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NUCLEAR
Plutonium from Sellafield in all children's teeth
Save The Valley seeks hearing to challenge Army's proposal
Tehran insists on nuke 'rights'
Iraq Scientists Say They Lied Over Weapons
N. Korea Might Make Nuke Concession at Talks - Paper
N. Korea Seeks Pay for Nuke Program Delay
Smugglers Enticed by Dirty Bomb Components
HISTORY MATTERS: The bad and the ugly of underground nuclear tests
Bush plans new nuclear weapons
MILITARY
End users worry arms critics
South Korea's Roh Says Iraq Shootings Intolerable
Murder of Japanese in Iraq Complicates Troop Plans
Colombian Rebels Target U.S. Troops
Europeans Reach Deal on Structure for Defense
EU military force won't harm Nato, says Straw
Rumsfeld Expresses Concern Over EU Defense Plan
A Look at U.S. Daily Deaths in Iraq
Oil Experts See Long-Term Risks to Iraq Reserves
7 Spaniards Killed In Iraqi Ambush
Iraqi Leaders Say U.S. Was Warned of Disorder After Hussein
Leading Cleric Calls For Elections in Iraq
Iraq's Shiites Insist on Democracy. Washington Cringes.
Israel's hard men fight for peace
Sharon Rules Out Halting Work on Barrier for Talks
Palestinian Rebuffs Talks, Citing Israeli Barrier
Abandoned WWII chemical weapons pose risk
Japanese opposition steps up protests over SDF dispatch to Iraq
Saudi King Grants New Powers to 'Parliament'
EU Defense Deal to Face U.S. Suspicions at NATO
Army Officer's Actions Raise Ethical Issues
CIA admits lack of specifics on Iraqi weapons before invasion
Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them Costly
Eisenhower warned us
Repaired Cole Is Deployed
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Patriot Act Author Has Concerns
U.S. Inquiry Re-examining Prison Death
ENERGY AND OTHER
Solar Impulse
When Breathing Is Believing
Debate Grows Over Biotech Food
Calculating the Risks
The dulling-down of children?
ACTIVISTS
China Releases Three Internet Dissidents
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Plutonium from Sellafield in all children's teeth
Government admits plant is the source of contamination but says risk is 'minute'
Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday November 30, 2003
The UK Observer
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1096570,00.html
Radioactive pollution from the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria has led to children's teeth across Britain being contaminated with plutonium.
The Government has admitted for the first time that Sellafield 'is a source of plutonium contamination' across the country. Public Health Minister Melanie Johnson has revealed that a study funded by the Department of Health discovered that the closer a child lived to Sellafield, the higher the levels of plutonium found in their teeth.
Johnson said: 'Analysis indicated that concentrations of plutonium... decreased with increasing distance from the west Cumbrian coast and its Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant - suggesting this plant is a source of plutonium contamination in the wider population.' Johnson claimed the levels of plutonium are so minute that there is no health risk to the public. But this is disputed by scientists, MPs and environmental campaigners who have called for an immediate inquiry into how one of the world's most dangerous materials has been allowed to continue to contaminate children's teeth. There have long been claims of clusters of childhood leukaemia around Sellafield.
In the late 1990s researchers collected more than 3,000 molars extracted from young teenagers across the country during dental treatment and analysed them. To their surprise they found traces of plutonium in all the teeth including those from children in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Alarmingly, they discovered that those living closer to Sellafield had more than twice the amount of those living 140 miles away.
Plutonium is a man-made radioactive material and the only source of it in Britain is from Sellafield. The plant, which reprocesses nuclear fuel from reactors, still discharges plutonium into the Irish Sea.
The original research was carried out in 1997 by Professor Nick Priest who was working for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. At the time the conclusions of the research received little attention because the study concluded that the contamination levels were so minuscule they were thought to pose an 'insignificant' health risk.
But earlier this year the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters, looking at health risks posed by radioactive materials, examined Priest's study. Some of the committee's members have now cast doubt on the conclusions that plutonium in children's teeth posed no health risk.
Professor Eric Wright, of Dundee University Medical School, is one of the country's leading experts on blood disorders and a member of the committee. He believes that the tiny specks of plutonium in children's teeth caused by Sellafield radioactive pollution might lead to some people falling ill with cancer.
He said: 'There are genuine concerns that the risks from internal emitters of radiation are more hazardous [than previously thought]. The real question is by how much. Is it two or three times more risky... or more than a hundred?'
Wright believes that, while the plutonium contamination is unlikely to pose a health risk to much of the British population, it might be a problem for some individuals.
He said: 'If somebody has a bad collection of genes which means their body cannot deal with small levels of internal radioactive material, then there could be an issue.'
Wright's comments, coming on top of the admission from the Health Minister, have led to calls for an independent inquiry. Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Norman Baker said: '[This] stinks of a cover-up. They have known for six years that Sellafield has contaminated the population with plutonium but done nothing. Yet the plant continues to discharge plutonium into the Irish Sea. It shows the wanton disregard the nuclear industry has for public health and there needs to be an independent inquiry.'
Janine Allis-Smith of the campaign group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment said: 'There is no safe amount of plutonium. The plant must be closed down immediately.'
However, Priest, who is now professor of environmental toxicology at Middlesex University stands by his original conclusions. He said: '[The plutonium in teeth] was at such low levels that it was toxicologically insignificant. There really is nothing to worry about.'
A spokesman for BNFL, which runs Sellafield, said: 'What is not clear is whether the plutonium recorded in this study originated [from Sellafield] or from nuclear weapons testing fall-out.'
-------- depleted uranium
Save The Valley seeks hearing to challenge Army's proposal for Jefferson Proving Ground
By: Peggy Vlerebome
Madison Courier Staff Writer
Saturday, November 29, 2003
http://www.madisoncourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=253&ArticleID=15293
Indiana - Save the Valley is asking the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to convene a hearing to consider the environmental group's concerns about the Army's latest plan for Jefferson Proving Ground.
The hearing request was filed Wednesday. The deadline for interested parties to request a hearing was Friday.
The Army wants to amend its license to use depleted uranium at JPG to a possession-only license that would be renewable every five years for an indefinite length of time. The Army originally had filed a decommissioning plan to terminate the license, but changed its approach early this year.
The Army says that because of unexploded ordnance, it is too dangerous to send Army or contracted workers into the depleted uranium area to collect soil and other samples for testing that would be needed as part of the decommissioning process.
"This is an attractive rationale for the Army: It conjures up the image of uniformed personnel stepping on UXO and being wounded and killed at a time when such images are especially powerful in the public mind due to the war in Iraq," Michael Mullett, the attorney for Save the Valley, wrote in the request. The hearing request was sent to the administrative judges who are handling the Army's license renewal at the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Army says that with five-year renewals, it could wait to start the decommissioning process until such time as there is a safe way for workers to enter the area.
Save the Valley, however, contends in its hearing request that the regulations governing decommissioning do not provide for an open-ended license with no timetable for decommissioning.
If the Army is allowed to not have a decommissioning plan in place, JPG argues, a precedent could be set for how the same issue is handled at other bases. The approach the Army wants to take at JPG, which is referred to in documents as a "contingent request for an alternate schedule for the filing of a decommissioning plan," has never been done anywhere before.
Save the Valley, however, says the Army "has not presented an adequate factual basis to establish the need for an alternate schedule."
The Army in its own reports refers to going into the depleted-uranium area several times for various reasons and having no problem with unexploded ordnance, Save the Valley wrote in its request. Reasons the Army or contractors went into the DU area included to collect data, install test wells and conduct a survey.
"Thus, the Army's contention now that such activities would be impossible is belied by its own ... survey," the STV request says.
"Inasmuch as it was able to inventory and recover DU in the past without incurring harm from the UXO, the Army should be able to conduct similar actions in the future for testing and characterization," the STV request says.
Postponing the decommissioning indefinitely flies in the face of NRC regulations that call for "timely decommissioning and decontamination," Save the Valley's request said, citing the regulatory commission itself in past policy statements having to do with licensees at various sites licensed by the NRC.
"Here (at JPG) the alternate schedule fails to place a limit on the time permitted to decontaminate and decommission the site," Save the Valley wrote. "Instead, it extends the time for submission of a DP (decommissioning plan) indefinitely. It also fails to place the burden of proof directly on the licensee to demonstrate that a longer period of time is required for completing decommissioning. Instead, it effectively places the burden on STV or any other concerned group in the future to demonstrate that a shorter period is required, This effectively turns the rule on its head and creates precisely the type of situation which the rule was adopted to correct and prevent: the indefinite postponement of the decommissioning of licensed sites."
Save the Valley also says the Army cannot say one way or the other that its proposed alternative schedule will affect human health and safety from radiation, and has no way of measuring whether any effects would be increased or decreased over time.
Also, Save the Valley said, the Army doesn't know exactly what is in the depleted uranium. "Further, it is apparent that the DU at JPG has not been tested for impurities, including the amounts of plutonium, U-236, neptunium, Americium, and other transuranics that it may contain," Save the Valley's request read. Transuranics are elements that have an atomic number greater than that of uranium.
"In order to assess fully the possible exposure risks to the environment and human health, the Army should know the exact composition of the JPG DU in terms of its constituent radioactive elements," Save the Valley said. "The Army has yet do so such an analysis and without doing so, it cannot perform complete and accurate dose modeling." Computer models are used in analyzing such things as effects on plants, animals, air, water and soil from given amounts of a harmful or potentially harmful thing such as depleted uranium.
The Army's plan for its license at JPG contains what Save the Valley called "some startling inaccuracies" including the identity of the nearest downstream water user and the direction of the prevailing wind. And, Save the Valley contends, the Army "overlooked or ignored" the impact of the geology at JPG on carrying contamination off-site, did not address the impact of tornadoes in spreading contaminants "merely because the area lacks buildings which could be affected" and did not include anything about the effect beaver dams could have on water flow and water tables, and thus the spread of DU.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's staff is in the process of conducting a technical review of the Army's plan. Save the Valley filed a motion to delay its request for a hearing until after that review is completed.
Save the Valley had sought a hearing previously and it was granted, but then the Army changed it plan and some of the issues changed.
-------- iran
Tehran insists on nuke 'rights'
November 30, 2003
By Ali Akbar Dareini
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031129-115547-7423r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran insisted yesterday its decision to suspend uranium enrichment was "voluntary and temporary," saying it plans to enrich enough fuel for at least one of seven nuclear power plants it expects to build.
Hasan Rowhani, head of the powerful Supreme National Security Council, also said Iran would punish countries that backed U.S. efforts to take Iran's nuclear record to the United Nations Security Council at last week's board meeting of the U.N. nuclear agency.
"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," Mr. 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."
The 35-member board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) adopted a compromise resolution last week censuring Iran for secrecy in its nuclear program but not directly threatening U.N. sanctions, as the United States had sought. Key European powers, worried that Tehran would stop cooperating, opposed a direct threat.
Iran has insisted its nuclear program is aimed only at peaceful uses, challenging U.S. accusations it planned to make weapons.
The Iranian government hopes to produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity by 2021 from nuclear reactors, along with one currently under construction. Iran's first nuclear power plant, being built by the Russians, is expected to be completed by the end of 2004.
Mr. Rowhani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, said Iran possesses the technology necessary to enrich uranium and does not need foreign assistance.
"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.
Mr. Rowhani said countries that supported the U.S. position 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, while Russia and China worked for a softer resolution, along with other European, nonaligned and Latin American states.
"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.
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraq Scientists Say They Lied Over Weapons
November 30, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Bombmakers.html
Iraqi scientists never revived their long-dead nuclear bomb program, and in fact lied to Saddam Hussein about how much progress they were making before U.S.-led attacks shut the operation down for good in 1991, Iraqi physicists say.
