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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 bricks and dirt, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American military commander in Iraq, said at the news conference.
"The captive has been talkative and is being cooperative," General Sanchez said.
Coalition troops captured two other Iraqis in the raid and seized two AK-47 assault rifles, a pistol and $750,000 in $100 bills, General Sanchez said.
He described Mr. Hussein as "tired" and "a man resigned."
The military targeted Mr. Hussein's hideout using information gleaned from interrogations of people with familial and tribal ties to Mr. Hussein, General Odierno said in a news conference.
"Over the last 10 days or so we brought in about 5 to 10 members of these families," the general said. "Finally we got the ultimate information from one of these individuals."
General Odierno said it appeared that Mr. Hussein had not been in that particular hiding place for a long time and theorized that the former Iraqi leader had "20 to 30" similar safe houses scattered around the country.
Abdel Abdel-Mahdi, a senior official of a Shiite Muslim political party who visited Mr. Hussein in captivity, said the prisoner was "unrepentant and defiant." He added: "When we told him, `If you go to the streets now, you will see the people celebrating,' he answered, `Those are mobs.' When we told him about the mass graves, he replied, `Those are thieves.' "
As news of the capture spread, celebratory gunfire broke out all over Baghdad, and large crowds poured into the streets, especially along commercial strips like those in the Karada neighborhood. People were speaking ecstatically of the capture, whooping, hugging and shaking one another's hands.
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, The Associated Press reported.
"We are celebrating like it's a wedding," a resident, Mustapha Sheriff, told the news agency. "We are finally rid of that criminal."
Another resident, Ali Al-Bashiri, said: "This is the joy of a lifetime. I am speaking on behalf of all the people that suffered under his rule."
But in Ramadi, a town west of Baghdad that has served as a loyal support base for Mr. Hussein, people had not heard about the capture by early afternoon. A feeling of anger was building up against the American occupiers, triggered by a car bomb this morning outside the police station in the nearby town of Khalidiya.
The bomb went off at 8:30 a.m. this morning, killing at least 21 people, mostly police officers, and wounding at least 33, according to military and hospital officials. Men standing at the scene and at the hospital blamed American forces for the blast, even though it was clear that the bomb was targeting Iraqi police working with the Americans.
Administration officials have said that Mr. Hussein's survival, despite the American hunt and a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or proof of his death, appears to have been a motivating factor in the armed opposition against American forces.
The whereabouts of Mr. Hussein had been a mystery since at least March 20, when the United States initiated the war in Iraq with a strike by cruise missiles and bombs on an installation in Baghdad where the top Iraqi leadership was believed to be hiding.
On April 7, three days after Iraqi television broadcast two videotapes of Mr. Hussein taped on an unknown date, the United States made a second attempt to kill Mr. Hussein by bombing a building in the Mansour district of Baghdad, where intelligence sources said the Iraqi leadership had gathered.
Those two strikes prompted some optimism at the White House that Mr. Hussein and his two oldest sons had been killed. But with the failure of investigators to find physical evidence of Mr. Hussein at the two sites, combined with testimony of senior Iraqi officials in American custody who said the Iraqi leader had not been at those locations, American intelligence agencies concluded that they had probably missed their target.
This view was further strengthened by the broadcast of several audiotapes with a voice purporting to be that of Mr. Hussein.
American officials have said the most compelling indications that Mr. Hussein was still alive were the intercepted communications among fugitive members of the paramilitary Saddam Fedayeen and the Iraqi intelligence service discussing the importance of protecting his life.
American officials had hoped they were getting closer to determining the whereabouts of Mr. Hussein when troops killed his sons, Qusay and Uday, on July 22 in a four-hour gun battle with American troops in a hideout in the northern city of Mosul. But an initial burst of confidence gradually faded and, as the bloody weeks dragged on, and American troops were unable to find either Mr. Hussein or conclusive proof that he had been developing weapons of mass destruction, the White House and the Pentagon tried to shift attention from those failures by arguing that the most important thing was that Mr. Hussein had been removed from power.
Still, even Mr. Bremer acknowledged several months ago that the coalition's inability to capture him or recover his body was helping to fuel the resistance movement.
"I would obviously prefer that we had clear evidence that Saddam is dead or that we had him alive in our custody," Mr. Bremer said. "It does make a difference because it allows the Baathists to go around in the bazaars and in the villages, as they are doing, saying: `Saddam is alive, and he's going to come back. And we're going to come back.' "
Edward Wong contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Kirk Semple provided reporting from New York.
Edward Wong contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Kirk Semple provided reporting from New York.
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At Least 17 Killed in Blast at Iraq Police Station
December 14, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Blast.html?hp
KHALDIYAH, Iraq (AP) -- A car bomb exploded Sunday morning at a police station in this town west of Baghdad, killing at least 17 people and wounding 33 others, a U.S. military officer said.
A suicide bomber apparently carried out the attack, U.S. army Lt. Col. Jeff Swisher said.
An emergency room administrator at a hospital in the nearby city of Ramadi said there were 18 people killed in the blast and more than 20 injured. Many of the victims were police officers, said the hospital administrator, Haitham Bahar Taha.
The attack in Khaldiyah, about 50 miles west of Baghdad, occurred at 8:40 a.m. near the main police station, residents and the U.S. military said.
No American soldiers were in the area when the bomb exploded. U.S. troops called to the scene blocked off the area and two helicopters were seen hovering overhead.
U.S. troops have been targeted by suicide bombers three times in the past week in attacks that left dozens of soldiers injured and one killed.
Khaldiyah is located in the so-called Sunni Triangle west and north of the capital, where attacks against occupation troops and their Iraqi allies have been fiercest.
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Saboteurs, Looters and Old Equipment Work Against Efforts to Restart Iraqi Oil Fields
December 14, 2003
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/middleeast/14OIL.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
AYJI, Iraq - Hussain Khalaf Tuma's mood was as foul as the smoke belching from the oil refinery a mile away.
Cradling an AK-47 and dressed in a ragged leather coat, he crouched on a patch of dirt by a flimsy cloth lean-to, guarding an unseen pipeline that runs underground for 150 miles from here to Baghdad. A handful of men from his tribe, the Qaissy, took turns standing watch around the clock. They slept between shifts on two narrow metal cots. In the summer, he said, the desert heat is unbearable. In the winter, the rain soaks right through the tent.
To put up with all this, Mr. Tuma said, he was being paid the equivalent of $2 a day.
"If this salary stays the same, I don't think I and the others will hang around to protect this pipeline," he said. "We can go elsewhere and get better work. Just imagine yourself here, sleeping in the wintertime, how cold it is these days. And you have seven children at home, and you're not sure if they've been fed. What would you do?"
Tribesmen like Mr. Tuma are on the front lines of one of the nation's most important battles: the effort to get the Iraqi oil industry running smoothly again.
Nothing is more vital for bolstering the economic health of Iraq and the sagging confidence of its people than oil. But since the American-led forces invaded Iraq, pipelines have been under constant attack by anti-American guerrillas and looters, cutting exports of crude oil and creating maddening supply shortages in a country with the world's second largest oil reserves.
With lines for gasoline stretching for miles and drivers forced to wait all day to fill their tanks, fuel shortages have emerged as a potent political issue with the potential to ignite civil unrest across the country.
Two American soldiers were killed recently while standing guard over long lines at gas stations, and many Iraqis warn that the kind of widespread rioting that broke out in August in the city of Basra may be just around the corner.
Sabotage and looting are not the only obstacles hampering the production and refining of crucial petroleum products for domestic use. Frequent power disturbances have shut down refineries for days at a time.
The refinery here in Bayji, the country's largest, is operating with technology from the 1970's and desperately needs new parts and technical aid from outside Iraq. Kellogg, Brown & Root, the unit of Halliburton paid by the American government to repair the oil infrastructure, has done nothing to help, Iraqi refinery managers said, adding that only two Eastern European countries have sent engineers.
A spokeswoman for Halliburton said that the refinery was not damaged by the war and so was not a high priority for repairs, and that managers could not expect to get all the equipment and technical help they needed immediately.
At the rich oil fields around Kirkuk, 60 miles to the northeast, exports of crude oil have been brought to a halt for some of the same reasons plaguing the refineries. To maintain high production, the oil company that runs the fields needs to replace spare parts that were looted after the invasion, said Manaa A. al-Obaydi, the deputy general manager for the company, North Oil.
Meanwhile, attacks continue on the main export pipeline, which runs 300 miles from Kirkuk through Bayji to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
"We can start up production for export, but we want to guarantee safety," said Asim Jihad, an Oil Ministry spokesman. "We want to guarantee protection. Whenever protection is ready, we will start production."
The Kirkuk fields can pump up to 700,000 barrels of oil a day for export, worth about $7.2 billion a year. The American-led government is currently relying on more secure fields around Basra for all the nation's exports and most of the overall production but wants to bring total production up to 2.8 million barrels a day by April, from 2.1 million a day in November. That means the Oil Ministry must get the northern fields working properly again.
Mr. Obaydi said the Kirkuk fields currently produce 230,000 barrels a day for refineries, which then process the crude oil into products like gasoline, kerosene and diesel fuel, all for use in Iraq. But the major pipelines running south from the refinery in Bayji and from Kirkuk go through Sunni regions that are strongholds for guerrillas battling the foreign occupation.
Last Sunday, along the 50-odd-mile stretch of road from here to Kirkuk, two men were scrawling a sign that read: "Long live Saddam Hussein. Death to the traitors."
