending, cutting taxes, on social issues," said conservative commentator Robert Novak.
Ideological Distortion?
A senior military official, who asked not to be identified, told Nightline that Cheney, a former defense secretary, was extremely selective in picking out intelligence on Iraq that supported his views, and that his staff's reports were distorted and ideological.
Another source told ABCNEWS that before Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out that case against Saddam Hussein in front of the U.N. General Assembly last January, he was provided with a draft of what would have been a four-hour-long speech. At least one major section of that draft, the part dealing with terrorist organizations and their relationship to Saddam, was prepared by the vice president's office.
Powell personally took the speech over to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and vetted it, line by line, with intelligence analysts over a 3 1/2-day period. Little, if anything, contained in the section on terrorism could be confirmed. So Powell dumped it.
The story may illustrate ongoing tensions between the vice president's office and the State Department, and between the vice president's office and the CIA.
"If you go back to the first Gulf War, the CIA told the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, that there was no Iraqi nuclear program," Clarke said. "After the war, when the U.N. inspectors went in, they found an enormous facility, the size of half of the District of Columbia, that was a nuclear research and development facility. The CIA didn't know about it. It wasn't bombed, therefore, during the war. And the documents that the U.N. seized revealed that they were probably about a year away from a nuclear explosion."
Before the 2003 Iraq invasion, Cheney showed up at CIA headquarters on several occasions to meet with CIA analysts, an unusual move for a vice president, Vince Cannistraro, the CIA's former chief of counterterrorism, told Nightline. But rather than focusing on the existing intelligence, Cheney often pressed analysts on what the agency hadn't found or wasn't reporting.
"The whole emphasis," Cannistraro said, "was, 'We are sure that there are weapons of mass destruction. We are sure that Saddam is acquiring a nuclear capability. Why isn't your reporting showing this? We're getting reporting independently from the intelligence community that convinces us that that's the case. You're not providing any corroboration for that.' ... The weapons of mass destruction analysts at CIA took these visits as intimidation, as pressure."
Defining Moment
However, it was Cheney's job to find out all about any weapons of mass destruction. Months before 9/11, President Bush asked Cheney to coordinate the government's response to potential chemical, biological or nuclear attacks by terrorists.
The attack on the World Trade Center became a defining moment in Cheney's vice presidency. Bush was out of town when the planes hit, and Cheney took charge at the White House.
Clarke, who was present as the National Security Council's point person on terrorism, said Cheney acted quickly, even getting authority to shoot down a hijacked jet that later crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
"I picked up the phone from the situation room and asked the vice president, 'We have fighters aloft now. We need authority to shoot down hostile aircraft.' And I thought that would take forever to get that authority," Clarke said. "The vice president got on the phone to the president, got back to me, I would say within two minutes, and said, 'Do it.' "
Cheney also was one of the first officials to go public after 9/11 to talk about what needed to be done.
"We've got to spend time in the shadows, in the intelligence world," Cheney said on Sept. 16, 2001. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there. And we have to operate in that arena."
"He was one of the first to realize that Sept. 11 may, in fact, not be just the worst thing that could have happened," said Ivo Daalder, who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
"It could have been much worse if the terrorists had somehow been able to acquire weapons of mass destruction," Daalder said. "So this marriage between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, which became a linchpin of the Bush administration's foreign policy, really by late 2001, and then announced publicly by the president in his 'axis of evil' speech in January of 2002, Cheney was one of the people who pushed this early on."
Three Against One
Daalder, who has just written a book on the Bush administration's foreign policy, said aspects of the vice president's office work differently under Cheney.
"What's new is this vice president has his own National Security Council staff, which is about, probably, as large as John Kennedy's National Security Council staff," Daalder said. "They write their own analyses. They do their own briefing papers. They are putting together their own views of what the policy should be for the vice president. So that what you have is that inside the White House, you have two sets of staffs and two sets of option papers, and two sets of briefing papers, ultimately, for a decision that is going to be made by one person, the president of the United States."
A former top official in the Bush administration said Cheney gets two whacks at every issue. He's in the interagency meetings where policy is considered. Then he is usually the last person to talk to the president privately before a decision is made.
Plus, some say Cheney almost always has backup in the interagency meetings.
"One often hears from people in the State Department, for example, that when they come into a meeting of the National Security Council staff, that they have a sense that the vote is 3-1 just from the beginning," Daalder said, "with the NSC, the vice president and the secretary of defense already lined up on one set of policy, and the State Department on another set of policies."
Surprise Partner
It was not always clear that Cheney would work so well with Bush.
On the campaign trail, the two sometimes seemed years apart. The youthful, wisecracking Texas governor genuinely appeared to enjoy pressing the flesh. Cheney, though only five years older than Bush, seemed more stolid, resigned to campaigning with little evidence of enthusiasm.
To some, Bush's selection of Cheney came out of the blue.
"It seemed so astounding that some people thought it was a ruse," Novak said. "In my own opinion, President Bush, then-Gov. Bush, saw his own limitations. He knew very little about Washington, hadn't been in politics for very long. And instead of a superstar media celebrity, he needed somebody who really knew where the bodies were buried in Washington and in politics. So, I think it was a very smart move."
However, some aren't sure sticking with Cheney will seem so smart. If things don't improve in Iraq, historian Douglas Brinkley wonders if Cheney might be seen as a liability, perhaps even a scapegoat.
"I think Dick Cheney, while on one hand has been the most influential vice president in American history, has now become a bit of a political albatross for the sitting president," Brinkley said. "If the war in Iraq is not going well, and postwar Iraq is not gelling, that we're getting Americans killed all the time, somebody's going to have to be sacrificed on the altar."
Rather than have Cheney campaign "in what could very well be a referendum on the war in Iraq and postwar Iraq," Brinkley said, "I think you will see [Cheney] stepping aside, staying on as a senior adviser, and filling in as one of the great speakers for the conservatives for Bush. But I think you're going to have to have somebody more vigorous on the campaign trail."
----
Senators Urge U.N. Role in Iraq Lawmakers Visit Troops in Baghdad
By Jim Krane
Associated Press
Saturday, November 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20023-2003Nov28.html
BAGHDAD, Nov. 28 -- A day after President Bush's surprise visit, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) arrived here Friday in less dramatic style, saying it was not too late to bring the United Nations back to Iraq.
A U.S. soldier, meanwhile, was killed when guerrillas shelled a military base in the northern city of Mosul.
Clinton and Reed said U.N. participation would provide legitimacy, easing the political burden and expense to the United States of administering Iraq.
"I'm a big believer that we ought to internationalize this, but it will take a big change in our administration's thinking," the former first lady said. "I don't see that it's forthcoming."
Both senators cautioned that the Bush administration's new plans to speed up the transfer of power to an Iraqi government were risky, given the political and social upheaval in the country.
Clinton said the main purpose of her trip was to show support for U.S. troops.
"I wanted to come to Iraq to let the troops know about the great job they're doing," she said.
Iraqis expressed different opinions about the significance of Thursday's 21/2-hour visit by Bush, which was organized in such secrecy that even members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council who greeted the president were not told about it in advance.
"We cannot consider Bush's arrival at Baghdad International Airport yesterday as a visit to Iraq," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council. "He did not meet with ordinary Iraqis. Bush was only trying to boost the morale of his troops."
A soldier inside the heavily fortified U.S. base in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad, died on Thanksgiving from a gunshot wound. Military officials have refused to describe the circumstances of the shooting.
Another soldier died Friday when four mortar shells pounded a base used by the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul.
In recent weeks, Iraqi insurgents have stepped up attacks in Mosul, which used to be relatively calm.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
NATO
May Broaden Its Role in Afghanistan
November 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/europe/29NATO.html
BRUSSELS, Nov. 28 - NATO agreed in principle on Friday to take command of military-backed reconstruction teams in five Afghan towns as part of a drive to stabilize the country further.
But the alliance, which is struggling to provide enough helicopters and intelligence officers even for the existing force of 5,700 troops in Kabul, the capital, said its mission would be expanded only if military resources were available.
"At the moment, we are establishing what number of troops would be required," said the secretary general, Lord Robertson.
Military planners say that if NATO undertook to protect more projects outside Kabul, it would have to deploy up to 3,000 more soldiers and set up a forward operating base, perhaps in neighboring Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, to protect them.
NATO took command of the International Security Assistance Force in August and set its sights on providing security in areas outside Kabul where Taliban militias are back on the offensive and warlords are thriving on a resurgent opium trade.
Until now NATO had agreed only to take under its wing a very large German-led reconstruction project in Kunduz, in the north, and to deploy troops temporarily outside Kabul to oversee elections and a disarmament program.
-------- arms
Nations Endorse Treaty to Clean Up Postwar Munitions
By Richard Waddington
Reuters
Saturday, November 29, 2003; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19866-2003Nov28.html
GENEVA, Nov. 28 -- More than 90 countries, including the United States, tentatively agreed Friday to clean up the munitions left by armed conflicts in an effort to reduce the huge number of postwar civilian casualties.
Under a treaty approved by member states of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), countries must remove or tell others how to find the unexploded cluster and mortar bombs, missiles and other weaponry of future wars.
There is no agreement on the exact toll taken by explosive remnants of war, the technical term for the lethal debris, but activists say the number of victims injured, maimed and killed runs into the tens of thousands each year.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 24 countries and territories are strewn with abandoned ordnance, is probably the worst-affected region, but the threat to civilians is also great in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
The new rules will be legally binding on signatory states, although there are no clear penalties for not complying. The protocol to the CCW convention comes into force when it has been ratified by 20 member states, a process that could take two years.
It is the first time that the Bush administration, which has expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of international arms control treaties, has joined a new global weapons pact.
"Everybody wanted it to be legally binding and we did not want to stand in the way," said Edward Cummings, head of the U.S. delegation. He added that no decision had been taken yet on whether Washington would actually sign the treaty.
The pact is the latest international attempt to reduce the suffering of civilians in war. The 1997 Ottawa Convention outlawed the use of land mines.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, a leading advocate of the new treaty, praised Friday's action. "The treaty is an important recognition that states are responsible for eliminating this serious threat to civilians in the aftermath of war," said Red Cross Vice President Jacques Foster.
But some non-governmental organizations criticized the vagueness of some of the wording.
Under terms of the treaty, states would have to clear areas they control, keep records of ordnance used in order to speed its recovery, warn civilians of the dangers, and provide technical, material and financial help when they cannot do the work themselves.
Although the rules might be difficult to enforce, particularly with rebel groups, diplomats said they hoped countries would feel morally obligated to comply.
As with land mines, the treaty is not retroactive, so there is no obligation to clean up the remnants of past conflicts. But the land-mine ban triggered a flood of money from donors, and the Dutch official who coordinated work on the new protocol, Chris Sanders, said he hoped there would be a similar response this time.
-------- business
Two Senators Seek to Postpone Boeing Deal for Tankers
November 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/business/29boeing.html
Two United States senators urged the Defense Department yesterday to postpone a contract with the Boeing Company for 100 air-refueling tankers in light of the recent dismissals of two top Boeing executives.
In a letter to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Peter Fitzgerald, Republican of Illinois, said "it would be irresponsible" for the Pentagon to go ahead without a full review into whether the Boeing executives, who were dismissed because of what the company called unethical behavior, improperly affected negotiations in the multibillion-dollar deal.
The letter also pointed to internal Boeing e-mail messages about the deal, which seem to suggest that Boeing was getting a good deal at the expense of taxpayers, the senators wrote.
The agreement, in which the Air Force would lease 20 Boeing 767 tankers and buy 80 more, was authorized as part of the defense appropriations bill signed by President Bush on Monday. But Boeing and the Pentagon still need to complete details of the contract.
Mr. McCain and Mr. Fitzgerald have long been critics of earlier proposals for obtaining the tankers.
