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NUCLEAR
Sellafield leaks worse than feared
Army shells pose cancer risk in Iraq
U.N. Inspector: Little New in U.S. Probe for Iraq Arms
Iraq's Illegal Weapons Are Clear, Bush Says
Baradei tweaks Israel with call for nuke-free Mideast
Six-nation nuclear crisis talks put off until next year: report
N. Korea Rejects U.S. Nuke Crisis Remedy
'US Missile-defence programme can cause arms race'
Fears over lost 38 warheads
Another Nuclear Threat
Bite-Size Nukes
Dean's candidacy inspires shock, awe
The Bush Plan for America
MILITARY
Historic Afghan Assembly Set to Open Disputes Over Draft Constitution and
Afghan Native Son, Home From America, Gives Orders
Dozens injured in northern Kenya as Muslims protest presence of US marines
China's defence minister set for Moscow talks
France to stage joint military exercises in Tajikistan
Finland debates neutrality as EU expands military role
EU fails to agree on a constitution
European Union Cannot Reach Deal on Constitution
Europe Fails To Agree on Constitution
Saddam captured: Pentagon official
NATO chief says Saddam's capture will stabilise Iraq
Saddam caught alive
Without Firing a Shot, U.S. Forces Detain Deposed Leader
At Least 17 Killed in Blast at Iraq Police Station
Saboteurs, Looters and Old Equipment Work Against Efforts
U.S. Considers an Increase in Pay
Bush Signs Bill to Let U.S. Penalize Syria
Blast Narrowly Misses Pakistani President's Car
Doctors Seeing More Brain Injuries From Iraq
General Clark to Testify for the Prosecution at Milosevic Trial
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Al Qaeda's Finances Ample, Say Probers
OTHER
Cancer Vaccine, The
ACTIVISTS
Koreans protest against sending troops
Greenpeace fights charges of conspiracy in Miami case
Survivors of atomic bombs protest Enola Gay exhibit
Hiroshima survivors protest Enola Gay exhibit at new US museum
Enola Gay exhibit stirs controversy by eschewing context
Winged icons roll out of mothballs
Plea by Hiroshima survivors
Joseph Gerson's Speech at Interfaith Program
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Sellafield leaks worse than feared
Fears for drinking supply as radioactive pollution at nuclear plant contaminates groundwater
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
Sunday Herald
14 December 2003
http://www.sundayherald.com/print38691
Radioactive contamination of the groundwater under the Sellafield nuclear complex is worse than thought and British Nuclear Fuels isn't doing enough about it, says the government's English watchdog, the Environment Agency.
The agency has told the local community in Cumbria it is "not satisfied" with the progress being made by the state-owned company in understanding the spread of pollution. New evidence indicates the contamination is "potentially significant".
"BNFL has messed up again," alleged Pete Roche from the environmental group, Greenpeace. "Contamination of groundwater is a serious matter, and BNFL has displayed a lackadaisical attitude in its efforts to discover the source."
BNFL admitted two years ago that the radioactive wastes, technetium-99 and tritium, had been found in boreholes on the site. Last year, the government's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate reported that the contamination was also detectable outside the site.
Now the Environment Agency is suggesting it has spread further. "The agency is concerned that the current contaminated land study is indicating that there is potentially significant contamination of groundwater," it reported to the Sellafield local liaison committee a few days ago.
"The lateral spread of technetium-99 and tritium on the Sellafield site appears to be greater than last reported. The agency considers the develop ment of deeper boreholes should lead to a greater understanding of the vertical spread of contamination into the aquifer beneath the site. The agency is not satisfied with BNFL's progress in such work."
The agency's inspectors are worried BNFL is not using the best practice when it samples groundwater. "We are very keen to protect the aquifer," one of them told the Sunday Herald. "We are pushing BNFL very hard on this."
Environmentalists fear contamination of the sandstone aquifer under the site could affect drinking water.
"It's disgraceful that this liquid radioactive plume is being allowed to spread out-side Sellafield unchecked and out of hand," Martin Forwood, a member of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (Core).
"That it now appears to involve not just technetium-99 but a number of other radioactive materials, and to have penetrated the sandstone aquifer below Sellafield, is a major concern and a threat to drinking water supplies. BNFL and the Environment Agency must come clean now with the public about what is happening."
There are several possible sources for the leak. One is six, huge, old tanks containing 3000 tonnes of radioactive sludge, another is some old waste disposal trenches and a third is a complex of ponds and silos containing high-level waste.
"The most likely source is previously reported leaks from historic facilities on the site. We are continuing our investigations to confirm the precise source or sources," said a BNFL spokesman.
"The levels found pose no threat to health, and are so low that sophisticated techniques are required to measure them. The company has already made improvements to its sampling regimes, and is developing an integrated monitoring programme as suggested."
-------- depleted uranium
Army shells pose cancer risk in Iraq
Depleted uranium causing high radioactivity levels
Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday December 14, 2003
The UK Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1106687,00.html
Depleted uranium shells used by British forces in southern Iraqi battlefields are putting civilians at risk from 'alarmingly high' levels of radioactivity.
Experts are calling for the water and milk being used by locals in Basra to be monitored after analysis of biological and soil samples from battle zones found 'the highest number, highest levels and highest concentrations of radioactive source points' in the Basra suburb of Abu Khasib - the centre of the fiercest battles between UK forces and Saddam loyalists.
Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in Basra reveal radiation levels 2,500 times higher than normal. In the surrounding area researchers recorded radioactivity levels 20 times higher than normal.
Critics of these controversial munitions - used to penetrate tank armour - believe inhaling the radioactive dust left by the highly combustible weapon causes cancer and birth defects. It has long been alleged that depleted uranium (DU) used in the first Gulf conflict was responsible for abnormally high levels of childhood leukaemia and birth defects in Iraq. Depleted uranium is also believed by some to be a contributing factor in Gulf War syndrome.
The disclosure comes days after the charity Human Rights Watch claimed hundreds of 'preventable' deaths of civilians have been caused by the use of cluster bombs by US and UK forces during the conflict. The latest research, based on a two-week field trip by scientists, was carried out by the Canadian-based Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) led by a former US military doctor Asaf Durakovic.
Tedd Weymann, deputy director of UMRC, said: 'At one point the readings were so high that an alarm on one of my instruments went off telling me to get back. Yet despite these alarmingly high levels of radiation children play on the tanks or close by.'
The amount of DU used during the Iraq war has not been revealed, although some estimate it was more than a thousand tons. Last week, Labour MP Llew Smith obtained from the Ministry of Defence a list of 51 map co-ordinates in Iraq where sites were struck by DU weapons. France, Spain and Italy claim soldiers who served in Bosnia and Kosovo, where DU shells were used by Nato, have contracted cancers.
Witnesses told the UMRC that a British Army survey team inspected Abu Khasib. 'The UK team arrived dressed in white full-body radiation suits with protective facemasks and gloves. They were accompanied by translators who were ordered to warn residents and local salvage crews that the tanks in the battlefield are radioactive and must be avoided,' the report states, adding: 'The British forces have taken no steps to post warnings, seal tanks and personnel carriers or remove the highly radioactive assets.'
Dr Chris Busby, who is a member of a government committee examining radia tion risks, expressed concern. 'There is no question that inhaling this radioactive dust can increase the risk of lymphomas,' he said.
Professor Brian Spratt, who chaired a Royal Society working group on the hazards of DU, said: 'British and US forces need to acknowledge that DU is a potential hazard and make inroads into tackling it by being open about where and how much has been deployed. Fragments of DU penetrators are potentially hazardous, and should be removed, and areas of contamination around impact sites identified. Impact sites in residential areas should be a particular priority. Long-term monitoring of water and milk to detect any increase in uranium levels should also be introduced in Iraq.'
In a statement, the MoD said: 'The allegations made by the UMRC are not substantiated by credible scientific evidence. They give no activity concentrations of the material concentrations on the ground or in the air, and their conclusions are not substantiated by readings taken by MoD's own survey team... The MoD sent a small team of scientists to Iraq in June to perform a preliminary survey in order to identify issues... and provide safety advice to scientists in the field. This survey looked at a small number of locations where tanks had been defeated by DU and found limited contamination at localised points; the highest contamination was at the point of entry on a defeated tank and this was fixed to the metal and could not be rubbed off on the skin by touch, much less inhaled.
'The UMRC appears to consider a small, highly localised area of contamination to present a large health risk. Use of "worst case" data to calculate risks to the population is inappropriate.'
-------- iraq / inspections
U.N. Inspector: Little New in U.S. Probe for Iraq Arms
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62518-2003Dec13.html
The United Nations's top weapons inspector says most of the weapons-related equipment and research that has been publicly documented by the U.S.-led inspection team in Iraq was known to the United Nations before the U.S. invasion.
Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), said in an interview and in a report to the U.N. Security Council that the only significant new information made public by the U.S. search team was that Iraq had paid North Korea $10 million for medium-range missile technology, which apparently was never delivered.
Perricos's assessments were his first public comments on the U.S.-sponsored search for weapons of mass destruction since he took over as acting chairman from Hans Blix, who retired in June. Perricos cautioned that his assessments were preliminary and made without access to classified working documents compiled by the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S. government team led by David Kay that is searching Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Still, the assessment shows that, even after Kay disclosed his preliminary findings, U.N. weapons inspectors remain skeptical of the Bush administration's prewar statements that Saddam Hussein had seriously breached U.N. resolutions barring chemical and biological weapons, and that such Iraqi weapons programs posed an imminent threat.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said the Iraq Survey Group stands by its report, and emphasized that Perricos had seen only the unclassified version of the report. He also said the investigation is not yet complete.
In the months leading up to the attack on Iraq last March, the Bush administration cited Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons and a reconstituted nuclear program as primary reasons for military action, after the U.N.-sponsored weapons inspections regime had failed to verify Hussein's claims that he had disarmed.
Since major combat was declared over in May, Kay's 1,400-member group has found no chemical or biological weapons. Kay told Congress last month the team determined that Iraq's nuclear program was in only "the very most rudimentary" state. He said his group, however, had "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment" that Iraq had hidden. He said he believes "there was an intent . . . to continue production at some point in time."
Among those discoveries were scientific documents that could have been useful in restarting weapons programs, a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses in Iraq Intelligence Services (IIS) facilities, a laboratory complex hidden in a prison, and evidence of a program for ballistic and land-attack missiles with ranges prohibited by the United Nations.
Last week, Perricos delivered an official quarterly report to the Security Council in which he said the findings made public by Kay were, for the most part, documented by the United Nations before the war.
"Most of the findings outlined in the [Kay] statement relate to complex subjects familiar to UNMOVIC," he said in the report. He qualified that by adding, "In the absence of access to the full [Kay] progress report . . . [the U.N. team] is not in a position to properly assess the information provided in the [Kay] statement."
Perricos said, for example, that U.N. inspectors had investigated reports that the prison lab was used to test effects of toxins on prisoners, but found no evidence of that.
The U.N. inspection team knew about most of the Kay group findings on Iraqi missiles, Perricos said. U.N. resolutions had restricted Iraq to delivery systems that could carry missiles no farther than 150 kilometers. Kay wrote that his findings to date were sufficient to show that Iraq had "dramatically breached U.N. restrictions," in part by converting SA-2 surface-to-air missiles into ballistic missiles with a range of 250 kilometers.
Perricos's report to the council, however, said U.N. inspectors had already inventoried and placed tags on SA-2 engines, so that inspectors could check later to make sure the engines were not used in delivery systems that would violate the distance restrictions.
Some of the published findings by the Kay group were new to the U.N. team, Perricos said, including the $10 million payment to North Korea and the discovery of labs in IIS buildings. Kay said Iraq's failure to disclose the IIS labs represented a potential serious breach of the Security Council resolution restricting Iraqi weapons.