Hashim Abdul Ghafour Shakir, deputy director of the government-run Oil Pipelines Company, which manages the nation's 4,200 miles of pipelines, estimated that there was an average of one attack per day by guerrillas or looters on the pipelines between here and Baghdad. On Tuesday, saboteurs damaged three pipelines, including one to Bayji.
The pipelines, just a few feet underground, make easy targets. A broken oil pipeline usually takes one to four days to repair, Mr. Shakir said, while one carrying liquid propane gas can take up to three weeks because the entire pipeline first has to be drained.
Under Mr. Hussein's rule, police officers patrolled the lines, scaring off looters. But the American-led forces "were very slow to stop the looters, and maybe soft with them," Mr. Shakir said. Over the summer, Oil Pipelines and other pipeline management companies hired local tribes like the Qaissy for security.
But there are questions about the degree to which certain tribes - especially those in the Sunni areas - honor their contracts. As the weary Mr. Tuma demonstrated here, wages - and thus morale - can be low. That leaves the guards open to bribery in a country where the practice was the norm under Mr. Hussein's government.
"Are we permanent guards here or temporary guards?" said Mr. Tuma, who was hired three months ago by a Qaissy leader. "If I'm only temporary, I don't care as much about this place."
Mr. Shakir said the tribes were responsible for setting the guards' pay, and that Mr. Tuma's salary of $63 a month seemed reasonable. Tribes failing to protect their assigned section of pipeline, he added, will be brought to court and fined.
But Mr. Shakir also acknowledged that the lines' enormous lengths made them difficult to protect. "Sure, they need some backup or support," he said. He suggested that the United States Army run helicopter patrols.
Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the Fourth Infantry Division, which operates in northern Iraq, said American soldiers no longer had any responsibility for protecting the pipelines, though they might respond to explosions.
Even if the attacks and looting were to stop, the refineries and surrounding power grids would still need serious overhauls before production could be increased. The refinery here at Bayji can process 300,000 barrels of crude oil a day but is operating nowhere near that capacity, said Riyadh Ghassab, the director general.
The slightest flicker in the power supply shuts it down, and once that happens it takes days to get it running again. Its three plants were built in the 1980's with technology from the previous decade, all of it frozen in time when the United Nations imposed sanctions after the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Several companies from Europe and one from Japan helped build the refinery, but only companies from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have sent engineers to help with upgrades, Mr. Ghassab said. Because of security concerns, the Japanese company has been reluctant to send help, he added. He and other managers have been meeting daily with workers from Kellogg, Brown & Root, but the Iraqis have received nothing more than empty promises, Mr. Ghassab said.
"They have consumed a lot of tea here," he said. "A lot of tea and paper, because all we get is paperwork from them."
Patrice Mingo, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said Kellogg, Brown & Root was under contract to repair oil infrastructure that "sustained war damage" or was "critical to stabilizing the domestic needs of Iraq." The Bayji refinery was not directly damaged by the war, Ms. Mingo said, and the available financing and number of repairs needed at plants across the country have made it hard to immediately meet the needs of all the managers.
A mile away from the refinery, Mr. Tuma walked from his tent and took a sip of water from a dirt-encrusted plastic bowl. He and a 17-year-old Qaissy tribesman, Ali Hussain, stared at flames spitting from the refinery's chimneys. A chill wind swept across the desert; the long night was about to descend.
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U.S. Considers an Increase in Pay for Iraq's New Soldiers After Many Recruits Desert
December 14, 2003
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/middleeast/14IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 13 (AP) - The occupation force led by the United States will reconsider the pay scale for members of the new Iraqi Army after about half the recruits deserted, the American general in charge of Iraqi military operations said Saturday.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said at a news conference that the major reason for the desertions was low pay, specifically among married soldiers who were struggling to support their families on $60 a month.
"We're working to review the pay scales and I think we'll have a decision in the coming weeks," General Sanchez said.
But he said the setbacks should not harm the overall goal of training 40,000 soldiers for light infantry battalions by next October. That contradicted reports that the American military had scaled back its goal.
"I believe our targets in training for the new Iraqi Army are still valid," he said.
He also said a separate force of 550 soldiers, drawn from militias affiliated with Iraqi political parties, was being trained to fight insurgents in Baghdad.
The unit, he said, was part of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and would work under the command of the First Armored Division, the American military unit in charge of the Iraqi capital.
General Sanchez, who had previously put the number of detainees under coalition control in Iraq at about 5,000, also said that the number was now "almost to 10,000."
Among the detainees are 3,800 members of the Iranian militant group Mujahedeen Khalq, who are restricted to their camp northeast of Baghdad and are "separated" from their weapons, General Sanchez said. The group has been fighting the religious government in Iran from bases in Iraq and is listed by the United States as a terrorist organization.
Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said that Americans have met with them concerning tactics used by Israel in the fight against Palestinian militants - an assertion that General Sanchez did not dispute.
Asked whether American troops were using Israeli tactics, including singling out individuals to be killed and collective punishment, General Sanchez said only: "It's a different time, a different place and a different country."
"We can be a ferocious army," he said, "but we can also be a benevolent army, and we are not going to change."
He said he had no idea how long it would take to catch Saddam Hussein but said there should be no doubt that despite frequent attacks against allied forces the insurgents would be defeated.
"There is no question in my mind that the coalition and the Iraqi people are winning," he said.
Meanwhile, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and at least two other members of the council left Friday for Spain to begin a European tour that will include France, Germany and Britain, an allied official said.
In Tikrit on Saturday, the American military said that Lt. Col. Allen B. West, who admitted threatening and beating an Iraqi detainee during an interrogation, will be fined and allowed to retire rather than face a court-martial.
Colonel West had faced three counts of aggravated assault and one count of communicating a threat, according to a statement from the military.
The most senior officer of the Fourth Infantry Division to face disciplinary proceedings in Iraq, Colonel West's punishment was determined after consideration of his good service record and the difficult environment in the country, the military said.
German Faults U.S. Training in Iraq
BERLIN, Dec. 13 (Reuters) - The German defense minister, Peter Struck, said Saturday that American soldiers were inadequately prepared for the mission in Iraq and needed "nation building" training to help the country on the road to democracy.
While praising the battlefield abilities of the American military in Iraq, he said in a newspaper interview with Welt am Sonntag that the soldiers were not doing enough to prepare the country for democracy.
"The U.S. soldiers are good combat troops but are not sufficiently prepared for the tasks associated with `nation-building' - setting up democratic and economic structures," he said.
He said German soldiers sent to Afghanistan on a peacekeeping mission are given special training. There are about 2,000 German soldiers among the 5,700-member International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
"Our soldiers that go to Kabul are schooled about the mentality and history of the country," Mr. Struck said, "and also know the differences between the different population groups."
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Bush Signs Bill to Let U.S. Penalize Syria
December 14, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/middleeast/14SYRI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - President Bush has signed legislation that provides for economic and diplomatic sanctions on Syria, but it also allows him to waive the penalties.
Mr. Bush signed the legislation in private on Friday. The White House had opposed the measure until Congress gave him the waiver authority. Several lawmakers have said they would take a dim view if Mr. Bush used his waiver authority, in view of the wide margins by which the legislation passed. The bill bars trade in items that could be used in weapons programs until the administration certifies that Syria is not supporting terrorist groups, has withdrawn personnel from Lebanon, is not developing unconventional weapons and has secured its border with Iraq.
With trade between the countries a modest $300 million or less annually, the penalties would have more political than economic effects.
-------- pakistan / india
Blast Narrowly Misses Pakistani President's Car
December 14, 2003
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/middleeast/14CND-STAN.html
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Dec. 14 - President Pervez Musharraf narrowly survived an assassination attempt here tonight when a large bomb detonated on a bridge 30 seconds after his motorcade had crossed.
Visibly shaken, General Musharraf appeared on state television and described what was by far the most serious attempt on his life since he sided with the United States in the campaign against terrorism in September 2001.
"The bomb exploded half a minute after I crossed," General Musharraf said. "I felt the explosion in my car. That is all I know. Certainly it was me who was targeted.
"I am used to such things. They have happened before. God is great. No problem, life continues."
The location of the assassination attempt was unusual: Rawalpindi lies near the nerve center of Pakistan's military establishment. It is considered one of the most secure cities in the country.
The bomb, described by officials as large, exploded 500 yards from the headquarters of the Pakistani Army 11th Corps and only a few miles from the Pakistani Army headquarters, where General Musharraf lives.
A senior Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was unusual that someone outside General Musharraf's close circle of aides would know the exact timing of his movements.
After the attack, the police sealed off the bridge and were deployed to sensitive sites across Islamabad, the country's capital, 20 miles north of here. The extent of damage to the bridge was not known.
The stability of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons, has long been a concern of the United States and the West. Military dictators have ruled Pakistan for most of its modern history. General Musharraf, who is president and chief of staff of the armed forces, seized power in 1999 in a coup. Were he to be assassinated or deposed, the line of succession would be unclear.
Residents described hearing a thunderous explosion at about 7:15 p.m. that sent people scrambling for cover inside their homes. Five hundred yards from the bridge, the concussion blew open a wooden front door, ripping off a piece of wooden trim, and shattered two large glass windows.
"We thought it was a rocket launcher," said Muhammad Habib, a 32-year-old factory worker visiting relatives in the damaged house. "We ran to the other side of the house."
The senior Pakistani intelligence official said multiple motorcades had been used since the police thwarted a plot to kill General Musharraf when he visited Karachi, the southern port city, in 2002.
The bomb was planted on the Nullah Lei Bridge, a short overpass that sits 200 feet above a small gorge. The bridge is ringed on three sides by luxury homes that house retired Pakistani military officers. A shantytown and graveyard lie on the other side of it.