Before that first Gulf War, the chief of the weapons program resorted to ``blatant exaggeration'' in telling Iraq's president how much bomb material was being produced, key scientist Imad Khadduri writes in a new book.
Other leading physicists, in Baghdad interviews, said the hope for an Iraqi atomic bomb was never realistic. ``It was all like building sand castles,'' said Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of sciences.
Seven months after a U.S.-British invasion toppled Saddam's Baath Party government, Iraqi scientists have grown more vocal in countering Bush administration claims, used to justify the war, that Baghdad had ``reconstituted'' nuclear weapons development, and that it once was a mere six months from making a bomb.
At best, Khadduri writes, it would have taken Iraq several years to build a nuclear weapon if the 1991 war and subsequent U.N. inspections had not intervened.
His self-published ``Iraq's Nuclear Mirage,'' a chronicle of years of secret weapons work and of a final escape into exile, is part of this senior scientist's emergence from a low profile in Canada -- intended to refute what he calls a ``massive deception'' in Washington that led the United States into war.
Months of searching by hundreds of U.S. experts have found no trace of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, just as U.N. inspectors found none before the war. No Iraqi scientists have confirmed the programs were revived in recent years.
Bush administration officials still speak, nonetheless, of a threat from such weapons -- of Baghdad's ``robust plans'' for them, as Vice President Dick Cheney puts it -- in defending last March's U.S. invasion of Iraq. They offer no hard evidence, however.
Khadduri, a U.S.- and British-educated physicist, writes that he did theoretical work on nuclear weapons as long ago as the mid-1970s, after joining Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission. By the late 1980s, as the secret bomb program accelerated, he was in a pivotal position as coordinator of all its scientific and engineering information.
The U.N. inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who dismantled the bomb program after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 war, saw Khadduri as a key source and conducted an all-day interview with him earlier this year in Toronto, where he has resided since 1998.
``Iraq's Nuclear Mirage,'' available via online booksellers, dismisses the U.S. contention that the atom-bomb establishment was somehow resurrected after the IAEA demolished it, U.N. inspectors were stationed in Iraq and Iraqi specialists were scattered.
``Where is the scientific and engineering staff required for such an enormous effort?'' he asks. ``Where are the buildings and infrastructure?''
The continuing U.S. weapons hunt amounts to no more than ``investigating mirages,'' he says.
An ex-bombmaker still in Iraq is just as dismissive of the unsubstantiated U.S. allegations.
``There was no point in trying to revive this program. There was no material, no equipment, no scientists,'' former bomb designer Sabah Abdul Noor said in a recent interview at Baghdad's Technology University.
``Scientists were scattered and under the eyes of inspectors, totally scattered. To do a project, you have to be together.''
Talib, the newly elected university dean, was an anti-Baathist who didn't participate in the bomb program, but was close to many who did. They vastly oversold their accomplishments before 1991, the physicist said.
``They put a lot of lies on Saddam Hussein,'' he said in a Baghdad interview. ``They took a lot of money out of him through what you call, in English, bluffing.'' When their installations were finally demolished, it ``saved their necks'' by burying their mistakes, he said. ``They could tell Saddam, `There's nothing left.'''
Khadduri, in his core position in the program, could attest to the overselling.
He writes that when he transferred top-secret documents of bomb program chief Jafar Dhia Jafar to an optical disc in 1991, he found the ``blatant exaggeration'' in a 1990 report to Saddam.
With its clever wording, Khadduri said in a telephone interview from Toronto, ``one could easily have been convinced we had produced a couple of kilograms of enriched uranium instead of a couple of grams'' -- that is, about four pounds of bomb material instead of a fraction of an ounce.
A bomb would have required some 40 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
In a 1997 summary, the IAEA said there were no indications the Iraqis ever produced more than a few grams of such material. It also said there were ``no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.''
Khadduri and others said the design and actual production of a bomb would have been an extremely difficult task.
It was an impossible quest, ``all futility,'' said one of Baghdad's senior nuclear physicists, Hamed M. al-Bahili.
Al-Bahili, who joined the Atomic Energy Commission in 1968 but remained outside the weapons program, said his colleagues inside ``all knew they wouldn't achieve results.'' As for whether the program was later revived, he said, ``these American inspectors are wasting their time.''
-------- korea
N. Korea Might Make Nuke Concession at Talks - Paper
November 30, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-talks.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - A leading Japanese daily said on Sunday there were signs North Korea may propose scrapping its nuclear weapons program at multilateral talks in return for a security guarantee from the United States.
Quoting diplomatic sources in Beijing, the Mainichi Shimbun said North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Yong-il had expressed readiness to make a new proposal centerd around scrapping its nuclear program. Kim had made the suggestion to Chinese officials during a visit to China from November 22 to 24.
The paper did not give any further details on what the proposal might contain.
On Friday, a South Korean government spokesman told reporters in Tokyo that North Korea was showing signs of abandoning its nuclear ambitions.
There has been a recent flurry of diplomatic activity from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia to try to kick-start a fresh round of six-way talks on ending the crisis over the North's nuclear weapons program.
The next round of six-party talks is likely to be held in Beijing next month. Media reports say they will take place from December 17 to 19.
In an attempt to defuse the crisis, Washington said last month it was willing to give Pyongyang unspecified security assurances in exchange for the North ending its nuclear ambitions.
The nuclear crisis began in October 2002 when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to having a covert weapons program despite having agreed earlier to freeze its atomic activities.
----
N. Korea Seeks Pay for Nuke Program Delay
November 30, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea says the United States should compensate it for halting work on two nuclear reactors there amid efforts to arrange a second round of six-nation talks on the communist state's atomic weapons program.
``The government is determined to certainly force the U.S. to compensate for all financial and material losses it caused'' to North Korea by suspending work on the light water reactors, Rodong Sinmun, a North Korean state-run newspaper, said. The report was carried by KCNA, the North's official news agency.
The U.S.-led Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, announced the yearlong suspension earlier this month to pressure the North into abandoning its nuclear weapons ambitions. The United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union belong to the consortium.
The ``decision made by the U.S. deserves serious attention as it came at a time when the six-party talks are high on the agenda,'' Rodong said.
The United States, Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas held talks in August to discuss the North's nuclear weapons program, and efforts are underway to organize a second round, possibly by the end of the year. The first conference ended without an agreement on future talks.
South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun has said that the fate of the North's nuclear reactor project will be tied to progress in resolving the larger nuclear weapons dispute.
The impoverished North badly needs the $4.6-billion reactors to generate electricity. In contrast to its current nuclear facilities, the North would have great difficulty converting the light water reactors for weapons production.
Rodong also said North Korea will not allow KEDO to remove any equipment, facilities, materials or technical documents from the construction site at Kumho, a remote northeastern coastal village.
The project was launched after North Korea promised to freeze and eventually dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons facilities in a 1994 deal with the United States. But the agreement went sour after U.S. officials said last year North Korea had admitted to secretly running a nuclear program in violation of international agreements.
Last month, it said it was building more atomic bombs, adding to the one or two it is believed to already possess.
-------- terrorism
Smugglers Enticed by Dirty Bomb Components
Radioactive Materials Are Sought Worldwide
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 30, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21879-2003Nov29?language=printer
TBILISI, Georgia -- When police caught up with him on May 31, Tedo Makeria was headed toward Tbilisi's main rail station, his lethal cargo hidden in boxes lined with lead so thick his taxi sagged from the weight. The suspicious policeman who halted the cab had barely cracked the trunk when he noticed the boxes and the distinctive labels that warned, "Danger: Radiation."
More police arrived within minutes, and a Geiger counter was produced. As Makeria smoked nervously in the back seat, the officers flipped the instrument's "on" switch and watched the needle leap off the screen.
"At first we were just shocked," Maj. Leri Omiadze, the ranking officer at the scene, recalled later. "Then we all started backing away slowly."
Inside Makeria's boxes were two capsules of highly radioactive metals -- strontium and cesium -- of a type that terrorism experts say can be used in a dirty bomb, a device that spews radiation but does not trigger a nuclear explosion. A third container held a vial of brown liquid that Georgian police identified as the substance used in mustard gas, one of the earliest chemical weapons. Only later did police learn Makeria's role in the affair. He was a courier for criminals trading in components and materials for weapons of mass destruction.
In a scheme still not fully understood, the boxes were delivered to Makeria by another Georgian, a man with a history of drug offenses. Makeria's job was to carry the boxes by train from Tbilisi to Adzharia province, a troubled enclave on Georgia's southwestern frontier. From there, police believe, they were to be transported by other couriers across the border into Turkey or perhaps even Iran, for delivery to an expectant customer. The buyer's identity remains unknown.
What is certain is that the Georgians who sought to profit from selling components of a dirty bomb are far from unique.
There have been dozens of cases of trafficking in radiological materials over the past three years, along with what some weapons experts describe as a disturbing new trend. While most sellers of such materials have traditionally been amateurs -- opportunists and lone actors in search of easy profits -- authorities are now seeing a surge of interest among criminal groups. In a string of incidents from the Caucasus and Eastern Europe to West Africa and South America, gangs have stalked and stolen radiological devices to sell for profit or to use in crimes ranging from extortion to murder.
The new interest in radiological material by smugglers and criminal networks complicates an already difficult task confronting governments: how to stop terrorists from obtaining any of the tens of thousands of powerful radiological sources around the world that are currently in private hands or have simply been discarded. In Georgia and other unstable corners of the world, radioactive materials are turning up on black markets alongside more traditional contraband, such as drugs or Kalashnikov rifles.
They are a currency of the global gray zone, a dangerous mixture of failed states, porous borders and weak law enforcement, where the tools of terrorism are bought and sold.
Crude but Effective
The involvement of professional smugglers and criminals only increases the odds that some of the radiological materials will end up in the hands of terrorists, U.S. experts say. Already, the sheer volume of such materials in circulation has prompted scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to conclude, in a study released in September, that a dirty bomb "attack somewhere in the world is overdue."
So serious is the threat that both the Bush administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency have launched major initiatives within the past 18 months to find and lock up abandoned radiological material across the globe. At the Energy Department, Secretary Spencer Abraham has made preventing a dirty-bomb threat a top priority, on a par with long-established programs to secure nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Union.
A dirty bomb, or "radiological dispersion device" in the jargon of defense experts, is not a nuclear weapon but rather a crude device that uses conventional explosives or other means to spread radiation over a wide area. Compared to true nuclear weapons or even to biological or chemical weapons, they are technologically simple, and well within the grasp of international terrorist groups, nuclear experts say.
Documents seized from training camps in Afghanistan two years ago by U.S. forces showed that al Qaeda leaders there planned to build a dirty bomb and may have begun gathering materials for one. Iraq, which struggled in vain for a decade to master the complexities of a nuclear weapon, built and tested a dirty bomb in the 1980s before abandoning the program on the grounds that it was ineffective against military targets, according to U.N. weapons inspectors.
Such a bomb would likely unleash panic and trigger economic and social upheavals. Even a moderately sized dirty bomb exploded in a modern city could contaminate large swaths of real estate with radiation, rendering some areas uninhabitable for months or years.
Last year, the Federation of American Scientists conducted a computer simulation to determine the impact of exploding less than two ounces of cesium-137, about 3,500 curies, in the heart of Manhattan. (A curie is a unit used to measure radioactivity. Experts say that a device of only a few dozen curies could make an effective bomb.) In the simulation, fine cesium particles spread across an area covering 60 square blocks. Cleanup and relocation following the blast would take years to complete and cost tens of billions of dollars, the study found.