Perricos, however, said that he has seen no evidence -- in the Kay group's public findings or elsewhere -- that the labs were used to develop weapons of mass destruction, or that they represented a serious breach of U.N. resolutions.
The pertinent U.N. resolution required Iraq to disclose labs capable of being used in chemical, biological and nuclear programs that it "claims are for purposes not related to weapons production or material." Perricos, however, said UNMOVIC inspectors had advised Iraqi officials to list as many of those laboratories as was reasonable, not necessarily to disclose every one.
When Perricos appeared before the Security Council earlier this month to answer questions about his report, several members asked why the United States had not shared the classified Kay report with U.N. inspectors. The United States said information may be passed on in the future, according to Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for Perricos, who added that UNMOVIC remained prepared to work with Kay's group if asked.
Perricos, in comments similar to those made by Blix, his predecessor, said he believes most of Hussein's thousands of chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed by 1993, and that nuclear facilities had been dismantled. Much of that destruction was supervised by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and some was carried out independently by the Iraqis.
Perricos also said he believed any remaining stocks of chemical and biological agents were destroyed well before the U.S. invasion last spring, though the Iraqis offered no evidence of what they had done.
--------
Iraq's Illegal Weapons Are Clear, Bush Says
Report Frames President's Record
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62543-2003Dec13.html
The White House said in a year-end report released yesterday that the invasion of Iraq had produced "clear evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons program" and new intelligence about his ties to terrorist organizations.
Those statements and other assertions in the eight-page report offer a preview of President Bush's plan for framing his record as he begins the final year of his term and plunges into his reelection campaign. The document also could provide fodder for Democratic presidential candidates, who contend that crucial elements of Bush's prewar case have been discredited.
"Working with the Iraqi people," the report says, "we are now learning the full truth about Saddam Hussein's regime, including: the mass graves of more than 300,000 victims of Saddam's brutality; clear evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons program; and previously undocumented ties to terror organizations."
The reference to an "illegal weapons program" includes a tacit acknowledgment that no actual weapons of mass destruction have been found, eight months after President Saddam Hussein's government collapsed. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, who is heading the CIA-led search, told Congress in an interim report in October that he had found no evidence that Hussein took steps to produce a nuclear weapon after the U.N. withdrew inspectors in 1998.
Bush said at the time that he viewed the report as vindicating the invasion, because it included evidence that Hussein spent billions of dollars and more than 20 years trying to acquire unconventional weapons.
A senior administration official said the statement about new evidence tying Hussein to terrorism refers in part to files of the former Iraqi Intelligence Service that were seized by the CIA. The Washington Post reported last month that the records would stretch 91/2 miles if laid end to end.
The administration had been vague on whether Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the new report does not make that claim. Bush said in September he had no evidence of that.
The report, "2003: A Year of Accomplishment for the American People," begins by saying that since Bush took office, "109 million taxpayers have received, on average, a tax cut of $1,544."
The sections are titled: "Building a More Prosperous and Healthier Nation," including the new drug benefit for Medicare; "Leading the Way Toward a Better and More Compassionate Future," including the "do not call" registry to restrain telemarketers; and "Winning the War on Terror and Addressing Global Challenges."
The report's themes echo those on Bush's campaign Web site, which outlines "Bush's Agenda for Building a Safer, Stronger and Better America."
The president devoted his weekly radio address yesterday to a similar review of the year, saying administration initiatives "have made us safer, more prosperous and a better country."
With critics saying the Medicare law will enrich drug, medical and insurance companies, Bush began by saying it will save seniors money and give them peace of mind. "We confronted problems with determination and bipartisan spirit," he said. "Yet our work is not done."
Among the assertions in Bush's report that drew the most attention of his critics were that the administration had practiced "fiscal restraint" and had "proposed stringent new rules on diesel fuel and power plant emissions, which will result in dramatic reductions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury."
The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning, three-month-old think tank, issued an eight-page rebuttal, "2003: A Year of Distortion." David Sirota, the center's director of strategic communications, called Bush's report "a manifesto of factual distortions and historical revision."
The Democratic National Committee said in an 11-page rebuttal that the White House rhetoric "betrays reality."
Bush's report lauds the "historic five-year, $15 billion effort to turn the tide of the AIDS pandemic" that he promised in January's State of the Union address. Officials of DATA, a group that advocates AIDS funding, said that they had learned from administration sources that Bush's budget next year would include a request about $2.7 billion, on top of the $2.4 billion Congress approved for this budget year.
That would bring the two-year total to $5.1 billion, which DATA said is less than what is needed and was expected based on Bush's speech. The administration has said the money would be weighted toward the end of the five years.
-------- israel
Baradei tweaks Israel with call for nuke-free Mideast
Mona Ziade
Pakistan Daily Star staff,
12/13/03
http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20archives/2003%20News%20archives/December/13%20n/Baradei%20tweaks%20Israel%20with%20call%20for%20nuke-free%20Mideast.htm
BEIRUT: No peace treaty will bring stability to the Middle East in the shadow of an Arab-Israeli arms race spurred by the Jewish state's suspected nuclear arsenal, according to Mohammed al-Baradei, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief.
Even though Israel and its Arab neighbors ostensibly agree with the notion of a nuclear-free zone, in practice they have set preconditions that make it hard to achieve, he said in remarks published Friday.
And because dialogue to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction is likely to be a long process, he added, it is imperative to start talking now.
Baradei spoke in an interview at his headquarters in Vienna with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The newspaper posted his remarks, the first to the Israeli media, on its website.
The US-educated, Egyptian-born diplomat disclosed that he has been to Israel several times. His most recent visit was during Benjamin Netanyahu's1996 - 99 tenure as prime minister.
"I was invited as a guest of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. I met with the prime minister; we discussed problems of the region, including the issues of nuclear weapons," Baradei said.
"I also visited some installations, including Nahal Sorek," a nuclear research facility south of Tel Aviv, he said.
But he has not been to the nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert, he said.
Western intelligence reports say Israel has acquired up to 200 nuclear weapons since Dimona was established in1958 .
Nuclear weapons are still a taboo subject in Israel, but Baradei noted that the Jewish state has never denied it had developed such weapons.
Baradei said most of the agency's information comes from cooperation with intelligence services, but would not explicitly admit to cooperation with the Israelis. And based on the information in his possession, neither Syria nor Libya are engaged in illicit weapons programs, as claimed by Israel and the United States.
"Yes, I have read reports about that, and I have also heard that American administration officials have raised these allegations," he said. "But we have no information that there is any prohibited activity taking place in Syria or Libya, and that they are violating their commitments. I very much hope that these reports are incorrect."
As for Iran, he reiterated that it has been involved in laboratory experiments, but not necessarily for military purposes. IAEA inspections have detected only half a gram of plutonium.
"Yes, only half a gram. Experiments like these and in quantities such as these are different from a country working at an industrial scale to develop a weapons program," Baradei said. "It is highly unlikely that a program on a large scale will go unnoticed. You have to understand we can't see every pin in a large country. But if there is a facility that has materials that can be used for weapons that, hopefully, we could detect."
However, he said, all these suspicions and overt and covert experiments feed the insecurity in the Middle East and encourage the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
"I met many times with (director-general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission) Gideon Frank and have visited Israel several times. Just recently I met in Vienna with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. In all of these discussions, I raised the regional situation and issues of nuclear weapons with them. The status quo is not one with which I feel comfortable," he said.
"I don't see a reason why Israel isn't ready to at least start the discussion," Baradei said. "I don't think they are ready to discuss the situation with the partners in the region; to discuss not only nuclear, but also biological and chemical weapons, and missiles. The time is now. Discussion doesn't mean you are going to conclude now. At the very least, it will take a long time.
"My fear is that without such a dialogue, there will continue to be incentives for the countries of the region to develop weapons of mass destruction to match the Israeli arsenal, and as you know, there are already weapons of mass destruction in the region. Israel has nuclear, maybe biological and chemical (weapons); others have biological weapons. It's not an incentive for security in the region," he added.
Asked if he felt that the absence of dialogue would would accelerate the arms race, Baradei replied: "absolutely."
"Israel claims that this issue can be considered only in the framework of comprehensive peace, and once peace is concluded and after Israel is recognized as part of the region," he said. "The Arabs, on the other hand, say this is a confidence-building measure that could contribute to peace."
He said much of the Arab frustration comes from the fact that "Israel is sitting on nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capability, while other parties in the Middle East are committed" to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the Jewish state has not signed.
"I think every country, including Israel, will benefit in the long run from a Middle East free from weapons of mass destruction not only nuclear but also biological and chemical and also some limitations on conventional weapons. But for that, a dialogue has to begin."
-------- korea
Six-nation nuclear crisis talks put off until next year: report
TOKYO (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214052020.l8d70hlg.html
Six-nation nuclear crisis talks will not resume this month as the United States is insisting the abolition of North Korea's nuclear weapons is open to international scrutiny, Japanese press reports said Sunday.
The plan for holding, by the end of this year, a second round of the talks, which were initiated in Beijing last August, has been abandoned "for technical reasons," the TV Asahi network reported citing a Japanese diplomatic source.
Foreign Ministry press secretary Hatsuhisa Takashima told AFP that he had no information on the reported delay.
The influential daily Asahi Shimbun said the United States and its allies, South Korea and Japan, had revised a Chinese-drafted joint statement for the talks because it was seen as ambiguous on the "verifiable and irreversible" manner of dismantling the nuclear programme.
The revised draft statement was sent on Saturday to China, the daily said quoting a Japanese government official. Russia is also a party to the six-nation process.
The news agency Jiji Press also reported from Washington, quoting a conference source, that the six nations will not hold the new round from December 17 to 19, the originally proposed dates.
"As a result, it is almost impossible to convene the meeting by the end of this year and the participating nations are set to aim for a meeting in mid-January," Jiji said.
The revised statement clearly refers to "verifiable abolition" of the Stalinist state's nuclear programme, Asahi said.
The Kyodo news agency, in a report from Washington overnight quoting a negotiation source, said China was expected to adjust the content of the statement with North Korea over the weekend and early next week.
But whether Pyongyang will agree to include a phrase about verification is unclear because it would mean Pyongyang discarding the nuclear card, Kyodo said.
On December 4, the United States, South Korea and Japan agreed that any joint statement should make six points, including a declaration of their willingness to resolve the standoff peacefully, to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, and to opening talks with Pyongyang on normalising ties if it abandons plans to develop nuclear weapons, Kyodo said, quoting negotiation sources.
--------
N. Korea Rejects U.S. Nuke Crisis Remedy
December 14, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea on Monday rejected a U.S.-backed proposal on ending a crisis over its nuclear weapons development, and it warned that Washington's ``strategy of delaying talks'' would only prompt the communist government to accelerate the program.
The North's main state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said it was rejecting the U.S. offer because it required North Korea to abandon its nuclear program and did not promise ``simultaneous'' security assurances from the United States. North Korea has long sought a treaty promising that the United States will never invade.
``If the United States insists on us acting first, the six-nation talks would be nothing but an arena for empty talks,'' Rodong said, referring to proposed discussions between North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Russia, Japan and China.
``If the United States wants a 'complete, verifiable and irrevocable' dismantling of our nuclear program, we also have the right to demand a 'complete, verifiable and irrevocable' security assurance from the United States.''
The United States and its allies sent a blueprint for resolving the nuclear dispute to Pyongyang last week. Officials did not divulge details of the plan, but news reports said it broadly seeks the verifiable dismantling of the North's atomic weapons program along with security assurances for Pyongyang.