Chaudry Rauf, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said General Musharraf was returning to his home after making a trip to Sindh Province, in the south, when the bomb detonated.
"It was very close," he said. "The procession had just passed."
Various Islamic militant groups have called for General Musharraf to be killed since he sided with the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. At the time, he reversed Pakistan's support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. He has also begun a limited crackdown on militant groups in Pakistan.
Elements of Pakistan's military are also said to oppose his pro-American stance. But General Musharraf himself and senior officials say the army remains firmly under control.
President Bush has called General Musharraf one of the United States' closest allies in the campaign against terrorism. Pro-democracy groups in Pakistan dismiss him as a dictator and say he is not serious about cracking down on Islamic militancy.
Pakistani military and police investigators inspecting the bomb site under spotlights barred journalists and onlookers from the area, so it was impossible to assess the damage. More than 100 yards from the site, dozens of chunks of asphalt lay scattered across the bridge.
There have been reports of two other assassination attempts on General Musharraf, but Pakistani officials have denied that they occurred.
The bombing occurred on a route that General Musharraf's motorcades use frequently when he travels from his army residence in Rawalpindi to official meetings in Islamabad. He chooses to live in the chief of staff's residence in Rawalpindi rather than the presidential residence in Islamabad.
Each time his motorcade moves down the four-lane road connecting the cities, traffic is blocked off in both directions. Hundreds of police officers are posted along the route, standing at intervals of 100 to 200 yards.
Residents condemned the assassination attempt, but one man expressed the resentment some feel toward General Musharraf. The man, who would not give his name, criticized General Musharraf for not doing more to stop the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Islamic hard-liners and some elements of the Pakistani news media regularly describe the invasions as acts of aggression that killed thousands of innocent civilians, even tens of thousands. Many Pakistanis, who have limited sources of information, accept that description as fact and deplore the United States.
"I don't like him," the man said, referring to General Musharraf. "He's not with the Muslim people."
-------- us
Doctors Seeing More Brain Injuries From Iraq
Protective Gear May Be Contributing to Rate Higher Than in Previous Wars
By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62523-2003Dec13?language=printer
Staff Sgt. Maurice Craft's leg was gone, just a bandaged stump poking out from the sheets of his bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The doctor who had just entered his room was looking for evidence of something harder to find: an injury to the soldier's brain.
"Do you feel you remember what happened?" asked Louis French, a neuropsychologist.
He was probing for indications of memory loss, or fogginess. French and his colleagues at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed suspect that soldiers wounded in Iraq are suffering brain trauma at a higher rate than in previous conflicts -- a trend that could reflect not just the type of warfare they're encountering but the protective gear they wear.
"I remember everything," Craft, 26, replied quickly. It happened about 7:30 in the morning on Nov. 25. He and his platoon from the 82nd Airborne Division were patrolling a road in Baghdad, looking for roadside bombs. They found one, and it exploded near Craft's Humvee.
"I felt like someone was vacuuming me out of a steel box," Craft said, lying in his bed. "I felt the worst pain I've ever felt in my life. I felt my leg crushing."
French was struck by the soldier's words. "This description of being sucked out, it's something other people have repeated," he said outside Craft's room.
The shock wave that accompanies explosive blasts could account for the vacuuming sensation Craft experienced. It also rattles heads, prompting many of the brain injuries doctors have seen at Walter Reed. The soldier would need further evaluation, the doctor decided.
"With his description, it's the kind of case I'd want to follow," French said.
Of 155 wounded soldiers at Walter Reed examined by the center's staff between August and early December, 96 -- or 62 percent -- have suffered a traumatic brain injury. In past conflicts, based on data gathered from the Korean and Vietnam wars, about 20 percent of all casualties suffered brain injuries.
French stressed that, unlike the data from past wars, the current figures do not represent a random sample because the doctors are screening only those soldiers they identify as being at risk of brain trauma based on the type of injury they suffered, including those from explosions, vehicle accidents and gunshot wounds.
The findings "suggest to me it's happening more often, but we don't have firm numbers yet to back it up," said French, assistant director for clinical services at the center. The center is surveying the casualties who arrive almost every week at the hospital in Northwest Washington.
One factor, doctors say, could be the nature of the war in Iraq. Many of the injuries to U.S. troops are caused by improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades -- weapons that are more likely to cause brain trauma than a bullet.
"Certainly we have seen a high percentage of blast-related injuries," said Laurie Ryan, a neuropsychologist with the center. "Given this, we may well end up seeing a higher number of brain injuries."
Moreover, doctors at Walter Reed suspect that the Interceptor body armor that has saved the lives of many soldiers in Iraq has meant that there are more survivors with injuries to the head, which is less protected than the torso. Ironically, the protection afforded the torso has left the brain as the most vulnerable organ, particularly to concussive impact.
The brain injury center is helping analyze whether a new helmet being worn by some U.S. troops is better suited for protecting soldiers from concussive impact than the standard Kevlar helmet most soldiers wear. The new Modular Integrated Communication Helmet includes a padded suspension system, but it is worn only by Army Rangers, various special operations forces, Marine reconnaissance units and some Army paratroopers.
The helmets worn by most troops "are great at stopping flying shrapnel," said French, but soldiers complain that they are not designed for absorbing concussive impact. "It's like having a pot on your head," said Army Staff Sgt. Tyler Hall, a Walter Reed patient who suffered serious brain trauma and other injuries from a booby-trap explosive.
The brain injury center, a collaboration between the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, was created after the Persian Gulf War as part of an effort to better treat and research neural trauma suffered by soldiers and veterans.
Some cases of brain trauma are easy to diagnose, particularly when a soldier's head is injured by penetrating shrapnel or blunt force. But damage done by a blast's shock wave can be more difficult to detect, doctors said.
Brain trauma can cause a broad range of physical, cognitive, emotional and social problems for victims.
"I'm having memory problems, nightmares. It's a long list," said Sgt. Gregory D'Angelo. The soldier with the 432nd Transportation Company was driving a truck in Iraq this summer when it came under fire. The truck crashed trying to escape, and D'Angelo's head hit the windshield at 60 mph, French said.
D'Angelo, who is undergoing neuropsychological testing to measure his injury, shrugged helplessly when French asked him how long he had been at Walter Reed. It had been only a week, but he had no recollection of arriving.
With early detection, treatment and therapy, many victims of brain trauma "can be expected to recover fully," French said.
Yet, he added, "brain injuries are sometimes put aside as not being as important or life threatening" as more obvious cases of trauma.
At Walter Reed, many of the soldiers French is evaluating have also suffered terrible injuries to their extremities. Of the first three soldiers French visited in the hospital's orthopedic ward on a recent afternoon, each, including Craft, had lost a leg.
Hall, with the 14th Combat Engineer Battalion, was severely injured near Tikrit in August when the five-ton truck in which he was riding was blown up by a buried artillery shell. Thrown violently by the explosion, Hall landed on his face, suffering severe injury. His hands were badly burned, and his left leg so shattered that it was eventually amputated.
Much of his treatment at Walter Reed has concentrated on preparing his leg for a prosthesis and healing his burns. But the trauma to his brain was also causing problems. Hall had headaches and nausea. He suffered equilibrium imbalance and had difficulty concentrating.
"I was having a hard time," Hall said. "Riding in a car, I was totally out of it. I'd get out and be totally nauseous. I was having trouble focusing."
Doctors placed a shunt in his head to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid and relieve pressure on his brain. "Most of the fogginess went away," Hall said.
"Sergeant Hall is facing many different things, but he's made remarkable progress," French said.
-------- war crimes
General Clark to Testify for the Prosecution at Milosevic Trial
December 14, 2003
By MARLISE SIMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/europe/14BOSN.html
ARIS, Dec. 13 - Washington has agreed that Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, can testify in the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. But the Bush administration has demanded the right to edit videotapes and transcripts of the sessions before they are made public.
The two former opponents, the American general and the former president of Yugoslavia, will face each other in court on Monday and Tuesday.
Closed sessions are routinely held at the United Nations tribunal that deals with Balkan war crimes, but usually to protect witnesses's safety. The conditions of General Clark's appearance are new.
The court agreed to give the United States government 48 hours to review the testimony and to ask judges to suppress any it regards as sensitive. Two government lawyers will accompany the general.
"The review is to ensure there was no inadvertent disclosure of sensitive, classified information," said Pierre-Richard Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes issues, in a telephone interview from Washington. During the Balkan wars, he said, General Clark "obviously had seen a substantial amount of intelligence." But, he added, "we feel fairly confident that the bulk of the testimony and videotapes can be released."
The current plan is to release videotapes of the sessions on Friday, after the review, said Jim Landale, a tribunal spokesman.
The two men confronting each other in court next week have met many times before. General Clark spent many hours with Mr. Milosevic in 1994 and 1995, when he was special adviser to Richard C. Holbrooke, who was trying to end the Bosnia war. They were both at the 21-day peace negotiations Mr. Holbrooke led in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, and they spent lengthy sessions negotiating before NATO began bombing Serbia and its province of Kosovo in March 1999.
Mr. Milosevic, whose trial began in February 2002, is facing 66 charges, including genocide, stemming from his role in those wars, which left more than 200,000 people dead, destroyed villages and towns, and drove more than a million people from their homes. General Clark will be a witness for the prosecution.
Prosecutors want to know how much Mr. Milosevic knew - or could have known - about crimes committed by members of the Bosnian Serb military who were on Belgrade's payroll and by Serbian police officers and other forces directly under his command.