Whether the radiation from such a blast would cause deaths or injuries is a subject of renewed debate. A view long held by radiation experts was that the human toll would be minimal; any deaths and injuries would be those caused by the blast effects of the explosion itself.
Now scientists aren't so sure. A new analysis, drawn from medical studies of radiation accidents, sees a significant health threat in the clouds of radioactive dust thrown up by a dirty-bomb explosion. The diluted radioactivity in those dust clouds would probably be too weak to cause serious harm. But, according to a new National Defense University analysis expected to be released next month, people near the blast site could suffer serious internal injuries from highly radioactive particles that enter the body through the nose and mouth and lodge in sensitive tissues. The severity of the injuries would depend on the type of radioactive material used, how it is spread, and how quickly the victims can be treated.
"If the particles are in a respirable form, they can do considerable damage -- to the lungs, to the digestive system, to the immune system," said Peter Zimmerman, chairman of the panel that produced the study. "Overall, the effects could be much worse than many of us previously thought."
Guerrilla Smugglers
Dozens of smuggling routes for nuclear and radiological materials have been charted over the past decade, but since 1999 a clear favorite has emerged. Judging from cases reported to police, nuclear traffickers have discovered abundant opportunity in Europe's southeastern flank: the Black Sea and Caucasus states that have long served as a crossroads linking Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Topping the list is Georgia, the former Soviet republic where huge crowds of demonstrators recently forced President Eduard Shevardnadze to resign. The small nation of 5 million suffers from porous borders, official corruption and rampant smuggling, problems exacerbated by three ethnic rebellions -- in the provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the north, and Adzharia in the south -- and regular incursions by guerrillas in the eastern region bordering Chechnya. In the conflict zones, trafficking in contraband has gone from a sideline trade to a thriving industry that supports tens of thousands of people, including, by some accounts, leaders of the rebel movements.
"Today, it's smuggling that keeps the separatist movements alive," said Aleko Kupatadze, a black-market specialist at the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center in Tbilisi. "Many of the guerrillas are really professional criminals who sometimes even switch sides. The violence you see has less to do with ethnic conflict than with disagreements over how the spoils are divided."
Radioactive materials are now caught up in the illicit trade. Georgia has been a dumping ground for Soviet-era radioactive hardware and waste, some of it extraordinarily lethal. Abandoned radioactive devices are found regularly in Georgia's rugged hills, often after a villager turns up with severe radiation burns. Two years ago this month, three woodcutters in northern Georgia nearly died of radiation injuries after stumbling across a Soviet-built generator powered by strontium with a radioactivity level of 40,000 curies. Nine such devices have been found in Georgia since the mid-1990s, and as many as three more are feared to be still missing.
"We inherited chaos. Radiological equipment has turned up in garbage dumps, even in sewage," said Dato Bakradze, director of international security and conflict management for Georgia's National Security Council. The possibility that Georgian terrorists or separatists might obtain one of the devices, he said, poses a "direct physical danger to our own country."
Since the early 1990s, Georgian police have been intercepting radioactive flotsam from amateur sellers hoping to profit from their discoveries. Lately, the materials offered for sale have become more sophisticated, and so have the traffickers.
At least three times since 1999, officials have discovered kilogram-quantity caches of uranium in vehicles leaving or entering Georgia. In the most recent case, on June 26, just over a pound of uranium was seized at the Georgia-Armenia border by guards armed with U.S.-supplied radiation detectors, according to Georgian security officials. Tests to determine the origin and enrichment level of the uranium were carried out with the help of U.S. Energy Department officials. The agency has declined to release the results. Georgian officials say they believe the material originated in Russia and was being transported through Georgia for resale in Iran.
The smuggling incident uncovered on May 31 in Georgia's capital appears to have been bolder still. If the plan had unfolded as intended, the radioactive materials would have moved by public train through the heart of the country's most populous city, into the troubled Adzharia province, a center of ethnic clashes and long-simmering hostility toward Georgia's central government.
Makeria, 33, the taxi driver, has told police he knows almost nothing about the origins or destination of the deadly cargo. In fact, he may not have realized the contents were radioactive, despite warning labels written in English and Russian, said Tamaz Alania, chief of the criminal division of Georgia's Internal Affairs Ministry.
"It is at least possible that Makeria did not know," Alania said in an interview. "He seemed confused and nervous when we first questioned him. And when we explained what was in the boxes he became much more nervous."
Makeria told police he picked up the unusually heavy green cartons from Giorgi Samkhakiuli, 29, an acquaintance of his father-in-law, who asked him to keep the boxes at his home in Adzharia until someone else came to pick them up. But Samkhakiuli, a man described by police as having a history of drug offenses, vanished after the smuggling plot was foiled. Investigators continue to pursue leads, but the search for others appears to have stalled.
Police have learned that the larger of the two radiological elements, a capsule of powdery cesium, was manufactured in the Soviet Union in the 1970s for industrial use. While the cesium has lost more than half of its original potency, it still contains enough radioactivity to seriously injure or kill, investigators said. Police were baffled about the possible origin of the mustard gas substance, which was still being analyzed.
Where and how the smuggled materials were to be used, police can only guess. But those responsible went out of their way to collect and package three radioactive materials with no known uses other than to terrorize or kill, said Malkhaz Salakaia, the investigations director at Georgia's Ministry of State Security.
"At this point we have to assume there are other people behind Samkhakiuli," Salakaia said. "And we cannot exclude that a criminal act was envisioned."
Iridium for Ransom
The radiological materials coveted by criminal groups are not found only in former Soviet states. Tens of thousands of powerful radioactive devices are currently in use across a wide range of industries, from medicine to metallurgy to mining. Some of them, because of their size, potency and availability, have become popular targets for thieves -- and a nightmare for counterterrorism experts.
One such device is known as a "well-logger," an instrument used by energy companies and geologists to search for underground oil fields. In well-logging, a powerful capsule of radioactive metal -- usually americium, iridium or strontium -- is lowered into a well shaft to probe for oil deposits, using beams of neutron and gamma radiation that penetrate dense rock. Then the radiation is measured to look for evidence of oil beneath the rocks. When not in use, the core is kept in a shielded canister the size of a small beer keg.
Well-loggers don't pack enormous amounts of radiation. But what they carry is dangerous.
"It's a neutron source," said Abel Gonzales, the radiation safety chief for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, referring to the type of deep-penetrating, tissue-destroying radiation emitted by well-loggers. If a dirty bomb is the objective, he said, "you could make something very nasty with that."
They also are easy to obtain. Tens of thousands of well-loggers are currently in use around the world, often in remote areas where they are liable to be stolen or lost.
One particularly worrisome criminal plot that recently came to light involved the theft of five iridium devices in Ecuador by a criminal gang that demanded -- and received -- thousands of dollars in payments for their return. It was the first known case of successful blackmail involving radiological material, and U.S. and U.N. experts fear the pattern could be repeated.
In a carefully planned, nighttime burglary Dec. 9, thieves broke into a storage shed in Quininde, in the coastal province of Esmeraldas, to steal the devices, which were owned by the firm Interinspec, according to accounts by investigators at the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency and Ecuador's Atomic Energy Commission. One of the thieves knew precisely where the instruments were kept and how much they were worth. He was a former employee who had been recently fired in a job dispute, Ecuadoran officials said.
Within days, the company received a ransom demand, and despite protests from government investigators, it decided to pay. Officials familiar with the case say the firm's top manager agreed to a price of $1,000 for each of the five devices. "He thought this was the best way to take control of the five lost sources," said Marco Bravo Salvador, technical director of the Ecuadoran commission.
The thieves, however, returned only three of the well-loggers, apparently deciding to keep the other two. Meanwhile, the company lost a sixth source in January when it fell from a boat into Ecuador's Quininde River. A seventh device went missing when a work crew accidentally left it behind after finishing a project in a remote jungle location.
After a massive search involving hundreds of army troops, the sources lost in the jungle and river were recovered. The two others, presumably still in the hands of bandits, remain unaccounted for.
Another recent theft, viewed by U.S. and U.N. officials as especially grave, occurred in December when a large well-logger was stolen from a truck in Nigeria. The owner of the device was Halliburton Co., based in Houston, which conducted its own search for several weeks before notifying the U.N. nuclear watchdog of the loss.
The device reportedly was stolen while being hauled through the oil-rich Niger Delta, between the cities of Warri and Port Harcourt. Initially, the truck driver told police that someone swiped the instrument from his vehicle when he stopped at a roadside motel for a nap. Later, investigators began to find discrepancies in the driver's story.
"The hotel story didn't check out," said one official involved in the investigation, who spoke on condition that his name not be used. "The suspicion now is that the driver took it," apparently as part of a plot involving accomplices. The thief was apparently knowledgeable about such well-loggers because, out of several devices on the truck, he singled out the most powerful one, the official said.
Months of searches using radiation detectors turned up no trace of the missing well-logger. Then, two months ago, investigators got a break. A well-logger discovered in a private scrap yard in September turned out to be the same one that was stolen nine months earlier. The scrap yard was in Germany, more than 3,200 miles from the Niger Delta.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
HISTORY MATTERS: The bad and the ugly of underground nuclear tests
Salt Lake Tribune
Will Bagley
November 30, 2003
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Nov/11302003/utah/115738.asp
What killed John Wayne? How about Genghis Khan -- in southern Utah, no less. As improbable as it may sound, the Mongol emperor may well have done in the Duke -- with help from Edward Teller, the genius of the nuclear age, the Atomic Energy Commission and five packs of Camels a day.
RKO pictures, Hollywood mogul Howard Hughes and director Dick Powell picked Snow Canyon near St. George to play the Gobi Desert in "The Conqueror," the extravaganza they made in 1954 about Genghis Khan's humble beginnings. It was a star-studded, big-budget spectacle of windblown battle scenes about the epic passion of one of history's most misunderstood mass murderers for the beautiful princess Bortai, played by bombshell Susan Hayward.
Marlon Brando was up to be the leading man, but for incomprehensible reasons, John Wayne decided Genghis would be the role of a lifetime, allegedly saying, "I see him as gunfighter." Powell signed up the Shivwits band of Paiutes to stand in for the Golden Horde, and in a stroke of genius, shooting was scheduled for St. George's balmy summertime.
The local population pitched in and charmed the cast and crew, but shooting the endless battle scenes proved to be about as much fun as being on the receiving end of a 13th-century Mongol terror campaign. It got so hot the Chamber of Commerce refused to print the temperatures.
Meanwhile, 136 miles downwind, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated 11 nuclear bombs in the open air above the Yucca Flats test site during 1954. The year before, the "Dirty Harry" and "Upshot-Knothole" tests blanketed Utah with so much plutonium that the fallout set off Geiger counters in Snow Canyon.
Powell was concerned about possible health risks, but government officials assured him the radioactive sands posed no problem. Advertisement
As art, "The Conqueror" was a bomb of atomic proportions and ranked as one of the 50 worst movies ever made. Hughes, however, loved it, and in his aged wisdom yanked it from the market and watched it over and over and over and over . . .
Meanwhile, by 1980, almost half the film's cast had contracted cancer, which killed Powell and all the leading stars, including John Wayne.
And Teller? When scientists who had developed the atomic bomb refused to produce a tactically useless hydrogen weapon, Teller volunteered on the condition he could conduct open-air nuclear tests.
Up to 1963, the United States detonated 215 atmospheric nuclear blasts totaling 428 megatons -- and the Nevada test site exploded 121 of them upwind of Utah.
Of 760 known underground tests between 1962 and 1992, "a surprisingly large fraction were not contained and contributed periodically to high levels of radioactive fallout in downwind areas," wrote radiochemist Edward Martell.