``The United States' strategy of delaying talks will only lead us to continue to strengthen our nuclear deterrent force,'' Rodong's commentary, carried by Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency, said.
The United States and its allies in the region want to persuade North Korea to end its nuclear programs through the six-nation talks. The first round, held in Beijing in August, ended without much progress.
North Korea's nuclear crisis began in October 2002, when U.S. officials said Pyongyang acknowledged having a nuclear weapons program in violation of international agreements.
The United States and its allies then suspended oil shipments to the North. Pyongyang in turn expelled U.N. nuclear inspectors, withdrew from the global nuclear arms-control treaty and said it was building nuclear arms to defend itself from U.S. invasion.
-------- missile defense
'US Missile-defence programme can cause arms race'
December 14, 2003
Hi Pakistan
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en47186&F_catID=&f_type=source
JAKARTA: Indonesia said on Monday that an Australian-backed US programme to develop a missile defence shield could trigger an arms race and undermine efforts for regional stability. The defensive system did nothing to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction but would encourage nations to develop a deadlier arsenal of missiles to keep pace with the new technology, Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda told reporters. However, Australia sought to play down its neighbour's concerns and said the only threats were posed by rogue states or groups seeking to develop a ballistic missile programme.
-------- terrorism
Fears over lost 38 warheads
14dec03
Australia Herald Sun with AP
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8152475%255E663,00.html
DOZENS of rockets fitted with so-called "dirty bombs" -- warheads that scatter deadly radioactive material -- are missing from an arms dump in a breakaway region of the former Soviet Union.
The news has sent shockwaves through the world of counter-terrorism and experts fear the missiles might have been sold to militant groups such as al-Qaida.
Weapons expert Oazu Nantoi said Russian military documents showed the dirty bomb warheads -- 24 ready to use, 14 dismantled -- had vanished from a military airport in Trans-Dniester.
The region is part of the former Soviet republic of Moldova, but has become a lawless state since launching a drive for independence 12 years ago.
Mr Nantoi, an analyst at the non-governmental Institute for Policy Studies in Moldova, said the documents were leaked by a disgruntled Russian military official seeking compensation for exposure to radiation.
More than 2000 Russian troops are acting as peacekeepers in a conflict that has cost 1500 lives. They guard an estimated 26,000 tonnes of weapons left after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
The weapons are known to have attracted the attention of black-market arms dealers who operate freely in a region known for its porous borders and little law enforcement.
"For terrorists, this is the best market you could imagine -- cheap, efficient and forgotten by the whole world," Vladimir Orlov, of the Centre for Policy Studies in Moscow, told the Washington Post newspaper.
So far, only conventional weapons are known to have been shipped out of Trans-Dniester, which lies close to Romania.
Security experts fear the radioactive warheads also might have been sold.
The rockets have a range of 13km, making them ideal for terrorists wanting to explode a dirty bomb in a major city.
Mr Nantoi said reports first reached him in 1998 that Alazan rockets -- normally used for weather experiments -- had been fitted with warheads modified to carry radioactive material.
When told the missiles had disappeared, he launched an inquiry that has so far failed to reveal their whereabouts.
"I could not discover what happened to them," he said.
"We tried to work with Moldovan officials, but there wasn't a clear investigation, because the territory is not controlled by Moldova."
William Potter, director of the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, was not surprised the missiles had vanished from Trans-Dniester.
"This is one of the places where the buyers connect with the sellers," he told the Washington Post. "It's one-stop shopping for weapons and all kinds of other illicit goods. Very possibly, that includes the materials for weapons of mass destruction."
----
Another Nuclear Threat
Three Mile Island Alert
14 December 2003
http://www.tmia.com/threat.html
The World Trade Center Terrorists Threatened to Attack Nuclear Facilities....and trained only 30 miles from Three Mile Island where they practiced a night-time mock assault on an electrical power substation.
Calling themselves the "Liberation Army Fifth Battalion" in a letter to the New York Times, the World Trade Center terrorists threatened to attack additional targets, including "nuclear targets" with "150 suicide solders." The letter was received four days after the bombing and subsequently authenticated by federal authorities. (The World Trade Center was bombed on Feb. 26, 1993.) The motive for the attack was revealed in the one page letter.
It said,
"The Americans must know that their civilians who got killed are no better than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support. The American people are responsible for the actions of their government and they must question all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people, or Americans will be targets of our operations that could diminish them."
They made a list of demands which included an end to interfering "with any of the Middle East countries interior affairs."
Although other terrorists have previously threatened to attack US reactors, the World Trade Center terrorists could have gotten their inspiration by an intrusion at Three Mile Island just three weeks before the bombing. A US Senate hearing was held to evaluate the implications of these two events and what they implied about security at the nation's nuclear power plants.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the oversight committee, labeled the TMI intrusion "a warning bell" and the bombing of the World Trade Center "a warning earthquake." Lieberman called nuclear plants "soft targets" after viewing a video which was prepared by the licensee (GPUN) to explain their security and demonstrate the intruder's route.
Terrorists Train Near Three Mile Island
"In late 1992 to 1993, training was conducted at a camp near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for operations and assassinations in the United States and overseas."
There was a worrisome fact being hidden from the committee! The Senators nor anyone else at the hearing were informed that the terrorists' training camp was only 30 miles from Three Mile Island! The FBI had been aware of the terrorists' activities at the camp at least one month prior to the bombing. (Some reports say as early as November of the previous year.)
Kelvin Smith, a self-described Sunni Muslim, taught martial arts and survival skills to visitors who rented his campgrounds. (On the same weekend that the TMI intrusion occurred, the World trade Center terrorists were observed by law officers performing a nighttime mock assault on a nearby electrical substation.) Smith is alleged to have taught the soon to be terrorists hand-to-hand combat skills and physical training.
The FBI conducted the raid on the training camp two days after the second plot to bomb multiple targets in New York was foiled. But, the FBI had not informed the NRC or TMI of the proximity of the training camp either! The NRC had been notified about the threat to attack nuclear targets four months earlier but not the location of the terrorists' camp!
This is an outrageous oversight for five reasons. (1) The World Trade Center bombers threatened to attack "nuclear targets" with "150 suicide soldiers" in a letter to the New York Times. The letter was received four days after the bombing and authenticated by federal authorities. (2) The anniversary of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident would occur only several days after the letter was authenticated. (3) The world-famous plant just had security weaknesses exposed to the world by the intruder. (CNN broadcast news of the intrusion.) (4) Law officers observed the terrorists conducting a night-time mock assault on an electrical power substation near the training camp. (5) At the time of the FBI raid at the training camp, the FBI believed there was still a third cell of terrorists at large. Since the bombers were actively preparing to carry out additional attacks, the FBI's failure to alert the NRC and TMI is alarming.
Eighteen hours after the raid, I telephoned the NRC Emergency Response Center to suggest that TMI be required to activate their "12-hour contingency plan" for truck bomb protection. The call was handled very thoroughly with the official asking me to repeat the information two more times as he accurately echoed a summarization. Ninety minutes later, the Emergency Response Center called back to say that the information was confirmed by the FBI and wire reports. The official said that my request was being treated with seriousness and that he had talked with other NRC staff who knew me and were familiar with my testimonies to the US Senate and the NRC regarding security issues. He assured me that I could rest knowing that the matter was now under careful deliberation.
But, the NRC refused to err on the side of caution and Three Mile Island did not activate their plan!
In 1989 the NRC instructed licensees to develop a plan which could be activated within 12 hours of notification by the NRC. There is one other inexcusable problem regarding TMI's contingency plan -- it doesn't exist.
Eight months after the FBI raid on the camp, the Nuclear Control Institute and I presented testimony to the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards for their debate on whether or not vehicle barriers should be required. The NRC had not informed the committee of the proximity of the camp either.
Sequence of Events
4/15/92 -- TMIA warns an NRC Advisory Panel of TMI security weaknesses
11/92 -- Terrorists begin training near Harrisburg PA
11/92 -- (alleged) FBI knowledge of training camp near TMI
2/7/93 -- Three Mile Island intrusion
2/26/93 -- World Trade Center Bombing
3/28/93 -- Threat to attack "nuclear targets" is reported and authenticated
3/19/93 -- US Senate hearing on adequacy of security at nuclear plants
6/25/93 -- Plot to bomb multiple New York City targets is foiled
6/27/93 -- FBI raid of terrorists' training camp near TMI
6/28/93 -- Our request to activate the "12-hour contingency plan for truck bombs"
2/10/94 -- Our testimony before the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Bite-Size Nukes
December 14, 2003
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14BITE.html
For 50 years the United States has maintained nuclear weapons with the express intention of not using them. Nukes keep the peace, the thinking goes; they are more about threatened payback than military utility. But there's a new school of thought among military thinkers: maybe we should all learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb -- at least in miniature.
With America battling new enemies, some Pentagon hawks want to reimagine the nation's nuclear arsenal on a smaller and more usable scale, building more precise ''low yield'' nuclear weapons with payloads a fraction of the 15 kilotons of explosive force that erased Hiroshima. And these hawks have influence. At the Bush administration's urging, Congress not only voted this year to lift a 10-year U.S. ban on research and development of new forms of nuclear weapons; it also approved financing for the research.
One argument for mininukes, of five kilotons or less, is a new version of an old concept: deterrence. The old nukes built during the cold war to roast millions of Russians are probably too destructive to use before Doomsday, and our potential enemies know that. Sub-Hiroshima bombs, however, could be used on limited targets -- the suspected hideout of Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora region a couple of years ago, say.
Bite-size nukes could be the answer to another one of the military's most worrisome problems: the suspicion that Axis of Evil types, like Iran and North Korea, are brewing their most sinister weapons in superhardened bunkers deep underground. Some planners think that only a nuclear payload can deliver the punch needed to knock them out. What's more, the ferocious heat of a nuclear blast would incinerate deadly stocks of chemical and biological agents, rather than spread them into the air (although there may be a trade-off -- critics claim that substantial radioactive fallout would be impossible to avoid).
Democrats are having bad cold-war flashbacks. Ted Kennedy says that ''you're either for nuclear war or you're not.'' On the stump, John Kerry has warned that the Bush administration is ''poised to set off a new nuclear arms race.'' And others fret that even a ''precision'' nuclear strike requires absolute certainty about your target. ''It turns out that this is still about having great intelligence,'' says Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ''What if we'd detonated one on what we thought were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?''
-------- us politics
Dean's candidacy inspires shock, awe
December 14, 2003
By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031214-011744-1683r.htm
BURLINGTON, Vt. - At the start of this year, Howard Dean was dismissed even by his own Democratic Party as a hopelessly leftward liberal with no chance of attracting voters outside his small Northeastern state.
He had barely $150,000 in the bank and four staffers - two of whom were responsible for the "national" campaign and divided the country at the Mississippi River.
Today, with his supporters outnumbering the population of his entire state and having raised more than $25 million, Mr. Dean has declined federal campaign funds because it would limit him to raising only $45 million for the primary.
Polls show him surging. And just last week, Mr. Dean's insurgent outsider campaign was deemed mainstream Democratic when former Vice President Al Gore surprised many Democrats by endorsing him.
"This is a campaign no one has ever seen before," said campaign manager Joe Trippi, a statement even his rivals don't dispute. "It's why other campaigns are having such a hard time competing with us, and we believe it's why George Bush will have such a tough time."
With an audacity that was his trademark in state politics here, Mr. Dean has tapped into deep discontent among those opposed to President Bush and his policies, especially the war in Iraq.
However, the key to the runaway campaign is the Internet, which has revolutionized the way the candidate reaches new voters and supporters reach the candidate.
"He's steamrolling everyone," said Andrew Smith, who conducts polling at the University of New Hampshire and has closely watched Mr. Dean's use of the Internet. "It was a stroke of genius."