General Clark faces direct cross-examination by Mr. Milosevic, who conducts his own defense and usually demands as much time to question a witness as the prosecution. Frequently, he is given more time.
Among the 280 witnesses who have already testified at the trial, there have been many high-profile witnesses and many senior military officers from other nations. Only France is known to have insisted that its top military officers testify behind closed doors.
In court, Mr. Milosevic has often railed against NATO's bombing campaign and said NATO was the one that had committed war crimes. Of the 23,000 bombs and missiles used during the 78-day campaign, some struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, several bridges, a train full of civilian passengers and a television station.
How much finger-pointing Mr. Milosevic will be allowed with General Clark on the stand will depend on Richard May, the British judge who presides over the trial.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- terrorism
Al Qaeda's Finances Ample, Say Probers
Worldwide Failure to Enforce Sanctions Cited
By Douglas Farah
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62515-2003Dec13?language=printer
Governments around the world are not enforcing global sanctions designed to stem the flow of money to al Qaeda and impede the business activity of the organization's financiers, allowing the terrorist network to retain formidable financial resources, according to U.S., European and U.N. investigators.
Several businessmen designated by the United Nations as terrorist financiers, whose assets were supposed to have been frozen more than two years ago, continue to run vast business empires and to travel freely because most nations are unaware of the sanctions and others do not enforce them, the investigators said. Several charities based in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that were reportedly shut down by the governments there because of the groups' alleged financial ties to Osama bin Laden also continue to operate freely, they said.
As a result, al Qaeda continues to receive ample funding not only to carry out its own plots but also to finance affiliated terrorist groups and to seek new weapons, the investigators and terrorism experts said.
A report released this month by a U.N. panel of experts documented the continued flow of money -- including drug money -- to terrorist organizations and warned that al Qaeda "has already taken the decision to use chemical and bioweapons in their forthcoming attacks. The only constraint they are facing is the technical complexity to operate them properly and effectively" -- rather than a lack of means to acquire them.
"We desperately need to revitalize our effort to choke off terrorist financing, because until we cut that off, we have not crippled al Qaeda's ability to attack us," said one senior U.S. official who monitors terrorist finances. "We started out well, picked all the low-hanging fruit, and then, as we have squeezed, they have simply moved on to different methods."
A separate report released last week by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that U.S. law enforcement still has no clear idea of how terrorists move their money and that the FBI, which is the lead agency in tracking terrorist assets, still does not "systematically collect or analyze" such information. It concluded that the Justice and Treasury departments have fallen more than a year behind in developing plans to attack terrorist financial mechanisms, such as the use of diamonds and gold to hide assets.
Under the sanctions policy adopted by the United Nations immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, individuals designated by the world body as terrorists or terrorist supporters were to have their assets frozen and be banned from international travel.
So far, the world body has publicly named 272 people as sponsors of terrorism.
But U.N. and U.S. officials said they do not know where more than a handful of those people are, and only 83 of 191countries have submitted the required U.N. reports on attacking terrorist financing and implementing the travel ban. Only a third of those have given the list to their border guards.
The investigators said some developing nations lack the resources to comply with the sanctions, while some wealthier countries do not know of the sanctions or are hampered by bureaucratic inertia.
U.S. officials said that about $138 million in terrorist assets have been frozen since the attacks, and that some steps have been taken to clamp down on charities and other known terrorist funding mechanisms. Officials noted the closure of three large Islamic charities in the United States and an ongoing investigation of a group of charities and organizations in Northern Virginia. Numerous alleged sponsors of terrorism, in the United States and abroad, have been publicly named.
But the officials acknowledged that al Qaeda, now more decentralized, needs less money to operate than it did when bin Laden was supporting training camps and propping up the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
The U.N. report said $75 million of the $138 million in frozen assets claimed by the United States belonged to al Qaeda or the Taliban. The Taliban money, which was a "substantial" portion, has been turned over to the new Afghan government.
Illustrating the ineffectiveness of the sanctions regime, U.S. and U.N. officials said, are the joint business empires of Yousef Nada and Idris Nasreddin, which sprawl across Europe and Africa and are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nada, an Egyptian national who lives in Switzerland, was designated a terrorist financier by the United Nations on Nov. 9, 2001, and was publicly accused by U.S. and U.N. officials of providing direct aid to al Qaeda. Nasreddin, an Eritrean who lives in Italy, was designated a terrorist supporter on April 24, 2002. At that time, the assets of more than a dozen of their joint enterprises were supposed to have been frozen, and a travel ban was imposed on the pair.
Both men have strongly denied any involvement in terrorist activities.
But U.S. officials and the U.N. report said that many of the pair's businesses, including a luxury hotel in Milan, continue to operate and that both men violate the travel ban with impunity.
The U.N. panel found that on Jan. 28, Nada traveled from his home in Campione d'Italia, in Switzerland, to Vaduz, Liechtenstein, to change the names of two of the companies that were targets of the asset freeze.
Despite his designated status, he traveled under his own name and even applied for and received a new passport shortly before leaving.
In Liechtenstein, Nada sought to liquidate both renamed companies and listed himself as the liquidator, a move that would have allowed him to pocket the proceeds. When U.N. officials discovered the move and protested, the liquidation was halted.
Lawyers for the two men did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
Victor Comras, a former State Department official who helped write the U.N. report, said that, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist strikes, the United States and other countries effectively froze some terrorist assets, but that the success was largely limited to halting money in the banking system.
Once al Qaeda understood the weaknesses and loopholes in the sanctions regime, Comras said, "money was quickly moved out of harm's way" by taking it out of banks and putting it into commodities, such as diamonds and gold, or into front companies.
"Al Qaeda had assets, and those assets are still around," Comras said. "They had a number of different ways to handle the problem, and they are using all of them."
U.S. and U.N. officials said the lack of enforcement is especially acute in Europe and Saudi Arabia, and they expressed dismay that, 27 months after the terrorist attacks, many countries have done little to install a legal framework that would make the sanctions effective. Most lacking in Europe are laws that would allow the seizure or shutdown of shell companies, businesses and properties -- not just bank accounts -- if there is evidence linking them to terrorism.
Legal issues, including how to confiscate properties when one owner is a designated terrorist sponsor but others are not, present another obstacle, officials said.
"The question is, how do you go after real properties and not just bank accounts," said Juan C. Zarate, the Treasury Department's deputy assistant secretary for terrorist finance. "These are men of resources, men of high finance who know how to reformulate their businesses and how to move money."
U.S. and U.N. officials said that some failures to effectively implement the sanctions stem in part from ignorance of the sanctions regime, and that others are the result of bureaucratic inertia.
"The European Union has very strong regulations covering money and travel issues in compliance with the United Nations," one U.N. official said. "One has to question how some of these governments can justify not being in compliance with EU regulations."
In addition, the body set up by the European Union to monitor compliance with the U.N. regulations has only two people assigned to the enforcement office and has no real authority.
U.N. and U.S. officials also said another problem is the ongoing activity of charities that were supposed to have been shut down.
Several branches of the al Haramain Charitable Foundation, a Saudi Arabia-based organization that in the past raised as much as $30 million a year, remain active, they said. Several offices of the organization were directly implicated in the financing of al Qaeda, and in May the Saudi government announced that the charity had been required to suspend all activities outside Saudi Arabia.
"Al Haramain is still active in a number of countries and has just opened a new Islamic school in Jakarta, Indonesia," the U.N. report said.
The al Haramain office in Saudi Arabia did not respond to telephone calls, but in the past its leaders denied any links to terrorism.
U.S. officials said that shutting down al Haramain and ensuring that other suspected terrorist financiers are put out of business by Saudi Arabia is at the top of the two nations' agenda.
Similarly, the U.N. report noted that the al Rashid Trust, a designated Pakistani charity, "continues its operation in Pakistan under various names and partnerships . . . it has continued to be active in funding al Qaeda-related activities as well as other social and humanitarian projects."
The investigators also expressed concern about the alleged activities of Wael Julaidan, a businessman who helped found al Qaeda and who was designated by the United Nations on Sept. 6, 2002, as a terrorist financier.
Until last year, Julaidan was the Saudi chairman of the Rabita Trust, a Pakistani charity also found by the United Nations to have funded al Qaeda activities. U.N. and U.S. officials said Julaidan continues to work in charities and to handle large sums of money.
A source with direct knowledge of U.S. actions said the "highest priority of the U.S. government is to get the Saudis to do what they said [they] would do and close down what they were supposed to close down." The source noted that, after agreeing to put him on the U.N. list, senior Saudi officials publicly denounced Julaidan's designation.
"Then the Saudis said he was questioned but wouldn't tell us what he said," the source said. "They said his assets are frozen, but won't say where. It's like Humphrey Bogart in 'Casablanca.' They round him up when the pressure builds and are shocked to find anything going on."
A senior Saudi official disputed the U.S. and U.N. accounts of the ongoing activities of al Haramain and Julaidan.
"Julaidan is not operating," the official said. "His assets are frozen. Al Haramain cannot spend a penny outside Saudi Arabia. We are doing what we can."
He added: "If they think al Haramain is doing something in Indonesia, then it is up to the government of Indonesia to take action, not Saudi Arabia."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
Cancer Vaccine, The
December 14, 2003
By SANDEEP JAUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14CANCER.html
Treating cancer with radiation or chemotherapy is a bit like firebombing a house to get rid of pests: it can do the job, but good stuff is going to get damaged in the process. Researchers have long searched for a more targeted approach that wouldn't injure healthy tissue. Now they may have found one in a surprising place: the human immune system.