"The total number of excess cancer deaths in local and remote downwind areas must have exceeded thousands. This does not include the added toll of stillbirths, birth defects, chromosome-aberration diseases, and other adverse radiation induced health effects."
Altogether, Nevada has seen 1,051 nuclear tests. How many Americans did they kill? Nobody knows. One scientific study found 52 excess leukemia deaths among Utah children between 1959 and 1967, but no one has looked into a possible link to Utah's extraordinary rates of chronic diseases.
Earlier this month, 80 percent of Utah's congressional delegation voted to spend $25 million to restart underground nuclear weapons testing. Of course, none of these test supporters lost a father to cancer that his family linked to radioactive fallout in southern Utah.
Of 2,043 known nuclear tests, how many times did a nuclear weapon fail to detonate?
Not once.
Historian Will Bagley appreciates the work of writers Chip Ward, Mary Dickson and John Fuller.
----
Bush plans new nuclear weapons
'Bunker-buster' bombs set to end 10-year research ban
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday November 30, 2003
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1096298,00.html
The United States is embarking on a multimillion-dollar expansion of its nuclear arsenal, prompting fears it may lead the world into a new arms race.
The Bush administration is pushing ahead with the development of a new generation of weapons, dubbed 'mini-nukes', that use nuclear warheads to penetrate underground bunkers.
Last week, it gave a quiet yet final go-ahead to a controversial research project into the bunker-buster. The move effectively ends a 10-year ban on research into 'low-yield' nuclear weapons. Critics fear it may lead other countries to push ahead with developing such weapons. It also comes at a highly sensitive time diplomatically, with the US lobbying countries such as Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear plans.
'The United States is spurring a new global arms race with our own development of a new generation of nuclear weapons,' said Democrat Ellen Tauscher, who led an unsuccessful bid in Congress to have the programme scrapped.
The new warheads are designed to use shockwaves to destroy deep bunkers even if the bomb does not reach them. Experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has shown army planners that bunkers are being built deeper and more securely. 'We have to be able to match our capability to our potential targets,' one White House official said.
But critics say the weapons won't work and doubt claims that the radiation will remain underground.
The US Army plans to convert two existing nuclear bombs - the B61 and B83. The B61 can be dropped by B-52 bombers or F-16 jets. The larger B83 has explosive yields of one to two megatons. Research will focus on hardening the bomb casings so they can penetrate layers of steel, rock and concrete.
Anti-nuclear campaigners say the B83's large size makes its classification as a 'mini-nuke' debatable. 'The powers that be describe them as low-yield weapons. But that is far from the case,' said Jay Coghlan, director of Nukewatch.
Critics also question the wisdom of developing such weapons and say America's willingness to deploy them will blur the distinction between nuclear war and conventional conflict. Bob Schaeffer, of the Anti-Nuclear Alliance, said: 'It is dangerous and provocative. It is like a drunk preaching temperance to everyone else at the bar, while ordering another round.'
Leading Democrats contend that the development of the bunker-buster is part of a broader re-evaluation of America's nuclear arsenal by George Bush's administration. They point to signs that nuclear weapons are being given a prominent role in the post-Cold War world, at a time when many others see them as obsolete. 'This White House has a dramatically different view of nuclear weapons compared with previous administrations,' said Tauscher.
'The administration's actions are having the opposite effect by erasing the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons. Russia has already indicated that it will develop new "tactical" weapons in response and no one doubts our enemies will follow suit.'
Since Bush announced a 'nuclear posture review' after coming to office, the administration has taken several steps to develop and modernise its nuclear arsenal to deter a wide range of threats, including chemical and biological weapons and what the review called 'surprising military developments'.
Three Tennessee Valley power stations have been selected to resume production of tritium, a substance used to increase the yield from a nuclear blast. Tritium has not been actively produced in the US for years and this is the first time civilian power plants have been scheduled for military use.
In April, the Los Alamos military laboratory in New Mexico produced the first 'plutonium pit' in America for more than a decade. Plutonium pits are triggers vital to the production of nuclear weapons and officials are pushing to get funding to build an entire new facility.
Concern also surrounds plans to cut the time needed to bring American underground nuclear testing sites back into working condition. Currently the time needed would be 24 months, but the administration has pushed for funds to reduce that to 18 months. While officials insist the US has no plans to resume nuclear testing - which would breach an international ban - critics say the enhanced preparations for a resumption are worrying.
'Why are they even talking about this now, unless something is planned? It makes no sense to us. America has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but it did not stop 9/11,' said Schaeffer.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
End users worry arms critics
November 30, 2003
By William J. Kole
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031129-115544-1905r.htm
PRAGUE - The crates labeled "sporting and hunting weapons" looked innocuous. But inside, dozens of Czech-made sniper rifles were cradled in plastic foam. Their destination: Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity.
An unidentified licensed Czech arms dealer sold the rifles - along with 176 Soviet-era tanks, 60 tank cannons and a dozen L-39 combat jets - to the Yemeni government in the past four years, according to a new report by an arms-control advocacy group.
The Czech exports, part of the country's $90 million-a-year arms trade, raise troubling questions about the ultimate buyers, since Yemen has a history of reselling arms to people from volatile nations across the Mideast and Africa, human rights groups say.
"You can never be sure that a country won't resell the equipment as its own surplus. It's a serious problem," conceded Vratislav Vajnar, managing director of the Association of Defense Industry, a trade group representing the Czech Republic's 120-plus weapons makers and exporters.
Al Qaeda terrorists are suspected in the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 U.S. sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000.
That bombing turned up traces of C-4, a plastic explosive developed for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. But Semtex, a Czech-made explosive, has been used in other terrorist bombings, and on Nov. 5 border police arrested three men as they tried to smuggle Semtex over the Czech border into Austria. Taped to one of the suspects' bodies was 51/2 pounds of the powerful explosive - enough to blow up a dozen jetliners.
The recent Czech weapons trade was outlined in a report by Amnesty International, which cited customs records and other documents.
Amnesty, Transparency International and other groups have expressed growing concern about legal sales of legitimate weapons and armaments to countries such as Yemen that are unstable, have ties to militant groups or are known for reselling equipment to third parties.
Yemen, the ancestral home of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, is particular cause for concern. On Tuesday, Yemeni security forces captured a man described as one of the country's top al Qaeda leaders and the suspected mastermind of the Cole bombing.
"Weapons sold to Yemen have ended up in Somalia and Sudan," Karel Dolejsi, who tracks questionable Czech arms deals for Amnesty, told the Associated Press. "Our leaders still have a communist mentality. They don't believe this information is for the public."
Czech authorities acknowledge the country's manufacturers and exporters have sold aircraft, tanks, weapons, ammunition and other military equipment to Yemen, Algeria, Angola, Colombia, Sri Lanka and other hot spots.
Although there is no hard evidence that terrorists have obtained arms from the Czech Republic, human rights groups say the risk is real that deadly weaponry will fall into the wrong hands.
In its report, Amnesty called on the Czech government - one of the few exporting nations to keep weapons sales a state secret - to make public the details of such transactions.
That secrecy will end next spring, when the country - a NATO member and a U.S. ally with 275 troops in Iraq - joins the European Union. The EU's code of conduct requires member states to publicize information on arms exports.
Companies are generally free to sell to countries such as Yemen that are not under U.N. arms embargoes, but officials carefully screen each transaction before giving their approval, said Ivo Mravinac, a spokesman for the Trade and Industry Ministry, which oversees the process.
"In the case that terrorism might be involved, the decision is of course negative," Mr. Mravinac said.
"But unless there are signals indicating something like that, the Foreign Ministry must contemplate whether it is appropriate to cast doubts on the guarantees given by the foreign government."
Mr. Vajnar, the Czech arms trade representative, believes the government's checklist for arms deals, and the burden on foreign governments to furnish credible "end-use certificates" proving the weapons are destined for armies - not terrorists or their middlemen - provide adequate security.
"If something isn't clear, the sale is stopped. You're out of luck," he said.
Last year, Czech authorities rejected 21 requests to export arms to several countries, including Iran, Mr. Mravinac said. They approved 1,090 other requests. Mr. Mravinac declined to identify the nations involved.
The Czech sales are dwarfed by those of the United States, by far the world's largest weapons exporter with $15 billion in annual business. Britain, Israel, Russia, France, Germany, China and Sweden are among other major players.
During the era of communism, which ended in 1989, then-Czechoslovakia was among the world's chief arms exporters. It sold hundreds of tanks, thousands of firearms and large quantities of Semtex to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cambodia and other trouble spots, a practice the government insists stopped long ago.
Libyan terrorists used Semtex in 1988 to down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 persons.
Although its market share since has shrunk, the Czech Republic remains a haven for arms dealers hawking high-quality weaponry including Skorpion submachine guns, L-159 subsonic light combat aircraft, Tamara mobile radar systems and a wide array of precision small-caliber handguns.
Applications for licenses to export Czech weapons jumped by nearly 40 percent this year. Neither the government nor the industry could explain the sudden interest, but both pointed to a surplus of military equipment that the army is trying to unload.
-------- asia
South Korea's Roh Says Iraq Shootings Intolerable
November 30, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-korea.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who faces a tough decision on what kind of additional troops to send to Iraq, urged a security review on Monday after what he called the intolerable shooting of four civilians there.
Gunmen killed two South Korean electrical workers in Sunday's incident near ousted president Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and wounded two, one critically.
``This incident is not terror against the military or a public organization but terror against civilians,'' Roh told his aides, the presidential Blue House said in a statement. ``This kind of inhumane activity is intolerable.''
Sunday's attack will almost certainly have major political ramifications for Roh -- although it seems unlikely he will change his October decision to deploy more troops.
His national security chief, Ra Jong-yil, told reporters: ``It's not desirable to link this issue with the additional troop dispatch plan.''
A spokeswoman for the presidential Blue House said Roh had been briefed overnight and the National Security Council would meet at 0200 GMT. Ra chairs the meetings and briefs Roh.
``Today's meeting will focus on whether the incident was targeted against South Korea or just an accident,'' Ra said. He said a number of unregistered civilians were in the region.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry official told Reuters the two wounded civilians were being treated at a U.S. military hospital.
SECURITY ALERT
Roh said a further alert should be issued to overseas diplomatic missions to guard against possible attacks. He said the security team should come up with additional safety measures.
Many South Koreans disagree with sending more troops and opposition has grown since the latest spate of attacks on non-U.S. foreigners. But one major conservative newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, took a different tack in an editorial.
``Although the deaths of the two South Koreans is shocking to South Korean people, we should remain firm in sending additional troops to Iraq,'' it said. ``It is now meaningless to discuss whether to send combat troops or not, the president should make a decision as soon as possible.''
Lee said the four civilians were working as sub-contractors from a South Korean company for an unspecified U.S. firm at a construction site for a power distribution plant.
The incident came a day after two Japanese diplomats were shot dead in a similar attack in the same area. Seven Spanish intelligence agents were also killed that day south of Baghdad.
Roh has committed to sending more troops to Iraq but has yet to decide whether to include combat forces in the expected 3,000-strong contingent. Some 675 medical and engineering troops have been based in Nassiriya, southern Iraq, since May.
A fact-finding team that included members of parliament returned last week from Iraq and is to report its findings to Roh soon.
History might question the decision to send troops to Iraq, Roh said on SBS television on Friday.
``The most important factor is whether strengthening ties with the United States will help resolve the North Korea issue, not economic benefits,'' he said, referring to a crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons ambitions.