By attracting supporters online, the campaign automatically creates a massive mailing list of hundreds of thousands of supporters who can be reached in an instant with the click of a button.
It also allows the campaign to ask supporters frequently for comment on decisions, such as the issues that need to be addressed in the race. Not only does this polling give supporters a feeling of ownership over the campaign, it also arrives at some pretty smart ideas, campaign officials said.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Internet strategy is how it allows Mr. Dean to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days by simply setting up an online fund-raising challenge for supporters to meet.
"They've got an ATM machine out there," Mr. Smith said. "and as money is being raised over the Internet, Dean isn't stuck at some fund-raising dinner. He's out finding new supporters or talking to voters."
On a recent Saturday morning, a tall, shaggy-haired guy manned the front office of Mr. Dean's headquarters, which now takes up the entire floor of a large building in an office park in Burlington. In constant motion, he answered the phones, grabbed incoming faxes, patched phone calls to other staffers and unpacked a new printer.
Many of those attracted to the Dean campaign are young, antiwar computer techies.
Bob Kunst, a Florida Democrat, worries that Mr. Dean's support doesn't exist outside the pseudo-hippie antiwar crowd.
"Dean scares us," said Mr. Kunst, who wants New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to run Mr. Dean off and challenge Mr. Bush herself. "He's doctor-assisted suicide for Democrats."
But the image of Mr. Dean is certainly not that of some pony-tailed peacenik wearing funky glasses like the people who came to the Green Mountain State by the busload during the 1960s and 1970s.
When Mr. Dean says he opposes the war in Iraq, he does so without raising any questions about his ability or willingness to fight if he wanted to.
"With his sleeves rolled up, he's kind of a bull-doggy looking guy," Mr. Smith said.
Vermont Republican Party Chairman Jim Barnett said confrontational campaigning was Mr. Dean's style during much of his political career in the state.
"To a large degree, his tone and his rhetoric is so vitriolic that it's tapped into a hatred among partisan liberals who actually hate President Bush," Mr. Barnett said. "I don't think it's something Howard Dean should be proud of."
Many key national Republicans are gleeful at the prospect of a Bush-Dean race next year. They are confident Mr. Dean can be portrayed as an ultraliberal, aging hippie with short hair.
Such sentiments remind Mr. Smith of the 1980 Republican primary, when then-President Carter looked way off to the right and hoped he would face an easy-to-beat Ronald Reagan.
"You have to be careful," Mr. Smith said. "You might get what you ask for."
--------
The Bush Plan for America: The Rise of an American National Security State
Jennifer Van Bergen,
12.14.2003
http://www.ftaaimc.org/en/2003/12/3232.shtml
Americans may not realize it yet, but the United States under Bush is already more than three-quarters of the way down the road to fascism. The facts are all there, but Americans do not yet see this ominous truth. It can be found (albeit surely not exclusively) in a bird's-eye view of numerous disparate but grand components: the enactment of the PATRIOT Act, the detentions at Guantanamo, the invasion of Iraq, the withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, the endorsement and promotion of the FTAA, the two prosecutions of Greenpeace and Lynne Stewart, the erosion and eradication of environmental protections, and a general policy of secrecy.
The Bush Plan for America: The Rise of an American National Security State By Jennifer Van Bergen 14 December 2003
My dictionary defines fascism as "a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism." Americans may not realize it yet, but the United States under Bush is already more than three-quarters of the way down the road to fascism.[1]
This is no conspiracy theory, no leftist complaint, no bleeding-heart sentiment. The facts are all there, but Americans do not yet see this ominous truth. There are many reasons for this blindness, but one that is usually not considered is that the evidence is scattered and merged with the general barrage of daily occurrences. We are both over-stimulated with random news and under-exposed to thoughtful content. But the evidence is there and it is growing rapidly and alarmingly. It can be found (albeit surely not exclusively) in a bird's-eye view of numerous disparate but grand components: the enactment of the PATRIOT Act, the detentions at Guantanamo, the invasion of Iraq, the withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, the endorsement and promotion of the FTAA, the two prosecutions of Greenpeace and Lynne Stewart, the erosion and eradication of environmental protections, and a general policy of secrecy. Included within this array are the doctrine of preventive war, avoidance and violation of international laws, the policies of indefinite detentions of suspect aliens and so-called "unlawful enemy combatants."
Behind all these is one large, looming idea: global domination.
The PATRIOT Act
The real purpose of the PATRIOT Act can be construed by its result. It gives tremendous powers to central authorities, undermines civil liberties, and enables suppression of opposition.
The PATRIOT Act is a mainstay of government oppressive power. The Act authorizes and codifies a near-absolute and permanent invasion of American's private lives, sets vast precedents in immigration law for nigh completely dissolving constitutional and/or international human rights, thereby setting the stage for the dissolution of these laws and principles, and of the rule of law itself, and finally erects a massive law enforcement apparatus that can be and has been used against immigrant and citizen alike, domestically and around the world.[2]
The importance of the PATRIOT Act to the goals of this Administration was made clear by the Attorney General's speaking tour to defend it. It is also apparent in the DOJ's repeated efforts to obtain court decisions under the PATRIOT Act that eviscerate individual rights in order to take more executive power, often forcing prosecutors to make arguments that would in other contexts have gotten them laughed out of court.[3]
Moreover, General Frank's recent remark that another major terrorist attack on Americans would likely cause "our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country"[4] indicates, if nothing more, a willingness in high levels of this Administration to consider, if not promote, martial law as a viable path. This conclusion is supported by the Guantanamo situation and the invasion of Iraq. Such a public official willingness to overthrow the Constitution is unprecedented in American history.
Guantanamo
Guantanamo establishes two important principles for the Bush Regime: (1) the right to detain any foreign national without evidence, due process, or right to counsel, and (2) the absence of accountability or judicial review. These principles are also established by the indefinite detention provisions in the Patriot Act (affecting immigrants) and by the "unlawful enemy combatant" designations outside of Gitmo (affecting citizens), which fall under no law. The DOJ actively argues for both principles in its legal briefs and oral arguments.[5]
Guantanamo also establishes the precedent of the American government's "right" to ignore the Geneva Conventions and other international instruments, such as the International Convention Against Torture. Geneva requires a status determination before a competent tribunal for every captured combatant. Claims of the use of torture at Gitmo have emerged.[6] The justification for the use of physical or psychological torture follows easily after the denial of legal process to accused person.
Iraq
The invasion of Iraq established the doctrine of preventive war: the idea that the U.S. can unilaterally attack another sovereign nation to prevent or neutralize a potential future threat. This is quite different from the doctrine of preemptive war, which is sanctioned by international law, that recognizes that attack "is justified by an imminent threat of attack, a clear and present danger that the country in question is about to attack you."[7]
If you combine the precedents set by the PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo, and Iraq, you need little more proof of a U.S. coup, not just in the United States, but worldwide. Although the Administration has declared this coup in the name of freedom, compassionate conservatism, national security and the war on terrorism, the main features of it are the contrary: dissolution of the rule of law, arbitrary arrests and detentions, violations and abuses of human rights and dignity, disregard for the sovereignty of other nations and even for the most basic principles of widely accepted international norms.
These conclusions will not surprise those who have closely followed the covert "interventions" of previous administrations or the history of covert American projects on its own citizens.[8]
However, these disparate components of U.S. foreign and domestic policy are generally viewed piecemeal by media and average Americans. Special interest groups and citizens focus on their own special interests. Yet, there are several other clear indicators of the Bush Regime's goals.
The International Criminal Court (ICC)
The Bush Administration withdrew from the ICC when the other signatories refused to guarantee immunity from prosecution for U.S. soldiers and/or operatives. Removing accountability is a big goal of the Bush Regime.
The Free Trade of Americas Agreement (FTAA)
The purports to embrace the idea of free trade between nations. In fact, what it does is promote corporate plundering of communities and natural resources and remove environmental and human rights protections.
Recent police actions in Miami, decried even by the relatively conservative Miami Herald, illustrate the underlying goals of both the PATRIOT Act and the FTAA.[9] Far from promoting local agriculture or business, appropriate local development and use of natural resources, or aiding local communities with funds or jobs, the FTAA Ministerial meeting in Miami resulted in the trampling of First and Fourth Amendment rights of thousands of demonstrators, media personnel, and legal observers. Chief Timoney happily noted that his police actions set the precedent for homeland security. The federal involvement in police training, which began six months before the meetings and demonstrations, illustrate the extent to which the preemption of local law enforcement, hinted at by the PATRIOT Act, has already occurred.
The Prosecution of Greenpeace
Recently, the DOJ announced it was indicting Greenpeace under an obscure federal law that appears to have been used only twice since its enactment. The 1872 law criminalizes "sailor-mongering" or the luring of sailors with liquor and prostitutes from their ships - obviously not the sort of actions in which Greenpeace engages.
If the DOJ is successful, Greenpeace will be forced to "give a government employee access to its offices and membership and donor records" and to "regularly report its actions to the government."[10]
Significantly, Greenpeace was the first group to demonstrate against Bush in Texas after his inauguration.
The prosecution of Greenpeace pulls together several elements in common with other items in the Bush agenda: it targets an environmental/activist group, it goes after and into the group's records, and it represses First Amendment expressions that oppose the U.S. government or its corporate interests.
The demand for unlimited access to records mirrors terrorist provisions in the PATRIOT Act. The targeting of activists also mirrors the uses of the PATRIOT Act. The targeting of environmentalists is similar to the dilution or eradication of environmental protections. The repression of First Amendment activities is found in the repression of FTAA demonstrations, as well as in some provisions of the PATRIOT Act.
Thus, it is difficult to view these components as random coincidences. Rather, the prosecution of Greenpeace joins distinct ideas and tactics that the Bush Administration has used elsewhere in bits and pieces. The joining of these tactics in this prosecution clarifies the Administration's underlying purpose in them separately: control, suppression, and eradication of opposition.
The Prosecution of Lynne Stewart
The prosecution of New York attorney Lynne Stewart, on the other hand, is a carefully focused targeting of the criminal defense bar. While the case involves the use of electronic surveillance and invasion of Stewart's law practice, more importantly the case targets the fundamental 6th Amendment right to counsel, the sacrosanct attorney-client privilege, and attorney ethics that require attorneys to maintain attorney-client confidentiality and zealously represent the client. Indeed, the prosecution threatens the very existence of the criminal defense bar, a result made most clear by the outcry of numerous attorney organizations.
Stewart was originally charged with material support of a designated foreign terrorist organization and, when that failed, was subsequently re-indicted for material support of terrorists.[11] The crux of the case was summed up by Judge Koeltl, who dismissed the original material support charges against Stewart. Koeltl stated that the prosecution "fails to explain how a lawyer, acting as an agent of her client ... could avoid being subject to criminal prosecution."[12]
The purpose of the Administration can thus be reasonably inferred in the same manner that courts determine intent: one is considered to intend the foreseeable results of one's actions. The DOJ clearly has no qualms about failing to distinguish between a lawyer, acting as an agent of her client, and a criminal. The result of such a prosecution is to scare criminal defense lawyers off of terrorist cases.[13] Criminal defense lawyers are the last line of defense from government abuses of constitutional rights. Without the defense bar, democracy falls.
Environmental Laws
According to a recent article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Rolling Stone Magazine, "Bush is sabotaging the laws that have protected America's environment for more than thirty years."[14] Kennedy writes that "the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife."