With ''foreign'' cells, like bacteria, the immune system works like a well-organized militia. Sentries called dendritic cells lie in wait at portals of entry, like the skin, ready to devour invading cells. After doing so, the dendritic cells display small bits of the invaders (called antigens) on their surface, and this display serves as a signal for specialized cells -- called killer T cells -- to multiply. T cells are made to recognize one specific antigen, and when they are activated, they stream through the blood searching for and destroying any cells that carry that antigen.
Cancer cells, however, have a devious way of evading the body's natural defenses. Malignant cells often closely resemble normal ones, so the immune system usually leaves them alone. It's as if cancer cells make their way past the sentries -- the dendritic cells -- by cloaking themselves in recognizable garb.
But researchers have now figured out a way to harness the power of T cells with a cancer vaccine. By isolating dendritic cells from a patient's blood and loading them with cancer antigens, they can replicate the first step in the immune system's response to invaders. The dendritic cells ''digest'' and display the cancer antigens, and when they are injected back into the bloodstream, they activate T cells, signaling them to exterminate any cells bearing the cancer antigens.
The dream -- to create a vaccine against cancer -- has been around for years, but the technology that makes it possible is just now becoming available. In June, researchers at Dendreon, a biotechnology company in Seattle, presented data from the first randomized, placebo-controlled study of a prostate-cancer vaccine. Their vaccine (called Provenge) was delivered intravenously to 82 men with advanced prostate cancer. It was a small test, but the researchers found that in vaccinated patients with less aggressive cancers, the disease progressed more slowly than in similar patients who got placebo shots. After six months, 36 percent of vaccinated patients remained ''progression free,'' compared with only 4 percent of placebo patients.
Dendreon has started vaccination trials for a number of cancers, including ovarian, breast and colon. Preliminary results, a company spokesman says, have been promising. Though the research is still at an early stage, one lesson seems to be emerging: with cancer, the best defense may be a good offense.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Koreans protest against sending troops
December 14, 2003
AFP
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/13/1071125714137.html
Seoul - Hundreds of activists took to Seoul's streets yesterday protesting South Korea's plan to send troops to Iraq, witnesses said.
Some 500 protesters, most of them student radicals, marched from a public park to another public park two kilometres away, chanting "no troop dispatch, no war" and carrying banners.
Police did not attempt to break up the demonstration, which was largely peaceful.
Hardly has a weekend passed without anti-war protests since South Korea decided to accept a controversial US request to send more troops to Iraq in addition to some 460 military engineers and medics who are already there.
Divided public opinion over the deployment was further polarised after a deadly ambush in northern Iraq a week earlier in which two South Korean construction workers were killed and two others injured.
Despite the first fatal attack by Iraqi insurgents against South Koreans, South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun vowed to honour his promise to comply with the US request to send troops.
He said he would consider sending around 3,000 troops, mostly non-combatants, to Iraq - far fewer than the United States requested.
----
Greenpeace fights charges of conspiracy in Miami case
December 12, 2003
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031211-105742-9875r.htm
It's been more than 100 years since the federal government prosecuted anyone for "sailor mongering," the criminal act of luring sailors with promises of prostitution and liquor off of ships and into port.
But that's the charge facing environmental group Greenpeace USA after members boarded a container ship near the Port of Miami without permission to protest illegal shipments of mahogany from the Amazon.
The two members of Greenpeace who actually boarded the vessel last year plus four others pleaded no contest and spent a weekend in jail, but the U.S. Attorney's Office obtained a grand jury indictment against the entire organization in July on conspiracy charges.
The obscure 1872 law forbids the boarding of "any vessel about to arrive at the place of her destination, before her actual arrival" and carries a $10,000 fine.
If found guilty, the organization faces "unprecedented supervision" by the federal government of future activities and protests, which frequently target the Bush administration, said Nancy Hwa, Greenpeace spokeswoman. The group's tax-exempt status is also at risk.
At a pretrial hearing today in the U.S. District Court Southern District of Florida, attorneys for Greenpeace will ask that the charge be dropped, arguing it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the First Amendment right to peaceful protest. A trial is set for January.
"Instead of prosecuting the smugglers, the Justice Department wants to brand Greenpeace a criminal operation," said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA.
Gerd Leipold, executive director of Greenpeace International, said Attorney General John Ashcroft should be targeting criminals who trade in the illegal mahogany market.
"Seventy percent of Brazilian mahogany is destined for the U.S. market, most of it illegal," Mr. Leipold said. "This is what Ashcroft should be stopping."
"Greenpeace will resist this overreaching by Mr. Ashcroft's Justice Department," Mr. Passacantando said.
The Justice Department referred comment to Matt Dates in the Florida U.S. Attorney's Office, who did not return phone calls.
On April 12, 2002, the activists boarded the M/V APL Jade with a banner reading "President Bush: Stop illegal logging" but were arrested by the Coast Guard before they could unfurl their message. The activists wanted authorities to search the ship and seize the timber.
In a press conference yesterday, civil liberties and environmental groups sided with Greenpeace and called on the government to dismiss the suit.
"Permitting the selective prosecution of a group like Greenpeace merely because the government disagrees with their point of view would irreparably harm the free-speech rights of all Americans," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way.
"Protecting the right to disagree with the government is what the First Amendment is all about. Indeed, it is profoundly patriotic to engage in peaceful dissent when you think the government is wrong," Mr. Neas said.
--------
Survivors of atomic bombs protest Enola Gay exhibit
The Japan Times:
Dec. 14, 2003
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20031214a6.htm
WASHINGTON (Kyodo) Japanese survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki handed letters and a petition to the Smithsonian Institution on Friday urging it to mention the human casualties caused by the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and the subject of an upcoming exhibition.
Sunao Tsuboi, of the Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, speaks Friday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Sunao Tsuboi, secretary general of the Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, and Terumi Tanaka, secretary general of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization, submitted the letters and the petition to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
The letters, including one from Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, and a petition signed by more than 25,000 people call on the museum to change its plan to exhibit the reassembled Enola Gay from Monday in a celebration of U.S. technology.
The museum should also show images of the casualties and damage caused by the bomb dropped by the B-29 Superfortress, they said.
Tsuboi and Tanaka tried to hand the letters and the petition to the museum's director, retired Gen. Jack Dailey, but the museum said he was out of town and not available.
Tsuboi, who survived the Aug. 6, 1945, attack on Hiroshima, and Tanaka, who was in Nagasaki when the bomb detonated above the city three days later, submitted the letters and the petition to the museum's associate director, John Benton.
The museum will display the reassembled Enola Gay from Monday, when its new facility opens near Washington Dulles International Airport.
The information panel for the Enola Gay will state that the plane dropped the first atomic weapons used in combat on Hiroshima and that another B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, according to the museum.
The panel will not mention the people who died in Hiroshima or the thousands of others who suffered from radiation sickness after the bombing.
The death toll in Hiroshima from the Enola Gay bombing rose to around 140,000 by the end of 1945, while some 70,000 had died by then in Nagasaki from a bomb dropped by a B-29 named Boxcar, according to reports to the United Nations by the two cities.
As of August this year, the combined toll of people who have died as a result of the attacks had climbed to roughly 364,000, with around 280,000 people having been recognized as hibakusha, or surviving atomic bombing victims, as of the end of March.
In 1994, the Smithsonian was planning to display part of the fuselage of the Enola Gay in an exhibit that was to focus on the massive human casualties and destruction caused by the U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their historical aftermath. But it bowed to protests by U.S. politicians and World War II veterans, scrapping the show in January 1995.
From that year through 1998, the fuselage section was exhibited but without reference to the destruction caused by the bombings.
At a news conference Friday at the National Press Club, Tsuboi said, "If the Enola Gay is going to be displayed, then you should also display what exactly happened when it dropped the bomb. In other words, you should show the historical facts behind the bombing.
"From our point of view, the Enola Gay is not the symbol of technological advancement but the symbol of evil," he said.
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Hiroshima survivors protest Enola Gay exhibit at new US museum
By US Correspondent Malcolm Brown
14 December 2003 1357 hrs
CNA Channel NewsAsia
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/americas/view/61909/1/.html
WASHINGTON : Japanese survivors of the World War II atomic bomb attacks by the United States have handed in a petition protesting a new exhibit in the US which includes the aircraft that dropped the first device.
The B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on the city of Hiroshima, is among the air and spacecraft which will soon be on public display at a huge, new museum site just outside Washington, DC.
A-bomb survivors are outraged that the display makes just passing reference to the attack which levelled Hiroshima with the loss of tens of thousands of lives.
The giant new museum was dedicated with great fanfare on Thursday.
"The centre is a monument to the great achievements in flight and to the greater, even, possibilities that still lie ahead of us," US Vice-President Dick Cheney said.
The cavernous interior of the Stephen F Udvar-Hazy exhibition hangar will one day hold 200 aircraft and more than 130 spacecraft.
Flight enthusiasts are delighted, but the inclusion of the restored Enola Gay is evoking strong feelings.
"This is the most symbolically significant plane probably in history and the symbolism is because it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and began the nuclear age," said Peter Kuznick, a professor at American University.
That age began on 6 August 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped a bomb nick-named "Little Boy" over the city of Hiroshima.
Nagasaki was hit three days later by another B-29, with the Enola Gay flying weather reconnaissance.
But the exhibit label focuses firstly on the technical sophistication and role of the B-29 in general, before mentioning that this particular plane "dropped the first atomic weapon used in history".
For those who survived the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and who came to Washington to make their views known - that simply won't do.