The initial agreement called for the Air Force to lease all 100 planes. The compromise to lease 20 planes and buy 80 is expected to cut as much as $5 billion off the $21 billion cost.
Mr. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that the deal might be worth looking into, in light of the recent dismissals. But the Defense Department has not yet received the senators' letter and could not comment, said a spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Venable.
Not only would a review further delay the long-awaited deal, but it also comes at a tough time for the 767 jet production line.
Orders from airlines for the widebody jet have dried up and Boeing's backlog of jets to be built dropped to 26 as of October, according to Boeing's Web site. Production on the first of the tanker jets is expected to begin in January.
The latest twist in the two-year-long effort to supply the 767 tankers to the Air Force stems from Boeing's dismissal on Monday of its chief financial officer, Michael Sears, and a vice president, Darleen Druyun.
Boeing said the two violated company policies by discussing a job for Ms. Druyun at Boeing while she was still employed by the Pentagon and was in a position to influence Boeing contracts, including the 767 deal. Boeing also contends the two tried to cover up their misconduct.
-------- china
Beijing Softens Its Stance Against New Legislation in Taiwan
November 29, 2003
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/asia/29TAIW.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Nov. 28 - Beijing shifted its response on Friday to new Taiwanese legislation on national referendums, expressing concern about the law and repeating previous warnings to this island against seeking formal independence but stopping short of any threats.
The official New China News Agency had initially posted a commentary on its Internet site noting that the referendum legislation removed "the imminent danger of Taiwanese independence."
By Friday evening, a separate brief statement was added, quoting a spokesman for the Chinese government's Taiwan Affairs Office. "We are deeply concerned about relevant things concerning `referendum legislation' in Taiwan and are paying close attention to the development of the issue," he said, adding no specifics.
The statement closed with a warning that any attempt to separate Taiwan from China "will not be tolerated absolutely." But in contrast with three warnings earlier this week of the possible use of force if a broad referendum law passed, the statement made no explicit threats.
Beijing has regarded Taiwan as a renegade province ever since the Nationalists lost China's civil war to the Communists in 1949 and retreated here.
The return on Friday to vague, albeit critical statements, was read by experts here as a sign of easing tension. A Chinese statement earlier this week had referred to Taiwan as a "shen sheng," or sacred, part of China, a term seldom used in recent years and viewed in Taiwan as a signal of great anger and intransigence in Beijing.
"I had goose bumps coming up when I saw it," said Su Chi, an influential Nationalist Party adviser on Taiwan Straits issues and a former minister for relations with China.
President Chen Shui-bian and his Democratic Progressive Party backed away on Thursday afternoon from previous demands by the party's pro-independence wing for broad legislation authorizing the use of referendums to pursue changes in the Constitution and sovereignty. In the end, the legislature approved a narrow version supported by the Nationalist Party and People First Party, which favor eventual political reunification with the mainland.
Politicians here said in interviews on Friday that a new consensus seemed to be emerging that the presidential campaign now getting started should be fought more on economic issues than on the potentially inflammatory sovereignty issue.
The more moderate tone follows several strong statements from American officials to Taiwanese reporters in Washington in the last week that the Bush administration does not want a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
A senior Taiwanese government official spoke Friday of an acute wariness of angering the United States by allowing any crisis to develop with China when the Bush administration was already preoccupied with Iraq and North Korea.
--------
Taiwan Vote Met With Caution
China Again Expresses Concern About Possible Referendums
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 29, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19936-2003Nov28.html
BEIJING, Nov. 28 -- China said on Friday it was "gravely concerned" about new legislation in Taiwan giving citizens the right to initiate referendums and was watching for any sign the measure could lead to a vote on independence.
China has warned that even holding a referendum on a domestic matter would be a dangerous step for Taiwan, and on Wednesday it threatened a "strong reaction" if the island adopted a referendum law that set no limits on what issues the public could decide.
The version of the referendum bill passed Thursday night by Taiwan makes it difficult but not impossible to call an island-wide vote on independence. State-run media in China quoted some Taiwan affairs experts as saying the "imminent danger" had passed, but a statement issued by the government's Taiwan Affairs Office was more cautious.
"We are gravely concerned about the relevant situation regarding the 'referendum bill' in the Taiwan district, and closely following the development of this situation," it said. "We are resolutely opposed to anybody using the 'referendum bill' to engage in 'Taiwan independence' " activities.
China considers Taiwan part of its territory, and has threatened to attack the self-governing island of 23 million if it declares independence or postpones reunification indefinitely.
The Chinese government's guarded response to the referendum legislation may be related to conflicting reports about its contents. The text published Friday did not include a key provision prohibiting referendums on changes to Taiwan's official name -- the Republic of China -- its national flag or its claim to represent the mainland.
Beijing has said such changes would amount to a declaration of independence and specifically demanded that any referendum law in Taiwan prohibit votes on those issues. Taiwanese officials said Thursday night that opposition lawmakers inserted such a ban into the legislation, but opposition party officials said Friday they had long ago deleted the clause from the amendments they offered.
Still, the legislation includes provisions that would make it extremely hard to amend Taiwan's constitution, which would be necessary to change the island's name, flag or the definition of its territory. For example, a referendum on a constitutional amendment cannot be initiated by citizens or the government but only by a three-fourths majority in the legislature, which would be difficult to achieve on a subject as divisive as the island's relationship with China. In addition, half of all eligible voters in Taiwan, not just those who turn out, would have to approve any constitutional change.
"The people of Taiwan should have a right to decide their future . . . so under this law, it's possible to change the name and the flag," said Su Chi, an influential adviser in the opposition Nationalist Party and a former minister of mainland affairs. "But the threshold is so high that it's quite unlikely those issues would be included in a referendum."
Su said he hoped Beijing would find the legislation acceptable despite the absence of the specific limits. "I'm crossing my fingers. I hope they can see democracy as it is," he said. "I hope they will understand that there are a lot of other limits."
Taiwan experts in China expressed concern about another provision in the legislation that allows the government to call a "defensive," or emergency, referendum on national security issues if the island's sovereignty is threatened by outside forces. The provision does not say what constitutes a threat nor does it say whether independence is a national security issue.
The legislation also allows citizens or the legislature to call a referendum on "major policy" without saying whether that could include issues related to Taiwan's relations with China. Any citizen-initiated referendum would require signatures from 5 percent of Taiwan's voting electorate -- about 800,000 signatures -- and approval from a legislative commission.
Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, who favors a broad referendum law and an island-wide vote on a new constitution in 2006, said Friday night he would try to remove "unnecessary obstacles" placed in the legislation by the opposition parties.
Cabinet spokesman Lin Chia-lung said the president might return the bill to parliament, but was worried the delay would make it harder for his allies to gather the signatures needed to put questions on the ballot by the March presidential election. Chen wants to hold three referendums in March on issues that would increase voter turnout among his supporters, including proposals to stop building a nuclear power plant, cut the size of the legislature and seek entry into the World Health Organization.
His rival in the presidential race, Lien Chan, had previously opposed holding any referendums, arguing that it would anger Beijing. But he reversed course this month after dropping in the polls, submitting a milder referendum bill.
Lien is now expected to propose referendums on five issues to mobilize his own supporters, on topics such as the national debt and educational reform.
Special correspondent Tim Culpan in Taipei contributed to this report.
--------
China Breaks Off Ties With Kiritabi
November 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Taiwan-Kiribati.html
BEIJING (AP) -- China said it broke diplomatic relations Saturday with Kiribati after the tiny Pacific island nation opened ties with rival Taiwan.
The announcement was a setback in Beijing's diplomatic rivalry with Taiwan, which has been ruled separately since 1949 but which the mainland claims as its territory.
Beijing has used its economic influence to isolate the island, pressuring others to break ties with Taipei and recognize the communist government as the ruler of all of China and Taiwan.
Beijing's ambassador to Kiribati, Ma Shuxue, delivered a complaint to its government saying the decision to recognize Taiwan ``flagrantly violated'' their diplomatic agreement, Xinhua said.
The statement accused Kiribati of ``creating `two Chinas''' and said its decision ``severely wounded the friendship of the Chinese and Kiribati peoples,'' the report said.
Taiwan has official relations with only 27 countries, mostly small nations in Africa and Latin America. However, many have extensive informal and commercial ties with the island, one of the world's most important trading powers.
Kiribati is a group of low-lying islands and coral atolls in the South Pacific with about 100,000 inhabitants. Before independence from Britain in 1979, it was known as the Gilbert Islands.
Following the decision to switch recognition, China began dismantling a satellite-tracking station in the islands that it had said played a key role in its civilian space program.
But Beijing had held off for weeks on a decision to abandon relations, possibly due to the strategic importance of its monitoring station. There has long been speculation that China used the base to follow tests at a U.S. missile range at Kwajalein atoll in the nearby Marshall Islands.
-------- europe
3 Arrested in Europe Are Tied to Recruitment of Iraq Fighters
November 29, 2003
By DESMOND BUTLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/europe/29TERR.html
LONDON, Nov. 28 - The Italian and German police arrested three North Africans on Friday as part of an investigation into a European-based network that the police said had been recruiting fighters for Iraq.
Two other suspects were being sought, the Italian authorities said.
The arrests provided new evidence of an increasingly organized movement of fighters from Europe to Iraq.
Prosecutors in Milan said they believed that people recruited in Italy by members of this group were responsible for suicide attacks in Iraq, according to Italian press reports.
The German police arrested an Algerian, Abderazek Mahdjoub, in Hamburg on an Italian warrant. The Italian police described Mr. Mahdjoub, 30, as a major operative who recruited Muslim fighters in Europe and arranged their travel to war zones.
In a related arrest, the Italian police detained a Tunisian man, Bouyahia Maher Ben Abdelaziz, 33, and a Moroccan, Jamal al-Maghrebi, 20.
In recent months, European and American intelligence services have expressed concerns about evidence that militants from an international network that includes Al Qaeda have been working to exploit Muslim anger over the occupation of Iraq to attract new recruits and open a new terrorist front.
The Italian press reports said investigators had linked the network to Al Tawhid, a terrorist group loosely connected to Al Qaeda and led by Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi.
Prosecutors in Milan said Al Tawhid used Northern Italy as a base to recruit volunteers.
Another confessed associate of Al Tawhid, Shadi Abdullah, was sentenced in Germany on Wednesday for involvement with at least eight others in a plot to bomb Jewish targets in Germany. Mr. Abdullah received a reduced sentence of four years in prison because he provided crucial information to investigators on Al Tawhid activity, the authorities said.
Mr. Mahdjoub, who was arrested on Friday, came to the attention of German investigators when he was expelled from Syria in March along with three other Algerian men after an apparent attempt to travel to Iraq to fight American-led forces. He was returned to Germany.
In July, he was arrested in Germany in connection with a Spanish-based terrorist cell that the police believed was planning an attack on a tourist location in Spain, but was released for lack of evidence.
Mr. Mahdjoub attended the mosque frequented by members of the Hamburg cell involved in the Sept. 11 attacks and had some contact with them, according to German police sources.
The Italian police say Mr. Mahdjoub led a cell based mostly in northern Italy and was nicknamed "the Sheik" by other members.
-------- iraq
U.S. Says Iraqi Police May Have Coordinated Attacks on G.I.s
November 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- There is no evidence that al-Qaida terrorists have taken part in the long string of attacks on U.S. or Iraqi targets, but some U.S.-trained Iraqi police appear to have coordinated some of those assaults, the top U.S. military official in Iraq said Saturday.
U.S. military officials are concerned that some attacks on Americans have been coordinated by a few of the numerous Iraqi civilians hired by the U.S. military, who may glean intelligence on troop movements and travels of high-ranking officers, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told reporters at the Baghdad Convention Center.
``Clearly those are concerns we have. We try to do the vetting (of Iraqi employees) as close as we can,'' he said. ``There have been instances when police were coordinating attacks against the coalition and against the people.''