Kennedy connects Bush's environmental policies with a wider, global picture. He writes that "the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House policies encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people." As with the Patriot Act, the purpose of Bush's energy policies can be seen from the results. The invasion of Afghanistan opened a corridor for construction of a gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and Pakistan. The invasion of Iraq put business opportunities into the hands of Cheney's Haliburton and other big companies. Rollbacks of domestic environmental laws give Bush's corporate constituents greater profits. Invasions of oil-rich countries (or, as with Afghanistan, poor corridor countries) do the same.
Derrick Grimmer, a scientist with a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics who has worked exclusively in the solar energy field since 1975, comments: "Terror politics is the method being used to gain control over energy resources, but that energy is essential to powering the military machines of that empire. Take away that physical substrate, the petroleum, and the terror machinery grinds to a halt."[15]
Secrecy
The Bush Administration has fostered and promoted secrecy from the outset, with Cheney's refusal to turn over to courts minutes of his energy task force, in the sequestering of and lack of information about the Guantanamo detainees and the unlawful enemy combatants, as well as the thousands of aliens detained under the PATRIOT Act. The Creppy Memo, issued by Immigration Chief Creppy, closed "special interest" immigration cases to the public. Libraries and bookstores are required to turn over customer usage and purchase information to the FBI upon request and are not allowed to tell anyone. The list goes on and on. Secrecy is the watchword of the Bush Administration.
"Democracy dies behind closed doors," said Judge Keith of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He continued: "The First Amendment, through a free press, protects the people's right to know that their government acts fairly, lawfully and accurately ... When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation." [16]
The picture, then, is not hard to piece together: disregard for civil rights and liberties and domestic and international laws, blatant grabs for power (again, both domestically and globally), exploitation and destruction of natural resources and communities, and the wielding of an ever-increasing police and military machinery to suppress dissent.
These are not new ideas. However, the canvas of this coup is so large, so comprehensive that we ordinary folks get mired in the over-abundant bits and pieces or disoriented by its grandiosity. An American coup, an American military dictatorship, an American fascist empire must seem improbable to people who hardly have sufficient power in their lives to ensure a secure roof over their heads and who have long viewed the United States as a benevolent force.
However, if there is any doubt, our officials have spoken clearly themselves.
The Plan for Global Dominance
In October 2002, Harper's Magazine published a brilliant article written by David Armstrong, an investigative reporter for the National Security News Service. The article was titled, Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance.[17] Armstrong noted that according to Rumsfeld, the purpose of "the Plan" was "preventing the emergence of rival powers."
Cheney's Plan for Global Dominance was originally rolled out in 1992 and according to Armstrong, "it met with bad reviews." Cheney "unconvincingly, tried to distance himself" from that early version of the Plan, but nonetheless continued in "unwavering adherence" to it over the years. Colin Powell contributed to the Plan with his doctrine of U.S. military "forward presence" around the world, and Rumsfeld added his "unilateralist, maximum-force approach."
Also included in the Cheney Plan was the doctrine of so-called "preemptive military force" which in fact includes "punishing" aggressors "through a variety of means," whenever the U.S. feels the need, as well as a "U.S.-led system of collective security" that "implicitly precluded the need for rearmament of any kind by countries such as Germany and Japan." This resulted in what Delaware Senator Joseph Biden called a "Pax Americana" plan, in which "a global security system" would be erected "where threats to stability are suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military power."
The Republican view is that "America comes first."[18] While this view purports to eschew "globalism," it simply replaces cooperative multilateralism with American unilateralism in the global context. Ultimately, it is an exceedingly dangerous doctrine. As Armstrong points out, "[w]e ... once denounced those who tried to rule the world." This agenda embraces what the country once rejected as "barbarous and unworthy of a civilized nation" and pursues "the very thing for which we opposed" the "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union.
But "[t]he Bush Administration and its loyal opposition seem not to grasp that the quests for dominance generate backlash." We reap what we sow. Nonrenewable resources such as gas and oil - the generators of the current American Empire - will not last forever. Those who would attain absolute power over others must live in eternal fear of losing it.
[1] For some reason, images of "the burning bush," and the phrase "scorched earth" come to mind.
[2] Chuck Michaels writes: "With each USAPA Title building upon the other and linking together an entire federal investigative, surveillance, intelligence and law enforcement apparatus, a disturbing amount of unchecked power is now place in the Executive Branch. What is even more disturbing is that these ... provisions are permanent." C. William Michaels, No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of the National Security State" (Algora Publishing, 2002), p. 129.
[3] Southern District of New York Judge Koeltl wrote: "When asked at oral argument how to distinguish being a member of an organization from being a quasiemployee, the Government initially responded "You know it when you see it." While such a standard was once an acceptable way for a Supreme Court Justice to identify obscenity, it is an insufficient guide by which a person can predict the legality of that person's conduct. Moreover, the Government continued to provide an evolving definition of 'personnel' to the Court following oral argument on this motion." U.S. v. Sattar, et al., http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/terrorism/ussattar72203opn.pdf. The court declared the PATRIOT Act provision in question unconstitutional-as-applied and dismissed the charges. The government has since brought a superseding indictment renewing the charges under a companion provision of the Act.
[4] John O. Edwards, "Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack," http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml.
[5] See, for example, William Glaberson, "Judges Question Detention of American," www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/national/18BOMB.html.
[6] "Claims of torture in Guantanamo Bay," www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s962052.htm; "Top UK judge slams Camp Delta," http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3238624.stm.
[7] Alan Bock, "Preventive or Preemptive War?" http://www.antiwar.com/bock/b091002.html.
[8] See William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage Press, 1995) and Colin A. Ross, M.D., Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists (Manitou Communications, 2000).
[9] Essay by Mary Economopoulos, Nov. 26, 2003, compiling FTAA articles, in my possession.
[10] Catherine Wilson, "Greenpeace Challenges Prosecution in Mahogany Case," http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031212/APN/312120837, and Jonathan Turley, "Ashcroft's actions suggest selective prosecution," http://www.arbiteronline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/10/23/3f975cfbe901e.
[11] See Mark Hamblett, "New Charges Lodged Against Lynne Stewart," http://biz.yahoo.com/law/031120/8a39732f3bbb07d825b0d20405da746b_1.html.
[12] U.S. v. Sattar, et al., http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/ussattar72203opn.pdf.
[13] See also, "Guantanamo lawyer quits after threat," http://www.msnbc.com/news/1001354.asp.
[14] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., "Crimes Against Nature," http://www.rollingstone.com/features/nationalaffairs/featuregen.asp?pid=2154.
[15] Widely-posted email from Grimmer, dated 11/27/03, commenting on Michael Ruppert's recent article "The Kennedys, Physical Evidence, and 9/11," http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112603_kennedy.html. Grimmer is a member of the Scientific Panel Investigating Nine Eleven, or S.P.I.N.E. See http://physics911.org/net/index.php.
[16] "Democracy Dies Behind Closed Doors: Throwing Out the Bush Secret Courts," http://whiteplainscnr.com/article752.html.
[17] David Armstrong, Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Cheney's_Song_America.html. All unattributed quotes in this section are to this article.
[18] Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) speaking in support of the "Republican Contract with America" of 1994, quoted in Pat Towell, "House Votes to Sharply Rein in U.S. Peacekeeping Expenses," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (Feb. 18, 1995), p. 535.
e-mail:: jvb000@earthlink.net
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Historic Afghan Assembly Set to Open Disputes Over Draft Constitution and Charges of Coercion Mar Preparations
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62467-2003Dec13.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 13 -- Amid repeated delays and furious behind-the-scenes negotiations, the country's historic constitutional assembly appeared set to open Sunday, marking a milestone in Afghanistan's erratic journey toward democratic rule.
But the final hours before the assembly were marked by international criticism of the proposed charter, charges of delegate intimidation and reports of high-level bargaining to predetermine what form of government the nationwide assembly will choose.
In addition to disputes between the government and rival political factions over whether Afghanistan should have a presidential or parliamentary system, several sources said an equally divisive challenge has emerged from influential groups seeking to restore the Afghan monarchy.
"There are now three options on the table, and there is a serious possibility that people will go for the monarchy," said one government source. The political party promoting the monarchy is not backed by the elderly former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, the source said, "but they are playing an excellent card."
Diplomatic sources said late Saturday that President Hamid Karzai, assisted by U.S. officials here, had persuaded key leaders of rival Islamic and ethnic factions -- including former President Burhanuddin Rabbani -- to accept his proposal for a strong executive and a weaker parliament without a prime minister.
Karzai, 45, who has headed the country for two years as transitional leader, was said to have promised various positions of influence to those leaders if he is elected president next year. In addition, he has appointed several former Islamic militia leaders to seats at the assembly, known as a loya jirga. Most of the 500 delegates have been elected, but Karzai was allowed to name 50 members.
"I think Karzai and the Americans are going into the meeting believing they have it sewn up," said one diplomat. The loya jirga, already postponed from October, was delayed for four days this week while intense private negotiations took place. Sources said it is now likely that Sebqatallah Mojadedi, a respected former Afghan president, will be chosen to chair the meeting at Karzai's behest.
While Karzai may have gained the political upper hand, both the charter draft proposed by his administration and the process of electing delegates came under strong criticism from international monitoring and rights groups on the eve of the assembly.
The International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization based in Brussels that follows Afghan affairs closely, said in a report issued Thursday that the draft is "significantly flawed" and "aimed purely at securing the status quo in Kabul" rather than building democratic institutions with broad national support.
The group was especially critical of the draft for specifying a "greater concentration of power in the presidency" than the version approved by a national constitutional commission. Karzai and his aides have justified this move by saying it would make for a more stable and governable country than a system with a strong prime minister as well as a president.
In a separate report issued Friday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said that militia leaders and commanders had threatened and bribed candidates to the loya jirga in an effort to get their supporters elected. According to some analyses, more than two-thirds of the elected delegates are affiliated with Islamic factions.
Ironically, several groups of delegates with dramatically different agendas have complained that the pre-meeting procedures have been blatantly undemocratic. Both women's rights activists and Islamic fundamentalists said they were upset that the loya jirga would be broken into small, private working groups, that Karzai has weighed in so forcefully on who should chair the assembly and that appointed delegates may have the right to vote.
One issue complicating the political dealmaking is the role of Islam in the constitution. Many conservative delegates want the charter to specifically enshrine strict Islamic legal codes known as sharia, a proposal that is strongly opposed by government reformists, U.S. officials and international donors.
But several sources said key Islamic leaders -- including Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf and Sayed Asif Mohsini -- have agreed not to press for changes in the current draft, which merely says that no Afghan law shall contradict the "sacred religion of Islam."
The one remaining wild card appears to be a groundswell of support to restore the monarchy -- the same issue that nearly derailed a loya jirga in 2002 before U.S. officials stepped in and made sure the former king publicly opposed any move to restore him to power. Zahir Shah, now 89 and in failing health, ruled for 40 years before being deposed by a cousin in 1973.
In a peculiar twist, the pro-monarchy group at the loya jirga is not close to the king but is headed by allies of Mohammed Daoud, the cousin who overthrew him. Still, nostalgia for the monarchy is so great, especially among the majority ethnic Pashtuns, that merely invoking the king's name could sway many delegates.
The aging king -- scheduled to formally inaugurate the loya jirga Sunday morning -- could be forced once again to disavow any monarchist movement. But sources close to the king, who returned to Kabul from a long exile last year, said late Saturday that his inaugural speech will neither favor nor oppose a particular form of government, but rather leave it up to the delegates to choose.
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Afghan Native Son, Home From America, Gives Orders
December 14, 2003
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/asia/14AFGH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 13 - Ali Ahmad Jalali logged off his Hotmail account on a recent Tuesday morning and turned to the five haggard Afghans seated in his office.