--------
Murder of Japanese in Iraq Complicates Troop Plans
November 30, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-asia-troops.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - The murder of two Japanese diplomats in northern Iraq is certain to complicate Tokyo's decision to send troops to Iraq and is also likely to increase opposition to South Korean plans to commit more soldiers.
Dozens of people, many of them soldiers, have died in a spate of attacks in Iraq targeted at countries helping the United States rebuild the country and crush Islamic militants.
Seven Spanish intelligence agents were killed in Iraq on Saturday in an attack on their unmarked vehicles south of Baghdad. Japan's Foreign Ministry said two Japanese diplomats were also killed in an apparent ambush near Tikrit, hometown of Iraq's ousted leader, Saddam Hussein.
The rising violence had already prompted Japan to delay a planned deployment of non-combat troops, while South Korea is still deciding on the mix of non-combat and combat forces, including possibly special forces, it will send.
The two countries are among the United States' staunchest allies in Asia and need Washington's help to resolve a crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
But rising attacks in Iraq are piling on the pressure for Tokyo and Seoul, whose voters increasingly oppose sending troops into a war zone and risk seeing them come home in body bags.
Such opposition is also adding to the pressure on the Bush administration, which is trying to spread the load of taming and rebuilding Iraq ahead of next year's U.S. presidential elections.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry official, who declined to be identified, said the ministry has asked its five-member mission in Iraq to step up security in light of the Japanese deaths.
There was no plan to withdraw from there yet, the official said. South Korea has had 675 medical and engineering personnel deployed in Iraq since May. The government is thinking of committing 3,000 more troops and President Roh Moo-hyun is believed to be close to deciding on the mix of forces to send.
``ANGER AND DREAD''
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vowed not to be blown off course by the diplomats' deaths -- the first of Japanese in Iraq since the U.S.-led war began there in March.
``Even though this incident has taken place, Japan must not give in to terrorism,'' Koizumi told reporters on Sunday.
``We will firmly carry out our responsibilities for humanitarian aid and reconstruction (in Iraq) as a member of the international community. There is no change in this,'' the prime minister added.
In an early sign of potential trouble, though, Katsuya Okada, secretary-general of the opposition Democratic Party -- which opposes the troop dispatch -- issued a statement calling on the government to explain its stance on the issue to the people.
``I feel strong anger and dread,'' he said.
Earlier, Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi named the murdered diplomats as Katsuhiko Oku, 45, and Masamori Inoue, 30.
``This incident is unforgivable,'' she said. ``There is no wavering in our country's basic stance to actively carry out reconstruction aid for Iraq without giving in to terrorism.''
Reports of the killings came hours after the top military commander in Iraq said attacks against U.S. forces had fallen sharply in recent weeks, despite figures showing November to be the deadliest month for U.S. troops since the war began in March.
Saturday's violence will also be carefully assessed by other Asian governments that have sent troops to Iraq, including Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines.
Thailand has 443 engineering and paramedical troops attached to a 10,000-strong, Polish-led multinational division, while the Philippines has a 95-member contingent serving as peacekeepers and doctors. Singapore has 192 Navy and Air Force personnel in the country.
Australia has nearly 800 troops in and near Iraq.
Several Asian nations including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, all of which have large Muslim populations, have refused to send troops despite pressing demands by Washington to contribute forces.
All three opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
-------- colombia
Colombian Rebels Target U.S. Troops
Associated Press
Sunday, November 30, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22469-2003Nov30.html
BOGOTA, Colombia, Nov. 29 -- Colombia's main rebel group warned Saturday that U.S. military personnel aiding government troops will face attack.
Raul Reyes, a commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, issued the threat two weeks after a grenade attack on two Bogota bars in which one person was killed and 72 were wounded, including four Americans.
"The invasive foreign troops are a military target for the FARC," Reyes said in an interview posted on the Web site of the News Agency of New Colombia, which carries official rebel statements.
Reyes insisted that he did not know whether the FARC was responsible for the bar attacks. U.S. and Colombian officials have blamed leftist rebels.
The United States has spent about $2.5 billion in mostly military aid since 2000 to help the Colombian government battle the FARC and a smaller leftist rebel group.
Some of the U.S. troops in Colombia are Special Forces who are training Colombian battalions in counterinsurgency tactics.
-------- europe
Europeans Reach Deal on Structure for Defense
November 30, 2003
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/international/europe/30EURO.html
NAPLES, Italy, Nov. 29 - Britain, France and Germany have struck a deal on a common European defense, including a guarantee of mutual assistance and a scaled-back plan for a headquarters, officials said.
That progress, announced Friday, came as negotiators struggled to reconcile views on Europe's constitution, particularly the voting system giving suitable weights to larger and smaller members. A spokesman for the British Foreign Office said it was consulting with "key allies" - a reference to Washington - before proposing the document to the wider group of European Union countries.
Earlier Friday, ministers discussed whether Europe's constitution would have a reference to Christianity in its preamble. The reference is supported by Poland and Italy, among others, and strongly opposed by France. Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister, said he had proposed a compromise that would refer both to Europe's "Christian roots" and to its "secular institutions."
The proposal on defense includes three major elements, according to excerpts of the document that were published in Le Monde: The European Union would begin a system where only select countries could take part in a common defense; the constitution would have a clause guaranteeing mutual assistance in case of attack; and a unit would handle operations and planning. There was no reference to a headquarters, to avoid the impression that the military structure could compete with NATO.
----
EU military force won't harm Nato, says Straw
Sophie Arie in Naples
Sunday November 30, 2003
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1096580,00.html
The row over the planned European Union constitution looked set to go to the wire last night after two days of talks between EU Foreign Ministers failed to reach agreement on key points from block voting to the role of God.
Despite a deal on European defence - with plans drawn up between Britain, France and Germany to create an independent military arm of the EU - several key issues still remain to be resolved when heads of state meet in Brussels in two weeks' time for the final negotiations over the controversial document.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who is pushing for a settlement on voting rights, said yesterday that he was leaving Naples - where the talks have been held - 'more concerned than I was when I arrived'.
But Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisted yesterday that good progress had been made. He said fears that an independent military capacity for the EU would rival Nato were misplaced, adding: 'I am a 100 per cent Atlanticist and so is the Prime Minister.
'This will underpin and strengthen Nato in many ways.'
He said he was 'in discussions' with the Americans about the implications of the scheme, thought to have taken Washington by surprise. America has made no public comment about the EU military scheme, but one Nato diplomat said it was likely to be regarded as a 'Trojan horse'.
Official details of the plan emerged on Friday as the Foreign Ministers began their meeting in Italy to iron out disagreements on a draft EU constitution which is due to be finalised in two weeks in Brussels ahead of the arrival next year of 10 new member states.
The defence deal would enable the EU to conduct military operations using Nato resources such as transport, communications and intelligence. In some cases, the Europeans could act entirely independently.
The draft text adds: 'If a member state is the victim of an armed aggression on its territory, the other member states shall give it aid and assistance by all the means in their power.'
This would happen only if EU members agreed unanimously on an operation, Straw stressed.
The plan was supported by EU countries and would-be members as a major breakthrough and the biggest sign of a mending of relations between Britain and the two EU heavyweights Germany and France, which were badly fractured over Iraq.
However, there was no deal on other issues such as the size of the future European Commission, voting procedures, whether the EU should have a single Foreign Minister and whether Europe's Christian roots should be written into the constitution.
Spain and Poland have threatened to block the constitution if they lose voting concessions won at Nice in 1999, giving them greater influence, but Germany is keen for a reweighting of votes.
Straw said it was best to put off the decision on voting since the present system would remain until 2009.
'It's only 2003 now,' Straw said. 'Why do we have to have an unnecessary argument about this?'
The UK has made clear its 'red lines' which cannot be crossed include keeping the veto on tax, foreign policy, social security and defence. It also wants the number of commissioners reduced to 15, rather than the full 25, once accession countries join.
----
Rumsfeld Expresses Concern Over EU Defense Plan
November 30, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-nato-rumsfeld.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday expressed concern about an emerging plan to enhance the European Union's defense capabilities saying he saw no reason for an effort that competes with NATO.
Arriving in Brussels for a meeting of NATO defense ministers, Rumsfeld also suggested NATO could assume an even larger role in Afghanistan.
``I certainly think that NATO has a fabulous record over most of my adult lifetime of contributing to defense and deterrence and a more peaceful world,'' Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him.
``Therefore I would say anything that puts at risk that institution...you'd have to have a very good reason for wanting to do it. And I think there's no reason for something else to be competitive with NATO, myself.''
Rumsfeld was commenting on a British-French-German idea to enhance the EU's defense capabilities and discussed by EU foreign ministers meeting in Naples, Italy, over the weekend. Details of the plan were expected to be completed within weeks.
Rumsfeld said countries benefiting from NATO's existence do not ``want something that would inject an instability into it.''
On the subject of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld said providing NATO with needed additional capabilities to expand its activities outside Kabul would be discussed at this week's NATO meetings.
NATO has commanded the 57,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since August and plans to extend its influence beyond Kabul by taking so-called Provisional Reconstruction Teams under its wing.
Asked if he envisioned NATO eventually supplanting the roughly 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld said: ``I certainly wouldn't rule it out.'' But he noted the United States was a NATO member and the U.S. force would not necessarily be ``replaced.''
``It's conceivable that a larger portion of the responsibility could move from the existingcoalition...to NATO having that responsibility,'' Rumsfeld said.
NATO chief George Robertson has said the alliance is struggling to generate the right military capabilities needed to handle the current ISAF mission, and already needs more troops on the ground.
Rumsfeld also said U.S. officials this week plan to discuss ideas with NATO allies regarding a fundamental redeployment of U.S. forces in Europe as part of the Pentagon's global restructuring of the U.S. military.
Rumsfeld did not discuss specifics but U.S. officials have indicated for months the United States could draw down troops in Germany and move them to points east in Europe.
Rumsfeld said changing the nuclear posture of U.S. forces in Europe would be part of this week's discussions.
``There will be a back and forth process for many months, is my guess. ... Of course it's not something the United States can or should or even could do unilaterally,'' Rumsfeld said.
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A Look at U.S. Daily Deaths in Iraq
By The Associated Press
Nov 30, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_US_DEATHS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
As of Wednesday, Nov. 26, 434 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, according to the Department of Defense. Of those, 298 died as a result of hostile action and 136 died of non-hostile causes, the department said. It did not provide an update on Sunday.
The British military has reported 52 deaths; Italy, 17; Spain, eight; Denmark, Ukraine and Poland have reported one each.
On or since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 296 U.S. soldiers have died - 184 as a result of hostile action and 112 of non-hostile causes, according to the Defense Department's figures.
Since the start of military operations, 2,094 U.S. service members have been injured as a result of hostile action, according to the Defense Department's figures as of Wednesday. Non-hostile injured numbered 350.
The latest deaths reported by U.S. Central Command:
- Two U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday when they came under fire near the Syrian border in Husaybah, 200 miles northwest of Baghdad.
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RESOURCES
Oil Experts See Long-Term Risks to Iraq Reserves
November 30, 2003
By JEFF GERTH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/international/middleeast/30OIL.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
As the Bush administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the pipes and pumps above ground that carry Iraq's oil, it has not addressed serious problems with Iraq's underground oil reservoirs, which American and Iraqi experts say could severely limit the amount of oil those fields produce.
In northern Iraq, the large but aging Kirkuk field suffers from too much water seeping into its oil deposits, the experts say, and similar problems are evident in the sprawling oil fields in southern Iraq.
Experts familiar with Iraqi's oil industry have said that years of poor management have damaged the fields, and some warn that the current drive to rapidly return the fields to prewar capacity runs the risk of reducing their productivity in the long run.