He said the insurgency was becoming particularly bloody for Iraqi civilians. Guerrillas launched more than 150 attacks on Iraqi civilian and police targets, killing scores during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended last week.
Sanchez also said the United States is boosting the number of infantrymen in Iraq and moving from a force based on tanks and heavy armored vehicles to one specializing in urban raids.
A new phase in the Iraq war, known as Iraqi Freedom II, would begin as current forces are rotated out of Iraq and replaced by new units, including several thousand U.S. Marines, Sanchez said.
``We are going to change the composition of our forces,'' Sanchez said. ``We'll have more infantry. We're moving to a more mobile force, one that has the right blend of light and heavy.''
Sanchez said he saw no need for an overall increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, and the number of troops would decrease as transportation, logistics and communications personnel are sent home.
The general said some support troops are being replaced by civilian contractors, in the case of transportation and logistics. The military also is starting to use commercial sources for communications, he said, thus allowing more soldiers to depart.
Washington currently has 130,000 troops in Iraq.
The Department of Defense had announced this month that the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq would drop to about 105,000 after troop rotations that start in January are completed in May. But the additional marines appear to bump up that total to 110,000.
``There's no way we're going to put this mission at risk in terms of combat power,'' Sanchez said, explaining the need for the marines, whose normal tasks tend toward invasions, not occupation duties.
``What we're in search of is a very mobile, very flexible, lethal force that can accomplish its mission. Those terms are dictated by the enemy.''
--------
SPYING
U.S. Is Worried Foe Is Tracking Targets in Iraq
November 29, 2003
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/middleeast/29INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - Bush administration officials are increasingly concerned that anti-American forces in Iraq are using simple but effective means to monitor activities and coordinate attacks against the American military, civilian administrators and visiting dignitaries.
As evidence, Pentagon and military officials cite a recent raid by troops of the 101st Airborne Division during which they broke up an apparent plot to assassinate an American colonel. The would-be assailants, they said, had observed and charted the Army officer's daily routine - including his jogging route and schedule of public appearances - to plan their attack.
Evidence gathered by investigators also sheds new light on the rocket attack that struck the Rashid Hotel during the overnight visit to Baghdad by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, in late October. Military intelligence officers have reported that the hotel staff was infiltrated over the summer by at least one former member of Saddam Hussein's secret service.
Although Pentagon, military and intelligence officials caution that some of the evidence remains circumstantial while investigations continue, these concerns help explain the extraordinary secrecy surrounding President Bush's surprise visit to Iraq on Thanksgiving Day.
American troops already vary their routes and routines, officials said, and are being encouraged to do it more. But Baghdad's infrastructure of roads and secure places to stay is limited, making it difficult to obscure actions that might allow an observant resistance to plan attacks.
"It does not require a very robust intelligence capability to pick up from time to time the presence of `high value' American officials," said a Bush administration official with access to intelligence reports from Iraq. "It is hard to shield the large security presence that identifies senior officials in Iraq."
Investigators are reviewing recent attacks on American convoys hit by improvised explosives to see whether the routes had become so routine as to make them obvious targets. They are also examining the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August, in which the explosives-packed vehicle detonated adjacent to the United Nations special representative's window.
American officials say operatives loyal to the ousted Hussein government do not require high-technology eavesdropping devices to gather substantial amounts of information on the activities of American officials. "Given the size of our footprint, you can't overestimate the amount of information you can gather just standing on a street corner and watching," one official said.
Mr. Hussein's government operated a Stalinist-style domestic security apparatus to control Iraqis, so there is no shortage of agents skilled in traditional surveillance techniques.
In the case of the Rashid, which had become home to Americans and other foreigners working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, "the hotel was penetrated," according to a Pentagon official.
Military intelligence officers discovered that, at least as early as summer, the Rashid's catering service had on its staff a former member of Mr. Hussein's intelligence agency, officials in Washington and Iraq said.
But officials noted that given the large Iraqi staff at the hotel, valuable information could just as easily have been gathered by listening to coffee house gossip, or by watching streets around the hotel for unusually large convoys.
Much of the intelligence-gathering by supporters of the former government falls into this category of waiting, watching and listening in order to plan attacks, officials said.
"It is not unusual for hostile factions to engage in both passive and active collection against key coalition leaders," a military intelligence officer in Iraq said. "As such, we've received indications that some of our key personnel have been observed and identified for possible targeting."
American officials in Washington and Iraq offer differing assessments on whether the multiple-rocket launcher set up outside the Rashid's security wall during the visit by Mr. Wolfowitz was specifically timed for that. One Army officer was killed, and more than a dozen Americans and other foreigners were wounded.
The launcher itself had taken weeks to construct, military officials said. While Mr. Wolfowitz's visit was a closely held secret before his departure, "I cannot believe that former regime loyalists were unaware the deputy was staying there," a senior administration official said. "He had been in the country for a day or two, which was widely publicized. He hosted an event the night before in the hotel, and did not leave. He travels with not a small footprint."
Military investigators say no suspects have yet been detained who could confirm that the attack was timed to the visit. "Would it have been possible for them to know, and to target him? Yes," a military officer in Iraq said. "Do I think it is likely they were targeting him specifically? No."
But recent raids have uncovered other evidence about the Rashid attack. By comparing technical fingerprints of the rockets, like welding and wiring, military officers are convinced that the same group that carried out the Rashid attack was also responsible for similar attacks a week ago.
In the recent attacks, rockets were fired at the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels and the Oil Ministry from four donkey carts disguised as hay wagons.
Army officers in Iraq stressed that a significant number of attacks had been thwarted by the American military and Iraqi security services, by American intelligence agencies and by information provided by Iraqi civilians.
The American-led alliance's intelligence system "continues to get better every day in theater, and we receive credible information which assists us in pre-empting potential attacks against our soldiers," a military officer said.
Investigators also continue to scrutinize the Aug. 19 attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people, including the special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The explosives were detonated next to the window of Mr. de Mello's office, investigators say, leading some to believe that the suicide bombers knew specifically where the senior United Nations official worked inside the building.
"You can certainly speculate and come to that conclusion, but no absolute determination has been made," an American official said.
Military intelligence officers also have realized that improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.'s, have been placed along routes frequented by American military convoys. "If you look at the pattern of I.E.D.'s, they go where we go," a military officer in Iraq said. "They watch us. They migrate with the herd."
--------
NEWS ANALYSIS
Iraq Exit Plan: New Obstacles
November 29, 2003
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/middleeast/29DIPL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - Two weeks ago, the Bush administration settled on an "exit strategy" for Iraq in which the United States committed itself to establishing self-rule there by next summer - well ahead of its previous schedule and just as the American presidential election season will be getting under way.
But the administration's initial plan for that transfer of authority has fallen apart, raising doubts about whether the June 30 deadline for ending the American occupation authority in Baghdad is still feasible.
At stake is whether the administration can reconcile President Bush's desire for a speedy transfer of sovereignty to a friendly Iraqi government next year, with the need to have some sort of electoral process to ensure that government's validity in the eyes of Iraqis and the rest of the world.
The "process," agreed upon two weeks ago, amounted to less than an election. Instead, it was an elaborate arrangement to hold caucuses throughout Iraq and give the Iraqi Governing Council considerable oversight.
The administration's quandary sharpened this week when Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, laid down his own definition of a legitimate government. Nothing less than an election was acceptable, he declared - a demand the United States and the Governing Council are now having to weigh.
Other Shiite leaders supported the Ayatollah's formulation, knowing that Shiites - who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population and are better organized than other groups - would be the likely beneficiaries of an early national election.
The fundamental question now is whether the administration has left itself enough time to put in place a government that can survive, be seen as legitimate, and is acceptable to the United States.
"We're boxed in," said an administration official. "We have a highly difficult set of issues to deal with here. We can't settle for just anything that gets us out of Iraq."
American policy makers say it is not just the American election timetable that requires quick action to transfer power.
In Mr. Bush's Thanksgiving Day pledge in Baghdad, he vowed that American military forces "will stay until the job is done." But hostility to the American occupation is growing so fast, they say, that if Iraq does not become self-governing quickly, attacks on American forces could increase.
Running counter to the pressure to speed up the transfer is the concern that any future government of Iraq be seen as something that Iraqis have chosen. The 24-member Governing Council, handpicked by the American occupation, is not currently seen that way by most Iraqis.
Administration officials say that a national election is impractical in the absence of up-to-date voter rolls, but that a system of provincial and local elections, town meetings and caucuses might be acceptable to the Shiites.
One step the United States opposes is establishing the Governing Council as an interim government of Iraq.
Dominated by former exiles, the council is held in especially low regard by Sunnis in the center of Iraq, where much of the anti-American violence is taking place.
American experts say Sunnis are feeling marginalized by the American occupation because their main sources of power - the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein and the Sunni-dominated army and security forces - have been disbanded. Finding Sunni tribal and community leaders to work with has been difficult, occupation officials say.
"If we turn things over next July 1 to whatever slapdash conglomeration that is out there - let's say the Governing Council plus some others, which is what they want - you could have a civil war in Iraq come next November," an administration official said.
American policy makers also worry that, although elections are the most legitimate path to self-government, a vote held too quickly could be dangerous as well as impractical.
Some American policy makers fear that a nationwide ballot right now would bring out the most radical elements in the electorate, ready and able to exploit growing Iraqi resentments toward any candidates seen as favored by the United States.
Officials close to L. Paul Bremer III and his aides at the American-led occupation authority say his concerns about these problems led to the initial American decision to postpone the transfer of sovereignty to the end of 2004 at the earliest.
"It would be a disaster to have an election whose legitimacy was contested," said Noah Feldman, an assistant professor of law at New York University, who was a constitutional law adviser to Mr. Bremer earlier this year.
"Nobody wants Palm Beach County in Baghdad," Mr. Feldman added. "Historical experience also suggests that quick elections under postwar conditions elect people not dedicated to democratization. Simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected."
Suddenly, earlier this month, that view shifted at the most senior levels of the administration in Washington. Mr. Bremer was summoned back for consultations, and a plan was worked out with the Iraqi Governing Council for what he called "a transparent, participatory democratic process" to choose a government.
"It was a document that looked like some treaty between the United States and the Indians in 1882," said Rami G. Khouri, executive editor of The Daily Star in Beirut. "To think they put this thing together in a couple of White House meetings with everyone in a panic mode, it's just humiliating."
Not only was that plan short of an election. But administration officials acknowledge that the Iraqi Governing Council is itself in some disarray.
While in Baghdad on Thanksgiving, Mr. Bush met four council members. But some in the Bush administration, harboring a certain distrust of the council, suspect its members of trying to disrupt any transition, and hoping to stay in power.
The most likely thing to happen now, an administration official said, will be for Mr. Bremer to try to broker a deal with the Shiite leadership for a system of at least partial elections to choose the new Iraqi government before June 30.
"It'll be hard to hold an election, but not impossible," said Mr. Feldman, the law professor. "But there is no solution here that does not have drawbacks."
--------
November Deadliest Month in Iraq
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 29, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19749-2003Nov28.html
More U.S. troops have died in Iraq in November than in any month since the war began in March, according to Defense Department figures.
With November nearly over, the official death count yesterday stood at 79, surpassing March (65) and April (73), when the invasion was underway and fighting was most intense and widespread.
The surge has reflected an increase in the effectiveness and the frequency of guerrilla attacks.
About half of the deaths resulted from the downing of four military helicopters, in which 39 soldiers were killed. U.S. aircraft in Iraq have been targeted in the past, but these incidents, involving either a surface-to-air missile or rocket-propelled grenade, marked the first major hits.
Most of the other U.S. combat fatalities occurred in ground attacks by enemy fighters using weapons that have become characteristic of their resistance: guns, rocket-propelled grenades and remote-controlled explosives.