For the last 20 years, the five men had endured the calamities that beset Afghanistan - a superpower invasion, civil war, an epic drought and harsh Islamic rule. During those same 20 years, Mr. Jalali lived cozily in suburban Washington, watching his son's soccer games and car-pooling to a job as a reporter and editor for the State Department's Voice of America radio network.
Yet today, thanks in large part to the United States, Mr. Jalali is Afghanistan's interior minister and one of the country's most powerful men. The Afghans who stayed behind are his aides.
"Are you all right?" Mr. Jalali said, as the men snapped to their feet and saluted him before the Interior Ministry's morning staff meeting. "Are you good?"
"Yes, thank you," the men answered.
Mr. Jalali, a balding, 62-year-old former Afghan Army colonel, journalist and military scholar, embodies a new American strategy that relies on convincing Afghan émigrés to return to their homeland and play a leading role in revitalizing the country's weak central government.
Amid rising Taliban attacks, the United States recently increased its total military and reconstruction spending in Afghanistan to $13 billion a year. Millions of those dollars are expected to go to augmenting government salaries to lure skilled Afghans home.
Mr. Jalali also stands at the center of a crucial American effort to increase security in the country before presidential elections next spring. After a $500 million, two-year effort to create a new Afghan Army produced a force of only 6,000 soldiers, the United States is spending $250 million to train up to 40,000 police officers under Mr. Jalali's command.
"He's the real force behind a lot of this," said an American adviser to Mr. Jalali, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If something happened to him, I don't know who would step in."
Western diplomats say the reliance on Afghan émigrés is a careful attempt to avoid fueling the fierce Afghan nationalism that brought invading British and Soviet troops to their knees here. Twenty years ago, Soviet advisers sat where Americans do today. American officials are also eager to avoid the perception of foreign occupation that hinders the United States-led effort in Iraq.
But Afghans who stayed in the country have already developed a nickname for Mr. Jalali and his Westernized ilk, a sign of how Afghans who stayed and suffered despise the ones who left. They are called "dog washers," a reference to the lowly jobs they were said to have had in America and Europe. In Islamic culture, the dog is considered one of nature's filthiest animals, second only to the pig.
Soon after Mr. Jalali was named interior minister in January, a cartoon in a Kabul newspaper showed Uncle Sam firing him out of cannon. Seated at a desk, Mr. Jalali is hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean toward the country he left 21 years earlier.
Mr. Jalali, who was born and grew up here in Kabul, grins when asked if he ever cared for dogs in the United States. A colonel in the Afghan Army when Soviet troops invaded in 1979, he fled to Pakistan and served as a top military planner for the Afghan resistance for one year. In 1982, he took a job with the Voice of America and wrote the first of hundreds of articles and military analyses.
He thrived in the United States, co-writing a book on the mujahedeen war against the Soviets, "The Other Side of the Mountain," considered a military classic. He said that when his longtime friend, Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked him to leave a job that paid nearly $100,000 a year and join the cabinet in Kabul, he thought about it for several months. His current salary is not augmented by the United States. It is $110 a month.
"I came here because I thought I could make a difference," he said in flawless, American-accented English. According to his Afghan staff, as well as American and German advisers, he has.
Since taking office in January, Mr. Jalali has emerged as the government's bold and effective "bad cop" to Mr. Karzai's "good cop." Mr. Karzai has been praised for not using violence to resolve political conflicts in the country, but he has also been criticized for being indecisive.
By contrast, in Mr. Jalali's 11 months in office, he has fired a dozen governors and a dozen police chiefs. His boldest moves included removing powerful governors and warlords in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and the southern city of Kandahar.
He suffers no fools. During the morning staff meeting, aimed at completing security arrangements for a constitutional assembly beginning this weekend, he grew visibly annoyed when two staff members arrived late. He peppered his aides with questions and jabbed his finger in the air.
The following day, during a meeting with one of his foreign advisers, he referred to a proposal as a "whiner paper." Yet he can be generous with praise, appearing to inspire fierce loyalty.
"I think Jalali is a man with remarkable courage," said Gerd Kunzel, a German adviser.
Critics maintain that some of his decisions have not played out well. When several hundred Kabul policemen arrived in Mazar-i-Sharif this fall, they had nowhere to sleep. The new police chief he appointed in Kandahar last served as a chief decades ago and has failed to win the support of local tribes.
His most daunting task may be getting the glacial Soviet-style bureaucracy that he heads to simply function. The ministry is believed to field 70,000 police officers, but no one is sure of the exact number. Across the country, officers complain that they have not been paid for months.
At times, Mr. Jalali speaks fondly of his years in the suburbs of Washington. He retains both American and Afghan citizenship, a compromise Americans may understand but Afghans may deem suspicious.
His family still lives outside Washington, where his wife is a preschool teacher and his son is a vice president at an engineering company. His daughter is completing her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her thesis is on the failure of past efforts to modernize Afghanistan.
Mr. Jalali says he knows history is against him. He knows, too, that warlords and Taliban leaders are thought to want him dead. He drives around Kabul in a German-provided, bulletproof Mercedes S.U.V. escorted by a dozen policemen.
But he insists his homeland is with him. "I face many risks, but at the same time I get a lot of encouragement, support and words of appreciation from the silent majority in Afghanistan," he wrote in an e-mail message. "This, in fact, keeps me going."
-------- africa
Dozens injured in northern Kenya as Muslims protest presence of US marines
NAIROBI (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214090714.la8ggpjk.html
At least 40 people were injured in violent riots by hundreds of Muslims in a northeastern Kenyan town against the presence of US marines on a humanitarian mission, police and press reports said Sunday.
"Several hundred people on Friday demonstrated against the presence of US marines, who were here to offer free medical and veterinary services," Garissa district police chief Remmy Ngugi told AFP by telephone from the provincial and district capital of the same name, 350 kilometres (218 miles) northeast of the capital, Nairobi.
"Placard-waving protestors burnt tyres on main roads and torched American flags and an effigy of US President George Bush at a Garissa playground before accosting the marines, but we managed to bring the situation under control," Ngugi said.
Kenyan media reported on Sunday that at least 40 people, including a local government official, were injured after riot police engaged the demonstrators in running street battles, amid claims that the marines were offering free services as a pretext to pursue terrorists.
The injured were taken to Garissa Provincial Hospital where most were treated and discharged, newspapers said.
Ngugi said the protestors were provoked after local MP Adden Sugow told a rally in the town on Friday that Americans were not sincere in their mission in the predominantly Muslim Somali-inhabited town close to the border with Somalia.
"We don't want American soldiers in our manyattas (villages), we can only deal with them indirectly through other agencies because we believe they have a hidden agenda," Sugow was quoted as telling the rally.
Police chief Ngugi said Muslim leaders were "against the US marines' humanitarian mission, despite having held a meeting with the mission commander before the operation started."
The marines, who are part of the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) that fights terrorism from its headquarters in Djibouti, arrived in Garissa on Tuesday on a five-day humanitarian operation.
Kenya has twice been targeted by suicide bombers in recent years: first in August 1998 when suicide bombers struck the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans.
The second time was in November 2002, when an Israeli hotel on the Indian Ocean coast was attacked, killing 18 people -- 12 Kenyans, three Israelis and three presumed bombers. Moments earlier, an Israeli jet narrowly missed being hit by shoulder-launched missiles after it took off from Mombasa airport.
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network claimed responsibility for both attacks.
-------- china
China's defence minister set for Moscow talks
MOSCOW (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214030015.1wv5nxhp.html
Chinese Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan arrives in Moscow Monday for a week-long visit to Russia aimed at strengthening military cooperation between the two countries, with particular reference to arms procurement.
"The Chinese defence minister will hold talks here and visit military plants in Saint Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod which supply submarines to China," Russian military sources told the Interfax news agency.
There will also be a political component to the visit, analysts said.
"The fight against terrorism will be discussed within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, as will aid to the governments of Central Asia and Afghanistan," Andrei Frolov, an expert at Moscow's Policy Studies Centre, told AFP.
"However the main topic will be military-technical cooperation."
Cao's visit to Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg follows the signature last year of a contract for the delivery of two modern destroyers, to be delivered in 2006, which are to be constructed at the Severnaya Verf shipyards.
The Nizhny Novgorod visit relates to a contract, also signed last year, for the delivery of eight submarines.
China and India are the Russian armaments industry's biggest client. China accounted for more than 2.5 billion dollars worth of orders last year, more than half of Russia's export contracts signed in 2002 (totalling 4.8 billion dollars).
"China makes bulk purchases and is not too demanding, so contracts with Beijing tend to be highly profitable," Konstantin Makiyenko, an expert with the Strategy and Technology Analysis Centre, recently told the specialist French monthly Courrier des Pays de l'Est.
The last major contract between the two countries was signed in January and concerned the sale of 24 all-purpose Sukhoi Su-30-MKK fighters for around one billion dollars.
However a crucial but altogether unheralded part of Russo-Chinese cooperation concerns technology transfer.
"Thanks to technology acquisitions and with the help of Russian engineers, China has made considerable progress in the manufacture of light fighters, aircraft radar installations, air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles and aircraft engines," Makiyenko said.
Frolov for his part said Russia was "helping China with the production of Chinese aircraft by supplying engines and radar."
Russo-Chinese defence cooperation gained momentum in the 1990s after Western nations introduced an embargo in response to the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. It was cemented in 2000 at a summit meeting between presidents Vladimir Putin and Jiang Zemin.
"China is our main partner, because although India can purchase weapons elsewhere Beijing cannot, as it still faces the European and US embargo," Frolov noted.
Bilateral technical cooperation is accompanied by political cooperation in the framework of the Shanghai organisation which groups China and five bordering or nearby countries -- Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- and focuses mainly on the fight against terrorism.
The body's anti-terrorist centre, based in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, is expected to become operational some time next year, as is the creation of a secretariat to be based in Beijing, Putin said in May.
Both Moscow and Beijing regard security in Central Asia, shaken by the Afghan conflict in late 2001 and further sapped by the drug trade and separatist movements, as a priority.
-------- europe
France to stage joint military exercises in Tajikistan
DUSHANBE (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214091422.elui07gw.html
France is to send troops to Tajikistan to take part in joint exercises with local forces, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said Sunday following talks with President Emomali Rakhmonov in the Tajik capital Dushanbe.
"Tajik troops this year received training in France, and next year we plan to carry out joint exercises with French troops coming to Tajikistan," Alliot-Marie said.
France has more than 100 troops based at the airport in Dushanbe, deployed in support of the 500-strong French contingent serving with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in neighbouring Afghanistan.
"We have the same concerns: drugs and terrorism," the minister said of her talks with the Tajik leader.
"We are making progress towards resolving our problems in these areas, and we want to maintain our efforts. ... And of course we touched on the issue of regional security in Afghanistan on the eve of the loya jirga," she said in reference to the grand assembly opening in Kabul Sunday to discuss a new Afghan constitution.
Alliot-Marie arrived in Dushanbe overnight Saturday from Kabul where she held meetings with, among others, the former King of Afghanistan Zaher Shah, President Hamid Karzai and Defence Minister Fahim Kahn.
She noted there that it was proving difficult to find new contributors to the NATO-led ISAF, the 35-nation force of 5,700 personnel whose task is confined to the capital Kabul, and that many NATO member states did not have the resources to increase their contribution in Afghanistan.
Two years after the toppling of the Taliban, southern and southeastern Afghanistan has been wracked by an intensified insurgency by fighters loyal to the fundamentalist groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Tajikistan provided logistical aid for the US-led war that ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001 but is itself a poverty-wracked former Soviet republic and a transit route for Afghan drugs heading for Western Europe.
Its long, porous frontier with Afghanistan is policed mainly by Russian border guards.