"We are losing a lot of oil," said Issam al-Chalabi, Iraq's former oil minister. He said it "is the consensus of all the petroleum engineers" involved in the Iraqi industry that maximizing oil production may be detrimental to the reservoirs.
A 2000 United Nations report on the Kirkuk field said "the possibility of irreversible damage to the reservoir of this supergiant field is now imminent."
American officials acknowledge the underground problems, but figuring out how to address them is a quandary for the United States. The Bush administration and the Iraqis are banking on oil revenues to help pay for Iraq's reconstruction, and American officials say that aggressively managing the reservoirs is crucial to keeping oil and revenue flowing. But so far, American officials have steered clear of delving below ground, partly, they say, out of fear of adding to suspicion in the Arab world that the United States invaded Iraq to control its oil.
The above ground versus below ground debate also raises the question of whether the American-led reconstruction effort is intended just to repair damage from the war or to improve conditions beyond what they were before the invasion.
When Wayne Kelley, a Texas oil engineer, and other experts asked about attending to Iraq's oil reservoirs during a government conference for contractors in July, Army Corps of Engineers officials said their mission was restoring war-damaged facilities, not "redeveloping the oil fields," according to a transcript of the meeting.
But in a recent interview, Rob McKee, a former top executive with ConocoPhillips who took over last month as senior oil adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, said that while some might overstate the underground problems, he believed that the reservoirs did demand attention. "It's bad," Mr. McKee said in a telephone interview, "but it will not be catastrophic and especially overnight." Still, he said, it is crucial to collect data, and do engineering on the problem.
Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, the Houston oil services and engineering company managing the Iraqi oil-repair job, said Iraq's present production levels and the administration's future oil goals "cannot be sustained without reservoir maintenance."
Thamir Ghadhban, a senior adviser to the Iraqi oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, disputed this view and predicted that production would return to prewar capacity of three million barrels a day by the end of 2004; currently production is at slightly more than two million barrels a day. At the same time, he said in an interview, "we should do much more than we have in the past" to maintain the reservoirs. "We definitely have to put more money into it and bring in consultants," he said.
The Army Corps of Engineers has already set aside $1.7 billion for maintaining Iraq's oil supply, and the money has been split between paying for imported fuel and fixing the Iraqi pipes, pumps and transfer stations, officials say. Approximately $2 billion has been approved for oil infrastructure repairs next year, including about $40 million to begin the study of the reservoirs. But managing the reservoirs could be a long and expensive process involving complicated computer simulation and changes in extraction techniques.
This work is particularly important, oil experts say, because while Iraq sits on one of the world's largest deposits, most of its oil is being drawn from two older fields, Rumaila in the south and Kirkuk in the north.
The complications in Iraq are common in aging fields, whose management is a delicate balance of geology, physics and economics. Petroleum engineers often compare oil reservoirs to a bottle of soda, which has a high level of energy when full but loses energy as it is depleted. Engineers use a variety of methods to maintain the pressure needed to bring the oil to the surface, including injection of gas or water into the fields.
Pumping oil too quickly can upset the balance, leading to more gas and water migrating into the wells and ultimately making extraction of oil uneconomical. Oil experts said Saddam Hussein demanded high production, but United Nations economic sanctions precluded Iraq from acquiring the sophisticated computer modeling equipment and technology required to properly manage older reservoirs. As a result, despite the ingenuity of Iraqi engineers, the fields have suffered.
Oil experts working for the United Nations found that some reservoirs in the southern part of Iraq "may only have ultimate recoveries of between 15 percent and 25 percent of the total oil" in the field, as compared to an industry norm of 35 percent to 60 percent.
Before the United States-led invasion, the Iraqis sought outside help in managing its reservoirs. "Kirkuk was of particular concern and particular urgency," said Maury Vasilev, senior vice president of PetroAlliance Services, a Russian oil-field company that held discussions last year with the Iraqi Oil Ministry. He said that because of the water content in the wells "there was a question of how much oil they could recover."
More recent estimates of Kirkuk's condition are also bleak. Fadhil Chalabi, a former top Iraqi oil executive now based in London, said Kirkuk's anticipated recovery rate had dropped to 15 percent from 30 percent. An American oil executive said Iraqi engineers had recently told him they were now expecting recovery rates of 9 percent in Kirkuk and 12 percent in Rumaila without more advanced technology.
Iraq's problems were well known to the United States before the war. The Energy Infrastructure Planning Group, set up by senior administration officials in September 2002 to plan for the oil industry in the event of war, learned that Iraq was reinjecting crude oil to maintain pressure in the Kirkuk field.
"Iraqis acknowledged it was a poor practice," said one administration expert involved with the group, and as the main war wound down the Iraqis " were unequivocal that that practice had to stop and right away."
But it did not. The amount of oil being reinjected is now 150,000 to 250,000 barrels a day, down from as much as 400,000 barrels a day last summer, said Mr. McKee, but he added that he had never encountered such a practice in his lengthy career in the oil industry.
The reinjection of oil was a clear sign of trouble in the underground reservoirs, but the energy planning task force decided not to address them, partly for political reasons, according to participants in the process.
"We didn't want to give fuel to the fire of debate that was saying the U.S. was just doing this to steal the oil," one administration official said.
Task force participants said there was another potential political factor. The group had secretly decided, without soliciting bids, that the contract for fixing Iraq's oil infrastructure would go to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton, which had an existing Pentagon contract related to war planning. Halliburton was previously run by Vice President Dick Cheney.
"Everyone realized the selection of KBR was going to look bad," said one task force member.
K.B.R. and others made a case that reservoir management was necessary and the occupation authority asked Congress for the $40 million now set aside for reservoir management. But Ms. Hall, the Halliburton spokeswoman, said this month that those underground tasks had been "pulled and are not being funded" even though reservoir maintenance is critical to even present production.
Mr. McKee, however, said the financing was not canceled, but just "pushed back for a short while."
There is not yet a firm price tag of modernizing Iraq's oil industry, but it is clear it will be enormous.
Edward C. Chow, a former Chevron executive who is now a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates it will cost $20 billion to restore Iraqi production to prewar levels, an amount that is more than double the administration's plan for oil reconstruction needs over the next four years.
Mr. McKee said he believed that Iraq could get back to the prewar production capacity of three million barrels a day under current budgets. But even he is cautious.
"How sustainable that would be is a question," he said. "I think it would depend a lot on how long they could nurse their old infrastructure along without it cratering."
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7 Spaniards Killed In Iraqi Ambush
Japanese Diplomats Slain in Separate Attack
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 30, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21908-2003Nov29?language=printer
LATIFIYA, Iraq, Nov. 29 -- More than a dozen insurgents ambushed and killed seven Spanish intelligence officers on Saturday on a highway near this town south of Baghdad, according to witnesses and Spanish officials.
The closely coordinated attack, in which gunmen fired from moving cars and behind a concrete wall, was the latest in a series against European troops taking part in the U.S.-led occupation. Witnesses said the ambush was carried out by loyalists of former president Saddam Hussein using automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
In a separate attack north of Baghdad, two Japanese diplomats were killed in an ambush near Hussein's home town of Tikrit, according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry. The Japanese government is weighing whether to dispatch noncombat troops to help rebuild Iraq, a contribution desperately being sought by the U.S. government but opposed by many Japanese.
An hour after the attack on the Spaniards, more than 100 residents of a nearby Sunni Muslim village swarmed the area, many chanting slogans in support of Hussein. In a display of jubilation mixed with hostility unusual even by the standards of other attacks on foreign soldiers, several youths forcefully kicked three of the bodies, which had been dragged into the opposite lane of the divided road.
People at the site said they believed that the soldiers, who were dressed in civilian clothes, were CIA agents or members of the Israeli intelligence service.
"Praise to the steadfast people!" several people shouted in unison. Others beckoned passing motorists to roll down their windows and then boasted: "Look what we have done to the Americans and the Zionists." It was the deadliest roadside attack on occupation forces since shortly after the capture of Baghdad.
Earlier Saturday, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq said that the number of attacks against American forces had fallen sharply in recent weeks but that November was nonetheless the deadliest month for U.S. troops since the war began in March.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said Iraqi insurgents were finding it increasingly difficult to strike U.S. and allied forces because the U.S. military had stepped up offensive operations against the resistance. In the past two weeks, he said, the number of attacks on U.S. and allied forces declined more than 30 percent to an average of 22 "engagements" a day. This did not translate into a lower death rate among U.S. servicemen, he said, because several attacks against them were especially bloody.
Witnesses interviewed about an hour after the Spaniards came under fire said the men were traveling in two sport-utility vehicles about 25 miles south of Baghdad when two cars filled with gunmen pulled alongside and began firing, forcing the lead Spanish vehicle off the road and into a muddy field.
The Spanish vehicles then came under fire from a band of attackers who had been waiting behind a concrete wall along the road, the witnesses said.
Although both vehicles were hit by rocket-propelled grenades and large numbers of bullets, some of the Spaniards returned fire and a gun battle ensued for more than 20 minutes, witnesses said.
"There was shooting everywhere," said Omar Hassan, 22, a student who claimed to have witnessed the attack and later joined the throng of celebrants. The Spaniards, he said, "were resisting a lot."
A fire sparked by a rocket-propelled grenade consumed the first car, witnesses said. An hour after the attack, it appeared that its occupants either had been killed by the time the fire began or were trapped inside. Two badly burned bodies, which witnesses said were from that vehicle, had been dragged out of the rear seats and placed in the median. Two other bodies remained in the front seats of the still-burning car.
The occupants of the second vehicle exited before their vehicle went up in flames and unsuccessfully sought to fend off the assailants while crouching on the road, witnesses said. One of them managed to run away and was rescued by a passing motorist, witnesses said, but the other three were killed, and after the attack their bodies were lying in the northbound lane of the highway more than 20 yards from their vehicle.
Hassan said some of the attackers fired a final volley of shots at the bodies on the roadway. "They said, 'By the name of Saddam, we kill you,' " he recounted.
Nearby, Ali Sarhan, 18, jumped up and clapped as cars drove by. "This will be a lesson for everybody in Iraq," he said. "If they are not going to leave our country, we will get rid of them one by one."
Spain's defense minister, Frederico Trillo, said in a televised address that the soldiers, from the country's National Intelligence Center, had eaten lunch in Baghdad and were "on their way to carry out reconnaissance in the area." Four of the soldiers were due to return to Spain shortly, he said.
Latifiya is just north of a large swath of central and southern Iraq that is the jurisdiction of a Polish-led multinational force. Spain has about 1,300 troops in that force.
Lt. Gen. Sanchez said Saturday that at the same time that attacks on Americans have fallen, the insurgents have dramatically escalated their strikes against Iraqis cooperating with the U.S. occupation, carrying out 156 attacks against Iraqi security forces, civilians and officials during the last month.
Speaking at a news conference in Baghdad, Sanchez said that some members of the newly constituted Iraqi police force have been participating in attacks on U.S. and allied soldiers.
He said that Iraqi security forces are playing an important role in helping U.S. soldiers to uproot insurgents, but added that at a time when large numbers of Iraqi police are being taken on in sensitive roles, he remains concerned about the potential for them to turn against their American backers. "Clearly there is always a concern when you're in this type of environment. We're trying to do the vetting as close as we can," Sanchez said.
At the site of the attack in Latifiya, not every passing motorist joined in the horn-honking and waving. The driver of a white Toyota sedan rolled down his window and castigated Ali Sarhan and his friends.
"You enjoy what you're doing?" the driver growled. "You're killers."
"We're not killers," replied Sarhan, a student. "We're defending our country."