At one point during the month, military officials reported that the number of guerrilla attacks was averaging more than 40 a day. In response to the heightened activity, U.S. troops intensified their tactics, engaging in a stronger show of force that included greater use of artillery, tanks, attack helicopters, F-16 fighters and AC-130 gunships to pound targets throughout central Iraq. The move was followed by a drop in the rate of assaults on U.S. forces to fewer than 30 a day.
In contrast to the higher combat deaths in November, the number of accidental deaths -- 11 -- stayed comparatively low.
In all, 437 troops have died in Iraq since the war began, 2,094 have been listed as wounded in action and 2,464 have suffered noncombat-related injuries, ranging from accidental gunshots to broken bones and injuries in vehicle accidents. Since May 1, when President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, 298 troops have died.
As the numbers have mounted, administration officials have offered various responses in an attempt to cushion the impact on public opinion and avoid a collapse in support for the Iraq operation.
Officials have noted that most of the attacks on U.S. forces have occurred in central Iraq, while the rest of the country has remained less menacing. They have emphasized the improvements being made to Iraq's public facilities, the revival of economic activity and the steps toward self-rule.
They also have cited a rapid growth in the number of Iraqi security forces, now exceeding 145,000, who are to relieve some of the burden on the 130,000 U.S. troops in the country and allow for a reduction to about 110,000 by spring.
Earlier this week, a senior general with the Coalition Provisional Authority suggested that the rising U.S. casualty rate should not be taken as a sign that the United States is losing the war, especially when compared with enemy casualties.
"The casualties that we put on the enemy far exceed the casualties they inflict on us," Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said at a news conference in Baghdad. He offered no figures for enemy dead or wounded, however. As a rule, the Pentagon does not publicize such numbers, to avoid the frequent enemy body counts that marked the Vietnam War and ultimately proved a poor measure of U.S. military performance.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this week provided one partial figure for enemy dead, indicating that the Pentagon is keeping some tally on the damage U.S. forces are doing to the ranks of Iraqi guerrillas. In the week ended Nov. 23, he said, U.S. forces had killed 40 to 50 enemy fighters and wounded 25 to 30.
Rumsfeld also sought to put the U.S. death toll in Iraq in the context of previous wars waged by American forces.
"If one thinks back to the casualties of wars past -- some 292,000 were killed in World War II, 34,000 in Korea, 47,000 in Vietnam -- we can give thanks that our forces in this war have not faced casualties of such enormous magnitude," he said at a news conference.
Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
U.N. Chief Denounces West Bank Barrier
November 29, 2003
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/29NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 28 - The barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank is causing serious harm to the Palestinian people and undermining the Middle East peace effort, Secretary General Kofi Annan declared in a report on Friday.
"When each party should be making good-faith, confidence-building gestures," Mr. Annan said, the barrier's construction cannot be seen "as anything but a deeply counterproductive act."
The secretary general's 11-page report, largely a distillation of various studies by the United Nations and other organizations, was his most comprehensive statement so far on the subject. The report was ordered by the General Assembly last month as part of a resolution demanding that Israel halt and reverse the barrier's construction.
The report "vindicates everything we said about the issue," the Palestinian envoy here, Nasser al-Kidwa, said in an interview. He said the Palestinian delegation would return to the General Assembly to push a resolution seeking an opinion from the International Court of Justice on whether the barrier was legal.
Israel says it is building the barrier - which includes an electronic fence, concrete walls, trenches and other obstacles - to block Palestinian attackers. In a statement on Friday, Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy ambassador here, said the barrier was a necessary response to what he said was the Palestinian leadership's refusal to stop the attackers.
Palestinians condemn the barrier as a land grab and an attempt to create a political border. They say that it does not hew along its length to the so-called Green Line - the boundary between Israel and the West Bank - but cuts into the West Bank and surrounds some towns.
Mr. Annan, while acknowledging that Israel had a right to defend itself, said in his report that the barrier had caused "serious socioeconomic harm" to the Palestinian people by restricting the movement of goods and people and limiting their access to land, jobs and markets. He said Israel's right to defend itself "should not be carried out in a way that is in contradiction to international law" and that "increases suffering among the Palestinian people."
While the resolution ordering the report declared the barrier in violation of international law, Mr. Annan stopped short of making a legal pronouncement on the matter.
"We were not asked to provide a legal analysis by the General Assembly, hence it's not in the report," Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace effort, said by telephone from London.
On Oct. 21, the General Assembly approved by 144 to 4, with 12 abstentions and numerous no-shows, a resolution demanding that Israel tear down the barrier. General Assembly resolutions carry only symbolic weight; the Palestinian delegation has nonvoting observer status in the Assembly.
The vote came after a group of Arab and Islamic countries dropped a second resolution that sought an opinion from the International Court of Justice on whether Israel was legally obligated to halt construction of the wall and to tear down the existing parts.
The resolution's proponents were concerned they would not garner a commanding majority of the vote.
Opponents argued that the measure was "a distortion of what the I.C.J. is for" and an attempt to use the court "as a political stick to beat the Israelis," one diplomat said.
Despite these reservations, Mr. Kidwa said he would circulate a similar resolution on Monday asking the court to weigh in on "the legal consequences" of the barrier's construction. He said he expected the issue to come to a vote later in the week.
--------
Coerced or Not, Palestinians Who Assist Israel Face Death
November 29, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/middleeast/29PALE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
TULKARM, West Bank - For a Palestinian accused of cooperating with Israel's security forces, confession can amount to a death sentence. But Muhammad Hilal apparently felt he had no choice.
Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades had seized Mr. Hilal, himself a member of the militant group, and interrogated him for three weeks. Now the camera was rolling. In great detail, Mr. Hilal, 23, spoke about informing on his fellow Palestinians by means of furtive cellphone calls to his Israeli handlers, allowing the security forces to track down militants here in this ragged West Bank town.
Mr. Hilal said he began working for the Israelis after he went to a military office seeking a travel permit for his mother. When it was rejected, he argued with the Israeli official and was taken to a room where a woman in an Israeli Army uniform greeted him.
"She asked me what I thought of the Palestinian uprising," Mr. Hilal said. "I said I had no business with the uprising. She put one hand on my shoulder and one on my leg and started to rub. Then she took off all her clothes. When I saw her naked like that, I had to have sex."
Afterward, Mr. Hilal said on a videotape that was distributed by Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades to international news agencies, an Israeli officer showed him 15 photographs of the sexual encounter and demanded that he work with the Israelis or the photos would be distributed in Tulkarm.
Mr. Hilal's description of his recruitment through sexual entrapment could not be corroborated. Shin Bet, the security service that runs the informer network, declined to comment on its methods and said that as a matter of policy it would not comment on individual cases involving suspected Palestinian informants. But a former Shin Bet official strongly denied that Israel would engage in such tactics.
"As far as I know, it is never used," said Gideon Ezra, an Israeli cabinet minister who served more than 30 years in the Shin Bet security service and was the deputy head of the agency before leaving in 1995. "We can't give a man this kind of motive."
Whatever the truth, the videotape offers insights into the shadowy world of Palestinian informers, real or suspected. Israel recruits thousands of them with offers of, if not sex, money and valuable favors like travel permits or reduced jail sentences, say Palestinians, who regard collaborators as traitors and have killed many of them.
The dead include Mr. Hilal and his friend Samer Ufeh, whose bullet-riddled bodies were dumped in an alley soon after the video was played on a television in the center of the Tulkarm refugee camp. Intended to act as a warning, the video was shown twice to rapt audiences that filled a square on the evening of Oct. 22.
On the video, Mr. Hilal said that after the sexual encounter, he consented to the Israeli demands, receiving about $70 and several phone numbers.
"The next day, I went to the clashes, got the names and sent three reports," Mr. Hilal said in the video. At one point, he passed on word of an explosives expert who had 19 bombs, winning high praise, he added.
Mr. Hilal spoke with great specificity, and several incidents he described were corroborated by Tulkarm residents. His family, however, insists that he was not an informer and offers a gruesome photo album that shows burn marks covering his corpse, evidence that he was tortured into making the confession, said his mother, Mazouzeh Hilal.
For Israel, the business of recruiting informers is a vital phase of the fight against terrorism. "Good intelligence is the most important thing in fighting terrorism," Mr. Ezra said.
Israel's security forces rely heavily on informers to stop suicide bombers and arrest and kill militants. The army carries out raids almost nightly in densely packed neighborhoods, which are poorly lighted and unmarked.
Without intelligence, "the army is a bit blind and deaf," Mr. Ezra added. "The minute a suicide bomber has a bomb, he is a weapon that is already in flight. Only good and accurate information can stop him."
Palestinians say Israel looks for those in vulnerable positions, then exerts great pressure on them, using blackmail and other threats to keep them cooperative.
Most often, Israel simply pays a small sum, perhaps $100 a month, for a typical collaborator, said Palestinian security officials who have investigated such cases. With the Palestinian economy in ruins, money is a powerful lure, the officials said.
Sexual entrapment is sometimes used, Palestinians say, observing that Palestinian homosexuals are particularly vulnerable in a society that is intolerant of gay relationships. They also maintain that the Israelis prey on drug dealers and addicts.
Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, said collaborators began making claims of sexual entrapment in the 1970's. Israel has other ways to pressure informers now, he said, and he hears far less about sex.
Abdel Karim, a Palestinian journalist in Tulkarm who has reported on cases involving collaborators, said he believed the accused sometimes made up or exaggerated sexual encounters, believing this was a more acceptable excuse than saying they had collaborated simply for money. While some are falsely accused, actual collaborators often give themselves away with unusual behavior, he said.
Hundreds of suspected collaborators were killed in the streets by fellow Palestinians during the first Palestinian uprising from 1987 to '93. After Israel and the Palestinians reached an initial peace agreement a decade ago, Israel resettled many of the informants in Israel.
The Palestinian Authority, established in 1994, now puts suspected collaborators on trial. But vigilante killings are also still common, and Palestinians have slain more than 70 in the past three years, Mr. Eid said.
An Israeli security official insisted that most of those killed were not informers, and Mr. Eid confirmed that many of the killings were actually score-settlings that are passed off as executions of collaborators.
Palestinians sometimes try to "turn" collaborators and use them against Israel.
In June 2001, the informer Hassan Abu Shaireh met his Israeli handler outside Bethlehem - and fatally shot him. Mr. Shaireh was shot to death by a security officer who was with the handler. While collaborators normally bring shame to their families, which are routinely ostracized, Mr. Shaireh received a hero's funeral.
About 70 suspected collaborators are being held in Saraya Prison in Gaza City, one of the largest Palestinian detention facilities, said Yousef Essa, a Palestinian security officer who handles such cases.
Suspects are often convicted in trials lasting only a few hours. In January 2001, two convicted collaborators were executed by a firing squad in Gaza. The European Union protested, and in response the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, said he would halt all executions.
As a result, Palestinian militants have taken it upon themselves to deal with suspected collaborators like Mr. Hilal in Tulkarm. Many vigilante killings have been carried out by Al Aksa, which is linked to Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement.
Mr. Hilal, meanwhile, said his initial role of informing on stone throwers was soon upgraded.
An Israeli officer "asked me to make friends with the wanted guys," Mr. Hilal said. On the video, he recited six names, including Raed Karmi, the Tulkarm leader of Al Aksa, who was killed by a roadside bomb on Jan. 14, 2002.
At one point in the video, Mr. Hilal said he received a call from his Israeli handler, who asked his whereabouts. Mr. Hilal said he was with several Aksa members, and the handler told him to take them to his neighborhood. Within minutes, Israeli forces charged in, and a shootout erupted. One Palestinian was killed, while Mr. Hilal was hit in the arm and taken away by the Israelis.
After that clash, Al Aksa issued a statement saying one of its members, Mr. Hilal, had been wounded and arrested.