"We would say that if the Enola Gay is going to be displayed, then they should also be displaying what exactly happened beneath the plane on the day that it dropped the bomb," said Sunao Tsuboi, secretary-general of the Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-Bomb Sufferers Organisations.
"In other words, they should show the facts and the history behind the facts and the history behind the bombing," he said.
The Japanese survivors are calling for the inclusion of a public display of photographs and other materials to illustrate the damage inflicted by the bombing.
"From our point of view, the Enola Gay is nothing but a symbol of evil," said Terumi Tanaka, secretary-general of the Japan Confederation of A & H Bomb Sufferers Organisations.
The hope is that if museum visitors see the damage caused by the bomb, it will advance the cause of nuclear disarmament.
"There is the opinion in the United States that still exists today that dropping the nuclear bomb from the Enola Gay was correct. This, I think, is a point of view that can be taken when one looks at the this scene from above the mushroom cloud. However, our point of view is based on looking at the situation from below the mushroom cloud," Mr Tanaka said.
The survivors took that point of view to Washington's Air and Space Museum, which runs the new exhibit.
Inside, they handed over a petition bearing more than 25,000 signatures to museum officials, who did not want to give interviews.
In a statement, the museum says that its role is to tell "the story of the development of flight" and chronicle "the history of the technologies that have made flight possible".
Officials say the labelling of the Enola Gay "does not glorify or vilify" the aircraft's historical role.
But American supporters of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are outraged.
"Imagine what we as Americans and other people in the world would make of a museum, let us say in the Middle East - anywhere in the Middle East - presenting replicas of the two technically advanced airliners filled with fuel that hit the World Trade Centre," author and activist Dan Ellsberg said.
And the elderly, but determined, campaigners won't settle for just handing in a petition.
When the new exhibit opens to the public next week, the survivors will be standing in line to see the plane that dropped the bomb which changed their lives and human history.
They say they plan a solemn protest about a display which they regard as woefully inadequate.
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Enola Gay exhibit stirs controversy by eschewing context
By Frank Davies
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Sun, Dec. 14, 2003
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/news/7488887.htm
WASHINGTON - The Enola Gay, the simple plaque tells us, was the most sophisticated bomber of World War II. The two paragraphs of text compress its momentous impact on the world to one spare sentence:
"On Aug. 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan."
The unmistakable icon of the nuclear age, the fully restored Enola Gay goes on public display for the first time Monday in the Smithsonian's new, cavernous Air and Space Museum in suburban Virginia.
But there is no mention of the 140,000 people killed by that bombing. Nor is there mention of the claims that the bombing was necessary to force Japan's surrender or of the wider controversy about using weapons that could destroy humanity.
The unveiling of the Enola Gay and its presentation are touching off a debate about how a museum deals with the pride and pain surrounding one of history's great turning points: President Truman's decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.
John Dailey, the director of the museum, recently described the B-29 Superfortress as a "magnificent technological achievement," one of the crown jewels in a vast space that contains some of aviation's most notable craft.
Terumi Tanaka, who was 13 when the atomic bomb fell on his city, killing five of his family members, sees the plane differently: "To the survivors, it is a symbol of evil in the world. I am surprised, angry and sad that it is on display."
Tanaka and four other Hiroshima survivors, called hibakusha in Japan, came to Washington this weekend with petitions and plans for a protest Monday when the museum opens. They seek recognition of the human cost of the atomic bomb attack.
About 400 historians, scientists and activists signed a petition urging the Smithsonian to "rethink its exhibit to include a balanced discussion of the atomic bombings and of current U.S. nuclear policy."
"This plane began the era of ultimate destruction," said Peter Kuznick, who heads the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. "It's just unconscionable for this country to display the Enola Gay in the national museum while whitewashing its role in history."
Smithsonian officials rejected the petition, saying the simple plaque identifying the plane "does not glorify or vilify" its role in history.
The labeling is "precisely the same kind used" for the other 81 military and civilian craft in the museum.
Dailey, a retired Marine general, said the bombing helped prevent later use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War because "it showed what can happen."
"But we don't tell people what to think about it," he added.
That did not satisfy the mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, who wrote recently to Dailey that the plane is not "simply another exciting step in the technology of flight. I urge you to convey the horrifying tragedy of nuclear weapons."
Summarizing the controversy over dropping the bomb isn't easy, many historians concede. Some of Truman's advisers, research shows, wanted to use the bomb quickly to intimidate the Soviets, who had just entered the war against Japan.
Military leaders were divided over whether the atomic bomb was necessary. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Douglas MacArthur doubted it was needed, believing Japan was on the verge of collapse.
But the specter of high U.S. casualties in an invasion of Japan haunted many leaders and soldiers. More than 12,000 Americans died on Okinawa, as Japanese soldiers fought to the last man.
"It's very important to understand the context of wartime attitudes in 1945," Paul Boyer, an historian at the University of Wisconsin, said.
Some of the Hiroshima survivors agreed that the debate over dropping the atomic bomb should not obscure Japan's aggression and atrocities over many years, from Asia to Pearl Harbor.
"It's only fair that all sides of the story be told, and especially important for the younger generations," said Tanaka, 71.
Some survivors have lobbied to make sure Japanese textbooks include information about Japanese atrocities.
Many American veterans see the atomic bomb as a godsend that may have saved their lives. Jack Pulwers, an Army veteran from Virginia, whose new book "Press of Battle" recounts the work of GI reporters during the war, said that was the sentiment in his unit.
Truman expressed that certitude many times. Pulwers, who worked for WABC News in New York, once interviewed Truman and told him how his infantry battalion was about to ship out for the Pacific when they heard about the atomic bomb.
Pulwers said: "I'll always remember what Truman told me: 'I saved your ass, son.'"
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Winged icons roll out of mothballs
By Hope Cristol, Globe Correspondent,
12/14/2003
http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/2003/12/14/winged_icons_roll_out_of_mothballs/
CHANTILLY, Va. -- There it was, that gleaming silver Boeing B-29 Superfortress: huge, plump, and more evocative now, as a retired bomber on clunky yellow stands, than on the morning of its major mission, before it changed the world.
Fully assembled for the first time in 40 years, the Enola Gay is a chilling centerpiece in the National Air and Space Museum's new companion facility, opening tomorrow at Dulles International Airport. It dominates the other World War II planes on display beneath its 141-foot wingspan. Its bomb bay doors hang open, taunting visitors to peer into the dark cavity that dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat.
I was born decades after the benignly named "Little Boy" bomb obliterated Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. I didn't lose any family in that war, and I don't particularly like planes. Yet standing before this icon of great historic contradictions -- ingenuity and ignorance, honor and shame, the end of World War II and the start of the Atomic Age -- I felt inexplicable tears try to force their way out.
A lot of what's inside the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, named for its $65 million donor, can evoke such visceral reaction. In a world of Disney renditions and dead-ringer replicas, this Smithsonian Institution museum is packed from floor to ceiling with the original history-makers -- from the earliest planes to modern rockets. You don't need a passion for aviation or space exploration to stand in awe of these machines. They speak of the human spirit of exploration; they tug on the heartstrings of triumph and tragedy.
They also look really cool. Aerobatic planes, gliders, and fighter jets hang from the arched steel trusses of the massive, hangar-shaped space. Bigger military and commercial planes, including a sleek, delta-winged Air France Concorde, fill the gray concrete floor space.
It looks like a boy's dream toy-room, all grown up. The museum, south of Dulles's main terminal and a short taxi ride away, is nearly three football fields long and 10 stories high, and filled with some 80 aircraft and 60 large space artifacts, a fraction of the more than 200 aircraft and 150 artifacts that will ultimately be on display.
One of the best vantages for all of them is the landing. Hanging overhead is the Curtiss P-40E Warhawk, a first-line fighter that scored important US victories, and the jet of the famed Flying Tigers, recognizable by the toothy shark mouth painted on its nose.
Below the landing is a jet that looked to me like something Batman would have flown. I didn't know what it was, but I got the feeling that this big, black, needle-nosed plane had to be important.
Apparently, it still is. The Lockheed SR-72 Blackbird, and built in the early 1960s, is still the fastest, highest flying operational jet-powered aircraft ever built. It can fly faster than three times the speed of sound, at altitudes of over 85,000 feet. On its last flight, this Blackbird set a transcontinental speed record, flying from the West Coast to the East Coast in 64 minutes and 20 seconds.
Behind the Blackbird is the James S. McDonnell space hangar, named for the founder of the company that built the nation's first manned spacecraft. This wing is much smaller than the main aviation hangar, but features items of historical and technological significance, from X-ray telescopes to the first US space shuttle, Enterprise, a test vehicle designed to operate in the atmosphere.
So how do the smaller planes get attention against the backdrop of the Blackbird, Enterprise, and Enola Gay? With big stories.
In the shadow of the Enola Gay, for instance, is a smallish, dark green, Japanese World War II bomber, the Aichi M6A1 Seiran. Designed to be launched from -- a submarine, its wings can be folded back onto the fuselage. The plane sits on two pontoons.
This wasn't the first Japanese floatplane used in the war. Japan operated reconnaissance aircraft from submarines before the United States entered World War II; in 1942, one attacked the Oregon coast. None of the 26 Seirans ever built saw combat, however.
"What happened was, the Japanese had these airplanes loaded on ships and as the end of the war came, the crews basically destroyed them," said Dik Daso, the museum's curator for modern military aircraft. After the war, US forces discovered a single Seiran in the Aichi factory. That's the one in the Udvar-Hazy Center, the only one in existence, Daso said.