"By killing innocent civilians?" the driver shot back.
"They're not civilians," Sarhan responded. "They're Zionists."
The driver shot a look of disgust at Sarhan. "You're not going to get rid of them by doing nasty things like this," he said. Then he drove away.
Correspondent Alan Sipress in Baghdad and special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Latifiya contributed to this report.
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Iraqi Leaders Say U.S. Was Warned of Disorder After Hussein, but Little Was Done
November 30, 2003
By JOEL BRINKLEY and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 29 - In the months before the Iraq invasion, Iraqi exile leaders trooped through the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department carrying a message about the future of their homeland: without a strong plan for managing Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein, widespread looting and violence would erupt.
"On many occasions, I told the Americans that from the very moment the regime fell, if an alternative government was not ready there would be a power vacuum and there would be chaos and looting," said Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and a longtime ally of the United States. "Given our history, it is very obvious this would occur."
Similar warnings came from international relief experts and from within the United States government. In 1999 the same military command that was preparing to attack Iraq conducted a detailed war game that found that toppling Mr. Hussein risked creating a major security void, said Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who headed the command.
But as Pentagon officials hurriedly prepared for war last winter, they envisioned Iraq after the fall of Mr. Hussein's government as far more manageable.
That miscalculation and the low priority given to planning for the aftermath of Mr. Hussein's fall have taken on new significance with the recent wave of deadly attacks and the Bush administration's abrupt decision this month to accelerate its timetable for transferring control to the kind of Iraqi authority that leading exiles were calling for a year ago.
The exiles were among the most energetic cheerleaders for the war, and critics of the Bush administration have accused some of them of skewing the facts in the process. But more than a dozen of the leaders who have returned to Iraq said in interviews here that they had also warned about the chaos that could follow.
The fact that the administration embraced their encouragement to go to war but apparently discounted their warnings is an insight into the Pentagon's prewar planning.
"I told them, `Let there not be a political vacuum,' " said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi author and college professor who said he had consulted with several senior administration officials and met twice with President Bush.
In many ways the war plan drove the postwar plan, senior military officials said. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the invasion force be kept as small as possible, prompting his commanders to build an attack plan based on speed and surprise. Any recommendations for sending more troops to maintain order afterward would probably have collided with the war plan, the officials said.
Besides, the plan for after the Iraqi government fell assumed that Iraqi troops and police officers would stay on the job - an assumption that proved wrong. "The political leadership bought its own spin," said one senior Defense Department official involved in the planning, in part because it "made selling the war easier."
Senior administration officials acknowledged that they had considered these warnings before the war, but defended their judgments.
"The United States government did extensive, detailed contingency planning for post-Saddam Iraq," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
The Pentagon developed plans to cope with catastrophes that did not occur, like widespread oil field fires and large-scale refugee flows.
The shortcomings in the planning became immediately apparent to some exile leaders after Baghdad fell. Rend Rahim Francke, who on Nov. 23 was appointed Iraq's ambassador to Washington, said: "When people started looting and the Americans just watched, what it did was legitimize lawlessness. `It's O.K. No problem.' And we are still suffering from it now."
Iyad Alawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord exile group, said, "I am not sure there was any strategy."
In fact, the Army's Third Infantry Division said in an after-action report that when it arrived in Baghdad it had no instructions, no mission statement.
"Despite the virtual certainty that the military would accomplish the regime change, there was no plan for oversight and reconstruction, even after the division arrived in Baghdad," the report said.
For years the passion of Iraqi exile leaders was not just freeing Iraq from Mr. Hussein but also figuring out what would become of Iraq after he was gone.
They wrote papers and held conferences. Most of them had not visited Baghdad for decades, and they carried on their work from the United States, Britain or Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq.
Starting in the fall of 2002 they received calls to meet with officials in the State Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House, including Mr. Bush.
They hardly spoke with a unified voice, or presented a single clear strategy for how to avoid the current conditions in Iraq. Some of them were self-interested, promoting a war that could bring them new power. Critics of the Bush administration have pointed to Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, as an exile who fed the officials exaggerated information to encourage the invasion.
But Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview that "while there's been a caricature of D.O.D. talking to Chalabi, the fact is we talked to lots of Iraqis."
The common warnings of unrest from the exile leaders were partly drawn from Iraq's history.
Some made the point, for example, that looting had accompanied other leadership crises in Iraq. After the Persian Gulf war of 1991, looting was rampant in "liberated" areas, Iraqi officials said. "The pillaging and looting was unbelievable," said Barham Salih, premier of the southeastern part of the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq.
The exile leaders were hardly a lone voice. Leaders of aid groups said they also warned about a lack of security in Iraq after the fall of the government. Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International and a former Pentagon spokesman, said, "It should have been expected."
In fact, it had been. The 1999 war-game exercise, which envisioned an American-led military overthrow of Mr. Hussein, "surfaced a lot of problems," said General Zinni, the former chief of the United States Central Command. But none perhaps as serious, he said, as the security void that would follow the collapse of Mr. Hussein's rule in Baghdad.
Some of the exiles said they told American officials that the void would be partly filled by the Iraqi police officers and elements of the Iraqi Army, which they said would remain in place, but only if an Iraqi-led provisional government was appointed. "The people would see that another government had been established, and they would have had confidence to stay in their jobs," said Mr. Barzani, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.
The American-led occupation authority appointed the Iraqi Governing Council instead, but United States officials have said that one reason it has not been more effective is discord among representatives of various factions of Iraqi society.
But to Iraqis, one reason for the troubled occupation is discord within the United States government. "This country fell victim to the intense struggle within the U.S. government over Iraq policy," Mr. Makiya said.
Last fall, experts from the State, Defense and Treasury Departments and other agencies began writing the outlines of plans for dealing with potential civilian crises in postwar Iraq, establishing a new government and other issues. But, officials said, the White House failed to resolve a feud between the State Department and the Pentagon over which department would oversee the mission, a fight that was settled only in January when Mr. Bush chose the Pentagon.
One issue in the feud was what kind of provisional government would be established. The Pentagon favored an authority led by Iraqi exiles, but the State Department was skeptical that exiles like Mr. Chalabi, who had not lived in Iraq in decades, could lead effectively.
The planning that did occur for Iraq after the Hussein government fell relied on several pivotal assumptions that turned out to be wrong, including the expectation that parts of the Iraqi Army and police force would remain intact. Mr. Feith, the Pentagon under secretary, said the assumptions about the police were based partly on a C.I.A. assessment that predicted that the force would "have respect even after the regime went away." The police never showed up.
Within the military, planning for the peace was a low priority. An early team assigned to that mission, Joint Task Force 4, was an understaffed orphan among the war-plotting teams churning out battle plans, military aides said.
In the end, administration officials appeared to have formed their views by picking and choosing from the advice offered. Mr. Makiya cautioned about the political vacuum, but also told Mr. Bush that American troops entering Baghdad would be greeted with "sweets and flowers."
In a speech just days before the war began, Vice President Dick Cheney said American troops would "be greeted as liberators."
The dangers of the political vacuum were real, Mr. Makiya said. As for the sweets and flowers message, he now says, "I admit I was wrong."
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Leading Cleric Calls For Elections in Iraq
Sistani Spells Out Objections to U.S. Plan
By Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 30, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21909-2003Nov29.html
BAGHDAD, Nov. 29 -- Iraq's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric said in remarks made public Saturday that he opposed key elements of a U.S. plan for a political transition in Iraq and insisted that a provisional government be chosen through elections, challenging the Bush administration's proposal for relinquishing authority by June.
The statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was made in response to written questions sent to his liaison office in London. While Iraqi politicians had reported elements of Sistani's objections after meetings this week, Sistani had not publicly addressed the proposal, and the remarks represented his clearest statement yet on the plan.
"The mechanism in place to choose members of the transitional legislative assembly does not guarantee the establishment of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people," Sistani said in the handwritten response, which bore the stamp of his headquarters in the holy city of Najaf and was sent electronically in English and Arabic from his liaison office.
"This mechanism must be replaced with one that guarantees the aforesaid, which is elections, so the assembly will emanate from the desire of the Iraqi people and will represent them fairly without its legitimacy being tarnished in any way," he said.
Given the influence of the ayatollah, perhaps the most powerful figure in Iraq, the administration and the U.S.-appointed Governing Council may be forced to overhaul the transition plan they unveiled only two weeks ago. But one key figure on the council said Saturday that the plan was not open to negotiation -- a comment that could indicate a looming confrontation with the country's influential clergy.
The Bush administration and the Governing Council, eager to adhere to a strict timetable for ceding sovereignty, have resisted the idea of immediate elections. They have feared that the absence of voter rolls and an electoral law would make a nationwide ballot time-consuming. A hasty election, they argued, would be vulnerable to both the violence that has wracked the country and to manipulation by religious militants and loyalists of Saddam Hussein.
Under the latest plan, a provisional government is to be chosen by caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces. The government would assume control by June 30, symbolically ending the occupation before next year's U.S. presidential election.
Sistani's objections are the latest sign of the clergy's growing influence in Iraq, where Shiite Muslims make up 60 percent of the country's 25 million people. That ascendancy has collided with U.S. ambitions to manage Iraq's transition and maintain influence over a government that will be linked to the United States through the infusion of U.S. aid and an American military presence expected to last for years.
Officials with the U.S.-led occupation said that they would defer to the Governing Council to respond to Sistani and that the members would have to decide whether to follow through with the transition plan.
"It's for them to decide whether they defend the agreement they signed, if they believe in this agreement as the best way forward for Iraq," a senior official with the occupation authority said. "They're going to have to answer these questions. They're the political leaders of Iraq."
The Governing Council's current president, Jalal Talabani, said the agreement would not be renegotiated. "The agreement has been signed, and we must respect our signature on this agreement," said Talabani, an influential Kurdish leader. "We're all in agreement on this."
Several council members said they would try to soften the ayatollah's opinion. "We will have to go to him and say, 'Elections will delay sovereignty and we need to get sovereignty,' " said one council member, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "We need to get him to change his mind."
More than a debate over the political process, the issue of elections has touched on the very identity of the country. In recent weeks, Shiites, in particular the clergy, have increasingly demanded elections that would almost certainly deliver them power. Kurds and Sunnis, both minorities in Iraq, have worried that elections would lead to Shiite domination and further marginalize them. In the interview, Talabani chafed at the influence Sistani was seeking to wield.
"This is a society comprised of Sunni, Shiites, Kurds, Assyrians, Christians and others," he said. "The ayatollah is a very important man of the Shiite society . . . but others have an opinion, too. There must be a consensus among all communities."
Sistani, 73, enjoys the widest following of any ayatollah in Iraq, and to many religious Shiites, his authority is traditionally unquestioned. Avowedly Shiite parties on the Governing Council -- among them the Dawa party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq -- have made clear they are loath to defy his views.
Sistani is known as a disciple of a school of Shiite thought that preaches a separation between politics and religion. But his disavowal of a political role has not precluded him from delivering judgments with sweeping political implications. In June, he declared a fatwa -- a religious edict -- that insisted that any convention charged with drawing up Iraq's constitution be popularly elected. That fatwa, at first largely ignored by U.S. officials, played a crucial role in forcing the Bush administration to overhaul its plan for Iraq's transition.
U.S. officials have said they were waiting for Sistani to formally comment on the new plan. His statement on Saturday does not carry the weight of a fatwa, but his supporters said they do not expect his opinion to shift. "When Sayyid Sistani says his word, he will not change it," said Ali Waadh, a Sistani representative in Baghdad.