But while in an Israeli hospital, Mr. Hilal said he was working closely with Israeli security officers, who brought him detailed aerial photos of Tulkarm and asked him to mark the homes of militants.
After his wound healed, Mr. Hilal said he was sent to an Israeli prison and asked to befriend his cellmates. But he said he gathered little useful information and was returned to Tulkarm in June, about five months after the shooting.
Mr. Hilal's quick release raised suspicions, Al Aksa members said. They became convinced of his treachery at the beginning of October, when Israeli forces carried out a lightning attack in front of his home. Two militants were killed, but Mr. Hilal and Mr. Ufeh slipped away.
The two were seized by members of Al Aksa and Islamic Jihad. The kidnapping was widely known in Tulkarm, but the militants refused to hand the two men over to the Palestinian Authority.
"I advise all Palestinians to be aware of the Israeli secret police," Mr. Hilal said at the end of his video. "Whatever they try to do to attract you, to fool you, don't let them."
-------- korea
Japan scuttles two spy satellites
Saturday, 29 November, 2003
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/asia-pacific/3248654.stm
Japanese officials have blown up a rocket carrying two spy satellites intended to monitor North Korea.
Officials at the Japanese space programme said the rocket had to be destroyed after take-off because of an unspecified technical failure.
It was impossible to save the satellites, the officials added. An investigation is underway.
The original launch had been scheduled for September, but was postponed three times because of technical problems.
"Shortly after the launch, we sent a destroy order to the rocket as we concluded that the mission cannot fulfil the purpose," said spokesperson Shoko Yamamoto.
"We cannot tell further details, but at least we can say this mission ended in failure."
Japan already has two satellites monitoring North Korea, which is suspected of developing nuclear weapons.
Wake-up call
The BBC's Jonathan Head in Tokyo says the incident is an embarrassing setback for Japan, just weeks after China - a technologically less advanced country - put a man into space.
Our correspondent says the Japanese are bound to try again to launch spy satellites.
North Korea has denounced the deployment of the first two satellites as a "hostile act" that could trigger a renewed arms race.
The satellite project was intended predominantly as a response to North Korea's firing of a ballistic missile over Japan into the Pacific in August 1998.
Until then Japan bought commercial satellite photos from the US and France.
The launch came at a sensitive time for Japan and North Korea as the two countries prepared to sit down at six-way talks to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
Some 400 police were around the launch site on the southern island of Tanegashima.
Coast guard ships were patrolling waters to thwart possible terrorist attacks or a possible attempt by North Korea to disrupt the launch.
-------- pakistan / india
Ceasefire holding on, says ISPR:
Troop pullback linked to solution of issues
By Rafaqat Ali
http://www.dawn.com/2003/11/29/top5.htm
ISLAMABAD, Nov 28: The ceasefire between Pakistan and India on the Line of Control, Working Boundary and Line of Actual Contact in Siachen, which came into effect on Nov 25, is holding on.
Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, the Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations, told Dawn that ceasefire announced by Pakistan was holding on and there was no report of any violation from any part.
The director-general hoped that the ceasefire would pave the way for durable peace between the two neighbours. However, he ruled out withdrawal of troops unless the outstanding disputes between the countries were resolved. "Withdrawal of troops from borders will be possible only after the resolution of outstanding disputes," he said.
According to reports, five causalities were reported to the CMH in Muzaffarabad because of a toy-bomb explosion in a house near the Line of Control.
The ISPR chief said he was sure that there was no cross-border firing and added that he would have to check about the toy-bomb explosion.
Foreign office spokesman Masood Khan welcomed the support given by the international community to Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali's initiative and the concurrence of Pakistan and India to observe ceasefire.
He particularly referred to statements by the UN secretary-general, China, United States, Britain, France and Russia.
Talking to official media on Thursday, Mr Masood Khan hoped that this effort would be a harbinger of a sustained peace process. He said the next step in the peace overture would be talks in New Delhi on Dec 1-2 for restoring air links.
APP adds: He said Prime Minister Jamali in his address on Nov 23 had said that Pakistan favoured immediate resumption of air links between the two countries.
He said the prime minister had also expressed the hope that at the forthcoming Pakistan-India civil aviation talks, modalities for restarting air services between Lahore-Delhi, Karachi-Mumbai, and Karachi-Delhi would be finalized.
The spokesman also recalled that Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, at his press conference on Nov 24, had underlined Pakistan's offer of instant revival of air links between Pakistan and India.
-------- prisoners of war
Guantanamo Bay Officer Charged
Army Intelligence Officer Charged With Violating Security at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp
The Associated Press
November 29, 2003
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20031129_674.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico Nov. 29 - An Army intelligence officer was charged Saturday with violating security at the U.S. detention camp for terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He is the fourth worker at the base accused of such violations. Two Arabic translators and a Muslim chaplain face charges ranging from espionage to adultery.
U.S. Army Col. Jack Farr was charged Saturday with failing to obey a lawful general order and making a false official statement, all violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, said a statement from the U.S. Southern Command in Miami.
"Specifically, he's charged with wrongfully transporting classified material without the proper security container on or around Oct. 11, and making a false statement in the course of the investigation into his handling of classified material," it said.
It was not immediately clear if Farr was under arrest, nor if he is still at Guantanamo Bay.
He had been on temporary duty there for six months, serving as an intelligence staff officer, the statement said.
His charges have been forwarded to the commander of the base, who could dismiss them, refer them to a court-martial or direct a pre-trial investigation, it said.
He has been assigned two Army attorneys and has the right to retain a civilian lawyer.
-------- space
Japan Space Launch Fails
November 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/international/asia/29JAPA.html
TOKYO, Saturday, Nov. 29 (AP) - A Japanese rocket carrying two spy satellites meant to monitor North Korea failed to reach orbit on Saturday and had to be destroyed, space agency officials said.
The launch of the domestically designed and made H2-A rocket, the workhorse of Japan's space program, had been delayed three times since Sept. 10 because of technical problems.
"There was no chance of the mission being recovered, so ground control issued an order to destroy the rocket," a spokeswoman for Japan's space agency, JAXA, said.
--------
Japan Spy Satellite Launch Ends in Failure
November 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-japan-satellites.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan blew up a rocket carrying two spy satellites for monitoring secretive neighbor North Korea minutes after launching it on Saturday, echoing failures that dogged its space program in the late 1990s.
North Korea is believed to be developing nuclear weapons, and the satellites, along with two others launched in March, had been promoted as a significant boost to Japanese intelligence gathering.
The failure is an extreme embarrassment for Japan just weeks after neighboring China put a man into space. There was no immediate word on the cost of the launch.
A spokesman for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said that part of a booster rocket had not separated as expected.
The Japanese-made H2-A rocket was shown blasting off into a cloudy sky to applause from observers at the launch site on the tiny island of Tanegashima, some 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Tokyo, where Japan's launch center is located.
Just minutes later, though, an announcement was made that the rocket would not be able to complete its mission and had been destroyed by the launch controllers.
``We verified ignition of the second stage, but after that we just didn't know,'' a harried official told reporters at Tanegashima.
``This was a real shock,'' said an official with the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center, which oversees the two spy satellites in orbit and was responsible for the two destroyed on Saturday.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi termed the result ``unfortunate'' and directed officials to determine what went wrong as soon as possible, Kyodo news agency said.
PREVIOUS FAILURES
The launch of the first two satellites earlier this year gave Japan its first independent means of scrutinizing North Korea from space at a time of growing crisis on the Korean peninsula over the reclusive communist state's nuclear ambitions.
Unspecified technical problems had twice postponed the launch, originally scheduled for September. It was then delayed a third time due to problems with the H-2A rocket.
This was the third major launch failure for Japan's space program and is likely to severely damage confidence after a string of successes.
In November 1999, controllers were forced to blow up an earlier edition of the H-2A, the H-2, eight minutes after its launch. A 10 billion yen ($91.65 million) satellite was lost as a result, and the H-2 program was abandoned a month later.
Another unsuccessful launch in 1998 cost 60 billion yen.
The blow this time will be especially severe because of the loss of the spy satellites, which Tokyo was counting on to use in surveillance of North Korea.
The satellite deployment was planned after Pyongyang's 1998 test-firing of a Taepodong ballistic missile, which passed over Japan -- showing that major population areas, including Tokyo, were within the missile's estimated 1,000 km (600 mile) range.
Pyongyang denounced the March launch as a hostile act that could set off an arms race in the region.
Officials sought to play down Saturday's loss.
``We still have two other satellites up there,'' the official at the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center said. ``We'll just have to use them to their fullest capacity.''
But the accident will clearly be a setback for Japan's rocket launch program, which is due to be taken over by the main manufacturer of the H-2A, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, in less than two years.
-------- spies
Intelligence Weaknesses Are Cited
Draft Says Agencies Not Equal to Needs of Preemptive Attack Policy
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 29, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20004-2003Nov28?language=printer
More than 10 years' work by U.S. and British intelligence agencies on Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons or programs has "major gaps and serious intelligence problems," according to a new study by Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East and intelligence expert who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Even a cursory review" of charges the U.S. and British administrations made in white papers released before the Iraq war "shows that point after point that was made was not confirmed during the war or after the first [six] months of effort following the conflict," Cordesman found in his study, a draft of which he provided to The Washington Post.
Although the United States has the world's most sophisticated technical systems for collecting and analyzing intelligence, Cordesman found, the Iraq experience shows that U.S. intelligence is "not yet adequate to support grand strategy and tactical operations against proliferating powers or to make accurate assessments of the need to preempt." Preemption, or waging war to prevent an enemy from attacking, is a key part of the Bush war on terrorism policy.
Another new nongovernmental report, on the Bush administration's controversial claim that Iraq was seeking specialized aluminum tubes to use in a centrifuge to create nuclear weapons material, raises questions about whether senior policymakers ignored technically qualified critics to promote the Iraqi threat.
Together, the two reports track what congressional sources described as many of the tentative findings of investigations by House and Senate committees.
The second study finds shortcomings in the way the U.S. intelligence community handled technical questions involving the tubes.
The Bush administration's strategies of using preemption or preventing countries from obtaining weapons of mass destruction "depend critically on reliable intelligence on highly technical matters," wrote physicist David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Albright has been working with Iraqi scientists since serving in the 1990s on the first United Nations inspections in that country; his study is to be released on the ISIS Web site next week.
In the fall of 2002, while polls were showing that the U.S. public and Congress were not convinced of the case for invading Iraq, administration spokesmen including Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice were making statements that the tubes were for nuclear weapons.
Such statements, Albright wrote, were made before a fierce debate within the intelligence community over whether Iraq intended to use them for rockets or centrifuges. The issue was decided in October 2002 by a vote in which those intelligence agencies with "no technical [centrifuge] expertise outnumbered those that did," according to Albright.
The process, he wrote, "exposed a fallible intelligence community that developed and adjudicated its technical disputes poorly."
Cordesman's and Albright's conclusions reflect many of the draft findings of inquiries underway by the House and Senate intelligence committees, according to congressional sources. Those committees are not expected to report their findings until next year, after reviewing the findings of the Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-person U.S. and British search for weapons and evidence of weapons programs in Iraq. David Kay, director of the survey group, said in October that he did not expect to make another report for 60 to 90 days.
Cordesman's study says the intelligence weaknesses shown so far with Iraq raise serious questions about how to deal with weapons proliferation overseas.
"No one who focuses on the specific case of the Iraq war can afford to ignore the fact that future threats of proliferation posed by states or terrorist movements may again seem so great that it may not be possible to wait to take military action until many key uncertainties are resolved," it says.
President Bush, for example, said in October 2002 that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." In his London speech two weeks ago, he said, "The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists and the dictators who aid them."