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Finland debates neutrality as EU expands military role
HELSINKI (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214041729.cqk6l38t.html
Finland's neutrality is likely to come under increasing strain as a result of the European Union's adoption of a landmark security pact.
The new European Security Strategy is an unprecedented attempt to enable the Union to act in a coordinated way on a global level, but the population here has no enthusiasm for greater defense cooperation.
However, an important part of the political elite is in favor of stepping up such cooperation with the rest of the EU, even if this means bringing the country close to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Indeed, it was at a summit conference here in 1999 that the European Union adopted the so-called Helsinki Headline Goal to be capable by this year of deploying a European force of up to 60,000 men with its own command structure within 60 days.
Non-alignment is solidly entrenched in Finland. It enabled the country to straddle the fence between the Soviet Union and the West, and most Finns see no good reason for abandoning it.
In addition, the government has changed since the 1999 summit, bringing into power with the Social Democrats the Agrarian Center Party, which is a strong defender of non-alignment, in place of the NATO-friendly Conservative National Coalition Party.
Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja said recently that the EU's intensifying cooperation on defense and security would not nullify Finland's commitment to military non-alliance. .
"Finland will be non-allied as long as we wish such a policy to continue," he asserted.
In the face of such views, former Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, one of the architects of the Helsinki Headline Goal, is now campaigning from opposition in favor of greater European defense cooperation.
"When Lipponen was prime minister, there appeared to be a clear plan to prepare Finland for NATO membership," said Tomas Ries, a security analyst with the Finnish Defense Academy.
Lipponen has been urging the government to sign up to the security guarantees contained in the beleagured European Constitution. He warned that Finland would be "sidelined" from European integration if it did not.
Instead, Finland has joined with other EU neutrals, Austria, Ireland and Sweden, in negotiating an opt-out from any mutual security obligations. Nevertheless defense analyst Christer Pursiainen said, "one can question if there is anything left of non-aligned status."
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the country's leaders abandoned the sacred cow of strict cold war neutrality, and drew close to Western Europe through membership in the European Community.
Ironically, one of the chief arguments for joining the community was the fact that it provided an implicit defense guarantee. Tuomioja has repeatedly argued that Finland does not need NATO on the grounds that the EU offers similar guarantees.
A government report, started under Lipponen, is expected to conclude that Finland has nothing to lose by joining NATO.
Experts agree that if Finland does participate in the EU's developing military plans, it would indirectly become tied to NATO anyway, since the EU would have to rely on NATO resources.
The argument about non-alignment has acquired a degree of urgency as a result of the US-led invasion of Iraq, which has spurred the debate about defense cooperation at a European level.
----
EU fails to agree on a constitution
December 14, 2003
By Paul Taylor
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031214-011742-5681r.htm
BRUSSELS - A landmark summit meant to agree on a first constitution for a European Union expanding beyond the former Iron Curtain collapsed yesterday when leaders failed to bridge wide differences over members' voting rights.
Spain and Poland blocked plans to give big countries, led by Germany and France, more voting power in a system that would take greater account of population size.
The impasse plunged the wealthy 15-nation bloc into a crisis, five months before it is due to admit 10 new members - mainly formerly communist states - in the biggest expansion in its history.
"Sadly, the disagreement was total when we moved to the voting system," Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told a news conference after cutting short two days of tough wrangling when he saw no compromise was acceptable.
French President Jacques Chirac called for smaller "pioneer groups" of countries to forge ahead with closer integration in defense, economic policy and justice, but denied this would lead to "segregation" or second-class Europeans.
"This will provide an engine, an example, that will allow Europe to go faster, further, better," Mr. Chirac said.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, his closest partner, took a similar line: "If we don't manage in the foreseeable future to reach a consensus, then there will emerge a Europe of two speeds. That would be the logic of such a final failure."
The breakdown capped a year in which Europeans were bitterly split over war in Iraq, EU budget rules were bent, Sweden voted against joining the euro and Britain delayed indefinitely a referendum on the same issue.
But Mr. Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair sought to play down the impasse.
"To look at this in apocalyptic terms is rather misguided," Mr. Blair said. "I think, ultimately, it will be resolved."
The leaders avoided open recrimination in the aftermath of the breakdown, but that truce seemed unlikely to last.
Mr. Berlusconi declined to blame Spain and Poland, pointing instead at the tough positions of Germany, France and Belgium.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who will step down next March, and Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who attended the talks in a wheelchair after fracturing his spine in a helicopter crash last week, were unrepentant at having defended their national interests.
The leaders set no date for resuming the negotiations and Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said serious talks were unlikely to resume until the first half of 2005.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who takes over the rotating EU presidency next month, said he would hold consultations and propose a way forward at the next regular summit in March.
Refusing to be downcast, Mr. Berlusconi said virtually all the constitutional treaty had been agreed on and negotiations would not have to resume from square one.
The existing Nice, France, treaty will continue to apply with its complex weighted voting system, but many governments fear growing complications once the bloc expands into Eastern Europe to a total population of 450 million.
The row stemmed from the Nice agreement in 2000, which gave Poland and Spain nearly the same voting rights as Germany, whose population is about twice the size of each.
A convention of lawmakers and national representatives led by former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing proposed a reform whereby most decisions would pass if backed by a majority of EU states representing 60 percent of its population.
European Commission President Romano Prodi, speaking for many supporters of European integration, said the failure to agree was a blow, but preferable to a weak constitution.
European Parliament President Pat Cox said the growing EU was "ill-equipped with today's treaties to meet tomorrow's challenges."
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European Union Cannot Reach Deal on Constitution
December 14, 2003
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/europe/14EURO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BRUSSELS, Dec. 13 - The leaders of 25 current and imminent members of the European Union failed to reach agreement on Saturday on a draft constitution, stumbling on a problem familiar to Americans: how to apportion power among large and small states.
At issue was a proposal to discard a voting system agreed upon three years ago that gave Spain, a member of the union, and Poland, which joins next year, almost as much voting weight each as Germany, which has more than twice the population of either.
Klaus Hänsch, a German deputy of the European Parliament, laid the blame for the failed meeting squarely on the two nations' unwillingness to compromise. "I hope that Spain and Poland realize that the failure of the summit is due to them, and that they missed a historic opportunity," he said.
But Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, chairman of the talks, defended the Poles. Entering the talks Saturday morning, he told reporters that on Friday he had circulated four different voting formulas among the leaders.
"You cannot make Spain and Poland responsible for an eventual failure," Mr. Berlusconi said. "They are open to other formulas."
Officially, the leaders said they would meet to try again next year. But the failure touched off bitter recriminations, notably between Germans and Poles, underscoring differences between current and imminent members of the union. The war in Iraq also played a part: the bitter divisions in "old" and "new" Europe over whether to go along with the United States' military action contributed to the wedges driving the leaders apart.
The failure prompted reports that some countries - most notably the six founders of the European Union, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - would go it alone in efforts to integrate more closely in areas like foreign and defense policy.
Poland's prime minister, Leszek Miller, left Brussels and was expected to convene a cabinet meeting on Saturday evening to inform the government of the outcome, Polish diplomats said.
The meeting was not without its successes. On Friday, the leaders took a first important step toward striking a deal on the constitution's draft text, the subject of almost two years of discussion, when they agreed unanimously to a common defense policy that included planning abilities independent of NATO.
The constitution is considered crucial in light of the approaching enlargement, by which the union, which began as a customs union of just six countries, will become a 25-member club, bringing most of the former East Bloc states, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, into its embrace.
"The striking thing is that 95 percent of the issues are largely resolved," said Kevin Featherstone of the European Institute at the London School of Economics.
Mr. Featherstone said it was the very fact that agreements had been reached in most areas that had narrowed the room for the usual horse trading that lies that at the heart of European compromises. With little else to decide, the voting rights issue became "crystal clear."
But he also said that Mr. Berlusconi's stewardship of the talks may have contributed to the failure. "Berlusconi has this putting-your-foot-in-it tendency," he said.
As with the American leadership in Philadelphia in the 1780's, Europe's leaders are acting because they recognize that the challenges facing an enlarged union require more efficient government structures. Recent moves, including the introduction of the euro and the creation of a central bank, have fueled the drive beyond simple economic integration toward common policies in defense and foreign affairs.
The analogy with the United States, which moved in the 1780's from a confederation to a stronger national government under the Constitution, has not escaped the Europeans. When the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, chairman of the convention that framed the draft constitution, left for vacation last summer, he took along a copy of David McCullough's best selling biography of John Adams, the author of the Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest such text still in use.
Mr. McCullough said by phone from his home in Massachusetts that in Philadelphia "all the small states were afraid of the large states, they feared they would take the ball and run with it." To provide equal weight in the councils of power, the founding fathers created the Senate, in which all the states were equally represented. "They called it the balancing wheel," Mr. McCullough said.
Europe's leaders toyed in the past with the idea of a kind of bicameral system, proposing to transform the Council of Europe into a kind of senate. But the idea was discarded in favor of a voting system agreed upon three years ago in Nice that gave mid-sized countries like Poland and Spain almost as many votes each in the European Council as Germany, despite its far greater population.
The discussions here have left Poland and Spain relatively isolated, because the system agreed to at Nice has been jettisoned in favor of an arrangement known as the double majority, which seeks to assure the rights of smaller states by defining a voting majority as at least half of the member states representing at least 60 percent of the total population.
Poland's foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, had dug in his heels on Saturday morning. "If it is not possible to agree on the change today we shall wait," he said before the day's talks began.
Large countries like France, Germany and Britain, who embraced the double majority because of a worry about the risk of giving too much voting power to the smaller states, have also built measures into the constitution that would assure their continued control.
Largely at British insistence, the states will retain veto rights over fiscal matters, leaving the door open to divisive issues like one that erupted recently over decisions by France and Germany, two of the largest nations, to run budget deficits that exceeded limits governing the euro.
Veto rights will also be maintained in matters of foreign and defense policy and changes to European treaties.
For the moment other differences appear to have been overshadowed by the issue of voting weights. Some countries, including Poland, have in the past insisted that the preamble of the constitution evoke Europe's Christian heritage. The draft text refers to Europe's "cultural, religious and humanist heritages."
The French president, Jacques Chirac, addressing reporters Friday, said that Europe's recent history was not a smoothly flowing river, but a "history of crises overcome."
Mr. Featherstone, of the European Institute, said there was not a sense of immediate crisis if the states failed, "but there is a climate of ideas across Europe that something must be done."
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Europe Fails To Agree on Constitution
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62756-2003Dec13.html
BRUSSELS, Dec. 13 -- Negotiations on a new European constitution collapsed in acrimony Saturday, with the 25 current and future members of the European Union failing to find a formula to satisfy medium-size countries worried that their voices and votes would be swamped by larger countries in an expanded union.
The failure left the EU facing one of the most critical crises of its history and could formalize an already visible split in the organization. Diplomats said several of the founding EU members, including France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, could soon issue a statement saying they were prepared to proceed on their own fast track, with deeper integration and shared policies.
French President Jacques Chirac raised the idea of a two-speed Europe immediately after the talks failed. He said a smaller "pioneer group" could go forward on areas of common agreement. "It would be a motor that would set an example," Chirac said. "It will allow Europe to go faster, better." He did not specify policy areas where the core group might move forward.
EU leaders, normally given to diplomatic language and positive "spin," did not try to mask their failure. "It has not been possible to reach agreement on all points," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The meeting could have continued, Blair said, but "there's no point in negotiations going on through the night. It's better to wait and get the right agreement."
Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and summit chairman, was equally direct. "Right now, it's just not possible to get an agreement," he said. The meeting could have dragged on, he said, but "we all felt it wasn't the right thing to do at this stage, given that the positions are so far apart."
Romano Prodi -- president of the European Commission, the EU's executive body -- said: "Today an agreement was not possible. Now we need to reflect at length and get our ideas sorted out."