Sistani's statement seems to leave little room for compromise, and the ayatollah showed virtually no flexibility in modifying his stance on the constitutional convention conveyed in the fatwa in June. But in contrast to that edict, he did not call for "general elections," only "elections." Whether the omission was intentional or an oversight remains to be seen.
Seemingly in response to concerns about the lack of voter rolls, Sistani suggested relying on a database used to distribute food rations that lists the name and address of almost every Iraqi. A similar proposal has been made by some members of the Governing Council. But a U.S. official involved in the political process said the database would prove difficult to work with, since it has not been updated and would not reflect changes in population since the fall of Hussein's government.
In his statement, Sistani also insisted that a basic law that is supposed to serve until a permanent constitution is completed must be "presented to representatives of the Iraqi people for approval." He did not elaborate, and it was not clear whether it was subject to a referendum. Under the U.S. plan, the Governing Council would draw up the law.
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Iraq's Shiites Insist on Democracy. Washington Cringes.
November 30, 2003
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/weekinreview/30BERE.html
FOR seven months, the United States has tried to finesse two crucial questions about the future of Iraq: How much control will the country's Shiite majority have over the drafting of a constitution? And how Islamic will that constitution be?
The answers could determine whether Iraq becomes a multiparty democracy, an Islamic theocracy, or even slides into civil war.
Last week, those questions took on a new urgency. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most important Shiite religious leader in Iraq and probably the most powerful local leader of any kind, said he opposed the American plan to turn over power to an Iraqi government next year without direct elections.
Ayatollah Sistani has vast influence over Iraq's 15 million Shiites, and so far he has urged them to show patience with the occupation. But he has insisted that delegates elected by popular vote write Iraq's constitution and approve its new government.
"No one has the right to appoint the members of the constitutional assembly," he said several weeks ago, in a statement in response to written questions. "We see no alternative but to go back to the people for choosing their representatives."
That view has opened a rift between the Shiite majority, roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population, and the Sunnis and Kurds, each about 20 percent of the population. (The Kurds, who dominate northern Iraq, are themselves Sunni Muslim but have little in common with the Arab Sunnis, who ran Iraq under Saddam Hussein and are usually referred to only as Sunnis.) Nor can the United States afford to ignore the Shiite position, analysts say.
The Shiite leaders "have a tremendous amount of clout," said Kenneth Katzman, senior Iraq analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "They can set off major, major demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people at the drop of a hat."
In addition, it is unclear whether the United States, whose motives for invading Iraq are regarded with skepticism by many, will feel it can oppose a clear call for popular democracy - exactly what the United States said it wanted to bring to Iraq.
The United States and the American-appointed Governing Council agreed on Nov. 15 that council members and local governments would choose an assembly next June to pick an interim Iraqi government. That government would then draft a constitution. The process would probably mute the influence of Ayatollah Sistani and the other three Shiite grand ayatollahs who live in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.
On Wednesday, however, Ayatollah Sistani, through a spokesman, said he would not support an interim government unless it was elected by a direct vote. In an effort to reach a compromise, Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of the Governing Council, traveled Thursday to Najaf to meet with the ayatollah.
A senior coalition official in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that the American-led coalition was not opposed in principle to direct elections but did not believe it could be ready to conduct one by June. But the official noted that the coalition would not automatically approve direct elections even if the procedural problems could be worked out. "It would be something we would talk about," he said.
But finding a compromise may be difficult. Mr. Hussein, a Sunni, impoverished much of Shiite southern Iraq, and jailed or killed many Shiite leaders. Now the Shiites want power to match their numbers - which is precisely what the Kurds and Sunnis fear. In addition, the United States is concerned that many of Iraq's Shiite clerics are supported by the anti-American Iranian theocracy.
To make sure their followers understand the issue, Shiite clerics across the south have for months proselytized about the importance of the constitution, while mosques offer worshipers pamphlets explaining the subject.
Then there is the constitution itself. However they are chosen, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish delegates will have to balance the conservatism of the Shiites with the relative liberalism of Sunnis and Kurds. Critical questions include the rights of women; whether senior clerics can overrule laws passed by an elected parliament; and how closely Iraqi law will follow the Koranic Sharia law.
"We totally allow women to go and work," Sheik Ali al-Najafi, the son of and spokesman for Bashir al-Najafi, one of the grand ayatollahs, said in an interview last month. "But to work in jobs that respect their dignity."
The Shiite ayatollahs say they want any constitution to be based closely on Islamic law, while still respecting individual and minority rights. What that means in practice is less clear, and may not be entirely to the liking of the United States.
Ayatollah Sistani has said constitution should guarantee individual liberties as long as they are consistent "with the religious facts and the social values of the Iraqi people." At the same time, he said elected leaders, not clerics, should have the final authority to make laws in a democratic Iraq. "The authority will be for the people who will get the majority of votes," he said in response to questions last month.
Bridging the gap between Islamic values and Western views of human rights will not be easy, said Noah Feldman, an assistant professor at New York University and expert on Islamic law who is advising Iraq on the drafting process. But Mr. Feldman said he believed the clerics would not demand an Iranian-style theocracy.
"It's going to be tricky and it's delicate, but it's going to be solvable, because in the end the Shia clerics are open to a state that's a democratic state but is also respectful of Islam," Mr. Feldman said. "No one around Sistani is saying, `Rule of the clerics.' "
Perhaps not, but the coalition official acknowledged that the coalition would have little control over an elected assembly and that it might result in a government unfriendly to the United States.
"There are some people who I think are on principle have concern about the Shias," he said. Still, the coalition has little choice but to move quickly to hand over power to Iraqis, he said. "No one likes an occupation."
-------- israel / palestine
Israel's hard men fight for peace
As campaigners from both sides sign their own draft treaty, Conal Urquhart meets the security chiefs who insist that Sharon is wrong
Sunday November 30, 2003
The UK Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1096286,00.html
They are Ariel Sharon's trickiest opponents - four former heads of the Israeli security service who have united to accuse the Prime Minister of pushing the Jewish state to the 'edge of an abyss'. Israel, they say, must find peace or perish.
Between them, they served for 20 years at the head of Shin Bet, the nerve centre of the war on Palestinian militants, but now they have dramatically changed tack to spearhead a new movement for peace more powerful than Israel has ever seen before.
Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon and Major General Ami Ayalon have fought the Palestinians with as much vigour as Sharon, who commanded an armoured division in the 1967 Six Day War. Shalom reportedly ordered the murder of two Palestinians who hijacked a bus. Under Ayalon's command, Shin Bet perfected the use of booby-trapped mobile phones for assassinations.
The stocky, shaven-headed Ayalon has fought Arabs all his life, but this pugnacious character is the new face of the Israeli peace movement which, after three years of the intifada, is finally beginning to have an impact.
Almost all Israeli public figures have done military service, but Ayalon, 58, has devoted his life to it. At 18 he joined the naval commandos and rose to head the navy. After retiring, he led Shin Bet.
'I am not a leftist, I have been involved in hundreds of military operations and killed many people. I have blood on my hands,' he told The Observer. His military past has given a new respectability to the peace movement, which used to be accused of being insufficiently patriotic.
Ayalon launched a peace initiative with Sari Nusseibeih, head of Al Quds, the Arab university in Jerusalem, which calls on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to adopt a policy of 'two states for two peoples', based on the borders before 1967 when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza. There is nothing new in this, but Ayalon says the timing is right.
It is not the only peace initiative which Israelis are addressing. Tomorrow in Switzerland, Israeli and Palestinian peace campaigners will sign the Geneva accords, a prototype peace agreement. Ayalon says both initiatives undermine Sharon's line that there is no Palestinian partner for peace.
Last month Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon, the army chief of staff, told reporters the government's policy of repressing Palestinians was reducing Israel's security, not enhancing it.
Commentators believe that because of such unprecedented attacks from areas linked to the Right, Sharon has been forced to change direction. Last week, he promised 'unilateral concessions' and hinted at evacuating some Jewish settlements on occupied land.
There has been no action yet and the living conditions of Palestinians are unchanged, but many commentators believe the government cannot ignore the demands of the public and the security establishment.
Ayalon said: 'Deep in our society there is a revolution, a groundswell of opinion. Many Israeli generals are talking; the four heads of Shin Bet have spoken; there are peace plans being proposed. When you combine all this with the economic situation, it will soon add up to a tidal wave.
'If the politicians do not listen to what the people and the security establishment are saying, there will be people in the streets demanding change.'
Avraham Burg, a senior member of the opposition Labour Party, has warned that the Zionist dream of a Jewish state is in danger: 'Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism.'
Avraham Shalom said Israel was heading for an abyss: 'If we do not turn away from adhering to the entire land of Israel [including the West Bank and Gaza] and begin to understand the other side, we will not get anywhere.
'We must, once and for all, admit there is another side, that it is suffering and that we are behaving disgracefully... If we don't change this there will be nothing there.'
Underpinning the fierce criticism of Sharon's administration is fear that Jews will become a minority in land controlled by Israel unless a Palestinian state is created. Ayalon and many Israelis fear that unless there is such a state, the Palestinians will demand equal rights in a single nation, leading to a Muslim majority within 10 years.
Sharon's insistence on stamping out 'terror' before opening talks is like Nero fiddling as Rome burnt, say his critics. 'The status quo is leading us to a place we do not want to be, a one-state solution. We need a two-state solution,' said Ayalon.
A People's Voice petition backed by Ayalon has so far attracted 200,000 signatures among Palestinians and Israelis. He believes 70 per cent of Israelis will sign if they have the opportunity.
The declaration in some ways offers more than the Palestinians could dream of, a state based on 1967 borders and Jerusalem as an open city. However, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had in Israel before 1948 is rejected.
Ayalon's initiative sees a two-state solution, whereas the Geneva accord includes negotiations on moot points such as which settlements become part of Israel and how the Palestinian state is to be compensated for this.
Ayalon said: 'This is a pragmatic exercise. We are not doing it because we love Palestinians. We are doing it because we want a Jewish democratic state.
'I have clear red lines, things people die for. One is that I do not want to see one Palestinian returning to the state of Israel.'
It is almost eight weeks since there has been a suicide attack in Israel itself, and this unprecedented period of calm has encouraged talk of peace. But just one serious attack in Israel will move the peace initiatives from the top of the agenda to the bottom.
Ayalon insists no attack must be allowed to slow momentum towards a two-state solution: 'Israelis know violence itself does not bring about security. This vision will secure our future.'
----
Sharon Rules Out Halting Work on Barrier for Talks
November 30, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html?hp
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday rejected his Palestinian counterpart's demand that Israel stop building a controversial barrier through the West Bank as a condition for talks.
``I hereby notify you that no condition shall be accepted...regarding the cessation of the fence, dismantling of the fence and other fabrications,'' Sharon was quoted as saying in the official report on Sunday's cabinet meeting.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie has said that Israel must stop work on the barrier before he would meet Sharon for talks on ending three years of Israeli-Palestinian violence and reviving a U.S.-backed peace plan.
Qurie, in Jordan, urged the United States on Sunday to press Israel to stop building the barrier.
Israel says that it is building a fence to stop suicide bombers. Palestinians say that the barrier of concrete and razor wire is designed to annex land occupied since the 1967 war.
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Palestinian Rebuffs Talks, Citing Israeli Barrier
November 30, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/international/middleeast/30MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 29 - The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said Saturday that he saw no point to meeting his Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon, unless Israel halted construction on the barrier it is building in the West Bank.
"If the Israeli government says it will continue building the wall regardless of what happens, then there is no need for any meeting," Mr. Qurei said after a cabinet meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "I am not saying this as a precondition, but I want serious positions."
Mr. Qurei's government was sworn in on Nov. 12, a