Nothing has been uncovered in Iraq to support the notion that Saddam Hussein had such weapons or entertained any such weapons transfer. In fact, both U.S. and British intelligence analysts reported that such a weapons transfer -- if Baghdad had such weapons -- would take place only when the Iraqi leader faced annihilation, and did so as his final act.
Cordesman's study says one weakness in gathering intelligence on weapons proliferation is that research can be done on legitimate civilian projects, mixing "highly secret covert programs with open civil or dual-use programs." It adds that in reviewing the collection of such material, "far too little analysis is subjected to technical review by those who have actually worked on weapons development."
In addition, it says, analysts often overlook problems in system integration, which "often are the real-world limiting factors in proliferation." The result, it says, is "to push analysis toward exaggerating the probable level of proliferation."
One of Kay's major findings in his October report illustrates that. He reported finding "a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) containing equipment that was subject to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW [chemical and biological weapons] research."
Kay does not support the allegation of illegal laboratories with evidence. He reports that records were destroyed and IIS officials have been questioned, and that "we are still working on determining the extent to which this network was tied to large-scale military efforts or BW [biological weapons] terror weapons." Still, he reported that "this clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW-capable facilities and continuing R&D [research and development] -- all key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production."
A senior U.N. weapons expert said recently that a lot of laboratory equipment such as that cited in Kay's findings in IIS offices might be used for weapons work, but was more likely used for criminal work or even food testing. Before they were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998, U.N. inspectors found that Iraqis often failed to report laboratory equipment, because reading the Security Council Resolution 1441 narrowly could include every piece of laboratory equipment in every school in the country.
Cordesman's study says that another intelligence problem is that "the intelligence effort tends to produce estimates of the maximum size of the possible current holdings of weapons and WMD materials."
In 1991, Iraq was required to declare its stocks and capabilities in the chemical, biological and nuclear fields, and that the number of weapons it reported was in the tens of thousands and stocks in the tons. Much of that was destroyed or disabled by U.N. inspectors or the Iraqis, but the Hussein government was often caught in lies and inexplicable gaps.
But intelligence analysts, the study notes, believed that Hussein was obsessed with record-keeping and lied, and assumed "that little or no destruction had occurred" whenever U.N. agencies reported unexplained issues.
Another major weakness, stressed in the past by the House and Senate intelligence committees, was in the inability to develop "a reliable mix of redundant human intelligence sources within the system or as defectors," Cordesman found.
The British were said to have agents in Iraq; one of them in the Iraqi army was the sole source for the statement that it would only take 45 minutes to deploy a chemical shell, according to a recently concluded investigation by the British government. U.S. intelligence did not believe that source reliable and never repeated the statement in its intelligence estimates.
-------- un
Annan Calls Israeli Barrier a U.N. Violation
Peace Prospects at Risk if 90-Mile Fence Is Not Dismantled, Report Indicates
Associated Press
Saturday, November 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19870-2003Nov28.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 28 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Friday that Israel is violating a General Assembly resolution against construction of a barrier that juts into the West Bank and urging it to dismantle the 90-mile section already built.
In a report to the assembly, Annan said the barrier -- a network of fences, walls, razor wire and trenches -- violates international law and "could damage the longer-term prospects for peace," including those offered by the U.S.-backed "road map" plan.
"In the midst of the road map process, when each party should be making good-faith confidence-building gestures, the barrier's construction in the West Bank cannot, in this regard, be seen as anything but a deeply counterproductive act," Annan said.
Israel says the intended 320-mile barrier is essential to prevent suicide attacks against civilians.
Palestinians say the barrier is a land grab ahead of any possible talks about the borders of a Palestinian state.
Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy U.N. ambassador, said Friday that Israel would not dismantle the barrier until the Palestinian leadership makes a "substantial and concentrated" effort to halt terrorist attacks.
"Israel fundamentally rejects the abhorrent propaganda campaign which seeks to stop and misrepresent the true purpose of the fence," Mekel said. "The fence is an efficient and nonviolent mean of self-defense, which has proven itself effective in stemming the wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians."
Officials at the Palestinians' U.N. observer mission did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
Robert Wood, a spokesman for John D. Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had no immediate comment.
Opposed by Israel and the United States, the resolution was passed overwhelmingly last month by the 191-nation General Assembly. It is not legally binding, but it is considered a reflection of international opinion. The resolution does not rule out further U.N. action against Israel.
The assembly could ask the International Court of Justice in The Hague for an advisory opinion, a possibility Israel has strongly protested.
The United States previously vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have declared the barrier illegal.
Earlier this week, Washington said it plans to penalize Israel for West Bank construction of settlements and the barrier by deducting $289.5 million from a $9 billion loan guarantee package.
The penalty will cost Israel a few million dollars a year, a punishment Palestinians dismissed as a cosmetic step.
-------- us
Reservist Faces Punishment After Questioning a Waiver
November 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/national/29ARMY.html
ROCHESTER, Nov. 28 (AP) - Capt. Steve McAlpin, a longtime Army reservist who spent most of last year deployed in Afghanistan, learned this week that he is facing insubordination charges that could end his 25-year military career.
His breach of discipline is questioning the legality of a waiver his battalion was asked to sign that would put his unit back in a combat zone after only 11 months at home. Under federal law, Captain McAlpin noted, troops are allowed a 12-month "stabilization period."
Captain McAlpin, 44, was notified in a memorandum on Wednesday that he was being removed from the 401st Civil Affairs Battalion's battle roster. He said he could face other punishment, including a court-martial and loss of rank.
Members of the 401st will be deployed for duty overseas next Wednesday. The commander, Lt. Col. Phillip Carey, says in his memorandum that Captain McAlpin had a "negative attitude" and was being "insubordinate towards the leadership" of the 401st.
Captain McAlpin said he questioned the waiver last Saturday in a teleconference with Col. Guy Sands, commander of the captain's parent unit, the 360th Civil Affairs Brigade in Fort Jackson, S.C.
About a dozen other officers refused to sign the waiver, as well as four enlisted soldiers called to redeploy, Captain McAlpin said.
"Soldiers are proud to serve any time, anywhere. I'd go tomorrow," he said on Friday from his home in Victor, 20 miles southeast of Rochester. "But I have four soldiers that don't want to go."
The memorandum orders Captain McAlpin to clear up his affairs at the unit by Monday, when it bans him from battalion grounds. It also transfers him to the Individual Ready Reserves, whose soldiers can be called up in the event of a national emergency.
Instead of signing the reprimand document, Captain McAlpin wrote a note of protest, stating that his performance evaluations had been excellent and that his record showed "no pattern of incompetence."
Captain McAlpin served in Bosnia in 1996. Last year, while stationed in Afghanistan, he was a liaison to local warlords, coordinated relief supplies and organized an English-language teaching program. He said the military should "honor soldiers that have gone already" by giving them "a break from the hazards of combat."
A spokesman for the 401st, Capt. Brian Earley, said Captain McAlpin's questioning of the waiver was only one reason he was being disciplined, with others including difficulties on the mission to Afghanistan.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
NEWS ANALYSIS
Division Over Death Penalty
November 29, 2003
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/nyregion/29DEAT.html
On March 7, 1995, New York's newly elected governor, George E. Pataki, fulfilled one of his main campaign promises by signing the state's death penalty into law. He called the law "the most effective of its kind in the nation."
More than eight years later, a ruling by the state's highest court has raised questions about whether the court will ever permit an execution. On Tuesday, the Court of Appeals overturned a death sentence for the second time, in the case of a Syracuse-area man convicted of killing his wife.
Some prosecutors said they were frustrated by the ruling because they would like to know whether they are wasting time and money pursuing capital punishment. In its decision, the court sidestepped broad questions about the law.
"We're eagerly awaiting guidance on the constitutionality of the statute," said Michael A. Arcuri, the district attorney in Utica and president of the New York State District Attorneys Association. "The decision didn't give us any guidance."
But the bitterly worded 4-2 decision did begin to reveal how the divided judges line up on the issue, one of the most volatile the court has faced in years. Two judges, some death penalty lawyers said, appear committed to capital punishment. Two seem troubled by the law. And two may be willing to let the issue play itself out over many years with case-by-case rulings.
The split drew new attention to Robert S. Smith, Governor Pataki's nominee to fill a vacant seventh seat on the court. Some death penalty supporters said that because of the division on the court, Mr. Smith could play a central role in determining the future of capital punishment in the state.
Mr. Smith has described himself as a conservative, but his views on the death penalty are not known. "We must make sure he's going to be fair on that issue," said State Senator Dale M. Volker, a Republican who led the effort to reinstate capital punishment in New York for two decades.
As a lawyer for convicted murderers, Mr. Smith has twice argued against the death penalty in the United States Supreme Court. But after he was nominated on Nov. 4, he said he was undecided on the issue. "I am not entirely sure," he said, "what my own views are."
If confirmed by the State Senate, he would land in the middle of a bruising battle. The two associate judges who dissented on Tuesday, Victoria A. Graffeo and Susan Phillips Read, used harsh language as they argued that the court should have left in place a first-degree murder conviction for the Syracuse-area man, James F. Cahill 3rd, who beat his wife with a baseball bat and later forced cyanide down her throat. Mr. Cahill is now to be sentenced to a maximum of life in prison for second-degree murder.
"The majority has substituted its `wisdom' and public policy choices for those of the Legislature," Judge Graffeo wrote. Both of the dissenting judges served in senior legal positions in Gov. Pataki's administration and were appointed to the court by him.
"It looks to me as though you would have two votes favorable to upholding the death penalty on all grounds," said a retired Court of Appeals judge, Stewart F. Hancock Jr., after reading the judges' opinions.
Some lawyers said two associate judges who were appointees of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, George Bundy Smith and Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, had formed a counterbalancing alliance that is open to criticisms of the death penalty law.
Judge Smith, who was once a staff lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P., voted with the majority and wrote a concurring opinion. He said one argument by critics of the death penalty "is a strong one." That argument claims the state's death penalty is unconstitutional because it can be sought arbitrarily by prosecutors, making it possible for life-or-death decisions to be tainted by racism.
He also criticized a provision of the 1995 law that requires judges to tell jurors that if they cannot reach a unanimous decision on a penalty, the judge will impose a sentence with a minimum of 20 to 25 years. Judge Smith said the possibility that a killer might one day be set free coerces jurors to vote for execution. Judge Ciparick, who was once a Legal Aid lawyer, agreed with Judge Smith on that point and also voted with the majority.
The majority's decision overturning the death sentence for Mr. Cahill was written by Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt, a former Dutchess County district attorney. It said that the trial judge had made errors in screening the jurors and that the prosecutors had not proved the aggravating circumstances the law requires to make a defendant eligible for execution, like the prosecutors' claims that Mr. Cahill killed his wife to keep her from testifying as a witness against him.
The fourth vote in the majority came from the chief judge, Judith S. Kaye. Some lawyers say the backgrounds of both Judge Kaye and Judge Rosenblatt contain hints of what might be ambivalence about the death penalty.
As a trial judge, Judge Rosenblatt once imposed a death sentence but suggested he might have personal reservations about capital punishment. When Judge Kaye was first appointed to the court in 1983, she was viewed as a liberal, and she wrote the court's opinion the next year striking down the state's last death penalty law. But death penalty lawyers say her record on the court in recent years leaves them unsure whether she now favors or opposes capital punishment.
So the tally on the death penalty in the court may now be 2 to 2, with two others, Judges Rosenblatt and Kaye, hesitant to make a sweeping declaration either way. Which could mean that Mr. Smith, nominated to be the seventh judge, may effectively determine the future of the death penalty in New York.
-------- prisons / prisoners
A Prisoner Of Panic After 9/11
Algerian-Born Detainee Seen as Victim of Excess
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20028-2003Nov28?language=printer
BATAVIA, N.Y. -- Benamar Benatta sits in a whitewashed cell, lost in a post-Sept. 11 world.