The objective of the center, 20 years and $311 million in the making, isn't just public intrigue. The National Air and Space Museum has a federal mandate: to "memorialize the national development of aviation and space flight; collect, preserve, and display aeronautical and space flight equipment of historical interest and significance." It is difficult to do right by that mandate when much of the collection is dissembled in storage hangars.
"What I'm getting out of this is a vastly improved storage space," says David DeVorkin, museum curator of astronomy and the space sciences. His "storage space" is the James McDonnell space hangar, which will be closed for several more months while Enterprise undergoes restoration. Instead of being boarded up, it will be glassed off -- so visitors can watch the restoration in process.
The hangar will be home to an unflown Mercury series spacecraft and the Gemini VII spacecraft, flown on a two-week orbital endurance mission in 1965. Until it opens, some of the artifacts will be displayed in the aviation hangar.
In addition to the important aircraft from World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam, there are the commercial, sport, business, and private planes. Display cases house aerial cameras and aircraft machine guns, astronaut equipment, Amelia Earhart artifacts, and flight suits. There is an IMAX theater and an observation tower, where visitors watch planes take off and land at Dulles. Eventually, there will also be a restaurant. Temporary food service will be available until a food court opens later in 2004.
Just months ago, the Udvar-Hazy Center seemed to be taking shape as a jazzed-up aircraft warehouse. Now, in time for the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers first powered flight on Wednesday, the facility is a full-fledged tourist attraction.
Hope Cristol is a freelance writer who lives in Washington.
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Plea by Hiroshima survivors
14dec03
Australia Sunday Times
http://www.sundaytimes.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,7034,8153587%255E950,00.html
WASHINGTON: Fifty-eight years after being devastated by a US atomic bomb, Hiroshima survivors pleaded with the US yesterday to honour their pain before the plane that dropped the bomb goes on public display.
Three ageing Hiroshima victims travelled from Japan to lodge written protests with US President George Bush and the National Air and Space Museum before the bomber named Enola Gay goes on public display tomorrow.
They accuse the museum of dishonouring the memory of the scores of thousands of civilians killed in the blast on August 6, 1945, and a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later, by not displaying casualty figures next to the plane.
"If the Enola Gay is going to be displayed, they should also say what happened beneath the plane on the day the bomb was dropped," said Sunao Tsuboi, who was about 1.5km from the centre of the blast.
"I was under this cloud," Mr Tsuboi, who still bears scars from the blast, said as he pointed to an enlarged photo of a mushroom cloud towering over Hiroshima minutes after the attack.
The Enola Gay, a gleaming silver B-29 Superfortress bomber, will be exhibited at a new annexe of the National Air and Space Museum, near Dulles International Airport, outside Washington.
It will bear a label describing it as the "most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II".
Survivors claim the exhibit ignores the agony of about 230,000 people killed in the blast and by subsequent radiation poisoning and disease, as well as the decades of pain endured by those who survived.
The museum's director, retired general John Dailey, has resisted groups who want the death toll included.
"We don't do it for other airplanes," he said.
The museum said its stance was consistent with the mission entrusted to it by the US Congress, which was to display and preserve historic and technologically significant air and space craft.
In a petition signed by 25,000 people sent to Mr Bush and Mr Dailey, survivors say they cannot "repress our deep astonishment and anger".
"To exalt this Enola Gay - which caused an unprecedented atrocity that violated all norms of morality and international law - as testimony to `technological achievement' is completely unacceptable to the atomic bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the petition said.
Debate has raged for years over America's use of the atomic bomb. Opponents of the twin raids have described them as a war crime. Other historians argue the action hastened the defeat of Japan and therefore saved thousands of lives.
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Joseph Gerson's Speech at Interfaith Program Protesting the Enola Gay Exhibit
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church
Washington, D. C.
December 14, 2003
[On December 14, the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution opened a new exhibit which features the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima. In response, a teach-in and an Interfaith Service were held in Washington, D.C. on the weekend preceding the opening of the new exhibit, and a protest was held at the new museum the morning that it opened.]
Friends, I am honored to be sharing the podium today with Tomonaga-san, and with Denise Nelson, Art Laffin, and Toussant L'Ouverture Tingling whose commitments and friendships have been important to me over the years. I have an especially poignant memory of standing with Toussant two summers ago at what for me is the most sacred memorial in the Hiroshima Peace Park - the burial mound containing the ashes of tens of thousands of anonymous victims of that cataclysmic and criminal bombing. Together, and in silence, we bowed toward the burial mound in the simplest and most profound expression of remorse and respect.
I want to begin by sharing a memory of a conversation with another member of the Hibakusha delegation, Professor Tanaka of Nihon Hidankyo, from some years ago. During a Hibakusha speaking tour in the late 1990s, we were sitting at a picnic table under pine trees in Maine, at a Quaker retreat. At lunch, Tanaka-san had spoken to people who had gathered to hear him, and after they had gone off to other activities and we were alone in the silent embrace those quiet trees. And then there was the moment when Tanaka-san turned to me and asked "After we die, who will remember?"
What I heard him ask was who will remember the deaths of two hundred thousand people, the experience of man-inflicted Hell, and the suffering wrought by what in today's terms were two small nuclear weapons? Who will understand the meanings of nuclear war, nuclear threats, and nuclear arsenals? What will you do to save humanity from itself?
The Smithsonian Museum, with its celebration of the Enola Gay is designed to help ensure that no one will remember. Our presence here, and what we will do in the days that follow demonstrates that memory and affirmation of life can prevail.
I have been very fortunate. Something like "a simple twist of fate" led me to the extraordinary privilege of meeting, coming to know, and working with the Hibakusha. I first traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki - which everyone should do at least once in his or her lifetime - in 1984. There, in addition to the horrifying legacies and artifacts of the Enola Gay's bombing, I found what Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzubaro has described as the "Hiroshima spirit." Meeting and hearing testimonies of people like Tanaka-Terumi, Konishi Satoru, Sawada-Shoji, Yamaguchi Senji, Watanabe Chieko, Taniguchi Sumiteru, and other Hibakusha I found "human dignity [that] transcends language." I was engaged and being inspired by people who have confronted, courageously endure, and who have transformed their excruciating physical and psychological wounds into what Wilfred Burchett first described as compassionate, indestructible witnesses and forces for peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons. They have seen, experienced and endured literal Hell. Their gift to us is the message "Never Again!" " Abolish all nuclear weapons!"
Like Orwellian "Newspeak" and "memory holes," the new Enola Gay exhibit is been designed to eliminate memory so that other nuclear wars can be fought. This is the U.S. way of war, as we also see (or don't see) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, El Salvador, Vietnam, the Philippines and so many other countries our government has attacked. The deaths of U.S. warriors and civilians should make the nation and heavens weep. Victims of U.S. militarism, of the U.S. Empire, are not worth a second thought. Already dehumanized by U.S. wartime propaganda, the Hibakusha were like other Japanese "vermin" who "must be completely annihilated." They were, and for many U.S. Americans remain, expendable people of color. These men and women are the "bad guys" whose very existence somehow threatens our security and survival.
Truthful remembrance is a powerful force. Last week in Seoul, South Korea I witnessed a young Korean tell an audience that contrary to the widespread Korean belief that that the Hiroshima bomb was a "beautiful" atomic bomb that ended a half century of extremely brutal Japanese colonialism, what he had seen at the Hiroshima Peace Museum had shown him that the atomic bombings were atrocities which must never be repeated. In the context of Korean history and culture, that was a powerful, even revolutionary, as well as life affirming moment that should be repeated here in the United States again, and again, and again.
Here in the United States, remembering or memorializing the Hibakusha (witness/survivors of the atomic bombings) and other victims of U.S. wars is more than inconvenient. Doing so in meaningful ways calls into question the legitimacy of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the wars that our nation has fought and the ways it has fought them. Memorializing the Hibakusha means undermining the cultural and intellectual foundations of U.S. "manifest destiny." Imagine for a moment a monument to the Hibakusha in the hallowed halls of Harvard University, whose wartime president James Conant who determined that the Enola Gay's target should be a "vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' homes." Think about how such a monument would shape the values and commitments of coming generations of the U.S. elite. Or, we can imagine a Vietnam Memorial-like wall of the names of the Hibakusha within our outside the Enola Gay Museum and how it would influence our commitments and who we are as a people.
Words are inadequate describe the travesty that "celebrating" the technology that brought the destruction and suffering that Tomonaga-san has described. We might read the German philosopher Carl Jaspers' 1947 speeches On the Question of German Guilt to begin learning how to repent and to respond to the crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of dragging humankind into the eras of "Mutual Assured Destruction," of state and non-state nuclear terrorism, and of possible omnicide.
As was the case with the Smithsonian Museum's exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the new Enola Gay exhibit serves the ideology and power of the nuclear state. Think about it. Washington, D.C. hosts the "Holocaust Museum" that memorializes the Shoah, the genocide of my people in heart rending detail. Imagine, instead that museum celebrating the technologies of Hitler's extermination camps or Zyklon B gas, with no reference to the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Leftists, mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers and grandfathers and others they exterminated. mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers and grandfathers. This, I think, is how we should begin to understand the Enola Gay exhibit.
When Jews and Hibakusha cry "Never Again!" we speak from the same anguish, the same hope for humanity. Never again! And it applies, as well, to what is being done to the Palestinian people.