The collapse of the summit torpedoes , at least for now, European leaders' grand design to have a constitution that would give the continent a new president, legal status and more clout on the global stage. "It's a mess," said Kirsty Hughes, a researcher at the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies. "It is a crisis."
The main issue dividing the group was the allocation of votes. Under the current complex system, Spain and Poland, both medium-size countries with about 38 million people, each carries almost the same clout as Germany, with 80 million people, and France, with 60 million.
France and Germany were pressing for what they called a more democratic voting system, in which all future EU laws could be passed by a simple majority of the 25 countries, as long as that represented at least 60 percent of the people living in the union. But prime ministers Jose Maria Aznar of Spain and Leszek Miller of Poland refused to agree to any new system that reduced their voting power. Miller attended the conference in a wheelchair and in obvious pain after a helicopter crash.
It now falls to Ireland, which takes over the presidency from Italy next month, to determine whether an agreement is possible. The looming deadline is May, when 10 new countries, mostly from formerly communist Eastern Europe, are set to formally join the EU. Some fear that a union of 25 members will prove too unwieldy to operate under the existing voting rules.
Berlusconi warned that the calendar now becomes an even greater obstacle to compromise. Spain is facing general elections in March, and all EU countries hold new elections for the European Parliament in June.
Irish diplomats said they did not intend to take up the constitutional question until at least March, partly as a way to let tempers cool.
In the meantime, talk of a separate European "pioneer group" moving at a faster pace toward integration -- essentially creating an EU within the EU -- has raised the possibility that the union could be in danger of a decisive split on the eve of its historic eastward expansion.
Analysts said, however, that they were uncertain how such a separate group would function in practice, what policy areas it might address and whether it would even be legal under existing EU treaty rules.
"I'm not sure how this core Europe group is going to work, but it does worry people," said Daniel Keohane, a researcher at the Center for European Reform in London. "I think the French and Germans always like this Plan B option, to operate outside the EU."
Hughes, of the Center for European Policy Studies, said some founding EU members might be thinking that "if this enlarged EU is going to split and not work, we are going to keep our political aims alive" by cooperating independently. Examples of separate cooperation already exist; only 12 EU members now use the common currency, the euro. And an open-borders agreement that allows free travel within the EU originally began with a small core group and still does not include all EU countries.
"I don't think it's in Europe's interest to have a two-speed Europe," Berlusconi said. He said that when it does occur, such as with using the euro, it "should be the exception, not the rule."
The draft constitution being debated was the product of two years of work by a constitutional convention, headed by a former French president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
Besides altering the voting system, the draft constitution included changes aimed at making the EU more efficient and giving it more clout on the world stage. Among the proposed changes was the creation of the powerful new post of president, who could meet on the international level with, for example, President Bush, as a representative of the EU. The constitution would also have created a European foreign minister to articulate a common European foreign policy. But since the constitution was part of a package, those changes are now on hold.
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Saddam captured: Pentagon official
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214120133.gaegiq38.html
A bearded, dishevelled Saddam Hussein was captured alive overnight in a raid in a residential area of Tikrit, a senior Pentagon official said Sunday.
"He was captured in Tikrit in a residential area," the official said.
"He was found in what appeared to be an attempt to disguise himself in a beard," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Saddam Hussein was among a number of people taken into custody, the official said, during what was described as a successful raid.
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NATO chief says Saddam's capture will stabilise Iraq
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Dec 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031214122345.faa3c9pz.html
The capture of Saddam Hussein is "excellent news" and will help to stabilise Iraq, NATO chief George Robertson said Sunday.
"Mr Robertson welcomes this excellent news which is going to help Iraq regain stability," the NATO secretary-general's spokesman Jamie Shea told AFP.
The ousted Iraqi leader was captured in his stronghold of Tikrit to the north of Baghdad, a senior Pentagon official said in Washington.
"This will help to build democracy in Iraq and bring about the reconstruction of the country," Shea said.
"We hope that it will lessen the terrorist acts against the coalition forces and the Iraqi population itself, as we have seen again just this morning with the attack against the police," the NATO spokesman added.
An explosion at a police station in western Iraq on Sunday killed 16 policemen and two civilians, including a seven-year-old girl.
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Saddam caught alive
December 14, 2003
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031214-071452-6526r.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- American forces captured a bearded Saddam Hussein as he hid in the cellar of a farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit, ending one of the most intensive manhunts in history. The arrest, eight months after the fall of Baghdad, was carried out without a shot fired and was a huge victory for U.S. forces.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we got him," U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer told a news conference. "The tyrant is a prisoner."
Saddam was captured Saturday at 8:30 p.m. in a specially prepared "spider hole" in the cellar in the town of Adwar, 10 miles from Tikrit, Lt Col. Ricardo Sanchez said. The hole was six to eight feet deep, camouflaged with bricks and dirt and supplied with an air vent to allow long periods inside.
In the capital, radio stations played celebratory music, residents fired small arms in the air and others drove through the streets, shouting, "They got Saddam! They got Saddam!"
At the news conference announcing his capture, U.S. forces aired a video showing a bearded Saddam being examined by a doctor holding his mouth open with a tongue depressor, apparently to get a DNA sample. Saddam was showing touching his beard during the exam.
Then a video was shown of Saddam after he was shaved.
Iraqi journalists in the audience stood, pointed and shouted "Death to Saddam!" and "Down with Saddam!"
"The captive has been talkative and is being cooperative," Sanchez said. Saddam was being held at an undisclosed location, and U.S. authorities have not yet determined whether to hand him over to the Iraqis for trial. Iraqi officials want him to stand trial before a war crimes tribunal created last week.
Ahmad Chalabi, a member of Iraq's Governing Council, said Sunday that Saddam will be put on trial.
"Saddam will stand a public trial so that the Iraqi people will know his crimes," said Chalabi told Al-Iraqiya, a Pentagon-funded TV station.
Two other Iraqis were also arrested in the raid and two AK-47 assault rifles, a pistol and $750,000 in $100 bills were seized, Sanchez said.
Sanchez described Saddam's demeanor during the arrest, saying he seemed "a tired man. Also I think a man resigned."
Forces from the 4th Infantry Division along with Special Forces captured Saddam, the U.S. military said. There were no shots fired or injuries in the raid, called "Operation Red Dawn," said Sanchez.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair welcomed Saddam's capture.
"This is very good news for the people of Iraq. It removes the shadow that has been hanging over them for too long of the nightmare of a return to the Saddam regime," he said in a statement released by his office.
In Baghdad, shop owners closed their doors, worried that all the shooting would make the streets unsafe.
"I'm very happy for the Iraqi people. Life is going to be safer now," said 35-year-old Yehya Hassan, a resident of Baghdad. "Now we can start a new beginning."
Earlier in the day, rumors of the capture sent people streaming into the streets of Kirkuk, a northern Iraqi city, firing guns in the air in celebration.
"We are celebrating like it's a wedding," said Kirkuk resident Mustapha Sheriff. "We are finally rid of that criminal."
"This is the joy of a lifetime," said Ali Al-Bashiri, another resident. "I am speaking on behalf of all the people that suffered under his rule."
In Tikrit, U.S. soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division, the unit that is responsible for security in Saddam's hometown, were smoking cigars after hearing the news of Saddam's capture.
Despite the celebration throughout Baghdad, many residents were skeptical.
"I heard the news, but I'll believe it when I see it," said Mohaned al-Hasaji, 33. "They need to show us that they really have him."
Ayet Bassem, 24, walked out of a shop with her 6-year-old son.
"Things will be better for my son," she said. "Everyone says everything will be better when Saddam is caught. My son now has a future."
"This success brings closure to the Iraqi people. We now have final resolution. Saddam Hussein will never return to a position of power from which he can punish, terrorize, intimidate and exploit the Iraqi people as the did for more than 35 years," Sanchez said.
After invading Iraq on March 20 and setting up their headquarters in Saddam's sprawling Republican Palace compound in Baghdad, U.S. troops launched a massive manhunt for the fugitive leader, placing a $25 million bounty on his head and sending thousands of soldiers to search for him.
Saddam's sons Qusai and Odai - each with a $15 million bounty on their heads - were killed July 22 in a four-hour gunbattle with U.S. troops in a hideout in the northern city of Mosul. The bounties were paid out to the man who owned the house where they were killed, residents said.
A Governing Council member, Jalal Talabani, told Iran's official news agency, IRNA, that Saddam's detention will bring stability to Iraq.
"With the arrest of Saddam, the source financing terrorists has been destroyed and terrorist attacks will come to an end. Now we can establish a durable stability and security in Iraq," Talabani was quoted as saying.
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Without Firing a Shot, U.S. Forces Detain Deposed Leader
December 14, 2003
By EDWARD WONG and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/middleeast/14WIRE-HUSSEIN.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 - Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, was captured in a raid on a farm near Tikrit on Saturday night, American officials confirmed today.
"We got him," the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, declared at a news conference here.
Coalition troops discovered Mr. Hussein hiding in a hole below a walled compound on the farm, located in the town of Ad Dwar, about 10 miles from his hometown of Tikrit.
Military authorities said that although Mr. Hussein was armed with a pistol at the time of his capture, he put up no resistance and not one shot was fired in the operation.
"He was caught like a rat," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who heads the Army's Fourth Infantry Division, told reporters.
Officials said they were able to confirm Mr. Hussein's identity using DNA tests.
President Bush said the capture of Mr. Hussein was "crucial to the rise of a free Iraq." He added: "In the history of Iraq, a dark and painful era is over."
Mr. Hussein was being held this afternoon at an undisclosed location and American authorities had yet to decide whether to hand him over to the Iraqis for trial. Iraqi officials want him to stand trial before a war crimes tribunal created last week.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said that ultimately the Iraqis will determine how Mr. Hussein will be tried. "It is they who will decide his fate," he said.
Finding Mr. Hussein solved one of the great mysteries that tormented the American-led occupation force in Iraq: whether he was still alive and, if so, where he was hiding.
Some senior Bush administration officials had suspected that Mr. Hussein was not only still alive but inspiring, if not leading, the guerrilla-style insurgency that has left more than 190 American soldiers dead since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May. 1.
Since April, when coalition forces pushed into Baghdad and declared the start of the occupation, American-led troops have tried to wipe away all vestiges of the old government in part by capturing or killing many of Mr. Hussein's former advisers and associates.
But their biggest target, Mr. Hussein himself, continued to evade coalition forces even as he broadcast audio messages intended to rally his loyalists while, seemingly, taunt the occupiers.
Mr. Bremer appealed to insurgents loyal to Mr. Hussein to give up the fight today.
"With the arrest of Saddam Hussein, there is a new opportunity for the members of the former regime, whether military or civilian, to end their bitter opposition," he said in the news conference, which was televised. "Let them now come forward in a spirit of reconciliation and hope, lay down their arms, and join you, their fellow citizens, in the task of building the new Iraq."
Mr. Blair welcomed Mr. Hussein's capture as an opportunity for national reconciliation in Iraq.
"Where his rule meant terror and division and brutality, let his capture bring about unity, reconciliation and peace between all the people in Iraq," Mr. Blair said. "Saddam is gone from power. He won't be coming back. That the Iraqi people now know." He called the cause of Mr. Hussein's supporters "futile."
At the Baghdad news conference today announcing the capture, American officials aired a video showing Mr. Hussein, with a scruffy white beard and wild, curly hair, being examined by a doctor. His face was puffy and wrinkled.
They also showed footage of a cramped, six-to-eight-foot-deep cellar where Mr. Hussein was found at about 8:30 p.m. on Saturday. The entrance to the hideaway had been camouflaged with br