Jailed the night of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the Algerian air force lieutenant with an expired visa has spent the past 26 months in federal prisons, much of that time in solitary confinement -- even though the FBI formally concluded in November 2001 that he had no connection to terrorism.
Since the government first took Benatta into custody, the United States has apprehended and released about 760 domestic detainees. More than 80 prisoners have been released from the military jail where alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It appears that no detainee has been locked up as long as Benatta, although it is impossible to know because of secrecy surrounding some material witnesses who may still be in government custody.
He remains behind bars, awaiting a deportation hearing, unable to post a $25,000 bond.
"Two years ago, I had hopes. I was okay," said Benatta, 29, a pale, handsome man who wore loose-fitting orange prison pajamas and spoke slightly French-accented English during a two-hour interview at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility. "Now I lie in my cell and think: 'What has become of me?' "
Benatta was among the 1,200 or so men detained by U.S. law enforcement agents in the frenzied weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He had a most unfortunate résumé: An Algerian and a Muslim, he was an avionics technician, and -- like most of the others -- he lacked proper immigration papers.
The Canadians had held Benatta since he arrived at the Peace Bridge crossing near Buffalo and applied for asylum the previous week. They turned him over to federal agents. A few days later, prosecutors sent him south to New York City, where he was placed in solitary confinement.
It was as though Benatta became invisible. His name never appeared on lists of detainees. His family in Algeria believed he had vanished. No defense attorney knew of his existence until a federal defender in Buffalo was assigned his case in late April 2002.
The federal government has few explanations for what happened. In legal briefs, the U.S. attorney in Buffalo blamed some of the delays on bureaucratic wrangling between prosecutors and the U.S. Marshals Service, and the confusion that followed the terrorist attacks. But in the documents, U.S. Attorney Michael A. Battle of the Western District of New York ultimately acknowledged that such conditions could "not justify violating the defendant's rights."
Two years after the attacks, federal Magistrate Judge H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr. would examine Benatta's case and find a study in governmental excess.
Schroeder issued an unsparing report in September, writing that federal prosecutors and FBI and immigration agents engaged in a "sham" to make it appear that Benatta was being held for immigration violations. Prosecutors trampled on legal deadlines intended to protect his constitutional rights and later offered explanations for their maneuvers that "bordered on ridiculousness," Schroeder wrote. And he found that the government compounded its mistakes by failing to act once it was clear that Benatta was not an accomplice to terrorists.
"The defendant in this case undeniably was deprived of his liberty," Schroeder wrote, "and held in custody under harsh conditions which can be said to be oppressive." To keep Benatta imprisoned any longer, the magistrate concluded, "would be to join in the charade that has been perpetrated."
Battle filed papers in October objecting to Schroeder's "harsh" criticism of his prosecutors, several of whom were identified by name.
Soon after, however, Battle accepted Schroeder's report and dropped the two criminal charges alleging that Benatta possessed false identification papers.
Battle, through a spokesman, turned down a request for an interview. A former federal prosecutor criticized by Schroeder also declined to comment, as did a Justice Department spokesman in Washington. A spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which assumed parts of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, noted only that Benatta now faces a "removal hearing."
After the terrorist attacks, federal officials defended detentions for immigration violations as central to preserving national security. "Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa -- even by one day -- we will arrest you," U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said in October 2001.
Critics have long contended that the government crackdown infringed on the civil rights of some detainees. Earlier this year, the Justice Department's own inspector general examined the government's handling of some detainees and found that many had been held without charge longer than is allowed by statute, and that a number had been denied access to lawyers for long periods. Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that the FBI took too long to investigate and clear them of connections to terrorism.
The inspector general's report also said that corrections and court officers in the New York region had subjected detainees to "patterns of verbal and physical abuse."
Benatta said he did not talk with Fine's investigators. But the Algerian was held in the same wing of the same prison they examined -- the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. His descriptions of being threatened and mocked by corrections officers closely track the report's findings.
"This is one of the worst cases we've seen," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which has sued the government to stop the holding of detainees without recourse to lawyers. "This is a perfect example of how the government has played a shell game with detainees for months and months."
Fleeing Algeria
Benatta landed in the United States on Dec. 31, 2000, an Algerian air force lieutenant accompanying 39 men to classified training seminars at Northrop Grumman Corp. in Baltimore. He held a six-month U.S. visa.
But Benatta did not return to Algeria. He would not discuss precise reasons for overstaying his visa but noted that Algeria is plagued by terrible violence and divided between an often-murderous Islamic fundamentalist movement and a military implicated in human rights abuses.
"I had a problem with the terrorists who wanted to kill me and with the military, which was beating and torturing people," he said. "My parents knew I did not intend to come back."
Benatta said he moved to New York City, where he worked as a busboy and lived with an Orthodox Jewish roommate in the Bronx. His visa expired on June 30, 2001. In what he described as a moment of desperation, he took a midnight bus to Buffalo on Sept. 5 and filed for asylum in Canada. Canadian officials detained him in a cell at their offices on the far side of the Peace Bridge, apparently concerned that he was depressed and perhaps suicidal, while they investigated his claim.
On the evening of Sept. 11, Benatta said, officers walked into his cell and asked about his military background and the false identification papers he allegedly carried with him. Within hours, he was on his way to a holding cell in upstate New York, where an FBI agent showed him a photo of the World Trade Center and told him of the attack.
"The agent warned that if I say I have no connection with this terrorism, I will spend the rest of my life in prison," Benatta recalled. "I thought they would offer me to the American people as the one who did this attack. I thought my life was done."
The next days, in his telling, became a blur. Teams of FBI agents repeatedly questioned Benatta. Guards put him in ankle chains and handcuffs, slung a chain around his waist, and loaded him into an airplane to New York City. Dozens of officers with rifles met him at Kennedy International Airport and took him to a federal prison in Brooklyn.
In court papers, the government does not dispute the outlines of Benatta's account. Schroeder discovered numerous violations of the detainee's rights during those first weeks. He noted that INS lawyers did not file legal papers to transfer Benatta until a week after he had arrived in New York, an action the magistrate termed "a sham."
More broadly, Schroeder found "damning evidence" that INS lawyers improperly "colluded" with the FBI and federal prosecutors to use immigration procedures as a "subterfuge" to "spirit" Benatta to New York City. Once there, the government "in essence arrested" Benatta for the purpose of conducting a criminal investigation of him and did not allow him to speak with a lawyer.
These actions, Schroeder wrote, violated Benatta's Sixth Amendment rights to a speedy trial. Federal prosecutors responded that the attorney general has the unilateral power to determine where to hold an immigration detainee, an argument Schroeder rejected.
At the high-security detention center in Brooklyn, Benatta was placed in a solitary cell -- known by prisoners as "the box." His cell was illuminated 24 hours a day. The guards wrote "WTC" in chalk on his cell door and, he said, for weeks they would knock loudly on the door every half-hour to wake him up.
He had no access to books, television or a lawyer. For weeks, he could not leave the cell except when FBI agents arrived to interrogate him about his job, ethnicity and religious beliefs.
"In the box, I had no right to shave, to shower, nothing," Benatta said.
"By the end of a month, I had a huge beard, and I couldn't even walk. You feel in there that one day is one month."
He recalled being forced to strip while guards mocked him. He said guards knocked his head against the elevator wall while he was in manacles and one time pulled his waist chain so tight he had trouble breathing.
"For three or four months, you couldn't talk or they would punish you," he said. "Then maybe things started to calm down."
Fine's report stated that "we believe there is evidence supporting the detainees' claims of abuse." The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District has declined to prosecute any prison guards.
Cleared, but Not Freed
On Nov. 15, 2001, the FBI cleared Benatta of any connection to terrorism. In a document quoted in Schroeder's ruling, the FBI wrote: "Given the negative searches and after consultation . . . with FBI General Counsel Hyon Kim and INS prosecuting attorney Ann Gannon, the writer requests BENATTA be cleared of his involvement in the captioned investigation." Battle agreed last month that "the FBI's 9/11-related interest in Mr. Benatta ended" on Nov. 15, 2001.
But no one told Benatta. He remained locked in solitary confinement for another five months and was never offered a lawyer, according to Schroeder.
Benatta betrays a rare flash of anger at the mention of those lost months. "I am cleared after Nov. 16, and still they kept me in the box. Why do they do that?"
With the terrorism investigation concluded, prosecutors in Buffalo obtained a grand jury indictment against Benatta on Dec. 12, 2001, on charges related to carrying false identification papers. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but federal officials never informed him and never offered him an attorney.
Benatta did not learn of the pending charges until April 2002, just before he was transferred to Buffalo. Prosecutors with the Western District offered him a plea bargain that would have carried a six-month sentence, essentially amounting to time served. But Benatta refused. When he arrived in Buffalo, a judge had assigned him a lawyer for the first time -- federal defender Joseph B. Mistrett. He decided to fight the charge that he carried false papers.
"I'm not a criminal. Never," Benatta said. "Now I could choose to go to trial."
Mistrett took a liking to Benatta and began filing motions. "It's so outrageous what happened to this guy," Mistrett said. "I was offended as an American citizen."
But despite his efforts, 17 months passed before Schroeder ruled in favor of Benatta, who lived during that time in a cell in the Batavia detention center, where he read and studied law. Last month, Battle filed papers that all but conceded that an injustice had been committed.
"The government agrees that the events of September 11th do not justify violating the defendant's rights," Battle wrote. "Dismissal may be appropriate."
Benatta's worries are like floodwaters that never recede. He now faces a deportation hearing and does not yet have an immigration lawyer. (Mistrett could contest only the criminal charges.) As a military man gone AWOL, he would face a grim fate should he land back in Algeria. "Look, I am in trouble," he said. "If I am not executed right away, I will spend my life in prison."
Human rights advocates suggest Benatta likely is not exaggerating. More than 7,000 people disappeared last year at the hands of Algerian security forces, more than the number recorded in any country in the past decade, according to Human Rights Watch.
Yet Benatta, whose geography has been circumscribed for the past 26 months by cinder blocks and barbed wire, does not sound particularly bitter. He said he understands how, in the weeks and months after nearly 3,000 people died, panic gripped a nation.
"I don't blame the United States. They've never had to deal with terrorists, and 3,000 people die; that's a lot."
Schroeder addressed the same concern in his decision. The FBI, he wrote, "would have been derelict" if it had not investigated Benatta. But he added a caution: "Under our Constitution, absent due process, the end cannot justify the means."
In October, when Battle announced he was dropping charges, a Buffalo reporter asked whether he planned to apologize to Benatta. "I'm not going to address that," the prosecutor said.
That's okay with Benatta. As his interview ended, he stood in Room V1O7 at the Batavia detention center and waited for a guard to unlock the door. Peering back at a reporter, he said: "I don't need an apology. I just want them to stop accusing me."
--------
Justice Dept. Reviews Prisoner Death Probe
Family Insists Inmate Was Murdered
Associated Press
Saturday, November 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19865-2003Nov28.html
In a rare step, the Justice Department is reexamining its investigation of the 1995 death of a prisoner that the victim's family alleges was murder at the hands of the government. Several inquiries have ruled the death a suicide.
Justice Department public integrity section chief Noel L. Hillman recently disclosed his decision in an affidavit in a civil case brought by the family of prisoner Kenneth Michael Trentadue. The family wants access to government records from the earlier inquiries.
Trentadue's bloodied body was found in his cell in an Oklahoma federal detention center in summer 1995, and the government ruled he hanged himself.
In the years since, information has emerged that evidence was mishandled or lost, prison officials lied and potential evidence of a struggle in the cell before Trentadue's death was overlooked.
At the family's request "the public integrity section is conducting an ongoing review, for purpose of criminal law enforcement, of all investigative materials, including attorney work product, grand jury materials and related documents," Hillman's affidavit stated.
The Justice Department told the court in the civil case this week that the department does not yet want to release documents from one of the earlier inquiries of Trentadue's death because of the "ongoing, related criminal investigation."