The campaign to prevent the world from understanding the human meanings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and of continuing preparations for nuclear war has a long history. We continue to hear President Truman's widely broadcast claim that the Hiroshima bomb saved a million U.S. lives, but how often do we hear or see the words of his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Leahy? He testified that "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance to our war against Japan." General (later President) Eisenhower concurred. "The Japanese were ready to surrender," he said "and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." Unknown to Leahy and Eisenhower at the time, were the Cold War roles assigned to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs by President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson, and Manhattan Project Director General Groves. But just as we could not see or hear Leahy and Eisenhower's words, or testimony about how the A-bomb would serve as "a hammer over" the Russians at the 50th anniversary Smithsonian exhibit, they are again forbidden at the Enola Gay exhibit.
From the beginning, the Pentagon did its best to ensure that the world `` would not see images of the death and suffering caused by the atomic bombs. When the U.S. military arrived in Japan, it destroyed or confiscated all the photographic evidence they could find of what the A-bombs had wrought. In addition to seizing still pictures taken by journalists like Wilfred Burchette. Documentary film footage taken by Japanese journalists and by the U.S. occupation forces was seized and locked away in Pentagon vaults for nearly twenty-five years, lest it be used as "Communist propaganda" during the Cold War. And, during the U.S. military occupation, Japanese people and scholars were forbidden to hold meetings to discuss what had happened in Hiroshima or to publish research about the consequences of the Atomic bombings.
Let me take you two steps further into this American version of Dante's Inferno. If you listen to or read Hibakusha testimonies, you will learn about something called the Atomic Bomb Control Commission. With pain, Hibakusha describe how soon after the atomic bombings U.S. doctors arrived to examine them and, incomprehensibly, how these doctors provided them no medical assistance. These medical examinations and related record keeping continued over the decades to this day. With what I long thought was understandable paranoia, Hibakusha have angrily claimed that the ABCC commission used them as guinea pigs. This was a level of evil and exploitation that for many years I long thought was beyond bounds of what the U.S. government and U.S. doctors could do.
I was wrong.
Four years ago, when a Hibakusha delegation came to the United States for the United Nations NGO Millennium Conference, an off the record meeting was arranged for Prof. Sawada Shoji, Rev. Hashimoto Sinai, and Claudia Peterson (a downwinder from St. George Utah who has lost her father, her father-in-law, her sister, her daughter, and her own health to the production and testing of U.S. nuclear weapons) with a very senior Department of Energy official responsible for overseeing all U.S. studies on the effects of radiation. As the meeting drew to a close, it occurred to me, that I might be able to ease some anxieties by telling this official about the Hibakushas' fears that they had been used as guinea pigs, and give him the opportunity to explain why their fears were unfounded. The official's response was immediate and direct. He said that ABCC studies have been used for all sorts of things, including the designs for new nuclear weapons.
I want to say something else about the evil of our nuclear state. We need to remember that, at its root, the U.S. has become a nuclear state. When I began writing With Hiroshima Eyes, I did not understand what I had taken on emotionally. I had anticipated that I would have to live in Hell while writing about the decision to use nuclear weapons against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about the death, damage, and suffering inflicted by those bombs.
I did not anticipate the experience of living within, as I wrote, the reality that every U.S. Administration since Truman - with the possible exception of Jerry Ford - preparing and threatening to initiate nuclear war, genocidal and possibly omnicidal murder. As Daniel Ellsberg explained yesterday, as early as the 1961 it was understood that if the U.S. launched nuclear war against the Soviet Union and China, between 275 and 375 million Soviet and Chinese people would die within thirty days, and that more than 600 million would die within three months. For month after month as I wrote, I had to live within and describe how successive U.S. governments threatened and prepared to initiate nuclear war: at least eight times to guarantee its Middle East hegemony and control of that region's oil, at least four times during the Vietnam War, during the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to maintain the status quo in Europe. It did it during the first Gulf War when President Bush, Vice President Quayle, Secretary of War Cheney, and British Prime Minister Major all threatened Iraq with possible nuclear attack, and an estimated 700 nuclear weapons were deployed to the war zone to back up those threats. This Bush Administration did it again in the run up to last spring's invasion of Iraq.
If we fail to apprehend this history and evil, we fail to understand our government as it is and the imperative of nuclear weapons abolition
As I move toward my conclusion, I want to return to the historic role of the politically engaged Hibakusha. Too few U.S. Americans know Japanese Nobel Laureate Oe Kensubaro's book, Hiroshima Notes which describes the transformative experience of his life - his 1963 engagement with Hibakusha. Oe wrote:
"I want to remember, and keep on remembering, the thoughts of the people of Hiroshima, the first people and the first place to experience full force the world's worst destructive capability. Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposedwound inflicted on all mankind. Like all wounds this one also poses twopotential outcomes: the hope of human recovery, and the danger of fatalcorruption. Unless we persevere in remembering the Hiroshima experience,especially the thoughts of those who underwent that unprecedented experience, the faint signs of recovery emerging from this place and people will begin to decay, and real degeneration will set in.
Almost sixty years have passed since the mushroom cloud rose above Hiroshima, carrying with it the vaporized, irradiated, fragmented, and shattered remains of ordinary people, their homes, places of work, and community. Yet, we continue to face the dualism of nuclearism's wounds.
On the positive side, we can point to the United Nations General Assembly speaking for humankind this year when it overwhelmingly passed resolutions calling for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to be brought into force, for the nuclear powers to comply with their Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty commitments for transparent, verified, and irreversible reduction and elimination of nuclear forces, for the inclusion of so-called missile defenses, the weaponization of space, and the reduction of non-strategic weapons in these negotiations, and it underlined the importance of the nuclear powers honoring the International Court of Justice's unanimous opinion that they are obligated to negotiate complete nuclear disarmament.[1]
These resolutions complement a long history of arms control treaties and agreements, the Canberra Commission roadmap for achieving nuclear weapons abolition, and even calls by former military leaders for nuclear weapons' abolition.
But the degeneration that Hibakusha and Oe have repeatedly warned us about has progressed to the point where many believe that nuclear war is more likely now then during the Cold War. As we meet today, our government still has nearly 15,000 nuclear warheads on alert, deployed at U.S. bases across the U.S. and internationally, and stockpiled for potential future use. Many of these weapons are hundreds, even a thousand times, more destructive than the Enola Gay bomb. The Bush Administration's Nuclear Posture Review reiterates a first strike nuclear war fighting doctrine and audaciously names Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, China and Russia as targeted nations. In recent weeks, the Bush Administration won Congressional approval for the research and development of new and more usable nuclear weapons. If it is built, the "robust bunker", a so-called mini-nuke will be seventy times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Funding has also been approved to accelerate preparations in Nevada for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing, which we can expect if President Bush is reelected, and which will reignite nuclear weapons proliferation and a global nuclear arms race. And, the Bush Administration remains the primary obstacle to a negotiated settlement of the potentially nuclear U.S.-North Korean confrontation.
The danger, of course, is not limited to Republicans. For nearly six decades, with and without new arms control agreements, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have maintained, modernized, and augmented the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As I have already explained, on more than thirty occasions since 1945, our government has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war in order to maintain its regional and global dominance.
When Howard Dean said the nuclear weapons "are a fact of life," he was not breaking new ground for Democrats. The Clinton Administration called nuclear weapons the "cornerstone" of our foreign and military policy, and Clinton's CIA Director, John Deutch was clear that the U.S. "never intended, nor does it intend now, to implement Article VI" of the NPT.[2]
Is there no exit? Were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings the first irreversible blasts of human self-destruction? Will anyone remember when the Hibakusha are no longer with us? Is there no alternative to the triumphalism of the new Enola Gay exhibit and all that it represents.
Years ago Wilfred Burchette wrote that the force most likely to move humanity to confront, contain and abolish nuclear weapons is the Hiroshima spirit of the world's Hibakusha. As we have experienced, their testimonies shatter the abstractions that insulate us in our daily denials. Their dignity and courage are models for us and are humanity's hope. As they have embraced Korean survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, U.S. uranium miners, Downwinders, atomic veterans; and Marshall Islanders, Tahitian, Kazakh, Russian, and other nuclear weapons victims, the number of politically engaged Hibakusha has grown, as has their influence.
Let me close with an example of the contagion of the Hiroshima spirit which is not unrelated to our coming presidential election. In 1997 Professor Tanaka, spent several days in Vermont during the speaking tour I mentioned earlier. His meetings there with grassroots activists led them to take the Hibakusha's call for nuclear weapons abolition to their annual town meetings, the popular political institutions which lie at the heart of the traditions and myths of U.S. democracy. After serious community education and organizing, people in thirty-three Vermont towns and cities voted to make negotiating nuclear weapons abolition U.S. policy. (Their sentiments and voting patterns were entirely consistent with what every national opinion poll tells us about the U.S. people's desire for nuclear weapons abolition.) Soon thereafter the Vermont Senate voted unanimously, and the State House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, to make Vermont the first U.S. state to officially endorse abolition. This a model for those of us in the other 49 states and something to which we can hold Howard Dean accountable.
Who will remember? As we confront the terrible legacies left to us by the Enola Gay and nearly six decades of U.S. nuclear terrorism, let us remember that remorse without life affirming action is less than true repentance. Let us make the pain, hopes, visions, and courage of the Hibakusha and the Hiroshima spirit our own. As Dan Ellsberg reminded us yesterday, we must take advantage of every moment and every opportunity we have to press for human survival.
No More Hiroshimas!
No More Nagasakis!
No More Enola Gays!
Abolish All Nuclear Weapons!
- Joseph Gerson <JGerson@afsc.org> American Friends Service Committee
[1] See, John Burroughs, "the Shameful U.S. Record in 2003 Disarmament Votes at the United Nations", Internet posting, December 9, 2003.
[2] John Deutch, M.I.T., October 16, 1998.
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