"Such disclosures can compromise that investigation by tainting witnesses, telegraphing the identities of potential subjects and targets, and interfering with the integrity of the tangible evidence," Hillman's affidavit said.
The family has been using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records gathered by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE), the government watchdog that evaluates the conduct of federal inspectors general.
Trentadue's brother, Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, accused Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine's office of engaging in misconduct and conducting a shoddy investigation when his office reaffirmed earlier findings that the death was a suicide.
Fine's inquiry, however, was the first to officially identify several problems with the honesty of federal prison and FBI officials who originally investigated the case and the handling and disappearance of evidence from the cell where the body was found.
The PCIE cleared Fine and his office of any wrongdoing, and Jesse Trentadue has been seeking access to those investigative records.
Officials said Hillman's new inquiry is not focusing on Fine or the inspector general's review; instead, it is examining the core issues of whether the death was a murder and whether prison and FBI employees did anything to tamper with evidence or cover up information.
Hillman's decision is extremely rare, particularly because his predecessor as public integrity section chief, Lee J. Radek, declined to prosecute anyone in the case after an investigation in the late 1990s ruled the death a suicide.
Officials familiar with the decision said Hillman was moved in part by the pleas of the family, members of Congress and federal law enforcement officials -- all of whom raised concerns about irregularities in the initial prison and FBI investigations. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) once vowed to hold hearings into the death, saying he suspected a murder, but he never followed through.
Hillman has not decided whether to convene a grand jury or refer some matters back to the inspector general, the officials said. He could simply close down the inquiry after reviewing all materials, or he could escalate the investigation, officials said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Nations Endorse Treaty to Clean Up Postwar Munitions
By Richard Waddington
Reuters
Saturday, November 29, 2003; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19866-2003Nov28?language=printer
GENEVA, Nov. 28 -- More than 90 countries, including the United States, tentatively agreed Friday to clean up the munitions left by armed conflicts in an effort to reduce the huge number of postwar civilian casualties.
Under a treaty approved by member states of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), countries must remove or tell others how to find the unexploded cluster and mortar bombs, missiles and other weaponry of future wars.
There is no agreement on the exact toll taken by explosive remnants of war, the technical term for the lethal debris, but activists say the number of victims injured, maimed and killed runs into the tens of thousands each year.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 24 countries and territories are strewn with abandoned ordnance, is probably the worst-affected region, but the threat to civilians is also great in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
The new rules will be legally binding on signatory states, although there are no clear penalties for not complying. The protocol to the CCW convention comes into force when it has been ratified by 20 member states, a process that could take two years.
It is the first time that the Bush administration, which has expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of international arms control treaties, has joined a new global weapons pact.
"Everybody wanted it to be legally binding and we did not want to stand in the way," said Edward Cummings, head of the U.S. delegation. He added that no decision had been taken yet on whether Washington would actually sign the treaty.
The pact is the latest international attempt to reduce the suffering of civilians in war. The 1997 Ottawa Convention outlawed the use of land mines.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, a leading advocate of the new treaty, praised Friday's action. "The treaty is an important recognition that states are responsible for eliminating this serious threat to civilians in the aftermath of war," said Red Cross Vice President Jacques Foster.
But some non-governmental organizations criticized the vagueness of some of the wording.
Under terms of the treaty, states would have to clear areas they control, keep records of ordnance used in order to speed its recovery, warn civilians of the dangers, and provide technical, material and financial help when they cannot do the work themselves.
Although the rules might be difficult to enforce, particularly with rebel groups, diplomats said they hoped countries would feel morally obligated to comply.
As with land mines, the treaty is not retroactive, so there is no obligation to clean up the remnants of past conflicts. But the land-mine ban triggered a flood of money from donors, and the Dutch official who coordinated work on the new protocol, Chris Sanders, said he hoped there would be a similar response this time.
-------- ACTIVISTS
The art of destruction
A sculptor's installation re-creates the lab that brought forth the first atomic bombs.
By Carl Schoettler
Baltimore Sun Staff
November 29, 2003
http://www.sunspot.net/features/bal-to.atomic29nov29,0,927867.story?coll=bal-features-headlines
WASHINGTON - Geiger counters crackle continuously in a low, ominous mutter as you move through the replica of the first atomic bomb laboratory that sculptor Jim Sanborn has created at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Oscilloscopes hum and flicker blue dancing lines that move across the screens like lunging fencers. Sanborn has re-created almost exactly the work tables where scientists of the Manhattan Project moved uranium and plutonium closer and closer to the critical mass that would release the power of the nuclear bomb. Banks of electronic packages that measure radiation stand like sentinels just as they did in the original laboratories in Los Alamos where the Trinity device and the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were produced. Curling wires and red and green lights look almost festive.
Sanborn's installation has a cool, eerie beauty that recalls a medieval altarpiece or a collection of Roman sarcophagi crawling with sculpted figures celebrating forgotten victories. No human figures manipulate the experiments in the subdued light of this lab. Perhaps it's dawn before the scientists arrive or some post-midnight hour after they've just left. Or perhaps they've gone to see the first test of the Trinity device on its tower over the White Sands National Monument. Or an accident has emptied the lab. They've left behind evidence of their presence: a tape measure at Fermi's Assembly for Determining the Critical Mass of a Hemisphere, a 15-inch, grade-school ruler on the Assembly for Determining Critical Mass, a slide rule on the piece called Assembly for a Los Alamos Prototype I, with its tiny cubes of graphite like a child's building blocks.
The specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hovers unstated and unseen somewhere beyond the sputtering electronics and the elegant experiments depicted on the work tables. We feel the dead in the processes that led to their destruction.
The Corcoran calls Sanborn's exhibition Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction.
"Scientists, I think, found the objects seductive," he says. "I think they found the science seductive, they found the power seductive. They found every aspect of this science absolutely fascinating. They based their entire lives on it. They based the life of the world on it. The life of the world, of humanity as we know it, was in the balance in this room.
"Some of the scientists like Oppenheimer realized [that] fairly quickly," he says. "Other scientists like Teller and some of the other hawks never realized it. ... A few of them never had any qualms about going as far as they could with it."
J. Robert Oppenheimer was, of course, director of the Manhattan Project. Edward Teller, the assistant director, was a major proponent of the hydrogen bomb.
Sanborn believes his representation of the Manhattan Project lab and the explosive core of the first nuclear bombs is the most accurate ever made. He shows what he believes the inside of the bomb looked like. He explains before the unit he calls Assembly for a Los Alamos Prototype I.
"This sphere you have here is how much uranium you needed to make the Little Boy device," he says. "That's the diameter of how much you need."
About 3 inches across, a little bigger than a baseball, enough to obliterate a city. Little Boy, of course, was the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.
"I feel as if the historical accuracy adds to the potency of the installation," Sanborn says. "I do installation art in order to have an effect on people. That's why I do it. Either to stimulate their minds or to stimulate their senses.
"People could be stimulated by recalling history. I think there is a certain relevance to including real objects in these things because it gives them a sense that what they are seeing is the real thing."
The spheres in Sanborn's installation are nonetheless quite beautiful. The initiators, which are exactly what the name implies, embedded in the center of the spheres, look like jewels in particularly exotic settings. He had them made by jewelers, as did the Manhattan Project scientists.
"I thought it really stunning that something so dangerous could be inherently so beautiful," he says. "It's the 'beauty and the beast' scenario, more or less. It depends. Some people walk into the room and don't know what they're looking at. It has no effect on them. Because they were too young to know what a Geiger sounds like, or the equipment and everything is so unfamiliar to them they don't register what it is.
"Other people immediately recognize the sounds and all of that and the equipment. The hair sort of stands up on the back of their neck and they know exactly what they're dealing with."
All this was top secret for years, and Sanborn loves a secret. He's a native Washingtonian, born in 1945, and one of his hometown's finest artists. His best-known work until now is probably Kryptos, an installation he did in 1990 for the CIA headquarters that includes an encoded message cryptographers are still trying to crack. He created a sandstone sculpture called Cold Spring Outcrop, for the West Cold Spring Metro station in Baltimore in the early 1980s. Tall, rangy and relaxed at 9 a.m., Sanborn recalls he had a show at the Corcoran in 1992 called Covert Obsolescence, about CIA and KGB covert operations. A bronze cylinder projected another encoded message across the gallery, in Cyrillic lettering.
"I thought the science of cryptography was really elegant science," he says. "That's what I did my piece about: the co-option of elegant science by the interface where pure science ends."
That's a message echoed in this new show.
The Geiger counters cackle on without interruption as he talks.
"Those are period Geiger counters," he says, much as antiques dealer might describe Colonial furniture. "They all had chummy names. This one was called Doc after one of the Seven Dwarfs. This one over here, one of the first, was Cutie Pie. They had nicknames because the names were technically all classified."
Betty Boop was also a Geiger counter; Sneezy, appropriately enough, was an air sampler. Sanborn acquired oscilloscopes named Scylla and Charybdis from the lab. And the chummy Little Boy and Fat Man.
"The red stools, of course, the scientists liked because they resembled a thermonuclear explosion," Sanborn says. "It has the mushroom cloud and the rings and things. There was a lot of dark humor floating around in the lab."
He made one of the stools, but another is an original, perhaps the one shown in a photo of the Manhattan Project in the show's catalog. His assemblies generally mirror photographs from the lab. He scoured Los Alamos for electronics of the period.
"I put up little signs in retirement homes and coffee shops and, by word of mouth, started telling people I was interested in anything to do with the Trinity project," he says. (Trinity was the first atomic device exploded.) People pulled stuff out of their back yards and garages and even little warehouses they'd built. Some were scientists retired from the Manhattan Project.
"The lab would have a sale on Saturdays of surplus material from the 1950s and '60s," Sanborn says. "Scientists would recognize something they made for the bomb project in the 1940s and buy it for 15 bucks or something. They were very familiar with what they were, exactly, and they felt as though they were historic. And so they kept them."
But they pretty much gave up hope that their artifacts would ever be shown after the controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian bowed to pressure and put on a denatured exhibit. Sanborn's sources decided the things they'd saved didn't have as much value as they had hoped.
"It didn't become amazing and historic and so they were in a position where all these guys were dying off and these objects were getting thrown out. So they just decided that I was one of their last chances that they would get shown."
He searched through the remnants with photographs taken in the labs and came up with lots of electronic materials that he's included in his installation.
"On this one over here," he says, "there's a detonating switch. They detonated all sorts of things there in Los Alamos in various canyons, blowing up radioactive material to see what would happen to it."
He's spent more than five years on this project. He'd been doing light projections on stone outcroppings in the New Mexico desert when he picked up a book about the 1945 Trinity explosion. He says experiments depicted in the book were thrown together like "duct tape and string constructions.
"It fascinated me that the ultimate device was originally designed that way," he says. "And, in fact, most science starts out that way, fast and loose."
He spent the next six months basically just reading, notably Richard Rhodes' books The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Sanborn and Rhodes will discuss the show at the gallery at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Sanborn pleads reticence when asked if his installation has a political message.
"I would never have been able to do this project," he says, "if I stated clearly up front exactly what I was doing. Because I worked with the extreme right and extreme left, my sources were from the extreme right and the extreme left. I wouldn't have been able to please anyone if I'd stated clearly what I felt about it. So I'm reticent to do that.
"A political message can be taken away from this differently by different people. I certainly did the installation to stimulate thinking about nuclear weapons and their use, and misuse, and handling, and proliferation, and all of those things. I definitely did it for those reasons."
The cables that snake across the floor may provide another clue.
"There are obvious nods to Edvard Munch with my wires," he says. "Edvard Munch's Scream heavily informs the wire design."
The thick wires flow across the floor like the lines of the shoreline and the sky in Munch's famous painting of anguish and anxiety.
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